Duchessina - A Novel of Catherine de' Medici (3 page)

O
NLY A FEW
months after my fourth birthday, a far-off event altered the course of my life. Pope Leo's successor died after only a year in office—poison was suspected—and Cardinal Giulio rushed off to Rome, determined to get himself elected as the next pope. The household gathered to watch my uncle's departure from Florence in a splendid procession. I wasn't at all saddened. His heart, I felt, was cold and dry and had no room in it for me.

When the news was relayed back to Florence that Cardinal Giulio de' Medici had indeed been elected, the city rejoiced. He took the name Pope Clement VII and placed his good friend, blustering Cardinal Passerini, in charge of the Palazzo Medici and of my two cousins and me.

Now that he was pope, Clement instructed Passerini that he wished to have me live in the most splendid manner possible. I was given several new gowns and hooded cloaks, more servants to dress my hair and wait on me, a richly carved bed and thick mattress stuffed with wool, and a much grander apartment to make room for all of this. Naturally, I found all of these changes exciting.

“But why?” I asked—my favorite question.

“The Holy Father wants to show you off like a precious jewel,” Betta said, “to make you a more desirable marriage prospect when the time comes.”

“I have no need of marriage prospects,” I confided. “I'm going to marry Ippolito. But don't tell anyone. I don't want Alessandro to know.”

Betta rolled her eyes. “I won't breathe a word of it,” she promised.

I
T SEEMED THAT
Pope Clement was not the first to think about marriage prospects for me. When I mentioned it to Aunt Clarissa, she told me another story, beginning with the marriage of my parents.

“It came about like this,” she said. “Pope Leo decided to send his nephew, Lorenzo de' Medici, to the christening of the firstborn son of the king of France. Leo had already chosen a bride for Lorenzo: Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne, a cousin of the French king. Lorenzo was as handsome as Madeleine was beautiful. The moment they met, Madeleine fell madly in love with Lorenzo, and he with her. She was just sixteen. He was twenty-six. Three days later they were married.”

I savored every detail of their wedding: my father in a fur-trimmed doublet, my mother in a gown of aquamarine silk embroidered with pearls, her hair caught up in a garland of jeweled threads. As vivid in my mind as though it were a painting by Raphael, this was the sole memory I had of my parents.

“You were born a year after their wedding,” Clarissa continued. “And then we lost them both. When Pope Leo insisted that I leave you in Rome, I was terribly worried, for I had no idea what was going to happen to you. Because your mother was French-born, King François sent his ambassador to take you to live at his court. But you had inherited not only your mother's vast fortune but also your father's, and Leo was not about to hand the richest girl in the land over to the French! He'd begun to think of a suitable husband for you before you even cut your first tooth. He ordered a pretty little
cassone
to be made for you by the most talented wood-carver in Rome.”

I still had that
cassone,
a small wooden chest, richly carved and painted, in which I kept my two most precious possessions—my mother's ruby cross and my father's gold ring with the Medici seal.

Aunt Clarissa went on with the story. “Leo told me, ‘When she's wed, we'll see that she has a much larger one. Several of them! And we'll fill them with the finest silks, the most opulent jewels a Medici bride has ever owned.' So this is nothing new, Caterina. The subject will come up again and again, until Pope Clement finds you the best husband in the world.”

2

O
NCE
I
HAD PASSED
my fifth birthday, Cardinal Passerini assigned a tall, gaunt lay brother named Fra Matteo to be my tutor.

“I've never been a teacher,” Fra Matteo confessed on the first day we sat down together at a table in the cardinal's library. “Do you know how to read, Duchessina?”

“No,” I said. “Do you?”

His pale face colored a bit. “
Si,
” he said. He pulled a thick book from the shelves. I recognized the Holy Scriptures. “We may as well begin at the beginning.” He began to read aloud in Latin:
In principio creavit Deus celum et terram.
“In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.”

I followed his finger as he traced the marks on the page, but I didn't understand a thing. Then he explained about letters and words, and after a while I began to see how it all fit together. I was learning to read.

After I had been studying with Fra Matteo for several months, I asked him about a drawing that hung on a wall of the library. “What's that a picture of?” I asked.

“It's a map,” explained my tutor. “If you were an angel high up in heaven looking down on the earth, that's how it would appear to you.” With his long, bony finger he outlined the shape of a boot. “This is the Italian peninsula, and that's the sea almost surrounding it.”

He pointed out the location of Tuscany and Florence where we lived, and Rome where the pope lived, and the duchy of Urbino, from which my father had taken his title and I now took mine.

The map fascinated me. Every time I went to the cardinal's library for another lesson, I studied that map. One day I asked Fra Matteo what lay beyond its edges. He unrolled a map of Europe and showed me England and France and Spain. I gazed at it for a long time.

“My mother was from France,” I explained, and the sight of my mother's country so moved me that I came close to weeping. “Someday I'll go there.”

“Perhaps you shall,” said Fra Matteo, rolling up the map and directing my attention back to my studies.

