Leonardo's Swans (39 page)
The apprentices are busy at their labors. Surely they would not stop the duchess from peeking at a work in progress. After all, it is undoubtedly her money that is financing whatever work has been done beneath that long white drape. Pretending that she is moving closer to one of the fire bowls to keep warm, she bends over and lifts the drape, revealing the lower right corner of the painting. She can see that the panel is of dark wood, walnut, just like the panel Leonardo used for Cecilia’s portrait. She looks up to see if she is being caught in her act of spying—she is not—and then lifts the drape a little more. On the canvas, a golden ribbon, much like the one the Magistro painted into the boughs on the ceiling of her apartments, rests against a crimson velvet robe. Intrigued that she has discovered what is undoubtedly a portrait, Beatrice proceeds with the unveiling, anxious to know who the sitter might be. If the Magistro is taking commissions for portraiture, then he will hardly be able to refuse the duchess when she demands a portrait of her sister.
Slowly she pulls up the drape. Red velvet embossed with gold makes up the bodice of the sitter’s gown. The beads of a simple necklace hang below embroidered ribbon lining the neck, exposing creamy skin. The shoulder is curved, the neck, long. The sitter is a woman, and young. The chin is round, the lips full, but set seriously. Raven hair, pulled back into a braid of sorts, hugs a high cheekbone.
Suddenly, the eyes are exposed. They stare slightly to the left, as they have often done in recent times, when Lucrezia Crivelli has been too timid, or too guilty, to meet Beatrice’s direct gaze. Lucrezia refuses once more to look right at Beatrice, instead turning her serious—studious, almost—stare at something just off to the side of the portrait. Look at me, Beatrice wants to scream, pains taking over her body. She is sick in the stomach and light in the head all at once, and she doesn’t know whether to bend over or drop to the floor. Instead, she grabs onto the easel for support, almost knocking it to the ground. The noise alerts the apprentices.
“I am not well,” she says, dropping the drape over the painting and looking at the stone floor of the refectory, not wanting them to see her flushed, disturbed face. One of the young men tries to approach her to offer his arm, but, without looking at him, she rushes past him and out the door.
The trees in the courtyard of the refectory are bare. The sky has turned from blue to gray, and the air seems much colder than just a little while ago. Beatrice sees that her attendants wait for her in two carriages, all huddled together to keep warm, snuggled under thick blankets, and laughing at whatever gossip they are exchanging to keep their minds off of the cold weather. What if they are laughing at her? What if the talk that brings those smiles to their faces is that the naïve little duchess sits for a family portrait by the Magistro to be painted in a solemn pose with her husband and two children glorifying their union and its issue, while she is also sitting right under the nose of Lucrezia Crivelli, who has taken her husband’s heart?
She cannot, will not, return to the carriages, only to see her ladies snap their mouths shut, quieting the gossip because its victim has just appeared. She sees the door of the church and knows where she must go—to Bianca Giovanna, whose sweet spirit will listen to her troubles and soothe her.
The church is empty, frigid, and dank. Beatrice falls on the floor next to Bianca’s crypt. “We are both alone,” she cries into her hands. “The only difference is that your husband would be with you if he could. My husband uses the death of his precious daughter as an excuse to stay away from me while he consoles himself with another woman. Is she so much better than I?” Beatrice pleads to the dead girl, who offers no response. She feels a pulling within her womb, as if the baby has suddenly become too heavy for her body and is pushing to get out. She doubles over, clutching her belly. The child seems to be making himself known to her at this hour of her need. “Does this child mean nothing to him either?”
In just a few years, she has gone from her husband’s sweetheart, confidante, and partner to his breeding machine. Lucrezia Crivelli is beautiful, true, but older than Beatrice, and married. And, Beatrice is sure, no intellectual match for Cecilia or Isabella, her former rivals. What is she offering to him that he cannot find in the arms of his wife? Did Ludovico simply tire of Beatrice because he possessed her? Do men automatically tire of a woman after she gives him the very best she can offer—love, companionship, partnership in his ambitions, children to carry on his name and fortune? It seems to Beatrice that a woman’s love is something to cherish, not toss aside for some new bauble.
And what bauble? Beatrice thinks that Lucrezia looks awful in the Magistro’s portrait—stern, serious, shoulders drawn tight, as if she is worried over something. As if she has something to hide. Beatrice is certain that Leonardo, like the rest of the kingdom, is upset over Ludovico’s indiscretion and has rendered Lucrezia less desirable than she is. The portrait looks to her as if the Magistro sketched in the outline and left the painting to his apprentices, since the face embodies neither the life nor the mystery nor the beauty nor the animation of the portrait of Cecilia.
But the meaning of Lucrezia’s portrait is inevitable. It is an indication that Ludovico’s feelings for her are permanent. She has replaced Beatrice. Did he not say that he would only ask the Magistro to paint a woman he loves? Now she has seen the awful proof that his affections have flowed away from her like water draining to lower ground. What is she to do?
You have your children
, people will whisper to her. She hears their voices in her head already, anticipating the words that will come if she dare complain to anyone of her plight. As if that is all she, or any woman, should want. Beatrice is only one and twenty. Must she spend the rest of her life cooing over her children and attending to their needs while her brief romance with her husband fades more and more from memory? It is unthinkable.
