The Second Duchess (43 page)

I felt the duke’s start of surprise. Clearly he had not considered this possibility.

“And when the scheme to restore his daughter failed,” I went on, “Duke Cosimo turned his attention to a second design: undermining your standing with the pope and the world by encouraging the rumors you were responsible for the young duchess’s death.”

“Have you read Messer Niccolò Machiavelli’s book?” the duke said unexpectedly. “It describes some of the exploits of Duke Cesare Borgia, who was, of course, my great-uncle.”

“No, my lord, I have not read it. It was not considered suitable for ladies in Innsbruck.”

“I shall commission a copy for you. Your mind appears to work with much of the same subtlety as that of Messer Niccolò’s prince.”

It was not at all clear if he meant that as a compliment or not. I said nothing.

“Very well. Let us test this new assumption,” he said. “Tommasina Vasari asks her father for the abortifacient. He is a favorite of Duke Cosimo’s—perhaps he thinks he can curry additional favor by telling the duke of his daughter’s predicament. They conspire together—Vasari makes up the potion, and the duke provides the flask.”

I nodded. “It falls into place quite neatly.”

“Mona Tommasina gives the flask to the young duchess that night, after I have left the monastery. The young duchess takes the potion and arranges everything she will need when it begins its work.”

I nodded again. He went on. “However, before it can take its effect, Sister Orsola smothers the young duchess in her bed, presumably out of jealousy, or for some other unknown motive.”

“Or possibly,” I said thoughtfully, “just possibly—to thwart the Medici conspiracy. She was greedy for jewels and luxuries, perhaps to make herself more attractive to her lover. Who knows what she might have been paid to do, and by whom?”

“I myself,” the duke said in a dry voice, “would have been the person most interested in thwarting any such conspiracy. If I had known of its existence. I believe—”

The door to his bedchamber swung open with a crash and a tiny black-clad figure appeared, framed in the doorway like a demon from hell in a
marionetta
morality play. The duke broke off midsentence, and I stepped back in surprise.

“By the lance of Saint George,” he said, sounding both exasperated and—if such a thing could be—affectionate. “One day you will go too far,
mia nonna
. Well, come in. What do you want?”

It was, of course, Maria Granmammelli. I was coming to understand she prided herself on these sudden appearances and disappearances.

“Good evening to you,
caro Serenissimo
. I have some news for the
Austriaca
, and since she said you knew of the commission she gave me, I mean to tell her now, before your eyes, and catch her out if what she said was a lie.”

“Do not be ridiculous,” I said. “Of course it was not a lie.”

At the same time, the duke said, “You will speak to the duchess with proper respect.”

“Oho, so that’s how the wind blows,” the old woman said. “Very well, Serenissimo, proper respect it will be, for your sake and the love I bear you. Do you want to know what I found in your crystal flask, or not?”

“The duchess and I believe we have pieced together the truth. The substance in the flask was an abortifacient, was it not? An expensive and efficacious one?”

Maria Granmammelli came to the duke’s writing-table and stepped up on a footstool so as to put her face at a level with mine. It was surprisingly eerie to look her straight in the eyes.

“That it was not, Serenissimo,” she said. “You and your lady have the wrong dog by the ear entirely. The powder in that flask was the dregs of poison. Deadly poison.”

 

 

 

He left her hanging there, and after a few more minutes she died. She didn’t become
immobila
. She just—died.

“
S
he could be mistaken,” I said. “The residue in the flask was almost four years old. And Messer Girolamo determined the young duchess was smothered, not poisoned.”

Maria Granmammelli had departed, satisfied with the sensation she had created. The duke had gathered up Lucrezia de’ Medici’s letters and papers and put them in a box of his own, made of plain iron and with its locking mechanism on the inside rather than on the outside. He locked the box with an iron key and put the key in his pouch.

“I would be more likely to believe Girolamo Brasavola was mistaken,” he said. “Doctor of the university or no. In matters of herbalism and potions, Maria Granmammelli’s knowledge is without peer.”

I could not help but think that so far her potions had done me little good. But of course I did not say so.

“The simplest explanation,” he went on, “is that they are both correct. There was an amount of liquid in her stomach. She drank the poison, but before it had a chance to take its effect, she was smothered.”

“But Tommasina Vasari loved her. She would never have given her poison, and she confessed to giving her the flask.”

“The flask, yes. Perhaps she was mistaken, or deliberately misled, as to its contents.”

“Misled,” I repeated thoughtfully. Suddenly a new and complex maze of possibilities sprang into existence. “By her father? What reason could he have had to wish the young duchess dead?”

