Duchess of Milan (22 page)

She read the passage again and again, until her eyes ached from the flickering lamplight. A sea creature. Half beast, half weed. She could no longer deny it. She had known it, and had fought it, for too many agonizing days and nights. The thing was in her, a bestial, thorny, strangling growth. Had it been in her long enough to know itself, to contemplate its terrible purpose? That did not matter. This creature would never have a human soul. Conceived without love, fashioned from the blood of a man who threatened everything she did love, the thing would only become more monstrous. It would kill her, of course, then it would kill Eesh, and finally its monstrous tendrils would reach out and destroy little Francesco.

Beatrice returned the book to her cabinet and opened the wooden storage chest at the end of her bed. The smell of the rose water sprinkled over the clothes was sickeningly sweet. Her hunting knife lay atop a stack of neatly folded chemises. She closed the chest and lay down on the bed. With her right hand she gripped the knife so that the gold, finial-like pommel projected from the bottom of her fist. She pounded the pommel into her bare abdomen. The first blow was tentative, but she pummeled herself again and again, her blows rising quickly in ferocity until her skin seared with pain and her bowels ached. Again and again, until she believed she would lose consciousness from the pain, that she would awaken to her victory and her husband’s defeat . . .

Some thread of reason finally saw the futility of this and drained the vehemence from her arm. She gave up with a vicious explosion, burying the blade of the knife in her mattress. She held a pillow to her face and screamed until she imagined herself suffocating in her own superheated rage. And then she cried. She had been trying to destroy the thing for weeks now, she admitted to herself, but its brute resilience had defeated her. Soon it would have a soul, soon it would know its own purpose and begin to kill.

Beatrice lay on her face for a long while, her thoughts wheeling, an awful humming in her ears, like a dozen trombones endlessly playing the same discordant note. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she walked to the big arched window facing Pavia and cracked open the shutters. The city lay before her under a quarter moon. Scores of slender rectangular towers stood like trunks in a ghostly geometric forest. Torches flickered from the flat tops of some of the towers, probably as guides to travelers, since the original defensive function of the brick spires, each of which represented a different noble family, had long ago been subverted by the Dukes of Milan. Beatrice heard vague shouting from the vicinity of the university, but the noise, more spectral than real, seemed to emphasize the loneliness of the darkened city.

She brought her face away from the glass. Her own reflection stared back, a phantom wavering over the flaming beacons. Her eyes were black orbits with a spark of fire at their center.

It has to die, she told herself, even if I die with it.

CHAPTER 18

The kitchen of the Castello Visconteo in Pavia was an enormous two-story food factory, busy with dozens of cooks, serving maids, and butchers, as well as a continuous traffic in assorted smiths, liverymen, grooms, game wardens, clerks, and butlers pursuing between-meals favors, both culinary and sexual, from the kitchen maids. The walls of the kitchen were entirely covered to the coffered rafters with utensils and supplies: hundreds of majolica and embossed pewter plates set in rows on the upper shelves; the next tier of shelves filled with porcelain and glass ewers, candlesticks, and goblets; and beneath that oaken cupboards stocked with gleaming silver tableware, plates of eggs, flasks of wine, baskets of fruit, crates of clucking capons. The hooded fireplace was as big as a cottage; attendants pumped the massive leather bellows and cranked rows of gear-driven spits studded with sizzling carcasses. Long tables filled the center of the room, crowded with women slicing fruit, rolling pastry dough, or plucking capons. At a small table in a corner, two butlers meticulously folded white linen napkins with hundreds of tiny creases, transforming them into strikingly naturalistic peacocks.

The center of attention was Scappi, the butcher, a small man with bulging forearms and a rattling singsong voice. Scappi methodically took a capon from his assistant, swiftly cleaved its head off, and passed the kicking amputee to another assistant, who let the blood drain into a clay urn before turning the headless corpse over to the serving maids for plucking.

“A man went to a priest to confess his sins,” Scappi said, his voice raised as if each person in the kitchen was listening to him; most of them were. “He confessed to the father that he had stolen from a man, but this man had in return stolen something more valuable from him. So the priest said to him, ‘One sin balances the other. You are absolved.’