N
EXT TO
B
ETTA
and Aunt Clarissa, my favorite person was Ippolito. I liked him immensely and watched for him,
hoping to find him alone so that I could have his attention and his kind smiles all to myself. Such moments were rare. But my feelings about horrid Alessandro only became worse as time passed. I wasn't the only one who avoided him. His nasty tongue and outbursts of temper kept everyone at a distance. I wondered how anyone could be so ill-humored.

I seldom left the palazzo, usually only to venture the few steps to the parish church of San Lorenzo in the company of several ladies—wealthy friends of Cardinal Passerini—and two Tartar slaves. The ladies, all heavily jeweled and veiled, generally ignored me, but their disinterest didn't bother me, for I wasn't much interested in
them.
I rarely saw children of my own age, except when my little journeys took me as far as Palazzo Strozzi, even larger and grander than our palazzo, to visit my aunt Clarissa and her husband Filippo and their four sons, my real cousins. When Passerini discovered how much I looked forward to these visits, he used them as a reward, meted out for good behavior, withheld when I displeased him. This angered me and taught me to deceive when necessary and admit to nothing.

My eldest Strozzi cousin, Piero, a serious boy, much like his father, was four years older than I. The next, Leone, sweet tempered but not terribly bright, was just a year older. Lighthearted Lorenzo was younger, and Roberto was an infant still living in the home of a wet nurse in the country to be cared for until he was weaned.
Once her duty to produce several Strozzi sons had been fulfilled, Clarissa declared her longing for a girl.

“I've always wanted a daughter,” she told me. “Every night I pray to the Holy Mother that I may be blessed with one—or, better yet, more than one! Naturally, though, my husband is pleased, as any banker would be, that sons don't require dowries in order to marry well.” She leaned close and hugged me. “But I do believe, Caterina, that a gracious God has sent you to soothe my heart that aches so for a little girl!”

If I'd been allowed, I would have gone in an instant to live with my aunt and her family. I sometimes dreamed of that. But such a thing was clearly impossible for a child to ask for—I didn't even think to mention my yearning to Passerini. I had to learn to be content within my small, restricted world: my sumptuous suite of rooms, with occasional escapes to the courtyard, the kitchen, the garden, and the chapel.

The kitchen was where I watched the bustling activity and listened to the raucous chatter of the cooks and bakers who prepared the two big meals served each day, the first at midday and another in early evening. In the courtyard I observed the comings and goings of high-ranking visitors to Cardinal Passerini, although why anyone would want to spend time with him I could not imagine. In the garden I enjoyed the birds and flowers and the small creatures that made their home there. But the place I came to know and to love most dearly was the Chapel of the Magi.

The small, windowless chamber was lighted only by flickering candles. On each wall a painting on plaster showed a part of the procession led by the magi, wise men from the East, on their way to Bethlehem to worship the infant Jesus.

The men wore fine garments richly embroidered and bejeweled. Their horses pranced through green wooded hills, and birds soared across an azure sky. Horses, dogs, deer, cattle, sheep, even camels and a cheetah, crowded the frescoes that covered three walls of the chapel. Candlelight reflected on the gilded crowns and the silver tips of lances.

The artist had portrayed everyone in the procession, even the three wise men, as citizens of Florence, many of them prominent members of the Medici family. Aunt Clarissa identified some of them. A handsome boy with blond curls and blue eyes, dressed in white brocade, rode a high-stepping white charger. Aunt Clarissa insisted that the boy, representing the youngest of the wise men, was supposedly
Il Magnifico.

“He looks nothing like the portraits I remember from my childhood,” she mused. “But that's who everyone says he is.”

The procession followed that golden-haired boy whoever he was. How I would have liked to have
him
as my friend!

The Chapel of the Magi became for me a secret treasure—a chamber where I could lose myself in the fantastical scenes and imagine myself as a part of them.

Princes, churchmen, shepherds, citizens, slaves—but nowhere in the entire procession could I find a single grown woman, or a young maiden, or a little girl like me. Maybe they had all been left behind in the large white castle at the top of the hill in the distance, watching the procession from one of the narrow windows. And so I gave myself a place in the midst of the procession—nothing too large or prominent, just a small figure off to one side, riding behind the golden-haired boy. I half closed my eyes and dreamed that I was there, dressed in silks and velvet and pearls, mounted on a fine white horse—Caterina de' Medici,
la duchessina,
on her way to worship the Christ child!

One day as I was lost in my fantastic dream, the door of the chapel flew open, and a short, wiry man with a crown of wild, uncombed hair loomed in the doorway. I shrank myself as small as I could in one of the carved wooden choir seats, hoping to escape notice. But the chapel was not large, and he quickly spotted me.

“Ha! I've caught a little mouse!” he boomed in a voice that seemed too big for his small size. “Come here, little mouse.”

Frightened, I sat perfectly still, as though made of stone.

“Well, then,” he said, “at least tell me: What do you think of all of this?” He waved his arms at the frescoes.

“I very much admire them,” I admitted cautiously.

“Oh, you admire them, do you? And what would you say, little mouse, if I told you the whole lot isn't worth a fig? Pretty pictures, that's all they amount to. Scarcely even art, let alone
great
art.”

“I'd say that you are wrong, because I'm quite fond of them,” I said. Still a little frightened, I went a bold step further: “And I would like to be a part of them.”