The Second Duchess (45 page)

He didn’t know la Cavalla had found the secret painting! He didn’t know no matter what he did, the duke was going to find him and rip his
coglioni
off. He could make la Cavalla disappear a thousand times, and it wouldn’t do him any good.

I
was a child again, seven or eight years old, in the austere old imperial nursery in Innsbruck. My nurse was making
milchreis
, rice pudding, my favorite supper. Thump-thump-thump went the wooden spoon in the pan as she stirred it and stirred it. Each stroke made a thick wet swishing sound. Milk and rice and eggs and sugar, and then the reddish-brown dusting of cinnamon. When it was finished we would share it, Margareta and Ursula and Helena and I, because we were all too young to eat supper anywhere but in the nursery.

I loved the cinnamon. Cinnamon—

—
charmingly childlike freckles like a dusting of cinnamon over her nose and forehead
—

A face that didn’t belong in the nursery. Didn’t belong in the dream at all.

Radiant. Smiling. Wrong, so wrong.

I opened my eyes.

Flickering darkness. One torch. Women’s faces, appearing to move in smoky ripples of light. The sound. Stirring, squelching. Not
milchreis
, then. Not the nursery in Innsbruck.

Where? What?

Holy Virgin, my head hurt. My mouth was as dry and bitter as bone.

I pushed myself up on my hands and looked around. A patterned marble floor, under a film of white dust. Familiar. Why was I lying on the floor in the ducal chapel? The women’s faces—they were not women at all, but Frà Pandolf’s frescoes, Saint Elizabeth and Saint Anne and the Virgin as a child. There was a woman, though, a real one, over by the niches where the statues were to be placed—

My mind kept slipping away from me. I recollected myself. There was a woman, tall and thick-bodied, over by the niches. She was mixing something in a bucket.

“You,” I said. My voice was hoarse, and the effort to speak hurt my throat. “Woman. I do not know how I came to be here, but I am not well. Water, I beg you, and then find my own ladies. I am the duchess, and I promise you will not be the poorer for it.”

She straightened and turned around.

I knew her.

But—

Reddish-brown hair and a bristling beard, black eyes, a foxy pointed nose, a self-satisfied smile.

Not a woman at all.

Frà Pandolf in his Franciscan habit. Not so much different, really, from a townswoman’s dress.

The Berlingaccio revels, the flap and flare of torches in the cold night air. Women in one courtyard, men in another. Crezia and Elisabetta Bellinceno, both punctiliously correct. Nora wineflown and sobbing, not correct at all. Townswomen pressing in, demanding the favors due them. Smells and noise and confusion. A woman handing me an armful of flowers, and me breathing deep, desperately grateful for the fresh sweetness.

Tommasina Vasari’s voice, whispering from the other side of death:
any piece of fruit, any flower you are offered might be poisoned. . . .

He had worn a woman’s dress, so he could mingle with the other women. Probably over his habit, so it could be easily pulled off and discarded. He had wrapped a woman’s coif over his face and beard. He had given me flowers.

“You poisoned the flowers,” I said.

He laughed. “Not I, Serenissima
.
You’re still alive, aren’t you? A sleeping-powder, no more—the apothecary wanted too much gold for the real poison.”

What did he want? Why had he brought me here?

“I will give you money,” I said. “You can go away, change your name—”

“She said the same. ‘Come away, we will have money, we will change our names.’ Can’t you duchesses understand I don’t want to go away, and I don’t want to change my name? My name—that’s what I value above all else.”

He says he will kill me before he gives up his art for me.
Nora joined the mad gabbling in my head. For Tasso, it had been only words, only theatrics. For Frà Pandolf, it had been deadly serious.

I saw her, all in her habit and cowl, bending over Sodona’s bed and pressing the pillow against her face.
Tommasina Vasari had seen exactly what she had described, a figure in a monastic habit smothering her mistress. What difference would there be, in a nighttime silhouette, between thickset, rawboned Sister Orsola and Frà Pandolf?

I struggled to throw off the effects of the soporific powder. “I will say nothing. Let me go now and no one will ever know.”

He picked up a mallet and tossed it from one hand to the other as if testing its weight. “Don’t be a fool,” he said. “There’s not a woman in the world who can keep a secret.”

“Surely there is something you want.”

“What I want is for the court to be like it was before you arrived and began poking your long Habsburg nose where it didn’t belong. I want you and your questions to disappear, and the duke to have a new mystery to consume him. Then I’ll finish the chapel and increase my renown, and the name of Frà Pandolf will live forever.”

