Duchess of Milan (7 page)

Eleonora sat on the bed and gestured for Beatrice to sit beside her. Beatrice refused. The Marquesa closed the bedchamber door behind her, walked warily by Beatrice, and then nervously smoothed her skirts as she sat beside her mother on the bed.

Eleonora's voice was lovely and unequivocal. “Beatrice, Cecilia Gallerani will continue to occupy her suite of rooms in this
castello.
Your father and I agreed to this as a condition of your marriage contract.”

This betrayal clutched Beatrice's heart like a cold fist. Father knew? They all knew? They sold me as a concubine, to be little more than a greased whore in some filthy Moor's harem?

Eleonora knew from Beatrice's glazed silence how painful the blow had been. “Beatrice, Isabella, there is no moment in the arms of a man that will ever exceed the passion when your child first grasps for your breast. And yet it is a strange passion, because to fulfill it you must so often deny it. That denial begins when you turn your child from your aching teat and place him in the arms of his wet nurse. And it never stops. Do you remember, Isabella, when I first sent you beneath the rod of Maestro Guarino? You were only three years old, my first baby. Do you think I no longer cared for your little girl's chatter and to punish you condemned you to recite from Latin? God, the sound of your childish babble was to me worth all the orations of Cicero. I gave away my joy and your . . . childhood so that you would become a woman daunted by no intellect beneath the divine spheres. And what once caused both of us pain has come around to bring us both happiness.”

“I know, Mama,” the Marquesa said reverently.

“Beatrice, I loved you no less because you were not with us, and spared you no less the pain of being shaped into a woman who could proudly wear the crest of Este. Do you think that when you finally came home from Naples my heart did not beg me to hold your hand all day and all night, to walk with you the entire length of the Po, to tell you everything I could not say to you all those years you were away? When I gave you up to your tutors each day, I tore the fibers pulsing from my breast. I dread more than if I were a condemned man walking to the scaffold the moment two days hence when I must leave you here. You are my last girl. Do you know how terrible the silence of our
castello
will be without a girl's laughter ringing?”

For a moment Eleonora's eyes seemed haunted by the silence of her girls' empty rooms. Then she thrust out her massive brocaded bosom and sat stridently erect. “I know you girls do not like to hear stories about the war with Venice. You were little girls then and you cannot remember, and for that I am grateful. And God knows I am grateful that we have been at peace ever since. The reason we have enjoyed this concord is because your father, my father, Il Moro, and the Signory of Venice have all agreed that Italy will not survive another such war. The French have become too powerful, too ambitious. If we are divided by our own quarrels, the Frenchmen will bring their army over the mountains and destroy each of us one by one. But this peace we enjoy is a fragile and complex construction. It needs a strong foundation if it is to endure.

“We, the women of the house of Este, are that foundation. Through our blood and that of your children all Italy will be joined. Naples and Milan and Mantua and Ferrara. Isabella's husband is the Captain General of the Armies of Venice. Florence is an ally of such long standing with Milan that they are ours as long as Il Moro lives. The only great power of which we are in doubt is Rome, but when the Holy Father dies, and that will not be long”--Eleonora crossed herself--”your uncle Cardinal Sigismondo and Il Moro's brother Cardinal Ascanio will have the power to make the next Pope their servant. We three women are the base upon which the power of Italy will be raised. And yet the foundation we provide is like a tripod. If any one of us is taken away, the entire structure will topple. And from those ruins Italy will never rise again. Not in your lifetimes, not in your children's lifetimes.”

Beatrice pursed her lips. She clearly understood the great mechanism of history her mother had described; she had grown up listening to the negotiations that had taken place at her grandfather's and her father's dining tables. “Mama, you say I am one leg of this tripod and that I must not be weak. How strong do I appear to be when my husband's whore is in all but name the Duchess of Bari?”

“Beatrice, we had to make a difficult choice. Your husband would not agree to the marriage otherwise, and we decided that no interest would be served if we broke the contract over this point.”

“Then you will have to forfeit my dowry. Because I will not live in the same
castello
as my husband's whore.”

