Duchess of Milan (4 page)

Eleonora, seated in a thick-ribbed, Venetian-style folding chair, continued to arrange colored glass jars of cosmetics on the lid of a wooden storage chest. She entirely ignored her daughter's abrupt suggestion.

The Marquesa smiled tartly and put her hands on her hips, in the manner of her mother. “Mama, doesn't it concern you that Il Moro seems curiously reluctant to sleep with Beatrice?”

Eleonora still didn't look up. Her voice had a tremolo of contrivance. “Beatrice's husband shows an admirable control over his passions. I cannot tell you how many grooms I have seen fall seriously ill in the midst of their wedding
feste
because they could not restrain their lust. The Duke of Milan was in peril of his life.”

“Oh, Mama, everyone in Italy knows that it took the Duke of Milan the better part of a year to consummate the marriage. That is the kind of wedding
festa
certain to make the bride ill.”

“Il Moro has assured me that he will attend to Beatrice. His astrologer is preparing a schedule.”

“Per mia fe,
Mama. I have never personally known a woman to have success with that method. As long as Il Moro continues to sleep with his mistress”--Eleonora's head involuntarily snapped up--”his astrologer is more likely to become pregnant than is Beatrice.”

Eleonora's ringing soprano lowered at least an octave. “You are presuming something that simply is not true.”

“Oh, Mama, you haven't lied to me successfully since I was eight, when you briefly convinced me that it was impossible for Signorina Anabella to be with child because she wasn't married and that she was going to the convent because she wanted Jesus to be her husband.”

Eleonora picked up a silver-framed mirror and self-consciously tilted her head as if appraising her image. She glared at something else and said nothing.

“Mama. You can practically smell her perfume in the halls. I believe she even has a suite of apartments in this Castello. Those rooms that were blocked by scaffolding, which our host so graciously regretted he could not show us because they are under renovation: when we passed by those rooms I thought I observed you incline your head slightly to the right. It is a tic you have whenever you are anxious about something.”

The room became as still as a tomb. The faint screech of a swift could be heard as it flitted past the big arched window overlooking the steel-blue moat. Eleonora examined the engraved frame of her mirror. Finally, still watching her fingers trace over the engraving, she said, “I don't believe that your sister is likely to be as observant. And I am certain I can depend on you to understand the necessity for discretion in this matter.”

“You can depend on me for my discretion, but I don't believe you can depend on Beatrice to be so easily duped. You and Father have never realized how truly clever she is. I don't know if Maestro Guarino ever told you this, he was so fond of me--that reminds me, I must write him--but, Mama, there were days in our Latin tutorials when Beatrice recited better than I did.” The Marquesa offered this information as gravely as if she had just revealed Beatrice's central role in the creation of the universe. “She will find out, and she will feel betrayed. You know how loyal she is, and nothing hurts her worse than betrayal.”

“No. She is too preoccupied at the moment to go snooping for a mistress whose existence her husband and I have been very careful to conceal from her. No. Not now. She will find out later, of course, and there will be tears and recriminations. But they will pass. It will all pass. But if we tell her now, while we are still here, she will feel she has our strength on her side, and she will force the issue. And I cannot allow that to happen.” Eleonora looked up again, toward something distant, visible only to her.

The Marquesa. shook her head slightly, a gesture for her own benefit, not her mother's. “Mama, I am going to help Beatrice unpack her chests. You have my word that I won't tell her anything, even though she is going to hate me as much as she will you and Father when she finds out. You are wrong, Mama.”

After the Marquesa had swished out of the room, Eleonora held the mirror before her face. The silvered image that stared back at her was one of heavy, almost vitreous white jowls framed by graying dark hair. The vivid sea-green irises were alien to her, someone else's eyes. She could not find her guilt in them.

