Duchess of Milan (56 page)

Il Moro has yet to receive the papers of investiture from the German Emperor. They say that this is because the Prince Electors of Germany have been troubled by the accusations regarding the unfortunate Duke of Milan’s demise. Il Moro says he is not concerned about the delay, but for my part I do not think these papers can arrive soon enough, as Milan without a Duke of Milan is a most unsettled state of affairs at a most unsettling time. Even the Signory will have to agree that there is no alternative to Il Moro now, save the nefarious Louis Duc d’Orleans, who is still in Asti and regularly sends forth messengers to proclaim that
he
is the rightful Duke of Milan. . . .

Naples, 23 January 1495

When he awoke, Alfonso of Aragon, the King of Naples, first thought that the thunder of a terrible storm had disturbed his sleep, a storm not unlike the Christmas Day tempest three years earlier. Then he realized that he could hear the French cannons. They were still more than two hundred miles away, but he could hear them. His silk sheets were wet with perspiration. He had to get up. He put on the coarse monk’s robe he wore when he washed the feet of his paupers, and he took up his silver pail. Holding a single candle, he crept silently out of his bedchamber and walked around the loggia of the inner court until he reached his late father’s sealed rooms. He unlocked the doors and locked them again behind him. He lit a polished bronze lamp shaped like a female griffin, with big woman’s breasts.

Most of his father’s belongings had been stored, and the rooms were empty. Alfonso went down a flight of stairs to a series of subterranean storage rooms. He stopped before a metal-studded wooden door and examined his key ring for the appropriate key. The lock ratcheted noisily. He paused before he opened the door, making certain that he still had his pail and sponge. He briefly wondered why he had not considered coming here before. It was so obvious now that this was what he had to do.

The room was about the size of a
guardaroba,
with a musty, camphorlike smell. The walls were bare stone, windowless. Two long rows of what appeared to be statues stood several paces apart, facing each other. This had been Ferrante’s private collection, but Alfonso had helped assemble it.

Holding his lamp high, Alfonso walked between the two rows of standing figures. They were dressed in real clothes, expensive tunics of embroidered silk and damask such as a nobleman might wear. As Alfonso passed, the light glinted in glass eyes. Alfonso stopped and thrust his lamp into the face of one of the figures. The glass eyes glared; the shrinking, desiccated facial skin had pulled away from the sockets. The withered lips had parted slightly to reveal real teeth. This was one of the older pieces in the collection, a nobleman Ferrante had executed and embalmed forty years previously. He was not keeping well.

Alfonso looked for someone newer, someone he knew. He found a man who had been in the collection less than ten years, the vellum-white pallor of a long final imprisonment now yellowed by embalming and lamplight but the skin still seemingly elastic, the lips full and proud. A line of neat stitches circled the neck; for aesthetic reasons, the head had been sewn back in place after being severed by the executioner’s ax.

“Don Marino,” Alfonso whispered. He fell to his knees at Don Marino’s feet. Realizing that he would topple the mummy if he tried to remove Don Marino’s velvet slippers, Alfonso symbolically sponged water over them. He began to weep, his squinty eyes compressed to bleeding slits, his massive round face contorted with grief.

After much weeping and wringing of the sponge, Alfonso stood up, his cheeks glistening with tears. “Forgive me, Don Marino,” he whimpered.

“France.”

Alfonso had expected Don Marino to speak; he had not expected this reply. But he knew he had heard it, as clearly as he had heard the cannons that had roused him from his sleep. He had even seen Don Marino’s lips move. “What?” he demanded.

“France.”

Alfonso swung the pail in a savage arc, and Don Marino’s tentatively attached head went flying into the shadows. It cracked against stone and rolled across the floor, rattling like a dry gourd. Then blessed silence. The silence of forgiveness.

“France.”

Alfonso whipped his mighty head around.

“France. France.”

He could not tell who had said it. He lunged several steps this way and that, thrusting the lamp in the dead faces.

“France. France. France.”

They were all saying it--he could see all their lips moving-- and he lashed out frantically with his pail, sending heads flying and corpses toppling, but even the disembodied heads continued the chorus of “France, France, France.” He hurled his pail into the wall and ran for the door.

Alfonso’s powerful legs pounded up the stairs. Out in the loggia, he found he could breathe again and he could no longer hear the traitors. But the French cannons had got closer, so close that their salvos shook the walls.

