Duchess of Milan (41 page)

Pavia, 1 June 1493

“Gian, let the grooms brush Neptune.” Isabella sat up straight in the saddle, her shoulders heaving with each breath. Her face was livid with the late afternoon heat and the exertion of trying to keep up with her husband’s riding pace.

Gian Galeazzo Sforza, Duke of Milan, dismounted and surrendered the reins of his favorite white stallion to the waiting groom. He stood in the shaded brick arcade and squinted out at his wife. With sudden inspiration, he stepped back into the glaring sun and helped her from her horse.

“It’s so hot, Gian,” Isabella whispered in her husband’s ear. “The water in the pool will be so cool.”

The pool at the Pavia
castello
was indoors, in the northern wing, facing the ducal park. A circular basin of white marble, its centerpiece was a fluted marble column crowned with four naked
putti;
each of the chubby carved infants held a curling, vinelike marble spout that spurted a steady stream of water back into the pool. Maestro Leonardo da Vinci had installed hot-water spigots for winter bathing, but in the summer the thick marble kept the water comfortably cool.

Isabella took an armful of towels from the pages and ordered them to lock the doors. She pulled her dress off before the locks even clicked and slipped out of her chemise while Gian was still bending over to unstrap his engraved silver spurs, worn directly over his riding hose.

“Just unlace your hose, Gian. Leave your spurs on.”

Completely naked, her heavy breasts swaying, she came to him and led him down the marble steps that ringed the pool until he was knee-deep in the water.

“Doesn’t that feel good on your feet, Gian? Sit down and let me take your doublet off.”

Gian slowly settled, the water lapping into his crotch. Isabella dove off the steps, wriggled underwater for a moment, then rose like Venus coming out of the sea, hair slicked back and pale skin gleaming. She walked up the steps and straddled Gian’s legs, then squatted on his thighs. Her nipples were tightly erect. She unlaced Gian’s riding doublet and his shirt and peeled them off, then cupped a handful of water and trickled it onto his bare, hairless chest. Hands clasped behind his neck, she pulled closer, letting her nipples tease his skin. Her strong, elegant fingers played over his long blond hair and half-sneering, half-angelic face.

“Gesu,
you are beautiful, Gian.”

She pulled his hose down past his knees. He was already semi-erect, and when she stroked his scrotum he stiffened immediately and reached up for her. She congratulated herself on the success of her tactics: Gian relaxed from his ride, the element of surprise, from his horse to his wife so quickly that he hadn’t time to panic. But then Gian had never been healthier and happier--a consequence of her curtailing his drinking binges and sending his more dissolute companions back to Milan.

“Kiss me first, Gian. The way I like it.”

With dutiful tenderness he gave her slow caressing kisses. Isabella closed her eyes, temporarily masking their sharply erotic glitter, giving herself a look of girlish innocence.

She awakened again and guided him to her. Eyes wide, she lifted up, then relaxed and let him slide deeply inside her. His hands kneaded her breasts, and the initial startling pain subsided into thrilling stabs of pleasure. Should I tell him now? she asked herself, then decided that she felt too wonderful to threaten this moment.

His lithe body was supple and hard at once, a lover’s body, she thought. “Good, good, Gian,” she murmured. “You’ve gotten so good. So good to me.” The light glowed above her, and in her passion she wrestled him off the steps into the pool. She thought fleetingly of Pygmalion, enamored of the statue he had carved, and wondered if she was starting to love Gian, the husband she was creating.

Gian stood chest-deep in the water, and she wrapped her legs around him. She was weightless now, her only link to the earth the pressure of his lips and the touch of him inside. There is a baby in there, she silently told her husband. Your baby, Gian, I am certain of it. This time it will be your son.

CHAPTER 34

On the River Po, Near Pavia, 11 June 1493

The pilot stood next to Beatrice on the elevated stern of the galley. He pointed toward a wooden platform jutting into the river from the right bank. “Your Highness, that is the last ferry before Pavia. We will dock within an hour.”

