Duchess of Milan (26 page)

“Do you think it will work?” Admiral Louis Malet de Graville, a stout, mid-sixtyish man, whose head swiveled on a collar of multiple chins, echoed the King’s question in a whispered aside to Antonello di Sanseverino, the exiled Prince of Salerno and the most ubiquitous of the King’s growing council of military advisers.

“It will go very nicely on the way up,” Antonello answered. Tall and white-haired, he stood among the King’s velvet-capped retinue like a bare-headed prophet. “However, I am convinced that His Majesty will decide in his wisdom to return to a four-wheeled design for the gun carriage. Not as maneuverable on flat terrain, but much safer in the mountains.”

“Shouldn’t you . . . speak now?” Admiral Graville offered. “We are moving precipitously as it is.” As one of the most cautious voices in the King’s council, Graville referred to Charles’s entire Crusade as much as to the test of the new carriage design.

“His Most Christian Majesty’s ardor is the keenest weapon we will take over the mountains. I see no need to dull that blade with unnecessary cautions.” Antonello watched the King and Louis mount their horses. He signaled his page for his own horse, then turned back to Graville. “His Most Christian Majesty’s ardor is certainly warranted by the latest news from Italy.”

“Indeed.” Admiral Graville inhaled importantly, his heavy chest straining against his embroidered doublet, as if he were preparing to devour Prince Antonello’s latest intelligence. The opportunistic Admiral was anxious to detect any shift in the political winds that might require a more aggressive tack on his part.

“The Milanese league with Rome, Florence, and Naples is finished.” Antonello hoisted himself onto his horse and settled his feet in the stirrups; his silver spurs twinkled in the bright sun. “Piero de Medici has defected and has persuaded King Ferrante of Naples to withdraw as well. Il Moro will soon realize that France is a more reliable ally than any of his Italian brethren. And then the mountains will be the only obstacle between here and Naples.”

Graville mumbled his reply to himself; Prince Antonello had already ridden to the King’s side. “And then perhaps Il Moro will pay for the three hundred additional ships we will need to ensure that Naples can be supplied once our army has taken it.”

The thirty-six horses, whipped on by the gunners clinging to the carriage, moved the cannon up the steep incline at a surprising clip, easily pacing the King’s advisers and the mounted Scots archers who served as His Most Christian Majesty’s bodyguard. King Charles swept his white sable cap in a triumphant circle above his head.
“Montjoie! Montjoie!”
he shouted. “Our siege guns shall be able to advance as rapidly as our cavalry!” He turned to Antonello. “Is it true that the Italians must use oxen to draw their cannons?”

“Indeed it is, Your Majesty,” Antonello replied. “They can move no faster than a funeral procession. If this were an Italian gun, it would still be back in Amboise.”

Charles honked his nasal laugh and shouted
Montjoie!
again. The gun carriage passed through a tiny Alpine meadow sprinkled with late summer flowers and quickly crested the ridge. To the east, misty snowcaps towered along the horizon like a spectral wall. The looping descent carved through sheer rock facing. The carriage groaned with stress as the team of horses picked up speed. Charles, accompanied by two mounted Scots archers, trotted alongside the gun carriage as it began to whip through the curves.
“Montjoie!”
The King’s white cap twirled against a backdrop of gray rock.

Iron wheel rims screeched. A chorus of whinnies came from the team drawing the cannon, and several of the horses stumbled. The gun carriage careened toward the King, and one of the gunners leapt off.

Wide-eyed, straight in the saddle, his head inches from the rock wall behind him, Charles watched the glimmering bronze monster bear down on him. An instant later sparks showered as the huge gun thudded against rock, once and then twice, the dull metallic sound punctuated by a pop much like the report of a small firearm. Carriage and cannon tumbled over twice, flinging off the gunners and bringing down the horses in a chaos of equine screams and kicking legs. The snout of the cannon rose into the air again and then, captured by its own mass, fell back onto the road and came to rest.

The gunners frantically began to cut the horses from their harness while the King’s advisers and guards scrambled to the aid of their sovereign. Charles was still in the saddle, leaning to one side, staring down at the road. Directly beneath him lay a motionless gunner in a yellow doublet and black hose, entirely intact except for his head. A single eyeball stared from the mess like an ox eye peering from a lump of freshly butchered offal.

