The Second Duchess (39 page)

“But why? In God’s name, why?”

“For her sake. Because I loved her. Because I hate him. Who is he to parade himself as the brother-in-law to the emperor, over my Sodona’s grave? I will hate him until I die.”

Scratch, scratch, scratch went Messer Giovanni’s quill. The sound seemed to come from very far away.

She looked up at the duke again. One of the guards tightened the loops of rope around her neck, to warn her. As if in a dream I turned and looked at the duke as well, and what I saw in his face stopped my breath.

“You will die soon enough,” he said to her. “So you confess you have attempted to assassinate the duchess at least once.” Each word scorched the air in the elegant little room. He seemed to have forgotten the monastery keys and the potion in its jeweled flask, forgotten her accusation against Sister Orsola. “Perhaps you know something of a dish of candied angelica as well? Or a saddle-girth that was cut?”

She stared at him, her lips pressed together in defiance.

The duke nodded once. The guard turned the screw again, as casually as if he were twisting a cork into a bottle of cheap wine. I heard a cracking sound.

Tommasina Vasari shrieked and bucked against the noose of rope. Her thumbnails looked as if they would burst from the blood underneath them. I could feel myself shrinking back in my chair, huddling myself around myself, sick and speechless.

The duke waited until her screams had subsided to hoarse gasps. Then he said, “I ask you again. Did you cut the girth on the duchess’s saddle, a fortnight or so ago when the court was hunting at Belfiore? Or do you know anything of anyone who might have done so?”

“No, no, no,” she whispered. The thumbscrew quivered and swung from her poor broken thumbs. “No, I cut nothing. I know nothing. I am dying. A priest, I beg you.”

“You are far from dying as yet.” The duke gestured to the guards. “Take her to the
prigioni
under the Lions’ Tower. Let her think upon her many sins, and perhaps she will have more to tell us in the morning.”

The two men dragged Tommasina Vasari to her feet and removed the thumbscrew from her thumbs. I could not look at what the little machine had done. At what my own questions, my own selfish investigations, had done. I felt dizzy and sick.

“Madonna?” the duke said. The guards and the prisoner and the screams and the scratching quill seemed to have ceased to exist to him. “Come, let us collect our mantles and your little hounds and walk out on the terraces. The cold air will do us good, and we will speak of this further in the morning.”

I rose unsteadily. To myself I said,
She hates you, she tried to kill you, she would try again if it were in her power
, but it did not help. I prayed I would not disgrace myself in front of them all by vomiting.

Messer Giovanni opened the door for us. The duke stood aside courteously for me to pass through first. I wanted to run, run, run. I took a step.

From behind us, Tommasina Vasari whispered, “It was a lie. I never saw the infirmarian.”

I stopped. The duke stopped. No one in the room moved.

Her voice was almost gone with screaming, but there was a ghastly trace of a laugh in it. She said, “It was your fine new husband I saw, Habsburg bitch. The duke himself, pressing the pillow down over her face.”

 

 

She shouldn’t have told them she tried to kill la Cavalla. Alfonso will never forgive her now, or let her go free. La Cavalla is his possession and an imperial archduchess, and for a
parruchiera
to try to kill her—that’s something he’ll take a quick and vicious revenge for.

T
he first thing the duke did was send a messenger to the monastery, asking Mother Eleonora to confine Sister Orsola until she could be questioned further. Then we walked in the rooftop gardens for a time in silence. Little by little my sickness and shivering passed away.

The duke said nothing to address Tommasina Vasari’s accusation. It was a lie, of course, a lie calculated to strike back at him—at both of us—in the only way left to her. I knew it. We could have agreed upon it in a sentence or two and put it behind us. But for him, to speak of it would be to give it credence, and to give it credence would be beneath him. So it was left to me.

I was numb, so if he was angry it did not matter.

“It was a lie, of course,” I said at last.

He said nothing.

“It was a lie,” I repeated. “She wished to strike back at you, at both of us. Let us agree to that, my lord, and be done with it, so we might speak of the other things she said.”

He stopped and looked carefully at a fig tree, espaliered against the wall where it was protected from the worst of the winter winds. One branch apparently did not meet his standard of perfection, because he drew the damascened dagger and cut it off.

“There is no need to dignify such an accusation with words,” he said. “But if you are so trifling as to need the words—well, you have spoken them.”

He dropped the branch on the ground and walked on, the dagger still glinting in his hand.

Perhaps I was not as numb as I had thought, because the word
trifling
stung. I gestured to my ladies and the little cluster of courtiers to step back, made my way to the corner of the terrace, and deliberately stepped between him and the wall so I could stand face-to-face with him.

