The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (66 page)

“But not her great heart,
illustrissima
,” I answered. “The woman who so courageously defended Forli against two rapacious popes cannot be ignored when one totes up a list of heroines.”

“I suppose not,” she answered, somewhat petulantly. “But surely all your heroines need not ride around brandishing swords and wearing breastplates in order to prove their
virtu
.”

“Not at all. I merely mention the lady of Forli because her exploits are so astonishing.”

“
Sì, sì, sì.
” She tapped her finger against her palm impatiently. “But who else?”

“A young woman I knew in Firenze who is the inspiration for this book. A Jewess of no particular talent or notoriety who gave her life for the love of a child.”

“Another dead one,” she pointed out. “Who else?”

“I have considered your illustrious sister of beloved memory, Duchess Beatrice of Milano.”

“Quite so.” She nodded.

“Considering that she had not yet reached the age of twenty-two when childbed fever took her, her accomplishments are all the more admirable. I believe that she was barely seventeen when her illustrious husband sent her to represent him before the Venetian Senate.”

“Eight days short of eighteen,” she corrected me.

“And the court over which she presided . . .” I continued.

“Shone with a light that illuminated all of Italy,” she finished the sentence for me. “Ah me, if we who love so much to spend money had but half of the wealth that my honorable brother-in-law lavished on my honorable sister.” She sighed deeply, moved by her own valiant efforts to achieve her sister’s illustriousness with so much less in the way of resources. Then, because she has never been a woman to waste time or emotion on regret, she went back to her subject with renewed vigor.

“But Grazia, my honorable sister is, alas, dead like so many of your candidates. Even Caterina Sforza of Forli is more dead than alive right now. Who do you have that is alive and breathing?”

“A young scholar in Firenze whom I met but once and who has immured herself in a convent for life in order to pursue scholarship. Her father has completely disowned her because she refuses to marry.”

“A decision I find quite incomprehensible,” she rejoined. “For surely we women are meant to be married. Why else has God arranged the race in two sexes?”

Dio mio.
Would I now be obliged to enter into a prolonged
disputa
on the subject of scholarly abstinence? But no. In one of those whimsical reversals that characterize her nature, she left off sparring with me, leaned forward in a most confidential manner. “I saw an old friend of yours last week in Bozzuolo.”

I was damned if I would rise to the bait.

“He was very eager for news of you. Don’t you want to know who it is, Grazia?” I knew perfectly well, but I refused to be trapped in her snare. Whereupon she shrugged and in an abrupt change of subject asked, “What news do you have from Ferrara? I understand that your brother Maestro Vitale has landed himself in serious trouble with my brother the Duke.” At last.

“But it is not Maestro Vitale who has reaped the punishment,” I hastened to explain. “The one being tortured in the dungeon is my cousin Asher, who is totally blameless in the affair.”

“And this cousin is very dear to you?”

“As dear as my brothers,” I answered. “Oh, madama, could you, would you intercede for him?”

“I could and I would, Grazia,” she replied. “But that leaves unanswered the important question: Will my intercession do your cousin any good? My brother is bitterly disappointed by the death of his heir and full of vengeance against your family.”

“But the soothsaying was my brother Jehiel’s doing, not Asher’s.”

“When it comes to satisfying a
vendetta
, one member of the family is as good as another,” she remarked. “Were the little children of the Ordelaffi family responsible for the assassination of Girolamo Riario? Your heroine Caterina Sforza knew them to be blameless. Yet she slaughtered them all, babes and women alike, in vengeance for her husband’s death. That is the way of a
vendetta
.”

Of course she was correct. That is the way of vengeance. But just this once I prayed, just this time, let it be different.

“By the way, Grazia . . .” I was jarred out of my supplication by the hard drawl of our earlier conversation. “About your
Book of Heroines
and who is to be in it . . . I would be disappointed to learn that you did not consider me fit company for the spinster scholar of Firenze and the rest. But I wish you to understand that my offer to petition my brother on your cousin’s behalf in no way represents a bid for membership in your sisterhood. I make the offer as a disinterested act of sympathy for one who, like me, is bound by indissoluble bonds of love for her family. I do not need to be bribed to be kind.”

