Duchess of Milan (35 page)

His powerful shoulders slumped. “I am sorry for this. For all of it. For what I have just said. I am sorry for you. I wish I could have been the gallant knight of your dreams. I am sorry for myself and for Cecilia. I am sorry that there will always be between you and me this unspannable, dark sea. ...” He gestured feebly with both hands, like a sick man reaching out.

Beatrice could only think how extraordinary this was, that the garden at Schifanoia was still touched with magic. Perhaps the sea of which he had just spoken never could be crossed. But at last she had called across those darkened waters and discovered on the opposite shore another human soul.

Extract of a dispatch of Count Carlo Belgioioso, Milanese ambassador to France, to Lodovico Sforza, “Il Moro,” Duke of Bari and regent for the Duke of Milan. Marked
“cito! cito! cito!”
Milan, 22 May 1494

My most illustrious lord Duke of Bari,

I had intended to deliver to Your Majesty in person this account of the proceedings at Senlis, but having completed a journey of six hundred miles in seven days and not being certain that Your Highness is still in Ferrara, I have dispatched this by courier along with messengers to Toriaga and Mantua in the event that Your Highness can be found at those destinations. . . .

. . . His Most Christian Majesty Charles VIII and Maximilian Archduke of Austria have agreed to a treaty of peace between the nations of France and Germany. . . . The extent of the territories ceded by His Most Christian Majesty offers ample proof of the urgency with which he has sought this alliance. . . .

. . . immediately following the signing His Most Christian Majesty called me to a private audience and informed me that he has now determined to cross the mountains and intends to petition for the support of Your Highness in this endeavor. He was blithe to offer assurances that his cousin Louis Duc d’Orleans’s claims to Milan would be put aside because of the surpassing value His Most Christian Majesty attaches to the friendship of Your Highness. His Most Christian Majesty is also most desirous that Messer Galeazzo di Sanseverino, whom he calls the foremost paladin of Christendom, be dispatched to France to advise him on the tactics required for an attack on Naples. . . .

... I am certain that I merely echo Your Highness’s own judgment when I suggest that His Most Christian Majesty’s assurances concerning Louis Duc d’Orleans should be regarded as bait for the French snare and nothing more. . . .

Ferrara, 24 May 1493

Ercole d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, passed Belgioioso’s dispatch to his wife. With a gold-handled, two-prong fork he speared another piece of roast pheasant and chewed it deliberately; Eleonora had finished reading before he chased the morsel with a sip of wine and meticulously dabbed his lips with a linen napkin. Il Moro and Beatrice were seated to his right, the two couples alone at the center of the long table. Even the pages had been asked to leave. Ercole prefaced his remarks by staring out the window overlooking the ducal park just north of the Este
castello.
Rows of lamps placed on stakes marked the future streets and major building sites of a vast new addition to Ferrara, already planned in precise detail before the first brick had been laid. The rows of lights sketched a flickering phantom city in the darkness.

“The German matter we discussed in Vigevano,” Ercole said, turning to Il Moro and giving him a diamond-hard look, his lips so tight they appeared drawn with a single line. “This would be the time for it.”

“I have done it.” Il Moro offered this revelation with only a slight hesitation and utter neutrality. “Two weeks ago Count Belgioioso warned me that the Germans and French intended to settle their differences at Senlis. In response, ten days ago I wrote the German Emperor’s son, Archduke Maximilian of Austria, and offered him the hand of our Duke’s sister, Bianca Maria, along with a dowry of four hundred thousand ducats. I expect an answer by midsummer. By then Maximilian’s father, who I am informed is gravely ill, most likely will be dead, and Maximilian will be the new Holy Roman Emperor.”

Beatrice immediately imagined hapless Bianca Maria as an empress, presiding from an enormous glittering throne in some frosty hall in Innsbruck or Antwerp. At first she had believed that Belgioioso’s urgent dispatch simply reported another abstract diplomatic maneuver, its contents of no more consequence than a dinner-table sonnet recited by a court poet. But the thought of sweet, foolish Bianca Maria packing her trousseau and disappearing over the mountains forced Beatrice to admit that this treaty signed at Senlis would change all their lives.

