A Matter of Taste

No doubt, I thought, one of the imperial Caesars had once inhabited this room. Such was the impression made by the high doorways, mostly blocked, the columns, some of them broken, and the few statues, battered but essentially intact, that still maintained their poses in the high niches of the wall. Except for the lamps brought by the latest generation of breathing occupants, the vast chamber was in darkness now, and its farther reaches were choked with rubbish. Once, I thought, this room must have stood much higher, resting freely upon the surface of the earth, while Caesar—Claudius, perhaps, or Caligula?—trod its marble floor. And somehow over the centuries it had been buried, encroached upon and covered by one generation after another of Roman buildings and pavements, litter and debris. How did such things happen? I began to have a sense of what a personal life of centuries might entail, besides the postponement of eternity.

Lucrezia had concluded her conference with her workmen. I returned my attention to the lovely woman who was concerning herself with bear vomit, and as courteously as possible expressed my curiosity as to how the Borgias, and she in particular, had happened to become so expert on the subject of poisons.

She laughed and said we had more urgent things to talk about, and I never received much of an explanation. But the opinion of my later years is that probably the first tendencies toward toxicity, when she and Cesare were mere children, had been cultivated by some old nurse. I wonder sometimes whether that nurse might have been a vampire too.

Lucrezia guided me out of the main chamber of the subterranean laboratory, and into another and more private room, where we might converse more freely. Harking back to our first meeting, Lucrezia went on to assure me, without my asking, that her and her brother's discovery of an anti-vampire venom had been purely serendipitous, and I their first subject only by sheer accident. Actually the two adolescents, as they then were, had been seeking a dependable aphrodisiac—a goal which, unhappily, had continued to elude her researches.

Lately her chemical researches had been allowed to lapse. With the added responsibilities of Lucrezia's new family in Ferrara—here she looked at me sharply, to make sure I understood she took those responsibilities seriously—she had little time and no longer much inclination for such pursuits. However, if it should turn out that her brother and her father had been poisoned—

I was glad, observing sweet-faced Lucrezia at this time, that I was not the one who had attempted to do her brother harm.

Taking advantage of the opportunity offered by the private room, we exchanged a kiss or two to cement our own relationship. This led to a more fervent exchange of endearments, and I fear I must now report that poor Cesare and Alexander had to wait.

While I am on the subject of the Borgia poison, the one so effective against the nonbreathing component of humanity, let me say here that I believe one of its vital components must be some compound of burnt and powdered wood. I have reason to believe that liqnum vitae might be particularly effective, but the final determination must await a new round of research.

Madonna Lucrezia and I both delighted in our subterranean meeting, but neither of us wanted to dally overlong. Within the hour I was hurrying aboveground to the Vatican, where I resumed my delayed efforts to get in to see Cesare.

The Pope on being stricken had taken to his bed in his usual apartments, and Cesare, likewise, in the rooms he normally used, which were just above those of his father. Both men were still in the chambers when I arrived.

I was told that the Pope, on the day before my arrival in Rome, had recovered enough to play cards; but then the indefatigable physicians had their way, and bled him once again. Still he lingered, but perhaps the bleeding was really the finishing stroke.

Cesare, when I was admitted to his room at last, still clung fiercely to life and swore even in a delirium of fever that he would recover. I offered what I could in the way of hearty encouragement, though silently I admitted to myself that he looked in a bad way. I wondered whether I should add my urgings to those of Constantia, advising my leader to save his life by becoming a vampire, even if that meant giving up his chances to be a king.

But I refrained—the choice was up to him, and if he wanted advice he would ask for it. Either Caesar or nothing—what a motto! What a man! Or so most of his friends and associates agreed. I could not fail to be impressed by the way he commanded fierce loyalty among them, a demonstration even more marked now in his time of helplessness.

On the night I have been describing, I arrived at Cesare's apartments, and argued and pushed my way in, just a few minutes before the time his physicians decided to stuff his delirious body, wracked with fever, into a bath of icy water in an effort to save his life.

Michelotto, who was now sitting in almost continuous attendance upon the sufferer, drew a blade and threatened these supposed healers—it was only with some difficulty that I and others persuaded Corella to sheathe his weapon again.

Looking closely at Valentino, I beheld certain lesions on his face that I did not remember seeing there before—of late he had affected to wear a mask much of the time—and seeing these eruptions made me think of certain other oddities I had observed during the last year or so. It came to me that in that period Cesare had started to display some signs of the infamous French pox.

Once I got a good look at the illness now threatening Cesare's life, it did look to me like malaria, with which everyone who then lived in southern Italy was more or less familiar. Many in Rome caught the disease in that unhappy summer.

Duke Valentino at the time of his icy bath was in no shape to give coherent orders, to me or anyone else, so Michelotto and I simply stood by.

But the physicians' heroic measures succeeded, and the fever soon left the Duke. By the eighteenth of August, when word suddenly came from downstairs that his father the Pope was dead, Cesare himself was on the road to recovery, though still extremely weak.

His immediate reaction on hearing that his father was no more—the news certainly came as no surprise— was to call Michelotto and myself to him, and dispatch us with orders to accomplish the looting of the papal apartments located just beneath his own. There, in the Pope's own bedchamber, built into the wall directly behind his bed, was a vault in which Alexander had been wont to keep the bulk of the papal cash, jewels, and gold on hand.

Michelotto saluted and was ready to leap into action. He got as far as the door of the room, where he stopped, looking back impatiently.

I was still standing, frowning, beside Cesare's bed.

'Well?' the patient snapped at me in his exhausted voice.

'Captain General,' I said, 'you have just told me that the money and other valuables down there belong to the Church.' It was no secret to anyone that Alexander had, all along, been squandering Church funds to further his son's career in any way he could. But that a Pope might choose to abuse his authority gave me no excuse to commit a robbery.

Cesare had no idea what I was talking about. 'Yes, and what of that?'

'Sir, you are asking me to steal this money for you.'

The glazed eyes of the sick man betrayed no hint of understanding. Feebly he endeavored to prop himself up in bed. At last he began to comprehend. Wearily he croaked: 'What strange scruples are these? My father, while he breathed, was the Church, was he not? And so the money was his, and what was the father's passes on naturally to the son.'

I considered this a childish attempt to twist the logic of morality. 'Certainly, my lord, a father may pass on his own property at will, to his son or any other heir he chooses. But that scarcely has any application in the present case.'

Borgia glared at me. I had seen strong men quail at far milder looks from him. But my own gaze was unblinking. Sternly confronting my bedridden commander, I demanded: 'When Alexander died, did the Church die? No. And you, Duke Valentino, will surely not maintain that you have become the Church?' The jaw of Michelotto, who had now returned to his chief's bedside, dropped at that thought.

I doubt that the Duke and his chief lieutenant would have treated anyone else in the circumstances with the patience they accorded me. In words of one syllable, as though they thought my intellect deficient, they explained the vital necessity for the Duke to replenish his own treasury in anticipation of hard times, now that his father's support had been so suddenly removed.