He ran to his secretary’s rooms and pounded the door. When the startled man appeared, Alfonso ordered him to dress and bring writing materials and meet him in his stepmother’s rooms.

His stepmother’s servants were up, and he stormed past them, flinging open the double doors to her bedchamber. The lamps in the sconces were lit, and a big fire provided additional light and a stifling heat. His father’s widow, Giovanna, a second wife who was in her mid-thirties, lay on white silk sheets, entirely naked, her face concealed by two big slabs of milk-soaked veal. She was a fleshy woman with a disproportionately slender neck and a prominent nose that jutted from between the two pieces of meat. Two female servants continued to sponge her skin with sweet-smelling water, doing nothing to cover their mistress.

“What do you want, darling?” Giovanna asked in Spanish.

“Witness this.”

“Witness what? Are you going to do something naughty? I thought you had done everything naughty there was to do.”

“Cover her,” Alfonso barked at the servants. “I have a secretary coming.”

Giovanna peeled the veal slabs off her face and tilted her head up. She motioned with her head, and the servants patted her face dry and wrapped her in a white silk robe.

Suddenly Alfonso’s huge shoulders jerked with alarm. He looked at his stepmother. “Didn’t you hear them?” he asked frantically. “The guns. The guns are all around us. You know that when they breach the walls they put everyone--man, woman, and child--to the sword. They are not men--they are beasts!”

The secretary arrived. Giovanna, her pale, unadorned face composed and curiously elegant, watched the scene with the worldliness of a woman who had already seen too much.

“Witness this, Mother,” Alfonso repeated. His shoulders jerked at another imaginary salvo, and he convulsively turned his head to the secretary. He motioned rapidly with his powerful hands, indicating the usual formal introduction. Then he spoke, much more loudly than his usual near whisper, as if he were competing with the sound of the French cannons. “I have with God’s guidance determined to abdicate my throne in favor of my son and heir, Ferrantino, so that I may leave this kingdom and make my peace with God before--” Suddenly he screamed, “Do they not have the simple courtesy to stop their firing until this business is done? They are dogs!”

But even after Alfonso had finished dictating his message of abdication, he could not make the French cannons fall silent.

CHAPTER 47

Milan, 5 February 1495

“You are luckier than Satan.”

Blond curls framing a radiant smile, the Marquesa entered Beatrice’s bedchamber, carrying in her arms one-day-old Sforza Francesco Sforza--named after Il Moro’s late brother Sforza, from whom Il Moro had inherited the Duchy of Bari. The newborn’s two-year-old brother, Ercole, wearing a little blue tunic and matching hose, clutched a ride on the Marquesa’s skirt, grinning and shrieking,
“Cia Mama! Cia Mama!”

The Marquesa sat on the bed and placed the satin-wrapped bundle in Beatrice’s arms. “Consider all the women, myself included, who have fruitlessly labored for years in hopes of a son. It wasn’t enough for you simply to have this darling little boy” --she scooped Ercole off the floor--”who I am going to take with me when I leave. Now you have the most perfect little
putto
I have ever seen. Look at him!” Sforza’s huge indigo irises peered out from his puffy, ruddy little face. “Look at how he looks at us! I have never seen a newborn do that!” She leaned closer to the infant. “I am your aunt Bel, the most beautiful sight you will ever see.” Sforza stared at her steadily, and Ercole sputtered, “Pputto! Pppputto! Spputto Spporspuh!”

“I am ill with envy,” the Marquesa added, looking skyward as if seeking redress for this inequitable distribution of sons. Then she soberly studied Beatrice, brushing her sister’s cheek with her fingers. “Your color is really good, baby. You know the bleeding has to have stopped. If it hadn’t, you would have bled much more during the night.” For a terrifying quarter of an hour after delivering the placenta, Beatrice had bled heavily. Somehow it had stopped. Beatrice had been more affected by the fright than by the actual loss of blood.

“I just ...” Beatrice worked her teeth over her lower lip. “The first time I was too tired to be afraid. This time I could think. I thought of everything: everyone I love whom I wouldn’t see again, my children growing up without me. Never making love to my husband again. I was so frightened, Bel. It was as if my soul was spilling out of me. Just lying there and watching it.”

“Your midwife said you did much better this time. Your next one will be over faster than a
meretrice
can find a customer in the Vatican.”

Beatrice smiled weakly and continued to bite her lip.

