Duchess of Milan (70 page)

Beatrice struggled for memories of Eesh’s mother; for a long time she had thought that Trusia Gazzella
was
Eesh’s mother. All she could bring back were quick glimpses of a beautiful sylph, more spectral than real, with an aura of quiet sadness.

“She killed herself, Toto. No one has ever admitted it, but I know that’s what happened because she talked to me about it. She would tell me how she wanted to kill herself but couldn’t because of us. She told me that. She killed herself right after I went off to be married, so that the news would reach me in the middle of my wedding
feste.
That’s how much she cared for me. In one week I learned that I had a dead mother and a husband with a dead prick.”

Beatrice reflexively crossed herself. She could see Eesh so much more clearly now. Her memories of Eesh’s mother also sharpened. The cloying scent of too much Milanese perfume. As though by masking the must of the crypt she could fool the living. And the weeping. Beatrice suddenly remembered standing near a doorway, hearing the strange, murmuring sobs, wondering what made grown people cry.

“I’m sorry, Eesh. I never knew. I guess I should know by now that you can love people with all your soul and never truly know them.”

Isabella lifted her quaking hands and looked at them as if they had suffered some terrible scarring. “She made me like this. Like her. Weak. Where every day is a struggle just to live. To keep repeating the lie of life.”

“No, Eesh. You are stronger than any of us.” Beatrice realized that she was about to cross the most forbidden threshold. “I couldn’t have done what you did.”

Isabella sniffed sarcastically, her black-wreathed head jerking. “You think you know what I did that night, and you have no idea. I wanted my son to be Duke of Milan so badly that I would have given my soul. And yet when I stood there beside you, my dream once again close enough to touch, only needing to let you speak ...” She shook her head, a self-incriminating gesture. “I refused it because I knew that if it was taken from me again, I wouldn’t have the strength to escape the darkness. Not again. I would waste and die. I didn’t have the courage to risk that. I gave it up to save myself. Only after I had saved this vessel”--she held up her hands again--”did I understand that I had cast down my soul from that height. In an instant I could see myself lying in the piazza, dead. By my own hand, like my mother. What walked away that night was a corpse of no value to anyone. Like my mother.”

“I don’t believe that, Eesh. You said yourself that we don’t know our own souls. I believe that you did it because you wanted to save our people. Because of the goodness in you. The love in you. The love that still has value, that is more valuable than anything.” She looked searchingly at Isabella. “Perhaps some of that love came from your mother. From a time when she was strong enough to love you the way she wanted. Perhaps someday you will forgive her. Perhaps your soul already has.”

“I envy you, Toto. You still live in a palace of dreams. You believe that you can still love a husband who has betrayed you. You think that you can win promises of peace from men whose only language is lies. You believe in forgiving the people who have only hurt you.” She smiled slightly, sardonically. “You even believe that Fortune will someday forgive us for what we did.”

Beatrice closed her eyes and leaned back. Her face was plumper than it had been even in her adolescence, yet shadowed with fatigue, a prophecy of what she might look like fifteen years thence. “I think you are also wrong about me, Eesh. Perhaps I do believe in peace, and even that my husband will love me again. I do want to forgive, and to be forgiven. I want you to forgive me. But I don’t think Fortune will ever forgive us for what we’ve done.”

CHAPTER 57

Vigevano, 5 September 1496

Beatrice had not realized how she would react when she saw her husband and Lucrezia Crivelli together for the first time--and not even close together; merely within the same field of view. Lucrezia had ridden to the hunt with Beatrice and her ladies; Il Moro arrived with the Emperor and a company of several dozen courtiers and diplomats. When the two parties converged and mixed, Lucrezia and Il Moro rode within a half-dozen paces of each other. Of course Beatrice had imagined them making love in countless different ways, but to finally see them both at once--fully clothed, mounted on their horses, not even glancing at one another-- almost stopped her heart.

