Duchess of Milan (5 page)

CHAPTER 3

Extract of a letter of Leonardo da Vinci, engineer at the Court of Milan, to international traveler and raconteur Benedetto Dei. Milan, 22 January 1491

. . . nor is there quiet in which to pursue one's own studies, owing to the great clamor and commotion of the wedding
feste
within the Castello. Certainly the most egregious and noisome of these events is the wedding joust, which commenced in the great piazza of the Castello this morning and will continue for two more days. O tumult of iron and clash of steel! All of this antique martial cacophony is taking place beneath the windows of my studios, from early morning until late in the afternoon. And I arose before the sun to attire Messer Galeazzo di Sanseverino in a costume of my design, a Scythian warrior's garb of marvelous ingenuity and wondrous invention. I have also supervised the decorations of the great hall for the occasion of a ladies' ball this evening. You can imagine my vexation at having time for little else. . . .

Having seen the bride, I am convinced that the bust of her executed in marble by a certain Maestro Cristoforo Romano, which made no claims for her beauty, nevertheless represents a meretricious report. However, my dear Benedetto, do not labor under the perception that the Duke of Ferrara has been reduced to penury to provide this pitiable creature's dowry. On the contrary, I am told by authorities most reliable that the Duke of Ferrara has extorted through various means a profit on the merchandise he has sent to us. The prestige of the Este, the oldest ruling family in Italy, has been purchased in dear coin by the far more recently arrived Sforza, who are desperate for it. O Cities of the Earth! What thunderbolt of Jovian rage shall be hurled down upon us when misbegotten children are bought and sold for the purpose of binding together the affairs of men. . . .

. . . Benedetto, you must write to me immediately if you have details as to the French foundry techniques. I can only assume that they have arrived at a process for settling impurities out of the bronze, thereby overcoming the brittleness that has hitherto made heavy artillery too cumbersome for an army determined to rapidly encroach upon its foe. . . .

“Careful where you step,” the Cardinal of Novara intimated, grasping his companion's elbow to help her negotiate the stuffed burlap bag lying on the wet stone floor. “Careful that you don't soil your
cioppa.”
The Cardinal gestured with his torch and sent shadows darting along the black walls of the narrow passage; they were beneath the level of the moat, in what had formerly been the dungeons of the Castello di Porta Giovia. Another bag blocked the way. “Salt,” offered the Cardinal as he and his guest crunched over the obstacle. “Except for a few rooms reserved for... unusual circumstances, that is all this is used for now. The storage of salt.” The sale of salt, which was monopolized by the state of Milan, was an important form of revenue; the exorbitant price included a substantial tax. The Cardinal made three rapid, shallow exhalations, his habitual expression of mirth. “The estimable, late, and not widely lamented Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza amused himself by bringing his subjects down here and nailing them into their coffins while they were still alive. He would then maintain a vigil until his guest was actually in need of a sarcophagus, listening to the desperate cries and the scratching, all the while describing in explicit detail how he had debauched the dying wretch's wife and sodomized his daughters. Then consider the late Duke's brother, our present Duke's regent, Il Moro, who has not executed anyone for a crime less than murder in five years but in that time has doubled the salt tax. I leave you to choose the greater tyrant.”

“Only peasants and laborers pay the salt tax,” Caterina da Borromeo, lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Milan, ventured without a hint of irony. She was sixteen years old, and her father was one of the wealthiest noblemen in Milan.

“And no doubt the peasants and the laborers received their twelve coppers' worth of amusement at the joust this afternoon,” the Cardinal remarked agreeably. He almost slipped, and muttered, “And no doubt we have each consumed a gold ducat's worth of wine.” The Cardinal thrust his torch into an open doorway, plunging the dank stone passage into a terrifying blackness. He withdrew the torch. “Not what I was looking for.”

After several more exploratory thrusts, the Cardinal found what he was looking for and pulled Caterina into a small room, barren except for a large circular wooden frame set in the center of the fungus-blackened floor. The Cardinal took two fresh tapers from his cloak, lit them with the torch, and set all three lights into the corroded iron rings nailed into the walls. The light revealed the Cardinal as a nearly bald man in his early thirties, with a swarthy complexion and a plump, indolent chin. He had been a cardinal for five years. The office had been purchased for him by his father, the leader of Novara's informal council of ruling nobility, in exchange for massive commercial concessions to Il Moro; the nobles had replaced the ceded revenues by raising their local taxes and had profited from their influence in Rome. The deal had been brokered by Il Moro's brother, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza.

