Duchess of Milan (64 page)

“My husband has designated me as regent in his absence!” Beatrice shouted. “I will lead you against the French!”

There was a moment of silence. Then whistles and hoots of derision, followed by the harsh tremolo of massed laughter. Beatrice felt as if their torches were burning her face. The people of Ferrara hadn’t laughed at Mama. Was Mama laughing too?

The armorers’ spokesman again shouted to be heard. “All very well, Your Highness. But how do you intend to do that!”

Again the laughter.

Beatrice turned to Isabella and told her, “I’m going down there.” She scrambled off the stone perch and helped Eesh down. The Councillors watched them as they had the entire drama, incredulously, powerless to intervene in front of the entire city. These were men who always did their business in private. Count Landriano’s mouth was open.

Beatrice steadied Isabella. “Are you all right, Eesh? I have to go down there.”

Isabella nodded. “Toto, I can’t go down there with you. I just can’t. I’m too tired. I am so tired now.”

“I know, Eesh.” Beatrice hugged Isabella again and kissed her cold, smooth face. “What you just did is more courageous than anything I will ever be able to do in my life. Thank you, Eesh. I know it is so little to say. You have saved us all.” She turned to a guard. “See that Her Highness is taken to her rooms. And do not send for Messer Ambrogio. Find her
vecchia,
Lucia, to look after her.”

Count Borromeo presented himself in front of Beatrice. “Your Highness, you must not go down there. I warn you that I have my artillery in place and intend--”

Beatrice thrust her face up at Count Borromeo so forcefully that he stepped back.
“You
do not warn the regent for the state of Milan. I warn
you,
Count Borromeo, that if you do not go back to your
palazzo
and stay there until my husband recovers, I will have you hanged for treason and stick your head up there!” She pointed to the brass spire far above them.

Count Borromeo meekly allowed Count Landriano to take him aside. No one else tried to prevent Beatrice from descending the steps to the gatehouse.

“Lower the footbridge,” Beatrice told the guards on duty in the gatehouse. The footbridge was just to the right of the main drawbridge; it was so narrow that two men would have difficulty walking across it abreast. The timber hoists squealed and the chains rattled as the bridge came down. Beatrice opened a door in the gatehouse wall, entered a short brick passageway, and turned a corner. Through a small arched gateway she could see the torches in the piazza.

The bridge had no railing, and she again experienced a momentary vertigo as she glanced down at the water. She looked up at the men waiting for her across the moat. The torchlight gave a sheen to armor, to unshaven faces slick with sweat, to hard sinewy forearms.

The armorers’ spokesman stood at the end of the bridge as if challenging her even to step into the piazza. She decided that he would have to throw her into the moat to stop her. She was within two steps. He had a tough, almost terra-cotta-colored face, seemingly fired to a glazed hardness by the heat of the forges. She did not slow her step.

The armorer stepped back. He had never seen a duchess this close; she was like some strange new species that had suddenly turned out to be more aggressive than he had expected.

Having reached the pavement, Beatrice reasoned that she had just begun a dialogue with these gentlemen. “You want to know how I intend to lead you against the French?” she shouted, her voice carrying throughout the piazza. “I do not intend to lead you against the French! I intend to go alone to the west gate and wait for the French! I am a fair shot with a light bow! Perhaps I could borrow one from one of you! But should any man here wish to join me in the sport of shooting Frenchmen, I will be glad to wager my skill against his!”

The armorers laughed, but just grudgingly. Beatrice realized that the moment was slipping away. She turned to the west and began to walk through the crowd. The men towered over her, their pikes crossing above her head like a lethal bower. At first they moved back to let her pass, but as she reached the outskirts of the piazza there was some shoving, and she was jostled a bit. Some of them had been wounded slightly: a cut eye, a split lip, an arm bandaged with a bloody rag. She was almost to the street. More men shoved just in front of her, some of them swigging from wineskins. Then the crowd cleared out.

A dead man lay on the pavement no more than a step away, trampled and tossed like a rag, his head and a leg at crazy angles. Next to his battered head was a pool of blood like a purple, crusted pudding.

Beatrice’s stomach heaved and her legs swayed. You can’t faint! she screamed at herself. If you faint, everything is finished! Then a rush of strength came almost like a hand at her back, and she walked past the corpse.

