Duchess of Milan (69 page)

“Madonna Lucrezia,” Il Moro said. “I’m afraid that my chamberlain has become addled with the heat. I asked him to go and inquire as to your health, not summon you hither to offer proof that you are well. I’m terribly sorry.”

She nodded slightly. “I must have misunderstood.” In fact she knew she hadn’t misunderstood, and she was certain that the chamberlain wasn’t any more addled than she was. She marvelled at the ease and conviction with which Il Moro lied.

Madonna Lucrezia was dressed for supper, in a
camora
with a relatively conservative bodice of red and black satin shot through with gold thread; white silk puffs tied with gold satin
stringhe
ringed her upper arms. Her skirt was a light black taffeta. Madonna Lucrezia’s features might have been assembled by an artist trying to prove that by combining flaws with beauty, he could create a greater beauty. The upper lip was thin, priggish, the lower lip poutingly erotic. Her masculine nose was ill-matched to her delicate round chin, but its sharp angles worked in mysterious concert with her wide, wondering eyes.

After a moment Madonna Lucrezia said, “I should apologize. This is most awkward.”

“It needn’t be.”

Her face seemed to contract, the harsh lines indicating disapproval.

“I was looking at some new things,” he said casually, undeterred by her expression. “Since you have come all this way, perhaps you would like to see them.”

She hesitated and then merely nodded warily. Yet in a strange way her eyes were open to anything. Staying back a pace, she followed him through his study into the
guardaroba.

He lit a lamp. The light revealed rows and rows of silver and majolica plates in wooden presses, credenzas full of rare antiquities. He went to a shelf cluttered with an assortment of small marble and bronze sculptures, some of them ancient Roman or Byzantine fragments, others, like a shiny gold saltcellar depicting a satyr ravishing a nymph, representing the astonishing realism of the contemporary
maestri.

“I just received these from my
procuratori
in Rome and Venice,” Il Moro said. He picked up a marble bust of a heroically handsome man, slightly worn by time. “I believe that this is Apollo. It really is of much finer quality than the small antique busts one usually finds. He has that sweet sadness that one finds so often in the larger portraits. It is as if these gods sense that their moment has ended, that a new age will hurl their proud statues into the dust. But perhaps they also knew that after centuries of darkness, our
maestri
would resurrect them.”

She reached out and put her hand on his arm. “Your Highness, this is all very interesting. You intend to describe these objects to me with great sensitivity, beginning with the sacred and progressing toward the profane. I will be expected to counter your rising innuendo with a certain practiced coyness.” She picked up the little golden nymph and satyr. “By the time you begin to rhapsodize about this, you expect that I will be in such a state of arousal that I will lift my skirts and show you that I’m not wearing any underlinens.”

He smiled with complete aplomb. “I’m afraid that as generously as I have patronized the art of seduction at my court, I am not at all practiced in it. I must say I admire the devastating precision of your critique.”

She smiled. “I hope I haven’t affronted you. God knows that my husband and my brother, who not a week ago commanded me to seduce you in pursuit of their ambitions, would consider this moment the fulfillment of all
their
desires. I simply didn’t want Your Highness to waste his valuable time.”

He seemed as relieved as Madonna Lucrezia that his halfhearted seduction had failed. “Well, I do not consider this time wasted. You are very charming. Even if you
are
wearing underlinens.”

“I’m not.” Her face changed so entirely that she might have been possessed. Now her eyes were predatory.

She took the step between them and looked up into his fascinated face. With one hand she drew up her light silk skirt well past her thighs. With her other hand she placed his hand on her bare bottom.

When he pulled her against him, she whispered in his ear. “As I told Your Highness, I simply did not want you to waste your time.”

CHAPTER 56

Vigevano, 29 August 1496

Ercole Sforza, the three-and-a-half-year-old Count of Pavia and heir to the Duke of Milan, walked purposefully to his mother’s chair. He wore a tunic of beige-and-black satin, white hose, and brown velvet slippers. His small features might have been stamped out of the same mold as Beatrice’s, but he had set them with a precociously masculine self-possession, something of his father’s dark intensity. He was now very much a little man.

