Rome had been deeply shocked at the murder of the Duke of Gandia, but not a soul dreamed of attaching the blame to his brother — not even Lucrezia. It was generally assumed he had been done to death by some political enemy of the Borgia House.
Cesare certainly felt no remorse and left Rome with a sense of considerable satisfaction to attend the crowning ceremony in Naples.
Lucrezia, robbed of the attentions of both her brothers, was forced to rely again on her husband for her nightly pleasures. As before she found him so comparatively frigid that, with her passionate nature, his very presence eventually became quite obnoxious to her. Some months later the Pope, on her request, dissolved Lucrezia's marriage to the young lord — on the grounds that he was impotens et frigidus natura — an impotence which was admitted by himself, and then became so widely published and lampooned that he became furious and in retaliation publicly accused the Borgias of incest. It was a charge which seemed so obviously designed to draw attention from his own comic state that nobody — not even the most gullible of the public — believed him.
After the dissolvement of the marriage, Lucrezia withdrew to the Convent of San Sisto in the Appian Way — partly to escape the various items of scandal which were rocking Rome, partly to appear to act with the decorum her situation demanded.
She was to spend a period of some six months in her own private quarters, taking part with the nuns in daily prayers, joining with them in much of their work.
For some weeks she lived with them, praying, making baskets, carving small figurines in wood, walking in the quiet grounds, feeding their dozen hens. She was happy for a time to be free of the world in which she always felt a little as if she was living on the summit of a volcano that was likely to erupt unexpectedly.
But, at the end of that time, accustomed as she was to fierce and frequent intercourse, she began to feel an aching void in her loins, began to consider how to best soothe it.
During her walks in the grounds she had particularly befriended a young nun who had been in the convent only a short time before her. This young girl, whose name was Carlotta, was designated to show Lucrezia how to make the baskets and the little wooden figurines.
They got on very well and it soon became apparent to Lucrezia that the younger and unworldly Carlotta was quite fascinated by her.
Lucrezia managed, cleverly, to discover that the girl, who had never had a lover, was taking ill to her new and voluntary exile. She felt in her a need which she didn't understand, although listening to her confused explanations, Lucrezia was only too well aware of the trouble — the young girl needed a good fuck.
Carlotta was very attractive in her own way. She was dark, with a long face and slightly Jewish nose dominating long, well-defined lips. Her body was completely concealed under the shrouds of her long robes, but the melancholy attraction of her face was quite enough to excite Lucrezia in her present manless state.
Giving way to the girl's hinted-at curiosity, Lucrezia began, during their walks in the grounds, to tell her a few things about her sexual life. But always she exaggerated the brutality of the male, making him sound an utter, unbearable brute.
“I don't think I could stand to have a man using me in such a way,” Carlotta said one morning as they sat staring at the water lilies in the little stream which ran. sluggishly through the lower reaches of the convent grounds. ''I should feel stripped of any sense of dignity I'd ever had.”
Lucrezia took the plunge.
“Yes. If the choice was between man and this convent, I would choose a cloistered existence within these walls,” she said. “But, fortunately there are other things one can do.”
The girl raised her fine, dark eyebrows.
“What- other things in place of a man?”
“A woman, Carlotta. Women are much gentler and more loving than men. And they understand a woman's needs whereas most men are selfish and oafish in their lovemaking.”
“But…”
“I think,” Lucrezia went on quickly, “much as I respect the Mother Superior and the individual right of choice, that any woman who locks herself away in a prison is betraying her function as a woman and displaying a fear of the world which belief in God should not justify.”
Carlotta stared at her, shocked. She had never dared to voice such sentiments, but they fitted well with her present mood of boredom and rebellion.
“You only have to look at the majority of the women here,” Lucrezia continued, “and you see immediately that they're women who are too ugly or too witless to succeed in a competitive and natural world.”
She took Carlotta's hand.
“But you don't belong among them, Carlotta. You are lovely and full of life which won't allow itself to be kept in check forever.”
The girl was flattered and moved by the words which were spoken to her in such sincere tones. They sped her own unformed impulses along the channel that Lucrezia intended.
“I feel you are right,” she said. She glanced around at the distant figures of the other nuns wandering in the upper part of the grounds among the trees. “I'm beginning to wish I hadn't taken my vows.”
