The Second Duchess (23 page)

She swallowed. A tear slipped down, leaving a glistening streak on her cheek. “It was more than a beating. Sandro cut the fellow’s throat like a hired assassin, and he has regretted it ever since—that he was slave enough to passion to sink so low, and take a mortal sin upon his soul.”

I crossed myself. Killing a man in battle or in the hot blood of a quarrel was one thing; murder by stealth, even of a groom who had dared lay a hand upon a duchess, was something else altogether.

“Could not Messer Sandro have turned the tables upon her?” I asked. “Gone to the duke himself, denied it all? From everything I have seen, he is one of the duke’s most trusted friends, as close to him as a brother.”

“She had a book,” Elisabetta said. “A forbidden book of lustful sonnets and engravings, with love-notes Sandro wrote to her on its pages. She had stolen it from the duke’s library, and she threatened to spin a tale that Sandro had been the thief, and used the book to seduce her. He was convinced he would have been damned utterly in the duke’s eyes, and that is why he fled.”

She broke off with a sob. My heart went out to her, and for the first time I found myself feeling animosity toward Lucrezia de’ Medici.

“You were in her household, then,” I said at last, to distract her from her distress. “You knew her well.”

“Yes.” She gulped and swallowed her tears. “I waited upon her from the beginning, when she came to Ferrara during the Carnival. I never thought she meant any harm, not at first, but the duke scorned her for her Medici blood and her lack of learning. She might as well not have been his wife at all, for all the attention he paid her, and it made her resentful and foolish. She might have loved him, I think, if he had given her any warmth at all, but he did not. So she hated him. And then he began to hate her as well.”

She had lost herself in her memories. I said nothing, praying Domenica would not come in with the orange cordial and break the spell.

“We were all terrified when she was taken away, afraid we would lose our places or even be arrested ourselves for keeping silence about her wrongdoings. But after she had been in the Monastero del Corpus Domini for a few weeks, she died suddenly. Her household was broken up, and we were all sent away. The duke did not want to see any of us about, because we would remind him of her. The last thing we did, the saddest thing, was to divide up her possessions—what would be returned to her family in Florence, what would be stored away, and what would be given to the poor for charity’s sake.”

Lightly, as if it meant nothing to me, I said, “Are there some of
Serenissima
Lucrezia’s possessions stored away here in Ferrara then, even after all this time?”

She nodded. “Nothing valuable, of course—the jewels and plate and fine clothes were returned to Florence to repay part of her dowry. What remains in the coffers are only the things not good enough to send back, but not suitable to be given away. They are hidden in a locked room somewhere in the Castello, or so the tale is told, and at least one of the coffers is supposed to have come from the monastery where she died. The duke keeps the key to the room very close, and no one but he sets foot inside.”

I felt a frisson of . . . what? Fear? Recognition? It took me a moment to realize why Donna Elisabetta’s words sounded so familiar and so chilling to me.

Domenica’s voice, the voice of reason, when I learned of Frà Pandolf’s portrait of Lucrezia de’ Medici:
It is the duke’s express order no eyes but his gaze upon it. . . .

Was it guilt driving him to hide all traces of his crime? Was it possessiveness, that he alone could look upon the radiant face of his victim, that he alone could see and touch what remained of her possessions? Was it pride, a wish to expunge her from the Este, wipe out her beauty and folly and all traces of her Medici blood, and at the same time keep her portrait and her possessions so he could gloat over his victory? Or was any of it true at all, and had the ever-whispering tongues of the court created and embroidered the tales?

“I am surprised you wished to come back to court,” I said. I wanted to lead her away from thoughts of the hidden coffers. “Surprised you agreed to marry Sandro Bellinceno, knowing what you knew about him.”

“I would have done anything,” she said simply. “Married anyone. You have lived at courts all your life, Serenissima, and you cannot imagine the tedium and meaninglessness of country life. I thanked God on my knees for the duke’s arrangement.”

So she and I were kindred souls, more than she knew. I wondered if she had read
Il Libro del Cortegiano,
with its vivid and delightful exchanges on the manners and entertainments of court life. “You might be surprised at how well I can imagine your country life,” I said. “In Innsbruck I—”

Just then Domenica came in with the cordial. Elisabetta Bellinceno and I turned our attention to the drink, well-sweetened and cooled with snow. She seemed relieved to have shared her secrets; as she relaxed, I saw how pretty she was and how sweet her expression could be. Perhaps one day I could persuade the duke to give her a place in my own household. Perhaps she and Domenica could be the first two of a Ferrarese we-three.

I sipped my cordial, spoke lightly about dressmakers, and thought about two things. First, how it was becoming increasingly clear that the duke was not the only one with reason to wish Lucrezia de’ Medici dead. And second, how I might manage to discover where the duke kept the key to that secret room.

 

 

He’s shouting at her, and she’s shouting right back.
I didn’t know! How could I have known?
Now he’s drawing back his hand as if he’s going to slap her, and . . . she has thrown one of his own boots at his head! She gives as good as she gets, does tall, skinny Donna Elisabetta, however much a fool she may be.

