Duchess of Milan (6 page)

“You know what they say, Mama.” The Marquesa whispered into her mother's ear, mirroring the pose of so many other couples in the gallery. “In no place save England or the Sultanate of Turkey is marriage held in lower regard than it is in Milan. They say that a Milanese husband, confronted with the inevitability of being cuckolded, prefers to serve as his wife's pimp and will deliver her to her lover's
palazzo
in his own carriage and kiss her goodbye on the doorstep, and anyone passing on the street will doff his hat in salute to this
étalage
of marital devotion. Then of course the cuckold will call on his own mistress.”

Beatrice could not bring herself to look at the women of Milan, but their liberally applied perfumes--scented with ambergris, cinnamon, myrtle, and aloe--and the pungency of the ivy and evergreen boughs gave the hall the cloying atmosphere of an overgrown garden on a sultry spring afternoon. The dancers whirling on the main floor below her were simple peasant girls costumed in red, white, and blue vests and skirts; their fervent Spanish-style
moresca
made up in sensual abandon for what it lacked in artistic precision. Beatrice peered over the marble balustrade and wished that she could leap to the floor and dance with them. There had been a time when she loved dancing more than anything, because there had been a time when she believed that one day she would be beautiful, that every time she rose on her toes in response to Maestro Lavagnolo's baton she would hasten the day when her heavy thighs would be drawn like hot blown glass into slender stems. But now when she danced she forgot entirely the liquid elegance that Maestro Lavagnolo had insisted on, and like these peasant girls she whirled and leapt in fierce staccato movements, punishing her short, muscular legs by forcing them to dance in a style to which they were more suited.

The music stopped and the dancers' skirts wilted; the girls turned in unison to the gallery and curtsied. “Beatrice,” Eleonora whispered, “you must receive the ladies now.”

Beatrice's entire body ached with fear. She forced herself to turn. The Duchess of Milan stared down at her, narrow nostrils flared slightly, the gray-green eyes set above her high cheekbones like cold Alpine lakes. With a strange wistfulness, Beatrice admitted to herself that she had no more chance to earn her imperiously beautiful cousin's friendship here in Milan than she had as a girl in Naples. But at least here she wouldn't make a fool of herself with clumsy, unrequited overtures. She stared back at Isabella. I hate you too, she silently offered as a reinforcing litany. I hate you too.

The eyes of the noblewomen of Milan were no warmer than Isabella's. Beatrice imagined them made of glass, the eyes of sinister dolls. At first she heard nothing when they greeted her. She saw the lacquered lips move and the metallic brocade
camore
crinkle into curtsies. She nodded to each supplicant, again and again. Each face was like a mask, not a real woman.

The woman who would not let go of Beatrice's hand was tall, with a sharp, aquiline nose; a pear-shaped diamond brooch perched just above her cleavage. She had been introduced as Giulia Landriano, one of the Duchess of Milan's senior ladies-in-waiting. “... delightful, were they not, Your Highness.” The words began to enter Beatrice's consciousness and compose sentences. Giulia had been talking about the dancers. “So entirely fresh and simple and quaint. Delightful.” Beatrice could not imagine that Giulia's acerbic eyes had ever found anything pleasing. “But then everything to do with Your Highness has been delightful. We so rarely see such
dolcezza
here.” Beatrice, accustomed to the oblique speech of courtiers and diplomats, began to hear Giulia's subtext as well.
Dolcezza
was the code word: sweetness. Sweet, delightful, simple. What was really meant was that Beatrice and the Ferrarese were perceived, like the dancers, as provincial and vulgar. “You bring
dolcezza
to Milan, Your Highness.”

The Marquesa took a half step toward her sister's antagonist. “And we rarely see such art as we have beheld here this evening, Madonna Giulia.” The Marquesa's ripe lips contorted with sarcasm. “An art so expertly contrived that at first glance one is scarcely aware of the common substance beneath such extravagant ornament. Rather like pouring gilt syrup on stale pastries.”

The surrounding conversation hesitated; the crowd contracted. Giulia inclined her head slightly, as if to signal that she had accepted the Marquesa's escalation of hostilities. “If one's tastes are limited to pastries, then one might indeed be overwhelmed by the ornament one sees here.” Giulia conspicuously caressed the diamond-studded gold chain that draped her bosom; the gold links were an exquisitely detailed miniature garland. “Is Your Highness familiar with the work of Maestro Caradasso?” The Milanese goldsmith Caradasso del Mundo was renowned throughout Europe. “Of course one must be able to pay for such skill in order to appreciate it. It is rather more dear than a confectioner's wares.”

