Duchess of Milan (14 page)

Il Moro swallowed and his breathing evened out. “You know my brother has left behind more than his evil spirit.”

“Lodovico. Bona of Savoy in France is no different than Bona Sforza in Milan. A shriveled, feebleminded bag of wind who could not induce the French army to march around a dung heap, much less cross the Alps. The French army will come to Italy only at the invitation of Il Moro. You know that is true. As for the wife of your brother’s son--”

“The Duchess of Milan has now made an agent of this . . .
Beatrice
of yours,” Il Moro snapped, like a child angry over the death of a parent.

Cecilia could not help herself. She started to laugh, beautifully, a sound like bells and lyres, with only a hint of irony. “Beatrice is the wife
you
married,
amico,
not some disease
I
have given you.”

Il Moro looked at Cecilia in wounded astonishment. And then he smiled, slowly, petulantly.

That weak, pained smile was proof to Cecilia that Il Moro could deal with the inevitable death of their love, and her heart lightened. “Lodovico, remember this.
Your
Beatrice has already proven that she is far too clever to be manipulated for long by that conniving, dishonest bitch. She will learn the truth herself, and it will be much more effective than if anyone attempts to warn her about her cousin. And when Beatrice turns against the Duchess of Milan, that will be your moment. Never forget that, Lodovico, because I will not always be available to remind you.” Cecilia lifted her hands and clutched her fists solidly, as if she had found something substantial in the air to hold on to. “That will be the moment Fortune has given to you.”

Extract of a letter of Giacomo Trotti, Ferrarese ambassador to the Court of Milan, to Ercole d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. Milan, 20 April 1491

My dear Highness and most illustrious lord Duke,

You will be relieved to know that yesterday Cecilia Gallerani was removed from her rooms in the Castello di Porta Giovia and has been installed in the Palazzo del Verme, awaiting the birth of her child. I have personally reviewed the marriage contracts, signed and sealed by Count Bergamini and Count Gallerani. And lest you think that Il Moro is temporizing until the investiture is done, let me assure you that he has displayed a grief so shamelessly theatrical that I can only assume it is authentic. For six days he has been closeted alone in his rooms, the shutters drawn by day, the lamps unlit at night. Those who have seen him describe a man so deep in mourning that he can scarcely bring himself to speak. I am certain we can expect his recovery in time to welcome the French envoys, who are due here, we are told, a week or so hence. . . .

During his self-imposed period of isolation, Il Moro had wandered his darkened rooms like a ghost, floating in the dense silence. He believed that the pain would never leave him, but that eventually his body would leave the pain.

After a while he had learned that he was in the company of other ghosts--his father and mother, Bianca’s mother, his youngest brother, Ottaviano. At first merely fleeting presences, they had started to become as real as the body he was leaving behind. He could not explain himself to them, but for a time he had welcomed their distraction.

On the seventh day the door appeared--not a figurative portal, and not the shadowy outline of the double doors he had sealed seven days previously. This door was so real that he could smell the moldy oak, see the brass Sforza viper nailed to the blackened wood. And he knew that on the other side was his eldest brother, Galeazzo Maria, fully embodied, waiting for him.

His substance returned to him with an icy rush. He stood staring at the door, his feet numb and his heart thudding, and in a dreadful epiphany realized what Cecilia’s absence really meant. She had been the guardian of the gate, the sentinel who kept his memories sealed inside. She alone had prevented him from opening the door and joining his brother on the other side.

Now he was free to go in, and the dark chasm of possibility yawned before him. His arms trembled and his cheek twitched, and for an instant he embraced the mad urge to do it, to complete the self-negation his grief demanded. Then he realized that simply crossing the forbidden threshold was not enough, that once inside he would have to look again into his brother’s eyes. Only that elemental fear, stronger even than his fear of death, held him back.

He stared at the door for a moment longer. “I am not like you,” he said in a cracking whisper. “I am not a monster.”

Il Moro pressed his hands to his aching eyes. The door vanished. He went to the double doors of his bedchamber, instructed the chamberlain waiting outside to light all the lamps in his rooms, and sent for his secretaries.

Beatrice crept in the darkness, surrounded by the chill and must of damp stone, following the sobs and screams. Finally she found the place and peered through a tiny hole in the thick masonry, probably drilled there by a jealous husband or lover. She could see the room clearly, crowded with midwives and physicians. The woman who was screaming sat in the birthing chair. The heavy oaken chair rhythmically heaved off the floor with the force of her convulsions.

