Duchess of Milan (52 page)

Gian’s kindly chamberlain, Messer Dionigi, showed Beatrice into the sickroom. The miasma of the perfumed, smoking censers only partially masked the stench of medicines and vomit, churning the anxiety in her stomach. Only with great will could she force herself not to bend over and retch. Eesh stood beside the bed, utterly composed, wearing her sinister, menacing-madonna suggestion of a smile. Bona sat on the opposite side of the bed, her shoulders clenched, her round eyes zeroed to tiny points of malice.

Four physicians in long velvet cloaks, droning on
sotto voce,
stood in the background like the chorus in a Greek tragedy.

At first glance Gian seemed surprisingly well, his head propped up on a pillow, his lank platinum hair framing his face. The feverish intensity of his irises and the pink tint that suffused his translucent skin gave him a luster of vitality. But Gian had lost too much weight to sustain the illusion. When Beatrice looked into the shadowed hollows of his cheeks and eyes, she saw the head of death.

Gian held up his hand to her. For a moment she had the utterly terrifying, utterly irrational fear that he would drag her into the underworld with him. Almost to spite that fear she took his hand; it was cool, with the dry, fine texture of the best goatskin parchment.

“Dear Beatrice,” Gian whispered. “Everyone is so worried about me.”

Beatrice squeezed his hand. “Yes, we all are, Gian. We so much want you to get well.”

“Beatrice, you know what everyone is saying. ...” Gian’s eyes rolled toward his mother. “Uncle Lodovico still cares for me, doesn’t he? And Uncle Ascanio too. I have had letters from Uncle Ascanio all about the hunts they have had in Rome.”

Beatrice’s throat knotted. “Yes, Gian,” she whispered. “You know your uncle Lodovico loves you very much. He always has. So do I.”

“That makes me so very happy. My physicians say I am improved, you know.”

The shadows seemed to vanish from Gian’s face. Beatrice could see only an angelic whiteness and light, as if Gian, stripped of his unwanted ducal trappings and his opportunistic favorites and the corruption of wine, had finally been revealed in all his innocence, an innocence as shocking as the revelation of his father’s pure evil might have been to one of his victims. Gian the lamb . . . He must not become the first innocent to die. Beatrice clutched his hand, willing her own life into him. Please live, Gian. We all need you. You are the innocent who guards us against the terrible things in all our souls.

Beatrice only vaguely heard the clicking and whimpering in the hall. Gian’s greyhounds, at least a dozen of them, burst into the room, spinning and bounding crazily, their long snouts reaching for their master’s outstretched arms. Gian invited them up on the bed, and they surrounded him, licking and prodding. Gian rubbed their heads and began calling them by name, beaming, the sick child surrounded by his favorite toys.

“I will look in on you tomorrow morning,” Beatrice said, happy to leave Gian to the creatures he most truly loved and could understand.

Beatrice had reached the hall when a bony hand clutched her arm like a claw. She turned to Bona’s beady little pupils.

“This treason will be proved, and you and your husband will pay like those who killed his father. You will be hanged and gutted and quartered, and the birds will peck out your eyes on top of the tower. Murderer. Murdering filth. Your day of judgment is at hand.”

“Go back to Gian, Duchess Mother.” Isabella’s voice was so soothing, so controlled, that even Beatrice was reassured by it. Isabella stood behind her mother-in-law, her hand lightly under Bona’s elbow. “Gian asked for you, Duchess Mother.”

Bona glared a moment longer at Beatrice, her frail body quaking with fury. Then her claw grip vanished, and she whisked around and vanished like a shadow.

Isabella cocked her head slightly in a patronizing fashion, her smile frozen on her face. She held her hands at her waist. “The Duchess Mother doesn’t know that you and your husband are already finished.”

“I don’t want to fight.” Remembering their last encounter, Beatrice meant this in a physical as well as verbal sense. “I hope Gian rests well.”

Isabella’s smile became hideously artificial. “And I hope you rest well too, Beatrice.” She took a step forward. “I hope you rest well knowing this. Tomorrow Gian intends to sign papers abdicating as Duke of Milan, citing his delicate constitution. Gian will designate his son Francesco as the new Duke of Milan. I will be named as my son’s regent. Of course your husband’s position as Gian’s regent will no longer exist. And since your husband will no longer be needed here, and as my father has already seized your little Duchy of Bari, I wonder where you will go.”