“You should make the best of things as they are,” Lucrezia said. “We are both in the same cul-de-sac of frustration. We should help each other.”
“But what can we…?”
“We can take the place of men for each other.”
The girl dropped her eyes and gazed down at the lilies. There was a silence for some seconds.
“I–I wouldn't know how… and — and I'm not sure that it's…”
“We all have deep centers in our beings which others may never reach,” Lucrezia cut in, “but unless they do, unless we try to help them to, we all live lonely, unsatisfied lives, lives which wrinkle us up with bitterness, the feeling of having missed what was essential.”
Carlotta raised her eyes from the stream and found herself unable again to withdraw them from Lucrezia's deep, compelling gaze.
“Come to my quarters after evensong tonight,” Lucrezia went on, “and I will show you what it means to reach that center.”
The dull peal of a bell calling them in to prayer cut short any reply the young girl might have made. She stared at Lucrezia, dropped her eyes at last and walked away toward the building. Lucrezia smiled after her for a moment and then slowly followed her.
That evening, alone in-her quarters-two rooms at the far end of a wing of the convent — Lucrezia, garbed only in a dressing gown, waited for Carlotta to come. She was almost certain she would come although the girl had given her no answer. She knew how the possibility of sexual adventure could play on one's nerves, stimulating, frightening, exciting all at the same time.
For Lucrezia, too, this would be the first lesbian experience and the idea filled her with the same lustful chill of eagerness that her first fuck had — especially as she had been deprived of her conjugal and fraternal rights for some weeks now.
She found herself unable to keep still as the minutes went by following evensong. She rose time and time again and looked out of the sloping window down to the grounds. At last she sat on her bed and tried to concentrate on the pages of Boccaccio's II Decamerone which she had smuggled into the convent with her.
As time passed she became more and more anxious. If Carlotta didn't come now she would die of frustration. She put down the book and stared out of the window again before walking into the next room where she studied herself in a small, silver-backed hand mirror.
Her heart leapt as there came a light tapping on her door. She ran to open it and almost clasped the young girl to her bosom as she drew her into her room.
Carlotta smiled at her briefly and stood uncertainly just inside the door while Lucrezia closed and bolted it.
“Make yourself at home,” Lucrezia urged, turning around to her.
Nervously, the girl went to the window, and locked out as if to reassure herself that the outside world was there, solid and unchanged. Lucrezia watched her pretending to interest herself in the exploration of the rooms, pretending to examine the few books, flicking pages over with a pointless speed.
“I was afraid to come,” she said at last. “Wasn't that ridiculous — we are quite free to visit one another's rooms.”
“We are quite free to act as we please,” Lucrezia added.
“Yes,” the girl said uncertainly.
“I have another gown — why don't you make yourself more comfortable and put it on,” Lucrezia suggested.
She handed over the garment and Carlotta took it nervously.
Lucrezia turned away and studied II Decamerone, listening to the rustle of clothes as Carlotta slipped out of them. She kept swallowing with nervous excitement.
At a well-judged moment she glanced around and caught her companion naked. Carlotta gazed at her with wide, embarrassed eyes and Lucrezia glanced back at her book immediately. But not before she'd had a glimpse of the girl's small, firm breasts, high up and dark, with the splodge of dark nipple giving them body, and her slim figure below it with the eye-catching fuzz of dark hair above her thighs. Lucrezia felt almost matronly beside the girl's small proportions.
She did not look up again until the girl came and sat beside her on the bed. Carlotta seemed to have lost some of her uncertainty. It was as if she'd reminded herself that she had, after all, come for a specific purpose and that there was no point in trying to pretend she hadn't.
Lucrezia replaced the book on a shelf over the bed and lay back on it, looking at her companion. Carlotta looked even more attractive out of her nun's somber garb, and the long V-neck of the gown revealed a smooth stretch of her succulent-looking skin between her breasts. The beginning of their bulge on either side of the valley of flesh was heaving with a nervous emotion.
“You are really very lovely,” Lucrezia told her. “It was a great mistake for a girl like you to get such a mad idea in her head that she wanted to pass the rest of her days in a tomb.” The conversation brought a sense of normalcy with it and Carlotta's voice hid a trace of relief as if a spell had been broken.
“If you hadn't come, I might never have realized it,” she answered.
“Sooner or later you would have — but I'm glad it's through me that your revolution is to be achieved.”
