Duchess of Milan (51 page)

“I matched that pair for you,” the masquer said. “I know that short women are ordinarily not to your taste, but you must agree that Lucrezia was a perfect fit. And Caterina loves tongue.” She sauntered down the steps.

Moving very slowly, almost as if he were indeed a statue gradually discovering life in his limbs, Hercules placed his hands beneath her buttocks and lifted her onto his priapic shaft. She wriggled to adjust herself and then seized the ends of his hair, forcing him to look into her eyes.

“I have dreamed of this,” he said in a trancelike cadence. “Every day and every night, with every other woman, for four years I have dreamed of this. You coming to me.”

“Coming to you,” replied the Duchess of Milan in a hot, growling whisper. “I have come back to you, Galeazz.”

Bernardino da Corte visually inventoried the shelves of Il Moro’s
guardaroba
as the porters emptied it of the tooled saddles and silver dinner service His Highness intended to take on the journey south; with all the Frenchmen about, Il Moro’s chief of security was concerned about theft. Satisfied that the packing was proceeding without incident, Bernardino opened one of the window shutters and observed that the night had lightened into the dull silver of dawn. He ordered the porters to open the remaining windows and snuffed his candle lantern. For a moment he stared out at Pavia’s thicket of brick towers.

He turned when he heard someone dismiss the porters. Galeazzo di Sanseverino came toward him with his bounding, curiously light stride. His blond hair was damp and his skin as rosy as a berouged woman’s. His blue eyes had a frightening cast, a strange icy whiteness, as if glazed with frost.

The last porter out shut the door behind the two men.

Galeazz looked down into Bernardino’s dark, expectant face. “Now,” he whispered. “Do it.”

The tip of Bernardino’s tongue rapidly traced a nervous circuit of his lips. “Has His Highness authorized--”

In a lightning motion Galeazz’s hand went to Bernardino’s throat, his fingers flexing slightly and cradling Bernardino’s swarthy chin. “You accuse yourself of treason by even mentioning his name in connection with this,” Galeazz hissed.

Bernardino stared back, his eyes glittered with fear.

“Do it,” Galeazz whispered. “Not because His Highness has asked it, not even because our lives depend on it.” Suddenly Galeazz bent forward and kissed Bernardino on the lips, tenderly, almost romantically. “Do it for me.”

Beatrice gingerly lifted her twenty-month-old son from his cradle. Little Ercole contorted his face and made several frog kicks but continued to sleep with his head against his mother’s shoulder. Beatrice carried him into her husband’s bedchamber, where his servants were just finishing lacing up his riding doublet. Il Moro motioned the servants out.

“He’s going to be so sad when he realizes that Baba isn’t coming back right away,” Beatrice said.

Il Moro took his sleeping son in his arms. “Within a month the French will realize that they are going to get no farther than Florence before spring. And by then His Majesty will be only too happy to allow me to return home to arrange the additional loans required to pay his troops.”

Beatrice looked down, her face offering a vestige of her once familiar adolescent pout.

“Carissima,
you know that it was the only thing I could do. We are so much safer with the French on the move again.”

“Louis Duc d’Orleans will still be in Asti.”

“Well, I am much less concerned about Louis Duc d’Orleans in Asti than I am with the idea of Orleans in Asti
and
Charles in Pavia.”

“I ... I have seen things.” She paused, waiting for him to ask, but he said nothing. “Blackbirds. Yesterday. One on each tower of the
castello.”

“Well, we have a great many blackbirds.
Carissima,
you have been my courage throughout all this. Be brave now. Everything favors us.”

Beatrice began to cry, quaking, childish sobs. Ercole awakened with a start and added a harsh, cracking protest of his own. Il Moro called for one of his servants and asked him to take the boy to his nurse. He held his wife in his arms and stroked her cheek and hair.

“Carissima,
I don’t understand this. You would not hesitate for a moment to go yourself.”

“I would rather go myself. I would rather ...” She pressed her cheek to his chest and stared out the window. The sun lay molten on the treetops, and the eastward walls of the city’s rectangular towers were a fiery pink. “I have everything I have ever wanted. Right now. Everything I have ever dreamed of. Perhaps that is what frightens me.” And yet to herself a deeper voice whispered: No, you want more. Much more. And that is what frightens you.