“I don’t believe I have ever seen anything quite so . . . ,” the King said, earnestly searching for words. “Quite so ... His entire head.”

Louis’s relentless eyes scampered over the corpse, then leapt to the rock escarpment behind it. He pointed to a glistening crimson stain, which might have been made by a bloody sponge hurled against the rock wall. “He must have been caught against the rocks, whereupon his head was struck by the muzzle of the gun,” Louis said abstractly.

“The poor dear man,” Charles said.

“I’m sure Your Majesty will want to try an alternative design now,” Prince Antonello offered. “Four wheels, with the rear set detachable to allow maneuverability where the terrain permits.”

“We must see that this brave man’s widow is not neglected,” Charles said, gaping at the gunner’s pulped head. “And we shall next try a four-wheel design.”

“We do not have money enough to build ships,” Admiral Graville whispered breathlessly to Prince Antonello. “Where will we find money enough to pension all the widows we will make when we cross the mountains?”

Prince Antonello glanced casually at Graville. “In Italy,” he answered.

Milan, 7 January 1493

The pain, like talons clutching her belly, brought Beatrice from a half slumber. She drew her legs up and waited, fear buzzing in her head. Eesh and Polissena had warned her that she would have these cramps now; unless they recurred within a quarter hour or so, they did not mean that her labor was imminent. But to her this mock labor was already terrifying.

Nothing followed the first stabbing contraction. After a while Beatrice pulled the covers aside and went to the window. In the early evening darkness the forest seemed like an advancing bank of inky mist. The moat beneath her had a dull, phantom gleam. Swallows, visible only as a wraithlike motion in the gloom, flew past the window.

Confinement, Beatrice thought, wondering if whoever had named this prenatal ritual had considered the cruel irony of the term. Following the usual prescription, Messer Ambrogio had ordered her to her rooms, where she would stay--by the letter of his instructions, always in bed--until her baby was born. Eesh had said she intended to inquire of Messer Ambrogio exactly for what crime a woman was being punished when she was confined to her rooms for the month preceding and the month following childbirth. Better for a woman merely to fornicate as the devil commanded, Eesh had joked; as long as she didn’t engage in God’s business of procreation, she was free to come and go as she pleased. . . . But now that Eesh was also in confinement, Beatrice couldn’t even see or talk to her.

The must of cold stone penetrated the scent of the pine logs in the fireplace. Beatrice’s suite of rooms had been moved from the light and airy Ducal Court, where she had lived since her marriage, to the Rochetta, the more heavily fortified citadel of the Castello di Porta Giovia. The immensely thick stone walls held the winter chill like blocks of ice. She could feel the weight of this prison around her, as oppressive as a tomb. Even the shortened days had closed in on her, each long night enfolding her like a shroud.

She crawled back under the covers and waited. After perhaps an hour her sleeping baby awakened with a sharp kick. But to Beatrice this pain was an antidote to all the rest, a wound so tender and delicious that she imagined warm honey flowing through her veins. She placed her fingers on her abdomen and gently stroked the hard knot created by a tiny fist or foot. In a whispered communion, she talked to her baby: “I wish you could stay like this inside me forever.”

CHAPTER 21

Extract of a letter of Eleonora d’Este, Duchess of Ferrara, to Ercole d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. Milan, 16 January 1493

My most illustrious lord husband,

... I arrived here this afternoon and . . . was greeted with great generosity and ceremony, as well as many shouts of “Moro! Moro!” . . . Beatrice is not resting well in her confinement, which I attribute to her unwarranted anxieties now that the birth is imminent. I pray that her labor comes soon, because her constitution has been weakened by these apprehensions. But it is my faith that within a week all this will be behind her and that I shall hold our first grandson in my arms. . . .

Il Moro has disclosed to me that His Holiness has proposed a new league to include Rome, Milan, and Venice. Il Moro intimated that he would be willing to set aside his differences with Venice if you would accommodate yourself to do so as well, as he is most desirous of our participation in this league. I told him that only you can make this decision, but that I felt certain you would agree to take the proffered hand of an old enemy to prevent a new and far more aggressive power from establishing itself in Italy. . . .

