The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi (4 page)

“Why do you stop reading?” the princess asked.

“Because I have heard of Harun al-Rashid. More than once.”

“You have read the story of my ancestor before?”

“No. But the name Harun al-Rashid comes from a poem my mother used to read aloud to Madonna Isabella D’Este and her ladies in Rome. The story is all about the Emperor Charlemagne and his paladins. It is called
Orlando Furioso.
”

She was noticeably unimpressed. “And what has this French emperor to do with my ancestor Harun al-Rashid?” she inquired.

“Harun was a Saracen,” Danilo explained politely. “He was an enemy of the Christian emperor.”

“Harun was a great caliph.” She drew herself up proudly. “He was the fifth son of Abbas, brother of Caliph Musa al-Hadji, son of al-Mansur, and Commander of the Faithful. He is a great hero in my family.”

“He was the enemy of my forebears,” the boy informed her. They were both on their feet now, glaring at one another.

“Then I, too, am your enemy,” she declared.

“And I am your enemy,” he retorted.

When she heard this, she wheeled around and stormed out of the room, leaving Danilo not entirely certain of what had happened but feeling somehow at fault.

“Princess!” he shouted after her.

He caught her before she reached the main classroom. “Please forgive me for raising my voice to you. I must apologize.”

She did not lift her eyes to meet his.

“You have been very kind to give me so much of your time and knowledge,” he went on. “I have repaid you with rudeness. Perhaps, if you will allow me to explain myself . . .”

She raised her eyes.

“You see, I have a personal interest in the Emperor Charlemagne,” he explained. “His paladins were the first knights of chivalry. And my father was — is — a knight.”

“Your father, the doctor, is a knight?”

“My legal father, the doctor, was wounded in battle at Pavia while serving King Francis the First of France. The King sent him home to Venice in care of a member of his court, Lord Pirro Gonzaga. My mother was overwhelmed with gratitude to this knight. Nine months later I was born. I am the first child to be born in the Venetian ghetto.”

This was the kind of story the princess had been educated to appreciate. “Are you saying,” she asked, “that your blood father is not the doctor but a Christian knight?”

There was still time to deny the truth that he had inadvertently revealed. But Danilo was urged on by his deep pride in his blood heritage.

“I am the son of a brave Christian knight and I am what is called a ‘love child,’” he told her.

Not surprisingly, the revelation of his bastardy hardly caused a ripple in the mind of the princess. She clapped her hands delightedly. To her, reared in the harem, irregularities regarding parentage were the stuff of everyday life. She took his soulful confession as just another of the countless tales of illicit love told in
The Thousand and One Nights.

“Your apology is accepted.” She held out her hand in a gesture of forgiveness. “I also raised my voice to you. But, like you, I have a personal interest in Harun al-Rashid. As Commander in Chief of the Faithful, he was ancestor and hero to my father, who himself is now Commander in Chief of the Faithful. We do not like to hear Harun referred to as a Saracen. The last foreigner who spoke that word in my father’s presence lost his head for it. If you take my advice, you will not use the word Saracen in this court unless you fancy seeing your head mounted on a pike outside of the Gate of Felicity.”

She hesitated, as if troubled by what she had just said, then smiled cheerily and added, “I misspoke. You could hardly see your own head if it was on a pike, could you?” And, with a toss of her curls, she flounced off, giggling.

Strange girl. Mind you, she did not seem to think any less of him for his bastardy. Of course, to a girl who cut her baby teeth on
The Thousand and One Nights
, secret paternity could hardly be a novelty. Come to think of it, if Danilo had to make a reckless disclosure to anyone, he couldn’t have chosen a better recipient. Still, he had revealed a fact that Judah del Medigo had not seen fit to share with his patron, the Sultan — the fact that his recently arrived son had been fathered by another man. And princes do not like to be lied to. Not that the doctor had actually lied, but the Sultan might not see it that way. And it was not his son’s place to reveal his father’s secret.

