Duchess of Milan (72 page)

He did not turn when Beatrice entered. She walked past the tables already set up for the friars’ supper. On the far wall Christ and His twelve apostles dined in what appeared an extension of the room, suffused with the soft, mystic light streaming through three illusionistic windows that opened onto a vivid imaginary landscape. Leonardo’s treatment of the subject was unconventional; instead of the usual rendition of Christ handing Judas a sop of bread, identifying him as the traitor, Leonardo had chosen the moment only slightly earlier when Christ said to all His disciples, “One of you shall betray me.” In Leonardo’s version Judas recoiled in horror, his face the only one shadowed from the radiance that bathed the rest of the figures. But all the apostles reacted with similar vehemence, a fury of denial, gesturing broadly and protesting, “You don’t mean me, Master? Surely not I!” To Beatrice, Leonardo’s message was obvious: at that moment each apostle had realized that he was capable of betraying Christ.

Beatrice took up a position almost directly behind Leonardo, staring at the painting as stoically as the artist himself. There was nothing mythical about the faces Leonardo had painted; all of his apostles--even his Christ--had been modeled from people the artist knew or had observed. Leonardo had created a parable of their time: the good men disclaiming “Surely not I,” no less horrified by their own secret guilt than Judas was by the certainty of his. Beatrice looked at the face of Christ, supposedly drawn from the young Cardinal of Mortara but with an unformed innocence wholly lacking in the Cardinal’s worldly prettiness. Nothing has changed, Beatrice thought, not in the fourteen and a half centuries since Christ gave his body and blood. The good men still protest that evil is not among them, the evil men claim their reward, and the innocents die.

She turned and walked out. The slanting late afternoon sun cast a sheen over the small, cobbled piazza in front of the church. She stood for a moment in the light. She had prayed in Santa Maria delle Grazie every day since Bianca’s death. But she debated going in today simply because she didn’t think she would have the strength to leave. She recalled what Eesh had once told her about the terrible exhaustion of despair, the unbearable effort required to sustain the lie of life. The lie of life. Beatrice decided to go in, if only because she didn’t care if she ever left.

The altar, directly beneath the dome, was lit with dozens of memorial candles; a softer light fell from the windows high above. The first time Beatrice had seen the new, cleanly engraved slab right in front of the altar, the torment had been unimaginable: Bianca was in there beneath it, and she knew she would never hold her again. And somehow Mama had been in there too. But after visiting Bianca every day for the past six weeks, she now found the huge, pinkish-gray slab curiously reassuring. It was Bianca’s fortress, guarding her from a world of pain and darkness. Bianca was untouchable now. No one would ever hurt her again.

Beatrice knelt on the wooden platform just beyond Bianca’s slab, resting her arms on the black onyx altar railing. At the altar table a white-robed priest labored over Mass, chanting and genuflecting with dreary efficiency. She glanced up at the round windows circling the dome above her, a ring of softly glowing suns. That was where Bianca had gone. Into the light. She was pure and innocent, and she had flown at once into the Supreme Light, to bask beneath the ineffable face of God. Bianca was happy and loved. Those she had left behind grieved for themselves, because they were still falling into darkness.

The lie of life. Beatrice thought of the hypocrites in Dante’s eighth circle of Hell, condemned to trudge through eternity in massive leaden cassocks. But in truth all the living wore the crushing cloak of lies, simply because they went on living. They promised their children peace when they could give them only wars, they promised each other love when they could offer only betrayal. The future had once promised Beatrice hope, but now she could see only the inevitability of her despair. The Emperor had abandoned Italy in disgust, and now the French were openly recruiting mercenaries for a new Italian campaign in the spring, an invasion with the sole objective of conquering Milan. Lucrezia was having his baby. Beatrice had confirmed that rumor just this morning. Now even her boys brought her sorrow. They would grow up like Eesh, watching their father love another woman. And soon she would have to lie to them, or otherwise tell them the truth: that in this journey into darkness good men suffer the woes of damnation and evil men prosper.

