Duchessina - A Novel of Catherine de' Medici

by Carolyn Meyer

  Lorenzo’s bastard? Lorenzo, my father—was he Alessandro’s father, too? My aunt had never mentioned that. How could such a despicable boy be my father’s son? It couldn’t be! I would not believe it! It had to be a different Lorenzo.

  But the very possibility made me ill, so ill that shortly after that scene in the kitchen I was put to bed with a fever and a bad stomach. For two days I refused to eat. Each time I fell into a restless sleep, I woke up sobbing. Betta sent for Aunt Clarissa, who hurried to see for herself what ailed me. I finally confessed to her the cause of my illness.

  “The wicked Alessandro is my brother!” I cried. “I would rather die than have it be true!”

  “Who told you such a thing?” Clarissa demanded.

  “I heard the servants talking,” I said, not wanting to cause trouble for the baker. “They called him ‘Lorenzo’s bastard.’”

  “Don’t believe slanderous gossip,” she advised me. “It’s hardly ever true. And what were you doing in the kitchen?”

  “Nothing,” I said, which was not quite the truth—I’d been looking for fresh figs and cherries. “But why do they call him Il Moro, the Moor?”

  I watched anxiously as Aunt Clarissa paced the room, her chin cupped in her hand. Finally she stopped and gazed down at me. “Listen, Caterina, I’ll tell you whatever you wish to know about your cousins if you will first promise to drink some veal broth and then to sleep until the bell rings for vespers.”

  I promised to do as she asked.

  My aunt sat beside me on my great bed. “Alessandro is a bastard, it’s true. But your father isn’t Alessandro’s father, so you may rest easy about that. Alessandro is the son of a cardinal, and his mother was a Moorish slave—that’s why they call him Il Moro. No one is permitted to speak of Alessandro’s relationship to the cardinal, although almost everyone suspects it. Because your father, Lorenzo, is dead, it’s easier to pretend that he was the boy’s father.”

  Alessandro, the son of a cardinal? My aunt had not mentioned the cardinal’s name, but I thought I could guess: loudmouthed Passerini. This new information was nearly as shocking as what I’d overheard in the kitchen. But I felt greatly relieved. At least the ruffian Alessandro was not my brother.

  “And Ippolito?” I asked. “What about him?”

  “That’s not a secret. He’s the son of Pope Leo’s younger brother, Giuliano, who drowned when Ippolito was just a boy. Leo was very fond of the child.”

  “And his mother?”

  Aunt Clarissa merely shrugged. “Ippolito’s a bastard, too.”

  ONLY A FEW months after my fourth birthday, a far-off event altered the course of my life. Pope Leo’s successor died after only a year in office—poison was suspected—and Cardinal Giulio rushed off to Rome, determined to get himself elected as the next pope. The household gathered to watch my uncle’s departure from Florence in a splendid procession. I wasn’t at all saddened. His heart, I felt, was cold and dry and had no room in it for me.

  When the news was relayed back to Florence that Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici had indeed been elected, the city rejoiced. He took the name Pope Clement VII and placed his good friend, blustering Cardinal Passerini, in charge of the Palazzo Medici and of my two cousins and me.

  Now that he was pope, Clement instructed Passerini that he wished to have me live in the most splendid manner possible. I was given several new gowns and hooded cloaks, more servants to dress my hair and wait on me, a richly carved bed and thick mattress stuffed with wool, and a much grander apartment to make room for all of this. Naturally, I found all of these changes exciting.

  “But why?” I asked—my favorite question.

  “The Holy Father wants to show you off like a precious jewel,” Betta said, “to make you a more desirable marriage prospect when the time comes.”

  “I have no need of marriage prospects,” I confided. “I’m going to marry Ippolito. But don’t tell anyone. I don’t want Alessandro to know.”

  Betta rolled her eyes. “I won’t breathe a word of it,” she promised.

  IT SEEMED THAT Pope Clement was not the first to think about marriage prospects for me. When I mentioned it to Aunt Clarissa, she told me another story, beginning with the marriage of my parents.

