Duchess of Milan (71 page)

“But you don’t agree with him.”

“No. No, I don’t.”

“I hate him,” Bianca said, her face flushed bright red.

“No, baby, I don’t ever want to turn you against your father. We just disagree--”

“That’s not the reason.” Bianca’s voice broke. “I hate him because of what he is doing to you. I know about Lucrezia Crivelli. Everybody in the
castello
does. He isn’t even trying to keep it a secret. I will never stop hating him for this, Toto.”

Beatrice rushed to Bianca and embraced her, feeling her hot tears against her cheek. “Don’t hate him, baby. Please don’t. For my sake don’t hate him.”

Bianca sobbed harshly into Beatrice’s ear. Finally she blurted out, “Toto, please don’t let it change things for us. Please don’t stop loving me because of him.”

“Oh, baby, nothing could ever change what is between us. I will always love you. Nothing, nothing, will ever come between us. Death could not separate us.”

Bianca sobbed with grateful relief. Beatrice took a handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped Bianca’s nose and sat down with her on the stack of embroidered drapes.

“I loved you before I ever loved your father,” Beatrice said.

Bianca sniffled. “Do you still love him?”

“Yes. Yes, I do. I will always love him.”

“What’s wrong with him? Why is he doing this to you?”

Beatrice gazed out the window for a moment, watching a bank of clouds march across the horizon. Then she said, “You know the first line from the
Inferno.”

Bianca recited the line almost automatically. “ ‘Midway through our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood, having lost the straight path.’ “

“I think your father is lost in that dark wood right now. Perhaps he believes that Lucrezia Crivelli will help him find his way.”

“Do all husbands eventually become lost in this dark wood, Toto?”

“I would imagine that sooner or later we all find ourselves there. And we all must find our way into the light again. Dante had to descend into Hell and climb Purgatory before he found his way. Let us hope your father’s journey will not be so difficult.”

“Toto, you know how you told me about the romances you read as a girl, how you dreamed of gallant knights who would whisper magic words in your ear and give you kisses as soft as starlight?” Bianca looked to Beatrice for confirmation. “I never had to read those books. I always had Galeazz. He was my knight, but he was real. I was ten years old the first time I sat in the grandstand at a joust and listened to him dedicate his victories to me. You’ve seen all my dresses made from the cloth-of-gold he won as prizes in the tournaments, my
guardaroba
full of the gifts he has sent me. At a thousand suppers I stared at his face and thought to myself, He is mine. My Galeazz. My knight. Every time he kisses me on the cheeks I dream of what it will be like when he holds me in his arms and kisses my lips. He is my dream, Toto, my living dream. I love him so much.

“Am I going to be made a fool, Toto? All of your ladies tell me I am. And when I see what happens to marriages here, I believe that they are right. I am no longer a girl. It
is
foolish for me to have a girl’s dreams.”

Beatrice put her arm around Bianca maternally. “Galeazz probably won’t be much like the knight you imagined him to be. You are likely to find marriage difficult at first. You might even find it miserable. You know I did. But I believe that someday you will find a love with Galeazz that will be much more profound, much more magical, than anything you ever could’ve dreamed of as a girl. I honestly believe that.”

“And then he will go off into a dark wood and break my heart.”

“I can’t promise you that that won’t happen, baby. I would give anything if I could. But I don’t think any love we have is ever lost or ever diminished.” Beatrice paused, reflecting on her own life. “I think perhaps if it is really a true and noble love, it can only grow. I look at my Mama and see how her love for my father grew into a love for her children and then into a love for every woman’s child. You will have your own children, and I know for myself that with each child your love grows. Your dreams are no longer so much for yourself as they are for them. Mama dreamed of peace for her children. She did not live to see that. Now I have her dream, and perhaps I will never live to see it. But if my children can dream it, and their children, and if each generation refuses to give up that dream, someday it will be real. So you ask me if you are foolish to hold on to your dreams. No; no, baby, you’re not. We are only fools when we no longer have dreams.”

