The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

  Sometime during that long night a basin was brought and her poor wasted body washed and the flea-filled blanket exchanged for clean linen. After that I remember a pair of powerful arms lifting up the fragile body and carrying it into a small anteroom, where I laid myself down alongside, the better to hold her in my arms.

  As dawn was breaking she sat up as if resuscitated and asked in a perfectly clear voice, “Am I forgiven?”

  “Of course you are,” I reassured her. “God has mercy. He forgives.” At a loss for words of comfort, I riffled through my mind. “The Lord is my shepherd . . .” The Psalm came to me unbidden. “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures . . .” Before I came to the end, a tap on the shoulder alerted me that this life — so entwined with mine for so many years and in so many ways — had ended.

  All through the long night I had felt the life oozing out of Zaira’s worn body, draining my own vitality with it in some kind of sympathetic union. Now a strong, callused hand took hold of mine and I began to feel a steady current of strength flowing back into me. Eyes closed, I clung to the vital force as I allowed myself to be lifted up and carried to my bedchamber.

  Need I tell you more? Lord Pirro was back under Judah’s roof, back in my heart, in my arms, in my bed. Time enough for shame tomorrow.

  I awoke in a sea of pleasure, with a muscled arm holding me safe as in a cradle. Then I remembered where I was and whose arm it was, and like Eve at the instant she bit into the apple, I knew at once the corruption of my body and pulled up the quilt to cover my nakedness.

  “Do not start off this day by shaming your body or our love, Grazia, I beg you.”

  I dared not look at the speaker.

  “Allow me to feast my eyes for just one moment more.” He always seemed to be asking for just one something — one look, one hour, one moment. Still I made no move to stop him when he slid back the coverlet and once again exposed my nakedness. I may be an adulteress but I am not such a hypocrite as to deny by day that which I condone by night.

  Once or twice I made an effort to disengage, but the power of our passion held us both in thrall to the point of total exhaustion. Finally toward nones we fell back for the last time on linens by then soaked through with the sweat of our labors.

  We did not awake until the bells chimed for vespers. When we did, Lord Pirro announced without any preamble, “You must marry me, Grazia. There is no other way for us.”

  I made a vain effort to protest. I spoke of Judah, whose absence in my cause had given us this opportunity. I spoke of ingratitude. I protested that I could not steal away from Judah in the night like a thief.

  “Write him a letter,” was the implacable answer.

  Dismiss Judah from our lives with a stroke of my pen? At the very moment that he was on an errand of mercy to save my brother’s life? It was unthinkable. The dissolution of this marriage, if it was to be, must be discussed, planned, prepared for. I owed Judah that. “I need time,” I explained.

  “You are not prepared to entrust your life to me, is that not the sum of these excuses?” he demanded in his usual forthright way. And I could not deny it.

  “For your lack of faith in me, Grazia, I have no remedy. After what I did to you in our youth, I can expect no better. But if you believe that it is all tumbling about in the grass with me, you are wrong. Perhaps it was true once, but the years have taught me lessons. To prove it, I wish to declare my intentions toward your son. When we marry, I expect to adopt the boy and bring him up as my own. For I love every part of you, Grazia, including everything that you love.”

  Why did I not tell him the truth at that moment? That he was offering to adopt his own son, the son I had kept from him for ten long years? I wish I could give you the answer.

  He was that day departing for Lombardia. Much as he wished it, he could not tarry. Milano — that elusive prize — was once again under siege. Only this time it was the Pope’s allies who were clinging desperately to their hold on the starving city, and the Emperor’s troops who encircled them in the iron ring of a blockade. Lord Pirro’s mission was to light a fire under the Duke of Urbino, Captain-General of the Pope’s League, and inspirit him to come to the aid of his besieged allies.

  “That man has more lead in his feet than in his cannons,” he quipped without a smile.

