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Authors: Michael Ennis

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CHAPTER 37

 

 

Naples, 2 February 1494

The high altar of the church of San Domenico Maggiore was a dense constellation of candles. The strong light blanched the faces of the gray and black-clad mourners, making the living look like corpses. But the puffy face visible on the bier at the foot of the altar had a curiously lifelike, rosy tint, accented by the black crepe draped over both the body and the catafalque. The mourners closest to the altar correctly assumed that the corpse was in fact a wax effigy and that the mortal remains of His Majesty King Ferrante of Naples had already been interred. But these mourners were too close to the new power in Naples to allow their blank, light-washed faces even the merest hint of speculation or suspicion as to why the old King had been so hastily put to rest.

The Requiem Mass droned on. The principal mourner, the soon-to-be-crowned King Alfonso II of Naples, frequently swiveled his burly head to receive whispered messages from a relay of several aides; the messengers came and went through a shadowed aisle chapel closed for new construction. Finally Alfonso himself strode heavily off into the aisle chapel. Two men-at-arms in silvery steel breastplates escorted him to a small room adjacent to the chapel, used by the painters to store their pigments, plaster, and tools.

A tall, athletic-looking man, perhaps in his mid-thirties, stood illuminated by a single lamp. Dressed in expensive riding clothes, he had a youthful face with experienced, self-confident eyes. He fluidly removed his velvet hat, revealing a fashionable blond coif.

Alfonso waved the guards out. When the door had been closed behind him he stared at the man for a moment. “The man who murdered my father,” he said, his deep, mysterious whisper penetrating the hollow moan of the Requiem choir.

The man’s eyes lost their glitter.

Alfonso took a step forward. His massive face, framed by a black cowl, seemed disembodied, a creature powerful enough to intimidate this man without the assistance of limbs. “Do you realize how much discoloration there was? We had to bury him within hours.”

Only the distant lament of the priests occupied the silence that followed. There was no trace of confidence in the man’s voice when he finally spoke. “I ... Your Highness . . . Your Highness will remember that I ... When a predictable result is desired, there can be that effect.”

“You are about to suffer an effect,” Alfonso whispered. “Given that there already is suspicion about my father’s illness, I can hardly allow you to . . .” Alfonso paused and raised his open hands like a saint delivering a benediction. “To remain in Naples.”

The man appeared to age ten years in an instant, his face suddenly shadowed and drawn with fear.

“However, you could be useful to me elsewhere.”

The man nodded warily.

Alfonso’s congenitally squinty eyes narrowed to glinting slits. “Milan,” he whispered at the threshold of hearing. “Now I need you to go to Milan.”

 

Vigevano, 10 February 1494

The big stone fireplace had been heaped with enough logs to last all evening, and the heat and glare radiated across the room. Little Ercole drooled open-mouthed at the spectacle for a moment and then tried to run toward the fireplace. Beatrice caught him up and pulled him into her lap so that he faced her. He flipped his head back to watch the fire.

She tried to find her grandfather in her son’s face and realized that she couldn’t really remember Ferrante, at least when she tried. It was more surprising to her to realize that she hadn’t seen her grandfather for eight years than to realize that he was dead. He had last written her when Ercole was born: nothing that had seemed personal at all, merely a diplomatic obligation. Yet there had been a time when he was all she had of a father. Suddenly the image of him popped into her mind’s eye, laughing, his cheeks puffed out and his eyes squinted, a big, sumptuously dressed clown. He’d wander from place to place at the dinner table, always plucking morsels from his guests’ plates, often eating his entire meal that way. To a little girl that had seemed so funny. Now she could see the sinister undertone, that Ferrante’s strange eating habits had been intended to convey the warning that whatever he gave he could just as easily and capriciously take away. And the things she had heard about him since coming to Milan: even if nine of ten were lies, it made her shudder to think that she had lived in the house of Aragon.

But the most terrible thing her grandfather had done was simply to die, to leave the void only his son could fill. She could always see Alfonso, a memory made indelible by fright, his angry red eyes seemingly oozing out through his slitted lids. Now the secret key she had obtained in Venice was like a hot blade in her breast. She would have to tell her husband that the Signory had given him a free hand if Alfonso should become King of Naples. And yet she knew that when she did, the wheel would spin again, and when it finally stopped, her husband might no longer be with her. She realized that she would rather lie to him than lose him.