“Beatrice, you do not know what difficulties we had in bringing this marriage--”

“I do not know, Mama?” Beatrice interrupted with sarcastic incredulity. “I was the one who waited each time he postponed the wedding, wondering what was wrong with me. I was there the night Il Moro's emissary came to withdraw the contract. I saw Father's face.” She saw it again, his muscular jaw hardened with fury, his thin lips like a blade, his murderous black eyes. “Father made him marry me. I know that. If father now asks Il Moro to remove his whore from my lodgings, it will happen.”

Eleonora listened to her daughter's defiant tone and studied her glaring face. Of all the children, Beatrice had been the least familiar with Ercole, yet she was the most like him. Like her sister, Isabella, Beatrice had Ercole's agile intellect and self-interested practicality, but unlike Bel or any of the four boys (would to God her boys had her girls' intellect), Beatrice also had an intensely emotional, irrational, often mystical aspect of her nature, the same paradox that made Ercole so difficult to fathom. More ominously, Eleonora reflected, Beatrice combined Bel's fiercely competitive nature with Ercole's recklessness. If Fortune were not capricious enough, Beatrice seemed determined to relentlessly taunt Her. That love of danger was what made Beatrice such a gifted rider; her horses sensed that she had no fear of being thrown, and respected her for it. But for a woman as close to the levers of fate as the Duchess of Bari might someday be, disregard for consequences was a curse. Perhaps, Eleonora sadly admitted to herself, that aspect of Beatrice's character underscored the importance of Cecilia Gallerani in this equation: estranged from her husband and his power, Beatrice would be relatively harmless. The real danger would arise if Il Moro ever came to love her.

“Beatrice,” Eleonora said with ruthless finality, “your father will never insist that Il Moro remove Cecilia Gallerani from her rooms.” She paused. “Because I will never counsel your father to make cause with you on this issue.”

“I want to come home, Mama,” Beatrice proclaimed.

Eleonora said nothing.

“I won't live here, Mama. I'm going to leave. I will take the jewels he has given me and go see my grandfather in Naples. Nonno will give me a town of my own. With a very stout wall.”

In an instant Beatrice fled to those walls, ancient terra-cotta bastions covered with brilliant green ivy and iridescent butterflies; she stood atop a parapet, guarded by her dolls in their taffeta
camore
and her tropical birds with their huge enamel beaks, and when Il Moro, kneeling far below, begged her to return, her birds assaulted him with screeching invective.

Eleonora sighed inwardly, her feelings too complex to untangle: pain, guilt, empathy, relief that her daughter's obstinacy had degenerated into fantasy. She stood up and wrapped Beatrice in her arms and kissed her still-wet cheeks. “I know that you are going to remain here and represent us proudly, because you have always done what your father and I have asked of you,” she said, stroking her daughter's hair. “Messer Ambrogio has prepared a draught for you. Drink it and you will sleep all night. You will see how much better everything looks when you are rested. These wedding
feste
tax everyone's nerves. There is no good reason for them to go on so long.” Eleonora kissed Beatrice again, briefly met the eyes of the Marquesa, and moved slowly to the door.

“Mama, I am never going to let him touch me again. I will not even take his hand.”

Eleonora didn't turn back to Beatrice; she did not want her daughter to see the wry etching of a smile on her sad, weary face.

A greyhound skidded across the marble floor and thudded into Isabella's knees; a second dog thrust its snout into her skirts. On the canopied bed, four bodies, naked flesh glazed with lamplight, were entwined in a sexual permutation that could not immediately be deciphered. A woman gasped sharply, and one of the dogs barked.

“I see you have guests.”

Gian Galeazzo Sforza, Duke of Milan, had not looked up when his wife entered the room; now he ignored her comment. He leaned forward in his chair and flicked his tongue at the wine in his Murano glass goblet. His fine platinum-blond hair brushed at the ermine collar of his satin mantle. Gian's lustrous eyes struggled to fix on the naked couple silhouetted in front of the fireplace. The woman, somewhat heavyset, was on her knees, her head resting on her arms and her nipples grazing the sable throw rug; the man knelt behind her, his pelvis slapping her buttocks in a steady rhythm. Like Gian and the couples on the bed, the two lovers seemed oblivious of the Duchess of Milan, perhaps even of one another.

The goblet slipped from Gian's hands and fell to the Persian carpet; the stem snapped off.

“Go to bed, Gian.” The Duchess appeared to regard the copulating couples as little more than furniture.

