Duchess of Milan (66 page)

Cameriano, 28 September 1495

“I didn’t know if you were sleeping.” Il Moro stepped into the doorway of Beatrice’s bedchamber. “I saw the lamps.”

“I’m not ready to sleep yet. I just wanted to close my eyes.” She removed the documents from her lap; she had propped her pillows against the headboard so that she could read in bed. “I had to reread the minutes of today’s session. I want to make certain that we can turn the Lord of Argenton’s exact words right back at him. Do you want to see them?”

He shook his head. In the uncertain light by the doorway he looked old and weary.

“I forgot.” She smiled fondly. “You remember every word as it was spoken. Would to God that I had your memory. Then
I
would rule the world.”

Il Moro remained standing in the doorway. He was still wearing the same tunic he had worn to the negotiating session in the afternoon, which was unlike him, since he usually changed his hose and tunic before supper. He seemed almost frightened at the prospect of entering his wife’s bedchamber.

“Why don’t you come in and sit,” she said, nodding at the folding stool, styled after a Roman Emperor’s camp chair, that stood by the shuttered window. It was unusual enough that he had come to her bedchamber; she was not going to scare him off by suggesting he sit on the bed.

He had not slept with her since his “illness”--as everyone now referred to his collapse. (And he did not speak of it at all.) She knew that he wasn’t frightened of the physical intimacy, that perhaps he still needed and wanted it even more than she did. He was afraid of the emotional intimacy. He was afraid she would ask him what had happened that afternoon in Vigevano. She could see it in his eyes, eyes that were no longer capable of opacity but held locked in their swirling dark depths a vision no man could confront. That day in Vigevano her husband had stood in the bitter gloom of the last circle of Hell and had stared up at the monstrous face of Satan.

Il Moro walked across the room, his step measured, his footfall almost inaudible. He pulled the chair close enough to the bed that she could more clearly see his face in the lamplight. He had gained weight since the “illness,” and silver gleamed in his dark hair. For his public appearances he wore a mask of composure and authority, putting all his effort into maintaining the illusion. At night he was like this, exhausted, aging, his sharp features sagging with doubt.

He sat with his head down, hands clasped between his knees, a hunched, nervous posture. “What can we do?” he asked. “Our Charlemagne insists that Genoa is his fief. Unfortunately I encouraged him in that delusion by purchasing the papers of investiture from him. Now that he realizes he is going to leave Italy without the territories he has mortgaged his state to acquire, he has gotten it into his head that his honor requires him to claim Genoa for his countrymen.”

“He doesn’t want Genoa,” Beatrice said. “He wants to be able to garrison troops in the citadel at Genoa and use the dockyards for the fitting of his ships. He thinks that if he can supply the few French fortresses still holding out in the south, he will be able to get Naples back.”

“Of course. But does it matter whether he is willing to continue the war because he wants the revenues of Genoa or because he wants the citadel and the dockyards? This is a man whose honor has compelled him to march an army halfway down the continent and back again, at the cost of a million ducats and thousands of lives, with as yet no more profit than a half-dozen Neapolitan fortresses, which will all be lost before next spring. What is simple reason next to this man’s extravagant honor? Now he has ten thousand Swiss mercenaries to advance his latest folly. And another ten thousand on the way.”

“There are fifty thousand soldiers of the League camped at Novara who are prepared to reason with King Charles.”

Il Moro looked up. His face was all hollows and shadows. “Fifty thousand men,” he said wearily. “Half of whom are suffering from dysentery, half of whom probably wouldn’t fight because the Signory doesn’t pay them on time. They don’t know whether they are commanded by Galeazz, who is a splendid jouster and my dear son-in-law, so I will say nothing about his abilities as a general, or by the Marquis of Mantua, whose courage I admire but whose mindless abandon cost us dearly at Fornovo.”

Beatrice loved the deprecating remark about Galeazz. Obviously her husband was abandoning one of
his
most annoying follies--that Galeazz was anything more than a peacock in armor. She looked at him sitting beside her, shaking his head slightly, his elegant lips shaped into a bemused smile. She realized that she cared for this man far more than the dashing Il Moro with whom she’d fallen in love. This new Il Moro had pierced his own private vanity, even if the public version was still intact. She wished she could somehow make him realize that she loved him now more than ever, that when she watched him like this she ached with longing for him. But of course they could never talk about who he had become. That would be touching too closely on the “illness.”

