The Second Duchess (35 page)

G
irolamo Brasavola, physician and scholar, son of Antonio Musa Brasavola the celebrated physician, botanist, and university professor, lived in a flat-faced brick house in the new section of the city. The duke and I arrived more or less incognito, which meant we were attended by only five retainers: the duke’s secretary, my ladies Christine von Hessen and Sybille von Wittelsbach, and two gentlemen-ushers.

“Welcome, Serenissimo, I am your servant, as always.” Messer Girolamo bowed as we were ushered into his private study. “Good day to you, Serenissima. It is my privilege you cross my threshold. Please, seat yourselves. Pietro, bring wine.”

The duke and I sat in two graceful Savonarola chairs, clearly placed with our visit in mind. He gestured for Messer Girolamo to sit as well, behind his elaborate and untidy writing-cabinet. Wine was brought. Then the servants, the gentlemen-ushers, the duke’s secretary, and my ladies withdrew, leaving us alone with the physician.

“I have come for two things,” the duke said. “First, I wish you to examine the duchess to determine if there is any impediment to her conceiving a child. The true purpose of this examination is to be known only to the three of us. Second, the duchess has some questions to ask you, and it is my wish you answer her with complete frankness.”

Messer Girolamo raised his eyebrows. “Of course, Serenissimo. All will be done as you wish. First I shall have the duchess’s horoscope cast—”

“That is not necessary.” The last thing I wanted was some unknown foreigner meddling with my stars. “My stars were cast in Austria, more than once, and I have all the charts and papers in my personal library. That will provide everything you need.”

The physician smiled. He was a pleasant-looking man of early middle age, everything about him plump, plain, and reassuring until you looked closely at his eyes; they were intelligent, weary, vast as the ocean with study and experience.

“Excellent,” he said. “It is best when a horoscope is cast by one’s own countryman. In addition, before I perform the examination I shall require exemplars of your bodily humors—your urine, your phlegm, venous and arterial blood, menstrual blood, and vaginal secretions. I will provide you with suitable containers.”

Holy Virgin. The man had not yet laid a finger on me and already I was staggered with mortification. What would I do when I actually had to submit to him
touching
—But no. I would not even think about it.

“It is not so fearsome as you think, Serenissima,” Messer Girolamo said gently. “You will be allowed to have your trusted ladies with you, however many you wish, and there will be draperies to preserve your dignity; all will be done quite quickly and correctly.”

“I cannot imagine dignity or correctness in such a situation,” I said. “But it is the duke’s wish, and as such, my obligation.”

“Even so.” The physician picked up a pen and wrote a few notes. “Now. You had questions you wished to ask? Remedies, perhaps, for small ailments?”

He looked at me. The duke looked at me. I took a sip of my wine—overspiced and oversweetened for my taste, but then, my taste seemed to have changed, as had so many other things—and I put the goblet down.

“No, not remedies. I wish to know, Messer Girolamo, everything you observed the morning you were called to the Monastero del Corpus Domini to attest to the death of Lucrezia de’ Medici.”

That clearly shocked him almost as much as his prosaic list of my bodily humors had shocked me. I could not help feeling a moment of satisfaction.

“
Per San Luca!
” he said at last. “Surely you do not—”

“Answer, please,” the duke said.

Messer Girolamo sat back in his chair and looked at us both. “Very well,” he said. “If you will permit me, Serenissima, I will consult my notes?”

“Of course.”

He opened a drawer in his cabinet and took out a leather-bound notebook, much thumbed and scuffed. He laid it out flat on the surface of his cabinet, riffled through the pages, paused, turned over a single page or two, and stopped.

“I write my notes in cipher, of course,” he said, although neither of us had asked him if that were so. “The morning you summoned me to Corpus Domini, Serenissimo, I found you, a priest, and several of the nuns gathered in one of the cells, and the body of the young duchess lying on a pallet, composed and with her eyes closed as if she had been sleeping. Her head was turned slightly to the right, one arm lay upon her breast, and the other lay straight at her side. She was dead already, and had indeed been dead for several hours, based on the coolness of her flesh and the degree of stiffening of her limbs. Publicly I supported the small fiction you described in your message to me, and I pronounced the duchess had died only moments before, after the priest gave her the holy unction.”

That corresponded with what the duke had already told me. I asked, “What else did you notice, Messer Girolamo? What do you think caused her death?”

He put one finger on the page and ran it down over the written lines as he read. “There was a faint violet tinge to her lips and there were some red specks in the whites of her eyes, but no other outward sign. When I opened her body—”

“When you
what
?” The duke half-rose from his chair. Wine lurched from his goblet.

Messer Girolamo looked up, keeping his finger on the line. “She was the Duchess of Ferrara, Serenissimo,” he said. “She had been ill from time to time, or so she claimed—that physician from Florence, Andrea Pasquali, was fool enough to encourage her every time he came to attend her. He returned, as you will recall, after her death, to satisfy Duke Cosimo with a final examination.”

“He examined her. He did not open her body.”

“Quite true. And he should have. It was out of the ordinary—a young girl found dead without explanation or any sign of distress. It was necessary to have a record, for history’s sake. And in case there were ever inquiries.”

Such as this one. He did not say it, of course, but the words hung in the air between us, unspoken.

I half-expected the duke to—Well, I am not sure what I half-expected the duke to do. Call his men-at-arms and have the physician arrested? Draw his own favorite damascened dagger and stab the man in the throat? As it was, the duke settled back into his chair and brushed delicately at a wine-spot on his mulberry-colored surcoat.