  This was the first mention I had heard of the dilatory tactics of Madama’s son-in-law, and I listened with only half an ear. Milano seemed far away, the Imperial army a chimera, and Urbino’s cowardice of much more concern to his proud mother-in-law than to me. What did matter to me was that I had a reprieve.

  “But I must know my fate soon, Grazia,” he warned me earnestly. “Now that I can see happiness within my grasp, it would be cruel of you to tease me with it only to refuse me at the end. When you decide, decide firmly and finally. I will expect your decision the day I return to Roma.”

  By my reasoning his liaison to Urbino’s camp was sure to be the work of weeks. By then Judah would have rescued my brother and returned to Roma. It seemed a virtual certainty that I would have the opportunity to make a clean and honorable break with him before Lord Pirro returned to claim me as his bride, if such was to be my fate.

  Man proposes. God disposes. Lord Pirro did not return from Milano within weeks. Milano fell to the Imperials before he arrived at Urbino’s camp. In the wake of that disaster he was ordered to proceed directly to Paris to solicit aid for the Pope from King Francis.

  Nor did Judah return triumphant to Roma. Instead, duty and a good heart set him on a detour to Ferrara with a new role: the bearer of bad tidings.

  FROM DANILO’S ARCHIVE

  TO GRAZIA DEI ROSSI DEL MEDIGO AT ROMA

  Beloved wife:

  Prepare yourself for the worst. Your brother is dead. I arrived too late to save him.

  I can see the shock in your eyes. The moment of disbelief. The refusal to accept what God has decreed. But He will not be gainsaid, not by all the tears in all the eyes in the world. Somewhere the end of Jehiel’s life was written. Now it has come. All we can do is trust in God and believe that what He does is for the best.

  I made several vain attempts to negotiate with the Inquisition using the five hundred gold ducats I brought with me, but there was no use to it. Once the magistrate relinquished him to the inquisitors, all hope of negotiation was dead. “We do not bargain for souls here,” I was told when I offered my bribe.

  I could not save him, Grazia. But I did see him once in his cell. We communicated through a small opening in the door. He thanked me for coming. Not a word of reproach that I had come too late. He begged us to take care of his widow and children. I assured him we would. He told me that a confessor came each day to ask him to recant his faith but this he refused to do even at the end. Small comfort though it may be, your brother died a martyr.

  You will want to know the circumstances of his death. The charge was that he performed a circumcision upon a scribe in the King’s court. Your brother swore to me that he had not performed this ritual, that the scribe had circumcised himself.

  “This scribe came to tell me how he dreamed of being circumcised and of seeing God’s angel write his name in the Holy Book. He asked me to circumcise him as had been forecast in his dream. I refused, I swear it, Judah,” he told me. “I warned this scribe that even to talk of such a thing was to put himself and every Marrano in Portugal into danger. But to talk to him was like talking to a deaf man. He was crazed in pursuit of circumcision.”

  Your brother told me his side of the story with a great show of sincerity, but there remains a question in my mind as to how the circumcision actually came about. Jehiel claimed that all the Marranos knew the scribe had circumcised himself but were too craven to tell the truth to the inquisitor. We will never know. The scribe too is dead, burned in the same pyre as Jehiel.

  Oh, my Grazia, it pains me to write so coldly of the
end of your brother’s short life. I know you cherished him with a special love. Perhaps my acting on your behalf better expresses my deep sympathy for your anguish than any words I am able to find.

  I have put off writing to Penina at Ferrara, but last night I had a dream that showed me the way I must go. I saw myself in a large armchair in your grandparents’ house, my lap full of little children. More children sat at my feet, innocent faces looking up at me, waiting for me to speak.

  The dream ended without my knowing what I had said to these children. But this morning I understood all. I must go to Ferrara and tell Jehiel’s sons face-to-face that their father is dead. To send them such news by messenger would be a slothful and derelict act. I must make the effort. I must soothe them and comfort them. I must let them know that, even fatherless, they are loved and will be protected and taken care of. It is my duty.

