The Second Duchess (40 page)

“Why would I be hiding when my Sodona had been taken away?” she breathed in my ear. It was as if she were screaming, but screaming so softly I could barely hear. “Covered with dirt, he said. Like a scullery-slut digging onions, he said. Fool. I was not hiding myself, but I was hiding something—”

I started awake. I was lying in my bed with the puppies pressed close, one on either side. At first I thought it was morning; but the sun in the gray winter sky outside my window was past its zenith to the west. Midafternoon, then. And earlier in the day—Holy Virgin, how could I forget, even for an instant? The questioning of Tommasina Vasari. She had given us no answers, not in so many words, at least; but the pieces had been there, and in my exhausted sleep I had put them together like one of Lucrezia de’ Medici’s puzzle-toys.

“She was hiding something,” I said aloud. “The kitchen garden, in the Castello. The cherry tree. Everywhere I’ve looked, I’ve found cherry blossoms and cherries. That is Lucrezia de’ Medici’s other hiding place.”

I called for Katharina and Domenica and asked them to dress me again, quickly, and to bring me my warmest hood and mantle. “I wish to go outside, into the kitchen garden of the Castello,” I said. “No, I wish to go alone. Not even the puppies.”

They thought I was mad. Perhaps they were right.

“Bring me a knife. No, Katrine, I wish to go alone. Find someone to show me the way to the kitchen garden.”

I could not fly, as I had done in my dream. I walked, perfectly prosaically, following the servant who had been called to guide me. We went through the covered way to the Castello and around to the back where the kitchens and gardens lay. The cooks stared at me, amazed. The servant opened the gate to the kitchen garden and bowed to me. I thanked him, gave him a
quattrino
, and sent him away.

It was too early in the year for the cherry tree to be in bloom, but when I looked closely I could see new buds on the branches, shiny reddish-brown shells like minuscule chestnuts. I folded my skirts into neat pads under my knees and knelt down in the mud. The winter rains had softened the ground; Ferrara was just far enough south of Innsbruck that the ground did not freeze so hard, and the kitchen garden was protected by the Castello’s walls. The knife sank in easily enough. Carefully and patiently I dug around the roots of the tree. The sun was slipping down behind the garden wall when I found it at last.

A wooden box, about the length of my forearm from fingertips to elbow, and half that or so in width and depth. It had once been fancifully painted and gilded, although little of the decoration remained after almost four years in the ground. The cherry tree had sheltered its hiding place from the worst of the spring rains, the summer sun, and winter cold; even so, when I picked it up the joinings came apart and the lid and one side fell away. The rest of the box gaped open.

Inside I could see wrappings of stained silk. When I folded them back I found a coffer, a little smaller than the wooden box, made of silver, chased and gilded. It was black with tarnish and securely locked, and unlike the wooden box it held together firmly. I gathered it up—it was heavy, although I suspected most of the weight was the silver of the box itself—and went straight to the duke’s chamber of government, the Camera della Stufa, on the first floor of the south wing of the Castello.

The decorated pottery stove that gave the room its name was well stocked up with wood and the room was comfortably warm. The duke was giving audiences. The men-at-arms, the secretaries and judges and various petitioners stepped aside with shocked looks as I pushed my way forward. When had they ever seen a duchess plastered in mud and carrying a blackened silver box still halfwrapped in shreds of ruined silk? It would be a story, I thought, for them to tell their grandchildren.

“What is this, Madonna?” the duke said. His look and voice made it clear he was displeased. “I am occupied with affairs of government, and you come in unannounced and unaccompanied, covered in mud like a farmer’s wife?”

“I must speak with you in private, my lord. Please.”

“You could not tidy yourself first?”

“Please
.
”

He lifted his hand, and they all went out without a word. I went up to his writing-table and placed the silver box on it. Dirt from my hands and fragments of rotted silk fell on the papers spread out before him. “Cherries,” I said.

He looked at me as if I were moonstruck.

“You know I found no hidden compartments in her wedding chests. I did not find the book, either. We knew she had hidden it somewhere, so there had to be another hiding place.”

His expression changed. “Have you found it?”

“I think so. This box was buried under the cherry tree in the kitchen garden. My lord, there were cherry blossoms painted in her portrait, and a basket of dried cherries among the things you collected in her cell at the monastery. She loved the flowers and fruit of the cherry, and your guardsmen found Tommasina Vasari in the kitchen garden among the fruit trees, muddied to the knees—the fruit trees. The cherry tree. Tommasina was not hiding, or at least not hiding herself—she was hiding Serenissima Lucrezia’s secret treasures.”

“You have an aptitude for deduction, Madonna.” He examined the box with the peculiar intentness he reserved for his interest in intricate mechanical devices. “The lock is on the outside, as you can see, so although we do not have the key, we can open the box if we break the lock itself away. Stand to one side, if you please.”

He picked up a heavy carved stone that weighted a stack of papers upon his writing-table and struck the lock. On the third blow the mechanism broke away from the box. He returned the stone to its place and put back the box’s lid. I stepped close to the table again.

