The Second Duchess (32 page)

I put the coif aside and began to pull out the braiding. My hands had begun to tremble. Anticipation? Passion? Fear? I could not separate the one from the other.

Silken, sleep-warmed, braid-crimped, scented with apricots. I pulled a strand or two of my hair forward, over my breasts. Then I looked up at him.

He tossed the glasses aside, and I heard them shatter on the tile. The work of an artist, the value of a
scudo d’oro
at least, carelessly reduced to fragments. Then he half-knelt on the bed and without gentleness or ceremony jerked the night-smock down over my shoulders.

“Do not think to toy with me,” he said. “However gentle I may seem, I am permitting you to continue this—investigation—into the death of my first duchess because I choose to do so. If I choose to put an end to it, an end there will be.”

I could feel the silky weight of my hair against my naked skin. The abrupt change in his manner exhilarated me, but frightened me, too. Everything was different. He was possessing me, but in some strange way I had gained power over him as well. We were at the edge of a precipice. Would we fall? Would only one of us fall? Would I be the one?

I whispered, “I understand, my lord.”

I did not have the courage to speak it.

“This time you will open your eyes. No, do not turn your face away.
Per Dio
, you will look at me.”

He had thrown off his own night-gown. I had never looked at him naked without immediately looking away; now I looked steadily and saw a man’s body, a man’s hardened skin and musculature, patches and lines of dark hair where before I had seen only silks and velvets. He bore scars, one on his arm, one over his ribs on the left side, an ugly one from hip to inner thigh on the right side, which at first surprised me—
Holy Virgin, the tournament at Blois
—but of course for all his courtier’s cultivation, he had known battlefields and tilt-yards in Italy, France, and Flanders.

“I am looking at you,” I said.

His fingers were brown from the sun, calloused from bow and reins, lute-strings and tennis-racquets. He twined them in my hair and spread it out over the pillows, leaving me as naked to him as he was to me. “My difficult wife,” he said. “My disobedient, obstinate wife.”

My blood and nerves rose to his touch, and my skin quivered. I put my arms around his neck. Neither of us spoke again. He had not come into my bedchamber, after all, for the sake of conversation.

 

 

I SLEPT THROUGH the morning bells, through Mass and breakfast and the call of the horns as the court rode out to hunt. I never knew when the duke left me. I slept and slept and slept, stuporous with exhaustion and excess. When I woke at last, I found myself stiff, bruised, hungry, and restive as a mare shut up in the stable too long.

“Bring me bread and wine, please,” I said to Nicoletta Rangoni, who was attending me. “Quickly, no ceremony. Then hot water to wash, and the blue gown and the dark green surcoat, the one lined with fox fur.”

“Are you going out, Serenissima? The duke ordered us to call the captain of his guard if you wished to go out, so you would have a proper escort.”

“A proper escort!” I laughed. Even that could not discourage me. “Proper spies, you mean. No, do not look like that, it does not matter. I am only going to the Lions’ Tower, and it is cold out on the galleries. I think you and Vittoria and the puppies will be escort enough.”

“Yes, Serenissima. The duke also suggested, Serenissima, you go and look at the work that has been done on the chapel. Two of the new panels have been completed, and the duke wishes to know your opinion of them.”

“Very well, we shall stop at the chapel for a moment. Now, the golden chain, the one with the keys? I brought it here yesterday, and I am not sure what I did with it. Look for it, please, while I am eating. Oh, and collect a lamp, and some oil. And the puppies’ leashes.”

I sopped the bread in the wine and ate it with relish. I refused jewels and braiding in my hair and bundled it all—
silken, sleep-warmed, braid-crimped, scented with apricots, twisted around the duke’s fists
—into a plain silver net. Within half an hour we were ready, Nicoletta and Vittoria, Tristo and Isa and I.

“Good day to you, Frà Pandolf,” I said as I stepped inside the chapel. I was surprised to see scaffolding, the walls broken through in places and the removed blocks of stone stacked amid dust, broken shards, piles of bricks, and buckets of sand and water. I was suddenly reminded of the bricks and building materials I had seen at the Monastero del Corpus Domini. How long had the building of the new cellarium been in progress? Years of disruption and dust, Mother Eleonora had said. How many years? And were secular workmen allowed inside the enclosure?

“The duke suggested I come and assess your progress,” I said to Frà Pandolf, who had been greeting me almost as effusively as Messer Bernardo Canigiani might have done. Apparently he had decided to acknowledge my existence again. “He did not tell me the renovations were so extensive.”

“Yes, Serenissima, the duke informed me he wished you to look at the work I have done so far. As you can see, in addition to the new wall-paintings, there will be niches where suitable bronze figures will be placed, the Blessed Virgin, of course”—he crossed himself; we all followed suit like startled birds taking wing, making a sudden colorful flutter of motion in the little chapel—“and Saint Anne her mother, and Saint Elizabeth the mother of the Baptist. It was the duke’s suggestion. He has already commissioned Claus of Innsbruck to cast the bronzes, and specified that they are to be in a very simple and monastic style. They will come all the way from Austria, in your honor, of course.”

“Of course.” I was taken aback that my glib excuse for my visit to the Monastero del Corpus Domini had borne such extensive fruit. “From the size of the niches, the figures will be life-sized.”

Tristo and Isa were tugging at their leashes, exploring the great gaps excavated in the wall opposite the windows. Their little black noses, always sniffing, had become comically smudged with white dust from the broken stone.

“Yes, Serenissima. In the late morning, the sun will illuminate them like the very light of heaven. Will you come and look at the paintings? I have finished two of them, and there will be four more.”