  I will sail from this port by the first fair wind to Genova and thence will make my way across the peninsula to Ferrara. God willing, I will be there by the High Holy Days.

  Bear up, my brave Grazia, God works in mysterious ways. We must be grateful to Him that your brother, always so troubled and so tumultuous, died at peace.

  There is no more to say save to call on God to comfort you in this terrible loss and to watch over our brother Jehiel, who, in his martyrdom, must surely have achieved a stay in paradise.

  God bless and keep you, my beloved wife,

  (signed) Judah del Medigo at Tavira.

  August 10, 1526.

  54

  Judah’s last letter from Portugal arrived toward dusk on a Friday. Everything about the moment is clear in my mind: the Sabbath candles waiting to be lit; you in a fresh camicia looking at least a hand taller than you had the month before (you are growing up too fast for a doting mother); the enticing aroma of the Sabbath pie, which I continued to bake even though there were only two of us to eat it. I remember thinking how fortunate I was to have a son so close to manhood to recite the prayer over the wine . . . and to read the letter to me. I pleaded tired eyes but in truth I could not bring myself to read what I knew Judah had to tell me.

  “Oh, Mama . . .” From your face, I knew that my fears were confirmed. “It’s Uncle Jehiel. He’s dead.” The word hit me like a body blow and knocked the breath out of me.

  What would I have done without you there to carry me upstairs (so strong for one so young) and to sit by my bed and comfort me (such a warm heart)? I will never forget that long night when I was lost in grief and you were the rock I clung to.

  At first I cried for a day and a night without stopping. After that the cataract erupted only intermittently. Whatever unseen hand turned the spigot, its touch was sudden and irresistible. Even your good efforts to cheer me could not overcome my terrible sense of loss.

  So it went in the early weeks of my mourning and may well have continued for God knows how long, but, once again, Madonna Isabella intervened, this time not by messenger but as a living presence come to pay a condolence call in her fabulous coach.

  She found me dirty, disheveled, and completely given over to grief — that is to say, everything her strong spirit despised. Yet when I apologized for my unbuttoned state she waved my explanations aside. “If we do not lose countenance at the loss of a much-loved brother or sister, when then?” she inquired. “The day Maestro Vitale’s soul departed this earth a part of you went with him.” She touched my arm gently. “The feeling is no stranger to my own heart.”

  My expression must have given away my surprise; one does not associate Madonna Isabella with deep grief.

  “Perhaps you forget, Grazia, that I too have lost brothers. Not to the pyre, I grant you, but to a living death. The auto-da-fé contrived for them is not hot but cold; not quick and brutal but slow and subtle. However, they are equally lost to me, equally removed from life, equally banished from my sight, as Maestro Vitale is from yours. And I too was able to do nothing to stop it.”

  An expression came over her face that I had never seen before, a look of despair so close to my own state that I felt at that moment as if we were sisters.

  “Oh, madonna.” I grasped her hand, heedless of the presumption of the gesture. “I do not think I can bear this.”

  “Yes you can, Grazia, just as I can and have learned to do. Every time I visit my old home in Ferrara I hear the voice of my brother Giulio calling out to me from the dungeons, ‘Save me, sister, for the love of God and our father . . .’ But I cannot save him nor ever could. I cannot even visit him to pray with him or to comfort him. My esteemed brother the Duke forbids it.”

  “But surely, madama, after all these years your honorable brother can find a morsel of forgiveness in his heart for his brothers.”

  “His heart is a stone,” she replied. “To him his brothers are traitors, disgraced, forgotten, as good as dead. But in my heart, they live. When I dance in the ballroom where we all practiced our steps together under Maestro Ambrogio’s wand, each step I take reminds me that directly below me lie the dungeons. And in my mind I see my brothers partnering each other in some grotesque charade of our moresca. Ferrante loved to dance. Even as a little boy, he was the best dancer among all my father’s children, more graceful even than I.”