Ercole popped up on her knee, babbled some request, and set his chin. That was it, the upward cant of his dumpling chin, just like Ferrante. That was her grandfather’s legacy to her son. They were blood, all of them. They would settle among themselves,-as a family. She would talk to Eesh when the opportunity presented itself. There was time. Alfonso couldn’t mount a military campaign in winter anyway.

An image came to her of her mother, as clearly as if she were still alive, and something lifted from Beatrice’s heart, the weight of her anger. She could understand the resentment that had inflamed her grief, that Mama had died before offering some final, incontestable evidence that she had loved her. But Mama hadn’t died simply to spite her, to abandon her again; Beatrice knew that. Of course she could never forgive Mama for leaving her in Naples, but it was possible to despise that Mama while still loving the Mama who had tried to make up for it, who had in her clumsy, overbearing fashion tried to love her. That Mama she would always love. And now she could finally forgive herself for loving her.

Mama, and now her grandfather, so quickly gone, vanished into elusive memory. She remembered a line from Petrarch’s sonnets: “Vicious Death, how quick you were to fling / Into gray dust the fruit of long age.” Fortune is swift enough, Beatrice told herself; I do not need to hasten her step.

Ercole grabbed her fur collar and pulled himself up so that he could gaze right at her. For the last few months she had observed that her son had begun to look less like her sister and more like her, but now she imagined that she saw the living image of herself as an infant, as if she were peering into some magic mirror where her mother still held her in her arms, before the trip to Naples, before everything changed.

Little Ercole stood in her lap, his head cocked with curiosity, wondering why his mother had suddenly started to cry.

 

Extract of a dispatch of Count Carlo Belgioioso, Milanese ambassador to France, to Lodovico Sforza, “Il Moro,” Duke of Bari and regent for the Duke of Milan. Amboise, 22 February 1494

. . . the King and his Council are more divided than ever upon the issue of the Italian adventure. With each day that passes, His Most Christian Majesty becomes more vehement and resolute in his determination to proceed. He has expelled the Neapolitan ambassadors, and I was informed yesterday that in several weeks the court will be transferred to Lyons so as to be in closer proximity to the mountain passes. In addition I have learned that the King intends to send to Asti a small advance guard commanded by Bernard Stuart d’Aubigny as soon as weather permits. The King has additionally ordered Briconnet to prepare a schedule of taxes and sundry levies to exact the expenses of the campaign from his people. Those among the King’s Council who oppose the King’s enterprise (and it is my observation that this faction grows daily) expect that the refusal of the towns and municipalities to yield these revenues will present an insurmountable obstacle to the said enterprise, a fiscal mountain that no amount of determination on the King’s part can enable him to climb. The King will then realize that only Your Highness is capable of financing his campaign, and he will renew his entreaties. . . . When I spoke with the King yesterday he was sorely disappointed that Your Highness has again refused to dispatch Messer Galeazzo di Sanseverino to counsel with him concerning his invasion plans, saying to me, “Truly! Is not Alfonso the sworn enemy of Il Moro? Why then will Il Moro not join with me against our common foe?” Thus, once again he requested me to petition Your Highness for the dispatch of Messer Galeazz to France, saying, “Seigneur Galeazzo is the foremost paladin of Christendom. If he were to ride with us, it should signify to all the world that our Christian enterprise enjoys the good offices of Lord God in heaven and Il Moro on earth.” This can be taken to mean, Your Highness, that such a gesture would signify to the King’s increasingly skeptical Councillors that you intend to make available to his campaign the considerable resources of our treasury. ... In short, Your Highness, the King is now quite unable to cross the mountains unless you permit it. ...

 

 

CHAPTER 38

 

Pavia, 16 March 1494

Isabella’s third labor was not nearly as hard as her first or quite so easy as her second, but the euphoria that had attended both was absent. She was detached, finding the whole procedure mechanical and uninteresting. To distract herself, she thought much of her home and childhood. Everything she remembered of Naples was brilliant, painted in fresh pigments. Everything after Naples seemed dull, a series of sepia sketches.