Beatrice shaded her eyes. A group of five or six horsemen had gathered in a clearing on the tree-lined riverbank, waiting to board the small, flat barge that would carry them across the water. As the galley came within shouting distance, one of the horsemen rode out onto the ferry. Even from a distance he was dashing, a dark-haired, dark-skinned man in a trim white-and-gold riding doublet, mounted on a beautiful white horse. The whites were unreal, brighter than the sun.

When Beatrice realized that this fantasy rider was her husband, her first thought was: Something is wrong. The last she had heard, Eesh and Gian were still in residence at the
castello
in Pavia; she could well imagine that hostilities had broken out between Milan and Naples, and her husband had been forced to come out and warn her. . . .

But her husband waved with such enthusiasm that she had no further theories to explain his welcome. “Pilot!” Il Moro shouted.

“I have come to abduct the beautiful Duchess of Bari! I warn you to surrender her, or we shall direct fire at you from our cannon hidden in the trees!”

The pilot laughed and steered the galley to a docking beside the ferry. He signaled the two remaining galleys and five barges carrying the rest of Beatrice’s entourage and baggage to continue on to Pavia. Crewmen scrambled over the railing to tie up the boat.

“There is a certain little boy who is most anxious to see his mother!” Il Moro shouted up to Beatrice. She found it hard to believe that this was the same man who had dispatched her from the docks at Ferrara three weeks previously, much less the man who had greeted her with icy formality at the end of her cold, foreboding nuptial voyage two and a half years before. Perhaps he hadn’t changed so much, though his face was thinner than she had ever remembered it and so darkened from the sun that his teeth gleamed like ivory; he looked fit, rested, and ten years younger than his age. But his eyes had changed entirely. Rather than the blank, obsidian stare she had become accustomed to, those eyes now had soft, almost velvet texture, a curiously erotic depth.

Il Moro shouted to his company of guards, and one of them led onto the ferry a big gray Barbary stallion, Beatrice’s favorite horse from the Pavia stables. “You can imagine how my wife suffered in Venice, where the only horses are made of bronze, and to be considered a
cognoscente
of the equestrian arts one must simply know which end of the horse to face when one sits in the saddle,” Il Moro announced to Beatrice’s ladies-in-waiting, who crowded the railing. “So I have brought my wife the means to recover her skill at riding.”

“Her Highness has not lost her skill at
scartino,”
called out one of Beatrice’s ladies. “On this journey she has won a thousand ducats going and now another thousand coming back! Anyone foolish enough to play cards with her will soon learn that Her Highness is Fortune’s favorite.”

Beatrice went into her cabin to find her riding gloves. And to remove Eesh’s letter from her document case; after the unspeakable oath she had sworn to deliver it, she did not want to postpone a moment longer. When she emerged, Il Moro helped her over the railing, lifting her in a grand sweeping gesture. He kissed her on the lips, as he often did for public display, but this kiss was strangely private, with a sparking contact that unsettled her stomach. Was it possible he already knew about the Signory’s decision? Had Ser Privolo also told Count Tuttavilla of the conditions under which Il Moro would be permitted to become Duke of Milan?

“We shall beat you to the
castello
by an hour!” Il Moro shouted to the pilot after he and Beatrice had mounted their horses. They rode off along the graded path beside the river. The guards followed behind, discreetly out of hearing.

After they had gone a short distance, Beatrice said, “I have a letter I promised to deliver to you. I presume it was stolen from a courier.” She wondered what had happened to the young man with whom she had now kept faith.

She watched his face as he read. The corners of his mouth turned down slightly, as if he were mockingly reciting Isabella’s rhetoric to himself. Finally he looked up, his expression neutral. “I hope you realize now that your cousin is hardly worthy of the loyalty you have shown her.”

“Is she here?” Beatrice asked, not certain which answer she hoped to hear.

“No. Your cousin and Gian left Pavia two days before I arrived. She is determined to turn Gian against me, which is sad, because I am truly very fond of him. Fortunately we don’t need to worry about Isabella’s father”--he slapped the letter with his hand--”bringing his army to her assistance as long as your grandfather is alive. That I can assure you. And the news we have from Germany is very good. We can expect within a fortnight an official announcement of the betrothal of Bianca Maria and the Archduke Maximilian.” He smiled, looking boyishly glamorous. “I don’t believe we will hear the sound of guns in Italy this summer.”

