The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (62 page)

“She expressed a wish to see you,” he added. “She calls you her little sister and asks when you will come to call on her.”

“And what did you tell her?” I asked.

“That you were fatigued by the journey from Firenze and harassed by household duties.”

“And how did she take it?” I asked, knowing that Madonna Isabella did not take kindly to being refused in the smallest matter for any reason.

“She seemed slightly annoyed,” he replied coolly.

To be perfectly truthful, I was tempted. I am not immune to the seductions of court life. But neither was I prepared to forgive and forget.

“Give her what excuse you will,” I told him. “Say I’m pregnant.”

“And are you?” he asked.

“No. But I soon will be. Better that than the truth: that I cannot bear to look upon her face. Or the Marchese Francesco’s. Together those two have brought me nothing but misery.”

“They too have their miseries,” Judah reminded me quietly.

“You refer to this mistress of his that he flaunts like a jewel?”

“That and her inability to produce an heir. The child she was carrying when you last saw her died within a few months of its birth.”

“Was it a boy?” I asked.

“A girl, I think,” he replied.

“Then the death of that baby was no misery to her. She cares only for boys.”

“That is a harsh judgment, wife,” he replied.

“Harsh but accurate,” I retorted. “Like all princes, Madama is more of a dynast than a mother. Do you know she refused to use the golden cradle for her first child because the poor thing was a mere girl? I would not be surprised if the second daughter died of neglect with a mother like that.”

“Sometimes women come late to a realization of mother love,” he reminded me. “Think of Diamante . . .”

“You dare to compare Diamante Bonaventura to a coldhearted bitch like Isabella d’Este!” The reproach came out of me harsh and loud.

“No need to shout, wife,” he remonstrated gently. But, as it so often did in those days, the subject of bearing children grated on my nerves. A fear had begun to grow in me that the child I so confidently planned might not be so easy to conceive. And, to exacerbate my unease, life seemed to be stirring everywhere around me but in my womb.

At Roma a child was born to Lucrezia Borgia four months after her second marriage and named after her father, Rodrigo. The question bruited about the peninsula was: Who is the child’s true father, her brother Cesare or her father, the Pope? Each of them had been seen kissing her full on the lips before, after, and in between her various marriages. But this gossip did not deter Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara from asking for her hand in marriage once the child in question was safely tucked away.

On the feast of Mathias we learned of the birth of a son to Philip the Handsome of Burgundy and his mad wife, Joanna of Spain, which brought to mind Isaachino Bonaventura’s prediction of the dynastic consequences of this marriage. Born during their endless journeying between Spain and Germany, this child had been dropped off at his birthplace like a cumbersome package in the same manner that the addled mother had deposited her other children wherever they fell out in the various towns of Europe. At the time, this Habsburg pup was simply one more reminder of my own disappointed hopes. It turned out that, as Isaachino foretold, his birth did produce far-reaching dynastic consequences. Still, I doubt that the Libyan Sibyl herself could have foreseen a troublemaker of the stature of Charles V, our revered Holy Roman Emperor, when his mismatched parents were joined in matrimony.

From Ferrara came the news that the two dei Rossi marriages celebrated the previous year were about to bear fruit. My friend Penina, married at last to the German rabbi, was expecting a child in the spring, and my brother and his slut of a wife, having produced an heir six months after their hasty marriage, were now expecting another. I prayed every day for one small share of this rampant fecundity and copulated with rigorous regularity. Still, the year 1499 drew to its end without any sign of a child in my womb.

In December, Leonardo of Vinci passed through Mantova with his friend Luca Pacioli. To earn a few ducats he obliged Madonna Isabella by drawing her in chalk. I have never seen this drawing. Her husband gave it away to the first person who asked for it. Imagine! To toss away a work from the hand of Leonardo. That Francesco ought to have stuck to judging horseflesh.

Oddly enough, Madama regretted the loss of her portrait even less than her husband. It was not really a very good likeness, she confided to Judah. It made her look fat. Judah reported this to me with considerable mirth. Overweening vanity in high persons always did tickle him.

“Of course she looked plump to him,” he remarked casually. “She’s at least five months pregnant.”

How had the
illustrissima
earned God’s blessing? Which of my sins was greater than hers or my cousin Ricca’s or Lucrezia Borgia’s or the mad Joanna’s? Among them, those women had committed harlotry, mendacity, desertion, incest, and tens of minor offenses against the Holy Writ. Yet God had judged them fit to be mothers and not me.

Rather than give way to despair, I cultivated a faith in numbers. I worked a sampler emblazoned with the number 1500 in purple and strung it up above my carrel like a banner to announce to myself that the new century would bring a change of fortune.

41

T
he first month of the year 1500 brought news of a terrible accident in Ferrara and a double death in the family. The letter, signed by my cousin Asher and penned by his own hand, was brief. On the previous day my grandfather and Penina’s young husband had drowned together in the waters of the Po en route to petition Duke Ercole at Marmirolo. The sled they were riding in had pitched through a weakened patch in the ice and sunk before help could be summoned.

Much as I dreaded the voyage, it seemed to me right that I should go to the funeral for Penina’s sake, and, as it often does, what I anticipated as an onerous duty turned out a pleasure.

We traveled by sled as my grandfather had done on the day of his death, yet I felt no fear. After my long confinement as a staid housewife the bracing air exhilarated my spirit, infusing me with a zest I thought I had lost forever. And when the merchants I was traveling with asked if I was game to ride on through the night, I agreed without a qualm. By stopping only to change horses, we reached Ferrara in less than two days’ ride, not far short of the speed of a dispatch rider.