The Marquesa flushed at the allusion to the Este family's relatively modest means; more than a few of the ranking Milanese nobles were wealthier than the ruling family of Ferrara. She stroked the choker around her neck; the pearls were spaced with intricate gold rosettes. “I prefer the work of our own Enrico da Fidele. Maestro Enrico is that sort of artist who emphasizes subtlety over contrivance, assuming as he does that his patrons are able to complement his creations with their own charms.”

Giulia nodded curtly at the Marquesa, then looked directly at Beatrice. From Beatrice's vantage the reflections of the torches gave the woman's pale irises a gold tint. “How charming that your sister has retained her native simplicity. But I can see that the Duchess of Bari already favors Milanese elegance.” Giulia stepped closer and appraised the floriate gold links of the ruby pendant Il Moro had given Beatrice. “I immediately knew this as the work of our Caradasso. He did a piece with virtually identical pendants for Cecilia Gallerani.”

Giulia had mentioned the name casually enough, but then she immediately pulled back as if startled by her own voice. Her eyes dilated with alarm. She made an abrupt curtsy. “Forgive me, Your Highness,” she said urgently. “I ...”

The conversation in the room fell away precipitously. The Marquesa snapped her head around, confronting her mother. Eleonora's jowls were slack, her eyes so intense they looked like emeralds.

Beatrice's forehead prickled, and then the cold realization rushed through her torso. She turned to her mother. “Mama?” she asked in a small, brittle voice. But she already knew. “Mama.” This time the word was not a question but had not yet formed into an accusation. Beatrice turned back to Giulia. “Who is Cecilia Gallerani?”

Giulia curtsied again. “Your Highness ...” Her mouth remained open, but she offered nothing else. The only sounds in the entire hall were scattered coughing and the collective shuffling of slippers and rustling of skirts.

For some reason Beatrice was drawn to the woman standing next to Giulia. Beatrice had met her minutes earlier and remembered her as Caterina, one of Isabella's ladies-in-waiting. She was perhaps sixteen or seventeen, with large, almost perfectly hemispherical breasts encroaching on her collarbones. And she had started to cry, her bare shoulders jerking rhythmically, her sobs like shouts in the silence. Finally she screamed: “Why won't someone tell her! Tell her! It is so cruel!” Caterina's hands clutched in pathetic supplication. “I can't believe no one has told her!”

“Beatrice.” Eleonora powerfully gripped Beatrice's arm, attempting to pull her back.

“Tell me what?” Beatrice called out, straining against her mother. “Tell me.” She wrenched her arm from her mother's grip and seized Caterina's slender shoulders. “Tell me!”

Caterina looked to Giulia. Her sobs were as regular as hiccups. Eleonora grabbed Beatrice again.

“Tell
me!”

Caterina vomited the words. “Cecilia Gallerani is your husband's mistress! She is going to have his baby! It is so horrible what everyone is doing to you!” She put her hands on her knees and keened dreadfully. Then her features went slack and she slumped to the floor.

Beatrice's instinct was to grasp something before she was sucked up into the sky like a feather in a cyclone. The scent-laden atmosphere was suddenly stifling. Her mother spun her around. A black penumbra began to close on her vision. She whirled away from her mother, and only her cousin's face was visible through the narrowing tunnel of light: Isabella with green cat's eyes, her lips sinuous with amusement. That was the last Beatrice saw before the dark circle closed.

CHAPTER 4

“Mama, she is not going to sleep through the night, and she most certainly will refuse one of this Messer Ambrogio's draughts when she does awaken.” The Marquesa paced the floor of the small sitting room that joined her temporary bedroom to her sister's antechamber; all these rooms would become part of Beatrice's permanent suite when the wedding party left. The sitting room was unfurnished except for several chairs and a cupboard enameled with elaborate heraldic motifs: lions, eagles, twining flowers, and the ubiquitous symbol of Milan's Sforza rulers, a looping, lurid blue viper with the flayed body of a man in its fangs.

