The Second Duchess (36 page)

Once he had it at his house, he gave the workmen money and wine and told them to wait. Then he stretched my flesh on a wooden trestle and unwound the shroud and graveclothes, and when it was naked, he looked at it for a long time. I’ll wager I know what he was thinking, the
pervertito
! He picked up the hands—the stiffness had long since passed off, and the arms were graceful and pliable again—and looked closely at the fingernails. Then he took out a thin knife and cut the body open, from throat to
figa
.

Tomorrow they’re going back to the monastery. I wonder what they’ll learn there. If I were to give them a hint, I’d say:
ask Sister Orsola about the key.

T
he next day after dinner we went to the Monastero del Corpus Domini.

“Good day,
mio caro
,” Mother Eleonora said to the duke, from the same chair in front of the window where she had been sitting when I saw her last. “I do not see you often enough. Good day to you as well, Madonna Barbara. I hope you are in better health than you were when last you visited us.”

“Much better, thank you, Mother Abbess.”

“Sit down. Sister Caterina will bring us wine. Have you come to make your devotions in the church? Or just as a kindness, to allay the ennui of a forgotten old woman?”

The duke smiled. “Don’t be ridiculous,
mia zia
,” he said. “You are no more forgotten than I am, and it would not surprise me if you know more of what goes on in the court than I do. No, we have not come to pray. We have come to speak to you of my first duchess.”

Mother Eleonora’s surprise was similar to Messer Girolamo’s.

“God save us all! She is dead and gone,
mio caro
, and the best thing you can do is leave her in peace.” She turned to me, her gaze for all the world like that of the golden-eyed lioness in the duke’s menagerie. “Is it you, Madonna Barbara, who suggested this? You had a goodly number of questions when you were here last.”

I smoothed my stiff brocaded skirts and looked steadily into her eyes. It was an effort. “It is a thing both the duke and I wish to speak of, Mother Abbess.”

The same silent, fresh-faced novice poured our wine, placed a piled-up plate of sticky almond-sugar cakes on the table, and withdrew. “Very well then,” Mother Eleonora said. “What is it about her you wish to know? We have been over this before, Alfonso.”

“I would like you to tell the duchess exactly what happened that night and the next morning. Please call the infirmarian and her assistants to testify as well. I want nothing, no detail, to be left out or glossed over.”

Mother Eleonora looked taken aback, and then I saw an expression I could not quite identify, a combination of arrogance, fear, and slyness. “Let me see,” she said. “Sister Addolorata has been dead these two years at least. Sister Benedicta abandoned her vows and ran off with a dyer’s apprentice.”

“There is, of course, Sister Orsola,” I said.

She smiled. She was Lucrezia Borgia’s one living daughter, and I wondered if her smile was the same as her notorious mother’s. Perhaps Madonna Lucrezia had smiled in just such a way, the corners of her mouth tucked in, calculating and secretive; her smile, it was whispered, had been the one weakness of Cesare Borgia, her brother. “Oh, yes, of course,” Mother Eleonora said. “Sister Orsola.”

“Call her,” the duke said.

It was done, and before we finished our wine and cakes, the rawboned infirmarian I remembered came into the room. “
Deus vobiscum
,” she said, bowing to Mother Eleonora. She paid no attention to the duke or to me.

“
Et cum spirito tuo
,” Mother Eleonora replied, making a cursory sign of the cross in the air. “Come in, my daughter, and kneel beside me. The duke and duchess wish to question you about the death of Duchess Lucrezia de’ Medici.”

I do not believe it was my imagination that a warning passed from the abbess to the infirmarian in the tone of those words. Sister Orsola’s expression went blank as an unpainted canvas as she knelt on Mother Eleonora’s left.

“Yes, Mother Abbess,” she said.

“I wish you to tell what you know of three things, Sister,” the duke said. “First, my dealings with the duchess on the afternoon before her death. Second, what happened the night of her death. And third, what happened the morning afterward. You are to speak plainly and truthfully, and have no fear of reprisal from either the abbess or me.”

Sister Orsola’s eyes slewed from the duke to the abbess and back again, like a hare caught between two foxes. “Plainly and truthfully, is it?” she said. “You already know the first and the third, Serenissimo, since you were there, so maybe it’s you who should be telling us. Or doesn’t your fine new duchess believe your tales?”

The duke’s eyes narrowed, and I wondered what he might have done to her if he had not already made his promise of no reprisals. In an even voice he said, “I wish for you to tell us what you yourself know, and at once.”

A flicker of cunning passed over her face, and then it took on the blank-canvas expression again. “You came into the monastery at about an hour after nones the day before she died,” she said. “I got the key to the duchess’s cell from Mother Eleonora and gave it to you, and you unlocked the door and went in, and then I went on about my business.”

“You could not have gone too far,” I said, “or you would not have heard the shrieking you described to me. In fact, given the thickness of the walls, I cannot help but wonder if you did not keep your ear pressed hard to the door itself.”

