Ariosto (28 page)

“Damiano!” The shock which had made Lodovico silent lost its grip on him. He took his friend’s hand and squeezed it in his own. “You must not wound yourself.” How inadequate the words were! He wished he could find a more eloquent expression, some profound comfort that would ease Damiano’s lonely suffering.

“Must I not?” Damiano inquired sardonically.

“For…” He faltered. “If you’re willing to lose your wife for Italia Federata, then it is for the sake of the nation that you must not. If you cannot for your own sake.” Lodovico had felt his eyes fill as Damiano told of Graziella’s desertion. Now the shared hurt was keen within him, and he saw the anguish of il Primàrio reflected in himself. He forced his voice to be steady. “Stay here for a day. Give yourself a respite from the other. One day will not make a difference.”

Damiano pulled his hand away. “You know I can’t do that. Ercole would be deeply insulted and rightly so. Since I have chosen Italia Federata, I must accept her terms.” Again he wiped his face, but this time he looked at his wet hands with bemused surprise. He had not known he wept.

“I will send a messenger and say that you have been taken ill and must rest here.” It was a desperate idea, and a foolish one. Damiano shook his head. “I will go myself, and surely I can make them believe me.”

“I am more touched than you know, Lodovico. I doubt if anyone else would offer this to me. But I must leave.” He got to his feet, pulling his hat from his knee and placing it once more on his head, paying no attention to the angle so that the plume dangled down toward the back of his high, stiff collar. “I stopped here…because I had to have some little time to myself, and the company of a friend. You have been a better friend to me than I have ever had, a better one, perhaps, than I could possibly deserve.” He grabbed Lodovico by the shoulders and embraced him once, harshly, then thrust him away.

Lodovico stood, astounded, thinking frantically for ways to keep this grieving man with him a little longer. “Alessandra will want to see you. She is at the marketplace, but will return shortly. You must let her see you. She’ll be very disappointed…”

“I will see her, but not now.” Damiano regarded Lodovico with curious compassion. “You really should go with your son, and if I were less greedy, I would order you to leave when he does. But my charity has limits. Against my nobler inclinations, I intend to keep you here. I pray God I will not regret my decision.”

“Damiano?” Lodovico blinked at this condemnation. “I promise you I will not compromise you. I will keep your confidences.” He said this stiffly, wondering why Damiano should be so unjust after trusting him. “Nothing you have said, nothing, will be repea—”

But Damiano interrupted him, despair in his face. You misunderstand me. It is not you I reproach, but myself.”

For the third time that afternoon Lodovico found himself without words. He stood in the center of the antechamber and watched while Damiano hastened to the door and went out into the stultifying heat of the afternoon.

Virginio tied his cloak to the back of the saddle and checked the buckles that held his wallet to his belt.

“Now you will be certain to choose your inn carefully,” Alessandra was saying as he worked. “And stay away from tavern wenches. Too many of them are poxy, and I will not have my son infected with the French disease. Find yourself an honest girl and treat well.” She put her hands on her hips to show how firm her orders were.

“Messer’ Ariosto…” said the understeward on the horse beside Virginio’s.

“He means you, my son,” Lodovico said gently when Virginio did not give the man his attention.

“Messer’?” A slight smile curved Virginio’s mouth. “Messer’ Ariosto. I suppose I am.” He turned to his parents and allowed himself to be hugged by each of them, then stepped back.

“Send us word when you have found lodgings,” Lodovico reminded him.

“Yes. of course. I’ll have Guido”—he nodded toward understeward—”bring a message.”

“There is some money set aside for you at the Paris of the Medici bank,” Lodovico went on. “You’re not to use it frivolously. Il Primàrio has given it to you for your education and for your advancement in the future. He has great expectations for you. Do well, and you will have his patronage and the patronage of his heirs for life.”

“I understand,” Virginio said patiently. He had been told this several times already.

“You’re anxious to be on your way, then.” Alessandra gave her son a last hearty kiss. “Be off then. But write to us. Remember, I can read, too. Do not write only to your father.”