Carlotta had again, as in the afternoon, become lost in Lucrezia's eyes. They seemed to hold her hypnotically. She came, as if Lucrezia had commanded her, and lay down on the bed beside her. Lucrezia touched the girl's cheek, lightly.
“Remember that this is the only way to liberate yourself from the horror and monotony of a death in life,” she said softly as her lips followed her hand.
Lucrezia was not very surprised to find that a relationship with a woman gave her as strong an erotic urge as with a man. It was as if it were something she'd always known, even when her conscious thought had included nothing but images of Cesare's, her father's, Giovanni's embraces. Now, she felt the soft smooth skin of the girl's cheek against her lips, a softness and a leafy fragrance which were missing in a man, and she felt her spirit stirred with the upsetting excitement of a new and forbidden experience about to come to fruition.
She slipped her hand into the girl's gown and Carlotta winced. Then her hand was caressing the small, firm breast with the lightest of touches. Her lips moved over the girl's face without losing contact — and found her lips. The lips were still, slightly reluctant and unsure. But as Lucrezia's hand moved from one breast to the other and tweaked the nipple, as her tongue played hide and seek with Carlotta's lips, the mouth opened with a sound which was near to a sigh, the lips relaxed and then kissed back.
Lucrezia's tongue gave up its game and lunged right out to fill the mouth which opened and spread at its assault.
Gently, her hand untied the belt of the gown. The material slipped slowly down to the bed off the glossy flesh of Carlotta's hips and thighs.
Lucrezia's hand rested on the girl's waist for a moment, the index finger playing with her navel. She noticed the girl was trembling faintly, like a leaf in the merest zephyr. She let her hand float away over the glassy expanse of flesh, lingering, unhurried, exploring every part while her tongue continued to caress the moist, heavily-breathing lips.
As her advancing fingers encountered the silky van of pubic hair, she slowed. She let her fingers course through it as through money. Under it she could feel the flesh swollen in a little mound, like a slight rise in the ground covered with a fine grass.
Carlotta wriggled her hips very slightly. She seemed ashamed of their movement, which was like an effort at escape.
Lucrezia sucked heavily on the lips which were trembling now in unison with the body.
With her free hand, she awkwardly unpulled her own belt and then pushed the plump flesh of her thigh against Carlotta's.
Slowly, as if stroking a timid animal, she allowed her fingers to continue on their downward progress. They moved down the rise and into the hot, little hollow between the oozing flesh of Carlotta's tightly-gripped thighs. Her path was barred for the moment by the instinctive inward pressure of those thighs. She stroked all the flesh she could reach and was rewarded with a sudden seepage of moisture around her fingers.
She moved her lips off Carlotta's and kissed her neck.
“Relax, darling,” she whispered. “Open your legs.”
“I can't bear it,” Carlotta whispered back after a moment. “It makes me jump every time you touch me.”
“All right — just let it go naturally. It'll come.”
Lucrezia went on with her gentle fondling. The hollow was very warm now and Carlotta was letting out an odd “oh” every so often from deep down in her throat.
Moving her lips down the neck, over the slim shoulders, Lucrezia invaded the breasts which were taut and straining with sensation. She closed her mouth over a nipple and sucked hard and strong, bringing forth gasps of torment from the girl.
Carlotta's thighs relaxed and, awaiting her moment, Lucrezia was able suddenly to advance her fingers so that the texture of flesh changed and she knew she was in the beginning of the wet ravine formed by those nether lips. Carlotta clasped her thighs together again, crushing the tormenting hand, but Lucrezia bore the weight and tickled the wet flesh with her fingertips.
She drew on the nipple again with her lips, sucking in as much of the breast behind it as she could.
Carlotta thrust her breast at the lips which seemed to be drawing milk from her shapely udders. She arched her hips and gave way suddenly, opening her thighs, relaxing them so that the raping hand was suddenly right between her legs, the fingers in at their target.
Lucrezia moved a finger in the suddenly conquered vagina. Carlotta groaned in submission.
Slowly Lucrezia titivated and explored the flood-washed well. She pushed in through the tight ring of flesh, to the accompaniment of a little squeal from Carlotta. She thrust up, and then up again, feeling the hips withdraw instinctively, pull up away from the hand and then ooze back as they became used to the exquisite pressure.
