Duchess of Milan (3 page)

Beatrice's brother Alfonso materialized out of the ruins of her imagination, no longer a pimply-faced thirteen-year-old but an ember-eyed Charon come to dispatch her to eternal woe. He lifted her carelessly onto her horse, and she hooked her lifeless thigh over the pommel of the sidesaddle. Cold air rushed under her velvet skirts. She had not been warm for two weeks, and yes, she had eaten too many eels; she only wished she had eaten enough eels to kill herself. Her throat ached from suppressing her sobs all morning. “Ride tall,” her mother commanded, demonstrating the correct posture by drawing up her fleshy chin and thrusting out her massive bosom. “Remember that you are an Este.”

The church was only two blocks away. A guard of Milanese gentlemen waited in the recessed portal; the sun reached in and reflected off their armor, lighting them like big lanterns. At the base of the steps, Messer Niccolo helped Beatrice from her horse. The cavernous stone nave of the church was nearly as cold as the outside; it smelled of fresh paint and the must of the bodies buried beneath the floor. Hundreds of candles blazed from the altar and the aisle chapels, illuminating choirs of colored stucco angels and brilliant new frescoes of ancient martyrdoms. The Duchess of Milan's ladies, bundled in their
cioppe,
waited in front of the altar. Beatrice had not seen her cousin in five years, but she recognized Isabella of Aragon's tall, broad-shouldered, head-slightly-downcast posture at once. The memories flashed by in precise detail, like miniature paintings from a book of hours. Isabella with a leopard--they let her have her own leopard--on a leash with a diamond collar. Isabella in a gown of black Spanish silk, the only girl with pearls in her hair. Isabella's extravagant bed, with a striped satin canopy fringed with tassels and little gold balls, the bed Beatrice had always dreamed of sitting on, holding hands with her cousin and laughing. . . .

Beatrice escaped into one of the intricate little images. She was so small that she couldn't see over the balcony but had to look out from between the stone balustrades. The Bay of Naples, far below her, glowed like a huge sapphire. Across the water was Vesuvio, her magic volcano, a thin banner of mist streaming from its broken cone. She wasn't frightened to be so high, but she was afraid for her mother and sister and baby brother, because they had gone someplace where bad things had happened; she had gotten to stay with Grandfather, and he had given her a new doll with a complete bride's trousseau. The doll's white porcelain skin was as warm as the sun. Her name was Bella. Beatrice stood Bella beside her and told her about Vesuvio. Suddenly her cousin Ferrantino raced through the balcony, appearing and vanishing in a tattoo of frantic footsteps. Then she turned and saw Isabella. She was so tall that the sun seemed tangled in her hair. She carried a
palla
bat in one hand; the wooden club had been carved and painted with figures Beatrice could not quite make out. It was hard to see Isabella's face because the sun was behind her. She walked over, picked up Beatrice's new doll, set it on the broad, flat stone railing, and spread its white satin dress over stiff porcelain legs. . . .

“Beatrice, go to your cousin and offer her your hand,” Eleonora hissed. Suddenly there was Isabella, lit by the candles framing the altar. Her chestnut hair was still parted in the middle and draped loosely over her shoulders in the Neapolitan fashion. But her face was fuller; her once awkwardly dominating nose, with its slender tip and long, masculine bridge, now had a striking elegance. A tight leather glove sheathed her hand; her clasp was cold, even through Beatrice's glove. Isabella's eyes, Beatrice thought, were the exact gray-green color and mysterious opalescence of the Bay of Naples before a storm.

The vision of Isabella vanished behind Eleonora's bulk. “I have hot spiced wine for the ladies,” Isabella said after she had returned her aunt's embrace. Her throaty voice had a beautiful, sexual melancholy, as if pining for some absent lover.

A hand came into Beatrice's, a faint warmth like a small bird. The girl standing beside her was so haunted and beautiful that for a moment Beatrice thought she had invented her: china-white skin, lips as brilliant as berry juice, heavy black eyebrows, and feverish brown irises glowing within deep, shaded sockets.

“I am Bianca, Your Highness,” the girl said in a high, fragile voice. Bianca could not have been older than ten or eleven. She tugged on Beatrice's hand and led her out of the circle of ladies.

The Marquesa drew Eleonora aside and whispered: “Mama, who is that girl with Beatrice?”

“That is Il Moro's bastard.”

“Per mia fe,
Mama. Does Beatrice know?”

“I told her this morning. She . . . accepted it.”

