Duchess of Milan (23 page)

Blinking as she emerged into intense sunlight, she saw the landmark she had been told to look for: a stucco niche, topped with a little triangular pediment, that had apparently once held a relief sculpture of the Virgin; all that was left was the head of the small figure. Farther down the street were the paired, nail-studded wooden gates of a stable. Immediately across from the stable was the doorway, just as it had been described, a pointed brick arch framed with a single band of terra-cotta rosettes.

The large wooden door had a smaller inset but no viewing grate. Beatrice pounded and waited. Finally she heard a woman’s voice. “What do you want?”

“I want to see the Mother.”

No response. Beatrice waited, panic beginning to drum in her ears, until the smaller door opened. She hesitated before stepping inside.

The room was cool, musty smelling, so dark that she could detect nothing except another door just to her right.

“What do you want?” Though also disembodied, this voice was different from the first, so ancient and frail that it seemed like a spirit. “What do you want?”

Something moved on the wall to the left. Beatrice looked closer. A little wooden panel had been opened a crack, and the voice was seeping out from it.

“What do you want?”

“I want to see the Mother.”

The panel revolved, becoming the back of a wooden turntable. Beatrice hadn’t been able to obtain gold coins without arousing suspicion--all of her purchases were made with bills of credit-- so she had brought some small pieces of jewelry. She placed the cloisonne earrings on the wooden ledge, and the turntable revolved back into the wall.

The door to her right opened. Light flooded in, revealing the barren, plastered antechamber. Beatrice entered the hall beyond. An incandescently verdant courtyard was visible through a window to the left; a sister in a long gray habit tended the flower beds. Ahead was the convent chapel. The open door allowed a glimpse of gold altar furnishings, a freshly varnished painting, and sprays of intensely colorful flowers.

Just past the window a dimly lit hallway beckoned. Beatrice walked by rows of nuns’ cells, each with a single iron-grated window. At the end of the hall a woman waited. She was young and wore nothing except a silk chemise unlaced almost to her navel; her nipples pressed against the sheer fabric. Her lovely white skin and deeply colored, full lips, reminded Beatrice of a Botticelli Madonna.

The woman led Beatrice down another row of cells, but these smelled of perfume, and the iron grates were covered with damask curtains. A woman’s laughter came from behind one of the doors. Another door opened, and a naked woman, fleshy breasts swaying, padded into the hallway and nonchalantly walked past; a man called to her from within the room, asking for wine. Beatrice was mildly alarmed at the realization that she was actually in a brothel, but the location of the business was unremarkable to her. Convents were dumping grounds for surplus daughters whose fathers were unwilling or unable to provide their dowries, and more than a few of the sisters in any convent would have carnal urges rather than the chaste devotion required of a bride of Christ. Some convents operated virtually openly as brothels. More common was a thriving side business such as this, which afforded all the sisters a more comfortable existence.

The woman in the chemise stopped and unlocked a door at the end of the long cloister. She gestured for Beatrice to go in. The room was lit by a sweet-smelling oil lamp suspended from a wall bracket. Sprays of flowers in porcelain vases had been set on the floor beneath a framed icon of the Holy Virgin, an ancient, Greek-style painting with a flat gold background. The only furnishing was a single stool placed beneath a wooden grate set into the opposite wall. The woman gestured for Beatrice to sit, then left the room and closed the door.

Someone coughed from behind the grate.
“I fiori,”
intoned a strident voice. For a moment Beatrice was startled into thinking that Polissena was sitting behind the wall. “The flowers,” the voice repeated.

Beatrice’s mouth was leathery with fear. “They are beautiful,” she said, her voice trembling.

“I am the Mother Abbess. What do you want?”

“I want to do something about a baby.” A long while passed with no response. Beatrice reflexively pressed her hands to her belly. “I want to know how to get rid of a baby.”

“Are you married?”

“Yes,” Beatrice whispered.

“Then have the baby. Tell your husband it is his.”

“No.”

“Then go away and have the baby. Pay a family to take it. If it’s a pretty baby someone might pay you.”

“I cannot have this baby.”

Another lengthy pause followed. “It’s very dangerous. For every woman who expels her baby and lives, two die. And even if you live, you may become so ill that you will never leave your bed again. Do you understand that?” The old woman’s voice seemed to echo from a cavern.

