Duchess of Milan (31 page)

“I can understand that you do not trust me,” Il Moro whispered. “But before you can presume to cast the light of truth on my lies, you really must ask your cousin who is the father of her son.”

CHAPTER 25

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. Vigevano, 1 March 1493

. . . yesterday the Duke of Bari transported all of us here to Vigevano for hunting and still more
feste.
This morning our occupation was a tour of Madonna your sister’s
guardaroba,
which would require until Easter if one intended to see everything! You could visit all the shops on the Via Torino in Milan, Your Highness, and not find so many goods as you would on Madonna your sister’s shelves. . . .

Madonna your sister has been out of sorts in recent days, and Madame your mother is worried that all the activity is too much for her. But the Duchess of Milan, who had a far easier delivery, is showing a similar distress, and I have not seen said Duchess so much as nod to Madonna your sister in two days. Thus I am of the opinion that all the conversation concerning what honors have been paid to which child has troubled the friendship of said duchesses. . . .

Vigevano, 2 March 1493

“Eesh!” Beatrice pounded her horse’s rump with her riding crop; he sensed the weakness in her hands and chopped his gait in a halfhearted attempt to throw her. When her horse did not run smoothly, she could feel the pain inside, as if the organs were still bruised from her labor. She was vaguely conscious of a tree flashing past, the new buds like little emerald ornaments. “Eesh!” she shouted again.

The chase had begun as soon as Isabella had, as usual, separated herself from the main body of the hunting party. After two days of her cousin’s icy disregard, Beatrice had realized that this hunt was her best opportunity to confront Eesh and obtain what she most desperately wanted: reconciliation.

She could see Isabella’s crop flailing and flecks of lather flying as her white stallion crested a grassy rise. Isabella did not look back from the high point, and her head, crowned by a green velvet cap and a single peacock feather blown back like a wind vane, quickly dipped beneath the horizon.

Beatrice rode hard to the top of the rise. Isabella waited for her in a shallow, muddy depression stitched with brilliant threads of new spring grass. She wheeled her horse about and stood her ground like an armored knight, her head high, the now-erect feather in her velvet cap emphasizing her stature.

Beatrice slowed and tried to recover. Her heart pounded recklessly, and her vision was blurred. She could hear her rasping inhalations against the mushy, sucking sound of her horse’s hooves in mud. “Eesh ...” She gulped a breath. “Eesh. I’m sorry, Eesh. I want to make everything the way it was before.”

Isabella’s horse jittered, and she jerked hard on his embroidered halter.

“Eesh, what do you want me to do? I will do anything, Eesh. Eesh, he is trying to say horrible things about you.”

Isabella’s complicated mouth twitched with possibilities. Finally she said, “Thank God for that. There isn’t anyone in Italy except for your husband’s fool Mariolo who believes a single word he says. If I wanted to escape the Inquisition, I would pay Il Moro to accuse me of heresy.”

“I hate him, Eesh. He says you want him to resign as regent so that Gian can rule Milan.”

A gamekeeper’s trumpet blared. Isabella looked up at Beatrice with a wry smile. “Now I see why your husband employs so many poets. He keeps them all busy writing these fables,” she said with familiar, casual flippancy. “Of course if Gian could be convinced that I actually wanted him to rule Milan in Il Moro’s stead, he would ride Neptune over the mountains and we would never see him again.
Gesu.”
She shook her head in mock astonishment, then smiled at Beatrice with her characteristic, girlishly dimpled innocence.

Isabella’s smiles and banter were a song in Beatrice’s soul. Things would never be the way they had been before. They would be better, their friendship now so much richer and deeper. She couldn’t wait to show Eesh her little boy. . . . But she knew that first they had to deal with the nemesis who haunted their friendship.

“Eesh, we have to stop him somehow. He’s mad. Eesh, that isn’t everything; he’s saying the most awful things.”

“What kind of things?” Isabella’s eyes narrowed.

On the periphery of Beatrice’s vision a hunting falcon hurtled into a nearby stand of trees. An instant later a hare screamed, a sound too much like a human child shrieking in pain. She knew she had to tell Eesh; it was the only way to stop her husband. “Eesh, he is trying to say that Francesco isn’t Gian’s son. Can you imagine?”