“Her death was out of the ordinary indeed,” he said with perfect calmness. It was at that point I understood there was something unusual about the duke’s relationship with this man. I doubt anyone else could have confessed such a thing and lived to tell the tale. “What did you find when you opened her body?”

Messer Girolamo looked down at his notes again. “She was with child—about three months gone,” he said. “Messer Andrea missed it entirely.”

“A bastard,” the duke said.

“Of course. If it had been a legitimate heir, the young duchess would have been resting on silken sheets in her bedchamber at the Palazzo della Corte, and not confined to a monastery with some vague tale of disordered humors. It was female, by the way.”

The duke nodded.

“Her heart and tripes were normal and healthy. There was no sign of poison’s effects, and only a small amount of clear liquid in her stomach.”

I looked at the duke. His face was expressionless. I looked back to Messer Girolamo and said, “Could you identify the liquid? Could it have been a potion of some kind?”

“I cannot say for certain, one way or the other,” the physician said. “But whatever it was, she drank it almost immediately before she died, because there did not appear to have been any absorption.”

“How then did she die?” I asked.

“I believe the young duchess was smothered, with something soft that left no mark upon her face.”

“Smothered!” I cried.

“Smothered!” the duke said, at the same time.

“Yes. The violet tinge of her lips and the reddish specks in the whites of her eyes and under the skin around them were the only abnormalities of her body. I have seen those signs before. I believe she was smothered, sometime in the night.”

“But that is impossible,” I said. “She was alone in her cell, and it was locked. Could it have been an accident?”

“No. She could hardly have smothered herself, then rearranged the bedclothes and composed her limbs so neatly.”

“So it was murder after all,” the duke said. “And the holy nuns who are telling us the cell was locked are either mistaken or lying. Messer Girolamo, this is something you should have told me immediately.”

The physician looked at the duke steadily. “I was under the impression, Serenissimo,” he said in his inscrutable voice, “you were at the time already quite well aware of the circumstances of the young duchess’s death.”

At first the duke did not seem to react at all. Then I realized his fingers had tightened on the arms of his chair, and the folds of his surcoat had become disarranged, almost imperceptibly, by his Herculean effort to control himself. “I did not kill her,” he said at last, stressing each individual word. “I concealed the time of her death, and I put away the flask I found beside her pallet, because I believed she had committed the sin of self-murder and I did not wish a Duchess of Ferrara to lie in unhallowed ground. But that is all. That is
all
.”

Messer Girolamo’s expression changed. I doubted he was often surprised, but this, now, was one of the rare occasions. “After all this time,” he said slowly. “All this time, and at last I learn I have been wrong.”

He said nothing more, but he did not have to. He had known the duke all his life; his father had served the duke’s father. He believed him.

I think that was the moment when I truly began to believe him, too.

“Very well, then—who could have smothered her?” I asked. “She was alone in her cell, and even if the cell itself was not locked, the monastery is enclosed. No one is allowed inside but the nuns themselves.”

“That is not entirely true,” the duke said thoughtfully. “I myself have visited Mother Eleonora in her parlor at Corpus Domini, and my uncle Ippolito had an apartment there, before he settled at Villa d’Este in Tivoli—such things are permitted for relatives and churchmen and patrons of the monastery, which proves exceptions are allowed.”

“And there is the construction of the new cellarium,” I said. “If that had already been begun at the time of—”

“It had,” Messer Girolamo said. He ran his finger down his written page again, and stopped at a particular line. “I noticed the workmen and made note of them.”

In my mind I went back to the day I had visited the Monastero del Corpus Domini. I had been led to Mother Eleonora’s beautiful parlor, then to the infirmary, then to the choir of the church. I had seen no one but the nuns. No one—

“There are also tertiaries,” I said. “I myself saw one of them in the choir of the church, the day I went to the Monastero del Corpus Domini to—to pray. She came in unhindered, and if she could do so, others could do so as well.”

“Indeed,” Messer Girolamo said. “Well, I have told you all I know, Serenissima. If you truly wish to find out what happened to the young duchess that night, I think you must ask your questions at Corpus Domini.”

As we went out, he gave me a coffer; I heard the clink of glass inside. The suitable containers, I supposed. I shuddered at the thought of filling them all. If I was to be allowed trusted ladies with me for the examination itself, presumably I would be allowed the same trusted ladies to assist me with the collection of my humors.

Katharina, of course. And Sybille and Christine. I could not bear such intimacy with anyone but my beloved we-three.

That night I dreamed of Maria Granmammelli, the Florentine ambassador Bernardo Canigiani, and the mysterious black-clad tertiary I had glimpsed praying over Lucrezia de’ Medici’s grave. They were quarreling, the three of them, over a coffer full of suitable glass containers. Among them, deep at the bottom, was a beautiful, sinister little jeweled flask with silvery residue in its belly.

Where was I in the tale of my death? They all agreed I was dead, and Alfonso put away my things. He then instructed the nuns to prepare my body to rest for a time before the altar of the church, until it was entombed. A few days later, after Messer Andrea the physician from Florence had come and gone, Messer Girolamo stole my body—stole it!—from the church, or at least bribed some workmen who were there to lay the foundation for the new cellarium to carry it away in a box that very night. I followed. I was still so newly
immobila
I couldn’t be out of sight of my poor flesh, cold and impenetrable as it was.