The head came out. The baby’s face was blue. A perfect little baby dyed Sforza blue. The midwife immediately began to pull even as Isabella’s panic contracted her muscles and seized the tiny body. “Let him come, Your Highness,” the midwife admonished, her voice breaking with fear. “You must let him come!”

Isabella held her breath and pushed the shoulders free. She looked down and saw the umbilical like a hangman’s noose around her baby’s neck. Some instinct told her to let him go, give him up, or he would die.

The midwife’s assistant quickly freed the baby from its umbilical, and pandemonium broke loose as the physician, surgeon, and midwife began to argue over whether to sever the cord and how to revive the limp, apparently lifeless infant. Isabella closed her eyes and pushed again, and the baby slipped free of her. The midwife produced her own knife and slit the cord and took the baby in her arms. She turned away from Isabella and pounded the baby’s tiny blue back and then began to knead its chest.

Isabella stared at the cut umbilical that protruded from her vagina, seemingly draining her of her own life. I am not part of any of this, she thought. For some reason she found her powerlessness comforting.

She had already begun to deliver the placenta when she heard her baby come to life. He coughed, then cried fitfully, almost delicately. The happiness lifted her gently, like a swell in a warm sea. “Give him to me,” she said.

The midwife turned. The baby was still pale, but the pallor was miraculous compared to the unearthly hue minutes before. Isabella reached out and felt the cool wet body and wanted only to give her baby her warmth. When she brought the baby to her breast she realized that it was a girl.

Nothing happened. Isabella continued to float in that eddy of well-being, not even asking herself why she wasn’t disappointed in her baby’s gender. “She’s beautiful,” she whispered, looking up gratefully at the midwife. “My beautiful little girl.”

 

Milan, 18 March 1494

The old dungeons beneath the Castello had a distinct brackish smell, much like that of the sea. The reason was simple: the dungeons were below the level of the moat, so water always seeped in, and they were now used to store salt. Galeazzo di Sanseverino rubbed the chill from his muscular arms and complained that he had not brought a cloak. “Where is the woman?” he irritably asked Bernardino da Corte, the assistant castellan of Porta Giovia.

“I’ve sent for her.” In torchlight Messer Bernardino’s dark complexion and sharp features were diabolically suitable for a denizen of this place. Galeazz looked more like an angel harrowing Hell.

“Who is she?” Galeazz asked.

“A kitchen maid. She works here in the Castello.”

“Well, that much of it makes sense. What if he doesn’t confess?”

“If he doesn’t confess, we will tie her up in his place and let every horse groom and pantryman in the Castello have at her.”

A door boomed shut and a torch flared in the darkened hall. The kitchen maid, wearing a wool shawl and an expression of wooden fright, was escorted by a single guard. Bernardino opened another door and motioned to the others to go inside.

A man had been tied naked to the wheel-shaped rack. His feet, hands, and genitals were purple with cold. The kitchen maid flinched at the sight of him.

“Do you know this woman?” Bernardino asked, his voice echoing against the damp, moldy walls.

The man tilted his head up; he was an athletic-looking blond in his mid-thirties, composed despite his predicament. “Yes,” he said matter-of-factly. “I would guess she’s the reason for my trouble. As I told you, I’m a
procuratore
from Rome, here to buy some gold plate for a client. Milanese goldwork, that’s what everyone who can afford it wants. I met her at the church of Sant’Eustorgio and decided to take her back to the inn where I am staying, the Saracen. I paid her for her work and tried to send her on her way, and she screamed and made a row and threatened to make trouble for me. Finally the innkeeper helped me throw her out. Is she someone’s wife?”

The kitchen maid snorted disdainfully. She looked at Bernardino and Galeazz. “It’s as I said. Why would a merchant with a thousand ducats sewn into the lining of his cloak go to Sant’Eustorgio to meet a kitchen maid?”

Bernardino looked off into a corner and pursed his thin, angry lips. “If he is what you say he is, why would he lie so ineptly?”

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