The Borgia Betrayal: A Novel Read Free

her soul. Meanwhile, it would fall to the secretaries to deflect the questions of anxious ambassadors and courtiers trying to determine what, if anything, the Holy Father intended to do.
    “Well, in that case—,” I said, and made for the door. It being ever necessary to maintain appearances, Borgia would take the strictly private passage that linked his office with the adjacent Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico where he housed both his young mistress and his slightly younger daughter from an earlier affair that had also produced Cesare and two other sons. I would have to use the more public route, which meant running the gauntlet of hangers-on clustered just beyond the inner office. Fortunately, as I was both a woman and a figure of some considerable apprehension, I would be spared the worst of the interrogation about to afflict the hapless secretaries.
    I got as far as the first antechamber before a nervous, ferret-faced fellow sidled up. Do not be misled by my description of him for, although it is accurate, I had a certain fondness for Renaldo d’Marco, formerly steward of Borgia’s palazzo when he was a cardinal and now elevated to his service within the Vatican.
    “Has he signed it?” Renaldo inquired, eyes darting furtively, which of course only made him more likely to attract undesired attention to himself—and by extension to me.
    I seized his sleeve and drew him off a little into an inglenook where we could be less readily observed. The pounding and sawing from the nearby wing of the Vatican Palace where Borgia’s grandiose apartment was under construction offered cover for private conversation. Even so, I kept my voice low.
    “Not yet, but he will.”
    “Are you certain?” Renaldo was not asking idly. Like almost everyone, he had bets placed with one or more of the hundreds of touts in Rome who took such wagers. He might also have entrusted funds to various of the merchant houses whose profits could be affected by the papal decree. In this, he and I were no different. Borgia had been more than generous—any sensible man is with his poisoner. I had no complaints, but I would have been thought a fool if I failed to make sound use of the information that came my way.
    “He has no choice,” I said. “He must have Spain’s favor and their Majesties have made it clear that there is no other way to gain it.”
    “But if Colombo is right—”
    I nodded brusquely. All knew the problem that had so far stayed Borgia from signing the decree.
    “If the Holy Father gives Spain what turns out really to be the Indies,” I said, “there will be war with Portugal. Everyone knows that. But all the scholars, the geographers, the mapmakers, all of them still say what they said when the great captain was peddling his crazed scheme to every court in Europe and being sent away empty-handed: The world is too big for him to have reached the Indies.”
    In the weeks since the battered caravel La Niña limped out of an Atlantic storm to find shelter in the port of Lisbon, few had been able to speak of anything other than the astounding news she brought. Scarcely had the first reports reached Rome than Borgia set to work to determine how he might take advantage of whatever it was that had just happened.
    To help him decide, we had endured a seemingly endless parade of sages who explained to him over and over exactly why, all claims to the contrary, Colombo could not possibly have reached the Indies. By all rights, he and his crew should have run through their provisions and perished at sea long before ever making landfall. That they had not could mean only one thing—they had found not the Indies with its great spice wealth coveted by all, but an entirely new, previously unsuspected land—Novi Orbis.
    “What if they are wrong—?” Renaldo began but I would have none of it.
    “The ancient Greeks knew the world’s girth and so do we. Colombo has found something else, something entirely new, whether he wants to admit that