Duchess of Milan (19 page)

CHAPTER 15

Milan, April 1492

“Elefante,
Francesco. Eh-lay-faahn-tay.” Isabella pointed to the elephant. Chained by the foot to one of the pillars ringing the courtyard of Il Moro’s menagerie, the beast passively swished its trunk across the straw-strewn flagstones.

Beatrice held Isabella’s son, Francesco. The sixteen-month-old boy was still swaddled below the waist but wore a white silk shirt and a little jacket of gold-embroidered brocade.
“Elefante”
Beatrice said.
“Elefante.”

“Delia,” Francesco blurted somewhat peevishly.

A lion growled. Both duchesses started and turned to the cage directly behind them. The lion began to roar, so powerfully that they could smell its carrion-tainted breath a half-dozen paces away. Francesco screamed and began to cry hysterically, his face quickly reddening in vivid contrast to his fine, almost transparent hair. The elephant stomped and snorted, the caged tropical birds shrieked, and monkeys began to screech. The duchesses and Francesco’s
vecchia,
Lucia, scurried across the courtyard and exited the menagerie through the gleaming white peristyle entrance.

Outside, Francesco continued to cry, his hearty protest obscuring even the racket from the menagerie. Isabella took him from Beatrice, kissed him fervently, and stroked his silky hair. When that failed to calm him she passed him to Lucia, who had no more success.

“He’s tired,” Isabella said. She signaled for the waiting coachmen to bring her carriage up. “Let Angela feed him,” she told Lucia. “Then put him to bed.” She kissed the still-squalling toddler and murmured to him, then assisted Lucia into the gilded belly of the four-wheeled
carrozza.
“Don’t come back,” she called up to the driver. “Her Highness and I are going to get horses.”

The Duke of Milan’s stables were a short walk from the menagerie. Surrounded by deep green pines, oaks, and elms, the stable complex resembled a large
palazzo
in the
all’antica
style; the ground floor was enclosed by an arcade of white marble columns and classical arches. The horse stalls were some of the finest accommodations in all Europe, regardless of resident species. Columns capped with intricately carved stone garlands supported the ribbed ceiling vaults, and superbly lifelike frescoes of horses decorated the walls; the Duke of Milan presumed that just as the human occupants of the Castello enjoyed pictures of their glorious ancestors, so his horses would be inspired by images of equine champions. The plumbing was the most advanced available: piped-in water in each stall, and a system of clay conduits to remove waste.

The uniformed grooms quickly saddled and bridled the duchesses’ horses. Beatrice and Isabella rode north through the ducal park. The afternoon warmed, and they pushed their horses to a lather, the trees flying past in a green blur.

“Let’s circle back toward the lake,” Isabella said when they finally decided to cool their horses; Il Moro had built an artificial lake near the stables and menagerie. “We can unsaddle and water them there.”

The landscaped park surrounding the lake was deserted except for a cluster of white swans at the north end; the workmen who had been installing a marble balustrade around the perimeter of the lake had apparently been sent elsewhere. The horses drank from the lake, and Beatrice and Isabella sipped from a tiered fountain of newly cut marble. They spread a saddle cloth on the grass and lay down side by side, squinting up at the sun. The horses slurped and snorted and flapped their manes.

Isabella turned her head to Beatrice. “In the sun I can see the red in your hair. I have it too. It’s our Spanish blood. But I love the way yours is, so dark underneath, with this transparent red halo. So beautiful.”

“I’m not beautiful, Eesh.” Eesh was a childhood nickname the duchesses had revived, a toddler’s Spanish pronunciation of Isabella’s Latin monogram, IX. “You’re beautiful.”

“It would be nice to hear my husband say that. But I’m two legs short of earning that sort of compliment from him.”

“Maybe Gian will change. Mama wrote me that marriage is like a lute. You mustn’t be distressed if it does not play properly at first. Day by day you must adjust the strings to produce a harmony. At least that’s what Mama says.”

“Gian isn’t a lute,” Isabella said dryly. “He’s a
cacarella.”
With her fist she made an obscene masturbating motion. Beatrice shrieked with laughter, which provoked a similar outburst in her cousin. The duchesses crowed and cackled and wrapped their arms around one another.