She entered the street that led to the city’s west gate. The Councillors’ army that had filled the street minutes before had vanished. A wagon smoldered in front of a shuttered shop arcade. Another dead man lay sprawled on his back, a dog lapping at his bloody face. She forced herself to walk on. Then she heard the noise behind her, a rattling of armor and the slapping of soft leather soles against cobblestones. She did not look back but squared her shoulders the way her mother would have done and quickened her pace.

When Beatrice reached the blocky brick towers of the Pusterla di Sant’Ambrogio, Milan’s westernmost gate, she finally turned around. An army jammed the street behind her, backed up as far as she could see. The armorers had all followed her.

Beatrice stood atop one of the towers flanking the double arches of the Pusterla di Sant’Ambrogio gate. Three large bombards had been hoisted to the flat terrace atop the tower, massive iron snouts pointing west. Neat pyramids of spherical stone projectiles stood beside each gun. Twenty or so armorers leaned against the notched brick parapet, looking to the west, waiting for some sign of the French.

Beatrice had seen only demons out there, the vague, shadowy horsemen that periodically dashed through the darkness. She knew that these hallucinations were due to fatigue; it was only an hour or so before dawn, and she’d had no sleep after the longest, most tumultuous day of her life. But her anxious vigil was also haunted by more substantial uncertainties. She had sent three riders to Novara in the course of the night, each with instructions to come back as soon as he had sighted the French army on the road. And if the messengers did not encounter the French on the road, they had been instructed to enter Novara and find out if the French army was preparing to march on Milan. The first messenger had left almost seven hours before. Enough time to enter Novara and come back. Perhaps he had been captured. Perhaps all three messengers had been captured hours earlier by a French army waiting right out there in the darkness, preparing to attack at first light.

All along the immense brick escarpment of the city wall armorers leaned against the parapets, pikes in their arms, crossbows rested atop the merlons. But the defense wasn’t as formidable as it appeared. The wall was centuries old, and the city had long ago outgrown it; tiled rooftops spread out to the west a considerable distance beyond the Pusterla di Sant’Ambrogio gate. Even Il Moro’s new ducal chapel, Santa Maria delle Grazie, had been built outside the city walls, its dome another phantom shape in the darkness several streets away. To facilitate passage between the suburbs and the inner city, the wall had been knocked down or pierced with unfortified gates in dozens of places. Wealth had been considered Milan’s best defense against invasion. Now Milan’s only defense might be the pretense that the city was defended.

Beatrice had also sent a steady stream of messengers back and forth between the Castello. They reported that her husband had improved substantially; Messer Ambrogio attributed the miracle to a tonic mixed with finely ground pearls. Whatever the cause, that was one burden mercifully lightened. The messengers also told her that Isabella was sleeping. Again she saw Eesh turning back from the precipice, the face of a woman who had just torn out her own heart. Was that the price Eesh had paid to redeem her innocence? Beatrice wondered what price she would have to pay to redeem her own.

Some armorers shouted and pointed to the darkened street extending west from the wall. Everyone hushed. The sound was a massive clattering, hoofbeats on cobblestones. Weary bodies tensed and weapons rattled. A single torch came out of the darkness, moving toward them. No one relaxed. The messengers had been told to carry a light if they returned while it was still dark, so that they wouldn’t be shot.

The rider halted his heavily lathered horse directly beneath the tower. “Your Highness!” he shouted up to Beatrice, his voice quavering with fatigue. “I left Novara three hours ago. The French army has learned from their own patrols that Milan is defended, so they have stopped their advance and are taking over virtually every house in Novara to quarter their troops. That would confirm what I heard as rumor, that they now intend to wait in Novara until the King himself can bring his army north to reinforce them!”

Incredible, Beatrice thought. Orleans was a smirking fool. Tonight he’d had Milan for the plucking. But the armies of the League would be here to defend Milan long before the French King arrived weeks from now--if he ever did. For a moment Beatrice enjoyed the sheer exhilaration of winning, of beating Louis Duc d’Orleans with nothing more than a ruse and a boast. Then she saw the sobering cost of her victory. For the men lying dead in the streets of Milan, this had been no game.

