stayed too long in childhood. It was said that he was young for his seventeen years. Life had been so pleasant. He had hunted each day, returning at night with the kill, pleasurably exhausted, ready to feast and sleep and be fit for the next day’s hunting.
He should have known that a member of the royal house of Aragon could not go on indefinitely leading such a pleasant but, as his uncle the King would say, aimless life.
There had come that day when he had been summoned to the King’s presence.
Uncle Federico had welcomed him in his jovial way and had been unable to suppress his smiles, for he was fond of a joke; and what he had to tell his nephew seemed to him a very good one.
“How old are you, Alfonso?” he had asked. And when Alfonso had told him, he had continued to smile. “Then, my boy,” he cried, “it is time you had a wife.”
There had been nothing very alarming in that statement. Alfonso had known that he would soon have a wife. But Uncle Federico, the joker, had not told all. “You are not sufficiently endowed, my nephew, to satisfy the bride I have in mind for you,” he went on. “Oh no! A bastard sprig, even of our noble house, is not good enough. So we shall ennoble you. Alfonso of Aragon, you shall be Duke of Bisceglie and Prince of Quadrata. What say you to that?”
Alfonso had declared his delight in his new titles. But he was eager, he said, to know the name of his bride.
“All in good time, all in good time,” murmured Federico, as though he wanted to keep the joke to himself a little longer. Alfonso remembered, although he had only been a very little boy at that time, how Uncle Federico—not King then but only brother of the King—had come to Naples from Rome and told how he had stood proxy for Alfonso’s sister Sanchia at her marriage with Goffredo Borgia, and how he had amused the company vastly—and in particular the Pope—by his miming of a reluctant virgin as the bride. As all knew that Sanchia had been far from a reluctant virgin for quite a long time before her marriage to little Goffredo, that was a great joke; it was the sort of joke which Uncle Federico, and doubtless others, reveled in.
Alfonso then wondered whether it was a similar joke which was now amusing his uncle.
“You are seventeen,” said Federico. “Your bride is a little older, but only a little. She is eighteen, nephew, and reputed to be one of the loveliest girls in Italy.”
“And her name, sire?”
Federico had come close to his nephew and put his mouth to his ear. “Nephew,” he said, “Duke of Bisceglie and Prince of Quadrata, you are to marry His Holiness’s daughter, Lucrezia Borgia.”
From the moment his uncle had spoken the dreaded name Alfonso had known no peace. There had been many evil rumors concerning that family, and his future bride had not escaped them. All feared the Pope. It was said that he was possessed of supernatural powers, and this must be so for at sixty-seven he had the vigor of a young man. His mind was alert and cunning as it had ever been; and it was rumored that his mistresses were as numerous as they had been in the days of his youth. But it was not the Pope’s vigor or diplomatic skill which was to be feared.
Rumors concerning the mysterious deaths of those who crossed the Pope’s will were continually being circulated throughout Italy. He and his son Cesare had formed, it seemed, an unholy partnership, and whenever their names were mentioned, men lowered their eyes and were afraid, for it was said that as little as a look could bring down the wrath of the Borgias, and that wrath could mean the assassin’s knife, a final plunge into the Tiber, or what was perhaps even more dreaded, an invitation to sup at the Borgia table. Those who lived within the shadow of the Borgias could never relax their vigil; they must be continually on the alert, watching, waiting and wondering.
It was to this shadow that his uncle was condemning young Alfonso, and not to its edge where he might exist in a certain amount of obscurity, but to its very heart.
His new brother-in-law would be that Cesare Borgia whose hands were so recently stained with his own brother’s blood. There were rumors concerning his relationship