The birthing chair suddenly whirled to face Beatrice. She knew that the woman was Cecilia Gallerani, though she had never seen her before. Blood gushed from between Cecilia’s legs, and she reached inside herself and pulled out a creature with blue, ropy limbs, the face of a doll, and a mangled skull. Her arms shot out and held the horrible thing right in front of Beatrice.

In an instant Cecilia had come through the wall. She stood beside Beatrice in a pool of her own blood; her eyes (but now they were Isabella’s eyes) lit up the entire passageway. She pointed to Beatrice’s navel, and suddenly Beatrice’s abdomen inflated grotesquely. Beatrice felt a watery evacuation from between her legs and looked down in horror at the crimson torrent rushing out. Cecilia laughed, her head back, her teeth like fangs. “Mama!” Beatrice screamed. “Mama ...”

Beatrice bolted upright in bed. She was intensely cold; the embers in the fireplace seemed impossibly far away, like a traveler’s lantern viewed from a distant hill. She remembered the dream vividly. She wondered if she had actually screamed “Mama,” and if anyone had heard.

She placed her hands to her belly. Was it possible that the seed had already been planted? Her sister had said that it took many attempts and that the stars were a very poor guide for success. Mama had said that it could happen the first time and that the stars were often reliable. The consensus among the kitchen maids in Ferrara, the principal source of sexual education in the Este household, had been that it was always possible unless you were having your monthly out-of-ordinaries, but no decent man would want you then. Beatrice had been regular as soon as she had started two years earlier, but since the negotiations over her marriage last summer she had only had a trickle once, and not on schedule. So how could she tell if ...
it
was inside her now? She had started vomiting last summer too, even when she wasn’t sick. So the only certain sign would be her weight. As long as she didn’t gain weight . . .

A faint rattle of footsteps came from the sealed antechamber. Beatrice burrowed beneath the down coverlet and prayed for deliverance. After a long while she admitted to herself that she probably had imagined the sound. But her fear remained, a taste like blood in her mouth. The price of her victory over Cecilia Gallerani, she realized, had yet to be paid. One night, as inevitably as the endless cycling of Fortune’s wheel, he would come.

CHAPTER 10

Vigevano, 28 April 1491

Leonardo da Vinci stood on the crest of the gradual rise and swept his arm out toward the Ticino River Valley, his gesture so elegant and important that he might have been a god sprinkling the landscape with powdered sunlight. But what Leonardo actually had brought to the Ticino Valley was water. The evidence of that miracle was everywhere: in the vast silvery grid of canals traced across the countryside; in the finer web of glittering threads marking the paths of the innumerable irrigation ditches. Nourished via sluices opened and shut in a complex orchestration, the hundreds of precisely squared fields created a patchwork of lustrous variety. Many lay entirely flooded, mirrors of the cloud-cobbled cerulean sky that had followed the morning rain; those fields where the heads of grass had begun to emerge above the flat sheets of water had an almost brocadelike, citron-hued iridescence. Others were thick, wind-rustled viridian carpets of wheat, barley, rice, and alfalfa. Some fields lay fallow, the dull, neutral beige of the soil belying its extraordinary fertility.

Bernard Stuart d’Aubigny, head of the French embassy to Milan and proxy for His Most Christian Majesty Charles VIII, came to Leonardo’s side, accompanied by Il Moro and the interpreter on this excursion, Galeazzo di Sanseverino, Captain General of the Armies of Milan. D’Aubigny was in his early thirties, a medium-size man with a heavy red beard and bright blue eyes.

Leonardo’s large, powerful hand flapped at the wrist in a kind of waving motion, as if he were indicating something beyond the horizon. Chin tilted up, flowing gray hair swept back from his high forehead, he appeared to be withstanding a cosmic gale. His high, musical voice added to the sense of wonder. After every two or three sentences Galeazz would translate Leonardo’s words in his own poetic cadence.