The news from Novara spread up and down the walls and backward to the Castello, a rising chorus of shouts and cheers and exuberant profanity. Within minutes a great buzzing storm of celebration rose above the city. Then the armorers nearest to Beatrice began to chant her name. “Beatrice! Beatrice! Duchessa! Duchessa!” The chant soon spread throughout the city. “Beatrice! Duchessa!” Again and again, the rolling thunder of adulation and respect.

Beatrice listened, too stunned and tired to be truly moved, dimly thinking that she would always remember this moment. Suddenly she could hear Polissena telling tales of war again, but this time about her instead of Mama, and she started to laugh out loud, almost screaming with hysterical release, conjuring an absurd image of Polissena growing eternally older and more wizened but never dying, outliving them all, telling their greatgrandchildren for the thousandth time how the Duchess of Milan stood on the city walls and kept the French in Novara. . . .

Her cathartic laughter was abruptly halted by a feeling so strange that her neck tingled. She was alone again, despite the continuing refrains of her name, as alone as she’d been when she first started to walk to this gate, but now there was a great peace and freedom in her loneliness. And then she saw Mama. Not a vision of some corporeal or even spectral Mama, but a more profound inner image, an understanding so complete that at that moment they might have been sharing the same soul. For the first time in her life she could see Mama without prejudice or resentment, so clearly, so wholly, her flaws and all her far more considerable virtues. Now she could see why Mama had had to leave her in Naples, how Mama had put aside the interests of her own child to save thousands of children. And she could feel the pain and guilt Mama had suffered because of it. She could experience the depth of Mama’s love for her, for the first time see how proud Mama had been of her. She could even feel how proud of her Mama would have been tonight.

Mama, I understand, she responded inwardly. I finally understand everything you did. I forgive you, Mama; can you ever forgive me? But the answer was so obvious. “Oh, God, Mama, I love you so, so much,” she murmured. “But you always knew. Now I know you did.”

It slowly faded, this intimacy Beatrice had never shared with her mother while she had been alive. Their reunion had been as passionate as a homecoming after a long absence, to be followed by the more gentle comfort of knowing that Mama would always be with her, would never leave her again.

Beatrice looked out into the gray genesis of dawn. In the distance she could vaguely see the steeples of the nearest village churches. “I know your dream, Mama,” she whispered into the ongoing din of celebration. “I know it isn’t finished. As much as anyone, I am responsible for starting this war. And now I must find some way to end it.”

CHAPTER 52

Extract of a letter of Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua and Captain General of the Armies of the League of Venice, to Isabella d’Este da Gonzaga, Marquesa of Mantua. Fornovo, 5 July 1495

. . . We have encamped upon the right side of the Taro River, on a slope that affords our defense. This morning the French established their camp upon the left bank, and to continue their retreat to the north they must now cross the river and encounter the armies of the League. Thus I find myself on the eve of battle in command of the greatest army Italy has ever seen. My mission, as God wills it, is not merely to resist the French but to exterminate them. . . .

Fornovo, 6July 1495

Rodolfo Gonzaga leaned next to the ear of his nephew Francesco Gonzaga and shouted against the roar of the rain: “There is no crossing!’

The two men stood in their stirrups and looked out across the Taro River. At this time of year the Taro was usually little more than a brook meandering through a rock-strewn wash on its journey from the Apennine Mountains to the Po River. But on this morning the Taro was a gray torrent several hundred paces across, its turbid surface roiling from the rain that swept across it in great, undulating curtains.

Francesco Gonzaga, Captain General of the Armies of the League of Venice, pushed up the visor of his helmet and glared into the stinging deluge. With his pugnacious lips and flaring nostrils, he looked like something half-man, half-beast. “Fortune is a woman!” he shouted. “She gives herself to the man who snatches her by the hair! We’re going across!”

Francesco raised his arm to signal the elemental force at his back, ten thousand elite shock troops. Almost a thousand of them represented the cream of Italian nobility, sheathed like the Marquis and his uncle from head to toe in beautifully tooled suits of armor. The knights were supported by light cavalry armed with crossbows, and an enormous body of footmen, vaunted Greek mercenaries called stradiots, their ranks bristling with pikes three times as long as an average man’s height.