And what’s it all about? The
I Modi
! How funny! Sandro thinks it’s hidden in those coffers in that secret room, and he’s full of choler at his wife because she told la Cavalla about it. He’s afraid la Cavalla will find the book and give it back to Alfonso. What a jest! As if Tommasina would have hidden the book in such a stupid place. Poor Donna Elisabetta is getting all her husband’s hard words for nothing, because whatever’s hidden away in those coffers, it isn’t
I Modi
.

Sometimes we
immobili
see one another, drifting, just shapes like wisps of smoke. I wonder if Niccolò is
immobilo
, like me, or if he went straight to purgatory. He wouldn’t have gone to heaven, not after all the sinful things we did together, but he was funny and kind, and surely he didn’t go to hell.

Maybe he’s
immobilo
because he was murdered. I hope so. I can’t bear the thought of Niccolò suffering for his sins because of me.

I’d whisper the truth in la Cavalla’s ear: i
t was not Alfonso who murdered me.

T
he duke said nothing to me about my conversation with Elisabetta Bellinceno, so it seemed she had kept her promise of silence. Nor did he mention my confrontation with Maria Granmammelli. He expressed his regret formally when I told him I was not yet with child. I suppose the news was hardly a surprise to him; Maria Big-Breasts would have run and told him long before I had the opportunity. I could not help but wonder what his initial reaction had been.

The whole business left me feeling—I was not sure. Empty? Disheartened? Frightened? I had not been able to shake off the slow poison of Nora’s rumor-mongering, however much I struggled to convince myself that false stories were always told about the great. Oh, please, Saint Monica, I prayed, let them not be true. Deceiving the duke about my investigations was beginning to exhaust me, and the simplest and safest way to protect myself was to become the mother of his son.

Next month, perhaps. Next month.

Christmastide continued, the celebrations and entertainments coming to a magnificent climax with the feast of the Epiphany on the sixth of January. The weather turned fine, unusually so for the time of year, and so a few days later we removed to a small palazzo called Belfiore, just to the north of the ancient city walls but inside the imposing newer walls built by the first Ercole, the duke’s great-grandfather. It was called a
delizia
, a delight, because it was meant for nothing but pleasure; this particular
delizia
was surrounded by fishponds and gardens, and by passing through the great gate called the Porta degli Angeli one reached the ducal hunting preserve known as the Barco, filled with game both natural and stocked. Here, the duke told me, the court would hunt, and in the evenings repose ourselves in richly painted rooms, where fires would warm us and more music and dancing would entertain us.

“In the duke’s
studiolo
here at Belfiore there are paintings of the Muses, all of them a hundred years old and more,” Domenica said as she braided my hair for our day of hunting. “Just wait until you see Urania—she might step down from the wall and tell your stars. And Erato! She is enough to make any maiden look about for the nearest gentleman. I wrote a sonnet to her last year, and one day I will read it to you.”

I still could not help liking Domenica. She was the one Ferrarese lady, barring perhaps Elisabetta Bellinceno, I had come to trust. Nicoletta Rangoni remained a mystery to me, aloof and silent as she was; she showed some small emotion only when she was brushing or walking or playing with the puppies. I continued to dislike Vittoria Beltrame for her perverse delight in others’ misfortunes, but she was openly the duke’s spy, and I preferred to know who was spying on me.

“Will you take your little hounds on the hunt, Bärbel?” Christine asked.

I smiled at the thought of the two tiny beagles in their embroidered scarlet collars among the greyhounds, the spaniels, the running hounds, and the huge alaunts that made up the duke’s hunting pack. Isa was asleep, curled nose-to-tail in an impossibly tight circle in the middle of the embroidered bedcover; Tristo was sitting next to her, watching me attentively, his dark eyes bright with intelligence, his head tilted, his russet ears perked wide.

“They are only babies yet,” I said. “And they are bred from the queen of England’s companion dogs, so they are not strong enough for the roughness and danger of the hunt.”

Nicoletta went over and lifted Tristo into her arms. “It is in their blood,” she said, kissing his nose. “You should see this one tracking rabbits and mice in the garden. His sister likes to chase little birds, and she will jump up at the tree branches when they fly away from her.”

When I was dressed in my hunting-habit of bracken-green wool, its bodice and sleeves slashed over gold-colored silk and the hem of its skirt heavily embroidered in gold thread, we went through Belfiore’s colonnaded loggias to the central courtyard. Katharina and Sybille, in hunting-habits of their own, accompanied me. One of my Austrian grooms was waiting with a beautiful Iberian mare named Tänzerin, Dancer in my own language, a wedding gift to me from my brother Maximilian’s court stud at Kladrub. She was silver-gray, almost white, with dapples over her shoulders and hindquarters like water-spots on silk. I had been offered the pick of the ducal stables, but until I was more settled I preferred to keep to the horses I knew, which had come with my train of household goods from Austria.