I was taking a risk to challenge her, I knew; what if she threw my ruby ring on the table and accused me of having bribed her? On the other hand, if she did that, she would have to give up the ring, and that I was fairly certain she would not do.

“Very well,” she said. “I listened.”

The duke sat like a statue, his face expressionless. Mother Eleonora took a deep draught from her cup of wine. After a moment I prompted, “And what did you hear?”

“
Il Serenissimo
there, he wanted her to tell him the name of the father of her brat. She swore she wasn’t with child at all. He threatened her, told her he’d put her aside for her sins and shut her up in a convent for the rest of her days so he could marry again and get himself a proper heir. He could hardly swear she was still a virgin and the marriage hadn’t been consummated, and no Este would ever claim consanguinity with the Medici, but making up a tale that she’d married unwillingly and always had a vocation for the church, that would’ve given him grounds for an annulment.”

I looked at the duke. “Is this true?”

“Let her finish,” he said coldly.

“Very well. Go ahead, Sister Orsola.”

“She started screeching and screaming, threatening to do away with herself, swearing she’d had no lovers and wasn’t with child. Said she couldn’t stand being locked in, would rather die and go to hell. Proper wild, she sounded. Throwing things, too.”

I thought of the broken pieces of majolica in the small coffer, the shattered mirror, and nodded. “What happened next?”

“
Il Serenissimo
came out with his face black as thunder, and I only just had time to jump back or he would have walked straight over me. He said Sister Benedicta and Sister Addolorata and I were to watch the duchess closely, night and day, and never leave her alone. Then he took himself off.”

“After that, no one but you and the other sisters entered the cell until the morning?”

Again that strange shift of expression across her face, cunning followed by blankness. “No,” she said. “No one else.”

She was lying.

“What happened then?” I asked. “Did you stay with her?”

“Yes. No. Well, I stayed for a while, and then the bell for vespers rang.”

“Who stayed with the duchess during your prayers?”

She looked down. “She wasn’t left alone.”

“That is not what I asked you. Who was with her?”

“Sister Addolorata was so sick with her rheumatics, she could hardly walk. Sister Benedicta was off somewhere, no one knew where. And the bell had rung. I had to go to vespers.”

The duke’s voice was soft, but even so it chilled me to the bone. His eyes were fixed on the infirmarian and the monsters had leaped to the surface, teeth and claws at the ready.

“That friend of hers,” Sister Orsola said sullenly. “Tommasina, she called herself. The
parruchiera
. She used to come sometimes, and she always had a trinket or two to give. What harm could she do? Better her with the duchess than one of us. By those last days, the duchess hated us all.”

The duke frowned. His expression relaxed a little, and I could see him sorting back through his memories of his first wife’s household, memories he had surely done his best to forget. “Tommasina,” he said. “A hairdressing-woman. Yes, I remember the name. She was part of the duchess’s original Florentine household, I think, and a troublemaker from the first. But she was sent home with the rest.”

“You may have thought she was,” Sister Orsola said, “but she made her way back into the city somehow. A small dark woman with a whispering sort of voice. Sometimes she brought the duchess cakes and sweetmeats, and they shared them with me so I wouldn’t tell. I hadn’t had cake since I entered here. I’m a baker’s daughter, I am, and I know cake, and what the whispering woman brought was good cake. I shared it with a duchess, I did. And that’s not all I shared. I—”

She stopped suddenly.

I drew my breath to press her on what else exactly she had shared with Duchess Lucrezia, but Mother Eleonora forestalled me. It was as if she had suddenly awakened from the lull of the wine and realized something dangerous was happening.

“So for the sake of your gluttony,” she said to Sister Orsola, “you allowed a secular person into the monastery, into the enclosure itself, without my permission. Go to your cell, Sister, and kneel on the bare stone floor and say one hundred Aves and one hundred Paters for your sins. I shall speak with you further this evening.”

As if we ourselves are not secular persons, I thought. As if all the ladies of the court with whom you gossip are not secular persons.

Sister Orsola may have been thinking much the same thing, for she did not lower her eyes or make any move to obey. Why did I think she was actually pleased by the distraction? “The Serenissimo said I was to tell the truth,” she said, “and I wouldn’t be punished.”

“You shall beg your bread in the refectory for a month for your insolence. Now go.”

“A moment,
mia zia
.” The duke’s voice was pleasant but cool. I wondered if he was also curious about what else the infirmarian had shared with his young wife. “Sister Orsola is correct. I promised she would face no reprisal if she spoke frankly, and I must insist you honor my promise.”

Mother Eleonora put down her wine-cup. She had an odd expression—angry, apprehensive, and at the same time weary. No, not weary, world-weary—as if she had suddenly seen one sin too many, or as if she were about to be caught in one lie too many, from which even her Este blood and her Borgia cunning could not save her.

“The results of this will be upon your head, then, Alfonso,” she said. She filled her cup again, all the way to the brim. “You may continue, Sister.”

“She’s still here,” Sister Orsola said. “Tommasina. She’s a tertiary now, not a vowed sister, but one who lives nearby and—”