“And the investiture?” Eleonora asked Il Moro in a strident soprano. “Milan is an imperial fief, but no Sforza duke has ever asked the Emperor to formally invest him as Duke of Milan. The Elector Princes of Germany can hardly be expected to endorse the marriage of their next Emperor to the sister of a mere duke who has not even been legitimized by imperial investiture. Obviously you also have been clever enough to propose that when Maximilian becomes Emperor, he avail himself of the opportunity to invest the Duke of Milan.”

Il Moro nodded, his features wooden.

“Then who is to be invested as Duke of Milan? Gian Galeazzo?” Eleonora did not blink during her pause. “Or you?”

Beatrice almost envied her husband’s ability to stare back at her mother with the same unblinking calm. “I would be quite foolish to petition the German Emperor for
my
investiture,” he said casually. “As you may know, the Signory of Venice has passed a secret resolution calling for an immediate invasion of our territories, and my assassination, should I even attempt to become Duke of Milan.”

He knew, Beatrice thought. He has always known about the secret resolution. That is what he meant when he said he was not certain he could do it.

“In that event you will permit the Signory of Venice to destroy you in a more expedient fashion.” Ercole spoke with the smug, elegant diction of a man tutored virtually from infancy. “The Signory will not have to spend a single ducat to be rid of Il Moro. Because when Alfonso of Aragon becomes King of Naples, he will do it for them.”

Eleonora’s eyes flashed irritably to her husband. “That danger does not exist at present. My father continues to enjoy--”

“Your father has had a very long life,” Ercole said, interrupting. “Longer, one would think, than God would wish to suffer his impiety.” Ercole’s muscular jaws flexed. “Longer than the devil should have to wait for his soul.”

“God will count my father’s sins, not you, husband.” Eleonora crossed herself. “As for my brother Alfonso, I believe that the states of Italy can restrain him when that time comes.”

“The states of Italy will do nothing if Gian Galeazzo, after having been invested by the German Emperor, wishes to exercise his full dominion as Duke of Milan--as no doubt Gian Galeazzo’s father-in-law will insist he do. Il Moro will be forced to resign as regent, and Milan will become a province of Naples.”

Eleonora sat erect and turned menacingly to her husband. “You have spent too much time with your architects, drawing plans on paper of things that do not exist.”

Ercole continued to look at Il Moro, his jaws clenching and pumping as he methodically worked at another piece of pheasant. Finally he dabbed his mouth and put down his napkin. “If
you
do not insist on receiving the investiture from the Emperor, you will not survive, your family will not survive, and Italy will not survive.”

“Nonsense!” Eleonora hammered the table with her beefy fist. “Who is telling you these things? That sorcerer you are always closeted with, who tells you he can conjure the dead?”

Beatrice had the sense that she was tumbling down a flight of stairs. She was stunned by her father’s apocalyptic forecast, but she was even more astonished by the realization that Father and Mama, who she always had assumed worshiped the common religion of a united Italy, disagreed so violently.

“You know that I share your concerns, my lord Father,” Il Moro said, turning to Ercole. He calmly pressed the tips of his fingers together. “But my only concern at the moment is simply to keep the French out, and to that end I must devote my attention to the integrity of our alliance with Rome and Venice. The last thing we need at this juncture is an opportunistic defection that would convince the French that we lack the unity to oppose them.”

Ercole gave his dry, grimacing smile. “If the Signory are faced with the choice of taxing themselves for the common defense of Italy or abandoning their allies, they will offer us to the French already basted and spitted.” Ercole angrily snatched Belgioioso’s dispatch from the tabletop. “Show this to the Signory. Tell them that if the French are allowed to conquer Milan, the Signory will awaken to find French soldiers pissing in the Grand Canal. The only thing that binds an alliance more strongly than greed is fear. Tell the Signory that if they do not commit publicly to our mutual defense, then we shall have no recourse but to make the King of France our ally and permit his army to cross the mountains.”

“Madness,” Eleonora muttered.

Beatrice glanced to the windows, wondering how this spring evening had become so sultry. The lights in the park seemed to flutter as if painted on a slowly spinning top. She felt bathed in heat and knew she had to leave the room or she would faint.