Gian's head shot up, and he looked at his wife, his sultry lips twisted with a sneer. There was a strange, wild beauty to him, at once fey and robust; his pallid skin was so delicate that it seemed translucent, but he had broad, angular cheeks and a powerful jaw.

“Go to bed. You are doubtless weary from the burdens of your title.”

Gian sprang to his feet, swayed as if he would collapse backward, and with the same motion that righted his balance, milled his arm. His fist caught Isabella just under her ear and sent her reeling sideways. She fell to her knees. The couple dallying before the fireplace disengaged and pattered from the room.

Isabella leapt up and raced to the oil lamp set on the scrolled brass sconce beside the bed. The group on the bed began to unknot; a woman fumbled for her chemise. Isabella snatched the lamp and began to stalk her husband, thrusting the flaming wick like a knife.
“Cacapensieri.
I'll burn your
cazzo
off. For what use you have of it.”

In a seemingly choreographed burst, the remaining guests, fleetingly recognizable as two women, one man, and a slender male adolescent, scurried out the door. Gian watched his companions depart, the clean planes of his jaw distinct. Then the resolution on his face vanished, as if the underlying bone and muscle had collapsed. A moment before, he had been a man. Now he was a boy. He stepped back.

Isabella threw the lamp into the fireplace. The glass globe popped, and the fire flared up. “Do you want to try tonight, Gian? Undo my laces.”

After hesitating for a moment, Gian began to untie the laces that bound the bodice of his wife's
camora,
his elegant fingers making an art of his fumbling. Isabella slipped the dress over her head and pulled her silk chemise off. No trace of her recent pregnancy remained, except a slight fullness in her breasts. The black patch between her legs was a broad triangle against the perfect white of her thighs.

“You haven't tried in a long time, Gian.” Isabella helped Gian remove his belt, tunic, and hose; his shirt concealed his genitals. She led him to the sable throw beside the fire.

For a half hour Isabella stroked, licked, panted, whimpered, squeezed, and grappled; nothing aroused her husband's flaccid desire. Finally she let Gian suckle her breast until he fell asleep.

CHAPTER 5

Smoke and sparks from the foundries along the Via degli Armorai poured into the low, slate-gray clouds. At the end of the boulevard, the unfinished roofline of the Duomo was a ghostly sketch against the glowering sky. Snow on the wind, her brother Alfonso had said; you can smell it. Beatrice realized she would even miss Alfonso.

“Mama, if it snows again I am going to perish. I am beside myself at the thought of going all the way to Pavia in this.” The Marquesa looked up at the facade of the Castello di Porta Giovia; the enormous central tower seemed to poke the belly of the ugly, overladen sky. The noise of the retinue gathered in front of the Castello was considerable; Il Moro had added two hundred Milanese men-at-arms to the Ferrarese contingent. Horses snorted and whinnied, and car drivers shouted at their teams. The ladies attending the Marquesa and Eleonora huddled inside their fur-lined
cioppe
and looked about sullenly. Alfonso pressed a pimpled cheek to Beatrice’s. He didn’t look at her, but he said goodbye graciously.

The Marquesa pulled her hands out of her sable muff and took Beatrice’s bare hands in hers. There were suddenly tears in her eyes. “Remember that you must hire a secretary as soon as you find someone suitable. You will no doubt be proffered some aging flatterer, but there are simply too many brilliant young men about today to settle for a toothless
vecchio
who has spent his life writing sonnets about horse races and wolf hunts. Now, as soon as your choir is entirely assembled, you must write me for the compositions
a la Flandre
that Girolamo da Sestola has collected for Father and me. And in any event you must write me once every week,
by your own hand
and to be dispatched by special messenger. I am dying at this moment; you know that, don’t you?” The Marquesa engulfed Beatrice in her voluminous sable
cioppa
and kissed her four times on each cheek. “My dearest, most special sister,” she said, and then she backed away and wiped at her nose with her sable muff.

“Messer Niccolo is giving the order to move along,” Eleonora said as she took Beatrice’s hands. Her eyes were so brilliantly green that Beatrice imagined they had the sun locked away inside them. If you think your sister is beautiful, she had always been told, you should have seen your mother when she was young. Beatrice could not really remember her mother before Naples, and when she had come home, Eleonora was already growing old and fat.