She looked up again at the glowing ring of windows far above her. Go, said a forbidden yet shockingly familiar voice. Fly up there. Take your little girl away from this. The voice became a tantalizing aria, an angelic siren song, luring her from her pain. The light began to draw her up like a luminous cyclone, lifting her out of her leaden shell. Her limbs became weightless, free, ready to fly. Let go, she pleaded to the last vestiges of her earth-bound body. I am ready. Let me go.

But she could not fly. The light dimmed, and the weight settled back around her. It was not the burden of life’s lies that bound her to earth, but a desire to fall all the way to the dark center of evil, to see at the end the only truth life allowed. To look into the face of Satan and see if it was her own.

“In a week I must go into confinement,” Beatrice called out above the frantic melody of a
moresca.
“Until then we will have a
festa
every night! I have sent for everyone! Tonight we will bury our cares and grief!”

Beatrice’s lady-in-waiting Dorotea nodded eager agreement, her violet-tinted blue eyes as hungry as her pet cheetah’s. Eyes that mirrored the mood of the entire court for the past few weeks. The mourning over the universally beloved Bianca had been replaced by a foreboding. The empty treasury and the new French ambitions were common knowledge. If Fortune intended to turn against them, they could no longer deter or postpone her wrath. They could only respond with vicious self-indulgence.

Once again their Duchess would lead them in their time of peril. Beatrice had brought more than a dozen musicians into her rooms. Lutes, woodwinds,
trombone,
clavichord, even two Spanish-style guitars--the ensemble designed to inflame eager passions rather than soothe tortured spirits. The best wines had been taken from the cellars, the finest Murano glass goblets would shatter on the floor. To make the anticipated sexual melee yet more interesting, some of the
buffone
had been dressed like women. Dwarfs raced through the rooms. The aggressive laughter of the tautly strung women competed with the spinning melody of the music.

By half-past seven the rooms were so crowded with courtiers and ladies that it seemed there wasn’t air left to breathe, only the intoxicating ether of abandon. Spinning circles of dancers formed, broke apart, and re-formed. Pearl-studded satin headbands went askew, plump breasts trembled in plunging bodices, hands roamed openly over bare flesh. Clusters of laughing ladies wagered on who would be first to make love in front of everyone, with whom and how, and when. The first goblet was thrown against the floor.

“You know who is missing!” Beatrice shouted to Dorotea. She pulled her lady away from the papal ambassador, a tall, horse-faced man who had become notorious for switching identities with his chamberlain just before the consummation of an affair with a necessarily besotted paramour; apparently the ambassador preferred to hide in a chest at the foot of the bed and listen. Beatrice put her lips to Dorotea’s ear and whispered. Dorotea laughed wickedly and ran out through the antechamber.

A half hour later someone observed that Beatrice was nowhere to be found. “Where is our Duchess?” another reveler yelled drunkenly. “Our muse!” But there were other attractions, and the dancers whirled on.

A few minutes afterward the entrance of the evening occurred. Galeazzo di Sanseverino moved through the crush, the men stepping respectfully aside, the women pressing closer. “Galeazzzz,” the ladies hissed like snakes, shameless participants in a lottery. Galeazz’s features were as Apollonian as ever, but he had dyed his hair black, and there was a slight darkening around his eyes, a hint of mortality. He glanced nervously about the room. He had taken a risk in coming here, but then he was fond of this kind of risk.

After a few perfunctory exchanges Galeazz excused himself and went to the lavatory adjacent to Beatrice’s bedroom. He shut the door quickly behind him. A scented taper burned in a little brass urn on the privy seat, casting enough light to illuminate the shadowy form of his paramour. Her back was to him. He waited.

The woman turned. “Galeazz,” she said.

Galeazz jumped as if he’d heard a corpse speak.

“I knew you would come, even at the risk of seeing me. Haven’t you made love to a different woman in every lavatory in this
castello?”

“Your Highness . . . ,” Galeazz said plaintively.

Beatrice stepped forward until her swollen belly almost touched him. “I’m sorry to disappoint you. You were expecting Madonna Dorotea. Why don’t you fuck me instead? Haven’t I heard that you like to get pregnant women on their knees and see if you can make their babies kick?”

Galeazz said nothing. The muffled music and laughter went on outside.

Suddenly Beatrice pounded on his chest, a massive, thudding blow that pushed him back a step. “She was my baby,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “She was my girl. You killed her, you bastard!” She pounded his chest again. “You could have loved her, and instead you killed her!”