Virginio swung up into the saddle, grinning with pride. Damiano had sent him a bay gelding from his own stable with a certificate of ownership, so that the horse was Virginio’s, not de’ Medici’s. The bay was well trained and answered the rein easily. “I go to Genova, then along the coast, then to Avignon. From there to Orleans and then to Paris. I have your letters of introduction in my saddlebags.”

“Very good.” Lodovico smiled toward his son and felt a certain loss. When Virginio rode out of the courtyard, he would no longer be his boy, but Messer’ Virginio Ariosto. The boy would be gone forever. He patted the bay’s neck. “Travel safely and well, God go with you,” he said.

“Thank you, father. God keep you and my mother safe and well.” He turned away and signaled to Guido. Then, without another word, he set his heels to the bay’s flanks and the horse sprang forward, the hooves clattering on the courtyard stones. Guido followed behind him.

Lodovico had put his arm around Alessandra’s shoulder and they stood together in the courtyard until they could no longer hear the sound of the horses.

“He’s gone,” Alessandra murmured when they had stood in silence.

“Yes.” Lodovico nodded. He turned to kiss Alessandra’s forehead, took her in his arms a moment, then let her go. “He’ll do well, wife. He’s a fine boy.”

She said nothing, as if not entirely convinced by her husband. “I don’t know,” she said to herself. “He’s been well enough until those weeks in Firenze…”

“Don’t be worried,” Lodovico said heartily, afraid of precisely the same thing his wife was. True, in Firenze he had refused the offers and returned to father’s house, but might not Paris, so far away and so tempting, give him a different attitude? It was one thing to ride an hour from the Porta San Gallo, from a city where Virginio was not a stranger. In Paris, he would be removed, by distance and his foreignness. In Firenze Virginio had decided not to trade his body for political favor. He had seen for himself how those who had could profit. What would France hold out to him? And would he make the same choice? It was useless to ask these questions, he told himself, because Virginio would do as he saw fit, not as his mother or his father or his confessor might wish.

“You’re not certain, are you?” Alessandra asked. “But what can we do now? If we bring him back, he will not forgive us. He must learn to make his way in the world…” She said this as if by rote, and did not he platitudes she was reciting.

“You’ve been a good mother. I’ve wanted to be a good father. What more can we do?” He shrugged and stared out at the garden, feeling old.

Margaret Roper was distracted at her next lesson. She answered the questions Lodovico put to her but paid little attention that it was quite impossible to make my progress. Her vellum copybook had two large smears across the page she had prepared, yet she hardly noticed them. Once she put a hand to her head as if it ached, and another time she sighed for no reason.

“What is it, Margharita?” Lodovico inquired when he had endured more than an hour of this.

“What?…Nothing.” She bit her thumbnail.

“You, who are so bright a student, work so shoddily and say that there is nothing disturbing you? I can’t believe that.” He folded his hands and waited, as if to sit thus for the entire day.

“It was not unexpected…”

“What was not unexpected?” He watched her as she tugged at a wisp of hair that had escaped from her headdress. “Won’t you tell me, so that we may resume our lesson?”

Margaret placed her hands together as if in prayer. “I don’t know if it’s wise…” Her firm mouth trembled. “We had word from England yesterday. King Henry has learned of our arrival here and is not pleased. He informed us—including my father—that we are exiled and may not again set foot in England. He has signed the proclamation. He has declared us traitors. She said the last so softly that Lodovico, sitting near her, could barely hear her.

“But you did not want to go back to England, did you?” He felt a welling of sympathy for this woman. “You came here to be free of your King’s wrath, didn’t you?”

“Yes, of course,” she said as she continued to pull at her hair. “But this is different, don’t you see? Before we would not go back because we chose not to, but now we are forbidden to, and the price of returning is execution.”

Lodovico listened to her attentively. He was aware of her plight, but until this moment had not realized that there were such dire consequences to their actions. “Your King isn’t so much a fool. Sir Thomas is a brilliant man, and no King is stupid enough to place pride before genius.”

“You don’t know Henry Tudor.” Margaret’s face hardened. “That whore he married will drive him to it now that she is near delivery. She wants no stigma attached to her bastard. Henry is hoping that the Grand Duke of Muscovy will accept an alliance with this child. He has both sons and daughters. That way he will both cement his relations with Muscovy and remove Mistress Boleyn’s child, whatever it may be, from the succession. Compared to that, what is an honorable Chancellor?”

