Fan Fiction · Set in The Borgias

The Poisoner's Apprentice

A story about a Borgia household servant · Read the novel this is based on

This is fan fiction. An original, unofficial story written by a contributor to this site, not by Alexandre Dumas. It is not part of the actual novel and should not be mistaken for Dumas's own writing.

Ruggiero had entered the Borgia household as an ordinary young servant, hired for his evident intelligence and his evident discretion, and had discovered only gradually, across his first years of service, exactly what specific additional duties his particular combination of qualities eventually marked him for within a household whose actual operations extended well beyond the ordinary domestic service his initial hiring had ostensibly required of him.

The training, when it began, arrived in stages sufficiently gradual that Ruggiero found himself, examining the process honestly in later years, unable to identify any single moment when he might have clearly recognized what he was being prepared for and refused to continue. He was taught, at first, only the ordinary chemistry of medicinal preparation, knowledge that seemed, in its earliest applications, entirely consistent with legitimate household management of the family's various real health concerns. It was only as his training progressed toward more specialized knowledge, the specific properties of substances whose medicinal applications required considerably more caution than their potential for entirely different, considerably more sinister application, that Ruggiero began recognizing, with a dawning unease he found himself unable to fully suppress, exactly what specific skill his employers were cultivating in him.

He did not object, at this stage, through any direct confrontation with the household authorities whose evident expectations had become, by this point, difficult to seriously misunderstand. He recognized, with the particular practical clarity that a servant's really limited options typically required, that direct refusal carried real personal danger in a household whose actual power and actual ruthlessness he had, by this point in his service, observed at sufficiently close range to take entirely seriously. He continued his training, therefore, while privately developing an increasingly troubled private reckoning with exactly what he was being prepared to eventually do, and exactly what continued acceptance of that preparation implied about his own developing complicity in whatever specific applications his training might eventually be called upon to serve.

What Ruggiero found himself hoping for, across these difficult months of continued training and continued private moral reckoning, was that his particular skills might never be called upon for their most sinister potential application: that his household's general reputation for occasionally employing exactly this kind of specialized poisoning expertise might exceed the actual frequency of its true practical use, and that Ruggiero himself might complete an entire career in Borgia service without ever actually being required to apply his most dangerous training against any specific, named target.

This hope proved, in Ruggiero's actual subsequent experience, only partially realized. He was called upon, across his years of continued service, to apply his specialized knowledge on several occasions whose specific details he found himself, in his own private later reckoning, unable to fully examine without considerable ongoing distress. Applications that he executed with the same careful technical competence his training had cultivated in him, while carrying, alongside that technical competence, a private moral burden that no amount of continued service ever fully permitted him to resolve or set aside.

He told himself, across these difficult years, the same justification that he suspected most men in comparable positions of dangerous service eventually constructed for themselves: that refusal would likely have cost him his own life without preventing the specific outcomes his household's leadership had already decided upon, since other, less scrupulous alternative agents would simply have been employed in his place had Ruggiero himself declined. This justification offered him some practical comfort, in his more honest private moments, without ever fully resolving the deeper question of whether his own continued willing participation, however practically defensible given his limited alternatives, actually absolved him of moral responsibility for outcomes his own specific technical skill had directly enabled.

He carried this unresolved moral burden through the remainder of his service and into whatever quieter subsequent years his eventual retirement from Borgia household service afforded him, understanding, in his own final honest reckoning, that he had become, through a gradual process he had never actively chosen at any single decisive moment, exactly the kind of instrument his employers had always intended to make of him: skilled, discreet, and ultimately willing, whatever his private moral reservations, to apply his particular expertise whenever his household's actual interests required it, regardless of how thoroughly that willing application eventually came to trouble the private conscience he had never quite managed to fully silence, however consistently his practical circumstances had required him to act as though he had.