CHAPTER 58

Extract of a letter of Leonardo da Vinci, engineer at the Court of Milan, to international traveler and raconteur Benedetto Dei. Milan, 15 November 1496

... I can tell you without risk of contradiction that there is no love for Il Moro here. The tax levies have been increased yet again, and he has made such public demonstration of his lust for his mistress that no one here will speak his name without spitting. It is widely regarded that the treasury is exhausted, but you would not know it to see the schedule of
feste
for the Christmas celebrations. (I have often reflected, my dear Benedetto, that the true miracle of this Holy Season is the magnitude of the industry given birth by a poor carpenter from Galilee.) I myself have not received a ducat toward my salary in the past two months, yet Il Moro has imperiously summoned me from my labors on my fresco of the Last Supper at Santa Maria delle Grazie (this after all the calumny that I will never finish it) and commanded me to render a portrait of his paramour, one Lucrezia Crivelli. I have drawn her a half-dozen times already, and as I am unpersuaded of her carnal attractions, I can find no feature to which I can ascribe the qualities of beauty. . . . If not for the good will everyone holds toward the Duchess of Milan, we should already have seen the mobs clamoring in the streets. In all this unseemly unfair the said Duchess has held her head high, and there is no one here who can claim with any veracity to have heard her disparage, in word or deed, her husband or even the woman with whom he so shamelessly consorts. . . .

Milan, 22 November 1496

“Your Highness, His Highness your husband.”

Her husband hadn’t called on Beatrice in her rooms since the night her baby was conceived--a baby now due in less than three months. Their separate lives had become a routine that grew less painful every day, partly because she was finally letting herself settle into it, but also, paradoxically, because as her baby’s term progressed she could see an end to it. She was his wife and the mother of his children. Lucrezia was a flickering passion in his dark wood, no more enduring than a single candle. When the baby was born he would come back.

He came in right after the chamberlain. All she saw was his terrible face: The same quiet madness she’d seen when he came to tell her about Alfonso’s attempt to poison him and their son; the same terror in his eyes she’d seen when he lay paralyzed with the “illness.” And something new, something still more terrible.

He advanced unsteadily. She just stared at him, silently begging him not to speak. She didn’t want to know. She saw in her mind something glistening and cold, like a dome of ice over her, an astringent but painless refuge for her soul. If he spoke, her icy sanctuary would shatter, and in would rush the terrible thing on his face.

He stopped, too far away even for her to touch him. His lips quivered. He was speaking, but the sound seemed to follow much later, as if his words were slowly boring through the ice that separated them, emerging spent, just at the threshold of hearing. “She’s . . . dead. Dead.”

Beatrice heard a high whistling sound. Of course, someone is dead, she thought. Someone I don’t care about but he does. Like Lucrezia. Dear God, yes . . .

“My daughter. Bianca.”

Silently: That is the sickest, crudest, most hateful lie. Bianca couldn’t . . . Oh, dear God, no ... Marriage kills as many girls as childbirth, especially the frail girls.

“I ...” His hands fluttered as he attempted to gesture but then fell lifeless to his sides.

For some reason the ice dome hadn’t shattered. It only whistled where his words had entered. But now she couldn’t breathe the cold air. She could breathe only if she screamed.

“Liar!” She lunged forward and hit him so hard that his head lolled and his knees sagged. The expression on his face never changed. “Liar!”

“I wish by all that is holy that this time I were,” he whispered into the shrill silence. “In Vigevano. A fever. Galeazz didn’t think it was serious, and then--”

“Galeazz didn’t think!” she screamed, her face livid and her hands clenched like claws. “Galeazz killed her! He killed her! I want him hanged! If I ever see his face again I will kill him myself!”

Il Moro seemed to take this threat seriously, and he managed to get his hands up for a brief expository gesture. “He is near death with grief. I know the pain that this must bring you. ...”

She didn’t hear anything else. He talked for an eternity, his hands making pathetic little circling motions at his sides. She was just your bastard, you bastard, she silently told him, as his lips quivered on. She was my baby. She was my girl. She was my best
arnica.

Now he had his hands on her shoulders. She knew that if she didn’t listen, his lips would never stop moving. She let his words in: “... Do you want me to stay with you?”