Then, in a terrible instant, the girl behind those eyes materialized and mocked her. Eleonora could hear that girl laugh derisively, telling Cardinal Riario that she had wearied of his feast in her honor, and watch every man at the gold-and-silver-strewn banquet table strain to hear her childish complaints as if they had received miraculous clues to her ineffable soul. She contemptuously snorted back at the girl, who'd had no soul then, only a girl's dreams. Eleonora was now thirty-six; when she had married Duke Ercole d'Este, eighteen years previously, she had been the most famous beauty of her generation. Her nuptial journey from Naples to Ferrara had become virtually a religious event; in every town and village along the route manic throngs had come out to gawk at her as if she were an incarnation of the Virgin Mary. But this virgin had required the constitution of an ox to present Duke Ercole with six children in the first six years of her marriage, and she had been rewarded with a suitably bovine physique. Of her beauty only the luminous green irises remained, eyes she could no longer confront. Not because there was no soul behind them but because they still harbored a dream.

Light scampered in the ribbed ceiling vaults: cherry amber light from the massive stone fireplace, syrupy golden light from rows of candles arrayed along a carved wooden chest placed against the wall, illuminating a gilt-framed portrait, the ghost of this room --Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the previous Duke of Milan, dead to assassins' knives for fifteen years. Isabella was drawn as always, and always against her will, by the face of the father-in-law she had never known. In many ways Galeazzo Maria had looked so much like his son and heir, Gian Galeazzo. The thick neck and proud square jaw, the pretty, sensitive lips, the narrow shoulders and the almost effeminate pose of his gloved hand. But the nose and eyes were not Gian's, were not even human. The late Duke had been posed in profile, looking toward the picture frame, but nevertheless his small dark eyes seemed about to pivot and attack.

The nose was enormous, hawklike, a cruel beak modeled in mortal clay by a sculptor of infinite vision and insight, to warn mere men that the mind of a demon lived behind that high, effete forehead. But when that face had lived, by the time most men saw its terrible truth they were already lost.

“Who have you been with?”

The French-accented voice came screeching from the shadows. “And don't tell me you haven't,
puttana.
When you are this late it means one thing to me: You have stopped for the first greasy pair of hands that want to wander up your skirts. It is a scandal to everyone how you go about whither you will without a single lady-in-waiting to attend you. It sickens me to think of how many have touched you.”

Isabella peered through the black gauze bed curtains and located the pale round face of Bona of Savoy, Duchess Mother of Milan; even through the shrouds, her mother-in-law's bulging eyes leered with owlish ferocity. “I am not late, Duchess Mother,” Isabella said, her voice artificially high and taut. “Messer Ambrogio has added an ingredient to your draught that he says will ease the swelling in your feet.”

“Poison!” Duchess Bona barked, but with a swift clawing motion she snatched the goblet and took the draught in three audible gulps. “I wouldn't need the attentions of Il Moro's sorcerer if I hadn't had to stand at the gate of the Castello all morning waiting on that Este brat. They took their time on the Via degli Armorai, to wallow in the treason of those filthy swine. I heard them! I heard them!” Duchess Bona snorted vilely. “She is short and will be as fat as her mother before she is your age. I do not believe that Il Moro even slept with her in Pavia.” Bona's head swiveled to confront her daughter-in-law. “Any more than I believe that my baby Gian ever soiled himself in you. Not that that will stop her any more than it did you. You were both raised by the same
impicatti
in Naples and gave up your virtue to the same lechery, as even the devil is ashamed to witness. She'll steal your lovers. I can see in her eyes she is more clever than you. I told everyone the first day Satan sent you to us that you had no more sense than a donkey with a thistle under its tail.”

“It is truly marvelous, Duchess Mother, how generous you are,” Isabella said. “Whatever qualities you possess, you are willing to credit to others in even greater abundance. You are the most infamous slut I have ever known, and yet you think that every other woman, even if she is an untouched maiden, has had more lovers than a Roman streetwalker. You are the most foolish woman I have ever known, and yet there is no one whom you do not presume the greater fool and will proceed to lecture as if you were a doctor at the University of Pavia. You are a very astonishing creature, Duchess Mother.”

As if she regarded Isabella's carefully cadenced assault as a subtle form of flattery, Bona displayed a row of ragged black teeth, the decayed corpse of the artificially winsome smile she had favored her suitors with three decades previously. “Yes, you will soon come whining to me about that Este brat, with never the thanks that I warned you.”

“And you, who have done nothing to defend the rights of your son's wife against Il Moro's mistress--a scrawny whore who believes in her diseased mind that her pimp lover is already Duke of Milan and she his duchess--will be even less effective against Il Moro's wife.”