The anger that followed was so visceral that her horse felt it and jittered nervously. She had an almost irresistible urge to deliver her ultimatum now, in front of the entire court, to watch her white-faced husband send Lucrezia off to a German whorehouse on a mangy mule while the ambassadors looked on with gaping mouths. Then even that response seemed too considered, and some vestige of the little Ferrarese bride she had been a lifetime ago urged her to spit in their faces.

She found herself still sitting in the saddle a moment later, her hands quivering on the reins, thankful that her rage had subsided as quickly as it had come. She inhaled, set her shoulders, and responded like a proper Milanese for whom adultery was no more remarkable than a handclasp.

She received her husband’s kiss on her cheek, as she had accepted all of his politically necessary displays of affection since the Emperor had arrived. Lucrezia, who in recent weeks she had seen almost as frequently as she had her husband, was still extended the same superficial politeness she offered all her ladies. Beatrice had no desire to engage a born-and-bred Milanese bitch in a contest of cold, indifferent stares.

The Emperor Maximilian rode to Beatrice’s side, greeting her with a tip of his simple black woolen cap. A tall man with a small, thin face, a hawkish nose, tight mouth, and sad, expressive eyes, the Emperor was thirty-seven years old, but his hair had already turned a pale silver. Having recently vowed not to wear colors until he had led a crusade to the Holy Land, he wore a black velvet doublet, white shirt, and black hose.

“Since Duchess Beatrice is the finest horsewoman in Europe, I intend to stay by her side,” the Emperor said in very adequate Italian.

“I’m certain my husband won’t mind giving me up and accompanying one of my ladies,” Beatrice said loudly enough for all to hear. Immediately she regretted the remark, though it wasn’t entirely gratuitous. She had been looking for an opportunity to separate her husband and the Emperor.

A few titters could be heard among the group of ladies. Beatrice didn’t dare glance at Lucrezia, though she doubted she had affected her stony composure. And she didn’t even need to see her husband’s face. With the same unbidden will that had allowed her to walk past the dead bodies in the streets of Milan, she put them behind her.

“Let’s not wait here for the beaters to flush the game,” Beatrice told the Emperor. “There are some good boar in the woods.” She lifted her crop and galloped off without looking back. She already understood the Emperor well enough to know that he would follow. There was so much of the child in him; he was impetuous, romantic, eccentrically independent. And he clearly hated the confining ritual of court.

The smooth, fast gallop gave her less fear for her baby than the slow, jarring trot in the company of her ladies. And it was a risk she would have to take. She recognized a familiar path at the treeline, reined her horse, and entered a grove of towering oaks. The path cut through an undergrowth of ivy and blackberry bushes; she felt the light, cool mist of the shading trees on her face.

“You have the most magnificent park in Europe,” the Emperor called out behind her. “I will come back when your boys are of age to hunt. I should like to take them.”

Beatrice smiled fondly. Ambassadors from all the Italian states had descended on Vigevano, clamoring for audiences with the Emperor. But he had put them off, instead spending an inordinate amount of time with Beatrice’s sons. And he talked a great deal of his own family. His first wife, Margaret of Burgundy, had given him two sons and a daughter in the first three years of their marriage. The second son died two weeks after his birth. Two years later, Margaret, pregnant again, had been killed in a riding accident. Their marriage had lasted only four years, but clearly Maximilian still loved her. He talked of Margaret as if she were still alive, and never even said the name of Bianca Maria, his present wife, occasionally referring to her abstractly as “the Empress.”

On the other hand, the Emperor had turned the legacy of his love into a dynastic vise capable of crushing France. His first son, Philip, was married to the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the King and Queen of Spain. His daughter was betrothed to King Ferdinand’s heir. A concerted Spanish-German attack would end forever the threat posed by the restive French army, but Maximilian couldn’t afford such an ambitious campaign. So, not unlike many impoverished Italian princes, the Emperor had hired himself out as
condottiere
to the Signory of Venice and the Duke of Milan. Maximilian had come to Italy not to prepare for the final destruction of Charles VIII’s war machine but to soldier-for-hire in pursuit of an objective that Beatrice considered dubious even from the Milanese and Venetian perspective.