“The
parruchiera
told us she stayed here in Ferrara, a fugitive, for the young duchess’s sake,” the duke said. “Perhaps her father was angry with his daughter for her disobedience, or feared for her, or had arranged a marriage for her and wished her to be free of the entanglement. Perhaps he simply hated the duchess as a rival for his daughter’s affections, and seized an opportunity to be rid of her.”

“If so, it had the opposite effect. Tommasina Vasari blamed you, and she became all the more determined to stay and take her vengeance.”

The duke’s expression darkened. “There is one way to know for sure. Bring the alchemist here to Ferrara and confront him with the flask, or what remains of it after Maria Granmammelli’s experiments.”

“He will never leave Florence willingly. And in any case, even if he agrees to come to Ferrara, surely the Medici will prevent him.”

I knew, the moment the words were out of my mouth, it was a wrong thing to have said. Being told his desires would be thwarted by the Medici was not something the duke would ever take pleasure in hearing.

“I can send agents in secret to persuade him. To abduct him, if necessary. I will get to the bottom of this matter, Madonna, one way or another.” He stood up, just as he did when he was dismissing ambassadors. “Now, I tire of this, and so I will wish you a good night. Tomorrow is the Berlingaccio, and I will be occupied all day with preparations. See you make your preparations as well. Perhaps once Carnival is over, I will have sufficient leisure to take up this matter again.”

And you will not pursue it independently
. He did not say it, but he did not have to.
Remember the vow you swore to me in the Garden of the Seasons at Belfiore
.

There was nothing else I could do, and so I sank into a curtsy. “I wish you a good night as well, my lord.”

He was not quite finished with me. “Messer Girolamo tells me you have not yet presented yourself for his examination.”

“There has been little time, my lord, what with our investigation, and my preparations for the Carnival.”

“You will see him on the Thursday after Ash Wednesday, if you please.”

“Yes, my lord.”

He turned away from me without acknowledging my response. I waited for a moment, finding rather to my mortification that I wished to stay with him. He ignored me. At last I went silently out of his bedchamber, with my loose hair and apricot perfume all for naught.

 

 

THE NEXT MORNING was indeed Shrove Thursday, the Berlingaccio, the beginning of the feverish final week of Carnival. In Ferrara it was celebrated with double nighttime revels famous all over Europe—the Notte del Duca and the Notte della Duchessa.

The gentlemen and the ladies were strictly separated for these celebrations, with even the entertainers and servants being all men and all women respectively. The Castello gates were thrown open and the townspeople were welcomed in over the drawbridges; it was a great tradition that any favor asked of the duke or duchess on Berlingaccio night must be granted. Domenica assured me no one ever asked for anything but a sweetmeat or a paste jewel or some equally inconsequential trifle, which would then be treasured and passed down from mother to daughter as a mark of good fortune. I would be wellprovided with such favors, she told me, in overflowing gilded baskets traditionally made to look like the cornucopia of Amalthea.

The separation of the gentlemen and the ladies did not go so far as to require the festivities to be mounted in different palaces; that would spoil the revelers’ pleasures in the connecting rooms and shadowy corridors. The Notte del Duca was held in the great central courtyard of the Castello, and the Notte della Duchessa in a smaller courtyard near the foot of the Saint Catherine Tower. Under the flaring torches and amid the largesse and wine and dreamlike costumes, even the commonest soldier or shoemaker might speak to the duke, and sewing-women and pie-makers might touch the hand of their duchess.

By further custom both the duke and duchess wore white at the Notte revels and were the only ones to go unmasked. So when I mounted my fanciful Carnival throne in the Saint Catherine courtyard, just at nightfall, I wore a costume of white satin and Messer Salvestro’s silver tissue, sewn with hundreds of jeweled medallions, Berlingaccio sun-faces, and roses of crystals and pearls. My hair was caught up in a net of silver threads knotted with more pearls, each one the size of a hazelnut. Over my brow I wore a circlet of diamonds that Eleonora of Naples had brought to Ferrara as part of her dowry, three generations before.

All in all, it was heavy, tight, prickly, and in every way uncomfortable, but surely it was magnificent enough to please even the duke. Would he ever see it? I had sent him no messages, received none from him, and remained in my apartments all day for my preparations as he had instructed me to do. What had happened to the passionate accord we had experienced in his presence chamber? Or had I alone experienced it, and for the duke was it indeed nothing but a chimera fit only for poets and adulteresses?