“So the man went on and told the priest how he had beaten a man with a club, but the man had struck him back. ‘One sin balances the other,’ said the priest. ‘You are absolved.’ This went on for some time, the man reciting his sins and how they were repaid in kind, the priest each time absolving him.”

Scappi held up a struggling capon by the neck and flourished his cleaver. “So finally the man said, ‘I have but one sin left, but it causes me the deepest shame, for it is a sin against you, Father.’ The man was almost too ashamed even to speak of this offense, but the priest kept urging him to make a full confession. Finally the man submitted. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘I have slept with your sister.’ “

The cleaver thudded into the chopping block, and Scappi’s voice crescendoed. “To this the priest replied, ‘Don’t be concerned, my son. As is the case with your previous sins, one balances the other. I have slept with your sister a half-dozen times. You are absolved.’ “

The kitchen resounded with laughter, shrieks, catcalls, and follow-up jests about oversexed priests. Beatrice had heard the entire joke from the hall, and she waited until the laughter subsided, knowing that her entrance would immediately dampen the high spirits. She strolled as casually as she could through the open door that led to the dining hall. The heat, generated by the enormous fire and compounded by the sweltering climate, almost made her choke. Her presence quickly hushed the banter. All of the women curtsied, and the men dipped to one knee.

Beatrice whisked her hands the way she had seen her mother do countless times, meaning that everyone should ignore her and return to work. The conversation picked up, but cautiously. She wandered over to a group of kitchen maids cleaning fresh trout and pickling live eels in barrels of wine. There were five of them, ranging from adolescents to a stout woman her mother’s age. Perspiration beaded their faces and soaked through their linen blouses. They curtsied again at her approach.

Peering into a bucket half full of sluggish black eels, Beatrice offered, “Ser Scappi is quite a wit.”

The kitchen maids nodded respectfully and continued working, but Beatrice could tell they were impressed that she knew the name of even one kitchen worker. The oldest woman, her immense bosom straining against her muslin apron, glanced up as she slit the belly of a trout. She had a blunt nose and a distinct mustache.

“I don’t know why everyone is so offended by the excesses of the priests,” Beatrice said wryly. “You’ve heard, haven’t you, how word of such scandals reached the Heavenly Father, who immediately dispatched an angel to investigate. The angel selected a priest known for his sinfulness--perhaps the very priest Ser Scappi has told us about--and alighted before him as he dined in his refectory, demanding that he offer proof of any good works he had performed that might compensate for his many transgressions. Well, this priest, being a clever man, told the angel, ‘Come, I will show you the myriad acts of charity I have performed in this town.’ And so he led the angel out into the streets and stopped among a group of gamblers tossing dice in the piazza. After the gamblers had greeted the priest familiarly, the priest informed them that the gentleman with him was an angel of the Lord, and could they tell said angel whether or not their priest was a charitable man? The gamblers immediately doffed their caps, and one of them said, ‘Father, I can swear before God that no man has given us as many gold ducats as has yourself.’

The stout kitchen maid snorted and nodded her head.

“So the priest led the angel to the town wine merchant, the town butcher, and the town cloth merchant, and each time he asked the same question and received the same answer: ‘Father, no man has given us as many coppers and ducats as has yourself “ Now all the maids were smirking and responding. “The angel kept a careful accounting of these myriad acts of charity, and when the priest had been throughout the town, the angel informed him that considerable as his chanties were, they were still short of the penance required for his sins. And that being the case, the errant priest could expect no lessening in the severity of God’s punishment.

“Rather than casting up his hands and begging to be spared the woes of Hell, the priest smiled and said, ‘Ah, Magnificence, I have saved my most important work for last.’ He quickly led the angel to the town whorehouse, where he found the woman who ran the establishment. The
meretrice
listened to the priest’s inquiry, and then pointed to the immense
palazzo
in which her business was conducted. ‘Not only do you provide the bread and eggs and capons to feed a dozen young women, Father, but you have built the roof over their heads.’ And at this the angel was so impressed with the priest’s compassion that he flew away immediately and left the priest to pursue his vocation as he had before.”

