Duchess of Milan (18 page)

“I think she is going to sleep for a while,” Madame said, as if this news had precedence over any crisis. Her daughter, Suzanne, had been a tiny baby, and for the first three weeks it had seemed that her struggling lungs could not sustain her wrinkled little body. But in the past few days Suzanne had begun to gain weight, and her bluish tint had faded. Madame nevertheless maintained her unflagging vigil, still sleeping and eating beside her baby’s cradle.

Pierre offered his wife a knowing smile. “She is strong like her mother. She wants to live. She will live. We can thank God for that.” His mouth tightened. “Yesterday morning Bernard Stuart d’Aubigny arrived at Bourges and ordered, in your brother’s name, that Louis be released from the tower. Louis was taken to Pont de Baragon, where he met your brother. I believe there is still time to arrest de Vesc and the Bishop of Mountabon before they can arrive there and rendezvous with Louis and your brother.” Etienne de Vesc and the Bishop of Mountabon were the two most powerful Orleanists still allowed at court.

Madame’s weary face revealed no reaction. Her menacing eyes, however, seemed to click through thousands of calculations. Then everything stopped, and she reached for Pierre’s hands. “No, no,” she said softly. “It is time. It is time.” She brought her husband into her arms. “You and I are in no danger from this. With one hand God has given us Suzanne, and with the other He has set Louis free. If that is the bargain God wishes to strike, then we have been blessed that He is so generous.” Madame placed her head on Pierre’s shoulder. For the first time since she had been fifteen years old, she permitted herself to cry.

CHAPTER 14

Naples, 25 December 1491

“I want to know why we have been brought here.” The request was uttered in a hoarse, desperate voice.

The guard smashed the butt of his knife against his questioner’s nose. The prisoner collapsed into a motionless heap on the slimy stones; with his filthy cloak, tangled hair, and emaciated limbs, he looked like little more than a pile of rags and bones unearthed from a hasty grave.

The remaining prisoners, a disordered assembly of about thirty men, responded to the assault with whispered prayers. They already looked like specters of the dead: blanched, gaunt faces and puckered, toothless mouths. They had been brought to the isle of Ischia from Naples, six hours distant by boat, the previous evening, Christmas Eve. Some had anticipated freedom; perhaps their ransom by the French. But they had merely exchanged their dungeons in the notorious Castel Sant’Elmo for equally doleful accommodations in a desolate, ancient fortress.

Another prisoner summoned the strength and courage to ask: “Why are we here?”

The guard who had struck the first prisoner stepped forward, searching for the culprit. But his superior, a grave-looking man wrapped in a fine wool cape, held him back.

“You are guests of the house of Aragon,” the man in the wool cape said casually. The irony was not entirely lost on his starvation-dulled audience. Most of these men were important Neapolitan nobles with a long history of opposition, sometimes violent, to the Aragonese rulers of Naples; many were the sons of noblemen who had actively supported French claims to Naples a generation previously. Five years before, Ferrante of Aragon, the King of Naples, had made peace with the rebellious nobles. To seal the accord, Ferrante had arranged the marriage of his niece to one of his principal opponents and had invited the rest of the rebels to a celebratory banquet in the great hall of the Castel Nuovo. (One prominent nobleman had declined the invitation. Antonello di Sanseverino, the Prince of Salerno, had responded with a note reading: “The old sparrow doesn’t fly into a cage,” and had then fled to Paris.) Shortly after the fourth course had been served, Ferrante had ordered the doors sealed; the guests had been summarily arrested and imprisoned, their property confiscated. The women and children had eventually been released, but the noblemen had spent the subsequent years in the lightless dungeons beneath the Castel Sant’Elmo. They had not been permitted any contact with the outside world. Many of their families already presumed them dead.

“God’s robe,” whispered one of the wraiths. “Today we will see Jesus.” The infection of fear quickly spread among the prisoners; it made sense that they would be killed out here, where the bodies could be disposed of in secrecy. Anxious queries and desperate murmurs became a frantic, chaotic chorus. Several men repeated saints’ names over and over. Finally one prisoner called out, “Let God witness that we asked you to provide us a priest!”

