Duchess of Milan (34 page)

Giovann stood motionless, holding the torch in one hand, his knife in the other.

“Get it,” his brother whispered desperately. “Get it and go!”

Giovann knelt and tenderly kissed his brother, then pressed the knife to his throat.

His brother answered the implied question with a rapid nod. “For Mother and Father and Je--” He shuddered at the quick movement of the knife across his neck. Blood surged over his collarbone. He looked into Giovann’s eyes and weakly smiled. He would not be alive when Alfonso’s guards found him.

Giovann entered the adjacent
guardaroba.
He heard a shout from somewhere, seemingly far away. The
guardaroba
was a treasure trove that might have held his wonder for hours in different circumstances; he had glimpses of majolica vases and gold statues and stacks of diamond-studded dog collars. He was looking only for the silver box. Where was it? Gilded candlesticks shaped like satyrs. A set of niello-handled knives. Serving trays painted with lifelike little scenes. There. Four silver boxes, all of them floridly engraved. Two were too small to hold letters. The other two, large enough to contain small documents, were identical. A glimpse of nudes engraved on the lid of one. No time to look through them and find what he had come for. Take them both.

He clutched the boxes awkwardly under one arm, remembering that his brother still had the small waterproof pouch, briefly cursing himself for not bringing a larger pouch for this contingency.

Now the shouts came from the next room. Giovann hesitated. Then he ran directly toward the voices. The guards were taken entirely by surprise, and he bulled past them.

A long hallway with a window at one end. Shutters partially open. Running, the sound of his own bare feet pounding stone, the sound of leather soles slapping behind him. If the window opened onto the interior courtyard he was dead. He flung the shutter aside, climbed onto the ledge, gathered for the leap necessary to clear the stone skirting of the facade, then flew into the abyss. The rushing stars were brilliant and precise, as if he were moving through the heavens at exactly their speed.

When he hit he had a dreadful instant of thinking that he had leapt into the interior court. But water surged into his nostrils and his limbs began to uncoil against his yielding, liquid salvation. He came to the surface, gulped air, then began to swim underwater.

The salt water in his wounds was like burning oil. He continued to swim underwater, surfacing for air a dozen times before he paused and looked back at the Castel Nuovo. Some of the windows glowed with lights, and torches moved along the long concrete mole jutting into the harbor. But he knew they could send out a dozen boats and have little chance of finding him now. Only then did he realize that he had lost one of the silver boxes.

Trying to hold the remaining slippery prize out of the water, Giovann swam on, his mind juggling a hundred things. Images of his broken mother and his disemboweled brother, an effort to remember the last time he had seen his father, the beginnings of an observation about Fortune choosing among pairs: his brother was dead; he had lived; one silver box lay at the bottom of the Bay of Naples. Giovann treaded water and looked back again at the lit-up seaside facade of the Castel Nuovo, wondering if the silver box he still held contained the letter that would bring down the house of Aragon.

CHAPTER 30

Extract of a letter of Eleonora d’Este, Duchess of Ferrara, to Isabella d’Este da Gonzaga, Marquesa of Mantua. Ferrara, 19 May 1493

. . . Your sister and her consort were greeted with shouts of “Moro! Moro!” which surprised me coming from our own people, but such is his popularity throughout Italy today. . . . Your sister wore a
camora
of crimson brocade embroidered in gold with that motif of the lighthouse tower at Genoa, which I know you girls regard as the latest
nove foze. . . .
Your sister looks exceptionally well, and her bearing and grace, which are so much improved, made me so proud that I fear I will have to confess! I truly feel that even though you and Beatrice no longer live under the same roof, it is those years with you as her model that have enabled her to acquire her present dignity and charm. . . . You would not believe the jewels and gowns your sister’s ladies have been provided for their appearance in Venice. So as not to have my ladies come off second best, I have given all of them pearl rosaries and new
camore
of green
velluto allucciolato
contrasted with stripes of black satin. I am holding in reserve a quantity of jeweled pendants and brooches for my ladies, in the event that your sister is inspired to provide her ladies with additional embellishments when she sees what I have done. . . . Your father has arranged a continuous week of entertainments, including three days of jousting and three nights of theatricals, innumerable
feste,
and a horse race, which your brother has entered. Today, however, will be a day of relaxation for your sister and her consort, as they have gone alone to the Palazzo Schifanoia, which Beatrice has always loved so. . . .

