Blood & Beauty by Sarah Dunant

sweat on the boy’s face.
    In his enforced exile, this fast-footed young Borgia is restless for entertainment. He sits, draped over a chair in one of the state rooms of the castle of Spoleto, perched on the hill above the city, a merciful cross-breeze moving in through the windows to counter what, even in September, remains a suffocating heat. In front of him sits a chest, its elaborately carved lid cluttered with maps and papers.
    Pedro Calderón has earned his spurs these last weeks, making no fewer than seven return journeys carrying news from both the Vatican and the house of Adriana de Mila. It is a longer ride than Siena, for Spoleto is deep into the hills of Umbria and by the time he urges the horse up through the winding cobbled streets towards the castle gate they are both in a lather of sweat. Still, it is worth it. Now when he arrives, he is shown straight into Cesare’s private apartments, moving past a row of people outside clutching petitions. More often than not when he comes into his presence Michelotto is with him, for he acts as his master’s bodyguard as well as his chief of men. In the kitchen, Pedro has heard, they have taken on new poison tasters. Already it is a palace of two tongues: one for the men and women who come from Spoleto itself and another for those who are intimate only in Catalán. What was once the language of secrecy is now the language of power.
    ‘I… I fear I have not done it justice, sire. You should have been there yourself.’
    ‘Oh, I am sure the Orsini and Colonna families were all shouting for me. “Where is the Pope’s bastard, the new Archbishop of Valencia, so we can squeeze his balls to congratulate him on his rise?”’
    They all laugh now and Pedro feels a glow that makes his aching thighs and thick throat seem a mere inconvenience.
    ‘It is a great appointment, Your Excellency. No one can deny it.’
    ‘Careful there, Calderón,’ Michelotto growls sweetly. ‘You get your nose too brown and the smell of it will reach others. Then you will be of less use to us.’
    The boy’s eyes stay bright, but the laughter stops in his throat. Michelotto finds that even funnier.
    ‘What of the Florentine contingent?’ Cesare is kinder. ‘Piero de’ Medici was there with his cardinal brother, yes?’
    ‘Yes. Yes. Though I… I heard talk that there was trouble in Florence.’
    ‘It is more than talk. His father’s shoes sit like boats on him. Not that his sap brother Giovanni would manage any better! Meanwhile, I see you bring no letter from my own dear brother,’ he says, a thin layer of ice coating the endearment. ‘Perhaps Juan is too busy celebrating to find the time to write.’
    ‘I – I don’t know, my lord.’
    ‘But he is not to be found at Adriana’s palace?’
    Calderón shakes his head. The Pope’s women had been there though. They had been in the room just before him, of that he is sure: the air had been heady with perfume, roses and frangipani, and the rush of their rolling skirts as they left had caused the dust to dance in the sunlight. The first time he had gone to collect letters he had sat on a chair where a strand of long fair hair lay carelessly across the arm. A cloak of beaten gold, so the gossip has it. He had wound it round his finger when the aunt was not looking. Later he had tied it around the clutch of letters, to keep his journey safe, but it rubbed off in his pouch somewhere on the road.
    ‘What about the word on the street?’
    ‘On the street? About your brother?’ He hesitates. ‘On the street they… they say that the Duke of Gandia cuts a fine dash and that the tailors and jewellers are flourishing under his patronage.’ They also say he is enjoying a juicy young bride while her half-baked husband is not looking. But it is hard to gauge what he is employed to find out and what to forget. ‘Certainly he is not much at home these days, my lord.’
    ‘Indeed.’ Cesare gives a mirthless laugh. There is nothing he could