“My lord Father,” she said, standing and awkwardly curtsying, “if I may be excused, I have need of some air.”

The balcony, suspended three stories over the moat by a row of small stone buttresses, commanded a view of the ducal park to the north of Ferrara. Beatrice leaned against the marble balustrade.

Her father’s city of lights shimmered in the still, cloying spring night. Terra Nova, the vast development was called. The New Land.

She focused on the purposeful rows of lamps, trying to make sense of what she had just heard at her father’s table. She remembered what Dante had written about Fortune: From season to season and land to land, she changes her changes endlessly, and so she must be swift of her own necessity. Beatrice had the sense that she was racing after Fortune into some kind of Terra Nova, a new land where the lanterns of hope flickered dimly in a wilderness of uncertainty and fear.

Footsteps clicked on the stone walkway. She did not turn to look, but she knew it was her husband. He stopped at arm’s length from her and silently looked out into the night.

“Your father will build it,” Il Moro finally said. “I have seen the plans. Magnificent. What you see tonight in lights will still stand in stone a thousand years from now.” He seemed satisfied with this assurance and became silent again.

Beatrice conjured the city, a monument to her father long after he had vanished from its streets. But strangely, she could not conceive of her father dying, could not even with her deepest intuition see herself condemned to mourn him.

“The light of reason,” Il Moro said almost to himself. “Perhaps this is the light of reason, these lamps in the darkness.” He paused as if struck by his own revelation. “And perhaps that light is also visible in the Ticino Valley, when the irrigation canals are lit by the sun and they become a grid of liquid silver as far as one can see.” He turned to her. “That is what your father and I are building. We are sending the light of reason and peace and prosperity across all Europe. Not in the sudden dawn of a new sun, but one by one we are hanging the lamps of reason in a dark wood.”

For a moment Beatrice let him lure her into that dark wood, guided only by the beacon of his words. He grasped her shoulders firmly but gently and turned her to face him directly. She wondered if he intended to kiss her. She wondered how she felt about that. . . .

“Your father and I want you personally to take Belgioioso’s dispatch before the Signory and ask them for a declaration on mutual defense. You speak as well as any of our ambassadors, and as Duke Ercole’s daughter and the wife of Il Moro, you will by your presence proclaim to all Italy the urgency with which we regard the situation. And of course as a new mother, you may even incline the Signory to regard you with sympathy. Certainly more sympathy than they will show Count Tuttavilla.”

Liar. Or perhaps he was revealing only a fragment of the truth. “You want something else,” she told him sullenly.

“Yes.” Il Moro sounded abashed, surprised by his own candor. But his eyes advanced aggressively. “I want you to query the Signory on my behalf. I can assume that you are now aware that the Signory has passed a secret resolution calling for my--”

At the words “secret resolution,” the truth rose from the gloom of that dark wood. Beatrice had an image of herself running madly out of Terra Nova, clutching her son’s little hand, trying to out-race a merciless night. When she spoke, she was as breathless as if she had actually been running. “If you want me to appeal to the Signory to withdraw the secret resolution that prevents you from becoming Duke of Milan, you must know that I will never do it.”

“No. I am not asking you to do that. I only want you to ask them under what circumstances they would consider withdrawing--”

“I am not some fool ambassador you can trick with word games.”

“You heard nothing of what your father said?”

“My father sold me to you. I am certain you can also afford to purchase his words.” Beatrice was surprised at how easily her anger came against her father; she was so used to blaming everything on Mama.

He gave her his infuriating “you don’t understand at all” look. “Obviously you are unaware that I am the one who is holding all of this together. Your father is already preparing to send your brother to France to offer the French army free passage through Ferrara in the event that I cannot obtain from the Venetians a firm and public commitment to our mutual defense.”

Beatrice laughed, her high, harsh notes leaping off into the night. “So you are the man upon whom Italy must depend for peace?”

Il Moro’s eyes flared with real annoyance. He turned away from her and set his hands on the stone railing of the balcony. For some time he looked down into the oily black moat, his bangs shrouding his face.