Steadily Lucrezia sucked the breast, gnawed it, remembering all the things she liked a man to do and doing them with that greater finesse which was born of her own intimate, subjective knowledge.
Her fingers could move more loosely, more freely now. The ravine had become a great river, like a dried-up wadi suddenly swollen with the seasonal rains, the channel leading from it had become bigger, more accommodating and the hips were moving and bobbing against hers, brushing her flesh with another's exciting, strange flesh.
Breathing hard herself, Lucrezia moved her finger out of the hole and fastened it on the hard little clitoris which had reared up with its first touch from an alien hand.
Carlotta cried out and then spread her thighs in complete, won-over invitation as the finger bit into that little stem of sensitive flesh. She was wriggling incessantly, her mouth wide open, gasping for air.
“Oh God, oh God!” she exclaimed.
Lucrezia worked furiously and delightedly on the clitoris which expanded at her touch, grew harder, longer. She could feel passion growing in it as her finger and thumb pinched it, tweaked it, stroked it, masturbated it. There was only one thing left to make Carlotta's initiating delight into utter rapture.
Lucrezia slid down her body, reveling in the tight, straining pressure of flesh against hers. Her wet lips followed the swells and hollows of the body in their descent. She withdrew down to Carlotta's thighs with them. She ran her lips down the thighs, kissing tantalizingly on their buttery, yielding insides. The thighs twitched, clasped her head, relaxed. She heard the fury of Carlotta's moans washing down upon her ears like the continual flow of waves against a reef.
Her thighs clasped and unclasped, tensed and untensed continually; her hips wriggled like fish on a hook and she was fastened to the bed with her own overwhelming passion which was no longer timid but demanding.
Sliding her lips up the thighs, Lucrezia met first the slippery ooze of fluid glossing the tops of the legs. She lapped it like a dog. It represented the passion of a lovely girl — nothing unpalatable about that.
Over the swamp and to the very brink of the ravine, a plunge of the tongue and she was kissing and licking in that inundated wadi which squirmed and pressed against her and squashed its side flat against her mouth.
She searched, her tongue leading her blindly in the wadi until she found that steep, stiff monument. She grasped it in her lips and Carlotta's hips went mad, writhing and twisting so that Lucrezia had to hang onto her prize as if she were on a wild horse. But she clung to it, sucking it voraciously while a thin whine of passion, broken often by a deep moan, crashed down on her ears from the tortured face high up above her.
Her hands grasped those slim hips. How slim they were compared to her own. They made Carlotta seem that much more girlish, innocent, helpless.
She slid her hands under the hips and ran them all around the firm, tense balls of bottom. What an excellent little bottom.
She squeezed and worked its pliable bulk as she sucked and licked. The buttocks tightened and relaxed in her hands, swinging wildly in torment. The girl had become a raging form of sexuality. There seemed nothing left of her except a moaning, writhing mass of sensual flesh.
Lucrezia pulled the buttocks apart forcibly. They were hot in the crack between them. There were a few young hairs and then a sweating smoothness. Her fingers slipped over it like little snakes.
The anus nestled there, unprotected now and she rifled it with her fingers they way she'd liked her father to intrude in hers. And Carlotta had no reticence any longer. She didn't even try to press her backside cheeks together. On the contrary she pressed them wide and back so that Lucrezia's finger actually penetrated the anus, the tight little ring of flesh, near to her sucking lips.
She used her tongue on the clitoris which seemed so big as to be unreal. There was a taste of salt and parsley in her mouth; the liquid was running over her face, growing into a torrent.
Above, out of sight, she heard Carlotta's sob.
“Oh, oh, it's here, it's here,” she heard her cry, out of control.
She sucked even more furiously, jabbing her finger deeply into the tight, tearing hole. She was terribly excited herself. She got a vicarious pleasure from the girl's helpless passion.
Following on her gasped out words, Carlotta twisted first one way and then the other in a quick, shivering convulsion. Her mouth opened wide and a long, continuous moan of sound exploded from it as she clasped her thighs around Lucrezia's head and squeezed.
The grip on Lucrezia was strong and suffocating, but she bore it until it slowly relaxed and the thighs fell away.
She straightened up, realizing just how hot her loins had become. A little longer and she'd probably have come herself.
She looked at Carlotta. The girl seemed to have collapsed in a coma. She lay with her head thrown back dramatically, her arms wide out beside her head. Her eyes were closed, her breasts heaving in a great swell of emotion.
