Cossa slumped into a chair. 'I could lose her.''
'If you will not ask her yourself, then only Palo can find out for you. After Palo is through with her, she will either be dead or you will banish her. She will be gone from you. And, as desperate as you are before me today, you will be more desperate trying to find her again. But if you must know, then you yourself must ask her – at least, that way, there is a chance for you, Cossa.'
The marchesa found him in the tower room of the palace. His face was grey. A-sheaf of papers lay on his lap. He looked up at her hopelessly as she came into the room as if, despite his love for her, she had forced him to destroy her.
'Cossa? Are you ill?' she asked.
' I know, Decima. I know everything about you. You sold whores in Rome. You dealt in boys with degenerates. You told fortunes as a heretical witch, made charms arid, amulets, and sold poisons to vengeful women:' He leaped to his feet scattering the papers. 'Don't deny it!'
She stared at, him with such contempt that he almost lost the certainty of his judgment. 'How can such things matter to you?' she asked him.
'How? You dare to ask me how?'
`You have taken money from the whores of Bologna for almost fifteen years and from the whores of the cities of the papal states for almost two.' She stared at him with distaste.
'Bernaba told you that! It is a lie! I helped her when I was a student and out of gratitude she set up those women to get me information to advance my position.'
'You took money from whores.' 'I was a boy!'
`You still take money from whores but you aren't a boy; you are a prince of the Church.'
We were talking about you, not me.'
'We will soon, of course, Cossa. But not yet. Let us talk instead about the night you murdered sixteen men to steal the pope's gold.' `Franco Ellera!' he screamed in pain.
`No one else living knew that.'
'Oh, yes, they did.'
`Who?'
'You.'
'Me?'
'Last; winter, when you were dying of fever after murdering that little boy at Rocco di Cento, you told, me everything. You ranted in my arms because, you told me, the men you had killed had come back to murder you.'
He held up his hands to make her stop speaking.
'I said to myself,' the marchesa went on, 'that, if that were the kind of man you are, then that must be what drew me to you. What else could the son of a pirate know to do? What else could be expected of a general of condottieri? I saw that, if you believed you owned a part of those whores, you had to take money from them because that was your share, as you saw it. You didn't need the money, but that is how a pirate or pitiless condottiere would think. Everything is a share in the loot which costs human bodies. You came from the sea. The pope's gold convoy was no different to you from a convoy of poorly armed merchant ships. You took the pope's gold then, as a natural conclusion for a brutalized man; you killed all the witnesses, your own people, because you feared the pope's vengeance. That explained everything to me, but it changed nothing. You are still a whoremonger and a pimp. You are still a thief and a murderer, which is rare enough work for a cardinal of the Holy Church: But we are what we become, Cossa, not what we think we are.'
His eyes became opaque with pain, trying to blind himself to this vile knowledge of himself. He wanted to find just enough light to show himself to himself as he had always seen himself. Deadly things lurked beyond such light. Because he could not shut out the truth of how she saw him and how he mast now see himself, he began to weep, sitting with his face clutched in his hands so he later confessed.
She knelt beside him and stroked his head. `I would have told you anything you wanted to know,' she said to him. 'If I couldn't conceal my life from myself, how could I hide it from you whom I love?' He reached out blindly to touch her cheek. 'Come" the marchesa said, – 'it is night. I have travelled a long way and I have been too long away from your arms.'
The marchesa had travelled over the mountains from Florence, where Cosimo di Medici had told her that his father had decided that the time had come to get the papacy for Cossa and end the schism in the Church. While the schism still existed, the Medici dream of getting one consolidated church banking account could never be realized. Giovanni di Bicci di Medici's plan was now the plan of the Marchesa di Artegiana because she was expected to execute it. She had had to be severe with Cossa about his boyish anxieties. He had to be, lifted into his saddle and sent off to his glory. There was a lot of money to be made.
21
With his mind revolving like a prayer wheel ten thousand times, Cossa told me where he had allowed his life to take a wrong turning. It happened, he thought – and of course he was wrong – during one winter's night when he was in bed with the marchesa at the Anziani palace in Bologna. The eternal rat moved across the bedchamber, where a single, foot-thick, half-spent candle burned at the centre of the room, twelve feet away from the bottom of the bed. Its melted wax piled up at its base like heaps of fallen angels. The bed stank of him and it mingled with the smell of the blind sanctity of the candle and the marchesa's faint smell, like sea moss.
She must have felt the golden hawk of her ambition, which was always perched inside her, fly in upward spirals across her chest, higher and higher from deep within her, until it was a nearly imperceptible thing in her sky but from such an elevation that it could see everything in the future. She listened to Cossa's hoarse, shallow breathing gradually subside. She turned towards him, brushing his arm with her breasts, and whispered into his ear, `You can be pope,'
His answer was a thick, contemptuous grunt.
She waited, thinking of the, enormity of the room and of the rooms around it, all nested into the size of the palace she had taken. She willed him to answer her.
`There are already two popes,' he said.
`The treasure of the Italian people is the papacy, Cossa,' she said harshly. `The French have their, university. The English have their kings. The Germans have the Holy Roman Emperor. The Italians must have their popes:'
'They have Angel Corrario, whose ancient body is called Pope Gregory XII'
`He is Ladislas's servant! We have a pope who cannot even hold Rome because he is eighty-one years old. And da Luna, the other great pope! Da Luna composes his ancient and tiny body – his dapper, tidy, neat and tiny body in Perpignan. He is Pope Benedict for the Spaniards and the Scots.'
She got out of bed with one lithe movement of her long legs and pulled a fur robe over herself, a powerfully made, tall, blonde woman of thirty-seven years – youthful, with cheekbones like kneecaps and a large soft mouth against, porcelain skin. I can see her carnal glory in my mind's eye. She strode around the bed and pulled a stool close to it at Cossa's side. She looked down at his shut eyelids, rectangular upon his square brown face. She leaned over, close to him, and spoke. `History has changed itself, Cossa„' she said. `The people of ltaly speak different languages, eat different food and think differently from the people of the other nations, except that they all want an end to this long ruinous papal schism.'
He grunted.
`Do you know: what this schism is doing to business in Europe, Cossa? How it is devastating the politics of the nations? Money and the power of the, Church are being thrown away instead of increasing themselves by a steady expansion of business. And, with the strength of the papacy split in half the nations are being ruled more and more by the princes… Not by popes. Not by the businessmen who understand what is best for all. This weakening must stop. You must stop it. You must dissolve the schism by uniting the Church under one people themselves. Not stable; papal, authority and containment, nor even the iron rule of princes, but rule by the people who are as hostile to the princes – with whom the Church can at least deal – as they will most certainly become to the popes.'