Duchess of Milan (25 page)

Beatrice cried enough for both herself and her sister. It was a while before the Marquesa realized that these were not tears of joy. “What in the name of God can be wrong now? Beatrice, I am the one who should be crying. I should be pounding the floor and ripping out my hair like the Franks mourning Rolando. I should be making an epic display of my grief. Really now, you are going to have to tell me.”

Beatrice sniffled mightily and blurted, “I can’t have a baby, Bel. If I have a son, my husband will use it to take Milan away from Eesh and Francesco. He isn’t afraid of anyone anymore. You heard him the other night.”

The Marquesa’s round, slightly fleshy jaws tensed; she had that icily adamant Este look. Her voice matched her face. “Beatrice, look at me. This is for you alone to know. Even Eesh cannot know. I swore to my husband that I would never tell anyone, not even Father. But I am telling you. What you fear will never happen. The Signory of Venice has drafted a secret resolution that Venice will move to attack Milan with every force at her disposal if Il Moro attempts to become Duke of Milan. It is no longer an issue that might be debated or postponed. It will not matter if His Holiness wears the miter and the German Emperor watches while Gian willingly drapes the ducal mantle on your husband’s shoulders. The Signory of Venice will never permit Il Moro to become Duke of Milan.”

The Marquesa’s revelation clanked through the elaborate construction of Beatrice’s fear like a great engine of war, leveling the huge dark walls, allowing her a sudden dazzling glimpse of some brilliant empyrean horizon. She let the relief carry her like a warm, lulling tide. And then the fear her sister would never be able to vanquish reminded her of its cold embrace. Even if her baby could no longer harm Eesh and Francesco, it would still kill her.

“And that is assuming you do have a son.” The Marquesa wiped her sister’s wet cheeks with the cuff of her chemise. “You might have a daughter, you realize.” The Marquesa shook her head wistfully. “At this point
I
would settle for a daughter. I really would.” She glanced upward. “But, our Father in Heaven, if you heard that, remember that I would prefer a son. Beatrice! Do you know what! Father is coming to see you! I entirely forget in all this excitement! He said that when he returned from the Certosa, he was coming to see how you are!”

Beatrice was as stunned by this as she had been by any of the preceding shocks. The entire time she had lived in Ferrara, her father had never ventured the intimacy of visiting her in her rooms, except the one time she’d had a serious fever and there had been some concern for her life.

“You must tell Father tonight, you realize. I will not let him leave this room without your telling him. I’m going to sit right here with you until he comes. Then if you won’t tell him, I will.”

The Marquesa launched into an extraordinary litany of ribald gossip from Venice, Paris, Rome, Genoa, Florence. Beatrice heard nothing of it. Her morbid determination had given way to a melancholy both stirring and unbearably sad. Already the demon in her belly, the agent of her husband’s obscene ambition, had vanished. In its place was a poor little thing that would come squalling into the world only to find itself alone. Suddenly she could feel the premonition of her death in childbirth far more strongly than ever, a palpable chill that chattered her teeth. She would ask Eesh and Bianca to look after her baby. She hoped it would be a little girl who would always remind them of her. . . .

The page knocked and announced the Duke of Ferrara. Ercole entered, smartly dressed in an embroidered tunic and a velvet beret. Beatrice’s emotions wheeled: awe, shame that she had actually hoped to deprive him of his grandchild, sorrow that he would never see her hold the infant in her arms, the hope that when he held her baby he would think of her.

Ercole stood rigidly beside the bed, his face a magnificent creation in stone. He inclined his head slightly to gaze down at Beatrice. The diamond-hard eyes registered a mild curiosity. “Your husband is concerned about your health. He intends to send for his physician.”

“Beatrice.” The Marquesa began to squirm as if she had fleas in her
camora.
Her twitching lips could only momentarily resist. “Why don’t you enlighten Father as to your condition?”

Ercole glanced quizzically at the Marquesa, who squirmed so violently she might have been goosed. “Bee-a-trice . . . Oh, Father, I can no longer stand it! Beatrice is going to have a baby! Father, Beatrice is going to have your grandson! Or at least your granddaughter. Father, I am so jealous that I should be the one in bed. I am dying with envy. I absolutely am. ...”