“I don’t know if I have the strength to go through another day of negotiations.” Il Moro lowered his head again. His voice was muffled with fatigue. “I really don’t. I am of a mind just to give the King back his papers to Genoa and be done with it. Get them out of Italy. If that is the price I must pay so that no more blood will be spilled, then so be it. Just get them out.”

“Lodovico. Lodovico.” Waiting until he looked up, she resisted her urge to hold out her hand to him. “We don’t have to give up to get them out. I’m certain of that.” Beatrice paused and calculated. “Tomorrow when they start making their threats, let me speak.”

He nodded without hesitation. “Fine. Of all of us, you are certainly the most fearless. I’m afraid that my particular virtue is the ability to make promises I do not intend to keep.”

“That is exactly what we will need. I will respond to their threats. And you will make promises we do not intend to keep.”

Immediately grasping the plan his wife had sketched, Il Moro gave her a weary but hopeful smile. He got up and stood beside the bed. Beatrice felt a catch in her chest.

He reached out and very softly stroked her cheek. “You are my treasure. You are everything to me. Without you I would be lost. Utterly lost.” He bent over and gave her a whisper-light kiss.

She was reminded of the kiss he gave her on the balcony in Ferrara, their first romantic kiss. Except that this time she wanted him so badly she couldn’t breathe. Stay, she silently pleaded. Please. I won’t ask anything of you.

He stood up again. “I really must go to my bed,” he said awkwardly; even the difficulty of his excuse touched her. “I fatigue so much more easily. Ever since ...” He gestured aimlessly with his hand. “Sleep well,
anima mia.”

A beginning, she told herself; it was the first time he had even alluded to the “illness” in her presence. Then she realized what else he had said.
Anima mia,
she thought as she watched him walk into the darkness. My soul. He called me his own soul.

Cameriano, 29 September 1495

The air crackled with the displeasure of powerful men. Beatrice looked at the face directly across the long, narrow table. Cardinal Briconnet, the French Minister of Finance, had already erupted during the first day of negotiations, standing red-faced to demand the cession of half of Milan’s territories before the French would send one man back across the mountains; he had called Il Moro a “traitor.” Today Briconnet’s swarthy color was every bit as inflamed with rage, as red as his cardinal’s robe. His nostrils flared and contracted, like a bellows.

Briconnet didn’t concern Beatrice. She studied Philippe de Commines, the Lord of Argenton, sitting next to Briconnet. A tall, fair-skinned, good-looking man perhaps ten years older than her husband, Commines had a polish and sophistication rare among the French courtiers. He was also the peacemaker among the French delegation. When Commines had been shown in this morning, however, he had seemed frustrated, with a deep undertone of sadness. Beatrice guessed that he had been requested to deliver an ultimatum. And as the morning had droned on, with the unyielding issue of Genoa--Commines and her husband had just gone through the daily ritual of the King’s request and Il Moro’s refusal--it had become obvious that the ultimatum would concern the cession of the King’s “fief.”

Briconnet muttered something in French to the man next to him--de Ganay, a black-robed lawyer who presided over the French Parlement; he had come with the army to help govern the short-lived Italian empire. Beatrice’s brother-in-law, the Marquis of Mantua, gave Briconnet a stare of such feral fury that it seemed he might leap across the table and take the Cardinal’s throat in his mouth. Briconnet glared back.

“His Most Christian Majesty desires peace above all else,” Commines told Il Moro in passable Italian after briefly consulting with the French secretaries. “So he has agreed to place his properties in your trust. You may continue to govern Genoa in His Most Christian Majesty’s name. But you must surrender the citadel of Genoa and allow His Most Christian Majesty to use the dockyards at his convenience.”

Beatrice resisted making a show of her alarm and surprise. This was what she feared most, that Charles would scale down his demands just enough to give her weary, frightened husband an excuse to give in. But the French King’s concession was nothing of the sort. This deal would give him what he most wanted, the ability to wage war from Genoa.