I should have thrown him to Louis of Orleans at Novara and then cut my own deal with the French
. Why did she help him? What has been her thanks?
I should have sided with Isabel of Aragon and Naples
. It would have been a wiser move. Then, perhaps, the young duke would still be alive, and Beatrice and Isabel would be running the kingdom while Gian Galeazzo busied himself with wine and the behinds of young men, and the present Duke of Milan would be dead or in a Neapolitan prison. Could Aragon—gloomy, unhappy Aragon—have been a worse or more deceitful partner than Ludovico?
“Oh unhappy daughter, forgive me for reviewing the faults of your father at your grave.” Is she causing the spirit of that girl unintended grief? Yet she is bitter, and Bianca Giovanna, who had witnessed Beatrice’s triumphs with Ludovico, would surely understand her sorrow at this latest and most devastating failure.
Beatrice’s ladies—mercifully not Crivelli, whom Beatrice could at this moment tear apart like a lion ripping into a rabbit—appear at the rear of the church with cries of how this incessant sorrow and grieving is good neither for the duchess nor for her child. How Bianca Giovanna had been a happy girl and would not wish for her death to cause permanent grief to those she loved. How the chill in the church is sure to settle in Beatrice’s very bones and make her give birth to a sickly boy. She feels arms pick her up off the stone floor, dragging her away.
“You’re the lucky one,” she says to the crypt, surprised at the snake’s hiss that emanates from her throat. Has she ever sounded so venomous in all her life? “You died before your husband got tired of you and threw you away.”
FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF LEONARDO:
The swan is white without any spot, and sings sweetly as it dies; with this song its life ends.
She has humiliated herself before members of her court. They will take her parting words to the corpse of Bianca Giovanna and spread them throughout the kingdom. Her stature as the wronged wife is now confirmed by her own testimony. Before a fortnight, everyone in Italy will know.
There is little she can do to counter the damage. She might speak to Ludovico, to impress upon him the harm that he is doing not only to her but to the strength and sanctity of their family, and to the whole of the kingdom by extension. But she is in no mood to ask for his attention or his affection or even his loyalty. If he does not realize what he is doing—that removing his love is the death of something beautiful—she does not feel like reminding him.
She feels like forgetting, and that is why she has summoned the singers and the musicians to her ballroom this evening. She has only one month until she enters her confinement, and what with the winter weather, she cannot spend it as she would like, outdoors on her horse, hunting until the sun sets. So she has decided that gaiety will be the order of the evening.
She does not ask her husband to attend the festivities. She hopes that he hears that Beatrice d’Este, despite his betrayal and public humiliation, is hosting a party. Without him. And dancing and singing with beautiful young men late into the evening. Men who find the duchess alluring despite the fact that he does not, despite that she has grown large with child and is no longer the nubile naïf who came to court six years ago.
Perhaps she will emulate the behavior of other women whose husbands take their attentions elsewhere. She looks around the room right now to see who might be a potential lover and is astonished at her choices. Have they all just recently appeared at court, or has she, in her consuming love for Ludovico, been blind to their charms? It seems that with each twist of her head to the tune of the music, she encounters another pair of tempting and hungry eyes falling upon her. She cannot rise from a curtsey without meeting some man’s appreciative gaze and blushing when she guesses his thoughts. They are all spry, lean, and young compared to her husband. She cannot know at this moment what is more beautiful to her, the thick brown curls of her guests from Calabria and other cities in the south, or the icy Nordic features of their friends from over the Alps. Some of the knights, guests from Emperor Max’s German court, have let their wolf-blue eyes settle for an uncomfortably long time upon the figure of the duchess as she dances, and she notices that she enjoys what once might have sent her into discomfort.
Were these looks of appreciation from other men always present? How is it that she has not noticed them until now? Do they admire how she twirls so gracefully when a pregnant belly might have thrown a less agile woman off balance? Have they seen her riding the ever-faithful Drago through the meadows outside the Castello, astonished that so small a woman has such dominion over so large a beast? Have they heard that she can pierce the heart of a wild boar with a single arrow, dropping him dead at her feet? Or are they thinking how the attentions of the Duchess of Milan might advance their own political and military ambitions? How is she to know? At this moment, she does not even care. She is enjoying the notion that her heart need not cease to beat because Ludovico has taken his love away.
This last thought opens a new landscape in her heart. Life, love, lust does not begin and end with her husband. There are many fields upon which she might sow the seeds of her affections. And with this new thought, she realizes that she is tired of this stiff bowing and polite turning upon one’s toes; these tame dances that begin and end with reverence paid to one’s partner. It is time for a new kind of dance, something to match the fresh daring rising up inside her. At once, a strange force rushes through her veins and seems to empty itself out in the core of her being. It feels to her as if some wild creature—and she does not mean her fetus, but another type of spirit—is expanding inside of her, demanding her to give some outlet to its pulsing energy. Beatrice feels that if she does not let the creature release itself upon the dance floor, it will consume its host. If she moves fast enough, if she whirls and twirls enough to exhaust the demon, then she, Beatrice, will have peace. Though the room is beginning to spin about her, she knows that it is not rest she needs, but to dance this feeling away.