“I love you.”

She looked up at him warily. “You don’t need to say that.”

“I love you in every way that it is possible for me to love, with all I know of my own soul. What I do not know of that soul you will help me understand. That is my faith. That is the faith that will bring me home. So let us say goodbye now,
amore.
I want brave faces for the Frenchmen.”

She clung to him, her eyes closed, feeling as if some huge motion of fate’s machinery had just begun to carry him away from her.

Finally Il Moro gently unwrapped himself from his wife’s frantic embrace. Together they went into the nursery, where Ercole was nursing. Il Moro waited until the feeding had ended. Then he took his son and kissed him and sang him a ditty about Scaramella, a scarecrow who became a soldier. Ercole laughed and shrieked. Beatrice could not watch her husband give her son a last kiss, believing that if she saw it she might somehow endow this farewell with the force of dreadful prophecy.

Then they walked out onto the second-story loggia with its rows of elaborate Venetian-style Gothic arches overlooking the gardens and pavilions in the central court. Beatrice took her husband’s arm as they descended the narrow brick stairwell at the main entrance to the
castello;
built to discourage armed attack, for a moment the chutelike enclosure seemed to Beatrice as dank and inescapable as a tomb.

The French King waited outside the
castello
walls, at the foot of the drawbridge spanning the sun-silvered moat. His Most Christian Majesty appeared only too eager to leave this place of inertia and doubts concerning his glorious Crusade. Most of his troops had already gone ahead to Piacenza, two days’ march to the southeast. But the King’s flutists, drummers, Scottish cross-bowmen, and armored household guard waited in ranks. The file of musicians and warriors extended across the drawbridge and through the park in front of the
castello,
finally disappearing into the cobbled streets of the red-brick city.

The King stood beside his black horse, chatting with Galeazzo di Sanseverino. Charles removed his cap with an elaborate flourish, and Il Moro responded by removing his beret; Beatrice curtsied. She looked quickly for Eesh and was both relieved and annoyed at her relief when she did not see her.

The farewells were florid and insincere, with the King kissing every lady in sight. Beatrice was grateful that her husband had given her a last moment of intimacy upstairs. She kissed him perfunctorily on both cheeks, only for an instant meeting his eyes.

Finally, with everyone ready to mount, Bianca, dressed in expensive black silk, bustled up to her husband, Galeazz. Standing on the toes of her wooden-soled black velvet slippers, she kissed him on each cheek. Then she hurried back to Beatrice’s side and took her hand. The drums rattled and the pipes shrilled and Il Moro’s trumpeters sounded a fanfare. Brandishing his white fur cap with the gold fleurs-de-lis, His Most Christian Majesty resumed his pilgrimage.

Bianca tightly clutched Beatrice’s hand while the procession disappeared into the streets of Pavia. “I recited prayers this morning for my father and Galeazz,” Bianca said meekly, as if uncertain that this amounted to much. “Do you expect that they are in great danger?”

Beatrice drew herself up against the leaden premonition in her heart. “No. I don’t expect that they are.”

“Toto, when do you expect that I will go to live with Galeazz? It is quite absurd to contemplate that I have been married for five years at present, and still ...” Bianca’s pale cheeks flooded with color. “And still the marriage has not been consummated. It is really becoming a matter of embarrassment to me.”

Beatrice looked at Bianca and saw herself at fourteen--the self-important diction, Bianca as awkwardly frail and emaciated as Beatrice had been pudgy and overactive. “I would want you to have a few years yet,
carissima arnica.
I didn’t feel comfortable being married until I was very much older than you are now.”

“I know. Toto, Caterina da Borromeo told me that Galeazz will split me in two. I told her that such an occurrence was most absurd even to contemplate, but she said that when a man is hard he can be bigger than any baby’s head.”

“Caterina is a liar.”

“I know.”

Beatrice studied Bianca’s brilliant cheeks and questing, deep-socketed eyes. She realized that she needed to spend more time with her, and that sense of responsibility served as a catharsis for her fears. She put her arm around Bianca’s impossibly slender waist and steered her back through the vaulted entrance to the
castello.
The gardens in the courtyard glistened with dew, and she felt a renewal of her hope.

