Duchess of Milan (28 page)

Mama was there, and for an instant her entire life was her hatred of Mama for keeping her from getting up. But she did not have the strength after that. When she opened her eyes again, she could hear her own voice through the whooshing in her ears. “Mama, where is my baby? Where is ... ?”

Mama left. When she came back, the bundle of mulberry-colored velvet in her arms sparkled for an instant, struck by light streaming through the partially opened shutters. A glimpse of ruddy skin and fine black hair. Beatrice expected something magical when Mama set the baby next to her, the full chorus of the turning spheres, but there was nothing, only surprise at his coarse, pinched little features.
“II suo fanciullo, miafanciulla,”
Mama whispered to her. Your baby boy, my baby girl.

Beatrice touched her baby’s cheek. He was so much softer than he looked; he felt as warm and velvety as she had imagined him. His lips puckered and his head wobbled toward her breast. Instinctively she fumbled at the laces of her chemise.

“No, baby,” Mama said. “You are too weak. And it will be better if you don’t start. If you do not take it up, you will not have to give it up.”

Clutching at her chemise, Beatrice raged at Mama and her own cold, clumsy, lifeless fingers; was part of her still dead? And then her baby opened his eyes and looked at her. She heard only a single note, but it was the clearest, purest sound she would ever hear. His eyes were some indistinct color, the lenses of a strange omniscience that Beatrice immediately understood. He did not simply know her soul, hear her soul sing. He was her soul.

Perhaps Il Moro had been in the room for a short while before Beatrice realized that her husband was present; it never registered with her that this man was also her baby’s father. He spoke animatedly to Mama--she did not know of what--and sat on the bed beside her. He kissed her and the baby, but the kisses had no more meaning than when Mariolo the
buffone,
in one of his clowning routines, would pucker and primp and pretend he was her lover.

“My son is becoming acquainted with his mother,” Il Moro said.

Idiot, Beatrice thought. I do not need to become acquainted with my own flesh, my own soul. In a hundred years you could not know him as I know him now. For a moment she was dismayed that she could feel such anger while she held her baby in her arms, but then she realized that her anger had saved his life. And would always protect him.

Il Moro stood up again and spoke with Eleonora. Beatrice continued her unblinking communion with her baby. I will never hurt you, she sang in silent oath, I will never let anyone hurt you. I will never let anyone do to you what Mama did to me.

“He’s almost here, Your Highness. Almost here.” The midwife stepped away from the birthing chair and murmured to her assistant, the same girl who had performed the version on Beatrice. “In three days you have managed to see one of the most difficult births I have observed in twenty-six years of attending, and now one of the easiest. And you would not imagine how much easier this birth has been for Her Highness than her first.”

Isabella heard the midwife’s remarks, and they stirred in her the sense of competition she had felt throughout her brief labor: competition with herself, to bring her baby out as quickly as possible, and the far more serious competition with Il Moro, to match his son with her own, to again bring the simple balance of numbers in her favor. As much as she hated to, she had to consider poisoners and plots and of course all the natural illnesses that took so many children in their first few years. This baby was her guarantee. Her first son, Francesco, would no longer have to assume alone the enormous burden of fate. And at the very least her second son would be a talisman, a symbol of Fortune’s continued favor.

She could feel how close the baby was, and suddenly she did not want her moment to end. She gave herself to it again, rising slowly into the intense light, occasionally exerting herself to stay aloft but often simply gliding, making huge swoops through the glittering vault of her expectations. This is love, she told herself, the true making of love, the most exquisitely sexual moment of life, the highest validation of my power.

She soared amid her baby’s cries. She watched them take him from her, head out first, bloodied yet perfect, already her image. He twisted; she shuddered once and pushed his torso out, without shame reveling in the surge of his flesh through hers. The umbilical twined across his legs like a blue Sforza viper. . . .

An alarm pulsed through her, bringing her crashing down. He is flawed, deformed! She was stunned, vacant, plunging through a sky that had lost the sun, everything drained from her. He is ...

An instant later she understood what she had seen, even before she heard the witnesses murmur “daughter.” Her son was not flawed, the bud of power she had expected to find between his legs somehow clipped in the womb. This son simply had never existed.

