Duchessina - A Novel of Catherine de' Medici (7 page)

I fixed my gaze on the painting of the Blessed Virgin and tried to frame a prayer that would convince her to get me out of this place. I prayed that Aunt Clarissa would come for me, or my cousin Ippolito, or Betta, or Pope Clement,
anyone
! I prayed that I would not be left here and forgotten.

N
OT KNOWING
what to do or where to go when the prayers had ended, I returned to the cloister and sat on a low wall, keeping an eye out for the rat. The rough tunic chafed my skin. Before I'd left the villa in Poggio that morning, I had been too upset to eat more than a little bread with pork jelly, and now I was hungry. My empty stomach ached and rumbled. I sat and waited, wiping away the tears that rolled down my cheeks. Now and then one of the nuns hurried by, skirts swishing. No one spoke to me.

I knew a little about the way the convent day was divided into hours for prayer, for work, and for meals and sleep. Later, at the ringing of the bell when the nuns returned to the chapel to chant midafternoon prayers and psalms, I again knelt beside the hawkeyed nun. She seemed to expect me. I wanted to ask her how I could get some food, but I was afraid. And so I waited.

At last, after the late afternoon prayers, when I thought I would faint from hunger, I followed the nuns to the refectory, a large chamber where they took their places on crude benches at long, bare wooden tables. Lay sisters carried in bowls of stew, gristly meat floating in a salty broth, and slabs of coarse, dry bread. The pudding-faced mother superior blessed the dismal food, which was then eaten in silence. I hungrily choked it down, remembering the dinners prepared by the cooks at Palazzo Medici: juicy roasted meats and boiled fowl, spicy fish pies, baked pastas with lots of cheese, fresh vegetables and fruits, delicious cakes and custards. The memory was a torment.

Still not knowing where to go or what to do when we were dismissed at the end of the meal, I returned again to the cloister. I think I would have welcomed the rat for company. Instead, the hawkeyed nun came to sit on the wall near me. She told me that her name was Suor Immacolata.

“And you are Caterina de' Medici, Duchess of Urbino,” she said, languidly drawing out the syllables. “Daughter of Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino,” she continued. “Am I correct? I knew him well.” She imitated a smile.

“You knew my father?” I asked, too eagerly. I should have guessed from her false smile that no good would come from this conversation.

“Oh, indeed I did. I knew a great deal about Lorenzo de' Medici. What would you like to know about him, Duchessina? He was handsome—no denying that,” Suor Immacolata said bitterly. “Nor can it be denied that he was lazy and arrogant, selfish and spoiled—and none too bright in the bargain. Or that I was a servant in his father's household, the daughter of the steward in the service of his father. Lorenzo ruined me—as he did many of the young virgins in his family's employ—and left me to bear his child. A little girl like you, Duchessina! I left her at a convent when she was only two days old. Imagine that! Somewhere in Florence is your half sister, serving rich girls whose fathers send them to be educated by the nuns until they're let out to marry a rich man.”

I was no match for this resentful woman. I should have gotten up and walked away from her, refused to listen to her tale, but it was as though millstones were attached to my feet. I could barely bring myself to form any words that would stop her mouth. “You speak ill of the dead,” I finally managed to whisper.

She laughed hollowly. “And I suppose you believe that his death was a tragedy! Well, perhaps so, for you. But I can tell you, your father lived a life of dissipation and debauchery. It was the French disease that took his life—not consumption, as I'm sure you've been told.”

“French disease?” I asked innocently.

“It wasn't only naive servant girls whom Lorenzo bedded,” she informed me, pouring her poison into my ear. “But prostitutes as well. They infected him with their filth. It couldn't have been a pleasant way to die. A wonder he didn't make me a gift of the pox as well as of a daughter.”

I somehow shook myself free of the paralyzing fear that had nailed me in place. “No more!” I cried. “No more!” And I ran blindly away back to my cell. Her words echoed in my head:
Somewhere in Florence is your half sister . . .

S
UOR IMMACOLATA
continued to make my life a misery, although it would have been miserable enough even without her. Santa Lucia felt like a prison, and I was surely a hostage. The food was only a little better than the scraps the Medici cooks threw to the dogs. Sharp straws poked through the mattress cover and scratched my skin, and vermin crawled out at night to feast on my flesh. Hot weather arrived, and my cell became an oven.