The stout maid put her beefy hands on her hips and chortled with laughter. She winked at Beatrice. “Well, Your Highness, there must be a dozen such priests here in Pavia, because there are a dozen good whorehouses.”

“Which is the biggest?” Beatrice asked. The woman looked at her curiously. “I overheard the Papal ambassador inquire of my husband,” Beatrice explained with a smirk. The women laughed. Rome had an extraordinarily large prostitute population, in no small part due to the holy city’s high concentration of clerics.

“The Saracen is the biggest,” offered a younger woman, perhaps ten years older than Beatrice; her otherwise pleasant face was marred by a large purple birthmark covering her cheek and eye. “There are fights outside in the street every night. All the university students go there.”

“I imagine an ambassador would prefer a more dignified establishment,” Beatrice said idly. “I wonder where he might go if he didn’t wish to be observed?”

The stout woman laughed. “Santa Margareta. The convent near San Teodoro.
Tutte meretrice.”

Beatrice poked her finger in the eel bucket. She took the woman with the birthmark by the sleeve and told the stout woman, “Tell the overseer that the Duchess of Bari has taken this
signorina
from her work for a moment.”

She led the startled maid to a small
guardaroba
next to the kitchen. She shut the door. The room smelled of flour. “I want to play a prank on someone,” Beatrice said. “I will need to take your clothes. In exchange you may keep my
camora.”

The maid nodded, numb with astonishment. Beatrice’s gold-embroidered
camora
was worth more than she could earn in a lifetime; it was also a dowry sufficient to buy her a decent husband.

“And I shall ask one other favor of you,” Beatrice said, unlacing the bodice of her
camora.
“You must tell me how to find this convent of Santa Margareta.”

The new Duomo of Pavia, under construction for four years, had already risen to the clerestory level, but the unadorned brick exterior was still caged within a framework of wooden scaffolding. Shirtless masons worked along the upper tier, filling the scorching late afternoon air with dust, shouts, and the chiming of trowels.

The piazza in front of the west facade of the church was dominated by an enormous bronze equestrian statue called the Regisole. Beatrice stood beneath the ancient statue, thought variously to be a Roman Emperor or a Goth King, and looked across the roofline to the south, an expanse of red tile peaks punctuated with brick chimneys constructed to resemble tiny houses. She located her next landmark, the cupola of the church of San Teodoro, three colonnaded octagonal tiers of steadily diminishing size, set one atop the other. Thus far she’d had no trouble finding her way. Pavia’s main streets obeyed an orderly grid established by Roman engineers two centuries before the birth of Christ.

Exiting the piazza, Beatrice entered a narrow cobbled street. Several scrawny dogs slunk against the walls. The three- and four-story buildings were crowded together, presenting a single canyon of brick; intermittently, the street tunneled directly through annexes joining the buildings on either side. The shadowy brick vaults held unsavory surprises--a large black pig rooting in the garbage, a scurrying rat, an unshaven laborer urinating. The street began to twist and meander. In spite of the suffocating heat, Beatrice clutched the kitchen maid’s threadbare wool shawl around her shoulders.

The street turned abruptly at a high brick wall. Beatrice realized she was already lost.
“Meretrice,”
muttered a voice from a dark doorway. A white-haired old man nodded at her, a wineskin cradled in his arms. A bearded man, a huge carbuncle erupting from the side of his face, sat on a doorstep, sharing a piece of bread with two boys; next to him a woman, stripped to the waist, nursed an emaciated infant. Another small child, naked and filthy, clung to the woman’s skirt. The woman looked up at Beatrice, her weary eyes terrifyingly vacant. Three boys darted past; the last of them hit Beatrice in the thigh with a stick. Tears welled, and for an overwhelming instant she wanted to be home. She had never been into a town alone.

She forced herself to turn the next corner and entered a dark, vaulted section of the street. What she saw seemed to rip her legs out from under her: a dead baby in a pile of rags. She wanted to run, but her legs wouldn’t respond, and she had to look again. She gagged, her horror only partially relieved. The decomposing corpse was a dead monkey, a pet someone had skinned and discarded.