Ferrara, 20 May 1493

Standing in the main hall of the Palazzo Schifanoia, Beatrice remembered another homecoming, seven years earlier. Compared to the colossal Castel Nuovo in Naples, with its magical vistas of sapphire-blue sea and the vast, flowered city climbing the hills behind it, the Este
castello
in Ferrara had seemed a cramped medieval fortress looking out on a flat, colorless town and a malarial park only recently reclaimed from a swamp. But the Schifanoia, her family’s pleasure house (the name meant “without cares”) set among the cool woods just east of the city, had given her a different sense of her curiously alien heritage. As a ten-year-old she had wandered these sleek
all’antica
rooms filled with Roman statuary and French tapestries, and even then she had been impressed by the intangible sense of assurance the Palazzo Schifanoia had conveyed, a feeling of centuries of refinement rather than the house of Aragon’s few frenetic decades of ostentation.

At that first homecoming nothing had impressed her like this main hall, called Salone dei Mesi, the Salon of the Months. It was named for the magnificent fresco cycle that entirely covered the walls, a breathtakingly illusionistic pageant of mythology, courtly extravagance, and everyday life, unfolding on an imaginary landscape of fantastically shaped hills, fairy castles, and ancient Roman ruins. Each month was represented by a god or goddess parading in triumphal procession through scenes of the season’s labors and diversions. March’s Minerva, her chariot drawn by white unicorns, presided over pruning farmers and a ducal hunting party charging through the countryside, teams of dogs yapping at the feet of the horses; rose-crowned Venus, seated on a floating throne drawn by swans, watched over an April garden party where trysting lovers were serenaded by musicians. As a girl, Beatrice had at first been embarrassed and later intrigued by the explicit eroticism of so many of the scenes: the Three Graces, entirely nude, in poses more prurient than classical; couples kissing and groping in the garden; and the culminating image of a man and woman embracing in bed, their clothes tossed on the floor in the disarray of hasty passion. She remembered how her sister had told her in rapt detail what was going on beneath the sheets.

Now she found the painted figures somewhat stiff and wooden compared to Leonardo’s or even Bergognone’s, the fashions quaintly out-of-date. But the rest was still vividly sensual. She glanced at Il Moro. He stood a few paces away, gravely studying the month of September, with its mythological vignette of one-eyed Cyclops forging armor on Vulcan’s anvil. She wondered if he ever fantasized about someone, perhaps Cecilia, ever clutched a pillow in his arms and pretended it was his lover.

She did not think about him making love to her. Since their exchange in the
guardaroba
at Vigevano, he had conducted himself as if he took seriously her threat to welcome him with a knife in the ribs the next time he tried to visit her bedroom. His respect had made her less defensive, and she had found that she could relax around him, even tease and joke with him during their occasional suppers together. It was still remarkable to her how much easier it was to be the mother of Il Moro’s son rather than simply to be Il Moro’s wife.

But this excursion had threatened their fragile rapprochement; in Milan they could largely avoid one another, but here they were expected to function as a couple most of the time. So far there had been no friction, and they’d even had some lively conversations about literature, various people at court, and several of the engineering projects Beatrice had visited. She only hoped the truce would last until she left for Venice.

“Copiosita,”
Il Moro said, admiring the sheer abundance of the frescoed imagery.
“Grandezza.”
He turned to Beatrice. “Shall we take a look at the garden before the mosquitoes come out?”

“The mosquitoes aren’t so bad here at Schifanoia.” For some reason the idea of visiting the garden gave her a sense of foreboding, but the reason was so indefinable that she swept it aside.

He offered her his arm as they descended the stairs. The gardens were behind the
palazzo,
several immaculately groomed acres of fruit trees, vine-covered pergolas, marble statues, and terraced flower beds laced with geometric gravel paths.

