Duchess of Milan (46 page)

The kitchen maid tilted her chin up. “I gave you the poison powder he gave me.”

“That means nothing,” Bernardino said. “Anyone can obtain poison. Perhaps you are what he says, just a spurned woman looking for revenge.”

The kitchen maid spit dramatically on the floor.
“Sciocca.
I should have taken what
he
offered me. He gave me five ducats just for putting the packet of poison in my wallet and agreeing to think about the rest of his offer.”

Galeazz stared at the woman. “You took the money? Where is it?”

The woman eyed Galeazz suspiciously. “Right next to the warmest place on my body. You want to look for it?”

Galeazz’s blue eyes were like ice. “Get it.”

The woman put her hand inside her skirt and pulled out a worn cloth wallet tied to her waist with a string.

Galeazz grabbed the wallet and counted out the thick gold coins. “Five ducats. That’s all he gave you?”

The woman nodded.

Galeazz’s hand darted from his side, just flicking against the kitchen maid’s face but making a sharp smack. The woman collapsed instantly, and her head struck the floor with a heavy thud. “Get that treasonous bitch out of here!” Galeazz snapped. The guard hastily dragged the unconscious woman out the door.

The man on the rack looked up again, his eyes suddenly keen with self-assurance. “You see, as I told you, I paid her for her work. Several nights’ worth. Certainly she is a cow, but her stamina is remarkable.”

Galeazz turned to Bernardino. “Don’t let him die until he has confessed.” The man’s eyes became as big and white as two eggs. “That cow is telling the truth, and you are lying,” Galeazz told him. “The first time you told us you spent only one night with her. For five ducats you could’ve had a first-class courtesan for a week. She isn’t worth a ducat for a lifetime of humps.”

The man determinedly retold his tale while Bernardino dragged a bag of salt from the corner of the room, pulled a knife from his belt, and slit the burlap. Bernardino spread the grainy crushed rock salt on the floor in front of the wheel, threw the empty bag aside, and crunched across the salt to the rack. He pumped a wooden lever and ratcheted the wheel up until it was almost horizontal, then leaned over the man’s face. “Shut your mouth now. I have only one question I wish you to answer. Who sent you?”

“As I told you, I am a
procuratore
from Rome. I--”

Bernardino walked around the wheel to the man’s feet. With the point of his knife he appeared to trace an outline of the left foot, as fluidly as a
maestro
drawing with a pen. The man howled and pounded his head back against the wheel. Blood streamed off his heel and spattered over the layer of salt on the floor.

Bernardino circled back around to the man’s head. The man stopped screaming and grimaced with determination.

“I’ve cut all the way around,” Bernardino said. “Now with one pull I can skin your foot like a rabbit. I’ll cook the raw meat with a torch until the fat runs, and then make you walk on salt until you answer my question. If you are still reticent, I will skin, cook, and salt your remaining foot. That failing, I will skin your hands and leave you down here with no water and enough rats and salt to last the rest of your life. Who sent you?”

“This is how I believe the step is done
alia Turca,”
Beatrice said. She stretched her arms straight over her head and clapped her hands as she twirled. “The costumes should have lots of
stringhe
and bits of mirror like the Scythians you did for my wedding joust, Maestro Leonardo. The effect when the Turkish dancers spin will be quite dazzling, don’t you think?”

Leonardo da Vinci nodded vaguely and made another notation in his sketchbook.

“The guests at our Oriental masque will imagine themselves transported to the court of the Sultan at Constantinople,” the poet Gaspare Visconti enthusiastically offered.

“I believe our masque is already quite dazzling as danced by Her Highness,” drawled Leonardo’s “assistant,” a young man called Salai, who performed no discernible function and was rumored to be Leonardo’s sexual pet, though anyone who knew Leonardo well understood that he abhorred physical contact and merely enjoyed browsing at pretty faces and physiques. Salai was about Beatrice’s age, with blond Milanese coloring and a pale fuzz on his cheeks and upper lip. His features were striking, but only because the Grecian beauty of his straight nose and broad, intelligent forehead was countered by sullen eyes and a snarling upper lip. A thin strip of Rheims linen shirt peeked above the lace-trimmed collar of his expensive green velvet doublet; his shapely legs were sheathed in pink hose, and silver buckles sparkled atop his rose-colored brocade slippers.

