The Second Duchess (27 page)

“Look at me.”

I looked up slowly. His eyes were narrowed, his lips pressed together in reticence or wariness or anger, or perhaps all of those and more. I did not know his expressions. I was married to him, I had shared his bed, I was at his mercy, and I did not know him at all.

“You do not believe me.”

“I do not disbelieve you.” My voice wavered. I swallowed and said more strongly, “I have the rest to tell you, and that may make it clearer why I cannot make myself certain, one way or the other.”

He looked at me for a long time. “You are fortunate, Madonna, that I choose to put my alliance with the emperor above my personal displeasure,” he said. “I have answered your question. It is your turn to speak. Who wishes to kill you, and why?”

I looked down at my lap and made a neat little pleat in the russet-colored silk of my overskirt. “There are those, I think, who may wish to silence—some questions I have been asking. And there are also those who—who whispered to me of conspiracies and old sins, and who may now regret their words.”

“By the bloody lance of Saint George,” he said, his voice so quiet and cold I almost expected the flowers around us to blacken and wither. “You had best tell me exactly what questions you have been asking, Madonna, and what conspiracies you have dared to listen to, and I warn you to leave off any women’s lies or dissimulations.”

I had thought I knew what fear felt like. When I was five or six, I had lost my way in a garden-maze at dusk, in Innsbruck. As a young girl, perhaps thirteen, I had skated too far from the edge of a frozen lake in Vienna, crashed through into the water, and for a few heart-stopping moments flailed against the underside of the ice. Only recently I had stood before the painting of Lucrezia de’ Medici, lost in my thoughts, while the duke came up silently behind me to jerk the curtain closed.

Those moments, it seemed, had been nothing. Now—now I was truly afraid.

But it was too late to turn back. I made another pleat in my skirt.

“I have been asking questions about your first duchess’s death,” I said, speaking slowly, one word at a time in the hope it would keep my voice from failing. “The conspiracy—I am not even sure it is a conspiracy. The Florentine ambassador said some unnerving things to me, under the guise of a literary conversation, and afterward claimed they meant nothing.”

I could not look at him as I said it. I thought I heard a single quick intake of breath, but my pulse was thudding so violently in my own ears I was not sure. I closed my eyes and crushed the silk of my skirt with both my hands, obliterating my careful pleats. Juana la Loca had been locked up, locked up mad and raving for fifty years. Her blood ran in my veins—would I go mad as well, if I were confined?

He was silent for a long time. I don’t think I breathed at all, not once.

“I see,” he said at last. There was no expression in his voice—he might have been acknowledging a secretary’s explanation of some small miscalculation in his accounts.

I took a shuddering breath and swallowed hard. Tears stung hotly in my eyes, but I would not, would not, would not acknowledge them by lifting my hand to brush them away. They blurred my vision and spilled over without a sound, hot on my fingers and making dark patches on my rich brocade.

Finally, in the same expressionless voice, he said, “I made it clear to you, I believe, that I did not wish you to ask further questions about my first duchess. And even so you pursued the matter?”

“Yes,” I managed to choke out. “I did it because—because you made it clear to me. Because of the way you made it clear to me.”

I had to stop. I had to regain my self-control. I closed my eyes tightly and concentrated on breathing slowly and deeply. I smoothed out the creases in my skirt and began to make another series of perfect pleats in the fabric. After a moment I felt calmer.

“I am waiting,” the duke said.

“After you—thrashed me,” I said, “I was humiliated, angry, frightened, just as I am sure you intended me to be. By the next morning, the tale had been whispered from one end of the Castello to the other.”

He said nothing.

“I went out to walk in the orange garden. Nora laughed at me behind my back. In front of all her little court, she laughed. In front of her lowborn astrologer and Messer Bernardo Canigiani, she laughed.”

Still he said nothing.

“From there I went to the chapel. While I was attempting to collect myself, Messer Bernardo approached me. He presented it very delicately, my lord, in the guise of a conversation about literature. But I believe he thought to use my humiliation and my anger to tempt me into a plot he was devising.”

“I see. And what sort of plot was this?”

“First, he invited me—pressed me—to leave Ferrara and travel to Florence, ostensibly to visit with my sister. It soon became clear his true design was to make it appear I had repudiated our marriage and fled to my sister’s protection.”

The duke said nothing.

“He then suggested I use my position here to gather evidence against you in the death of Serenissima Lucrezia. That I should convey that evidence, whatever it might be, to Florence, and put it into the hands of Cosimo de’ Medici.”

I stopped. I could hardly put it more baldly than that.

“And did it not occur to you,” the duke said after another long pause, “to tell me of this conversation immediately?”

I swallowed. “I might have imagined Messer Bernardo’s meaning. It might have been a deliberate attempt to create disharmony between us. You had just beaten me for expressing an interest in Lucrezia de’ Medici. If I had come to you with a tale of some Florentine plot to avenge her death, a tale Messer Bernardo would surely deny, I feared you would—”

I broke off. We both knew what I might have said.
I feared you would beat me again. I feared you would murder me as well.