“As if God had given me the time to separate you spitting bitches when every day I must prevent Il Moro from taking everything that belongs to Gian. Better that the Gallerani whore were to send you and the Este brat home to the pit that spawned you both. Her child could never challenge Gian.”

“Challenge Gian? Challenge Gian? You disgusting old slut.” Isabella's voice rose to an incredulous pitch. “Gian has already been defeated. It is my baby whom Il Moro now must challenge, and Il Moro must have his own son to do that, he must be able to offer Milan the promise of his own succession before the people will allow him to depose Gian and declare himself their Duke. And I will never give up, the way you did with Gian. I will defeat Il Moro's son no matter which of the two bitches--his wife or his whore--presents him with an heir.”

“Your devil-sent spawn has no more right to be Duke of Milan than the issue of a whore and a horse-comber. Which no doubt he is.”

Isabella stared down at her mother-in-law. When she spoke her tone was measured, almost deliberately dull. “You don't think we would have something to fear if Cecilia Gallerani were to give birth to a male child, Duchess Mother? Particularly since Il Moro does not seem inclined to spend much time sowing his new bride's field.”

“Birdbrain. I know the people of Milan like you never could. I was their Duchess. A real duchess. The people of Milan would never accept a bastard as their duke's heir.” Bona's black teeth emerged again. “If he intended to make the Gallerani whore's bastard his heir, why did he need the Este brat?”

“Perhaps, Duchess Mother, Il Moro's marriage had something to do with the Duke of Ferrara's threats to turn Venice against Il Moro, now that the Duke of Ferrara's son-in-law is Captain General of the Venetian armies. And Il Moro finally agreed to honor the marriage contract in early August, which was most likely before his whore conceived, so he most certainly did not know about her pregnancy then. And even now, how can he be certain the child will be a son? Perhaps, Duchess Mother, Il Moro is like a man who enters two horses in
upalio
race. He doubles his odds. Then he will place the colors of his house on whichever mare crosses the finish first.”

“Idiot. He has already tried to marry the Gallerani whore once before. Everyone was against it.”

Isabella understood that by “everyone” her mother-in-law meant the leading Milanese nobles, who had the most to lose in the event of political instability. “And every week Il Moro coaxes one of them into his hand. You see how he has just given Count Borromeo a concession to manufacture silk in Mortara? A day will come when no one will care whether Il Moro's selection of a bride is agreeable to the Duke of Ferrara. And don't for a moment believe that the Pope would not annul Il Moro's marriage. For a proper price, His Holiness would sell Il Moro the virtue of Christ's own Mother. And what if Beatrice d'Este cannot conceive, Duchess Mother? You know that her sister has been married for a year, and she told me today that she still does not have any signs of a child.”

Bona snorted. “The Duchess of Ferrara had a squalling brat every time her husband pinched her cheek. That is why she looks like a cow. Hah! The ones everybody calls
bellissima
as girls are the ones who most quickly become
grossa
as women.” Bona's eyes contracted like two sphincters. “You had better pray to your devil that the Gallerani whore has a son and that Il Moro continues to believe she is his duchess and her bastard his heir. Because if Beatrice d'Este has a son, only my dear nephew the King of France will be able to save us.”

“If your nephew crosses the Alps with his army,” Isabella said wearily, as if repeating a self-evident proposition, “it will not only mean the end of Il Moro's obscene ambitions. It will be the end of Italy.”

Bona grinned like a madwoman.

“So you are saying that the best thing for us to do would be to support Cecilia Gallerani against Beatrice d'Este?” Isabella asked, her tone conciliatory.

“Now you have found the speck of sense in your empty head. Better to have two hens fighting over the same cock. If you defeat Cecilia Gallerani, the Este brat will be the next Duchess of Milan.”

“As usual you have given me a great deal to think about, Duchess Mother.” Isabella nodded respectfully. “I am going to retire and consider what you have told me. Sleep well, Duchess Mother.” Isabella collected the goblet, dropped the dark bed curtain like a shadow between herself and her mother-in-law, and turned to leave. But as she passed the portrait of the murdered Duke, she paused and met his eyes.