Inside, at the very top—oh yes, the book, an exquisite thing, covered in dark blue velvet only slightly damaged by the damp, richly embroidered with gold and colored silks, and studded with small pearls. The arms of Este were appliquéd in the center upon a cartouche of white satin, and the duke’s personal device of the flame with its motto
Ardet Aeternum
was worked in gold and scarlet four times, one in each corner.

He opened the book gently. The figures in the first engraving leaped up at me—a woman with her back to the viewer, naked and voluptuous, her legs entwined with the legs of the man who clasped her passionately. Under the illustration was a sonnet, which began:

I flamed with blushes and looked away.

“Aretino leaves little to the imagination,” the duke said. “The interlineations are much more crudely written but express a similar thought.”

It was the missing
I Modi
; the notes had to be Sandro Bellinceno’s. Would it turn the duke against his greatest friend at last, to read the unembellished details of his wife’s betrayal written in his friend’s own hand? I thought of Donna Elisabetta and felt my heart break for her.

With no apparent emotion he turned the brittle, discolored pages. The bodies in the engravings writhed and strained. I tried not to read the words. One engraving was a strange one: the woman lay on her stomach with the man astride her, his muscled back to her as he gazed at her lushly rounded backside. He had a ribbon or thong in his hand, with which he might have been intending to bind her. The woman’s upper body was twisted as if she were attempting to escape him—or perhaps only to gaze at his buttocks with lust of her own. She was clutching a cushion.

I wondered what tale the accompanying sonnet could possibly tell.

The duke turned two more pages. At last, to my relief, he closed the book.

“I am in debt to you, Madonna, regardless of what else comes of this business. I feared the young duchess had sent this to Florence, or to the pope himself.”

“Will you tell me now,” I said, “why this book is so dangerous? Embarrassing, perhaps, considering the content, but what harm could it have done to you in the hands of the Florentines?”

“When it was first printed, some forty years ago, old Pope Clement suppressed it. Messer Marcantonio Raimondi, the artist who created the engravings, was thrown into prison, and all the copies of the book itself were destroyed.” He laid his hand upon the book possessively. “This one may very well be unique, the single survivor of the original printing. It has artistic value far beyond its subject matter.”

“And as you hold Ferrara as a papal fief, such obvious evidence you have flouted the pope’s will in this matter could damage your efforts to gain the Precedenza.”

He smiled very slightly and ran his fingertips over the device worked in the corners of the book’s binding.
Ardet Aeternum
. Aflame forever. He said, “Once again you surprise me, Madonna, with your grasp of political matters. That is it exactly.”

“Well, if you wish to keep it, it might be wise to rebind it in a less—identifiable—covering.”

“An excellent suggestion.” He set the book aside; clearly he had decided what to do with it and considered the matter closed. “What else is here?”

“I do not know. I did not open the box before bringing it to you.”

“Show me.”

 

 

And yet my hate is becoming gray and thin like smoke, instead of black and blood-scarlet like it used to be. It’s blowing away in shreds and tatters. I suppose what’s left of my
immobila
self will blow away, too, so I leave nothing behind when I’m sucked down to hell.

I
looked inside the box.

The young duchess’s treasures were few. A small clay pot with some sort of dried color in it. Two locks of hair braided together, one red-gold and one reddish-brown. A jewel or two. A leather glove that even now, after four years, smelled of the stable. A packet of letters. And at the very bottom, a roll of linen, yellowed and stiff—a small painting. I took it out and put it on the table uncertainly.

“Unroll it,” the duke said.

I found myself hesitating. The book was the duke’s, a stolen thing. I felt no compunction in finding it and returning it to him. The rest of the things were different. They were hers, and she had hidden them. She had not meant for other eyes to see them.

“Unroll it,” the duke said again. “Or give it to me and I will do it.”

Slowly I spread the painting out on the table.

Lucrezia de’ Medici smiled up at me, a languid, sated, secretive smile, her smooth cheeks flushed with delight and her goldenamber eyes glimmering like pools of fire. She lay naked amid a tangle of velvets and silks and white-pink cherry blossoms, her identity unmistakable, her skin gleaming with the sensual effort she had just expended. What beautiful sloping shoulders she had, what magnificent arms, what pert, rosy-nippled breasts, what a sweet indentation of waist and swell of hip.

She looked straight at the painter, her eyelids heavy, her lips parted and swollen. The painter’s style, so detailed, so richly colored, so brilliantly discerning, was unmistakable.

Frà Pandolf.

So even the friar-painter had been her lover.

The duke gazed at it for a long time. I turned my face away. I could feel her heat radiating from the canvas, smell the musk and crushed flowers, taste the sweat gleaming on her skin, caught unerringly by her lover’s brush. Peach-fleshed, heavy-eyed Lucrezia, taunting her cuckolded husband with her youth, her sensuality, her immersion in the pleasures of the flesh.

I would never look like that, never smell like that, never, not in all my life.

For an anguished moment I envied her, bitterly and hopelessly.

I heard a whisper, steel against leather, then a single indescribable sound. The writing-table lurched. I looked around. The duke had drawn his damascened dagger and driven it into the polished wood, straight through the painted canvas where the young duchess’s heart might have been.