Beatrice felt everything rush out of her, leaving nothing but a membrane of nerves filled with cold air. That was why Eesh wanted everyone on the way south, that was why Eesh was giving Gian wine and feeding him fruit. She had to tell her husband. . . . Suddenly Beatrice realized she was alone to face this monster. The monster who in one mighty swipe had shattered her mythical realm of Everything. Then her fear and despair contracted to a single icy center: My baby. Will Eesh hurt my baby?

“Rest well, little girl.” Eesh’s smile was unforced now, perfectly serene.

“You will have to be approved by the Council of Nobles. I will go before them and testify that Francesco is not Gian’s son.”

“And as you will be able to produce no witnesses to corroborate your slander, I will have you taken out and beheaded for treason.”

“Galeazz will--”

“Galeazz? Where is Galeazz? He is away with your husband and the Frenchmen. And even if he were here, would he sacrifice his own head for you and your husband? And who would believe him? Perhaps Galeazz is the liar. Have you considered that?”

Beatrice felt as powerless as she had when Eesh had pinned her to the floor. She couldn’t say anything, she couldn’t move. Shadows danced at the periphery of her vision, and she struggled to keep from fainting. She focused so hard on holding back that flickering corona of darkness that she did not hear Isabella cheerfully bid her good night and recognized only the vague, dreamlike motion as Isabella returned to her husband’s sickroom.

There was not enough to keep Beatrice busy that night. She hurriedly packed her most valuable jewels and papers and made certain that little Ercole’s nurses would be ready to travel in the morning. At first light she intended to go to Vigevano, away from Eesh’s people. Once she was certain her baby was safe, she would dispatch couriers she could trust to Piacenza, informing her husband of the situation.

But after her simple preparations were completed, she had nothing left to relieve her anxiety.  Her husband had been so wrong. The stars were not aligned. The stars were falling from the sky. In her mind’s eye she saw the shower of fireworks after Bianca Maria’s wedding. Fortune’s warning. She had heard it then, but she had not really understood and in her own haste had forgotten it later. Then she realized that it had already been too late, even on the night of Bianca Maria’s wedding. The moment to choose had been in Venice. Mama had been right. For an aching instant she wanted to go back, to hold Mama in her arms and beg her to make everything right again.

Finally Beatrice went into her baby’s nursery and sat beside him as he slept, thinking that he would somehow absolve her. But all she could think, over and over again, was: I have done this. To myself, to my husband, and to our baby. I have done this.

Two hours before dawn Beatrice was startled by a whisper in her ear. “Your Highness.” She turned and saw the sturdy face of Ercole’s nurse. “Your Highness. The Duke of Milan ...” The nurse trailed off in a way that drew a line of ice from the nape of Beatrice’s neck to the tip of her coccyx.

“Stay with Ercole,” Beatrice said. “Lock the doors behind me and admit no one except me.”

She raced out into the darkened loggia. Immediately she noticed the torches in the lower arcades and in the stables at the north end of the courtyard. Scores of people, the Duchess of Milan’s people, were moving about. She hesitated, wondering if she should flee now. But she had to know what had happened to Gian. If some accusation was to be invented later, she wanted to be able to offer her own witness in her husband’s defense.

The hallway next to Gian’s sickroom was empty and utterly silent. Had Gian already been taken to Milan to appear before the Council of Nobles? Had they lured her here to finish with her? Would they later say she had come to poison Gian?

But she could hear nothing. With real dread and a bit of girlishly morbid fascination, she tiptoed forward. She slid against the wall and peered as stealthily as she could around the thick stone molding.

Two things: Gian’s pasty face, and a woman in black, seated, head bowed. The woman was Bona.

Beatrice crept past the molding and stood in the doorway, ready to run if Bona called out. But Bona merely stared at something cradled in her hands. A portrait miniature. Beatrice tiptoed two steps farther in. Suddenly Bona looked up, and her eyes instantly froze Beatrice’s heart. Just as quickly Bona’s eyes failed to recognize her and returned to the little round painting.