Gaspare Visconti and Beatrice’s secretary, Vincenzo Calmeta, looked at Salai with open disapproval; his comment was almost suggestive and presumed a familiarity with the Duchess he in no way enjoyed. Salai apparently took the reproving glances as a challenge, because he approached Beatrice with a pretentiously languid, hips-forward walk.

“Your Highness is quite the most splendid woman in all Italy,” Salai said in his lazy, drawn-out diction. “You are grace, you are elegance, you have quite the finest jewels and the most extravagant gowns of any woman who has ever lived. One can see why these Milanese women bray after you like hounds at a hunt, quite furious with envy.”

At this inelegant metaphor even Leonardo’s head popped up. Leonardo had flowing gray hair and a long gray beard, but his high, unlined, baby-pink forehead and large, wondering gray eyes gave his face an incongruously youthful, feminine aspect.

Beatrice smiled at Salai, who stood with a hand propped defiantly on his hip. “Thank you, Ser Salai, for envisioning me as a vixen pursued by a pack of snarling bitches,” she said, shooting a wry glance at Calmeta.

Salai stood his ground for a moment and then gave up the game to prowl Beatrice’s study, affectedly nodding at the rows of leather or damask-bound books like a scholar contemplating his research.

Beatrice and the three artists began to gossip about the Turkish Sultan’s exiled brother, who resided in Rome; the Sultan paid the Pope an enormous fee to keep his brother in a state of luxurious confinement, thus eliminating a potential rival at home. The Sultan’s brother was noted for his prodigious appetites.

They didn’t even notice the liveried page when he entered the room and made his first announcement. The young man cleared his throat and again said, “The Duke of Bari wishes to see his wife alone.”

The artists looked to Beatrice. “We will have time to finish after supper,” she told them. The men bowed and departed, Salai pausing to flourish with his arm like a
buffone
miming a courtier.

A moment after Salai had languorously exited, Il Moro came in. He appeared ill, a green tinge to his pale skin, his forehead misted with perspiration. His eyes were shattered, the look of a man gone quietly mad.

“Ercole,” Beatrice said as she rushed to him. “Oh, dear God.”

Il Moro shook his head. Beatrice spun through a catalogue of the remaining possibilities: Father, Bel, Bianca . . .

“He sent someone to kill our little boy. To poison our little boy and me--”

Beatrice grabbed her husband’s shoulders and actually shook him. Her voice was so shrill that he winced. “Who did? Alfonso? Was it Alfonso? Our baby--where is our baby!”

Il Moro spoke as if in a trance. “Ercole is in his nursery. Nothing happened. Messer Bernardino caught the man--”

“Who sent him? Alfonso?” Beatrice’s face was bright red.

Il Moro nodded. “I myself heard the confession, before ...” Il Moro looked away, his forehead now beaded with sweat. He swallowed so thickly that it appeared he might vomit. “Alfonso sent a man here to poison us. He tried to bribe a kitchen maid to poison our food.”

Beatrice saw a whirling image of little Ercole as still and black as the babies Mama had warned her about. She wanted Alfonso instantly dead, his fat scowling head rolling off a scaffold, his neck squirting blood. Eesh. This was what Eesh wanted her father to do, to free her from “the yoke of Il Moro and his wife.” If only Eesh were here she would strangle her with her own hands. . . .

Her husband took her in his arms and pressed her head to his chest. “Everything I have tried to hold together is coming apart,” he said.

Strangely, Il Moro’s weary, desperate tone settled her. All the spinning images of catastrophe fluttered and winked out. She felt no emotion whatsoever, only a dead, cold purpose. She extricated herself from her husband’s embrace.

“I have to know something,” she asked him. The question seemed to be written in her mind; she was not even consciously thinking anymore. “You told me that Francesco is not Gian’s baby. Who is the real father of the Duchess of Milan’s child?”

Il Moro had to sit on the bed. His head lolled like a drunk’s. Perspiration ran down his cheeks.

“I must know. I must know for certain if she lied to me about her son.”

Il Moro looked up helplessly, then looked down again.

“If you cannot tell me, then there can be no trust between us.”

When he spoke, his voice was small and hollow: “Galeazz.”

“Dear God.” For a moment she felt a curious outrage that Galeazz had betrayed Bianca. Then Beatrice realized that Galeazz had in fact betrayed
her,
that Milan’s shining knight was a tarnished fraud.