“... the Ticino River, two leagues distant. Along the banks I propose the construction of ten separate towns, each of these communities limited to precisely five thousand dwellings containing no more than thirty thousand inhabitants. Every privy would empty into an underground conduit that would then be carried by canal into the river and thence away into the sea. In addition, we would offer public privies to ensure that odious habits of public urination and defecation are discouraged. The chimney smoke that so deprives our cities of light and contaminates our every breath would be spirited away by a system of revolving cowls, operated by the convection of the fire beneath, that would propel the offending vapors high into the atmosphere--”

“Ah, yes, Maestro Leonardo, do forgive me,” Il Moro interjected. “But we must move along if we are to tour Vigevano before dark.” Vigevano was an ancient Roman city two dozen miles west of Milan, recently revived under Il Moro’s aegis. “You will be most impressed at what we have done there,” Il Moro told d’Aubigny. “We have taken the old Roman forum and redone it in the very latest
all’antica
style, and Maestro Donato Bramante, whose work you have seen in Milan and who is without peer at recalling the glories of the ancients, is building us a tower.”

The party remounted and rode into the sun. Dozens of large buildings sprawled over the western horizon, red tile roofs flaming in the late afternoon light. A cylindrical brick creamery towering like the donjon of a French castle was the centerpiece of the complex. The road leading to the creamery was jammed with oxcarts loaded with clay urns. The visitors had already spent most of the afternoon touring the vast farm, called Sforzesca, Il Moro’s personal experiment in advanced agricultural techniques.

D’Aubigny rode in silence, plucking thoughtfully at his beard. He had been prepared, at least in concept, for Milan. But finally to see it? Perhaps Paris had been the great city of Europe two or three centuries before, a golden age still manifest in the glorious glass-walled cathedrals like Notre Dame and Saint Chapelle. But while more than a hundred years of almost continuous war with the English had beaten down the provincial nobility and had vastly increased the relative strength of the French kings, the spirit and intellect of the French people had been crushed, a decline as evident in the capital city as it was in the ravished countryside. Idle, incestuous, frivolous, Paris had joined Babylon, Athens, Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople, that litany of toppled giants. Paris had been dying for two hundred years. It belonged to another time. And Milan would be the future. Paris was winding, cluttered, festering. Milan was clean, with broad, paved avenues, neat rows of shop arcades, and spacious
piazze.
In Milan d’Aubigny had seen a hospital as large as the Chateau du Louvre, built in the modern, reasoned, elegant Italian style. Anyone who needed treatment was accepted; there were beds for fifteen hundred patients, and d’Aubigny had been told of another such charity hospital, almost as large, elsewhere in the city. Just as profoundly affecting was the Milanese commitment to destruction. The Via degli Armorai, with its endless rows of clanging forges, had literally shaken d’Aubigny to the bones.

But after the wonders of Milan, d’Aubigny had expected to see a countryside strangled by tax collectors, the price France had paid with her dun, wasted fields and brutalized peasantry. Instead this, a city of agricultural commerce on a scale unheard-of elsewhere in Europe. D’Aubigny studied the rows of two-story stables marching along toward the northern horizon. The cattle and horses fed in their stalls, on rolled bales of hay stocked in the second-story lofts; d’Aubigny believed he had been shown more livestock here this single afternoon than he had seen cumulatively in France in five years. The workers were housed in rows of whitewashed, tile-roofed houses, and they wore neat linen tunics, clean white leggings, and ankle-high leather slippers; to d’Aubigny, accustomed as he was to the filthy rags and mud-crusted bare legs of the French peasantry, this was perhaps the greatest of the Milanese miracles.

And yet if one listened to Il Moro and his officers of state, this was only the beginning. Il Moro. Two days ago he had seemed just another wayfarer on the avenues of history, a name briefly shouted as its bearer journeyed from anonymity to oblivion. But now it was obvious that Il Moro was more than a mere pilgrim searching for the elusive shrine of fame. He was a builder of history’s roads, a man who would determine his own route across the continents of time.

The party of sixty secretaries, diplomats, and men-at-arms headed north. The main road to Vigevano was muddy from the rain, and the afternoon wagon traffic had left deep ruts, slowing the horses to a cautious walk. D’Aubigny glanced over at Il Moro, regal yet insouciant, with his proud Caesar’s nose and intense black eyes. Who are you? d’Aubigny wondered. You are the most skilled liar in Christendom, and yet every man wants to believe your words. You talk to us of nothing but peace, yet your arms factories all but bellow “War! War! War!” You say you are the humble servant of the Duke of Milan, and yet what you have shown me today is an ambition that would rule the world.