“Let the devil watch you die,” the man in the wool cape answered. He turned and motioned one of the guards to open the low wooden door. A cold draft swept into the chamber, and the wind moaned through the hallway beyond. The man in the wool cape ducked his head beneath the lintel and disappeared. A moment later the noise of the wind rose to a tremulous shriek, as if a cyclone were raging outside.

Seemingly propelled by the tremendous gust, a crouching, nearly naked figure came through the doorway. He stood erect, a towering black man wearing only a loincloth, his massive shoulders and arms glistening with rain. In one hand he carried a smith’s hammer, the tapered end sharpened to a spike.

The chamber echoed with protests and prayers as the guards pushed back the cluster of prisoners. Two guards brought one man forward. The prisoner was tall, with a prominent nose that seemed half his virtually fleshless face. His feverish eyes frantically searched the black man’s impassive features. In a movement so quick it did not seem real, the black man brought the spike end of the hammer smashing into the prisoner’s face, then ripped it out again almost before the split-melon sound had registered. The grotesque puncture spurted blood, brilliant crimson against ghastly white skin, and the man fell like an empty sack.

The guards had to hold the second victim’s long, stringy hair. He spit, missing the black man, and shouted: “Jesus curse the devils of Aragon until every bastard’s son burns in hell! Jesus curse the whoreson Ferrante! Jesus curse Alfonso the--” The spike plunged into his eye socket.

Within minutes all of the prisoners lay in a heap of rags and skeletal limbs, splotched with darkening blood and the yellowish-gray serum that moments before had been memories and hope. The wind screamed. The man in the wool cape came back into the chamber and slipped up behind the executioner. The black man did not seem to hear, and he glared with astonishment when the man in the wool cape reached up and quickly and expertly cut his throat.

The gale came from the east in a steady roar, driving enormous spume-capped swells across the usually placid Bay of Naples. The waves rolled against the concrete harbor mole and slapped into the massive seafront flank of the Castel Nuovo. Alfonso of Aragon, Duke of Calabria, heir to the throne of Naples, stood at his window high above the water and watched the phosphorescing foam climb toward him. No one in Naples could remember such a storm. It had come up just after midnight, and now this Christmas midmorning was as dark as dusk.

“It is done,” Alfonso whispered to himself. He turned away from the window. He wore nothing except two large rings, one of sapphires and diamonds set in gold, the other ruby-studded. His thighs were thick and solid, a necessary support for his expansive belly and heavily muscled shoulders. A cap of black curled hair fell over the nape of his neck and concealed all but a finger’s width of his forehead. His rounded jowls were massive yet firm, suggestive of both indolence and brutish strength. But Alfonso’s mouth was urbane, delicate, as if shaped by constant poetic utterances, and his painfully squinted eyes--a congenital deformity--made him appear as if he were always weeping.

“What do you think of them?” Alfonso addressed his question to a young, compactly fleshy woman with large, dark nipples and luxuriantly wavy black hair. She was sitting up in a canopied bed strewn with embroidered silk pillows, studying a sheaf of architectural renderings; several of the large drawings were detailed plans for an entire city laid out in a precise grid.

The woman looked up. “What is the word?” she asked rhetorically.
“Simmetria.
Everything is just alike. Too much
simmetria.”

“That is the beauty of it.
Simmetria. Regola.
Do you think we can pass an ordinance that the people of Naples will no longer be permitted to empty their chamber pots into the streets? But if all the streets run in straight lines from the hills to the sea, every time it rains, the shit will be washed away.”

“So that is what you tell your architects? Foremost, you must consider the shit?”

Alfonso’s massive shoulders jerked slightly, a reflex of amusement.
“Belleza,
simply because you have proved to be an expert at your profession does not mean that you are ready to instruct these
maestri
in theirs.”

“If I were as inventive at my work as these
maestri
are at theirs, I would be sleeping with peasants and footmen.”

Alfonso knelt on the bed and presented his penis. “Let us see what sort of
invenzione
you have for this.”

The woman laughed and stroked Alfonso’s massive thigh. When Alfonso’s penis began to stiffen, she looked up at him with challenging blue eyes and a wry smile.

She turned, startled. The double doors at the end of the room had rattled. Two men, one thin and sumptuously dressed, the other plump and attired with grotesque extravagance, walked casually into the bedchamber.

The thin man intoned, “Your Highness, His Majesty your father.”