“It is you who are a fool.” I pushed myself to my feet, staggered, and fell to my knees again. I was still dizzy, and my elaborate Berlingaccio costume impeded me. The diamonds of Eleonora of Naples felt like a circlet of thorns around my forehead. I tried again to get up, and this time I succeeded. “It will make no difference if I disappear. The duke already—”

The shock of the blow snapped my head around. The floor came up and cracked into my hands and knees. There was a moment of nothing but shock and then it hurt, Holy Virgin, it hurt like nothing I had ever felt before. The whole side of my face pounded with agony. I think I vomited. Or perhaps it was blood dripping down from my nose and lips.

“Be silent,” the Franciscan said, as if from far away. “I could kill you now if I wanted another mortal sin on my soul, but I’ve got enough of those already. I’ll be ready for you in a moment.”

He went back to his stirring. Swish-thump, swish-thump, swish-thump.

Think. Do not tell him the duke has already seen the secret portrait of Lucrezia de’ Medici, the duke’s men are already searching for him, and this plan of his, whatever it is, is hopeless. If he knows that, he will kill you quickly. Let him believe he is still in the duke’s favor, and look about for a way to escape.

I lifted my head carefully. How far to the doorway? Could I manage it without being struck down again? And what was that heap of clothing? Was it the woman’s dress he had used to insinuate himself into the women’s revels?

A low groan. For a dizzy moment I thought Frà Pandolf himself had been taken ill, and I would have my chance to escape after all. Then I realized the heap of clothing was not just clothing but another woman in a gown and tunic. There was blood like a dark red mantle wrapped around her head and flung out over the floor. My first thought was that it was one of my ladies, Katharina or Domenica or Nicoletta. But none of them would wear such rough clothes.

Then I saw my own ruby ring on the woman’s finger.

Sister Orsola.

Of course. I had been right. Frà Pandolf was her lover from about the court. Frà Pandolf was the second thing she had shared with Lucrezia de’ Medici.

But if they were lovers, why was she lying on the floor groaning?

“All right, Orsolina.” It was the Franciscan. “You first.”

He grasped her by the shoulders and heaved her up, and I saw her face. It was indeed Sister Orsola, although I might not have known her if I had not recognized the ring. Her face was a mask of blood, her nose sickeningly misshapen, her left cheekbone crushed. I retched again and put my face down against the cold marble of the floor.

He dragged her to one of the niches along the side wall, where statues cast by Claus of Innsbruck were intended to stand. There was a low wall of brick built up before the niche, of a height to reach to a man’s knees. Why would he do that? How would the bronze be settled in the niche, if there was mortared brick blocking the way?

He dropped Sister Orsola into the niche, behind the wall. I heard her gasp and sob.

“Now you, Serenissima. Up you go.”

I screamed when he lifted me, screamed as loudly as I could. It was like trying to scream in a dream—no matter how frantic my gasps for breath, no matter how violently I forced the air out, little sound was made. I screamed again and again. He laughed.

I kicked and scratched and bit like a child, but he did not care. He stuffed me down behind the wall, next to Sister Orsola. My jeweled skirts filled up so much of the space it was hard to move.

To my horror, he stroked my cheek softly.

“You do have pretty hair,” he said. “Take comfort,
mia cara.
My painting of you will live through the ages—the duchess who vanished into thin air—the duchess who ran away—who knows what they will say? They will look at the painting and tell a hundred stories, a thousand, and always they will say, ‘It was Frà Pandolf, the magnificent Franciscan, who made her live.’ ”

“Get your hand away from me,” I said through clenched teeth. “The duke will find you and tear you to pieces.”

“He’ll never know. This is your own fault—if you hadn’t tried to rake the midden of Duchess Lucrezia’s death, I’d have no quarrel with you.”

Rather than dignify that with an answer, I grasped the top of the wall and tried to drag myself out of the niche. He picked up a mallet—blood on it, thick, dark blood . . . oh Holy Virgin, that was what he had used then, her face, my face—swung it hard and smashed my fingers.

 

 

WHEN I CAME to myself again, he had built the wall high enough that I could just see over the top. The mortar—that was what he had been stirring. I cradled my left hand against my breast and watched him as he fitted a brick into the half-finished top row. The mortar oozed out like clotted cream. I could smell it—like wet dust, with a cold bite of quicklime.