Then her eye was drawn to the sharply pointed stone merlons atop the third story of the
castello’s
inner facade. A half-dozen crows sunned themselves on these stone perches, their fat, glistening black bodies like the obsidian finials of an enormous crypt. She looked quickly down, but on the second-story loggia she caught a glimpse of a woman standing in the still shadowed arcade, her black dress partially concealed by one of the white marble columns. Beatrice could not really distinguish the features of the woman’s face, but some essence of an expression was visible through the veiled light. She knew it with an instinct that traced along her spine like the cold edge of a knife: Eesh, chin slightly tucked, smiling.

CHAPTER 42

Dispatch of Bernardino da Corte, assistant castellan of Porta Giovia, to Lodovico Sforza, “Il Moro,” Duke of Bari and regent for the Duke of Milan. Marked
“cito! cito! cito!”
Pavia, 20 October 1494

Your most illustrious Highness,

I must convey to you the most unfortunate news concerning your beloved nephew, our most illustrious Duke of Milan. After showing much improvement, His Highness prevailed upon his wife and mother to allow him a large quantity of wine, to the great consternation of his physicians. The sudden decline in His Highness’s health subsequent to this indulgence has caused the most profound alarm here, and His Highness’s physicians believe that only through Divine Mercy can it now be reversed. Your Highness must be advised that by the time this reaches you the Duke of Milan may already be dead. I wish it were not for me to dispatch these woeful tidings, but as always I am your faithful

servant.

Piacenza, 20 October 1494

Galeazzo di Sanseverino led Il Moro out onto the balcony overlooking the garden. They had been lodged in one of the best villas in Piacenza, a cavernous late-medieval structure that had been renovated and provided with a marvelous new garden. The topiaries, shaped like lions, rams, and dolphins, sent out long, distorted shadows in the late afternoon light. Galeazz spread his map on the marble railing of the balustrade. The map was a rough sketch of the principal roads between Piacenza and Florence, with
x’s
marking the location of the fortresses that controlled those routes.

“Now that they have decided to take the route through Florence and Rome, they must cross the Apennines and advance along the coast here,” Galeazz said, tracing a line that proceeded south from Piacenza to the coast, then looped back inland to Florence. “That means they must take the Florentine fortress at Sarzana”-- he pointed to an
x
on the coast about halfway between Piacenza and Florence--”or expose their supply lines to continual harassment. Because of the height of the promontory on which the fortress is perched, their cannons will not be effective. By itself, the fortress at Sarzana is capable of delaying the French advance until the rains begin.”

Il Moro studied the map silently, and Galeazz stared out into the garden. Suddenly Il Moro turned around, as if he had sensed an attacker. A moment later his chamberlain, elegant in tricolor Sforza livery, appeared on the balcony, escorting a courier in riding clothes the uniform reddish-brown of the local roads; even the courier’s face was caked with sienna-hued dust.

The courier fell heavily to his knee in front of Il Moro. “Your Highness, I was directed to deliver this to you with my own hand. You will forgive me.”

Il Moro waited until the chamberlain and the courier had bowed and exited. He impassively broke the messy, obviously hasty wax seal. Galeazz watched him intently while he read. Il Moro revealed nothing and quickly handed the note to Galeazz.

Il Moro’s unblinking black eyes now fixed on Galeazz; it seemed that Galeazz required an unusually long time to digest Bernardino da Corte’s brief dispatch.

Galeazz’s hand trembled slightly as he returned the dispatch to Il Moro. “What will you do?” he asked, his voice fractionally higher than usual.

“Of course I must return to Pavia immediately. The King will understand.”

Galeazz folded his hands together. “Your Highness, you do not know what to expect in Pavia. I would like to come with you in the event ...” He shrugged his powerful shoulders.

Il Moro studied Galeazz for a long moment before replying. “Yes.” He nodded coolly. “Yes, of course. We do not know what we will find.”

Pavia, 20 October 1494

Beatrice ran into the horses in the hall just outside the Duke of Milan’s sickroom. The scene was unreal, hellish: the wavering torchlight in the narrow passage, the harsh rattling of the horses’ hooves on the pavement, the flared nostrils and glaring eyes of the frightened beasts. Beatrice wondered for a moment if she was inhabiting a nightmare. But she could understand why the Duke of Milan wanted to see his horses. She was not at all certain why he had sent for her.