I gestured to Nicoletta to gather up the puppies before they hurt themselves on the sharp fragments of broken stone. “Yes, of course, I would be pleased to look at them.” A lie, of course, because I wanted nothing more than to get away and go to the tower room while there was still time for a thorough, leisurely search of the wedding chests.

“This one shows the Blessed Virgin as a pure child, at the knee of her mother, Saint Anne,” Frà Pandolf said. “Move closer to the window, Serenissima, to gain the full effect.” He came up very close to me and actually dared to touch my arm, presumably to guide my attention. I stiffened and withdrew, although in the throes of his encomium to himself, I did not believe he noticed.

“Look at the way the light illuminates her! Look at the folds of Saint Anne’s mantle, and the individual perfection of the pages of the book that—”

“Yes, yes,” I said, stepping back even farther. There was something about the painting, for all its virtuosity, that made me uneasy. The face of the Virgin, the half-closed eyelids, the parted lips—it was like the portrait of Lucrezia de’ Medici and yet unlike. Surely unlike—surely I was seeing a resemblance that was not there.

“It is beautiful,” I said. “I am sure the chapel will be magnificent when your work is completed. Nicoletta, Vittoria, come, let us go.”

 

 

AND SO AT last I was on my way to the Lions’ Tower, to search through Lucrezia de’ Medici’s wedding chests for further evidence, to look for hidden compartments, and to collect the jeweled crystal flask. If I found anything useful in the chests, particularly the mysterious missing book, I would give it to the duke; the flask I would give to Maria Granmammelli. I would even let her dose me with further potions if she would examine the sediment and make an attempt to identify it.

At the top of the tower, I unlocked the door to the storageroom. Nicoletta lit the lamp and gave it to me; I went inside alone and closed the door behind me. The small coffer from the monastery was just as the duke and I had left it, and we had already examined it quite thoroughly. It was the four large coffers I was interested in. Two of them, I remembered, had been used to transport the duchess’s clothing and possessions to the monastery. The other two held what remained of her property, left behind when her valuables were returned to Florence in repayment of her dowry.

The ones taken to the monastery, I reasoned, would have been unpacked and repacked at the time, their contents examined and reexamined. But the other two would have been hurriedly filled with the detritus of the young duchess’s life. Who knew what they might contain?

I chose the largest first, the one with painted fruits and flowers and unicorns wreathing the initials
A
and
L
. It took two tries to find the right key, but when I did, it clicked satisfyingly in the lock. Slowly, with a sense of—what, awe? fear? anticipation?—I lifted the lid.

What first met my eye could not have been more prosaic: piles of smocks, headdresses, kerchiefs, and night-coifs with the remains of embroidery that had been picked away, probably for gold and silver thread and small jewels. I rummaged deeper and found a few gauze partlets and veils, leather gloves also stripped of their ornamentation, and several pairs of slippers. At the very bottom there were a heavy woolen cloak, spotted by rain, and two pairs of worn wooden chopines.

I went through the chest again, then unlocked and searched the second chest, then even the third and fourth. Still I was frustrated: all four chests were filled with nothing but clothes of the less valuable sort, dishes and candlesticks and wine-cups that had been chipped or scratched, half-used cosmetics and pomades, and other equally meaningless bits and pieces of a young girl’s life. There were no papers, no letters, no trace of the book the duke had described. But perhaps there were secret compartments.

I crouched down in front of the largest chest and ran my finger over the painted carvings. Here again, on the side, there were flowers rioting and lush fruits, pomegranates and peaches and berries, the color fading and flaking. Here again was the cipher combining the
A
and the
L
. I traced the letters with my forefinger. Each loop and swirl seemed to end by curling back upon itself. Perfect hiding places for hidden latches. But there was nothing.

I moved the lamp closer and examined the outer surfaces of each chest carefully, all the carvings, all four sides, tops and bottoms. Then I looked at the interiors, felt for joinings or rough edges, and compared the apparent size and depth of each chest with the actual measurements.

Nothing was out of order. The chests were ordinary wedding chests, with no hidden spaces.

So if there were no secret compartments, and the book was not here, there was another hiding place. There had to be.

I sat back on my heels in front of the largest chest and ran my finger one more time over the painted carvings, the flowers and fruits and unicorns, the cipher combining the
A
and the
L
. I remembered my dream. I traced the
A
with my forefinger, and said aloud to the dusty air, “Alfonso.” It sounded strange to me. I wondered if I would ever call him such, to his face. There was something else about my dream—but as dreams will do, it flickered in and out of my understanding, and I could not quite catch hold of it.

I locked the large chest securely, and then opened the small coffer, intending only to take the flask. Everything was as it had been—the clothes, the broken majolica, the toys. Suddenly I looked at the toys more closely. They were not the gilded and jeweled playthings of a duke’s daughter, a duke’s wife. They were plain wood, crudely painted. I could not imagine Lucrezia de’ Medici owning them; yet here they were, among the other objects from her monastery cell.

Someone had given them to her, to help her while away the time.

Sister Orsola? Would a Clarissa, vowed to poverty, have painted toys, however cheap and crude they were? She had grasped my ring quickly enough, but that was an adult acquisitiveness; I could not see her playing with a child’s toys.

Where had they come from, then? Who had brought them to the Monastero del Corpus Domini, and who had given them to the young duchess? Had the doors of the monastery been less firmly locked and barred than the duke presumed?

I took the crystal flask from the depths of the chest. Its jewels glittered balefully at me in the flickering flame of my lamp. I tucked it into my sleeve, straightened up, and brushed the dust from my skirts.

At suppertime I would tell the duke what I had done, and pose to him my question about the toys. But before that, I would speak to Maria Granmammelli and persuade her to employ her best arts to discover what had been in the crystal flask.