Il Moro looked up at her. He was entirely defeated, his eyes dull and foggy. “You see why I cannot make an issue of the boy’s legitimacy. Even now. Everything is undone.”

Her thoughts were clear and astringent again. “No. Everything remains to be done. When I was in Venice, the Signory agreed that if Alfonso ever became King of Naples, they would withdraw the secret resolution and permit your investiture as Duke of Milan.”

Il Moro sat benumbed for a moment. “How? How can you be sure?”

“Ser Constantino Privolo himself told me in the name of the
Serenissima Repubblica.”
She waited for the obvious question, but when it did not come she asked it for him. “Do you want to know why I didn’t tell you until now?”

He looked up at her and shook his head weakly. “No. I think I understand your reasons. I want to know how you did it.”

“I told the Doge that you had concluded negotiations with the German Emperor and that you intended to receive the investiture regardless of the Signory’s objections.”

He took this in without immediate response, then offered a slight, abstracted smile. “I can’t do it. If I declare that I intend to receive the investiture, I will have to bring the French over the mountains.”

She seemed to be standing beside herself, watching a person who looked like her go to her husband and clutch his head with both hands like a
condottiere
steeling a young soldier before his first battle. “Now is the time to do it.”

“The Emperor will make no public agreement until--”

“I don’t mean that. Now is the time to send Galeazz to France and bring the French army over the mountains and have done with Alfonso. Otherwise we must simply wait for Alfonso to send a more skilled assassin.”

“And we escort to our doorstep the Duke of Orleans, who may well be a more profound menace.”

“No. Once you ask the German Emperor to deliver the investiture you have already purchased from him, the Emperor will have to indemnify your title against Orleans. King Charles will not risk war with Germany simply to acquire another title for Louis Duc d’Orleans.”

Il Moro stood up quickly, the hard obsidian gleam returning to his eyes. “You are reckless, irresponsible, probably mad.” Again the abstracted smile. “But you are also the most remarkable woman I have ever known. Yes. Of course. I will have Galeazz make it very clear to King Charles that the Emperor has agreed to secure Milan and that we must have a waiver of Orleans’s claim to Milan before we will finance the French campaign against Naples.”

Il Moro thought for a moment after he had stopped talking, as though waiting for a translation of his own words. “Yes. Everything is in place. It all works now.” He embraced Beatrice, clutching her tightly. “This is the moment. This is the moment that Fortune has given to me.”

Pavia, 22 March 1494

“Messer Antonio de Gennaro, His Majesty your father’s ambassador to Milan, Your Highness.” The chamberlain bowed and withdrew.

Isabella was in her little girls’ nursery. Her new baby slept in her cradle beneath a down coverlet, while fourteen-month-old Bona pushed a beautifully carved and painted wheeled donkey across the carpet. Antonio de Gennaro entered with big, heavy-footed strides, still in his riding clothes, his face livid from the cold wind. He dipped to his knee. “Your Highness, you must pardon me. I have information of utmost urgency for His Highness.”

Isabella motioned to the nurses, and they bowed and scurried off into the antechamber. Her eye on little Bona, Isabella said, “His Highness is out after stags. I will give him a complete accounting of your information.” She looked up directly at the ambassador.

“Of course. I had assumed that since Your Highness has given birth so recently and is still in confinement--”

“We do not observe confinements here,” Isabella said. “I have already sent my physician back to the university whence he came. He is fully qualified to treat whatever maladies his aged texts may suffer, and I am only too happy to return him to that endeavor.”

“Pardon me again, Your Highness.” The ambassador cleared his throat and got to the point. “Galeazzo di Sanseverino is preparing to leave Milan with a large traveling company. His reported destination is Asti, but I have every reason to believe that he intends to meet with the French King in Lyons. If so, we can assume that Il Moro has decided to assist the French in their attack on Naples.”

“But you are not yet certain.”

“Your Highness, the Duke of Bari’s secretary has officially protested to me that a man allegedly in the employ of your father has confessed to a plot to poison the Duke of Bari and his son. Of course I was denied an opportunity to question or even to see the alleged assassin. This ‘plot’ is clearly an invention of the Duke of Bari, intended to serve as the scantest pretext for the dispatch of Galeazzo di Sanseverino to France and any subsequent hostilities.”