The witnesses dutifully exited the birth chamber. The midwife rinsed the little girl and showed her to the Duchess of Milan. “Your birth was so easy this time, Your Highness. I am certain you will have no difficulty nursing her now if you wish.”

Isabella numbly shook her head. “You had better see that her wet nurse is ready for her.”

Extract of a letter of Teodora degli Angeli, lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Ferrara, to Isabella d’Este da Gonzaga, Marquesa of Mantua. Milan, 20 February 1493

. . . indeed for a time I feared for the well-being of Madame your mother, she spent so many hours kneeling on the cold floor of the Ducal Chapel beseeching Our Sweet Lord to deliver Madonna your sister, and certainly all of this has done nothing to relieve Madame your mother’s stomach difficulties, of which you already know. But Madonna your sister has regained her health most marvelously, and now Madame your mother insists that Madonna your sister can look forward to nothing but the most salutary births in the future. Madonna your sister rests quietly most days (so altogether different from her demeanor as we know her), but she glows like the altar of the Duomo when her
bello puttino
is brought to her arms. . . .

The ambassadors, counts, cardinals, magistrates, and various and sundry dignitaries were invited in to view the gifts and decorations as soon as it was judged that Madonna your sister had recovered sufficiently. As you have requested, I have made every effort to be as detailed as possible and ascertain the value of the items described herein ... a set of crystal flagons supported on gold bases in the shape of griffins, satyrs, and dolphins valued at 3,500 ducats apiece, a large chased gold urn of
all’antica
design in excess of 15,000 ducats. . . . The canopy of Madonna your sister’s bed is crimson
velluto riccio sopra riccio
with ... a fringe of little golden spheres which I am informed is valued at 8,000 ducats by itself. . . the cradle [has] four gilded columns [and] a canopy of blue
tabi
silk fringed and laced with gold, wherein your little nephew Ercole slumbers beneath cloth-of-gold valued at 150! ducats an arm-span. . . . Madame your mother is concerned that the display is excessive and will unnecessarily provoke the Duke and Duchess of Milan, since these oblations have exceeded even those which greeted the birth of the Duke of Milan’s heir. Already, we hear, there have been comments to that effect from the Duchess of Milan’s chambers. . . .

Madonna your sister will be freed from her rooms four days hence, as will the Duchess of Milan, the time having been determined by Messer Ambrogio da Rosate. (From all the regard paid this individual’s pronouncements, Your Highness, you would think that Messer Ambrogio, not Madonna your sister, had actually given birth to
il Bello puttino.) . . .

CHAPTER 23

Milan, 24 February 1493

“He’s been such a sweet little boy this morning, Your Highness.” The wet nurse looked into the glassy, satiated eyes of four-week-old Ercole Sforza. The infant released her nipple with a wet pop, his lips vivid beneath a translucent coating of milk.

Beatrice took the swaddled bundle and held her son against her shoulder, his downy head cradled against her bare neck, his clean, moist scent more exquisite to her than the finest Milanese perfumes. She stroked his back, and when he erupted with a resonant belch, she and the wet nurse exchanged smiles. At first she had been jealous of her baby’s wet nurse, who was two years older than she but seemed much younger because of her unsophisticated manner. But Beatrice had quickly warmed to her son’s provider (whose own child had been stillborn the same day as Ercole’s birth) and had already given her a fortune in cast-off gowns.

“If he spits up you will ruin your lovely
camora,
you will have to select a new one from your
guardaroba,
and we do not have time for that if you are to leave your rooms at Messer Ambrogio’s designated hour.” Eleonora advanced through the doorway, a formidable presence in glistening black satin highlighted by the enormous diamond brooch perched on her considerable bosom. “And even if you care nothing for Messer Ambrogio’s schedules, you must not keep the Duchess of Milan waiting. You know that everyone will be watching you carefully for any suggestion that you are behaving in a fashion disrespectful of the Duchess of Milan and her daughter.”

“Listen to your sainted mother.” Polissena followed Eleonora into the room, her hooded head bobbing furious agreement. “You will be hard-pressed as it is simply to stay on your feet today, Your Highness, what with the
Te Deum
at Santa Maria delle Grazie this morning and the reception at Count Delia Torre’s
palazzo
this afternoon. And after the scare you put us through, your sainted mother and I are neither of us well enough at present to carry you off in our arms if you become fatigued, as we did when you were a babe.”