Lucrezia lay down alongside her and kissed her shoulder. After a while she spoke.
“Wasn't that worth a year in a convent? Isn't it worth anything on earth?”
Carlotta's eyes opened slowly, sleepily. She'd lost all trace of her early embarrassment.
“I feel purged,” she said softly. “I feel satisfied and purged of all the frustration and not knowing that I've ever felt.”
Lucrezia smiled at her and kissed her bare arm.
“You obviously enjoyed it,” she agreed. “Your enjoyment was so infectious that I almost had a climax myself.”
Carlotta opened her eyes again and looked at her. Realization had dawned that there were, of course, two of them, that Lucrezia had given her undreamed-of pleasure, that it was now up to her to reciprocate.
“I'm not at all expert,” she said. “I shan't know what to do.”
Lucrezia began to quiver with anticipation.
“Just do what I did,” she said with a break in her voice. “And that will be wonderful.”
“I have to get my breath back a moment.”
They lay together for a few minutes longer. Lucrezia could hardly wait and she kept pressing her round belly again Carlotta's side and tensing her pelvis against her.
“God, I want it very badly!” she muttered.
At that Carlotta turned over toward her and she fell backwards on the bed. She lay there staring up at the ceiling concentrating on herself, looking inward at the sensation inside her.
She felt the warm face come down on her breasts. To Carlotta her breasts were enormous in comparison with her own. They just asked to be nestled against, to be used as a pillow in which to bury one's face.
The face brushed against the tight, hurting points of her breasts, piquing her with a spear-point of ecstatic pain that rushed straight to her genitals. And then those cool, well-defined lips closed on her nipple in a soft, fondling grip that made her squirm already.
They began to suck, drawing her pear of breast into the mouth, drawing it in, in, swallowing it, sucking it, pulverizing it with sharp, needed pain.
Lucrezia's legs began to jerk in spasms and the unknown fingers slid down her body, the image of her own, and went straight to the spot which played no timid games with them but waited, wide open like a trap, thighs wide apart and squirming.
Lucrezia held her breath waiting for the contact, expecting it, but still jumping with delight when it came. Cool fingers caressed her long, deep cleft which was stinging as the juices were washed into it from her inner regions.
The fingers explored like timid animals- and everywhere they touched and slid they left a burning, a prickling sense of near-destruction.
Lucrezia groaned. She liked to groan. She let the groans escape from her mouth-not that she could really have controlled them-to show her appreciation of what was being done to her.
Then with a sudden jump she felt the fingertips find her little erection. That was too much. She squirmed her hips in a movement that was almost circular, that was wild, exaggerated.
And the fingers were relentless. They pressed there, loved there, pinched there, gave no quarter although her moans became helpless sobs of passion.
Lucrezia felt her hole growing wide. The love-juice was swamping, too, and her belly was in unbearable torment. There couldn't be much more to go.
“Your mouth, your mouth!” she pleaded.
The fingers came out of her sultry cleft giving her a brief respite. But they were replaced immediately by a pair of cool lips which seized on her clitoris, sending a shock through her whole body.
“Oh, wonderful, wonderful!” she gasped. She could hardly utter the words. They tumbled out in a rush of sound which was mostly escaping breath, wheezing out like steam from a hot spring.
The mouth was working hard, giving her no chance to catch her breath. She was out of breath as if she'd been running hard.
And then the hands, remembering, slid around her hips and dug handfuls from her big buttocks, rummaging between them to find the anal orifice.
“Wonderful, wonderful!” she breathed again, lost and helpless.
She felt the heat like a great wood fire down in her passage. It was as hot as a lump of smoldering charcoal, felt ready to splinter into pieces at any moment.
“It's coming… it's… coming… oh!” she gasped, more as an outlet for her feeling than as a warning. She jerked her legs this way and that as if they were puppets and she held the strings. Speech was now impossible. The sounds from her mouth were animal noises, enlarging in abandon with every lick of that tongue on her erect little organ.
She clamped her legs around Carlotta's head and squeezed her loins up at her face, forcing, straining, arching. She felt the burst, the splintering aid site cried out, stifling her cries with her fist as the last suck drew her liquid passion through her channel.
A new and regular activity was begun in the quiet haven of the convent.