The Second Duchess (50 page)

“I do not believe you. You are disquisitive and difficult, after all.”

“And require firm handling.” Someday I would make my brother Ferdinand pay for his masquerade as the envoy of the Count of Tyrol, and his lighthearted words describing me that the duke apparently would never forget.

The duke smiled. “No,” he said. “In that your brother was wrong, and it was my misjudgment that I listened to him. You require reason and—honor for your position. From now on you shall have them.”

Again I felt that new, indefinable closeness between us. I felt as if I could say anything to him. I remembered the white king from his chess set, crowned and spurred on his caparisoned horse, off to war. Or to a joust.

“Alfonso,” I said again. It still did not feel natural. That would come, I hoped. “I would ask a question of you.”

“Ask.”

“What happened at the tournament at Blois?”

“Blois?” He sounded genuinely puzzled for a moment. Then he said, “Ah, yes. Blois. Someone has been whispering ugly tales to you.”

“Yes.” I did not tell him who had said it, and he did not ask.

“I was unhorsed. You have seen the scar. The animal fell on me with its whole weight. Even so, however painful and embarrassing it might have been, I suffered no lasting injury.”

I said nothing.

“It is my desire to beget heirs for Ferrara with you, Madonna, and I am fully confident my desire will come to pass. I cannot be any more forthright than that.”

“In that we are as one.” I looked down at my hands, which rested peacefully on the carved arms of my chair. I saw my poor broken finger, still splinted and bandaged with linen strips. My wedding ring had protected the others. When the splints and bandages were no longer needed, I would wear the ring again.

He put his own hand over mine. “We are,” he said.

“And the chimera of poets and adulteresses?”

That did not puzzle him; he knew at once what I was referring to. He smiled. “I still contend that is true, on the whole. Perhaps there are exceptions.”

We sat for a while in silence, alone in the courtyard, our hands joined. It was so rare for either of us to be unattended. It was as if we said more to each other, much more, without words.

“I will buy Masses for their souls, the three of them,” the duke said aloud, at last. “My aunt will arrange it, I am sure, at Corpus Domini.”

“I will pray for them privately. And there are four, not three.”

“Four? The Tassoni girl, the
parruchiera
, and the nun. Surely you do not intend to pray for the Franciscan.”

“No. The fourth is your first duchess.”

A dark shadow of monsters flickered up under the surface of his eyes. They would always be there. I would always have to take care when I saw them. “Why would you pray for her? She brought her end upon herself.”

“Not such an end as she suffered. You will not pray for her, for charity’s sake?”

“No. And I do not wish to speak of the matter again. Come, let us go in. It is almost time for supper.”

He rose. I rose as well and put my hand upon his. Everything had changed between us, but that was something for us alone to know. The world would see only the duke and his duchess, grave and courteous as always, their sport and their entertainments, their art and their music, their patronage and their court.

I was content with that.

“Very well, I will not speak of it again,” I said. “But here and now I make a vow before God and the Holy Virgin, and before you too, my lord—I will pray for her, all the rest of my life.”

 

 

 

 

 

First published as “Italy” in 1842 in
Dramatic Lyrics
, the second volume in a series of self-published books entitled
Bells and Pomegranates
by Robert Browning. In 1845 it was given the title “My Last Duchess” in the seventh volume of the series, entitled
Dramatic Romances and Lyrics
.

T
he wonderful thing about good poetry is the way it lends itself to multiple—and often contradictory—interpretations. My vision of “My Last Duchess” is not wholly the traditional one of the duke as a monster and a madman who murdered his innocent young wife out of sheer pride and possessiveness. Browning wrote with the sensibility of the Victorian age, and today we read his nineteenthcentury take with twenty-first-century eyes; I have tried to put the duke back in the sixteenth century, where he belongs. Pride and possessiveness were not, after all, unappreciated traits in a Renaissance prince.

 

 

AS I WROTE the novel, I read and reread the poem, and I simultaneously read both primary and secondary historical sources. I tried to work Browning’s dramatic fictionalizations into the historical world of the real Alfonso II d’Este, Lucrezia de’ Medici, and Barbara of Austria.

