Andromeda

Alfonso of Naples is not a eunuch after all.

They’re sweat-slick together and warm; the matter of consummation seems to have resolved itself, depending on one’s understanding of the particulars. Alfonso is a pleasant companion, but Lucrezia’s mind is left unsatisfied. She’s hungry for answers, and asking polite questions over breakfast is all very well and good (such a talent he has for discussing dark things dryly, such a light manner) but her husband will not be the same man in the morning as he is here, twisted in the bedsheets and breathing kisses against her thighs.

How odd it was, to be naked as Venus on a mild and sunny morning, shut up tightly in their stuffy little bower with a man – this particular man, otherwise quite frank with himself – only half-undressed. Not that Sforza had shown her any more of his despicable body than necessary, his coarse legs and his face and his hands, and even that had been too much; she had wanted to know every part of Paolo and been denied it. But with Alfonso, alone with him, they had the opportunity and yet did not. Their states had reached a strange sort of equity – she was a woman who hungered and bled and fell into black moods and Alfonso was… himself. Capricious, but not particularly frightening. She’s seen wild cats in captivity with similar resigned attitudes.

He begins to sit up, propping himself up on one elbow (sleeve twisting) to clumsily trace the soft down of her belly. Her fingers idle along the bones in his back until they stumble against a scar.

“My love,” she says, feeling the troubled line start to form between her brows and willing it away into tranquility.

“Am I your love already, Lucrezia?”

His damp shirt has stuck close to the skin of his back and the marks on it are visible through the linen. Lucrezia has never seen marks such as these, more than scars – cruel and spreading. Their discoloration shows through the cloth indistinctly like a stain, unhealthily raised, and when she touches it with the flat of her hand she half-expects it to come away bloody.

And this was the French king’s work. The French king who had prostrated himself before her father and asked for his blessing, who she’d been able to manipulate so deftly with only wit and a cup of wine. He did this, or his men did it, while he watched, but that meant no difference – servants were feeble extensions of their masters, eyes and ears and hands. (Was father crippled now, too? With only a daughter to do God-knew-what work? Was she, with no confidante?) The French king had made light of his own looks, but coarse as his features were, Lucrezia hadn’t thought him an ugly man until now.

Her husband doesn’t startle, but looks up from between her legs. His eyes are dark and candid.

“Yes, and there’s your surprise. Your lovely late wedding gift. Would you like to see?”

She doesn’t know how to answer, which elicits a mildly peevish “well, then”. He hoists himself up, scuffs at his mouth with his sleeve and sheds his nightshirt – the muscles of his shoulders work stiffly.

There is an ugly white burn a few inches above one nipple, like a touch from the head of a poker. In fact, she supposes as she runs her hands over it that that’s where it came from. (She imagines the burnt smell without wanting to, and it sours her stomach.) Paolo’s body underneath his clothes had been dark and hard from work; Alfonso’s complexion is quite refined and he is soft, not entirely unlike herself. Motherhood has altered her and time will alter her further.

There is a diamond-shaped mark on his side, strange and sacrilegious, and when she touches it he quotes scripture under his breath, watching her with dark eyes uncertain.

His back and sides are mottled with more individual marks, spaced apart carelessly; they are variously blanched almond white and dull red. A slick burn, a long scar; they’ve all healed, none are precisely new, but some are raised and some are smooth to the touch. There are marks on his thighs and pale buttocks as well, fewer but no lighter.

Father had allowed this, and when Alfonso refused to be murdered, had avoided another loss by instead making him be married. He smiles at her, very thinly.

“Nasty business. Such are the privileges of ruling, I suppose.”

“Do they still pain you?”

“Often." He drums a stiff finger against her leg teasingly. “The Borgia family plays roughly with its friends, I’ve found.”

“The Borgia patriarch, you mean. I can be kind.”

Father can be gentle too, more tender and more affectionate than anyone who’s ever seen him speak from his throne would believe, but that’s cold comfort to him now. She can’t speak for Cesare. And Juan has never been kind.

“And I can be cruel.” It’s not a threat, though it might be in another man’s voice – he sounds too tired and too lazy and will only wink at that possibility, for now. “Just so long as you’re not cruel with me, are we agreed?”

He settles down beside her and lazily rings her throat with a collar of little bites. She lies back against her pillow, stroking the individual whorls of his damp hair.

“Lucrezia?”

“Mm?”

“If I were to organize a hunt – only a little one – would you accompany me?”

Lucrezia gives it her consideration, and phrases her answer most graciously . At the moment she is bloodthirsty.

Every one of her hunting dogs is a bitch with a mouthful of sharp teeth, and every beast they fell between the two of them has something of her father in its face, somewhere around its dead sticky eyes.