The echo of his mother’s voice had undone Danilo. Hearing it in his head saying the name Harun al-Rashid had brought on a rush of longing so fierce that he had to bite his lip — hard — to hold back his tears. Then, as quickly as it had descended, his grief was overcome by fear. What if Princess Saida should happen to mention the identity of his true father to her grandmother, the Valide Sultan? And what if the Valide should mention it to her son, the Sultan? It would be a neat bit of gossip to pass on to him. And, in a world rife with plots and betrayals and deceit, the Sultan could easily get the wrong impression.

First thing the next morning Danilo pulled the princess aside.

“I shouldn’t have told you about my blood father, but I did,” he confessed. “Now I must ask you to keep the confidence.”

To his surprise, she agreed without hesitation. That ought to have been the end of it. But that night he dreamed he was a boy again in Marchesana Isabella’s Roman salon, pressed into service as a page during his mother’s reading of the French romances that her patroness doted on. Even in the dream, he could feel the scratchy surface of the starched white
camicia
he wore on those occasions, and the weight of the heavy silver salver that it took all his boyish strength to hold steadily aloft as he offered glasses of spiced wine to the Marchesana’s
demoiselles
, to his mother (who liked to sip as she read), and to the great lady herself, fat and puffy but imposing nonetheless with her twisted strands of pearls and her bejeweled fingers.

From the square below could be heard the muffled sounds of the sack of a great city. Screams, curses, and blasts of powder seeped into his dream. And through it all, his mother continued to read from Ariosto’s poem,
Orlando Furioso
. Poetry was read aloud daily in Madonna Isabella’s court in Mantova, and — sack or no sack — she insisted on maintaining the ritual in Rome.

But suddenly, as happens in dreams, the drawing room was overrun with wild, black-haired Saracens who seemed to have climbed up the palace walls from the square below. They were led by the blackest and wildest of all: their leader, Harun al-Rashid. His mother had stopped reading. The
demoiselles
were screaming. Madonna Isabella swooned. Danilo woke up in a sweat.

The next day, when he came again to the name of Harun al-Rashid while reading, Danilo broke off and found himself once more confiding in the princess.

“It is the name that takes me back,” he explained. “When I read the name of Harun al-Rashid, I could hear it coming from my mother’s mouth. The Este family was very fond of French romances. They had a library full of them.”

She seemed puzzled, and indeed he was hard put to find a Turkish equivalent for the term
roman
. But now that the floodgates of memory were open, he had no will to stop the flow.

“You see,” he found himself telling her, “my mother was the private secretary to the Marchesana Isabella D’Este, wife of Marchese Francesco Gonzaga of Mantova.”

“Marchesana?” Her query was more of a conversational courtesy than an expression of interest.

“Marchesana is what you call the wife of a marchese.” Seeing no sign of comprehension, he decided that a degree or two of rank inflation was in order. “A sort of Italian princess,” he explained.

Now he had her attention. Princesses were something she understood.

“I was not aware that your mother was secretary to a princess.” She spoke with a new respect in her tone. “I thought she was just one of those clever Jewesses who go shopping for the ladies of the harem.”

“My mother was no bundle-woman,” he hastened to assure her. “Her name was Grazia dei Rossi. She translated many books into Italian from Latin and French and was renowned as a scholar.”

“And this princess she served?”

“Isabella D’Este is daughter to the Duke of Ferrara. In Europe they call her La Prima Donna del Mondo, the First Lady of the World.”

Saida nodded approvingly. Titles were something she also understood.

“The Lady Isabella and her family used to commission works of poetry.” He paused, then added, “As your father does.” Again he was greeted by a nod and a smile of approval.

“And my mother was in this lady’s service,” he went on, “when Ariosto dedicated his poem,
Orlando Furioso
, to Lady Isabella D’Este in honor of the birth of her first son. He even gave her name, Isabella, to one of his heroines.”

Better and better. The Ottomans were even more enthusiastic dynasts than the Estes, if that were possible.

In all the months since he had arrived at Topkapi Palace, Danilo had spoken to no one about his life in Italy, about his escape from Rome, or about his mother’s death. Now, having begun, he could not stop himself.