Refictionalizing the material that Browning himself had fictionalized in his poem sometimes gave me an eerie feeling. Browning’s art is such that he makes his version seem so real—more real, sometimes, than the historical record—and yet the real personages behind the figures frozen in the luminous amber of the poem cried out to be heard.

 

 

ALFONSO II D’ESTE was a soldier, a sportsman, a musician. He fought in the French army with his cousin Henri II and his brother-in-law Duc François de Guise; he was a world-class tennis player (the first written book of rules for tennis was dedicated to him); he was a great patron of the art and literature of the day and the inventor and supporter of the first professional female singing group in Europe, the Consort of Ladies. So although he was indeed vain, arrogant, and vengeful, in his context these qualities did not make him a monster. After all, Cesare Borgia, of whom
The Prince
was written, was Alfonso’s great-uncle.

Alfonso’s device of the flame and the motto
Ardet Aeternum
are historical, although some sources contend they were adopted only later in his life.

 

 

LUCREZIA DE’ MEDICI, the “Last Duchess” of the poem’s title, is generally characterized as a charming innocent, a victim of the duke’s jealousy and madness. Even Browning, however, drops a hint this is not entirely true: “. . . and if she let / Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set / Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse . . .” I collected one or two hints from the historical record that she was not entirely meek and sweet-tempered, spiced it with the much better-known lives of her sisters and sisters-in-law, imagined myself in her place—and found a very different Lucrezia.

 

 

AFTER A FLURRY of contemporary whispers about poisoning and strangulation, history settled down and decided that Lucrezia de’ Medici had died a natural death, probably of tuberculosis. Perhaps she did. Then again, perhaps she did not. On his first trip to Italy in 1838, Robert Browning clearly came across some of the old rumors about Lucrezia’s death, and so fictionalized her relationship with Alfonso in “My Last Duchess.” As my stepping-off point for my story was Browning’s poem, I have followed his fictionalization and woven it together with my own research into the historical record.

Am I maligning Cosimo de’ Medici by suggesting he might have poisoned his own daughter? Possibly. But he was known to have had a violent temper, and even during his own life there were accusations that he stabbed his elder daughter, Maria (who was originally to have married Alfonso), to death for taking a lover. Other rumors hinted that he murdered his son Garzia after Garzia supposedly murdered another of his sons, Giovanni. (This was ultimately disproven by modern-day exhumations and forensic science, which showed the two boys and their mother, Eleonora of Toledo, died together from malaria in 1562.) The fact remains that there were whispers; and what is considered evil today was unexceptional for a great prince in sixteenth-century Italy. Cosimo is certainly known to have ordered the assassination of his relative Lorenzino de’ Medici, his last rival within the Medici family.

 

 

COSIMO IS ALSO known to have had a passionate interest in alchemy.

 

 

THE DEVICE OF creating a poison and disguising it as an abortifacient, leaving the choice of swallowing it in the victim’s own hands—and the decision taken only because she had disgraced the Medici name by the standards of the time—was very typical of the elaborate contrivances of the day.

 

 

AS FOR MESSER Bernardo Canigiani, he was indeed Cosimo de’ Medici’s ambassador to Ferrara. He was a successful diplomat for many years (he did indeed return to Ferrara, but that is another story) and a man of the world, and I believe he would have had few qualms about carrying out his master’s wishes, whatever they might have been.

 

 

BARBARA OF AUSTRIA, my wonderful heroine and the historical second duchess of Alfonso II, has little recorded about her as a personality. She received a deeply religious upbringing with her sisters, at least two of whom became nuns; at the same time she embraced her worldly position as Duchess of Ferrara with every apparent evidence of satisfaction. I have made that dichotomy one of the keys to the character of my own Barbara. She is recorded in more than one document as being—well, there’s no way to soften it—ugly. But in her portrait in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, her hair does glow apricot-gold under her jaunty little cap.