Beatrice hesitated. “Yes.”

“We use rue and savin. They’ve been used since the time of Hippocrates and Pliny the Elder,” the Mother Abbess said. “We grow them in our courtyard. That is so we know exactly how strong they are. But if the dose isn’t sufficient, it merely weakens the woman; the baby gets bigger while she rests to try again, and so the next dose usually kills her before she can expel the baby. Your best chance is to take a strong dose the first time.”

Silence. Beatrice listened to her thudding heart and heard a faint whispering from behind the grate. Wild thoughts swirled through her head; she saw Bianca kneeling beside her candle-framed bier.

Beatrice almost leapt off the stool in alarm when the door opened and the woman in the chemise entered. She handed Beatrice a small blue phial like those used for perfume.

The voice from behind the grate gave Beatrice another start. “Empty the entire phial into one cup of wine and take it immediately. The wine will keep you from vomiting it up. You will vomit later, of course, but by then the agent will already be at work.”

Silence. The phial in Beatrice’s hand was as cold as frozen iron, as heavy as an anvil. Her stomach roiled.

The Mother Abbess’s voice was a dreary exhalation, a door closing, sealing all that was living behind. “May our sweet Lord forgive you and have mercy on your soul.”

The woman in the chemise escorted Beatrice as far as the chapel but left her at the doorway, as if she was expected to pray. Beatrice wandered in, entranced by the prismatic light streaming through the stained-glass windows. The large three-panel altarpiece had been opened to reveal a nativity scene painted in the meticulously realistic modern style. Flowers heaped the altar, the scent suddenly fragrant and delicious.

Newly cut marble slabs patchworked the floor; the neatly incised inscriptions revealed that most of the bodies interred beneath them had been sisters of the convent. Beatrice wandered raptly over the crypts, a curious order restored to her universe. More than the existence of God, she believed in God’s system of rewards and punishment, that vast, multilayered, spherical harmonium described in such vivid detail by Dante. As she watched the dazzling lights play over the names of the dead, she heard the music of those vast spheres, an immense cathedral organ playing notes of pure golden ether. She was not a murderer. If the soul of the monster had not been formed, she had no more sinned than had a Neapolitan fishseller displaying his basket of dead octopuses.

(She saw Giovanna’s dead baby again. . . .) She did not wish to die, so she didn’t see how she could be condemned to the Wood of Suicides, her body transformed into a tree endlessly ripped by screaming harpies. And if she did not destroy her husband’s evil spawn, she could well be accused of treachery to her kin and spend eternity in the black, frozen lake of Cocytus, in the ninth and last circle of Hell. Perhaps for her far lesser betrayal she would be condemned to wait for centuries beneath the barren cliffs of antepurgatory. But someday, on some bitter, lonely dawn, she would be permitted to begin her climb to the highest sphere.

Beatrice knelt on the hard, cool floor and gratefully clasped her hands. Now she needed only a single, final absolution. No, not an absolution, merely a witness to her tragedy and ultimate triumph. And two days hence, that witness was expected to arrive.

“Father,” she murmured, staring up into an ineffable light. But it was not the Lord of Paradise whom she addressed. “Father will be here on Thursday,” she whispered to herself.

CHAPTER 19

Vigevano, 5 August 1492

The Marquesa encouraged the skirt of her
camora
to lift in the powerful easterly gust. “This is one way of keeping cool,” she told Beatrice. “As we are so high, I shouldn’t think anyone can see up my dress. Do you remember the time we apprehended Diodato wandering beneath the grandstand at the joust, enjoying the view?”

Beatrice and the Marquesa stood on the observation platform just beneath the brass cupola of Maestro Bramante’s tower, which commanded an unobstructed panorama of the city of Vigevano and the surrounding plains. The center of the city, which during medieval times had deteriorated from Roman order to a haphazard cluster of rusty-red Romanesque dwellings, had been completely razed and reconstructed in the preceding few years. Bramante’s tower crowned a polygonal
castello,
also of his design, itself as large as many towns. The enormous courtyard of the
castello
already featured a neatly groomed labyrinth; a classically styled wooden pavilion, designed by Leonardo da Vinci, had been built at the center of the elaborate maze of hedges, flower beds, and gravel paths. But the central glory of the city was Bramante’s stately re-creation of the old Roman Forum. The long rectangular piazza was framed with a three-story arcade incorporating Bramante’s usual repertoire of elegantly simple classical motifs: rounded arches, columns with Ionic capitals, rows of oculi.