  She half smiled. “Is there room for him to dance in his cell in the dungeon? I ask myself. Do my Giulio’s beautiful eyes ever see the glow of the sunset or the beams of the moon? No. My brothers are as deeply planted in the dank earth as your brother’s ashes and I can do as little as you to bring them back. There, you see, you have stopped weeping.”

  To be sure, I had. “You have helped me to bear my burden, madonna,” I told her.

  “And you have eased my pain, Grazia,” she responded. “Your tears opened a chamber in my heart that I thought was sealed forever.”

  In that spirit I agreed to follow her advice and attempt to return to life as soon as my month of mourning was finished. “Maestro Vitale loved life and hated gloom,” she reminded me. “If you wish to honor his memory you will make yourself a monument to his spirit, if not for your own sake, for that of your son.” She hardly paused before adding, “By the way, where is the boy?”

  “He is at a private scuola that Judah arranged for him,” I replied, happy to be able to offer a truthful excuse why she could not meet you. My cub-mother’s heart warned me that if once she set eyes on you, so fair and sturdy of limb and so obviously a soldier’s son, she would find a way to suck the story of your parentage out of me. And this revelation I was determined to withhold for a time and place of my own choosing.

  But I did gratify her wish to have me return to her service the following month — just in time, as it happened, to become an unwilling participant in one of the most scurvy plots in the history of this peninsula.

  I believe that we in Madonna Isabella’s household got word before anyone else of the Colonna brothers’ plan to raid the city of Roma in the name of Emperor Charles V. In fact, Madama was the one who warned his Holiness of the impending danger. How did she gain intelligence of this highly secret plan? Through the indiscretion of a lovesick swain under the spell of one of her donzelle.

  You who now consort with these young girls daily and who often sport with them in the garden perhaps do not understand how it is that such wellborn young ladies have given Madama’s court its slightly raffish reputation. You know her view: that, just as boys of good family are sent as pages to the courts of kings for their worldly education, so her girls come to her court to finish their education as women. You may not have heard the accusation by her enemies that she uses these human adornments to decorate her court in the same way she uses works of art to decorate her grotta — that is, to enhance her status in the world and for nefarious political purposes. Madama is hurt by these slanders, for, as she said to me in a confidential moment, “I do not impress these young women into my service, Grazia. They beg to come. Their parents know that at my court
they will learn the ways of the world and be launched into the marriage market under the finest auspices. And everyone knows I take good care of them.”

  She spoke the truth. After less than four months in Roma four of the current crop of donzelle were already promised to eligible husbands. But there is an obverse to this pretty picture, the side that Madama prefers to turn to the wall, so to speak. These donzelle do not receive their education free. They more than pay their way by acting as magnets for the rich, powerful, and clever men who typically patronize a renowned salon. Furthermore, the girls perform as sponges, albeit delicate and subtle ones, who sop up information and pass it on to their benefactress to be used for the advantage of herself, her family, and her little state.

  You may remember that when we first came to this palace, there lived here among the donzelle a distant connection of Madama’s, Giulia Gonzaga, celebrated as the most beautiful virgin in Italy. Whether or not she was the most beautiful — or indeed a virgin — this jewel of a girl sparkled with enough brilliance to capture the heart of Vespasiano Colonna. The bride was fourteen years old. The grizzled groom was a widower over fifty, very rich, brother to Cardinal Pompeo Colonna. It was considered by all a brilliant match.

  Now with the wedding less than a month away, the besotted bridegroom found himself about to attack the city where his beloved bride was tucked away under Madonna Isabella’s protection. Passion overcame reason. Fearful that the shock of waking up with troops outside her window would alarm his bride, the old campaigner threw discretion to the winds and sent the girl a note warning her that a secret raid on the Vatican was in the offing.

  “Stand fast and have no fear, darling,” the foolish man wrote to his Giulia. “You will always be safe in the stronghold of my family where you now reside and soon you will rest within the sheltering arms of your knight, Vespasiano Colonna.”