“His Highness isn’t going to Latin today,” Ercole said calmly and distinctly.

Beatrice arranged her son’s unkempt, delicately curled hair. “Really? Who decided this for His Highness?”

Ercole stared defiantly. “His Highness decided.”

“Well, this isn’t something that His Highness decides. His Highness’s mother decides.”

Ercole stared a moment longer. Then he screamed shrilly, “I don’t want to go to Latin!”

Beatrice shrugged. “I don’t hear when you scream like that. You are going to Latin because that’s how you will learn to make your mother understand what you want without screaming at her. Who knows? If you do very well with your lessons, you might be able to convince your mother that you don’t need to study Latin any longer.”

Ercole turned to settle his malevolent gaze on his nineteen-month-old brother, Sforza Francesco, who already had his father’s sturdy jawline and close-set dark eyes. The implication in Ercole’s menacing stare was obvious: If he had to spend the next two hours with his Latin tutor while his little brother got to play with his mother and her guest, then his little brother was going to pay later.

Beatrice looked up at the boys’ nurse. “Anna, you had better take Sforza and put him to bed. It’s time for his nap. And ask His Highness which he would rather do: go to bed like his
baby
brother, or go to his Latin tutor.”

After Beatrice had kissed the boys goodbye, Anna took each by a hand and led them off to their respective fates. “His Highness is going to Latin,” Ercole pronounced on his way out.

Beatrice smiled wryly at the guest sitting opposite her. The guest, Isabella of Aragon, responded with a brief flicker of amusement. Isabella resembled a Spanish widow in her high-collared black silk dress, her hair veiled in black lace. Her eyes were the color of unpolished jade now, with a latent richness beneath their dull surface. But her skin remained morbidly pale and her once statuesque neck thin and corded. She did not appear so much weary as frangible, as if she would shatter at the wrong word.

It seemed Eesh would always be a casualty of the war. Her heroic self-denial, which as much as any single act had saved Italy from the French, had utterly drained her; for months afterward Eesh had suffered a paralyzing, wasting melancholy, withdrawing even more than she had after Gian’s death. The good news of that fall, that Eesh’s brother Ferrantino had reconquered Naples, might have revived her, but it soon had been followed by word of her father’s death in a monastery in Sicily. Eesh had begun to recover this summer, however, and she and Beatrice had talked occasionally, always with excruciating circumspection, carefully avoiding the powerful currents of longing, shame, and recrimination that swirled around them. Then, just three weeks before, the news had come from Naples that Ferrantino had died suddenly of a fever. Eesh had plunged into the depths again, shutting herself up in her rooms, talking darkly of a curse on the house of Aragon. Beatrice had considered going to Milan to console her cousin, but there was too much to be done in preparation for the Emperor’s visit. So she had decided to at least make the gesture of inviting Eesh to Vigevano.

“Bona has started Latin,” Isabella said, her voice dry and brittle. “Her tutor is Messer Niccolo. He says she’s doing better than Francesco did. God, do you know that this is the first time I’ve been away from my children since . . . It’s strange. I thought they would forbid me to leave them. They hardly noticed. Even the baby. Only then did I realize how little time I really spend with them. How much of them has been given to other women. And now their tutors.”

Beatrice smiled with wistful sympathy. “I feel the same way. I’ve gotten so involved with . . . other things”--Beatrice realized that it would be cruel to say she had gotten so involved with state business, a role Eesh once coveted for herself--”that I don’t see the boys for two or three days at a time. Almost a month when we went to Germany. And now that Ercole has started his lessons ...” Beatrice sighed. “It really makes me sad, Eesh. I keep thinking of what Mama once told me about loving our children. She said it was the most powerful passion there is, but to fulfill it you so often have to deny it. I didn’t understand her at the time. But then I don’t think I ever really knew my mother until after she was gone.”

Beatrice looked down at her thickening midsection; some of her increased girth was due to the baby, most of it was the weight she had put on the preceding winter. “I know it’s a strange thing to say, but I feel that I have become so close to Mama since she died. To her spirit. I know she’s inside this baby. I really do. That’s why I want so badly for this baby to be a girl.”