Ercole remained implacable for an instant longer. And then the miracle occurred. It was as though his face, this icy Alpine massif, had been animated by a pink-flushed sunrise. Beatrice watched in wonder as the mountain came to her, bending almost in supplication. Her father sat beside her and took her in his powerful arms, and he kissed one cheek and then the other, again and again. There was a rushing weightlessness, as if she were leaving the earth entirely, speeding on toward Dante’s incandescent Paradise. Her father held her away for a moment, his eyes unabashedly glistening with tears, and then kissed her on the lips, and at that moment she imagined that she had, like her poet, been granted a final, ineffable vision of the face of God.

“I am so proud of you,” Ercole said. “I am so very, very proud. You must give your husband this news at once.”

Her husband. For a glorious moment, Il Moro had not existed in Beatrice’s new universe. Her husband. “Father,” Beatrice said, “I think it would be best if you told my husband. There is someone whom I must tell first.”

“Duke Ercole. I am pleasantly surprised.” Il Moro motioned for the chamberlain who had escorted Ercole into the room to bring some wine. “Messer Galeazz and I were examining Maestro Dondi’s workmanship. You know he devoted sixteen years to this instrument.”

Ercole strolled around the enormous clock, a brass-and-wood edifice that reached to Galeazz’s chin. Galeazz had removed a brass plate and was studying the fantastic network of chinking cogs and whirring gears inside. This mechanism set in motion an elaborate crown of sculpted brass zodiacal symbols, celestial charts, and scored and painted spheres, all circling to the cadence of the universe.

Galeazz looked up at Ercole and nodded his head in a perfunctory bow; the minor slight was instinctive, habitual rather than intended. “This device records the position of the sun, stars, and planets as well as the time,” Galeazz said, his tone so hushed and self-important that one might have assumed that he had set in motion both this miniature cosmos and its full-size counterpart.

Bending to study the almost lacelike filigree of clockworks, Ercole’s head bobbed rhythmically in time to some music suggested by the ticking machinery. Finally he glanced up at Il Moro. “I have ascertained my daughter’s malady.” Ercole paused for an uncomfortably long moment. “She is carrying your child.”

Galeazz snapped erect.
“Per cap de Dieu!
How splendid.
Stupendissimo!”

Il Moro’s sensual dark lips worked as he looked between the two men. “My mother was the wisest woman I have ever known. She had the motto
merito e tempore
engraved on the frontispiece of all her books. Do your best and be patient, and your efforts will be rewarded. I have patiently done as Messer Ambrogio has advised me, in spite of the many who criticized our method, and now I have my reward.” He stepped forward and warmly clasped Ercole’s hands.

The page entered with three glass goblets of wine on a silver tray; Galeazz quickly snatched his up. “Let us drink a toast to the mother,” he said, “and offer a prayer for her health.”

Il Moro and Ercole took their goblets. “Yes,” Il Moro said, “let us drink to my Beatrice.” He glanced briefly at Galeazz, his hawkish profile flashing, then offered Ercole a frank, open smile. “And let us pray for a son.”

Beatrice found her cousin in Francesco’s nursery, singing her little boy a Neapolitan lullaby. Beatrice waited until Isabella had finished the song and laid her son back in the cradle.

“He had a bad dream,” Isabella whispered.

Beatrice leaned over the railing of the cradle and just touched her lips to Francesco’s forehead.

“I’m glad you came,” Isabella said when they had left the nursery. “Your sister and I have been discussing . . . we know something is troubling you. She wanted to talk to you first.” Isabella glanced toward the window overlooking the vast, darkened courtyard. “Why don’t we go for a walk in the labyrinth?”

Isabella took Beatrice’s hand and led her through her rooms into a single-story arcade open to the central court. The labyrinth, a maze of flower beds and waist-high hedges, shone with the faint pearlescence of the quarter moon. Only a few years old, the labyrinth nevertheless appeared ancient and mysterious, an artifact of some supernal power that had long ago resided here. The duchesses found an entrance at the south end of the broad circle and began gyring inward along the gravel path. Isabella put her arm around Beatrice’s shoulder, and Beatrice slipped hers around her cousin’s waist. They wandered silently for a while, not worrying about their progress toward the center, steering around the abrupt corners or retracing their path when they encountered a dead end.

At length Isabella asked, “Are you still upset by what your husband said the other night? You know your sister has told me that the Signory of Venice would almost certainly oppose him if he tried to coerce Gian. She was very reassuring. I really enjoy having her here. It is simply remarkable the ways in which you and she are alike. And the ways in which you are different.”