  “It came about like this,” she said. “Pope Leo decided to send his nephew, Lorenzo de’ Medici, to the christening of the firstborn son of the king of France. Leo had already chosen a bride for Lorenzo: Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne, a cousin of the French king. Lorenzo was as handsome as Madeleine was beautiful. The moment they met, Madeleine fell madly in love with Lorenzo, and he with her. She was just sixteen. He was twenty-six. Three days later they were married.”

  I savored every detail of their wedding: my father in a fur-trimmed doublet, my mother in a gown of aquamarine silk embroidered with pearls, her hair caught up in a garland of jeweled threads. As vivid in my mind as though it were a painting by Raphael, this was the sole memory I had of my parents.

  “You were born a year after their wedding,” Clarissa continued. “And then we lost them both. When Pope Leo insisted that I leave you in Rome, I was terribly worried, for I had no idea what was going to happen to you. Because your mother was French-born, King François sent his ambassador to take you to live at his court. But you had inherited not only your mother’s vast fortune but also your father’s, and Leo was not about to hand the richest girl in the land over to the French! He’d begun to think of a suitable husband for you before you even cut your first tooth. He ordered a pretty little cassone to be made for you by the most talented wood-carver in Rome.”

  I still had that cassone, a small wooden chest, richly carved and painted, in which I kept my two most precious possessions—my mother’s ruby cross and my father’s gold ring with the Medici seal.

  Aunt Clarissa went on with the story. “Leo told me, ‘When she’s wed, we’ll see that she has a much larger one. Several of them! And we’ll fill them with the finest silks, the most opulent jewels a Medici bride has ever owned.’ So this is nothing new, Caterina. The subject will come up again and again, until Pope Clement finds you the best husband in the world.”

  2

  Palazzo Medici

  ONCE I HAD PASSED my fifth birthday, Cardinal Passerini assigned a tall, gaunt lay brother named Fra Matteo to be my tutor.

  “I’ve never been a teacher,” Fra Matteo confessed on the first day we sat down together at a table in the cardinal’s library. “Do you know how to read, Duchessina?”

  “No,” I said. “Do you?”

  His pale face colored a bit. “Si,” he said. He pulled a thick book from the shelves. I recognized the Holy Scriptures. “We may as well begin at the beginning.” He began to read aloud in Latin: In principio creavit Deus celum et terram. “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.”

  I followed his finger as he traced the marks on the page, but I didn’t understand a thing. Then he explained about letters and words, and after a while I began to see how it all fit together. I was learning to read.

  After I had been studying with Fra Matteo for several months, I asked him about a drawing that hung on a wall of the library. “What’s that a picture of?” I asked.

  “It’s a map,” explained my tutor. “If you were an angel high up in heaven looking down on the earth, that’s how it would appear to you.” With his long, bony finger he outlined the shape of a boot. “This is the Italian peninsula, and that’s the sea almost surrounding it.”

  He pointed out the location of Tuscany and Florence where we lived, and Rome where the pope lived, and the duchy of Urbino, from which my father had taken his title and I now took mine.

  The map fascinated me. Every time I went to the cardinal’s library for another lesson, I studied that map. One day I asked Fra Matteo what lay beyond its edges. He unrolled a map of Europe and showed me England and France and Spain. I gazed at it for a long time.

  “My mother was from France,” I explained, and the sight of my mother’s count
ry so moved me that I came close to weeping. “Someday I’ll go there.”

  “Perhaps you shall,” said Fra Matteo, rolling up the map and directing my attention back to my studies.

  NEXT TO BETTA and Aunt Clarissa, my favorite person was Ippolito. I liked him immensely and watched for him, hoping to find him alone so that I could have his attention and his kind smiles all to myself. Such moments were rare. But my feelings about horrid Alessandro only became worse as time passed. I wasn’t the only one who avoided him. His nasty tongue and outbursts of temper kept everyone at a distance. I wondered how anyone could be so ill-humored.

