The Second Duchess (38 page)

The tertiary flushed up to her hairline. “I was not hiding.”

“You were taken back to the duchess’s apartments,” the duke went on, as if she had not spoken, “and confined there with the rest of her women. A few days later you were expelled from the city. Now we find you returned in secret, ingratiated yourself at the Monastero del Corpus Domini, and were in fact present there the very night the young duchess died.”

“I was not there that night.”

“You were seen. Do you wish to contend the holy sisters are lying?”

Mona Tommasina’s eyes, like the eyes of a trapped animal, grew huge and dark. I could see the bones of her knuckles through the skin of her clasped hands.

“Very well, I was there. I wished to comfort Sodona, that’s all.”

The duke seemed to pay no attention to the pet name, although this woman had no right to speak in such a familiar fashion of Lucrezia de’ Medici, a princess of Florence, a duchess of Ferrara. He said only, “And what did Serenissima Lucrezia say to you that night?”

“She was crying. Throwing things, breaking things. She said you meant to force her into a convent for whoring and make her sign papers to have your marriage annulled.”

“You brought her a flask,” I said. “She had spent her anger, and everything she could break was broken. It was only then you gave it to her.”

“What is it to you—” She broke off, her eyes slanting to the duke, full of fury and spite and fear. In a more moderate voice she said, “Very well, yes, I gave her a flask.”

“What was in it?”

“A sleeping potion.”

The duke looked at her. She tried to meet his gaze, but after a breath her eyes flickered away. She looked down at the floor and said, “It was a woman’s potion. She wanted to be rid of her bastard. How she laughed to think she would eventually prove you wrong about her, however right you might have been in truth.”

Messer Giovanni turned over his paper and began a fresh sheet. There was not the slightest hesitation in his note-taking.

“And so it was you who killed her,” the duke said. His voice was silky and vicious. “You mixed the potion incorrectly, and by your carelessness you poisoned her—your precious Sodona.”

I sat very still. Only a few days before, Messer Girolamo had assured us the young duchess had been smothered, not poisoned. Why was the duke accusing Tommasina Vasari of poisoning her mistress and friend, when he knew poison was not the cause of the young duchess’s death?

“I did not mix it wrongly!” the woman cried. “May San Giacomo be my witness, the potion was already mixed and sealed when I received it from—”

She stopped suddenly.

She had said too much. And that, of course, had been the duke’s intention.

“From?” he prompted with deceptive gentleness.

She had turned white as chalk. “From an old woman in the marketplace.” Her voice shook. “Just an old woman, one of a hundred. I never knew her name.”

The duke looked at her, his eyes black with monsters. Then he rose and stepped forward and struck her, a single cracking blow across the mouth that jolted her head around and knocked her off her feet. She sprawled to the tessellated marble floor like a disjointed poppet.

I stared at her. I stared at him. I tried to breathe and found I could not. The sudden eruption of violence in the exquisitely proportioned and furnished little room was so discordant I could not comprehend it. The duke looked at his hands for a moment; I could see a smudge, blood or spittle or both, on the back of his right glove. Quite calmly he removed both gloves—soft brown leather, embroidered with gold thread and citrines and pearls and probably worth a year’s pay to either one of the guards—and tossed them fastidiously to the floor. Then he seated himself again.

“From?” he repeated.

There was blood on the woman’s mouth, and her eyes glittered with hatred. She pushed herself up to her hands and knees. “An old woman,” she said again. “In the marketplace.”

“That is a lie, Mona Tommasina,” I said. God only knows where I found the courage to intervene, but I could not bear to see him strike her again. The duke said nothing to silence me, so I took a breath and went on in my most reasonable voice.

“The flask that contained the potion was beautiful and extremely valuable. No old woman from the marketplace ever sold a potion in such a flask. You yourself could not possibly have owned such a thing. Tell us where you got it and who prepared the potion for you, and save yourself further suffering.”

She would not look up at me. “I stole it,” she said.

“From whom?”

“One of the ladies I attended. I don’t remember which one.”

Very well, I thought. Stubborn fool. Let us try another approach.