“Mama.” The Marquesa paused. “Mama, there is something else, isn't there? Something you have not told her.”

Eleonora grasped the Marquesa's sable muff as if she intended to strangle the dead beast. “I will not permit--” A Milanese lady drifted within earshot, and Eleonora smiled graciously.

Bianca guided Beatrice to a chapel in the south transept. Shadows nickered over carved marble figures hoisting a huge white sarcophagus. “The man in there was formerly our Duke,” Bianca said in a wondering voice. She looked up at Beatrice. “My bird died. I would have preferred that she be buried in a church, but of course that couldn't be. We buried her in a marble casket carved by Ser Domenico. Her name was Daria.”

Having not spoken since the previous night, Beatrice was now convinced that only this enchanted child could hear her. “When my first parrot died, we wrapped him in black silk and lit candles around him and sent him down the Po”--the Po was the river that ran through Ferrara--”in a little galley that we had painted and gilded. Perhaps he is still floating far out in the sea on his beautiful ship.”

“My mother is dead. I never saw her. I imagine that she was very beautiful.”

Beatrice gave Bianca's hand a comforting squeeze. “I'm sorry about your mother.”

“I imagine I already prefer you to the Duchess of Milan and certainly to Duchess Bona,” Bianca chirped. Bona of Savoy was the Duke of Milan's widowed mother, the dowager Duchess of Milan.

Beatrice leaned over and gave Bianca a light kiss on her cheek. As she did, she glanced back at the ladies. Isabella was watching her. For a moment the Duchess of Milan's face was shadowed; then the candles washed her features with light. Beatrice remembered something about her cousin's eyes, the narrowing, the elongation at the corners. A twist of her lips, a way she had of looking amused and angry at once. The memory lured Beatrice across time, and she again confronted her cousin on that balcony high above the Bay of Naples, this time to see the end of it: Isabella smoothing the doll's dress, looking at her like that for a long moment. And then the
palla
bat blurred past and Bella's head exploded and her entire body flipped off the railing. Beatrice could see her falling, her white satin dress iridescent in the sun, the fragments of her head showering into the sea like a shattered snowball, and she could hear Isabella laughing. . . .

Beatrice blinked the present into focus. But her cousin was still looking at her, her bemused expression unchanged over all these years, as if she, too, remembered that day.

Satan did not raise Jesus to a high place and tempt Him with Milan, thought Cecilia Gallerani. Her high place was just beneath the brass cupola atop the soaring central tower of the Castello di Porta Giovia. The cold breeze that huffed through the streets below was, from this promontory, a biting wind. Behind her sprawled the Castello, as big as a good-size town, with moats like rivers, its massive wings engulfing vast courtyards, the rectangular severity relieved by white-columned arcades and gracefully arched window moldings of sun-pinked terra-cotta.

To the south and east lay the great wheel of Milan, rimmed by its cyclopean wall. The city's hub was the cathedral called the Duomo, the largest in Italy, its unfinished dome gaping, the rest a gleaming lace of sculpted marble, as sugary white and fantastic as a confectioner's creation. Cecilia guessed that the crowd packed into the piazza in front of the Duomo numbered a hundred thousand; they were shrouded in the white fog of their own exhalations. The day was so clear that she could see the blackbirds wheeling over the throng.

The wedding procession had already reached the piazza, and it paused in front of the Duomo while the guards cleared a broad path through the crowd. Il Moro was distinctly visible as a tiny figure in a pearl-white tunic flecked with gold; for a moment Cecilia thought she detected a pinpoint of light glancing from the grape-size diamond that always hung from his black velvet cap. Effortlessly, she conjured a life-size portrait from that distant miniature image. Il Moro's boyishly unlined skin was fair, his coloring otherwise dark--long, sable-hued bangs, shadowed, opaque eyes, heavy eyebrows--and this contrast emphasized the character of his face as deftly as an artist's chalk on a blank sheet of vellum. His nose, elegantly narrow from the front, strongly humped in profile--the nose of a Caesar--evoked experience and command; his small dark mouth, almost as delicate as a woman's, suggested sophistication and sensuality. These sharply sketched features could appear almost angelic from one angle and then hawklike, menacingly evil from another; all Il Moro had to do was turn his head slightly to make a complete transit of human nature.

