The Second Duchess (10 page)

“What do you intend to do, my lord?” I found my voice at last. “Surely we can—”

“Be silent,” he said. “I am not accustomed to having my wishes flouted, Madonna, and this time I intend to make certain it does not happen again.”

I stared at him, breathing hard. I wanted to shout,
And what is it exactly, my lord duke, about your first duchess’s life and death that you are so resolute to conceal?
But frightened and angry as I was, I did not dare. It would be foolish—dangerous, even—to anger him further.

“I have warned you twice,” he said. The deadly choler in his voice was terrifying. “And even so, you have defied me. She had the excuse of being fifteen years old and a pawnbroker’s daughter. You, a woman grown, an emperor’s daughter, an emperor’s sister, should know better than to sink so low.”

Holy Virgin, was he reading my mind? In desperation I made my voice soft and pleading. “It was conversation for courtesy’s sake, no more. I am sorry I disobeyed you. I will not do it again. Please, my lord, you are frightening me.”

He did not reply. He stepped over to the hearth, where a bundle or two of poplar withes lay awaiting the
domestica
who would light a fire in my room later on. With short, angry movements he pulled first one stick, then another from the bundle, until finally he found one about as long as his arm, about as thick as his finger. He cut through the air with it twice and then turned back to me.

I stared at him in horror.

I had been beaten as a child, of course. My father had been brought up at the strict Spanish court and brooked no disorder or disobedience in his sons and daughters. I had been switched by my nurses for clumsiness, for insolence, for dirtying my clothes; caned across my palms by my tutors for wrongly conjugated Latin verbs and errors in history lessons. But that was when I was a child, and now I was a woman and married. It was not unheard-of for husbands to beat their wives, but despite the duke’s threats and the fate of poor Maddalena Costabili, I had never seriously believed it could happen to me.

To me! An archduchess of Austria! And with a commonplace stick from the hearth!

“You would not dare—”

Before I could finish the sentence, he caught me by the arms and threw me down across the bed. Holy Virgin, he was strong. I jerked back, and it was as if I were struggling against steel or stone. He pinned me flat on my face with his hand between my shoulder blades.

“I will be master in my household,” he said. “Never forget it.”

He jerked my skirts up over my back and struck me across my legs with the switch. Through my thin taffeta stockings the blows were hard and sharp and stinging. He struck me again, this time over the fine embroidered linen of my drawers, and then again. I clenched my teeth and twisted under his hand and refused to cry out at first. Then I did cry out. After that I could not help myself, and I screamed. When I screamed, he stopped.

I heard him break the stick and throw it aside. I pushed myself up on my hands and turned my head. I could feel tear-wet strands of my hair stuck to my cheek and the heavy strings of pearls and rubies swinging loose against my shoulder. My brave scarlet bridal silk was rucked and crumpled around me. The stripes on my flesh burned and throbbed.

“If you think,” I said, my voice sick and shaking. “If you think—”

I could not go on. I swallowed and closed my eyes and struggled to breathe.

He stood there quite calmly, one hand on the latch of the door. His eyes were cold and his clothing was hardly disarranged. The storm had passed, and hardly a ripple remained to mar his dark, glittering surface. Underneath the monsters intertwined: the fifteenth-century Este lord who had beheaded his young wife and his own son for incest; the vicious and rapacious Cesare Borgia, his great-uncle; the mad Valois princes of his mother’s blood.

“If I think what, Madonna?”

From his expression he might have done nothing more than correct a mastiff for disobeying a command, or dismiss a singer for a C in
alt
that was slightly flat. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to scream my suspicions, the world’s suspicions, at him, just to provoke some response. I sank my nails into the silk of the coverlet, trembling with fear and hurt and fury.

“If you think you will beat me into mindlessness, you are mistaken.”

He looked at me until I could bear it no longer. I capitulated. I looked away.

“If I had wished to beat you into mindlessness,” he said, “I would have done so.”

He turned and left the room.

I heard the puppies begin to bark in the outer chamber. Had Domenica returned? Had Sybille clung to her post despite his dismissal? Then I heard his voice, cool and emotionless, and Paolina Tassoni’s voice replying. I wondered what he was saying. I wondered what she was telling him.

Spy, spy, spy. I would have her out of my household. I would have her out of the court entirely, if it were ever in my power. If I ever had power again.

I jerked the dangling string of pearls from my hair; the thread broke and the perfectly matched spheres scattered over the bed and the marble floor. I remembered what the Ferrarese tiring-woman had whispered when she braided them into my hair on my wedding day. I remembered being careless with my jeweled bridal skirts as I was formally presented to the duke in the forecourt of the Castello.
What are silks, what are jewels, to ones such as you and I?

I threw myself down on the bed again and gave myself up to my tears.