“How did you gain entry to the monastery? It is an enclosed house.”

“A door was left unlocked.”

“It will do you no good to lie,” I said. “Mona Tommasina, I beg you, answer the questions honestly and completely, and I will speak for you. I will—”

“
Asburgo
,” she hissed at me.
“Austriaca
.
”

To my horror she spat at me.

I jerked back. At the periphery of my vision I saw the duke half-rise from his chair. Time stopped. Then slowly the duke seated himself again and said without expression, “Bind her. Tell one of the duchess’s women to fetch water.”

I started to breathe again. “It is nothing. It is no matter,” I said, although I could feel my skin crawling with repulsion at the thought of the woman’s spittle on my skirt. Holy Virgin. What would he do now?

The guard with the rope bound Mona Tommasina’s hands before her, wrist to wrist, palm to palm, and jerked her to her knees with a few more twists of the rope about her neck. Christine came in, flushed and frightened-looking, with a vessel of water and some cloths; she knelt before me to clean the hem of my dress. I stood like a child who had dirtied her clothes. Christine finished her task, avoiding my eyes, and went out of the room.

“Now,” the duke said. “The duchess has tried reason, and you have rejected it. Madonna, you will sit, if you please.”

I sat. Mona Tommasina said nothing.

The duke looked to one of the guards. That was all it was, just a look—not a gesture, not a word. The man understood. He reached inside his leather jerkin and produced a mechanism consisting of two oblong steel plates about an inch wide and six or eight inches long, held together by sliding bolts at either end and a screw in the center. The end of the screw was forged into two delicately worked loops like the wings of a butterfly. The second guard dragged Mona Tommasina tautly upright upon her knees, half-choking her with the loops of rope around her neck; the first man forced her thumbs into the openings formed by shallow depressions in the top and bottom plates.

“Do you know what this device is,
parruchiera
?” the duke asked. He might have been asking her if she knew what a comb was, or a curling-rod. I shivered, although there had been no change in the temperature of the room.

“I don’t remember where I got the flask,” the woman whispered. “I bought the potion in the marketplace. I went into the monastery through a door that had been left unlocked.”

The duke nodded to the guard.

The man turned the screw, once, twice, three times. I saw the two plates of the device move closer together around the first joints of her thumbs. Her thumbnails darkened. Her face twisted with pain. Without the slightest sign of emotion the guard turned the screw again. She made an eerie whining sound and writhed against the rope, her eyes squeezed shut, her teeth bared.

“Where did you get the flask and the potion? How did you enter the monastery?”

She had started to shudder and sob. I tried to imagine what it would be like, crushing pain and no escape, no palliation, just pain and more pain and more pain and a rope around my neck and utter helplessness. My own throat felt swollen with tears of fright and sympathy and horror.

“A key!” she cried suddenly. “I had a key! Gesù, Gesù, stop, stop!”

The duke nodded to the guard, and he loosened the screw two turns. Mona Tommasina knelt there whimpering and coughing, half-hanging against the rope around her neck.

“Very well. Where did you get it?”

“From Sister Orsola. I gave her jewelry, earrings with opals and carnelians, a bracelet—I don’t remember it all. I gave her wine and fruit and cakes. She was greedy for it all.”

“Jewelry, to a Clarissa? What use did she have for jewelry?”

“I don’t know. She wanted it—I don’t know why. There was a story she had a lover, a man from about the court.”

I leaned forward a little, remembering how readily Sister Orsola had snatched up the ruby ring I had offered her. “Who was this lover?”

“I don’t know. It was only a story. I don’t know who it was or if it was true at all.”

I remembered thinking how easy it would have been for Sister Orsola to take the abbess’s keys from her luxurious chamber. Clearly she had done so, and since she had given a copy of the enclosure key to Tommasina Vasari, she could just as easily have given another copy to a lover.

“Very well,” I said aloud. “At least we now know where you got the key. Let us return to the potion you gave the young duchess. Where did you get it?”