Beatrice looked at Gian. She prayed for his delicately purple eyelids to quiver, to open. His skin appeared to be little more than a white, waxy film stretched over his bones. His lips were as pale as his skin, except for a curious indigo coloring where they met, like a thick line of ink drawn across his face. She shuddered with the memory of a snatch of court gossip she had heard a few years previously: someone had mentioned a poison figuratively said to seal lips, its only trace a black discoloration visible on the lips for an hour or so after death.

Then an even more profound realization struck her. This is a dead man. A man who held my hand and spoke to me just hours ago. With that a thousand images of death came screaming down from the shadowed ceiling coffers and corners of the room: murdered Christs and slaughtered saints and Mama’s black babies, diving down at her in their terrible flocking splendor and vanishing into Gian’s lifeless face. All the death that had surrounded her for her entire life in religious ritual and art now had a human face. Gian the dead man. The first dead man she had ever really seen. And then, with a pain so awful that she had to clutch her heart, she saw the truth that Gian’s waxy face had just revealed to her. Mama is dead. Mama is really dead. For the first time she allowed herself to see her mother as a corpse like this, rotting in the earth, not some distant presence with whom she would one day be reunited, like the almost mythical Mama she had dreamed of as a girl in Naples. Mama no longer existed.

Something made her touch Gian’s face. He was not as cold as she had thought he would be. “Oh, Gian,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” Then everything collapsed inside her, and she began to cry. “Oh, Mama,” she said, gasping for breath. “Oh, Mama.”

Bona finally looked up, her round face soft and quizzical. She blinked several times and then held up the portrait medallion, a tiny image of the late Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza. “This is my husband, the Duke of Milan,” Bona said with black-toothed, smiling pride. “My daughter is the Empress of Germany. My son . . . My son ...” Bona’s smile turned into a grimace, and she, too, began to cry.

Il Moro found his wife just after dawn, still standing beside Gian’s corpse, Bona still seated opposite her, in a silent communion of grief and regret. He and Galeazz were so fouled with road dust that Beatrice didn’t recognize them at first. Only when he spoke did his wife fall into his arms.

“Give her some wine, half water,” Bona said, looking up, then looking down just as quickly. Il Moro stood over Gian for a moment, shook his head sadly, and turned away. He guided Beatrice into the hallway and shut the door on Bona. He put his still-gloved hands firmly on Beatrice’s shoulders.

“When did Gian die?”

She looked up numbly at her husband. He really did look like a Moor now, his face as dark as a
moresca
mask. “Several hours ago. He was poisoned. I saw it.” She described the sign. She could immediately tell from her husband’s eyes that he’d had nothing to do with it. Then, a moment later, something flickered across his vision, something not as readily on the surface of his consciousness as a willful conspiracy. But she dismissed it, realizing that he had many things on his mind now, things she could not even begin to think of.

“Your Highness.” Galeazz was questioning her now. “Where is the Duchess of Milan?”

The question was as shocking as its almost simultaneous answer. She hadn’t even thought that Eesh wasn’t here to grieve beside her husband’s deathbed. “Milan,” Beatrice blurted out. “She has gone to Milan to appear before the Council of Nobles and submit Francesco as the new Duke of Milan. She intends to serve as his regent.”

Il Moro swallowed thickly. “I must go to Milan,” he said almost absently.

“If you will excuse me, Your Highness,” Galeazz said, “I wish you would stay here long enough to organize as many men as possible to serve as your guard, and at least rest long enough to wash your face. Let me go ahead to Milan. Again pardon me, but I am a much faster rider than Your Highness.” He paused, glancing nervously at Beatrice. “And I am the only one who can question Francesco’s right to the succession.”

Il Moro turned to Galeazz and looked at him for a significant moment. “You know what that could mean, Galeazz,” he said very softly.

Galeazz nodded. “I am no longer in the employ of the Duke of Milan,” he said in a grave whisper. “Now my allegiances are those of the heart.”

CHAPTER 43

Milan, 21 October 1494

At midmorning Il Moro entered the Castello di Porta Giovia from the ducal park to the north of the city; he decided against bringing his guards in and left them hidden in the trees. The guards at the Castello drawbridge told him that the Duchess of Milan had summoned Milan’s Council of Nobles and that at least a hundred gentlemen had already been admitted to the Sala della Palla in the Rochetta; the last had arrived only minutes before, and still more were expected.