“I had a dream last night,” he found himself confiding — confiding! — in this girl. “I saw Harun al-Rashid breaking into Madonna Isabella’s salon during the sack of Rome.”

“I have heard of that unfortunate event,” she chimed in. “My father told me of it. But you are mistaken. Harun al-Rashid is not the villain of the piece. The attacker was King Charles of Spain, who calls himself the Holy Emperor even as he attacks his own Pontiff, Pope Sir Clement the Seven.”

She spoke this garbled version of these European titles with such assurance that it took all his patience to refrain from setting her straight.

But, this time, he took the high road. “Quite so, Princess,” he agreed. “Quite so.”

To which she responded, “Please tell me more about your dream.”

At this point, he might have excused himself from further confidences. But instead he went on.

“In my dream, I confused Harun al-Rashid with the true villains of the sack of Rome, the Emperor’s German soldiers, his
landsknechts
.”

“The so-called emperor,” she corrected him sweetly.

“I was brought up to think of Charles the Fifth as the Holy Roman emperor,” he advised her.

“The Venetian
bailo
told my father that people in Venice say that this Charles is neither holy, nor Roman, nor an emperor,” she said.

“They also say that in Rome,” he admitted, “but they still bow down to him. It all depends on how you look at him, doesn’t it?”

She sniffed.

Not about to be intimidated, he went on. “What my dream taught me is that you and I live in the same world, Princess. Although we speak different languages, our stories are inhabited by the same heroes and villains. We may see them differently, but we share them in our dreams.”

This was clearly a new thought to her, and she took several moments to consider it before she spoke. When she did, her voice was quiet and modest. “I would like to know some of these romances that you speak of. Especially the favorite story of your mother’s patroness — the Princess Isabella D’Este.”

“I could read that story to you,” he ventured. “My father, the doctor, keeps my mother’s manuscript of
Orlando Furioso
on his shelf.”

Again, she took a moment to consider, and during the silence a plan formed in his mind.

“What if I translate the story of Isabella from Italian into Turkish and read it to you?” he asked. “Then you can correct me as you do when I read stories aloud from
The Thousand and One Nights
. That way” — he was finding himself increasingly at home with the idea — “I will still be doing my Turkish lessons and you will be hearing one of my stories.”

By now, his hours spent with Princess Saida had given him a fair notion of what would suit her: the simple account of an event studded by incident, few digressions, and jeopardy lurking at every turn. And he seemed to have found these requirements in Ariosto’s tale of Princess Isabella — a story that had been Madonna Isabella D’Este’s favorite, a story with a heroine that the poet had named after the great lady herself. He set to work that very evening, full of zeal for the project and blissfully unaware of the pitfalls that lay in wait for him buried among Ariosto’s doubled quatrains.

What Danilo had not realized was that although Ariosto’s epic was a collection of many separate stories, the Italian poet had chosen to tell his stories not sequentially as in
The Thousand and One Nights
, but by picking them up and putting them down throughout the text the way a knitter saves out bundles of stitches for occasional use throughout a pattern. The task of sorting out a single story demanded patience and scholarship. And, in spite of his mother’s efforts to train him, Danilo del Medigo was neither patient nor scholarly.

Damn Harun al-Rashid! Damn Isabella! Damn the poet! Why had he made such a rash offer? He had been better off with Scheherazade, who turned out to be not nearly as boring as he had expected. Still, he could not bring himself to give up and admit failure, certainly not to a girl. Besides, something else held him to the task. He might be a bastard, but his mother was no
puttana
. Grazia dei Rossi had been a respected scribe and a true scholar, and in some way he had taken on this impossible task to honor Grazia the Scribe. Why?

Maybe because this was the kind of task his mother would have tackled readily and accomplished brilliantly. So he kept at it.

Meanwhile, Princess Saida was getting impatient. He began to work at his translation secretly, under a quilt, while his father was asleep. One night his candle set fire to his quilt. One day he fell asleep on the back of his horse. But when he finally reached the tragic end of the romance of the doomed Isabella and her lover, Zerbino, he was as certain as one who is in thrall to royal whims that this tale was just the bait to entice Saida into his world.