  I seldom left the palazzo, usually only to venture the few steps to the parish church of San Lorenzo in the company of several ladies—wealthy friends of Cardinal Passerini—and two Tartar slaves. The ladies, all heavily jeweled and veiled, generally ignored me, but their disinterest didn’t bother me, for I wasn’t much interested in them. I rarely saw children of my own age, except when my little journeys took me as far as Palazzo Strozzi, even larger and grander than our palazzo, to visit my aunt Clarissa and her husband Filippo and their four sons, my real cousins. When Passerini discovered how much I looked forward to these visits, he used them as a reward, meted out for good behavior, withheld when I displeased him. This angered me and taught me to deceive when necessary and admit to nothing.

  My eldest Strozzi cousin, Piero, a serious boy, much like his father, was four years older than I. The next, Leone, sweet tempered but not terribly bright, was just a year older. Lighthearted Lorenzo was younger, and Roberto was an infant still living in the home of a wet nurse in the country to be cared for until he was weaned. Once her duty to produce several Strozzi sons had been fulfilled, Clarissa declared her longing for a girl.

  “I’ve always wanted a daughter,” she told me. “Every night I pray to the Holy Mother that I may be blessed with one—or, better yet, more than one! Naturally, though, my husband is pleased, as any banker would be, that sons don’t require dowries in order to marry well.” She leaned close and hugged me. “But I do believe, Caterina, that a gracious God has sent you to soothe my heart that aches so for a little girl!”

  If I’d been allowed, I would have gone in an instant to live with my aunt and her family. I sometimes dreamed of that. But such a thing was clearly impossible for a child to ask for—I didn’t even think to mention my yearning to Passerini. I had to learn to be content within my small, restricted world: my sumptuous suite of rooms, with occasional escapes to the courtyard, the kitchen, the garden, and the chapel.

  The kitchen was where I watched the bustling activity and listened to the raucous chatter of the cooks and bakers who prepared the two big meals served each day, the first at midday and another in early evening. In the courtyard I observed the comings and goings of high-ranking visitors to Cardinal Passerini, although why anyone would want to spend time with him I could not imagine. In the garden I enjoyed the birds and flowers and the small creatures that made their home there. But the place I came to know and to love most dearly was the Chapel of the Magi.

  The small, windowless chamber was lighted only by flickering candles. On each wall a painting on plaster showed a part of the procession led by the magi, wise men from the East, on their way to Bethlehem to worship the infant Jesus.

  The men wore fine garments richly embroidered and bejeweled. Their horses pranced through green wooded hills, and birds soared across an azure sky. Horses, dogs, deer, cattle, sheep, even camels and a cheetah, crowded the frescoes that covered three walls of the chapel. Candlelight reflected on the gilded crowns and the silver tips of lances.

  The artist had portrayed everyone in the procession, even the three wise men, as citizens of Florence, many of them prominent members of the Medici family. Aunt Clarissa identified some of them. A handsome boy with blond curls and blue eyes, dressed in white brocade, rode a high-stepping white charger. Aunt Clarissa insisted that the boy, representing the youngest of the wise men, was supposedly Il Magnifico.

  “He looks nothing like the portraits I remember from my childhood,” she mused. “But that’s who everyone says he is.”

  The procession followed that golden-haired boy whoever he was. How I would have liked to have him as my friend!

  The Chapel of the Magi became for me a secret treasure—a chamber where I could lose myself in the fantastical scenes and imagine myself as a part of them.

  Princes, churchmen, shepherds, citizens, slaves—but nowhere in the entire procession could I find a single grown woman, or a young maiden, or a little girl like me. Maybe they had all been left behind in the large white castle at the top of the hill in the distance, watching the procession from one of the narrow windows. And so I gave myself a place in the midst of the procession—nothing too large or prominent, just a small figure off to one side, riding behind the golden-haired boy. I half closed my eyes and dreamed that I was there, dressed in silks and velvet and pearls, mounted on a fine white horse—Caterina de’ Medici, la duchessina, on her way to worship the Christ child!

  One day as I was lost in my fantastic dream, the door of the chapel flew open, and a short, wiry man with a crown of wild, uncombed hair loomed in the doorway. I shrank myself as small as I could in one of the carved wooden choir seats, hoping to escape notice. But the chapel was not large, and he quickly spotted me.

