through it once, twice, sighing, then moved again to stand in front of me and study me as a painter might assess his own work.
Once again, he surprised me. As I stood there for his regard, he walked up to me, knelt again with the reverence of a pilgrim at a shrine, and kissed the dark mound of Venus between my legs. I started slightly-then started even more when he parted my nether lips with his thumbs and began to massage the region with his tongue.
Embarrassment warred with delight. I twitched, I shifted my weight from leg to leg, I tried, overwhelmed by the sensation at one point, to pull away from him, but he cupped his hands round my backside and held me fast.
‘Stop,’ I begged him, for I was swaying backward, near falling. In response, he half-lifted me and pressed me hard against the nearest wall. ‘Stop,’ I begged again, for the feeling was too intense to bear…
Only when I ceased begging and began moaning did he at last lift his face, wearing a self-satisfied, wicked little smile, and say, ‘Now to the bed.’
He did not, as I had hoped, continue licking; instead, he kissed me full on the lips, his beard and tongue covered with my scent. For the first time, I experienced the warmth of flesh pressed against flesh, from head to breast to sex to legs to toe, and shivered: how could this be sinful, and not divine?
We wrestled. I could not, as I had with Onorato, lie back and let myself be the object of attention, a passive creature to be won: I fought, in the midst of Cesare’s pleasuring me, to do the same for him. I
He would not enter me: he made me wait, made me demand, made me plead. Only when I had crossed over into madness did he at last oblige me, and I clung fast to him, legs and arms grasping him so tightly they ached, but I did not care; I had him now, and would permit no escape. He laughed slightly, softly, at the ferocity with which I held him, but there was no detachment in it. I could see reflected in his dark eyes the wildness in my own: we were lost to each other. I was no more an ordinary lover to him than he to me. We were possessed of a passion that not all men and women have the grace to experience in their lifetimes.
He rode me-or I him, I cannot tell, for we moved of a singular accord-with alternating savagery and delicacy. During the latter times, as he moved inside me slowly, his eyes narrowed, his breathing slow and tortured, I tried to thrash, to force him back to more brutal love-making, but he held me fast, pinning my arms above my head, whispering, ‘Patience, Princess…’
Once again, he drove me to begging-something I would do for no other man. I ached to be spent, to be done away with; but Cesare was determined to take me to the precipice of the greatest desperation I had ever known.
How much time passed since I had entered his chamber, I could not say. It might have been hours.
When I could bear no more, he tore himself away. This provoked the worst horror in me-such a thing could not be allowed. Yet he was stronger than I, and with that strength, gently applied, and calm words one might use to soothe an anxious beast, he coaxed me to lie back, and applied tongue and fingers to the delta between my legs.
I thought I had experienced pleasure before; I thought I had experienced passionate heat. But the sensation Cesare induced in me that night began slowly, building like an ember coaxed into raging flames. It seemed to begin outside myself, somewhere in the heavens above my head, and I felt it descend on me, an unspeakable, sacred force, inescapable, all-consuming. The room before me: the bed, my own naked skin, the walls and ceiling, the flickering light-even Cesare’s face over mine, his eyes wide, burning with anticipation-disappeared.
I shall certainly go to Hell for saying it, but there seemed nothing in all the world but God, but bliss, whatever one must call the extreme sensation where all boundaries between self and the world disappear. Even I was gone…
Yet despite my absence from reality, I sensed union with Cesare again. He had mounted me in the midst of my ecstasy, merging with it, riding it until our voices joined.
I was quite used to repressing my moans of delight in the past, to reducing them to whispers, lest others hear. This experience tore from me a scream, one I was quite helpless to control. But it was not only my voice; Cesare joined in. Yet I could not have differentiated one of us from the other; the two of us made one sound-which surely was heard in every corner of the papal apartments.
We lay for a time on the bed. Neither of us spoke; I certainly could not, for my throat was rendered quite hoarse, and I was exhausted, my long hair stuck to my arms, my back, my breasts, with perspiration. At long last, Cesare turned to me and smoothed tendrils back from my forehead and cheek.
‘I have never had such an incredible experience with a woman. I think I have never known love before now, Sancha.’
I coughed, then managed to whisper, ‘My heart is yours, Cesare. And we are both damned for it.’
He rose to fetch me wine. A sudden playfulness overtook me-the same sort of silliness that had come over me in Saint Peter’s-perhaps because of the sense of freedom provoked by ecstatic release. I would not, I told myself merrily, be deprived of the finest lover I had ever known, at least not so soon after being conquered by him. As he attempted to rise from the bed, I wrapped both my arms about his thigh.
He laughed-dignified Cesare, always in control, snickered in helpless surprise at the unexpectedness of the act. Nonetheless, he continued onward, struggling toward the carafe of wine, certainly thinking that I would not persist in such childlike behaviour.
Chuckling, I strengthened my grasp; he, in turn, would not be dissuaded from his task.
I held on even as he rose, clinging to his leg despite the fact that doing so pulled me from the bed onto the fur-carpeted floor. He gasped with hilarity and astonishment at the fact, and took one step, two; all the while, I held on firmly, forcing him to drag me along.
At last, he yielded, collapsing on top of me, and the two of us giggled on the floor like children.
When I returned to my own bed, I lay for a time listening to Esmeralda’s soft wheezing breath, and stared up at the darkness. At first I dwelled in drowsy euphoria, reliving the moments of bliss with Cesare…and then guilt returned once more, bringing me to full, agitated consciousness.
I was, like my forebears, far too capable of cruelty and deception-especially when away from my brother’s good and gentle influence. Only two days among the Borgias, and I was already an adulteress. What was to become of me, if I spent the rest of my life in Rome?
Summer 1496
XV
As pleasant as the month of May was in Rome, June turned warm, and July even warmer; August was intolerably hot compared to the temperate coastal cities I had lived in. It was the custom for His Holiness and his family, as well as everyone else of wealth, to retreat to cooler climes for the month. But this particular August marked the return of the Pope’s son, Juan, from the court of Spain-and so, despite the heat, the occasion was marked grandly, with feasting and parties.
Despite my fears, I suffered no further advances from Alexander; I could not help thinking that Cesare had somehow convinced his father to let me be. But Cesare would say nothing to me of the situation; he only advised