“Yes, I need the words.” It was the first time I had spoken to him with anything but courtesy or fear or both, and with all the distress I felt there was a rush of satisfaction, too. “And I do not believe it is trifling to need them. You may consider yourself above suspicion, my lord, in your Este arrogance, but others do not.”

The monsters leaped to the surface of his eyes, black as candlesoot, tooth and claw a-glitter. “How dare you,” he said very softly.

He still held the dagger. I thought of Tommasina Vasari on the morning of my wedding, holding the pointed braiding-bodkin.

“I dare because I am tired of being afraid to dare.” I grasped two handfuls of my brocaded skirt-fabric in my fists and held them tightly to keep my fingers still. “Your first duchess may have been a pawnbroker’s daughter, my lord, but I am an archduchess of Austria, and whatever mistakes I have made since I came to Ferrara, I am your wife and your equal in blood, and I will not be spoken to as if I were a simple-witted child. Half Europe believes you murdered Lucrezia de’ Medici, whether you did or not—will you break my thumbs, too, for saying it?”

We stared at each other. I could hardly believe what I had just said. Where had it come from? What monsters of my own had Tommasina Vasari’s screams unleashed?

“Furthermore,” I said. I was shaking again. I did not know what I was going to say and did not care. “Furthermore—”

“Stop,” he said. “Stop now, Madonna, before you say something unforgivable.”

I sucked in my breath and pressed my lips together. For a long moment neither one of us said anything.

When I had my voice under control again, I said, “I will ask your pardon for one thing only, and that is what I said last. I know you applied the worst of the torture only after she confessed her attempt on my own life. I know such things are done, but—I have never seen it before, seen it with my own eyes, heard the screams and the breaking of bones with my own ears. Whatever her crimes, she is a woman, and helpless.”

He glanced at the little knot of courtiers, desperately effacing themselves in the opposite corner of the garden. He looked at the dagger in his hand as if he had never seen it before, and slowly he slid it back into its jeweled sheath. Then without a word he took hold of my hands and unclenched my fists, one finger at a time, freeing the brocaded silk I had clutched and crumpled. His touch was perfectly gentle, in eerie contrast to the violent words that had just passed between us. I was frozen with shock at my own outburst and shame that he had once again noticed my inability to control my hands when I was distressed.

When he had my hands free, he brought his own fist up under my left hand and began to walk again, giving me little choice but to walk with him. I could not see his eyes, and I wondered how much of his restraint was due to understanding of my distress, and how much was the result of witnesses being present.

“You brought this business about yourself, Madonna, with your questions and pryings, and my original intent was to show you what you had done. The matter of her scheme against you on the day of our marriage—that was as much a shock to me as it was to you, and I will not ask your pardon for applying the question after that.”

“I understand,” I said. It seemed as if the world had reversed itself, because now it was I who did not wish to talk about the matter further. I felt disoriented and dizzy.

“And for every jot of my—Este arrogance—you yourself have a corresponding share of Habsburg pride.”

“I cannot deny that.”

He was right, of course, that I had brought it all about. If I had bowed my head in true humility before the laughter and whispers of the court, if I had never sought revenge and vindication by asking questions about the past, none of it would have happened. Paolina Tassoni would not be moldering in her untimely tomb. Tommasina Vasari would not be in the dungeons under the Lions’ Tower, tortured and condemned.

“It must end, my lord,” I said. “It all must end, as quickly as possible.”

“I agree. And I think it will. I believe the infirmarian has the answers we seek, about my first duchess’s death. Then all that is left is to find the—the missing book you mentioned, so it cannot be used against me.”

That struck a spark of interest in me, despite myself. “What is it, my lord, about the book? Why is it dangerous?”

“Perhaps when we find it, I will tell you.”

I said nothing more. We completed our circuit of the terrace and passed back inside the Castello, with our little clutch of courtiers following us at a wary distance.

“Go to your apartments, Madonna,” the duke said. “Rest and compose yourself and have your dinner served to you privately. I have affairs of government to attend to, but tomorrow we will pursue the
parruchiera
’s accusations further.”

 

 

TOMMASINA VASARI FLOATED in the air before me, her black skirts rippling in an invisible wind. She had no feet. She clutched my hand, and I could feel the broken bones in her thumbs like sharp sticks. “He murdered his first duchess with his own hands, they say,” she whispered. “In the kitchen garden. Come see. Come see.”

I followed her. I could not fly as high as she did because my arms were full of blossoming cherry branches and my skirts were weighed down with mud.