By early June of each year our household at Palazzo Medici had always moved from the city to one of the Medici country villas, most often to Poggio a Caiano, where mountain breezes cooled us on even the hottest days and Betta took me to wade in the Ombrone River that flowed past sprawling orchards and vineyards. Never before had I endured the sweltering days of summer in the city. But that summer of my eighth year there was no escape.

I begged Suora Madre—Mother Superior—to send for Aunt Clarissa. “Not possible,” she told me coldly. “Accept the fate God has given you.”

I
LEARNED
the rhythm of life at Santa Lucia by imitation, doing what the nuns did.

Seven times during a twenty-four-hour day, from before dawn until bedtime, a bell in the convent tower summoned the nuns to the chapel to chant psalms and prayers. The bells marked the canonical hours beginning with lauds while the stars were just beginning to fade, followed by prime at sunrise and then the “little hours” with the Latin names: terce, or third, at midmorning, sext—sixth—at noon, and the ninth hour, none, in midafternoon. Vespers was sung before suppertime, and compline before the start of the nighttime silence.

At first I had nothing to do in the periods between the prayers in the chapel. Then the mother superior decided that I must be put to work. She sent me to help in the washroom, stirring the household linens in great vats of steaming water with a wooden pole—work that had been done by slaves in Palazzo Medici. I hated it, but at least the nuns assigned there were not cruel, and one—Suor Caterina, who shared my name—was kind enough to explain the convent rules as we wrung out the sheets.

“Whatever you do, don't complain about anything,” Suor Caterina warned me, twisting the linen one way as I twisted it the other. “One of the rules here is that anyone who complains will be punished. You'd be ordered to prostrate yourself on the stone floor for hours at a time.”

I scratched a flea bite. “Just for saying the soup tastes like rotting garbage?”

Suor Caterina giggled. “Exactly. Even though you're right.”

“No talking!” called the nun in charge.

For a few hours each day in the washroom my loneliness was lessened a little, when Suor Caterina and I managed to exchange a few words without being noticed.

Each night I pulled a straw through the mattress cover and hid it in a crack in the bed frame. When I had seven straws I tied them in a bundle with a thread drawn from the hem of my tunic. In this way I kept count of the weeks of my captivity as they dragged by. But no matter how earnestly I prayed for this nightmare to end, or for a visit from my aunt or a message from Betta, God remained deaf to my pleas. Maybe my desires weren't worthy of his notice. Or maybe I wasn't deserving of his graciousness. I began to lose hope.

Someone came to my cell when I was not there and found my bundles of straw. They were gone the next time I looked. I opened my
cassone
and saw that someone had taken my mother's ruby cross and my father's gold ring out of their silk wrappings and put them back carelessly so I'd be sure to notice.

And always, there was the specter of Suor Immacolata, her eyes following me. I believed that she whispered her venom to the other nuns; they were watching me, too. I tried to avoid her, but that was often impossible. I looked for another place in the chapel to kneel during prayers, but there was none. She trapped me.

“You're hated here, you know,” she hissed as we knelt for terce. “And not just because of your treacherous father. All the Medici are hated! Someday all of them will be driven out, murdered in their beds as they deserve. Florence will become a republic, and freedom will flourish once more.”

I put my hands over my ears and refused to listen.

I
'D LOST COUNT
of the weeks I had been at Santa Lucia, but I could guess how many from changes in the weather. Early in September the rains came. At first they brought relief from the oppressive heat, but when they continued day after day, the dampness penetrated everything. Our clothes were always clammy. Mold flourished in every corner. We heard that the Arno River had overflowed its banks, sweeping off entire households.

Then the rains slackened and stopped. Chill winds swept down from the north, heralding the arrival of autumn and the coming of winter. I shivered through the cold nights with only a thin blanket, and soon I developed a persistent cough. The water froze in the washbasin. My lips were cracked and raw. My hands were bleeding.

I was not the only one who suffered. Suor Caterina, my friend in the laundry room—my
only
friend—became too sick to work. Many others had fallen ill as well, so many that the chapel was only half full at prayers. Then I learned that two of the sisters had died. One of them was Suor Caterina.

I wept harder at the news of the little nun's death than I had since my arrival at Santa Lucia. My despair deepened. No matter how tired I was, I couldn't sleep; no matter how hungry I felt, I couldn't eat.

Then one day the mother superior summoned me. “A gentleman has come to visit you,” she informed me, sullenly. “This is against convent rules, but I am powerless to prevent it.”

“Who is it, Suora Madre?” I asked, curious but also uneasy.