Alfonso signaled the woman with a slight motion of his head. She stacked the drawings neatly, got up, entirely naked, and sauntered toward the door, her plump buttocks twitching to her insouciant gait. She curtsied to the King of Naples and vanished through the doors. The thin man, who was the King’s chamberlain, bowed and retreated, closing the doors behind him.

Ferrante of Aragon, the King of Naples, walked to the windows and looked out at the screaming sea. He was a mocking image of his son grown old: the once-muscular shoulders atrophied, the belly a swollen paunch, the jowls sagging until they almost swallowed his neck. The effete nature suggested by Alfonso’s mouth was more pronounced in his father. Ferrante’s gray hair ringed his face in painstakingly shaped curls, and he clasped pudgy white hands over his breast. His immense girth corseted in a pale-blue tunic embroidered with riotous floral patterns, his sloping shoulders wreathed with a massive necklace of gold fruit clusters, the King of Naples resembled a court buffoon’s caricature of an aging homosexual. But there was also a measure of strength and intelligence absent from his son’s more robust features. Ferrante’s aggressive, chiseled nose seemed to spring from his forehead, flanked by wary, worldly, frighteningly alert green eyes. He turned from the window, and his eyes posed a question.

“I had them moved last night.” Alfonso’s voice was a deep bass, but his delivery was strangely quiet, almost a whisper. “I gave the order. Obviously we will not have word from Ischia for at least a day or two.”

Ferrante nodded almost imperceptibly. Then his eyes indicated that the subject had changed. “Did you talk to Camillo?” Camillo de Scorziatis was a Neapolitan envoy who had just returned from Milan.

“Why?” Alfonso asked irritably, joining his father at the window. “He only confirms your opinions.”

“Perhaps because my opinions are correct.” Ferrante chuckled softly. “You know he says that your daughter and Beatrice have become
amice.
I thought that might happen. They were both such gifted children. So very special.”

“And you imagine that the friendship between two girls will concern Il Moro? If Il Moro had his prick in God’s Mother, She would not influence his policy. As it is, Beatrice is less of a wife to Il Moro than the Duke of Milan is a husband to my daughter.”

Ferrante turned to his son, his lips subtly pursed. “I would say that is one of the advantages of the situation. Camillo says that Il Moro sleeps with her once a month, the date determined by his astrologer. Rather better that Beatrice and Il Moro are not so close and are so unlikely to produce an heir. Or you don’t agree?”

“Perhaps you should pay more attention to what is happening in Paris and less to who is sleeping with whom in Milan.” Alfonso swiveled his massive head and confronted his father. “They are coming. It is a question not of if but of when.”

“They will come
if
they can get their cannons over the mountains, and
if
Il Moro invites them. They are as yet unable to accomplish the former, and I think the latter unlikely. The loudest commotion in Paris currently is the ranting of the Orleanists, who want to attack Milan, not Naples. Il Moro has the best ears in Europe. He hears those voices. He knows that his head is on the same block as ours.”

“Il Moro’s head is too big to share a block with anyone. He has betrayed us once. He will betray us again.” Alfonso referred to the war with Venice eight years previously, when II Moro had negotiated a separate peace, without even consulting his Neapolitan allies.

“That was a wise decision on his part. I did not like it any better than you did, but he did what was expedient. What was best for his state and his people. I put more trust in a clever scoundrel than in a honest fool. And Il Moro is too clever to let the French come over the mountains.”

“And if he negotiates a secret agreement with the Venetians? He will not need to fear the French.”

Ferrante looked to the sea and shook his head. “The Signory of Venice will permit Il Moro to unite all Italy, but the Signory will never permit Il Moro to become Duke of Milan,” he said softly. “Il Moro’s only real ally is a chimera, the same imaginary beast you are bent on pursuing. His strength is not in what he is capable of doing--though he is capable indeed--but in what other men fear he might do.”

An enormous gust blustered against the window. One of the panes cracked with an audible chink; a moment later it exploded into the room, and the cold rain howled through the opening. Both men stumbled back in alarm. Then the wind subsided to an eerie whistle, and Ferrante began to chuckle. But Alfonso of Ar-agon, the conqueror of the Turks at Taranto, the man who had twice marched his armies to the gates of Rome, stared at the shattered glass on the floor, his burly face a mask of horror.