“No one--”

“No one suffered more than you. I know. My husband assured me of that. But then my husband never could see behind the shining armor of your hypocrisy.” She gave a nasty laugh. “Perhaps he could only see the reflection of his own vanity. Perhaps that is all any of us saw. Who else have you killed, Galeazz?”

Galeazz stepped back toward the door, “Your Highness, I think--”

Beatrice lunged at him and pressed her hunting knife to his throat. He stiffened with pain as the point penetrated the soft skin beneath his jaw, but he made no effort to resist.

“I want to know who killed Gian. Who did it and who ordered it.”

He said nothing, and she jabbed the point of the knife in again. “You can tell me here, or you can tell me down below. In the dungeons. I will have you strapped to the wheel and your feet roasted until you tell me. And if you think my husband will be able to save you, you are wrong. He isn’t even here tonight. He has bought his whore a
palazzo
in town, for her convenience when she goes shopping. They are sleeping there tonight.”

“Bernardino da Corte poisoned him,” Galeazz said in a strangled voice. “I ordered it. I ordered it because Isabella told me what she intended to do. She thought she could convince me to support her. I knew then that the only way to stop Gian from abdicating was to kill him.”

“Did my husband know?”

“He didn’t order it. I ordered it.”

“Did he know?”

“No.”

“Was it ever discussed?”

Galeazz hesitated. “Yes. But your husband said he would never permit it.”

She felt the truth then, a cold trickling inside her. “But you knew that he wanted it. If he’d had the courage he would have ordered it. You knew that. And when it was done he knew that you had done it.”

“He never asked,” Galeazz protested. “I swear he never did.”

“My husband never asked because he was afraid you would tell him the truth. Because then he would have had to face his own guilt.” Because then my husband would have had to look up at the face of Satan and recognize his own. Then Beatrice asked herself, Was my denial any less vehement than his? I suspected and too easily accepted any reason to dismiss my suspicions.

She lowered the knife, then let it drop to the floor. A moment before, she’d believed that she could kill Galeazz. Now she could not even hate him. She had an image of all of them sitting at a table like the apostles in Leonardo’s
Last Supper:
herself and her husband, Eesh, Galeazz and Bernardino, King Charles and Orleans, Bona, Alfonso and Ferrante, Ser Privolo and the Doge. The face of Christ was Gian’s. Perhaps dark-faced Bernardino had been Gian’s Judas, but they had all schemed for Gian’s betrayal in one way or another, had all been capable of his murder. She knew the protest they’d all recited, because she had said it to herself a thousand times. Surely not I. Surely, Master, I am not capable of such a thing. But they had all poisoned Gian, they had all slaughtered the thousands of other innocents who had perished in the war. And they had all poisoned their own souls.

She pushed Galeazz aside and opened the door. The renewed blare of the music heralded her arrival in some harsh new realm. Everything was wrong: the colors too garish, the mouths of the revelers distorted, their laughs like arrows in her womb. She wanted to scream to everyone to get out, but she was afraid to be alone with herself.

Beatrice joined a spinning circle of dancers, finding escape in her old refuge of motion. She shouted for the musicians to increase the tempo, trying to blur the excruciating colors. She remembered the May Day when she and Galeazz had danced on the whirling rim of fate, with every choice possible, every destiny a brilliant shooting star. Now the circle had closed, and all the stars had fallen from the sky. Every choice had been Fortune’s deceit, Fortune’s fraud. There was nothing left to do but spin, waiting for the darkness, waiting for the end.

A deep, stinging pain pierced her womb and she lost control of her feet, falling, tumbling off the spinning wheel. When she finally stopped she was on the floor, watching a frantic mosaic of hose-clad legs and swishing velvet skirts. The music lost its rhythm and then piece by piece stopped, the clavichord the last instrument to fall silent, a sad plinking of isolated notes. Men shouted, some women screamed. They came to her, bending down to show her their horrible faces. Why? she thought. Why?

She felt the warm gush between her legs. At first she imagined she had wet herself, and that was why they all looked so horrified. Then she knew. Dear God, she pleaded as the room began to spin. My little girl. Please, God, not my baby girl.