“I warned you we should tell her. You will recall very distinctly that I raised the issue just yesterday. Mama, I am beside myself, I truly am. I simply hope she is not lying there plotting revenge on both of us right now. She is an expert at revenge. Do you remember what she did to Eugenia Casella? That was very clever. They had to shave Eugenia's head entirely. Her hair grew back another color too, and they never could make her a braid after that . . .”

The Marquesa was interrupted by a crash echoing through Beatrice's
guardaroba,
a room ordinarily used for the display and storage of clothes and valuables, but which was now filled with wedding gifts. “Mama, I told you that Polissena was too aged to be of use here. I would sooner have a drunken centaur in my
guardaroba
handling my plates. ...” The two quick crashes that followed were too harshly orchestrated to be accounted for by the palsied hands of an old woman.
“Per mia fe,
Mama ...”

Eleonora came out of her chair with startling agility; three more crashes resounded before she reached the
guardaroba.
Porcelain shards littered the floor. What at first seemed a child darted along the wall and clutched for the sanctuary of Eleonora's skirts; it was Fritello, Beatrice's dwarf. In the fluttering lamplight Beatrice's face appeared almost indigo with rage. She had methodically removed from their wooden presses at least two dozen large majolica plates, intricately glazed with mythological and religious scenes, and arrayed them on top of several wooden storage chests. With a spasmodic, marionette motion she plucked up another plate, raised it overhead, and smashed it against the floor. Eleonora crunched across the remains of the wedding plates, grasped her daughter's rigid arms, and jerked her off the floor as if she were indeed a large puppet.

“Remember who you are and who you represent,” Eleonora hissed. “You are not some child whose tantrums can be ignored. You are a symbol of the state, the mother of the state. ...”

Beatrice's voice was so low and vicious that it visibly startled Eleonora. “You lied to me, Mama.”

“I withheld from you the unpleasant truth that is the first great test of marriage, because I did not think you were ready to accept it like a woman and a duchess. And now I can see that I was correct. ...”

“You
see!
You
see! It is I who see, Mama!
I
see!
I
see! I see how you have piled lie on top of lie. I see that you tell me to behave like a duchess when you permit me to be disgraced in front of everyone.” Beatrice paused and stammered wordlessly, considering an unthinkable oath. “I hate you, Mama!”

The slap cracked through the room, and Beatrice's head rolled drunkenly. “Never, ever say that to your mother. You could hate me for a thousand years and that could not add up to one instant of the love I have for the baby I carried in my womb. The baby I carried--” Eleonora stopped herself, but the moment came screaming out of time.  Six-week-old Alfonso under one arm, Beatrice wrapped around her neck, almost strangling her, Isabella's desperate little hand in hers, the children's shrieks in the dark stone passageway like all the souls trapped in Hell . . . And then, as always, she banished the memory of that failed coup with a quick, savage image: an executioner's sword flashing in the sun and the spout of blood from her nephew Niccolo's headless neck.

Beatrice's shoulders heaved, and she wrenched forward; the tears literally burst from her eyes. Eleonora wrapped her in her massive reassuring arms. “This will all change, baby,” Eleonora whispered as she stroked her daughter's hair. “I promise you it will. He will love you more and her less with each day. I promise you. I have known the same tears you are tasting now, and I have seen how in time that bitterness can turn into the most indescribable sweetness.” But Eleonora knew that she had not tasted this particular gall. She would never forget the look on Ercole's face at their first meeting, that proud, arrogant face seemingly carved from ice, those diamond-hard eyes.
Diamante,
the diamond, his people called him. Hard, brilliant, and cold. And yet when that face had beheld hers for the first time . . . That night, as he lay in her virgin arms, it had been his diamond-hard eyes that had wept with the fulfillment of his desire.

Beatrice sniffed loudly. “Mama, when is she going to have his baby?”

“That is no concern of yours. If the child lives, it will be a whore's bastard and nothing more. You are Il Moro's wife before the witness of God, and your son will be his heir.”

“Mama, she is not just a whore. She lives here in this Castello in a suite of rooms, just like a wife. Those rooms we were told were under renovation.”

Silence followed. “Mama . . . ,” the Marquesa said threateningly.

“Isabella!” Eleonora snapped. “Close all the doors! Tell the guards that no one shall be admitted to the Duchess of Bari's suite until the Duchess of Ferrara instructs them otherwise. Then join me in your sister's bedchamber.”