Lodovico was not shocked, and that alarmed him. A year ago, even in Damiano’s court, he might have felt revulsion for the shameful behavior of the King of England. Now he was bitter but he no longer could muster a sense of outrage. He put his hand on Margaret Roper’s shoulder. “The Pope will not allow it.”

“The Pope has nothing to say about it. Henry has broken all ties with Rome and he will not change his mind. He can be the most
mulish
man.” Her blue-gray eyes were brighter than Lodovico had ever seen them and her voice had taken on the sharpness of authority. “He will take any liberty, use any device, perpetrate any evil if he thinks it will serve the Crown. And the Crown, of course, is himself. He was a handsome enough youth, and he is a fine figure of a King, there is nothing behind that façade but corruption.” She had picked up her copybook and now she slammed it down on the table with the full force of her anger.

“Margharita!” Lodovico had half risen from his chair and was staring down at her. “Numi! What passion you have within yourself.” He tried to laugh. “You must not let the King distress you. He is insane, and madmen must not distress you.”

“This particular madman is King of England,” she said through her teeth, though she lowered her voice.

“But it cannot last. He has the Pope against him, he has argued, even, with the Protestants, they say. His own people must be in turmoil. How long can such a king reign? A year? Two? Five? It cannot be long, not when he has set aside his wife and taken his mistress to his bed as his Queen. Someone will oppose him and it will be over. Then you and your family will go home again to the praise of your people.” He was afraid that it might take longer than five years, but he was very certain that if half of what Margaret Roper told him were true, Henry Tudor would be supplanted before the start of the next decade, seven years away.

Margaret gathered her hands into fists. “I hate that man!” She whispered with venomous softness. “I hate him. He has treated us with arrogance and contempt. He has made a mockery of the finest man in his kingdom. There is no one who has cared more for the safety and protection of the Crown than my father, and if King Henry thinks that Richard Rich will serve him as well…”

“Richard Rich? Riccardo Ricco?” In either form, he know the name. “Who is he?”

“The new Chancellor of England! Oh, yes. Not content with banishing Sir Thomas More, King Henry has appointed Richard Rich his successor. This is the very man who provided Henry with the legal excuses to exile our family. The Chancellorship is his reward. It is Henry’s way of telling the world that he will have no one around him with an opinion that does not concur with His Majesty’s.” Her voice was quite still, a deadly cutting quiet that pierced like fine, honed steel.

“It will not last,” Lodovico promised her.

“Not even if Henry forms an alliance with France? It would be possible once arrangements have been made with the Grand Duke of Muscovy. Henry imagines himself an Emperor striding the world around. Russia to the east, and then all the English claims to France reasserted. Before my father left, he warned me that it could happen just that way.” “The King of France is no idiot,” Lodovico said soothing her. “Your Enrico will not be able to convince him that they are united in their goals. France has other problems to contend with—Spain would take it badly if France opened negotiations with England. You saw the letter I had from your father, and I am certain that Damiano would let you see most of the reports he has received.”

Margaret pounded the table with her fists once. “I am generally a calm and self-possessed woman,” she announced to the room. “Yet when I am here, and I think of what Henry Tudor has done to my father and our family out of pique, all the emotions I have rise in me like bubbles in boiling water.”

Lodovico was relieved. The worst of this tempest was behind them. “Poets are said to be made of emotions, he reminded her with his most tolerant smile, and wondered if it were so.

“I also understand,” Margaret went on in a more reasonable tone, “that il Primàrio’s son was said to be in England. I had that from Cecily Howard, who is a lady-in-waiting to Mistress Boleyn.”

“His son? Which one?” Lodovico was suddenly cold. The remote troubles of that distant island had not touched him, but with this revelation, he felt the whole might of Henry Tudor become a threat. If one of Damiano’s sons was there, and decided to cause trouble, he could find no more effective way than to keep King Henry apprised of Medici family politics.

“I believe it was Renato.” She frowned over the name.