Isabella seemed to retreat into her wrapping of black lace and Spanish silk. Beatrice realized that with all her painstaking effort to avoid the forbidden subjects--the war, Gian, Eesh’s father, Il Moro, Galeazz, the mere use of the title “Duchess of Milan”-- she had cut too close to an old wound. Eesh’s mother.

“Anyway, I know I’m getting fat like Mama,” Beatrice added, hoping that this trivial conclusion would put aside the painful subject.

“When do you expect the Emperor?” Isabella asked, accepting the offering.

“Within three or four days.”

Isabella stared out the window overlooking the labyrinth. Beatrice wondered if she was remembering the night they held each other there. That moment when all their fates were suspended.

“So you are going to tell the Emperor that it would be a mistake for him to get involved in this Pisa business.”

Beatrice was triply astonished--that Eesh knew about her opposition to the Pisa campaign, that Eesh at all cared, and that she had the strength to bring up a political matter of any kind. The careful protocol of their reconciliation had been completely discarded.

“We hear things,” Isabella said, flipping her hand casually. “After all, the Empress is my sister-in-law. I can’t believe that your husband is so foolish as to want to bring another
oltramontani
army into Italy. Of course I can’t believe that the Emperor would be so foolish as to march into Italy with Il Moro as his sponsor,” she added, almost taunting Beatrice now. “Your husband is the most faithless man since Judas. It isn’t that he lies to his enemies to achieve his ends. We’ve all done that. But he keeps faith with no one. Friend, enemy, or lover.” Isabella emphasized the last word. The dramatic silence that followed was also part of her syntax.

Beatrice looked away. “Does everyone in Milan know?”

“He has slept with her every night for the past two weeks. Right here in this
castello,
as I understand. Her brother, a whoring priest, has already gotten a benefice. In Milan they are talking of nothing else.”

Beatrice felt the same cold hollowness she had the first time she’d heard the rumor about Lucrezia Crivelli. One of her ladies had “reluctantly” told her, no doubt in an attempt to curry favor. Beatrice had known immediately that it was most likely true. Her husband had once said that he needed to reach out in the night and touch someone who knew his soul. Now he needed someone who did not know his soul, someone who would not be able to share the agony of his inner struggle. Someone who might possibly save him from knowing himself. And of course when she had next seen him after hearing the rumor, just the blankness of his expression had been her confirmation. She didn’t think he intended to lie to her; if she had asked about Lucrezia Crivelli he probably would have told her. But she hadn’t asked. And after that they had simply avoided one another’s eyes.

“I can’t believe that after all you have done for him he can humiliate you like this,” Isabella said sharply. “You have the power now to destroy him.
You
do. You don’t even need your father anymore. You could put that bitch in a convent tomorrow and make him hang his prick on a peg for the rest of his life.”

“Do you think I haven’t thought of that? God, Eesh, do you realize how easily I could end it? I would simply have to tell my husband that if he does not place that whore in the most miserable, lice-crawling brothel in Germany, I intend to stay with my sister in Mantua until he does. That would be enough. I am not exaggerating, Eesh. He may not need me in his bed, but he could not function without me at his side.”

“Then you must do it. Today. Even if you never want him to touch you again, you must do it for your children.” There was a note of almost hysterical urgency in Isabella’s voice, as if she were the wounded party.

Beatrice sat back heavily. “I have rehearsed that ultimatum a thousand times, I believe. A dozen times I have called for my chamberlain to announce me to my husband so that I could deliver it, then sent my chamberlain away with some other task.” She shook her head sadly. “I cannot do it. I cannot do it to him. I think I understand his pain.”

“His pain? You understand
his
pain?” Isabella was almost shrieking. “I can’t believe you. That is the kind of thing I imagine my mother saying. The kind of weak, mewling self-sacrifice that drove my father away from her. From us. From all of us. She let my father’s mistress sit in her place at supper just as though she were our mother. I had to sit there and watch that bitch Trusia Gazzella with her hand on my father’s cock while my mother cried in her rooms. Yes, I’m sure my mother understood his pain just as she understood her own pain. She was always away at some spa, her servants sponging hot water over her pain, rubbing unguents into her pain. Who understood our pain, the pain of children whose mother might as well have been dead?”