The Family - Mario Puzo [130]
Alexander put his hand on his daughter’s head and tried to stop her tears. “Shh, shh,” he said. “God is merciful. He will forgive them both. Otherwise there is no reason for his being. And one day, when this worldly tragedy is done, we shall all be together again.”
“I cannot wait an eternity for happiness,” Lucrezia cried, and then she stood and ran from the room.
This time there was no question. Everyone knew Cesare was responsible for the killing. Yet word had spread of the attack on him in the garden, and so most Romans thought his action justified. Within a short time the two Neapolitans were caught, confessed, and were hanged in the public square.
But once the initial shock wore off, Lucrezia was enraged. She entered Cesare’s chambers, screaming that he had first killed his brother, and now his brother-in-law. Alexander tried to keep Cesare from becoming angry, for he wanted no breach between his two favorite children. Yet Cesare was stunned and upset by his sister’s presumption that he had killed their brother Juan. He had never considered defending himself to her, for he never imagined she suspected him.
After several weeks Alexander and Cesare could no longer bear seeing Lucrezia in tears, or stand to witness her misery. And so they began to avoid her, and finally to ignore her. When Alexander tried to send her and her children back to Santa Maria in Portico, Lucrezia insisted on leaving Rome for Nepi and taking her children and Sancia with her. Her brother Jofre was welcome, she told her father, but no other brother could come. Just before she left, she informed Alexander that she never again wished to speak to Cesare.
Cesare struggled to keep himself from following Lucrezia, for he wanted very much to explain. Yet he knew it would do no good, and so he distracted himself with strategies for his campaign. The first thing he knew he must do was go to Venice in order to reduce any possibility of interference from their quarters, for Rimini, Faenza, and Pesaro were territories all under the protection of the Venetians.
After days of sea travel Cesare finally approached Venice, and the huge shimmering pastel city built on stilts emerged from the vast dark waters like some mythic dragon. He saw Saint Mark’s Square before him, then the Doge’s Palace.
From the harbor he was taken to an imposing Moorish palace just off the Grand Canal, where several noble Venetians greeted him and helped to make him comfortable. Cesare settled in, and soon requested a meeting with the members of the Great Council. There Cesare explained the Pope’s position, and offered an accommodation: papal troops would defend Venice from the Turks in the event of an invasion, and in return Venice would withdraw its protection of Rimini, Faenza, and Pesaro.
In a brilliantly colorful ceremony, the council passed his resolution and draped Cesare in the scarlet coat of an honorary citizen. He was now “a gentleman of Venice.”
The two years Lucrezia spent with Alfonso had been the happiest time of her life, a time when the promises her father made her in childhood seemed to come true. But now the grief she felt over Alfonso’s death transcended the loss of her husband’s sweet smile, bright eyes, and pleasing disposition. It transcended the loss of their laughter, even the loss of her innocence when she first bedded Cesare. For then she’d had faith in her father, trust in her brother’s love for her, and in the power of the Holy Father to bind and unbind sin. But since the death of Alfonso, all this was lost to her. Now she felt as abandoned by her father as she did by her God.
She had come to Nepi with Sancia, Jofre, her sons Giovanni and Rodrigo, and only fifty of the most trusted members of her court to accompany her.
There, just a year before, she and Alfonso had spent their hours together making love, choosing fine furniture and lovely wall hangings to decorate their castle, and walking through the tall dark oak trees and groves in the vibrant countryside.
Nepi itself was a little town, with a