The path broadened into a small bowered clearing. Patches of sunlight glimmered like golden tesserae in the leafy canopy overhead. The Emperor came alongside Beatrice. “I hope I have not brought discord to your house,” he said earnestly. “I have the greatest affection for you and your husband.”

“You have not brought this discord.”

“But you do not agree with your husband on my Pisa campaign.”

“May I be honest with Your Majesty?”

The Emperor nodded with boyish enthusiasm.

“I understand that Pisa is an imperial fief and that you feel a responsibility to its people,” Beatrice offered. “I understand that my husband and the Signory believe that your presence in Italy will discourage the French from mounting another Italian campaign. But even if you succeed in this venture, the results will be temporary. You will have to garrison Pisa against the Florentines, who will try to recapture it. Who will pay for that? The Signory will not, and my husband cannot. And if your campaign does not succeed as quickly as you expect and you require additional troops, again I ask, who will pay?”

“I will be welcomed into Pisa,” the Emperor said, more wondering at his own stature than boasting of it.

“Perhaps. But your success will not discourage the French from waiting until you must inevitably leave. And when the French cross the mountains again, then who will pay you to come back and save Italy? The last war has taken everything we have, Your Majesty. Rather than waste the few ducats we have left on the transient conquest of Pisa, we would all be better served if that money were spent building a German army capable at any moment of marching into Paris.”

“This war in Pisa is not big enough for you? You want me to attack France?”

“No. I want you to convince France that she cannot steal her prosperity from Italy. That instead of spending every
livre
on cannons and crossbows she must devote her revenues to putting new lands under cultivation and building mills and factories and universities. You would not have to attack France to eventually convince the French that their monstrous army, which can only be fed by conquest, is a luxury they can no longer afford.”

“And when the French have become peaceful, that will leave the English free to adventure in Europe. I will be honest with you and say I do not like this English King Henry in our League.”

“Then we will prove to the English that they cannot make war on the Continent. And then they, too, will have to find the way of prosperity and peace.”

The Emperor had the rapt, distant look of a daydreaming boy. At length he said, “Duchess Beatrice, you are very brave, very noble. I hope that one day your boys will have your peace. Or maybe their boys. But there are two things I am certain I will never be able to do while I live. Bring my Margaret back. And bring peace to Europe.” He turned his head quickly, listening. “I hear dogs. Come, let us go back to the hunt.”

Vigevano, 7 September 1496

“You will be able to make do with one dining table, if it is long enough,” Beatrice told Bianca. Galeazzo di Sanseverino’s new
palazzo
was on the eastern edge of town, and the big arched windows of the second-story dining hall overlooked the verdant ducal park, affording a sweeping view of the Alps. At present, the big room was entirely empty except for several large stacks of folded damask drapes.

In two days Bianca was moving into Galeazz’s home, the consummation of a six-year-old marriage. In little more than a week the onslaught of social obligations would begin, when she hosted a suite of Venetian ambassadors, arriving to consult with the Emperor on the now-inevitable Pisa campaign.

Beatrice walked over to the stacks of fabric and pulled up a length of red damask embroidered with blue Sforza vipers. “What we will do is drape the side windows with this and do the center windows with the gold drapes with the imperial crest. That should be your principal motif, so we must make certain that we also have
confetti
in the shape of imperial eagles.”

Bianca’s fragile, hollow cheeks had filled out in the past few months, but not so much that they detracted from the delicacy of her finely pointed nose and small mouth. Her wondering eyes had narrowed slightly, their feverish innocence replaced by the earthier anticipation of a young bride. She wore her brown hair parted down the middle, with a long Milanese-style braid, but she had also adopted one of the latest
nove foze,
a lock of hair wrapped beneath the chin. “Toto,” she asked, “has the Emperor decided to go to Pisa?”

“I’m afraid he has.”

Bianca bit her lower lip. “Why has my father brought the Emperor into Italy to pursue another campaign? It is a betrayal of what my father has always said he believes.”

“Your father thinks that what he is doing will prove to the French that the Emperor is serious about his guarantees for the security of Italy. He hopes that this little war will prevent a big war.”