 

 

FIFTEEN YEARS OLD and a pawnbroker’s daughter! By the Baptist, I want to kill him. It drives me mad sometimes that I’m
immobila
, that I can only watch and not touch the living.

I expected him to
fottere
her when he finished thrashing her. That’s how it would’ve ended if he’d thrashed me. I never would’ve let him walk away like that—there’s nothing like a touch of the whip to make the
pota
cry out for the
cazzo
. La Cavalla didn’t look aroused, though. She looked angry and frightened. Well, it’s about time she learned what Alfonso is really like.

Chi lo sa!
I’m just glad it wasn’t destroyed. Someday poets will sing praises to me, all on account of that portrait. La Cavalla looked like she’d swallowed a frog when she saw it. I wish she could see the other one, too, but it’s hidden away where no one will ever find it.

I
did not go down to supper, and the duke did not send a message requiring my presence. After my first tears, I lay awake on the bed, dry-eyed, staring at nothing, thinking of nothing. I collected the loose pearls on the bedcover and counted them over and over, dividing them into even piles; when I realized what I was doing, I struck the pearls aside with a cry of despair.

It terrified me when I became aware of myself doing such things, counting, pleating, rearranging. I’d had the habit as long as I could remember, and my nurse in Innsbruck had slapped my fingers over and over and threatened me with tales of madness in my blood, tales of my grandmother Johanna of Castile, who was called Juana la Loca, Johanna the Mad, and locked up in a castle in Spain for fifty years because of it. Such tales they told of poor Juana and her single-minded obsession with her handsome husband; my nurse had been a young waiting-lady in Juana’s household and had never forgotten her mistress’s passionate tempers and furies. Madness like that began, she would hiss at me, with little habits like counting candied almonds into piles or arranging the skirts of my dress in perfect pleats. It was a known thing that madness sometimes skipped from one generation to another in noble families, and I struggled to quell my singularities. I did not always succeed. How often did I set things straight, count things, make creases and pleats, when I myself did not know I was doing it?

My head ached fiercely. I was cold. When the soft silver dusk began to press in at the windows, I knew I would have to call my ladies to undress me. I could not sleep in my bridal scarlet with its jewels and wide skirts and stiffened bodice, and I was sewn into it; it would be impossible to cut the stitches and unfasten all the hooks and clasps and unlace my corset by myself.

This was yet another of the disadvantages of rank and fashion. A third: they had all been, I was sure, avidly listening at the door. Appearing as the chastised wife before my beloved we-three, who knew me so intimately, would be bad enough; I hated the thought of facing the Ferrarese ladies, who were relative strangers.

Holy Virgin, I hurt all over. The thought that my disgrace would be whispered from one end of the Castello to the other did not help matters. I tried to sit up, and quickly changed my mind. I rolled to my side and slid off the bed.

“Sybille,” I called. My throat was sore with crying. Please, I thought, let her have waited in the outer chamber. “Katharina. Christine. Please come in, my we-three. I want you.”

Sybille, Katharina, and—not Christine but Paolina—came in with suspicious promptness. Tristo and Isa gamboled among their skirts, sniffing the floor for treats, their little white-tipped tails whipping back and forth with delight.

“Paolina, you may go.” I was hardly going to have the duke’s spy undressing me and goggling at the marks of the duke’s displeasure on my flesh. To my surprise, the girl’s eyes filled with tears, but she whispered a husky, “
Si, Serenissima
,” and fled.

“Where is Christine?” Even as I said it, I knew I sounded like a fretful child, but I could not help myself. “I want all three of you together.”

“She is off somewhere with Messer Luzzasco, the organist,” Katharina said. “She and those Bendidio sisters, the ones who sing. You know Christine—if she hears a little music, she is lost for hours.”

This lightened my misery a bit—Christine’s delight in music always gave me pleasure. “Perhaps she will come back with some new songs to play for us. Will you undress me, please, the two of you, and bring my night-smock and coif? I will have a cup of wine and go straight to bed.”

Katharina took up the silver-gilt scissors that hung on a chain at her waist and began to clip the stitches in my bodice. “Your dress is ruined,” she said. “And you have broken the string of the Este pearls—they are everywhere.”

Little Isa, in fact, was about to eat one of them. I gathered her up just in time and put her in the middle of my bed.

“Pick them up, then.” Perhaps I was too brusque with her, but I did not want to think about the loose pearls, and in any case it was certainly not my doing the scarlet dress was spoiled. In a more temperate voice I said, “Ask the duke’s wardrobe master to tell you how many there were, and be careful you have them all.”

She did as I directed, grumbling to herself in German. Sybille, always so loving, her hands always so gentle and warm, unhooked the clasps to free me from my mantle. She stroked my disheveled hair as she unlaced my corset, but said nothing. It was a huge relief to be dressed again, at last, in the loose cambric night-smock.