pope, always providing; that he had what looked like the lion's share. Someone had managed to get close enough to tamper with him. Someone had made him what had looked at the time like a better offer.
The Marchesa had reasoned her way through the maze. She decided that, if Cossa had met secretly or otherwise with anyone, it would have happened at some time during the five weeks between her leaving him in the field and her return to confer with him again. When she had left, he had been growing more and more enthusiastic about the plan to make him pope. He had cross-questioned her about the tactics for, handling the, cardinals and princes in Pisa, frequently correcting the strategy and. improving upon it, always having a sure touch for designing bribes. Whatever had occurred had occurred during that five-week period, and the Marchesa realized that the only person who could reveal whom Cossa had spoken to was me.
She understood me too well to ask such things directly, so she went to Bernaba and explained what Cossa had done to cheat them all, and principally himself, out of vast fortunes and the papacy. To Bernaba, next to the money involved, the papacy was the crowning jewel of mankind, and, since she knew Cossa, as well as she did, she wanted the papacy for him; she was even able to construct a fantasy whereby he, as pope, would become her confessor. She listened to the marchesa's insistence that Cossa would still one day be pope and, admiring popes as she did, loving her husband and not being able to
imagine how high he would rise if Cossa became pope, admiring the marchesa more than any ruffian in Italy; she naturally agreed to get the information.
The marchesa was astonished, not jealous, when she weighed up what Bernaba had passed to her from me. Even she thought it was strange that she a dealer in women all her life, had never considered the possibility that another woman could have been the force which had deflected Cossa from the papacy. When she sifted through what 1 had told Bernaba about what they had talked about in that single night which had brought on the great upset in Pisa, she ordered a twenty-four-hour surveillance on Cossa. The barren reports came to her every day, but she was a patient woman who knew that, sooner or later, either Cossa or Catherine Visconti would have to make their move.
She talked to Cosimo about it: `After all,' she said, `soldiering is his natural bent. The Church, is just an acquired talent. But surely he must know that this woman is a Visconti who will have him
assassinated as soon as he gets everything done that she wants done.' `Now we know,' Cosimo said, `but it's too late. Filargi is the pope.' 'It certainly is not too late,' the marchesa protested. `What can we do?'
`Filargi is an old man.'
`Old men die.,' If this old man dies, then I, say it becomes your problem to make sure that Cossa will accept at the next conclave.' `That is too indefinite for my father, Decima.' 'Perhaps it can be made definite.'
How do you mean? No, no! Don't tell me.' He held up both hands before himself in alarm, his face grown pale. 'We have never spoken of this.'
'I have studied hard how to bring pressure on Cossa to make him accept. I have worked out the single uncontestable solution in this world. You, will easily be able to, persuade Cossa to be pope.' 'How?'
She told him how, and irrevocably – although I did not know it until much later – they became my enemies.
Since the day she had brought him the good news, the marchesa had lunched every Friday with the pope at his palace. She brought him delicious gossip from the world; titbits which her daughters had searched out in the corners of all the high places in Europe, and the sweet old pope was enormously entertained by the merry innocence of it all. Gossip was not all she brought with her. She brought powders which she had commanded since her earliest days as a ruffian, when young women had come to her crying for vengeance against men whose lives they wished to put away without suspicion being cast upon themselves. Between the peals of his laughter and the sips of his, wine, the marchesa palmed her potions into his drink and poisoned Pope Alexander V to death. This I know, for I was in the room when she admitted it.
30
On 2 May 1410, Cossa and I were in Forlimpopolo, beyond Forli on.the way to Ravenna, besieging 200 horse and 200 foot of Ladislas's stragglers, when he was recalled to Bologna because the pope was dying. When we reached the papal palace, Alexander was sinking fast. Cossa didn't go into the sick room to see the pope immediately. On the way to his apartments, he found a committee of senior cardinals waiting for him in the anteroom. Covered with dust and wearing war gear, he excused himself. I went into the pope's room, and spoke to the doctors, then I went to Cossa, in his apartment, and said, `The pope is finished and the word is out.'
'What does that mean?'
`It means that couriers' have come in to say that Pierre D'Ailly and the Duke of Burgundy are on their way from France, and John of Nassau is coming from Mainz.'
`How did they find out the pope was dying that far away.'
`He's been ill for about three weeks. Now we know he's dying.'
'There is something very odd going on here,' Cossa said.
'That's not all. Cosimo di Medici is on his way from Florence.'
'What do they all want, for Christ's sake?'
'On the surface it's a crisis, isn't it? I mean, in a sense, it's the natural thing to do. They are running out of popes. They have to keep up the inventory.'
`Help me out of this gear. Tell those old farts to come in here in ten minutes. Tell them I'm having a bath.' As an afterthought he said, 'Every one of them has been bribed to the hairline.'
`After Pisa last year, you should know,' I told him.
When the committee came in, Cossa was ready for them. As ready as he would ever be, I thought. While he was dressing, he had told me he was soaked by a premonition of loss, except that he hadn't lost anything. He said he was trying to think of Catherine Visconti and the Milan gold which would buy him all the condottieri he needed to bring him to power in Italy, then make him perhaps King of the Romans, then perhaps Holy Roman Emperor: I didn't laugh at him. It was real to him. But he said that even that beautiful thought wouldn't stay with him because he knew the cardinals and the bankers and the princes wanted to make him pope.
He greeted the cardinals as they entered the room and apologized for keeping them waiting. They rumbled their acknowledgements. There were four of them: Jean de Brogny, Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, most senior; Antonius Calvus,; Cardinal of Mileto; Pierre Gerard, Cardinal Bishop of Tusculum; Ladulfus Maramaur, Cardinal Deacon of San Nicolo in Cacere Tulliano, a Neapolitan. They were quite accustomed to having me at all meetings. Privately, they called me the Witness.
`His Holiness grows weaker and weaker,' de Brogny said:' `An excellent man in the whole course of his life, gifted in sweetness and prayer. But he has very few hours left.'
`He shines with goodness,' Cossa said.
`Cossa, in a few hours your Church will need you,' Maramaur said in the Neapolitan dialect. Cossa stared at him coldly. He began to feel the stirrings of panic. He had; been about to begin his march upon the conquest of Italy but these old men were going to insist upon something else for him.
`Soon there will be a conclave,' de Brogny said. `We must have the assurance of your consent to your election as pope, as should have happened in Pisa.'
Cossa sat down heavily. `Please – he said, `sit down, my friends.' He took a deep breath as they remained standing in a semi-circle around him. `My reasons are the best reasons,' he said. `I am not fit for the papacy. I lack the holiness.'
`We will surround you with holiness like high walls,' de Brogny said. 'We will elevate you as upon a cloud which will hold you above all on earth, shining with holiness.'
'Three would be no one to run the Church.'
'You will run the Church.' The pope. As it should be.'
`The Church is in shards,' Antonius Calves said harshly. 'At this moment the Church, must have a leader who
