Jeanne Kalogridis - The Scarlet Contessa

“You!” he roared, his voice shrill with outrage. “You rotting bitch, how dare you speak to us so! How dare you . . .”

He struck out. The stinging blow caught my upper lip, and almost tipped me backward in my chair. Stubbornly I held on and would not stir from my place, though my lip smarted enough to provoke tears. I refused to shed them, but looked boldly back at him.

“You,” he hissed, his anger transforming in that exhaled word to curiosity. He stared at me, and his eyes narrowed in disbelieving recognition, then widened as his brows rushed together in fear. “Mother of God, it’s her, she’s a ghost! A ghost come back to haunt me! God help me . . . Save me, someone!”

He crossed himself and staggered backward, promptly falling over his own chair; Ottaviano and Filippo rushed to help him. As he struggled back to his feet, his brothers clutching his elbows, he bellowed, “Get her out of here! Get her out!”

I rose, and when the guards caught hold of my arms, I did not struggle, but let myself be pushed through the swiftly opened doors, and flung down upon the cold, hard marble in the loggia. Once there, I sat up and gingerly fingered my lip to find it greatly swollen. I touched my tongue to it, and tasted blood and morbid satisfaction.

Bona was sitting in front of her fireplace beside Caterina and Chiara when I returned from the duke’s chambers. I knew she still felt betrayed over the cards, but at the sight of me, she let go a cry and rushed to embrace me. I put my hands upon her shoulders to comfort her, and when she realized I was otherwise untouched, she let go a sob of relief.

I admit, I was surprised to find Caterina there, wearing an unusually somber expression. Once she learned I was mostly undamaged, however, she grew at once insolent. While Francesca went downstairs to the larder to find a piece of fresh meat for a poultice, Bona made me sit in front of the fire and gently pressed her own kerchief to my lip to staunch the bleeding. She could not bring herself to ask how her husband had behaved, but Caterina, who had settled in the chair beside me, had no such reluctance.

“Did the king appear?” she asked.

Bona, Chiara, and I looked at her in puzzlement.

“The king,” she prompted. “The one with the sword. You drew that card for my father before, when Lorenzo came to visit. Did it come again? Or does some new future await him?”

Bona’s lip curled. “You ought not ask such impertinent questions,” she said, with uncharacteristic asperity. “Let Dea rest. She’s tired and has been through enough.”

Caterina ignored her and turned her whole body toward me. “It must have not been a very good future, or he wouldn’t have hit you.”

Bona was right: I was tired—tired of secrets and lies. And Galeazzo’s reaction had left me with an odd sense of power. No matter what punishment he was planning for me, I no longer cared. I had spoken the truth and it had squarely hit its mark; now I did not want to stop.

“The king was there,” I said, my words muffled by Bona’s kerchief and my huge upper lip. “But he appeared inside another card: the Tower.”

Caterina leaned closer with avid curiosity. “And the Tower means?”

“The wrath of God will strike your father down,” I said flatly, and tried not to care when Bona flinched.

Caterina caught her breath, her eyes oddly bright. “When?”

“I will not hear of this,” Bona interjected. “Fortune-telling is pure wickedness, an abomination. . . . I wish to God that you had never seen those accursed cards! How could you have taken them from me?”

“Soon,” I answered Caterina. To Bona I said, “Forgive me, Your Grace. Of late, my mind seems not to be my own.”

Bona crossed herself. She was on the verge of weeping, I realized, and so I fell silent and answered no more of Caterina’s questions.

The duchess never said anything more about the cards that I had taken without her permission, yet from that moment on, she developed a perceptible coolness toward me. I had stolen from her, and Bona would not forget it.

Chapter Six

On Christmas Day, three masses were said in the duke’s chapel; custom demanded that Galeazzo and all of his courtiers attend. I missed the first, however, as I slept poorly, given my throbbing lip, and Bona told me to stay abed when the others rose.

I attended the other services and the great banquet, but wore my black veil to hide my swollen lip, and ate and drank little. When the dancing began, I retreated to Matteo’s chamber and tried again to make sense of the cipher in the little leather-bound book from his saddlebag, without success. I also wondered what became of the triumph cards I had left with the duke and his brothers, but did not dare ask Bona.

The next day was the feast of Saint Stephen, the first martyr. As such, the duke was expected to attend mass at the church of Santo Stefano in the southeastern quarter, a short ride away. But normally temperate Milan was in the grip of the coldest weather most of its citizens had ever seen; an ice storm had glazed the city during the night, and been followed by a dusting of snow and a fierce wind that blew the clouds away, leaving trees, bushes, and roofs glittering in the early-morning sun.

The wind howled as I rose and dressed in my black mourning. A quick glance in the duchess’s large hand mirror revealed that the swelling in my upper lip had gone down, though the skin was still purplish and bore a dark red scab where it had neatly split; I lowered my dark veil again. Bona kept her bed curtains pulled; she had been up retching during the night, and Francesca, I, and the chambermaids all agreed we would not wake her, but send a message to the duke that she was too ill to rise. Beyond the window, branches bowed low, snapping from the weight of the ice and groaning in the wake of the wind; I expected that most of the court, Galeazzo and his magnificent choir included, would refuse to go out in such weather, and instead celebrate the saint’s day here at the castle.

I was wrong. An hour after we sent word to the duke that the duchess was indisposed, Caterina came running into Bona’s chamber, her pale, pretty cheeks flushed and damp with tears. Her mother, Lucrezia Landriani, one of the duke’s dearest, and most prolific, mistresses, lingered in the doorway, lest her presence offend the duchess.

“I won’t go!” Caterina exclaimed, pouting, as she entered. She was dressed in a confection of white watered silk trimmed lightly in crimson velvet and studded with gold beads; her long yellow curls had been neatly contained in a hairnet littered with diamonds and tiny rubies. “Where is the lady duchess? I must speak to her!”

“Duchess Bona is ill, Madonna Caterina, and cannot be disturbed,” I said in a hushed, warning tone.

Caterina recoiled slightly at the word ill and moved no farther; she gestured at me. “Help me, then! My father the duke is insisting that all of his”—she lowered her voice out of respect for Bona—“ladies and children accompany him to Santo Stefano!” His mistresses, she meant; perhaps it was Galeazzo’s way of getting even with his wife for not accompanying him in the cold.

“In this weather?” Even I was surprised.

Caterina nodded; a cascade of diamonds and rubies sparkled at her ears. She was truly magnificent to behold that day, a porcelain beauty with gleaming golden hair, dressed in shimmering white, the dark red trim serving to accentuate her pale glory.

“He would have us walk halfway across the city in this wind,” she said, and as if on cue, a gust rattled at the window. “Only the bishop and the ambassadors will be allowed to ride beside him on horseback. Please, Dea,” she said, “can you not wake the lady duchess? She could send a note asking His Grace if my mother and I could ride beside him in the Lady Bona’s stead. She could even say that I am weak from a recent illness. . . .”