Beatrice glanced at the ridiculous couple, her massive mother done up in mourning hues and her withered matron of honor nodding along after Mama like a skeletal dancer in a death masque. She turned away from them and squinted into the bright pewter morning haze visible through the windows of her baby’s nursery. Mama always sounded so far away now; Beatrice imagined herself on a sunny windswept promontory, with Mama’s voice so vague and distant that it surely belonged to another life. But of course Mama didn’t understand that she was addressing a ghost, that the Beatrice whom Mama still admonished and advised had died the day her baby was born. Not because she had almost lost her life but because on that day she had finally found it. No one else could understand that her journey through darkness had begun the day she was born and had ended the day her baby was born.

Surrendering her baby to his wet nurse, Beatrice felt a stinging vestige of fear, almost like the pulling of scar tissue over a wound. In the first few days after Ercole’s birth, each time she had given him up to his nurses she had experienced the utter terror that she would not see him again; she had yet to entirely convince herself that each parting was only temporary. When she came back into her
guardaroba,
her ladies-in-waiting greeted her with a flurry of dramatically deep curtsies. They proceeded to swarm about her with predatory ferocity, openly squabbling among one another for the honor of draping the Duchess of Bari in her white-sable-trimmed satin mantle or straightening the ribbons entwined around her single braid. Beatrice could hear the rustling of ambition in her ladies’ silks and see the fear behind their obsequious smiles, and she hated their sudden attentiveness more than she had their two years of studied contempt. It was as if they expected her husband to declare himself Duke of Milan before the day was over.

Beatrice ignored her ladies and kissed Il Moro’s illegitimate daughter Bianca, who waited shyly on the periphery of the fray, cheeks blazing against her pallor. Trailed by her glittering retinue, Beatrice took Bianca’s hand and proceeded through her study and her all-too-familiar bedchamber, finally leaving her rooms for the Sala della Palla. There she was applauded by an expectant audience of the court fixtures, whose existence she had almost forgotten: fools and dwarfs, diplomats and clerics, bureaucrats and men-at-arms. She felt as if she were the victor in one of the great tournaments, and for an instant everything inside her constricted into a single icy anxiety: He has already done it. He has already used my baby to make himself Duke. Reason quickly discarded that scenario (most of all, he would not dare do it with Mama here), but the residue of fear heightened a curious exhilaration she had never felt before and could not pause to examine.

The Duchess of Milan and her retinue waited in the open portico of the Ducal Court. It was a smaller group than that attending Beatrice, largely limited to ladies-in-waiting. Isabella’s ladies were as glossy as a freshly varnished painting in their silks, satins, face paints, and gum-arabic-slicked hair, awaiting the rounds of post-partum celebratory
feste
with the coiled insouciance of hunting leopards. But their cold blue eyes and perfunctory smiles made it clear that they had nothing to celebrate. The contrast with Beatrice’s entourage was so evident that even Beatrice had to admit it to herself: It is thought that I have won and Eesh has lost.

She had never seen Isabella so richly dressed, her
camora
of green-and-gold-striped
appicciolato
velvet shot through with silver threads and crimson braid, her hair laced with tiny diamonds, her mantle of crimson velour wrapped loosely around her broad shoulders, leaving a ruby pendant exposed between her cleavage like a glistening dab of blood. Isabella smiled at Beatrice wanly, almost wearily, the tight corners of her eyes betraying her tension. Again Beatrice thought: What has he done that I know nothing of, that perhaps even Mama does not know?

Beatrice curtsied urgently, kissed her cousin on the cheek, and whispered, “I have missed you so much, Your Highness.”

Isabella folded her in an embrace; Eesh’s tense, powerful back felt almost like armor beneath her soft velvet dress. “The first month of confinement felt like a week,” Isabella said in her usual flippant tone, “and the second month felt like two years. Next time I am pregnant I will insist that Messer Ambrogio be chained to his bed for the duration of my confinement. He will quickly agree that two or three days in bed is all that should be required to ensure a mother’s health.”