He said nothing.

There was no longer any hope of concealing my tears. “There is another reason I did not tell you. What Messer Bernardo said led me to think. If there was indeed proof you had—” I hesitated. I still could not quite believe I was speaking the words. “Proof you had participated in the death of your first wife, and if the Florentines could plot to use that proof against you—then I could do the same. I could find the proof first, keep it from the Florentines, and at the same time use it privately against you to protect myself against further mistreatments.”

Neither of us said anything then, for a long time. I looked at the blue hyacinths on the other side of the pathway. Despite the sun, they were already drooping.

“You are the Duchess of Ferrara,” he said slowly. “As such you are my subject. For you to attempt to prove a charge of murder against me, privately or publicly, is treason.”

He gave the last word no particular emphasis, but still it felt as if he had struck me across the face. I had no defense, because what he said was true. But neither did he have a defense against the accusations of murder, other than his unsupported word.

I lifted my head. The duke was looking at me as if he were trying to decide which palace would be my prison while he petitioned the pope for an annulment of our marriage. Or which monastery—But I did not dare think of that.

“My lord, I cannot defend myself against your accusation, because it is true,” I said, as steadily as I could. “I can only give myself up to your mercy. I swear I will ask no more questions, meddle no further, and pattern myself to be exactly what you wish me to be, now and always. I ask only that you allow me my freedom and exonerate Katharina Zähringen from the unjust charges against her.”

There. It was said.

There was a long silence.

“Do you take me for a fool?” the duke said at last. “You will never be a silent, subservient wife. And as I told you only a short time ago, I am not a man to be bargained with like a shopkeeper.”

Jacta alea est
.

I had cast the die, then, and I had lost. I felt as if I had turned to stone. Even my tears froze in my eyes, unshed. Katharina would be subjected to
la scopa
. And I would go mad. Locked up, I would slowly and quietly go mad. I would make pleats in my skirts and count the stones in my prison-walls forever.

He put one hand over mine and held my fingers still. “You do that when you are distressed,” he said. “Make folds in your skirts, put things straight. Do not think I have not noticed.”

That was the final humiliation. I found myself shivering with the effort it took to keep my hands still.

“Now,” he said.

“You are my wife. That cannot be easily undone, and in any case it is important for me to get an heir for Ferrara. It is also to my advantage to maintain good relations with your brother.”

I blinked. My tears were liquid again and blurred my sight.

“Therefore we will keep up the appearance of an amicable marriage. You will not be confined in any obvious way, although you will have at least two Ferrarese ladies with you at all times and you will not go outside the Castello or the Palazzo della Corte without a suitable escort, whom I will choose. This is for your own protection, you understand, until I can be sure there will be no more assassination attempts.”

“Yes, my lord,” I whispered. It was all I could do to speak at all.

“You will tell me everything you have done so far, and everyone to whom you have spoken, in this mad scheme of yours to collect information about my first duchess’s death.” He made it sound as if I had been collecting night-soil in the street.

“I swear it, my lord.”

“You will say nothing to your women about this, nor to anyone else. I will not have your foolishness become a byword about the court.”

I felt hot color flood up into my face, but I also felt a spark of anger. It stiffened my spine, which was, I must confess, sadly in need of stiffening. I said, in a steady voice, “I will say nothing, my lord.”

“You will be absolutely truthful with me, in everything, from this moment forward.”

“Yes, my lord.”

To my amazement he smiled. Though wintry as the midday air, it was still a smile. “I am sure you think you mean that,” he said, “but I do not believe it. Nor do I believe for a moment you will ask no more questions. Oh, you will refrain for a fortnight or two, but then that disquisitive nature of yours—and it was your brother who called it that, you will recall, not I—will overcome you. You will tell yourself one or two questions will do no harm. You will tell yourself, ‘The duke will never know.’ Am I correct?”

As much as I wished to imagine myself keeping my word faithfully down through the years like the patient Griselda of Messer Giovanni Boccaccio’s famous tale, he was probably correct. I said nothing.

“Therefore the investigation will be continued, but at my direction and under my command. I will allow you to ask whatever questions you wish, of whomever you wish, but it will be in my presence.”

Holy Virgin. Was he serious? “And if you do not like the answers you hear?”

He stopped smiling. His voice was like ice burning against naked skin. I looked at the clasps of his surcoat, golden flames, and for the first time I truly understood his choice of the device.

“I will hide nothing from you,” he said. “May God and Saint George be my witnesses, Madonna, whether I like the answers to your questions or not, I will satisfy you once and for all as to what became of my first duchess.”

 

 

It didn’t take la Cavalla long to break, did it? I would never have submitted so quickly just to save one of my women from
la scopa
. But of course, she had a choice. She could tell Alfonso the truth and he’d set her free. I didn’t have a choice. I could’ve screamed the truth from the rooftop of the Lions’ Tower, and it only would’ve made Alfonso angrier and more determined to keep me walled up forever.