Of the funeral there is nothing to tell. Of the subsequent events, much. The reading of my father’s will had revealed the greed that lurked in the shadows of our family’s grief when property was at stake. This time, it took longer to surface, not due to any change of heart but because my grandfather’s style was so prolix that it took an entire morning for the poor lawyer to wade through the ocean of platitudes that preceded the actual bequests. It is a style reminiscent of the poems you have heard intoned at Madonna Isabella’s fetes written to mark the death of one of her little dogs.

But finally, in the early afternoon, after digging through a ton of verbiage, we came to the hidden bombshell.

“My house in the Via delle Volte and all its furnishings . . .” As one, the assemblage leaned forward, on the alert. “I bequeath to my grandson Jehiel and his wife, Ricca —”

That is as far as he got.

“My house! Never!” La Nonna’s shout was loud enough to be heard by the eels sunning themselves in the Comacchio basin. Before anyone could quite grasp what was happening, the old lady fell on the floor and lay there gasping. “Not my house . . . No . . . no . . . no . . .” Whereupon her voice trailed off and she began to twitch and foam at the mouth.

If ever I had wished for revenge against La Nonna, I got it that day, watching her borne out of her
sala grande
held high in Jehiel’s arms as on a catafalque, pursued by the two women she had trusted and who, it was now clearly revealed, had conspired to betray her. Yet I felt no triumph in my revenge. Only a faint disgust and a strong wish to get out of that house — Ricca’s house now, it seemed.

Penina voiced the sentiments of us all when she murmured, “I don’t envy Jehiel caught in the current of that filthy pool.” The unaccustomed sharpness of her comment reinforced my conviction that in spite of her marriage she had not given up her hopeless passion for my brother. And who could blame her? He had grown into a wonderfully handsome man, all traces of boyhood plumpness erased, his body lithe and strong, with solid, broad shoulders and narrow hips. And all of this natural beauty was enhanced by the rich court clothes he had taken to wearing. Even his black mourning doublet was trimmed with fine lace. And the sheen of his costume remained untarnished by that damnable yellow circle that Duke Ercole had once again ordered the Ferrarese Jews to wear. Jehiel was excused from that humiliation by the special dispensation of Prince Alfonso, Duke Ercole’s heir. Somehow my brother had become a member of the prince’s inner circle . . . shades of my father. He would have been at court even now had it not been for the required mourning, Asher said. As it was, Este pages came every day to our portal with secret letters and messages for Maestro Vitale.

“What does he do at court?” I asked Asher.

“He claims to be employed in the cannon foundry.”

“Do I take it you do not believe him?” I asked.

“He hardly dresses like a foundryman, does he?” was his rejoinder. “Nor does a foundryman generally sail the river on a prince’s bucentaur or gallop at the prince’s side chasing wild boars. And where does he get the money for these clothes he keeps buying? Not from a foundryman’s salary.” He stopped himself suddenly. “I sound envious, do I not?” he asked.

“You sound skeptical, as I am after what you tell me, cousin,” I replied. “We both have cause to know Jehiel’s recklessness.”

“I do fear for him,” he answered. “Yet I refuse to repeat idle gossip.”

“By the time there is proof, it will be too late to save him,” I replied. “You do him no disservice by telling me, Asher. I am his sister. I love him.”

“Very well,” he sighed. “They say he sells Hebrew amulets to the ladies and gentlemen of the Duke’s court and that he forecasts the future from Tarot cards. If the
Wad Kellilah
proves that he is practicing magic with the words of the Torah, they will whip him in the synagogue and excommunicate him just as they did your father.”

“Does he admit to selling amulets?”

Asher shook his head. “But it is the most likely explanation for his sudden affluence. Christians will pay any price for Jewish magic.”

I knew he spoke the truth. Judah was constantly being badgered by importunate Christians for
brevi
— as these bits of gibberish were called — from
The Sword of Moses
or
The Wisdom of the Chaldeans
. “They think we Israelites have Jehovah by the tail,” he explained.

Now it seemed that my brother was invested in the business of catering to this perilous fantasy. I knew I must speak to him at once — and firmly. But each time I saw him that day he was whirling in and out of the house in La Nonna’s service and could not be stopped. First the doctor had to be fetched. Then the pharmacist was brought to purge the invalid, and the butcher to bleed her. Each time I passed the door of her room, I was assailed by groans of pain and noxious fumes.

By the time of the compline bells I had given up hope of cornering my brother. But after I retired, an opportunity unexpectedly arose. Hearing footsteps on the tiles overhead, I pulled back the shutters at my windows and saw him standing on the roof above me, peering through some kind of astronomical instrument.

Stealthily, so as not to alert Ricca, I made my way up to the third floor loggia and onto the roof tiles. There I found my brother, eye to lens, gazing skyward through a glass with such intense concentration that I had to pluck at his sleeve twice to alert him to my presence.

“Grazia, what brings you here?”

“I might ask the same of you, brother,” I answered in the Talmudic style.

“I have come to look at the stars, as I do every night.”

“You have become an astrologer?”

“Better say an acolyte. I am following up the studies I began with a certain master in Mantova.”

“I do not like it, Jehiel,” I stated flatly.

“You do not like astrology, sister? Or the master? Or the stars?”

“All three of those things. Only fools or people who wish to deceive others pretend to read a man’s destiny in stars and cards. All wise men agree on this, men as far apart as Maimonides and . . .” My tongue stumbled as I said the name, “Pico della Mirandola.”

“Yet the same Pico hired more than one Jew to teach him the secrets of cabala,” he retorted. “So I must conclude that I am acting according to the precepts of wise men if I seek out numerical formulas for bringing rain or destroying an enemy.”

“Are the stories true, then?” I challenged him. “Are you selling amulets to the Christians?”

“If I am?”

“This is no game, Jehiel. The Jews will excommunicate you if they catch you at it.”