When they had stopped laughing they remained in their embrace. Isabella looked intently into Beatrice’s eyes. “Have you ever wondered how it would feel to be like this with a man?” she whispered. “I don’t mean in bed, quickly proceeding to their objective, but like this. To hold someone close without wanting that, even if you did that later.”

For a moment Beatrice couldn’t imagine wanting anything more than the intimacy she was enjoying with Isabella. But of course she remembered. Those velvet, sultry nights at the Villa Belriguardo on the river Po, when she had stayed up and raptly listened to her half-sister Lucrezia fantasize about her husband-to-be, nights when her sister had read from her fiancé’s letters, embellishing his ardent declarations of love with anticipatory visions of their lovemaking. A hundred nights, a thousand nights when Beatrice had read and reread all the great romances in the light of flickering oil lamps, memorizing the words of Rolando and Tristan and Petrarch and hearing them again in the darkness, feeling the warm hand of a gallant cavalier or an ardent poet in her own, and falling asleep with his words sparking like fireworks in her mind.

“Words,” Beatrice whispered. “I want a man to tell me things.”

“I only want a man to kiss me. Not like men kiss, but like this. ...” Isabella’s lips brushed Beatrice’s, as softly as her own breath. The kisses moved in an infinitesimal procession from one corner of Beatrice’s mouth to the other; there was never a sensation of pressure, only warmth and a perfect smoothness.

Beatrice’s head buzzed, surprising and alarming her. But she was strangely disappointed when her cousin stopped.

“Oh, God,” Isabella said. She groaned and let her head fall back. “Kissing Gian is like sticking your head in a wine barrel full of pickled eels.” She turned to Beatrice. “I’ll tell you what it’s like sleeping with Gian if you’ll tell what it is like with Il Moro.”

The duchesses shrieked with laughter.

“I will go first,” Isabella announced. “Gian cannot do anything if he hasn’t had enough to drink, and he can’t do anything if he’s had too much to drink. At first he is most interested in my breasts, which I like. I love to have my breasts sucked. He likes to see me entirely naked, so there is always a lamp left lit or it is done during the day. If I can surprise him and not give him time to think about it, he can become very excited. One time I was able to persuade him when we were out riding. That’s when I enjoy it the most, when Gian gets . . . excited.”

Beatrice reminded herself that at least one of her childhood dreams had come true: perhaps she wasn’t sitting beside Eesh on her bed, as she had dreamed in Naples, but here she was talking to her as intimately as a sister. “My husband drinks a little too,” she said. “I can always smell it. But he never . . . It’s like he is giving me one of Messer Ambrogio’s medications. Once a month he sends word to expect him. He never talks, he lifts my chemise and lifts his shirt, and he proceeds. I know it will be over more quickly if I relax, so I think about things I like. I pretend I’m floating down the Po River on a summer afternoon, with the musicians playing, throwing petals in the water and counting them. It doesn’t take very long.”

“Do you ever enjoy it?”

“It doesn’t feel bad anymore. I know he tries not to hurt me.”

“Do you want a baby?”

The question startled Beatrice so much that she sat straight up. Isabella’s pitch was wrong: disingenuous, dishonest. But Beatrice told herself that Isabella was only hiding an understandable concern, a concern they both shared. If she were to give Il Moro an heir, everything would change. If ... The fear suddenly made her queasy, and she fought the truth
she
was hiding. Her voice was high and tentative. “Eesh . . . Eesh, weren’t you afraid when you had your baby?”

Isabella sat up, pulled the hem of her skirt to her knees, and stroked her slender white legs. There was a strange movement of her eyes; a narrowing, a flicker. But it passed. She shook her head. “You would be frightened if you listened to all the
favole
the old women tell you, how if you see a lizard on your windowsill the day you conceive you will have a monster with a lizard’s tail, and how you must have learned this on Christmas Eve if you want to stop hemorrhaging: ‘On Christmas night Jesus was born, and Christmas night he was lost. On Christmas night he recovered again. Blood, stay in your vein, as Christ’s blood stayed in his.’ As if you could remember to say that if you were bleeding to death.” Isabella’s lips twisted sarcastically. “You know that when you’re a duchess you have to have witnesses present, don’t you? They show them in as soon as they get you in the birthing chair. You are sitting there with all of them staring between your legs, to make sure you don’t cheat and pull some whore’s newborn infant out of the washing basin. Messer Ambrogio kept getting me out of bed and sitting me in the birthing chair, even though I could tell I wasn’t close to ready. That tired me more than the birth--getting up, sitting there for an hour, lying down when the baby didn’t come, getting up ... on and on.” Isabella shook her head contemptuously. “Even if you weren’t carrying a baby in your belly, all that activity would tire you. Have you ever had a fever so bad that even your bones ache? That’s how I felt. As if a poison were running through my veins. As if a hot cannonball were inside me, pressing against my backbone. And when the baby started to come, I believed I would look down and see my bowels spilling out of me.”