“The wheel,” the Cardinal said in a mocking tone that could not entirely disguise a certain unease. He gave the device a slow, groaning quarter turn. “I like to think of this wheel as an ancillary to Dame Fortune's far more prodigious mechanism. When this wheel spins, it can turn a saint into a heretic and a heretic into a saint.” He looked at Caterina, his eyes swimming with a flagellant's desire. “Which would you rather be, my child: a heretic or a saint?”

Caterina's face seemed to waver in the torchlight, flickering between generations; her lips were lush with prepubescent innocence, but she had the hard cheekbones of a thirty-year-old. “I would like to confirm our understanding,” she said in an assured woman's voice. “There are three benefices. The total income is two hundred ducats a year. They are to be assigned to my brother separately, so that he can sell one or two if the need arises.”

The Cardinal nodded. “If your brother has your skill at mercantile transactions, my child, I am certain he will aggrandize these incomes in short time.”

“He is an idiot who will gamble them away in a fortnight.” Caterina's eyes had a glassy determination. “I won't take all my clothes off. It's too cold in here.”

“I don't expect you to,” the Cardinal whispered. “I am, after all, a prince of the Church.” He withdrew several lengths of gold cord from his ermine-trimmed cloak. “I think you can stand comfortably on the rim. I won't be giving you a spin.”

Caterina stood on the rim and leaned back against the angled frame of the wheel. The Cardinal gently spread her legs and arms and with the cords tied her wrists and ankles. “My delicious little martyr,” he murmured reverently. “You are a far more felicitous vision of virtuous self-denial than one finds amid the obscene gore favored by these modern painters, who force one to count each droplet spurting from a saint's truncated neck. How very much more agreeable. I imagine you didn't know I was such a disciple of tradition, did you, my child?”

The Cardinal drew closer, and his fingers hovered over the hooks that fastened Caterina's
cioppa.
“May I peek?” he whispered. Caterina responded with a high-pitched giggle. The Cardinal unhooked the
cioppa
and spread the fur lapels gently aside. Caterina wore a gown in the currently fashionable style called a
camora;
the tight bodice had a deeply cut, rectangular neckline that revealed Caterina's prominent collarbones and an impressive amount of firm, high bosom. The Cardinal sighed admiringly. After a few moments' contemplation, his fingers delicately worked at the laces of the bodice; he then spread the bodice apart and slipped the underlying chemise off Caterina's shoulders and breasts. “Ah,” he sharply exhaled. “Your nipples are hard.” Caterina giggled again.

The Cardinal stepped back and drew up his floor-length velvet robes. He fumbled for a moment, then rocked his hips in a steady, swaying rhythm. Caterina smirked and teasingly pressed her erect nipples toward him.

The light in the room rippled and brightened. Suddenly Caterina's eyes were wide with fear, as if she were a real victim on the wheel. The Cardinal observed her response and stopped masturbating.

“You are a dedicated servant of God, Your Reverence. I can see that you practice your collegial duties even when absent from Rome.”

The Cardinal let his robes fall, then turned and inclined his head in acknowledgment. The Duchess of Milan stood in the doorway like a condemned man's last vision. The Cardinal made the sign of the cross with wry urgency.

“Administer your sacraments elsewhere, Reverence. I have business with my lady-in-waiting.” Isabella's voice was husky and calm.

The Cardinal shrugged, retrieved one of his torches, and left. The Duchess of Milan stepped in front of Caterina.

“I need you to perform for me as well. Tonight, at the ladies' ball in honor of the Duchess of Bari. The time has come to do away with Cecilia Gallerani.”

Caterina snorted contemptuously. “You're mad.”

“You are going to do it, little slut, or I will make known your business with the Cardinal.”

“My father already knows,” Caterina spit back. “He introduced me to the Cardinal. He needs a place for my idiot brother, Cesare.”

“I wasn't referring to your father. I meant your lover.”

Caterina thought to say: In your case that would be the same, but she decided she didn't want to die in this place. “Messer Bernardino doesn't care who else I sleep with,” she offered in a sulking voice.