She marveled at his casual self-assurance; the last time she had seen him, the
oltramontani
barbarians had virtually been at the gates. “You’re not alarmed at the refusal of the Signory to commit to our mutual defense?”

“Not when I will soon have the next German Emperor in my employ. I must tell you, Beatrice, that I would have been more concerned had the Signory blithely made a public pledge to defend us, a pledge they had no intention of fulfilling. That they vacillated shows that they take seriously their alliance with us. I am very proud of how well you did with them. You were direct, as I knew you would be. If I had given the task to Tuttavilla, he would still be phrasing the question. You immediately obtained an answer.” He paused and dropped his gaze from her eyes to her torso, almost as if staring at her breasts. “I understand from Count Tuttavilla that you also arranged a private meeting with the Doge. Why?”

He doesn’t know, she told herself. His tone was too genuinely suspicious. It delighted her that he seemed to wonder if he could entirely trust her. “I believed that the Doge was more sympathetic to our interests than was the majority in the Signory. I hoped that even if the Doge would not differ with his colleagues, the meeting itself might help divide the Signory.”

“Just so.” He quickly looked into her eyes again, sounding relieved by her explanation. “Beatrice, you are becoming a very clever diplomat. But then I always suspected that you had a very special gift.” His smile was too glib, as if
he
was really the clever one and had engineered her entire dialogue with the Venetians. And yet there was something else to it, perhaps the sensual gleam of his teeth against his dark lips, that stimulated a distinct fluttering in her breast. For a moment she imagined him an ardent suitor from one of her girlhood romances, preparing to declare his love. Then she realized that in Venice even her fantasies had changed, that now she had more substantial dreams to chase, more complicated games to play. All her life she had waited for love. Now she would pursue her desire.

They rode on, splashed with the dappled light that filtered through the shade trees. Dragonflies hovered and darted in the sultry air. You really don’t know, Beatrice inwardly told her husband. You think you are playing me to your own end, when I hold in my breast the secret that can raise you up or cast you down. You think you are going to seduce me, and you do not realize that I have already seduced you.

“This is the first volume of the works of Pliny, which Messer Minuziano intends to print in their entirety. He has also promised me Cicero and Tacitus.” Il Moro offered the book, bound in red morocco leather polished to a sheen, to Count Girolamo da Tuttavilla.

Tuttavilla reverently fingered the pages of immaculate new vellum, the printed text so crisp and dark that it seemed engraved. Il Moro watched him, an expression of satisfaction working at the corners of his mouth. “I believe our presses are the equal of any in Europe,” Il Moro said. “Were you aware that the grammar of Lascari my brother commissioned the year he died was the first book printed in Italy?”

Tuttavilla looked up, jarred from his reverie. “Your brother was a complicated man, wasn’t he? What you said some months ago about
chiaroscuro,
the contrast between light and shadow, certainly applies to him.”

Il Moro’s relaxed mouth tightened; there was a slight tremor of his lower lip. “Yes.” He paused for a moment. “Why do you suppose my wife arranged a private meeting with the Doge, without informing anyone in the ambassadorial mission?”

Tuttavilla made a small shrugging hand gesture. “My own opinion is that she is a very competitive young woman who felt that the Signory had gotten the better of her in their interview, and she hoped, in a manner of speaking, to swing her
palla
bat at another ball.”

“She insists that after having determined that the Signory was opposed to a proclamation of mutual defense, she hoped that an unannounced meeting with the Doge might serve to foster suspicion among the Signory as to the firmness of their own policy.”

Tuttavilla nodded. “So she told me. And indeed she may have been correct. In my informal conversations with members of the Signory during our farewell
festa,
I perceived a certain softening of their position.”

“So you believe that Beatrice’s interview with the Doge advanced the interests of our state.”

“Indeed yes. As I wrote you, she conducted herself splendidly throughout our mission. She is a marvelous speaker, with a keen wit and a natural charm that is most compelling. There was not a Venetian I spoke to who failed to mention with all sincerity her delightful nature,” Tuttavilla offered. “Though we have ample enough evidence of Her Highness’s charms without requiring the Venetians to validate them.”