Isabella stopped, frowned, and made several silent words with her mouth. “I saw this way out of the pain,” she said at last. “A light. I could fly in it. Toto”--Toto was little Francesco’s pet name for Beatrice and had been adopted by his mother--”it was ... I felt I had huge wings and could fly, and with each thrust of my wings I rose away from all of them and yet at the same time pushed my baby into the light. And suddenly I was free, I was above all of them, floating in the light, and my baby was with me. And when I saw my baby’s face for the first time I knew that he wasn’t God’s baby or his father’s baby but that he was mine alone. My will, my strength, a strength that no one else could ever have, had given him life.” Isabella clutched her legs tightly. “I can’t wait to have another baby.”

Beatrice stared off toward the lake; two of the swans drifted on the water like white marble statues set on a sheet of lapis lazuli. “Eesh, do you think there are things inside us that our whole being knows yet conceals from our minds, because we could not endure the knowledge and continue to live?”

“You mean a premonition? You’d better not talk like that. They are still burning witches out in the country. And in Florence too!”

“No, I’m serious, Eesh. I don’t mean a vision such as a saint might have. I mean something the mind conceals, a ... foresight that does not reach the eye. But it remains in our minds, like . . . like a painting waiting to be unveiled, and if we come too close to removing the drape from that picture, the rest of our being must warn us of the peril. Do you think that’s possible?”

“Yes. I didn’t mean to make sport of you. Yes. I think I understand what you are saying. You are talking about a profound intuition, one that ...” Isabella’s own intuition flew out at her like a cawing raven, and she fought it away. “It is a warning that was planted in your soul the day you came into the world, but you can’t see the thing you fear, only sense it when you are near it.”

“Eesh, do you remember when Giovanna . . . died?” Beatrice reached into the unfathomable depths of her fear. Giovanna had been one of the ladies-in-waiting who had attended their grandfather’s second wife, also named Giovanna.

“You remember that? I was about ten then, and they wouldn’t let me anywhere near her. But I heard the stories. How did you find out?”

“Eesh, I saw it. I promise you I am not imagining. I wasn’t supposed to be there,  but I knew where to hide.”  She had crawled into one of the narrow stone passages--built to facilitate escapes, spying, and clandestine liaisons--that laced the walls of the Castel Nuovo in Naples. “I saw them. ... I saw them bring the baby out.”

“Al nome d’Iddio.
Was it really . . . like they said?”

Nausea and a feverish, vertiginous sensation swept through Beatrice as she continued. “Yes. I saw it, Eesh. They couldn’t get its head through, so they had to ... Eesh, I heard it.” She heard it again, the wet crunching as the baby’s skull, irrevocably wedged in the pelvis, was crushed with a surgeon’s lance, in the hope that at least the mother might be saved. “The surgeon used a hook to bring the baby out. Its head was ...” She could still vividly see the horrible thing they had pulled out of Giovanna, the tattered pulp of its skull and its limp, slimy limbs, like an octopus on a gaff. “Eesh, I saw Giovanna die too.”

Now the images overwhelmed her, coming in rapid, nightmare sequence. Giovanna had seemed to get better for several days. Then infection had begun to spread throughout her body, a dreaded gas gangrene that had rotted her insides, swelling her grotesquely. “Eesh, she looked like a pigskin full of water. She kept getting bigger and bigger. She screamed so much.” The screams again pained Beatrice, like a knife scraping her bones. “When she finally died, the pus gushed out of her mouth and nose, and then she swelled up even bigger. I couldn’t believe she didn’t burst.”

“That is the kind of thing that might happen once in ten years.” Isabella shook her head emphatically. “I remember one of the
vecchie
saying that Giovanna was so narrow in the hips it was a wonder she could even piss, much less pass a child.”