For a moment Isabella’s face seemed as waxy and still as that of a corpse. Then she smiled, a cold, brittle animation. Beatrice remembered a gold-haloed Virgin she had once seen in a church in Naples, painted in the old Greek style, so menacing in her archaic, stylized serenity that her unintentionally wicked smile had haunted a little girl’s dreams for weeks afterward.

“If anyone else but you had repeated such an obscene slander, I would have them tried and executed for treason.” Isabella raised her riding crop, loudly thwacked her horse’s rump, and rode off.

Through a sparkling halo of sunlight and tears, Beatrice watched her cousin disappear over the rise. She made no attempt to follow. She focused on details--the muddy water pooled in the depressions left by the horses’ hooves, a hunting falcon spiraling high in the cobalt-blue sky, anything to keep the icy needles of intuition from rushing through her veins. Oh, dear God, she pleaded. Please don’t let it be true.

Isabella rode directly back to the
castello
in Vigevano. Within an hour she had her children and their nurses loaded in carriages and on the road. She left instructions for her husband, organized a small contingent of guards, and rode south along the canal to Pavia. For much of the journey she drove her relay of horses at a furious gallop, leaving her guards pressed to keep up with her.

She arrived at the
castello
at Pavia at nightfall. She paced from room to room while the permanent serving staff hurriedly lit the lamps in the sconces and set the fires. Then she ordered them out.

She continued to walk about her rooms, the sense of confinement oppressive, the cold walls chasing her from one room to the next. So many thoughts flew through her mind, a thousand screaming blackbirds released from a cage all at once. “Bitch!” they cawed. That was what it was, the bitches. What the bitches were doing to her. The bitches: Fortune; Beatrice, whom she never should have trusted; her daughter, who should have been a son. Her mother, the primordial bitch. Her mother, that helpless, desiccated bitch. The crying, the fainting, the months she would vanish to some spa in Abruzzi so that she could “rest.” The way she smelled when she came back, reeking of her Milanese perfumes. No wonder her father never slept with her mother.

Suddenly the screaming birds quieted. The stillness was awesome, the sound of all the engines of fate paused and waiting. Waiting on her. That was how strong she was. How strong she was in spite of all of them.

She shouted for a servant, desperate to do the thing while the wheel waited. When the door opened she quickly gave the orders, and in only a minute the servant returned with several blank vellum sheets and her pens and ink. Isabella placed the writing materials and a lamp on a little table beside her bed. She dipped her quill into the inkwell and held her breath and waited, listening, assuring herself that the silence of destiny had not yet been disturbed. Then in that stillness she scratched the salutation in rapid strokes: “My most beloved and illustrious lord Father ...”

Beatrice whispered to Ercole’s night nurse to lie down for a while, telling her that she would sit with her baby and get the wet nurse if he awakened. She put her candle on the table in the corner and stood over the cradle in the guttering light. Ercole looked most like her sister, Bel, she decided; he would have a fair complexion and sandy hair. She marveled at the precision and delicacy of his features, so tiny yet so perfect. In a world suddenly gone mad around her, this was all the reason she needed. “I believe in you,” she whispered to her sleeping son. “And you will always be able to believe in me.” He puckered and smacked as if he had heard. She thought of Dante’s universe, where the light of divine love turned all the spheres, each sphere acting on the one beneath it, transmitting that light like a series of lenses. Whatever God was, she imagined that all His love was now focused on her baby.

The flutter of light and shadow made her pivot in alarm. Il Moro stood behind her, his black hair like a cowl, his face indistinct. She wanted to rush out, but she was afraid to leave her baby with him.

Il Moro went to the cradle and gazed at his son with his head bowed. He said nothing for what seemed a very long time. Then he whispered, “The spheres in their grades take love from the highest and do their work below.”

The quote was from Dante’s
Paradiso.
The coincidence frightened Beatrice, and more than ever she wanted to leave. But she had lost her legs.

He spoke in a soft, familiar whisper. “Your cousin has decided to leave us for the
castello
at Pavia. I tried to persuade Gian to stay on here, but rather than risk offending his wife, he intends to join her in the morning.”

Beatrice hadn’t known that Eesh had left. She felt bitter resentment toward Eesh for widening the gulf of uncertainty that now separated them. But more than that she hated her husband for being the one to tell her.

“Have you had an opportunity to pose your cousin the question I put to you?”