Madama’s generosity had given me a shred of hope to cling to. But that last shred was severed when just two days later we had word from Dorotea that her beloved son, Asher, had died after an application of the strappado. As the Greek physician had predicted, my cousin’s heart gave out from the shock of the tremendous blow. His death united all the surviving members of our family under my roof (except Jehiel who, as Ricca reminded us daily, might as well be dead).

Dorotea brought her son’s body by river from Ferrara to Mantova, and together she and Ricca and Penina and Gershom and Judah and I buried him. Then we settled down for the mandated thirty days to mourn.

I never knew how much I had depended on my cousin or how much I loved him until he was gone. The one person who would always come when I called, who would always love me no matter what, was gone, never to come back. I feel his loss to this day.

Prayers were said for him for thirty days. But on many of those days we were compelled to forgo the memorial prayer service because we could not gather up the ten men needed to form a
minyan
. Mind you, our Jewish neighbors had much to lose by public demonstration of friendliness toward us: cancellation of their Ferrarese
condotta
; seizure of their persons. Still these considerations did not stop Davide Finzi from joining in our prayers. He was always present both morning and evening, along with his sons and his two grandsons. Nor did the Norsa family desert us for fear of Alfonso d’Este’s wrath. But in the middle of the month, they were off on their annual journey to the Champagne Fair, and after that, my beloved Asher was mourned or not depending on whatever stray Jewish travelers the barges washed up on the shores of the Lago Superiore who could chant “
Yisgadal v’yiskadash
” with my brother, my husband, and our few loyal friends.

One of the Mantovans who did make haste to convey condolences was Madonna Isabella. Granted, unlike our Jewish neighbors, she stood in no danger from her brother Alfonso for expressing sympathy with us. On the other hand, she certainly had nothing to gain by her kindness. For the second time in as many weeks I was touched by her compassion and resolved to call upon her at the Reggio as soon as our mourning period ended. I felt certain she had honored her promise to petition her brother on Asher’s behalf. And, in the event, I was proven right. For Dorotea later informed us that Marchesana Isabella’s petition arrived in Ferrara on the very day that Asher expired in the arms of the torturer.

If ever you wish to put a truly vicious curse on anyone, wish him to be locked up in a small house for a year with your Aunt Ricca. That I did not mangle her to death during her daily lamentations for herself is a credit to my forbearance. But eventually I began seriously to question my own ability to continue living in such proximity to her. Yet I had promised Jehiel to care for her.

I might simply have left the house to her and fled. Judah had been offered a fine appointment — as body physician to Count Giovanni Sassatello, General of the Republic of Venezia — which included as is customary a house, a mule, an allowance of oil, fish, and grain, and an astronomic stipend of twenty-five ducats a month.

After a year with Ricca and her brats, the offer to move to Venezia appeared to me as a dispensation from the Almighty Himself. But there were Gershom and Penina to consider. Could I in conscience inflict the burden of Ricca’s custody on them?

I never thought to consult Gershom on the matter. To me he was still a boy even though he already had served an arduous apprenticeship as a fledgling banker and had emerged with glowing testimonials. Here I digress briefly to warn you against myself, my son. No matter how old or how wise you grow, I fear I will always consider you in some sense a boy. And I strongly advise you to stake your claims as a man whenever the opportunity arises and to pursue them vigorously in spite of my opposition. It is a task that children born of strong-willed parents inherit.

Your Uncle Gershom needed no such instruction. Not only did he have the nerve to oppose me, he was born with a banker’s sense of timing. During the preliminary skirmishes between me and Ricca he stood by, allowing the boil to grow and fester until the day it burst. When that happened, he stepped in as healer.

Ricca and I had long detested each other. She felt I had cheated her of her birthright. I resented her disloyalty to my brother. But when we joined battle in the sewing room it was not over such substantial issues but over a small piece of lace I had been saving to trim a bonnet for Penina’s little Sarabella.