Beatrice pulled away and faced her cousin, all of the terrible will she had mustered to abort her child now directed to this seemingly far more difficult moment. Her heart screamed in her ears. “Eesh . . . Eesh . . . Eesh ...” She imagined she was drowning, gasping for breath. “Oh, Eesh, I’m going to have a baby. . . .”

Isabella’s bosom rose in a quick, breathtaking jerk. Then she became entirely still, as though suspended in time, herself an artifact of this ancient place. Her face appeared to pale, though perhaps the change was merely a quirk of the light. And then she stepped forward, so slowly that it seemed she was moving beneath a moonlit sea, advancing through the viscosity of time. With exquisite care she took Beatrice in her arms.

“I can see it now,” Isabella murmured. “You changed so gradually that I never thought... I did wonder why you always went behind a tree when I did. But even that ...” Her lips pressed against Beatrice’s ear. “Darling, I won’t lie and tell you that there wasn’t a time when I would have feared this more than anything. But I can honestly tell you that now there is this . . . joy in knowing that you . . . that we can now share this . . . miracle. Darling, we are more than empty vessels for men’s dreams. What we create in our bodies is the one true miracle in the world. And it is ours, and only we can share it. Soon I will not need to tell you that. Soon you will feel the new soul stirring inside you, and no one will ever again be able to convince you that it belongs to anyone else.”

Beatrice’s tears slicked her cheeks. She should have been convulsing with sobs, but she was so drained that the tremors passed through her like ripples on a pond. “I’m afraid, Eesh.”

“No, no, darling, you mustn’t be. You are so strong. You know you are. There’s nothing for you to fear.” Isabella suddenly clutched Beatrice powerfully, as if to prove to her cousin that her body could withstand the ordeal of childbirth. Beatrice responded with a fierce embrace. She was so close to Eesh, as close as she had ever been to another human being, their bellies and bosoms pressed as tightly as lovers’; she believed that she could hear Eesh’s heart beating alongside hers. The passion Beatrice had never even imagined in her husband’s arms shuddered through her, a sensation that she could see and feel and hear at once, surrounding her with pealing notes that burst into great rings of light. Her soul filled with a vast, choraling revelation: she had just conceived her baby. Not the furtive liaison that had planted her husband’s seed, but a higher union, the endowment of a new human soul. Now her baby had been conceived in love. And now she could love her baby.

She clung to her cousin, the night expanding limitlessly into sound and light, her heart racing to the rhythm of four joined souls. And then something stirred in her womb, a single note both sharply discordant and more beautiful than every other magic sound. She pulled away from Isabella and pressed her tingling fingers to her belly. She looked up at Eesh, wondering, the entire universe hushed.

Isabella’s eyes glittered in the weak moonlight. “Your baby moved,” she whispered.

CHAPTER 20

The French Alps, Near Grenoble, September 1492

His Most Christian Majesty Charles VIII peered down the muzzle of the massive siege cannon. Narrow shoulders hunched forward, humped nose jutting, and vaguely focused eyes bulging, the French King looked like the transfixed victim of a bronze serpent that was twice as long as he was tall and easily capable of swallowing him whole; the cannon’s gaping bore could accommodate an iron ball about the size of Charles’s disproportionately large head.

“I propose we harness it and bring it up the col,” offered Louis Duc d’Orleans, the King’s cousin. Louis’s shifting gaze wandered rapidly over the team of three dozen horses drawn up in front of the cannon, then darted to a grass-covered ridge, framed by violet-tinted blue sky, just several hundred paces up the narrow, roughly graded road.

Charles stared for a moment at Louis, his slack mouth open. Then he fluttered his hand at the team of gunners. The uniformed men immediately set about harnessing the horses to the heavy wooden carriage--supported on two massive, iron-rimmed wheels--that cradled the gleaming bronze siege gun.

“Do you think it will work?” the King asked Louis.

Louis shrugged his athletic shoulders. A slight flicker of his lazy, lascivious mouth suggested that this was all sport regardless. Louis had a curious mien, always poised between a scowl and a smirk. His strong chin and straight, handsome nose were countered by a small forehead and narrow temples that seemed to have entrapped his alert, mischievous eyes, forcing them to flit about like a pair of caged birds.