“Isn’t that good news about Uncle Alfonso!” the Marquesa said brightly. “Your husband says that Alfonso’s abdication will make it so much easier to provide support for Naples now. Can you imagine? Three Kings of Naples in the space of one year. I don’t remember our cousin Ferrantino terribly well. Did you like him when you were there?”

Ferrantino was two years older than Eesh, but for most of the time Beatrice had been in Naples, he had been shorter than his sister. Ferrantino and Eesh had been inseparable companions in mischief, but Ferrantino had always been fairly quiet and gentle; he had never taunted or teased Beatrice unless it was something Eesh made him do. He had always been so slender compared to his father, with big rabbity teeth. “He was a nice boy, Bel. Maybe he will bring an end to all the terrible things that have happened in Naples.”

The Marquesa nodded and crossed herself, one of her mother’s mannerisms she had adopted after her death. “You know, baby, I think so often about Mama, how she always talked about this peaceful and united Italy of hers. It was more than a faith with her. It was her dream, really, and I place dreams ahead of faith, because dreams can never be corrupted. Otherwise they would no longer be dreams. Of course I always thought that Mama’s dream was so silly and impossible.” She smiled wistfully. “But now I think that despite the Frenchmen, or really because of them, someday we will have that peace.”

Beatrice wondered why she never could discuss Mama with her sister; the subject had already foundered a dozen times during Bel’s visit. Perhaps because she was afraid that Bel would learn about the ambivalence of her feelings toward Mama. Or perhaps because she had always known that Bel had been Mama’s favorite.

“It is time for the two young gentlemen to return to their nurseries and for the Duchess to put her lights out and go to sleep . . . ,” Polissena interrupted from the doorway.

The Marquesa did not turn at the sound of Polissena’s voice but instead continued to look at Beatrice, bobbing her head and miming Polissena’s speech to extraordinary comic effect. Beatrice burst into laughter so abruptly that her womb seared, but she couldn’t help herself and laughed so hard that tears spilled down her cheeks.

“... And what the Marquesa chooses to do is between herself, Our Lord, and the devil,” Polissena continued, her head bobbing fiercely, “as she has disregarded every advisement concerning her health that those of us with long experience have offered her.”

The Marquesa finally turned for her counterattack. “Polissena, your experience is so long that--” Suddenly Polissena gasped and shuddered, and the Marquesa broke off.

“Nostro Signore,”
Polissena said, crossing herself. “When Your Highness turned around just now I thought I saw your sainted mother sitting there. Your mother fifteen years ago. The most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Just then Your Highness was the image of your sainted mother. Dear God, I thought I had seen a ghost.” Polissena offered a final baby-buzzard glare of defiance--apparently to her own emotions--and then began to cry.

The Marquesa looked at Beatrice helplessly, then got up and went to Polissena. Her eyes glistening with tears, she gingerly wrapped her arms around Polissena’s frail, stiff torso. “I miss her too, Polissena. I miss her too.”

Milan, 21 February 1495

“Per mia fe.
I always wondered how it was done.” The Marquesa walked around the base of the ancient Roman statue. Carved in luminous white marble, the sculpture depicted Zeus, transformed into a swan, making love to Leda, the all-too-human wife of the King of Sparta. The considerably larger-than-life-size swan gripped the life-size Leda’s plump white buttocks with his webbed feet and folded his wings around her naked back. “Entirely convincing,” the Marquesa added.
“Perdio,
Beatrice, you can virtually hear them grunting with passion. Or perhaps she is whimpering and he is honking. Anyway, such
vivacita.
It’s new, isn’t it?”

“My husband had it shipped from Rome a few weeks ago,” Beatrice said. The statue was one of dozens arrayed across the lawn bordering the artificial lake. Acres of the surrounding ducal park had been transformed into formal gardens--geometric patterns of trees, hedges, and flower beds, all interlaced with gravel paths. Nearby was what appeared to be a complex of immense Greek temples: Il Moro’s menagerie, the late Duke of Milan’s stables, and Galeazzo di Sanseverino’s new stables. The winter that had never really arrived had left the foliage a brilliant green; only the relative paucity of flowers betrayed the season. In lieu of nature’s most extravagant hues, the park was sprinkled with hundreds of Milanese courtiers and their ladies in their best riding clothes. Most of them had dismounted, leaving their horses with their pages. They walked in pairs or clustered around the various musical entertainments:
alta
bands, consisting of two woodwinds and a
trombone,
playing lively dance harmonies, and lone lutenists singing lengthy comic or romantic narratives.