The Borgia Bride Read Free

be kept waiting for commoners.

    We returned directly to the Castel Nuovo, the trapezoidal hulk of mud-coloured brick built two hundred years earlier by Charles of Anjou to serve as his palace. He had first removed the crumbling remnants of a Franciscan convent dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Charles had valued protection over elegance: each corner of the castle, which he called the Maschio Angiono , the Angevin Keep, was reinforced by vast cylindrical towers, their toothy merlons jutting against the sky.
    The palace stood directly on the bay, so close to the shore that, as a child, I often stuck an arm through a window and imagined I caressed the sea. On that morning a breeze rose off the water, and as I rode in the open carriage between Alfonso and Isabella, I inhaled with pleasure the scent of brine. One could not live in Naples without being in constant sight of the water, without coming to love it. The ancient Greeks had named the city Parthenope for the ancient siren, half-woman, half-bird, who for unrequited love of Odysseus had cast herself into the sea. According to legend, she had washed up on Naples’s shore; even as girl, I knew it was not for love of a man that she had been lured into the waves.
    I pulled off my veil to better enjoy the air. To get an improved view—of the concave lunar crescent of coastline, with dusky violet Vesuvio to the east, and the oval-shaped fortress, Castel dell’Ovo, just to our west—I rose in the carriage and turned round. Isabella reseated me at once with a harsh tug, though her expression remained composed and regal, for the benefit of the crowd.
    Our carriage rumbled through the castle’s main gate, flanked by the Guard Tower and the Middle Tower. Connecting the two was the white marble Triumphal Arch of Alfonso the Magnanimous, erected by my great-grandfather to commemorate his victorious entry into Naples as its new ruler. It marked the first of many renovations he made to the crumbling palace, and once the arch was in place, he rechristened his new residence the Castel Nuovo.
    I rode beneath the lower of the two arches, and stared up at the bas relief of Alfonso in his carriage, accompanied by welcoming nobles. Far above, his hand reaching beyond the towers, an exuberant, larger-than-life statue of Alfonso gestured toward the sky. I felt exuberant, too. I was in Naples, with the sun and the sea and my brother, and I was happy.
    I could not imagine that such joy could ever be taken from me.
    Once inside the inner courtyard with the main gate closed, we climbed from the carriages and entered the Great Hall. There, the longest table in the world held a feast: bowls of olives and fruit, all manner of breads, two roast boars, their jaws propped open with oranges, roast stuffed fowl, and seafood, including succulent little crayfish. There was much wine, too—the Lachrima Christi , the tears of Christ, made from Greco grapes cultivated on the fertile slopes of Vesuvio. Alfonso and I took ours diluted with water. The Hall was adorned with flowers of every variety; the vast marble columns were draped with swags of gold brocade, trimmed in blue velvet, to which were fastened wreaths of blood-coloured roses.
    Our mother, Madonna Trusia, was there to greet us; we ran to her. Old Ferrante liked her, and cared not a whit that she had borne two children to my father without the benefit of wedlock. As always, she greeted each of us with a kiss on the lips, and a warm embrace; I thought she was the loveliest woman there. She glowed, an innocent golden-haired goddess amidst a flock of scheming ravens. Like her son, she was simply good, and spent her days worrying not about what political advantage she might gain, but what love she might give, what comfort. She sat between me and Alfonso, while Isabella sat to my right.
    Ferrante presided over the feast at the head of the table. In the distance behind him stood a great archway which led to his throne room, then his private apartments. Over it