“I didn't mean him. Or Galeazz.” Isabella's delicate lips scrolled a subtle smile. She came closer. “I saw you drinking in the grandstands at the joust. You must have been quite besotted to come down here with that pervert.” Isabella was close enough to whisper in Caterina's ear. “You are really very pretty. The most lovely of all my ladies. I don't know why you waste yourself.” Isabella touched her lips to Caterina's cheek. Caterina's head jerked slightly, and her solid breasts swayed.

Isabella's kisses moved down Caterina's neck, then along the slope of her bosom. Her tongue flicked at Caterina's nipple, raising a tight knot. Caterina shuddered. “You like it, don't you?” Isabella whispered hotly. Caterina hiccuped and circled her head, her eyes closed.

Isabella stood straight up. “But you like it better with Madonna Giulia, don't you?”

Caterina's eyes shot open. Giulia Landriano, a married woman in her late twenties, was also one of the Duchess's ladies-in-waiting--like Caterina from a prominent and ambitious Milanese family. “When I tell Giulia how you have betrayed her love, she will use her knife far more readily than any cuckold. Do you remember that serving girl who was stabbed during Holy Week the year last?” Isabella smiled at the terror in Caterina's eyes. “I am certain you know that she, too, committed the error of disappointing your Giulia.”

Caterina broke down with a series of explosive dry sobs; finally the tears came. Isabella untied her and helped her from the wheel, then took her in her arms and began to stroke her hair maternally.

“Y-you might as well kill me now,” Caterina whined with genuine pain. “Either way I am
finito.”

Isabella laughed. “I don't mean for you to assassinate Cecilia Gallerani, nor do I intend to. All I expect of you is to help me sharpen someone else's blade. Now, you are going to need an accomplice to assist you. Someone extremely facile in conversation.” Isabella began to lace up the bodice of Caterina's
camora.
“Your friend Giulia has an agile tongue, does she not?”

The Sala della Palla was the largest room in the Castello di Porta Giovia. Used variously for state banquets, balls, and tennis matches, it was a three-story, ribbed-vaulted hall overlooked by a long balustraded mezzanine gallery. For the ladies' ball arches of woven ivy spanned the vaults, creating an enormous indoor arbor, beneath which were suspended wheel-shaped silver candelabra. Musicians in gold tunics, playing trombones and large woodwinds called
piffari,
clustered at one end of the chamber. Rows of pages in red-white-and-blue uniforms stood along the walls, holding up trumpet-shaped ceremonial torches. The torches illuminated a series of new frescoes depicting the manifold victories of II Moro's father, the legendary
condottiere
--mercenary commander--Francesco Sforza: a sweeping martial pageant featuring dashing mounted knights, forests of lances, elegantly choreographed surrenders, and ornate victory dedications to the Virgin.

Beatrice stood on the open mezzanine gallery, surrounded by her mother, sister, ladies-in-waiting, and the Duchess of Milan and her attendants. She was screened from her cousin by the Duke of Milan's unmarried sister, Bianca Maria Sforza, an astonishingly beautiful and perpetually distracted seventeen-year-old; Bianca Maria was presently destroying the effect of her sublime dark features by childishly wagging her head in rhythm to the music. But she apparently had a sweet, innocent nature. She and Beatrice had discovered that they had been tutored by the same dance master, Maestro Lavagnolo.

The ducal ladies were in turn surrounded by perhaps two hundred Milanese noblewomen, ranging in age from reedy bejeweled adolescents to waddling bejeweled dowagers who could scarcely stand without younger relatives to prop them up. But most of the women were frightening in their hard, varnished beauty. Their faces, coated with glossy white ceruse and crimson rouge, seemed fashioned of wax; their cerused breasts, plumped up by the tight bodices of their
camore,
were of such consistent roundness that they might have been shaped in molds. Most of the younger women were blond--either natural or bleached with lemon juice--and virtually all of them wore their hair pulled back, parted in the middle, and entirely slicked down with gum arabic except for a fringe of delicate Venetian-style curls. They moved among one another in wary circling packs, busy scarlet lips dipping to curl-draped ears. Emerald chokers and pearl-beaded hair nets returned the light with piercing glints.