Beatrice felt her legs return to life. She hated him most of all for destroying this moment with her baby. She took a last lingering look at Ercole and quickly walked out into the half-darkened
guardaroba.

Il Moro caught up to her and grabbed her arm and turned her around.

She looked with disgust at his hand. “Has Messer Ambrogio given you instructions for tonight?” she said acidly. “I have already given you the son you need. If you try to come to my bed again I will give you a knife in the ribs.”

He released her arm. “If you have asked your cousin the pertinent question, then you must know the truth--”

“I know that you are the most expert liar in Christendom.” It isn’t true, Beatrice angrily argued to her own gaping doubt. What I read in Eesh’s face was not a confession. . . . “Tell me the name of the father.”

“I have no desire to place the father in jeopardy, any more than I wish to threaten the peace by revealing the Duchess of Milan’s treason.”

His response startled her viscerally, like the sudden kick of a baby in the womb. If he were lying, she realized, he would blithely offer to produce his proof. “Then why tell me?” she asked, but just as quickly she answered her question. “I see.” She nodded to signal her understanding. “But you have wasted this secret of yours. Because even if the Duchess of Milan’s child was fathered by a savage from Guinea, I will never help you become Duke of Milan.”

“You are such a passionate student of my ambition. Have your studies revealed a reason why I would want to make myself Duke of Milan?”

She realized that she had never gone beyond the simple conclusion that he wanted it because he wanted it, that he merely hoped to add the Duke of Milan’s scepter to the rest of the baubles in his treasure vault. It infuriated her that in all her imaginary rehearsals of this confrontation, she had overlooked this essential point.

He turned away from her, his position altering the pitch of his voice in a way she’d never heard before. “You come from a family that has ruled in Ferrara for two hundred years. My father’s father was born in a tiny village in the Romagna and on the day he died could not sign his own name. He was a shoemaker’s apprentice who became the greatest
condottiere
of his time. He was christened Muzio Attendolo, but his strength, his
sforza,
gave our family its name. He fought in hundreds of battles, but he never forgot his humanity. He drowned trying to pull his page, a mere boy, from a flooded river.

“My father, who fought for the first time when he was twelve, was twenty-three years old when his father died and he took over his troops. He was everything his father was and much more. A legend more than a man. He never wore a helmet in battle, and they say that often when the soldiers who opposed him saw his face they gave up and laid down their weapons. He fought for most of his life. He was almost fifty years old when he fought to make himself Duke of Milan, and he fought for years after that against the Venetians to keep his state. In spite of all that, he had the wisdom to build. Castles, churches, Milan’s first charity hospital. He hired the architect Filarete, one of the greatest minds of his generation. Half of what you see in Milan my father built.”

When Il Moro spoke of his father his cadence had quickened to a crescendo of controlled passion, perhaps a subtle vehemence. Now his voice fell again. “I was my father’s fourth son. I never expected to succeed him. But I never expected so much of what happened after my father died.” An undertone of regret inflected this last statement, as simple and sad as a mourner’s sob against the elaborate polyphony of a Requiem. “I never tried to be the warrior my father was, and even trying mightily I will never be half the man he was, even in those qualities that have nothing to do with war. But I will build this edifice of state my father has left us higher than even he could have dreamed, if only because of the strength of the foundation he erected. And I pray that our son will build higher still and see further than I ever dreamed.”

He turned, his shoulders slumped like a brickmason’s at the end of the day. “I am not a bad man,
cara sposa.
Perhaps, as you think, I am also not a terribly good man, but I am endeavoring to do good works, to make Milan prosper so that all of our people will prosper. I live in a world of men who do not respect good works nearly so much as they respect the capacity to reduce those works to dust. Men like your uncle Alfonso. The King of France and the Duke of Orleans. Ask your mother about the good works of the Signory of Venice. And as long as my nephew is Duke of Milan, we will be hostage to the intrigues of Naples and France and at the mercy of the Signory’s whim. All Europe protests the danger of my ambition. But who protests the danger to Milan of a drunken, simple boy, the pawn of a dishonest wife who would escort her father’s army to the gates of Milan to further her ambition? And even if you assume the best of Gian’s wife, what of his vicious, idiot mother, who all but openly begs the French to deliver her son from the oppression of Il Moro?”