One day, without a by-your-leave, she picked it up and began to trim her cap with it. As I sat watching her stitch, it was as if her needle plunged into me each time she ran it through my lace. The first day she wore it, the sight of that finely worked filigree entwined in her coarse black plait set me on fire. I went for her like a wild thing. She lunged for my face with her nails. I grabbed her hand and bent the fingers back until they cracked.

Alerted by our shrieks, Gershom rushed downstairs from the courtyard, convinced, he later told me, that someone was dying in the sewing room. What he saw was two grown women rolling around on the tiles locked in furious combat, with hair and blood flying. He had to enlist the help of our manservant to pry us apart but he finally did put a stop to the joust. Ricca stalked off muttering curses and I was left to the pitiless judgment of my little brother.

“Oh, Grazia.” He could barely contain his amusement. “I am astonished at you. Where is my lady sister, the devotee of the ancients? What has become of the golden mean and ‘Above all, no zeal’?”

“Even I can be driven beyond endurance,” I replied crossly.

“So I see.” He came closer to inspect the river of blood that Ricca had dug into my cheek. “This wound must be attended to. Shall I call Judah?”

If there was anyone I did not wish to see me in this sorry state, it was Judah. So I persuaded Gershom to fetch a certain unguent from my beauty box to cleanse the wound of infection. “She is as likely to be rabid as any other mad bitch,” I explained, my vengeful spirit still at the boil.

Until then I had tended to his blackened eyes, bruised limbs, and other childish hurts and had never missed the opportunity to preach to him the virtues of restraint and self-control. Now the roles were reversed. He not only spread the healing unguent on my burning cheek, he also added to the treatment a dollop of wise counsel.

“I have heard the expression that no kitchen is big enough to accommodate two women, but for you and Ricca a refectory would not suffice. You two cannot live under the same roof, Grazia. You will end up killing each other.”

“What’s to be done, then?” I asked.

“Obviously one of you must yield place to the other,” he answered.

“If it were that simple I would happily leave this house to her and Penina. And you, of course, brother,” I replied. “But who then will take care of you?”

“Take care of
me
?”

“You and the women and children,” I replied, still quite unconscious of the implied insult to his manhood.

“Might I suggest to you, sister, that I no longer need taking care of, in your sense? And that I might even be capable of taking care of the others?”

I admitted that the thought had never entered my mind.

“Are you ready to hand over the reins, Grazia? Think before you answer. For if you are, I am willing to take them up and lead this ragtag little dei Rossi force from now on.”

“Can it really be that simple?” I asked.

“For me it is,” he answered gravely. “I have only one condition to make, Grazia.”

“And that is?”

“I refuse absolutely and categorically to marry either of those women.”

Marry? It was becoming clear that he had a completely different picture of himself than I did. “Do you have your own bride picked out, then?” I asked, half teasing but half serious.

He blushed and denied it. But something in the denial, some trace of braggadocio, hinted that this fledgling had already made his initial voyage into Venus’s orbit. Maybe more than once.

That day he and I struck our bargain. From now on he would be head of the family. I would leave the house and its inhabitants under his protection and follow my husband to Venezia.

Once decided, our move to the Veneto was accomplished with astounding ease and quickness. To Ricca it must have seemed as if God had reached down from heaven to pluck out a thorn in her side — namely, me. To Gershom my departure spelled a change in his status from boy to man. Even to Penina, who I thought would regret my departure most, the new arrangement promised certain advantages.

“This time things will be different between me and Ricca, Grazia,” she told me. “I am finished playing the mat under her feet. My daughter demands more of me. If not for myself, I must contest Ricca for little Sarabella’s rights. And I will.”

The only one who seemed to regret my going was, of all people, Dorotea. She actually wept when she heard the news of our imminent departure.

Mindful of her service to me, I paid my final visit to thank Madonna Isabella. I had in addition a second purpose: to offer her a place in my humble pantheon of heroines, should she be gracious enough to accept.