Everything appeared unchanged. They wandered by the small zoo, and Beatrice greeted the tiger and giraffe like old friends. They went inside the aviary, a pavilion of fine copper-wire netting erected over several towering trees. Beatrice immediately recognized the big African parrot, Almanzor, and called to him and tried to get him to say her name. It saddened her that he didn’t remember. She saw a sulfurous flash of yellow but couldn’t be certain if it was her pet canary, Gia, in whom she had confided so much. She had even thought of taking Gia to Milan, but how could she have expected him to be happy where she wasn’t welcome?

“Beatrice!” belatedly squawked the parrot. Beatrice applauded gratefully. She decided that she would come back with her little boy to look for Gia.

They left the aviary and walked among the orderly gravel paths. Some things
had
changed: a grove of newly planted orange trees where there had once been beds of purple irises; a pair of new topiaries shaped like swans. But the rosebushes were exactly as she had left them. Gnarled and knobbed from decades of pruning, they wore blooms of a creamy, slightly pinkish white or a crimson so deep and rich that it turned dewdrops into little rubies. She had always admired these bushes, ancient and scarred yet perpetually the source of such exquisite new beauty.

Her anger came with astonishing suddenness and violence, as though in one beat her heart had pumped venom through her entire body. “I hated you so much,” she said fiercely.

Il Moro looked at her, blinking rapidly with surprise.

She knew she had to say it all now, that the words would come as inevitably as blood from a wound. “When I came home from Naples it wasn’t because Mama wanted me home but because I was already betrothed to you and it was time for me to prepare to become your bride. I used to walk in this garden and dream of you, that you were a gallant knight like the heroes of my books, on bended knee pleading for my perfumed glove to hold to your breast. I sat beneath that pergola and cried until my eyes were swollen shut the first time you postponed the wedding. The second time, I cut a rose from this bush and left my blood in exchange, a token of my -wounded heart, certain that my knight -would never come.”

Beatrice paused, her mouth pinched with anger and her hands quaking. “We were here at Schifanoia that summer night you sent your emissary to withdraw the contract. Father’s face: I will never forget my father’s face. The next morning I could not bear even this garden. I walked on the paths by the Po and thought I would throw myself into the river. I thought my father was angry with
me
and that only by dying could I spare my family further humiliation.” She paused again and stared into the past. “I came here the day before I finally left to come and live with you. There was snow on the ground, and they had to light fires to keep the birds and animals from dying. I told my canary, Gia, how much I hated you. It was all so foolish. Because here in this garden I never dreamed how much I would really come to hate you.”

She had no more words. The pain was gone, the venom flushed from her limbs. She felt a strange exhilaration, like rushing along in a whistling wind.

“Do you think I didn’t hate you?” Il Moro asked smoothly but with a strange, coldly squeaking undertone. A tic began beneath his right eye. “I loved Cecilia Gallerani more than I can believe I will ever again love a woman. Not the love you imagine from picture books and French romances, but a love that is nurtured and rooted so deeply in the soul that when it is removed everything is ripped out with it. When you took Cecilia away from me I mourned as I have not mourned since my mother died--”. He broke off as if his final words had been some accidental, self-annihilating incantation. But then he dully repeated, “My mother . . .” before trailing off again. Now his eyes conveyed something unmistakable yet incongruous: fear. His cheek twitched wildly. But after a few seconds the tremor passed and he composed himself.

“In the ten years that I lived with Cecilia Gallerani I never made love to another woman,” he said with a sadness that rang true. “Until your wedding night. When I entered you for the first time, I felt . . . violated.”

“It was I who was violated, you will remember. And not only on our wedding night. I realize that our hurried liaisons at Messer Ambrogio’s behest haven’t made me an expert in the arts of love, but I am quite unable to see how it would be possible for
me
to have forced
you.”

“Your father forced me.”

True, she told herself, that thought entering her suddenly vacant consciousness like the trilling of a single frightened bird in the silent wake of a storm. He believes this, he felt these things. He loved Cecilia, still loves her. Perhaps he wept for her, still weeps for her. Had Cecilia and Il Moro also been victims in this tragedy? Does he love our son, she abruptly wondered, in the way he loves Cecilia, not simply as a tool of his ambition? Suddenly she blushed furiously, ashamed that she had forced both herself and her husband to strip naked and stand staring at one another’s pale, starved souls.