“Why should you grieve for him?” Alfonso had demanded. “Have you not healthy sons in Ferrara?”

But she did grieve. She grieved for the past, which had been so sad and might have been so different.

Pain had seized her although the child was not due until August. She called to her women, and they came hurrying to her bedside.

That night a seven-months child, a daughter, was born; the child sickly, refusing to take nourishment, was hurriedly baptized.


* * *

Lucrezia lay in a fever.

Her long rippling hair hung heavily about her shoulders. She lifted her patient eyes to those who watched her, and implored them to alleviate her pain.

“Your hair, Madonna,” they murmured, “it is so heavy. Shall we cut it off? It would mean great comfort to you.”

She hesitated. She could not clearly remember where she was. She thought of long afternoons, lying on a couch in a Moorish shirt, her hair damp about her; she remembered washing it with Giulia Farnese whose hair had been similarly golden.

Cut off her hair, of which she had been so proud? She would not have believed that she could ever consent to such an action.

But the heat was unendurable, the pain intense and she was so tired.

She nodded slowly, and lay quietly listening to the click of the scissors.

Alfonso came to look at her, and she saw the alarm in his face.

I am dying, she thought.

Alfonso had moved away from the bed, and was beckoning to the doctors. “What hope?” he asked.

“None, my lord. She cannot survive. She is dying now.”

Alfonso nodded slowly. He stared at that once beautiful head now shorn of its golden glory. Lucrezia … she was thirty-nine; it was young to die. She had given him the future Duke of Ferrara, and in time had become a good and docile wife, but he had never understood her, he had never wanted an elegant lady. He thought of his Laura, grown rich and plump under his protection, Laura the bonnet-maker’s daughter who was the mother of two children. Laura whom he had called Eustochia, the good conceiver. Laura, earthy and passionate, a woman whom he could understand and who could understand him.

He wanted a steadier life now; he wanted a wife who could be both mistress and mother of his children.

Watching the life slowly leave Lucrezia’s body he thought: I’ll marry Laura.

He went back to the bed. Lucrezia’s eyes were glazed and, although she appeared to look at him, she did not see him.

She was thinking of all those she had loved and who had gone before her; her mother, Vannozza who had died last year, her brother Giovanni, her father, Cesare, Pedro, Alfonso of Bisceglie—those people whom she had loved as perhaps she had never loved any others. Three of those six people had been murdered, and by one hand. Yet she had forgotten that as she slowly slipped away from this life.

I am going to them, she told herself, I am going to my loved ones.

Her lips moved, and it seemed to some of those watching at her bedside that she murmured: “Cesare.”

A hushed silence had fallen on the apartment.

Lucrezia Borgia was dead.