Milan, 25 January 1493

“What do you feel? What do you feel?” The midwife’s eyes were glassy with fear, and her shouts were only through some quirk of pitch audible at all through Beatrice’s screams.

“I can’t tell . . . ,” answered the midwife’s assistant, unheard by anyone, her adolescent features livid with distress. She was kneeling on Beatrice’s bed; her arm, concealed almost to the shoulder by Beatrice’s hiked-up chemise, disappeared between Beatrice’s legs.

“Feel for the nose! Feel for hair!” the midwife shrieked. “Find the head! Find the head and bring the head down!”

Beatrice’s head snapped up, the cords of her neck standing out against her blanched skin, her lips drawn away from yellowed teeth and pale purple gums in a death’s-head grimace. Her eyes fixed for a moment of insane purpose on the midwife’s assistant. She whipped her leg from the grip of one of Messer Ambrogio’s assistants and nailed it against the girl’s slender back before it was captured and again pinned to the bed.

“Do you have the head!”

The girl’s head snapped up as vehemently as Beatrice’s, her tear-glazed eyes almost as wild. Now the girl’s shrill voice could be heard. “She keeps moving! She almost broke my arm!”

Messer Ambrogio shouted into the ear of Beatrice’s mother. Eleonora nodded. With an urgent sweep of his red cloak, Messer Ambrogio went to the door. A moment later two burly pages followed him back in. He assigned them to relieve the men attempting to immobilize Beatrice’s legs, then moved the two assistants to Beatrice’s midsection and directed them to hold her pelvis as firmly as possible. Beatrice thrust up her hips in a last desperate bid for freedom, and her chemise fell back, revealing the girl’s arm inserted into her vagina almost to the elbow.

Beatrice’s head pounded against the mattress, and her seemingly continuous scream changed pitch, becoming an eerily inhuman growl. The midwife’s assistant lurched back, convulsively withdrawing her blood-smeared arm from the birth canal.

“Did you turn it?” the midwife screamed at her.

“I think so,” the girl said, her answer inaudible against Beatrice’s long, bestial moan. The girl’s eyes flooded with tears, and she began to cry, still unheard.

Messer Ambrogio ushered Eleonora into the antechamber, signaling the dour, tough-looking surgeon and the midwife and her assistant to follow. He closed the door. When he spoke, his voice hissed like an oracle, a calmly sinister accompaniment to the animal noises still coming from the bedchamber. “Was the version successful?” he asked the midwife, giving her a halfways glance.

The midwife clasped the shoulders of her youthful assistant and looked at her searchingly. The girl was perhaps thirteen. She was still sobbing. “I felt the head,” she whimpered. “I ... I moved it down.”

“Would she know the difference between a head and a rump?” the surgeon asked Messer Ambrogio, not deigning to address even the midwife, much less her assistant. “I make it tantamount to treason to entrust the Duchess’s health to a girl who is no doubt witnessing her first birth.”

Angrily snatching up the girl’s frail, bloodied arm, the midwife said, “The Duchess’s womb is shut so tight I would have been lucky to get my thumb through. It is rare to find a girl with both an arm as slight as this and half the wits to follow instructions. And when they have done the version once, they do not want to do it again.”

Eleonora addressed all of them, her green eyes sweeping purposefully. “Let us assume that the head is in position,” she said, giving the girl a grateful nod. “What can we expect now?”

“If
the version has been performed, we will see the birth progress normally,” responded Messer Ambrogio, his whispered skepticism seconded by the surgeon’s imperious scowl.

“If the version had been performed hours ago, as
I
urged, we might expect the birth to progress normally.” The midwife curtsied apologetically to Eleonora. “But now I fear she is exhausted. She has been in labor for a night and a day. A very hard labor.”

Eleonora’s eyes did not flinch. “And if the birth does not progress normally?”

“Massage of the afflicted parts might be more effective now,” Messer Ambrogio offered.

The midwife curtsied reflexively. “Herbs. Salves. But she is so fatigued, Your Highness. ...”

“Then it is likely that these prescriptions will be no more successful now than they were last night and all this day.” Eleonora turned to the surgeon. “I do not intend to let my daughter die with a child in her womb. Do you have the instruments necessary to remove the child?”

Messer Ambrogio’s slack old lips drooped. He visibly paled. “We would have to consult with the Duke of Bari before--”