As little as a year earlier, Cecilia had believed that she understood what was really there, between those apparent extremes. But now she was less certain. For her, Il Moro's eyes had always measured the true breadth of his character; usually guarded and impenetrable, they occasionally revealed shimmering glimpses of their brilliant depths. She would never forget the first time she had seen that inner radiance, a light she still believed destined to rise like a new sun over all Europe. But lately she wondered if Il Moro's incandescence hadn't blinded her to something hidden more deeply in his soul, a darkness inhabited by ghosts even he could not bring into the light.

Cecilia blinked, focusing again on the distant piazza. Alongside Il Moro rode the Duke of Milan, mounted on his white stallion, Neptune. When the crowd had been pushed aside, Neptune broke from the formation and trotted forward. The horse stilled again, then began a series of complicated dressage maneuvers, rearing back, forelegs churning in perfect circles, like a marvelous mechanical toy. An acclamation rose up from the crowd and drifted through the snapping wind. “Duca! Duca! Duca!”

The rest of the wedding party joined the Duke and proceeded across the piazza toward the Via degli Armorai, the broad, straight avenue, flanked by the arms factories for which it had been named, that ended directly beneath the central tower of the Castello. The factories, fronted with porticoes that faced the street, resembled large villas; the spires of the wooden cranes used to lift the immense foundry molds rose from open central courts. To celebrate Il Moro's marriage, both sides of the Via degli Armorai had been lined, for their entire length, with thousands of dummy warriors on wooden horses, all of them attired in real armor; the gold damascening of the polished steel plate flickered in the sun. At regular intervals the blunt snouts of bronze siege cannons jutted into the street.

The wedding party entered the armored cordon. Il Moro and the Duke of Milan rode side by side. The first fitful shouts, from the far end of the avenue, lost their meaning in the wind. Cecilia's hands jerked to her blanched face; for a moment she suspected an assassination attempt. But she quickly established the source of the still-faint calls. Crowded behind the wood-and-steel dummies, largely hidden within the shadowed porticoes, was the real army of the Via degli Armorai, tens of thousands of smiths and foundry workers, uniformed in dirty muslin shirts and soiled leather aprons.

The shouts cut through the wind, the muffled clamor beginning to harden and take shape, rhythmically, as if the armorers were hammering the two syllables on their anvils. “Mor-o. Mor-o. Mor-o.”

Before the wedding party had passed the first factory, the oaths had raced the entire length of the avenue. Within moments the vast sprawl of Milan seemed to have a single voice. “Moro! Moro! Moro!” the armorers thundered again and again. “Moro! Moro! Moro!” The sound pounded away until it seemed that the oaths were actually echoing off the icy blue vault of the sky, as if the hammers of the Via degli Armorai were smashing that immaculate porcelain dome to bits, as if the name “Moro” were a challenge to heaven itself.

The harsh percussion wakened the baby sleeping in Cecilia's womb; tiny, indistinct limbs pummeled her belly. She slipped her hand inside her
cioppa
and pressed it against her swollen abdomen. “Don't be frightened,
anima mia,”
she whispered against the gale from the streets. “That is your father's name you hear.”

CHAPTER 2

The Marquesa extended her arm and dismissively flipped her fingers at the view through the large arched window. The pool in the center of the arcaded court was still frozen. The neatly shaped topiaries and patterned hedges surrounding the pool also had an icy glimmer; garlands of tinsel and paper and ribbon streamers had been woven into the dead branches and arbors. In spite of the decorations, the topiaries, which in the spring would flesh out into fanciful shapes--lions, dragons, leaping dolphins--had a disquieting appearance without their leaves, as if they were ossified spirits. Beyond the skeletal foliage, at the far end of the courtyard, loomed a suitable backdrop: a windowless, three-story gray stone bastion. “Appalling. They should have consulted Alberti's treatise on architecture before they built that monstrosity. What do they call it, the Rochetta? The Rock. How very poetic. Didn't Il Moro tell us that Duchess Mother Bona lives in there? Actually that is rather poetic. In the name of God, Mama, could you believe her this morning, standing beneath the gate of the Castello like Cerberus at the gate of Hell? I didn't know if she was going to kiss Beatrice or bite her.
Cacasangue,
Mama”--Eleonora looked up sharply in response to her daughter's profanity--”the woman has been widowed for fifteen years, and as I have heard, she hardly let the sheets get cold, and yet to look at her you would think her husband departed only yesterday. Black is such a becoming color for a young woman with my complexion, but the effect is quite spoiled when these old hags are everywhere with their widow's weeds. I get quite distressed at having to say, 'No, the Marquis is still with us,' whenever I wear black.” The Marquesa paused for a heartbeat. “Mama, I think you had better tell Beatrice.”