Il Moro hesitated. Beatrice could feel his quivering will, a palpable vibration. Then he said, “I am not going to surrender the citadel. Make this clear to His Most Christian Majesty, Monseigneur d’Argenton. If His Most Christian Majesty desires peace, then I am willing to work with him to that end. If he wants to continue this war, then I can accommodate him to that end as well.”

Commines’s fair complexion colored. For the first time in almost two weeks of negotiations he wore an expression of anger. He clenched his fist. “Then the twenty thousand Swiss mercenaries who have joined our camp will make that accommodation most uncomfortable for you, Your Highness.”

“Indeed.”

Everyone except Il Moro turned in astonishment at the clear, high music of Beatrice’s voice. The Frenchmen might have just heard a dog talk.

Beatrice aimed her vivid black eyes directly at Commines. “These twenty thousand Swiss you refer to, Monseigneur d’Argenton. They are subjects of His Most Christian Majesty?”

Commines looked at her as if he had been forced to humor a fractious child. “Of course not.”

“Of course not. They are here because they are mercenary soldiers. The Swiss live in a poor country. They have come in such numbers because there is famine at home and they need the money to feed their families. They do not yet know that His Most Christian Majesty cannot afford to pay them.”

Commines’s face reddened again. “They know that they will be paid from the treasury of Milan.”

“They will fight for your promises? These Swiss are simple mountain folk,
monseigneur.
They are not Florentine bankers who trade in promissory notes. You build the most marvelous cannons in Paris, Monseigneur d’Argenton. In Milan we build printing presses. By tomorrow afternoon I can have five thousand printed broadsheets circulating in the Swiss camp, warning them that the King of France does not have the funds to pay for their services. By the next morning you will be the ones fighting these twenty thousand Swiss.”

Commines suddenly had the vacant, bewildered look of a shipwreck survivor. Cardinal Briconnet leapt to his feet, pointing at Beatrice, shouting in French. She made out a few words; he was saying, Why should they listen to anything a woman said?

Il Moro started to rise to challenge Briconnet, and Beatrice held him back with a firm hand on his thigh. But the Marquis of Mantua popped up from his seat and shouted at Briconnet, “That is my sister,
cacapensieri!
If you persist in insulting her I will gladly negotiate with you in the courtyard--”

“Francesco!” Beatrice snapped. “Thank you. But sit down.” She turned to Briconnet and said pleasantly, “Would you be so good as to sit with us, Your Reverence.”

Finding no support for his position, Briconnet sheepishly took his seat.

“Now, Monseigneur d’Argenton. You must convince His Most Christian Majesty that the citadel will remain ours. As to your use of the docks, perhaps that is an issue my husband is willing to negotiate.”

Beatrice turned to her husband. Il Moro nodded approval, the infinitesimal twist of his lips--certainly detectable only to her-- telling her that he understood. This was the promise he did not intend to keep.

“Thank you, Your Highness.” Commines sighed with open French emotionalism. “You have given me something I can take back to my King.”

Extract of a letter of Philippe de Commines, Lord of Argenton and Councillor to His Most Christian Majesty Charles VIII, to Pierre de Beaujeu, Duc du Bourbon. Vercelli, 9 October 1495

. . . and so His Most Christian Majesty affixed his signature and seal to the articles of peace. ... In the end it was our want of money that compelled us to accept this peace that few of us desired and most of us do not believe will last. . . . Louis Duc d’Orleans was obliged to renounce forever his claim to Milan, while in exchange Il Moro paid our expenses so that we might cross the mountains again. . . . We leave behind the bones of our countrymen and take with us only the certainty that the afflictions we have suffered are an acknowledgment of the power of God. If any man has profited from this enterprise, it is Il Moro, who now governs all Italy. We must watch that he does not become the governor of all Europe. . . .

CHAPTER 54

Vigevano, 18 November 1495

Setting her clavichord on the table near the glowing fireplace, Beatrice pulled up a bench so that she and Bianca could sit side by side. She opened the leather-bound book of songs that her sister had just sent her. The rows of bars, notes, and lyrics were embellished with ornate lettering and beautiful miniature paintings of birds. In the lamplight, the jewel-bright little birds flickered as if they were about to spread their wings. Rain rattled against the windows.