She felt the great surge of grief rising inside her and just wanted him to leave. She shook her head.

“I ...” Again the helpless hands.

She couldn’t speak. She just made a pushing motion with her hands, pushing him out. His expression changed slightly, and he turned too quickly to leave. As he walked out she could hear his heavy footfall much more clearly than she had his words. In the dimming light she had a final, dull realization, that by sending him away she had lessened his pain.

Il Moro returned to his mistress’s suite of rooms on the second floor of the Rochetta, the rooms formerly used by Duchess Bona (who had been moved out of the Castello, to a
palazzo
on the Piazza del Duomo).

Lucrezia Crivelli took him in her arms as soon as he crossed the threshold.

“I told my wife,” he said. “I had to be the one to tell her. She loved Bianca like her own. ...”

“Of course you had to be with her. Perhaps it would be better if you stayed with her for a while.”

He shook his head. Tears tracked down his cheeks.

Lucrezia undressed him and put him to bed. She propped him up on pillows and gave him a goblet of wine. She was silent throughout, her fingers consoling him with light touches and gentle, spontaneous caresses. Finally she stripped to her chemise and snuffed the lamp.

Il Moro felt the terror of sudden darkness, a violent tremor welling inside him. Then Lucrezia’s body pressed against his and he marveled at the narcotic effect of her flesh. In the beginning he had believed that this liaison was never intended, that a mere caprice had resulted in the accidental betrayal of his wife. And even after the dalliance had begun in earnest, he had insisted to himself that he had never intended to make it public; that had been the result of a vicious gossip campaign orchestrated by the same ladies-in-waiting whose subtle advances he had spurned for years.

But now, his defenses reduced by grief, he admitted to himself the desperate need this passion had fulfilled. Beatrice possessed a courage he could never have, an unrelenting reminder of his own moral cowardice. She had become strong enough to unmask his most profound self-deceptions, to enter him and harrow the darkest vaults of his soul. He could argue that he had abandoned her out of love, an Orpheus who had realized he could only lead his wife deeper into Hades, but that too was a mask. It was simply less painful for him to deny Beatrice his love than to allow himself to suffer the loss of her love. And so he had found Lucrezia, whose infinitely mutable face wore as many masks as his own. He could love Lucrezia without pain, because she would never demand the truth that would force him to betray her.

“Lodovico,” she whispered. “Give me your hand.”

She placed his cold hand on her belly.

“Lodovico, nothing can ever bring Bianca back. She was unique. We must accept what time she had with us as Fortune’s gift.” She pressed his hand tightly. “And we must begin again. We must take the love she left us and go on. You are touching the child of our love, Lodovico. I am going to have your baby.”

Extract of a dispatch of Francesco Foscari, Venetian ambassador to Milan, to the Signory of Venice. Milan, 11 December 1496

. . . hearing that the Emperor had left Pisa and gone to Pavia, I immediately made my way there but for many days was refused an audience. . . . None of my entreaties could persuade His Imperial Majesty to remain in Italy and complete the enterprise on which he so recently embarked. When I told His Imperial Majesty that the Signory could not be held responsible for the storm that destroyed our fleet at Pisa, he replied, be that as it may, he had no inclination to fight God and man at the same time. Indeed, I believe that the true enemy of this enterprise is Il Moro, who in his overweening arrogance assumes that he can employ the German Emperor as his
condottiere
and force the Signory of Venice to serve as paymaster, leaving to himself only the task of accepting the prize. . . .

Thus His Imperial Majesty began his journey back across the mountains. His enterprise, pursued at such great cost, has effected no result and leaves the affairs of Italy in still greater confusion than he found them. . . .

CHAPTER 59

Milan, 2 January 1497

The refectory next to the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie was deserted except for the solitary presence of Leonardo da Vinci, who stood on the scaffolding at the far end of the small dining hall. Dressed in a long green velvet
vestito,
he stared at the anguished face of Saint Philip. He frequently worked like this, contemplating his almost finished
Last Supper
for days at a time, without lifting a brush. Then he might come in one morning and paint furiously until evening, without pausing to eat or drink.