“It wasn’t the potion that killed her!” She twisted against the rope. “The potion was good—it was good! I would have drunk it myself—my father is the Duke of Florence’s favorite alchemist and—”

She stopped. She sucked in a shuddering breath. Her eyes were distended like the eyes of a terrified mare.

So another question was answered. The potion had come from her father in Florence.

“It wasn’t the potion . . . it was her, the infirmarian, Sister Orsola . . . I saw her, I saw her put a pillow over Sodona’s face and hold her down—I saw it, I swear!”

I was taken aback. Even the duke seemed surprised. Messer Giovanni’s scratching paused for a moment, then began again.

“I came back to the monastery that night, much later—I wanted to make sure the potion had worked and Sodona was safe.” There were tears and sweat streaking the
parruchiera
’s face. “I saw her, all in her habit and cowl, bending over Sodona’s bed and pressing the pillow against her face. Why do you think I attached myself to the monastery as a tertiary? I was waiting my chance, and one day I would have had my revenge.”

She broke off, coughing and shuddering. Messer Giovanni’s quill scratched.

“Why did you not come forward at the time,” I said, “and tell what you saw?”

“Because . . . because I was afraid . . . I would be arrested, blamed . . . no one would believe me. My father would be blamed for making the potion.”

The duke sat back in his chair and looked at me. His calm self-possession both horrified me and steadied me. “What say you, Madonna?” he asked me. “Is she telling the truth?”

“I am not sure,” I said. “She knows the young duchess was smothered, which is a point in her favor. On the other hand, I think she would say anything now, out of pain and fear. What reason would Sister Orsola have to kill the young duchess?”

“It appears Sister Orsola was less than strict in the practice of her vows. Perhaps the young duchess knew something about it all, or had seen something the good sister did not wish anyone else to see. Perhaps the duchess also had heard this tale of a lover connected to the court.”

“Perhaps,” I said thoughtfully. “But consider. Mona Tommasina admits slipping back into the monastery that night. Perhaps she herself smothered the duchess, from some reason she has not yet confessed, and is lying to save herself.”

Tommasina Vasari lifted her head. The pure hatred in her eyes made me start back in fright.

“To save myself?” she hissed at me. “Do you think I don’t know I’m already condemned? It was Sister Orsola who murdered my Sodona, and I only wish I’d found my chance to kill her in turn. You’d be dead, too, dead, if I’d had only one more moment of time.”

“I?” I stared at her. I had dizzy, half-formed thoughts of the candied angelica and the slashed saddle-girth. “What do you mean?”

She bared her teeth at me, in what she might have meant to be a smile. Then in a husky, conspiratorial voice she whispered,
“He murdered his first duchess with his own hands, they say. She was so young, so beautiful.”

At first it did not make sense. Then in a rush I remembered the morning of my wedding day, so vividly I could smell the scent of the Po di Volano and taste the red wine and sugar and cream in the posset I had drunk, feel the weight of the silver-mounted looking-glass in my hands. The silken pavilion on the ducal barge. The snap of the wind in the imperial standard. My Austrian ladies. Strange Ferrarese ladies. Dressing me. Arranging my hair.

“You,” I said. “It was you. That is why there has always been something familiar about you. On the morning of my wedding, you braided my hair with pearls.”

“It was so easy.” The words spilled out, hoarse, scornful, taunting. “A bribe here, a bribe there, money I had been saving one
giorgino
, one
diamante
at a time, and suddenly it was I who was to dress the hair of the new duchess and not the woman Principessa Crezia had chosen. It should have been simplicity itself—a hollow bodkin filled with venom, an accidental scratch. But I wanted you to be afraid. I wanted to be sure you knew what was to come. I waited a moment too long and lost my chance.”

“Holy Virgin,” I said. My voice shook so I could hardly control it. I crossed myself, and then crossed myself again. I felt the compulsion to do something over and over sink its claws into me, and I clasped my hands together hard to forestall it. “You meant to poison me that morning.”

I saw her. I saw the very moment.
The court of Ferrara is like a love-apple, beautiful and rosy-red and alluring to the senses, but poisonous, so poisonous
, she had said. The braiding-bodkin had gleamed gold in her hand.