Il Moro’s new order broke down at the outskirts of the city, where the red tile roofs were strewn in medieval disarray. But past the city walls, the impeccable geometry resumed. The system of canals and irrigation conduits was a silver grid extending for dozens of miles in every direction; scores of farm complexes and village church spires dotted the countryside like pieces on a vast verdant chessboard. To the south and east, the neat procession of croplands faded into a hazy distance. To the north and west, the great wall of the Alps established the horizon. The snow-capped rim glowed softly pink in the morning sun.

Beatrice felt the wind like a great suction, carrying her out over the landscape. But all she could see from her lofty perspective was the blue phial in the chest at the foot of her bed, waiting for her, an inevitable fate. For two days she had soared and plunged, from grandiose visions of martyrdom to intense, strangling fear. She did not question that she would do it, however. It would have to be at night, when she could be certain that everyone would be present in the
castello.
Then actually taking the fateful draught would be as simple as leaping from this tower, to fly in the wind.

“Beatrice! You must tell me you can see them!” The Marquesa pointed to the south, where the main road from Pavia paralleled a canal. “There they are! I’m absolutely certain it’s them!” Pinpoints of sunlight glimmered on distant armor, winking through the faint cloud of dust stirred by the horses. “Beatrice, it
is
Father! He has brought
everyone!
Now, we must go down and have our horses saddled and ride out to meet them. No. What we will do is get our horses and wait for them in the Forum in a very stately fashion, as if we are greeting Caesar and his legions on their return from Gaul. No. I am too impatient to wait. ...”

Accompanied by a half-dozen guards, the Marquesa and Beatrice intercepted their father’s escort within sight of the city gates. Duke Ercole d’Este, mounted on a white stallion with gold-embossed leather harness, rode at the head of his contingent of armored guards, who in turn preceded the “everyone” to whom the Marquesa had referred, a contingent of at least two score actors, poets, singers, and musicians wearing a variety of colorful tunics and an eccentric collection of often-beplumed caps. Hundreds of grooms, pages, and dog handlers, proceeding among a swarm of greyhounds on leash, brought up the rear.

Beatrice believed that no man had ever looked more handsome on a horse than her father. Duke Ercole’s powerful chest and shoulders stretched taut a tunic of pale yellow brocade embroidered with gold thread; his muscular legs were sheathed in maroon hose. The sheer planes of his face had a golden summer sheen, highlighted by the long silver hair flowing from beneath a velvet beret. His posture was so erect he seemed to be standing in his stirrups rather than sitting in the saddle.

As a little girl, Beatrice had never even had a notion of what a father actually looked like. Her porcine, bejowled grandfather Ferrante had doted on her in his jovial, casual fashion, as if to hear her laugh was his favorite entertainment, but he had evoked no more awe in her than the court buffoons like Diodato. And menacing, diabolical Uncle Alfonso had been the opposite; she could not remember him ever speaking to her directly, and had he, she probably would have screamed in terror and run off. Then she had returned home to discover this tall, forbidding, granite-faced stranger, so rarely glimpsed because he attended interminable Masses, both in the morning and at Vespers, day in and day out; when he wasn’t in church, Ercole was organizing passion plays or collecting food for the poor or leading white-robed pilgrims through the streets. Beatrice had quickly learned that she could go to her window overlooking the courtyard and watch her father ride out to Mass every morning, his fine silver hair streaming from his velvet cap like moonlight frozen in the dawn. The ritual of watching him had become her own daily devotion. Women, she had been taught in Naples (though she would eventually be told differently by her Ferrarese sister), were the sore-kneed worshipers at the altar of love, and men merely the flat, gilded altarpiece images to whom they prayed, no more real or substantial than the cut-out, gold-silhouetted figures in an old-fashioned painting. So on those first moon-washed mornings it had been enough for her that Duke Ercole, straight in his saddle, with his singers riding behind him on their mules like the twelve apostles, had simply looked like a father.