  “Ha! I’ve caught a little mouse!” he boomed in a voice that seemed too big for his small size. “Come here, little mouse.”

  Frightened, I sat perfectly still, as though made of stone.

  “Well, then,” he said, “at least tell me: What do you think of all of this?” He waved his arms at the frescoes.

  “I very much admire them,” I admitted cautiously.

  “Oh, you admire them, do you? And what would you say, little mouse, if I told you the whole lot isn’t worth a fig? Pretty pictures, that’s all they amount to. Scarcely even art, let alone great art.”

  “I’d say that you are wrong, because I’m quite fond of them,” I said. Still a little frightened, I went a bold step further: “And I would like to be a part of them.”

  The strange man examined me more closely, and I in turned examined him—his bushy, untrimmed beard; eyes that burned with intensity; a misshapen nose; a high forehead furrowed with lines like a plowed field; an unsmiling mouth. “Tell me, little mouse, do you have a name?”

  “I am Duchessina. And do you have a name, signore?”

  “Michelangelo Buonarroti, at your service,” he said with a formal bow. “I am a great artist—the greatest in the world,” he added. “I have painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. I have sculpted the Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica. And perhaps la duchessina has seen the sculpture of David that stands in the Piazza dei Signoria?”

  I shook my head.

  “No, I suppose not. A statue of a nude male is not suitable viewing for a little mouse.” He smiled mirthlessly, exposing darkened teeth. I wondered if he was half mad, but he no longer scared me—I sensed that he meant me no harm. After a while the strange artist began muttering to himself, seeming to have forgotten that I was there. Eventually he turned and left, still muttering, “Must find that devil Passerini,” and I was alone again with my beloved pictures of the magi.

  DAY AFTER DAY I watched glumly as my two older cousins made their presence felt—one loudly and boorishly the other gaily and pleasantly—around the palazzo. They were often in the company of Cardinal Passerini or one of their other tutors. Sometimes I saw them dressed to go out in their bright-colored clothes, stockings trimmed with silver lace, Alessandro in a pink cape, Ippolito in his blue satin tunic. They wore jaunty feathers in their velvet caps and golden chains around their necks and carried scented gloves, and they were off to roam the streets of Florence, out of sight of the cardinal. Sometimes I heard them returning toward dawn, singing loudly, laughing at nothing.

  Being a girl and so much younger, I was naturally excluded from their activities. When the two were together, they
shunned me. This was better than having Alessandro notice me. Michelangelo was right, I thought: better to be a little mouse, quiet in my corner, seeing everything without being seen.

  But sometimes I was unlucky. Surly Alessandro pounced, delighted when he managed to make me shriek. I trained myself not to give him the pleasure of reacting. I will not jump when he startles me, I vowed. I will not weep when he says something cruel. And I promised myself that I would never run to Cardinal Passerini or my aunt or Betta, carrying tales about what dreadful thing Alessandro had said or done to me. It took immense self-will not to cry, but I gradually gained mastery over my feelings.

  Then one day he sneaked up behind me and shouted, “Frog!”

  I spun around and glared at him. “Why do you call me ‘frog’?” I asked, more calmly than I felt.

  “Because you look just like one. Those popping eyes of yours—they’re like a frog’s,” he said with intolerable smugness. “Have you seen yourself in a mirror? If you have, then you know what an ugly little thing you are.” Alessandro smirked and strolled off, leaving me standing there, too stunned and hurt to reply, tears pricking my eyes in spite of my vow.

  Is it true? Am I ugly?

  I was about six years old then, and until that time I had never considered whether I was or was not beautiful. No one had spoken of it. There were no little girls in the palazzo with whom to compare myself. But there were a great many serving girls and kitchen helpers and chambermaids, and I had noticed that those with small waists, generous bosoms, delicate skin, abundant hair, and winsome smiles were the ones who seemed to have the easiest time of it, to beguile the men in order to get their way.

  Michelangelo, the artist—the genius—had called me “little mouse,” and I hadn’t minded. But on that day, with that one cruel remark, Alessandro planted a seed in my heart. I understood that I was not beautiful, as a woman should be, and that I would have to find clever ways to get what I wanted.