Free Duchess of Milan by Michael Ennis

than she had ever been before. Perhaps that was why she asked the forbidden question that lay beneath all her questions like an endlessly drawn-out Kyrie Eleison in a Mass. “Mama, why did you leave me in Naples?”
    “Why would you ask that after all these years? And why now?” Eleonora released Beatrice and held her away from her. She looked at her daughter with wary eyes. “It is not so unusual for a child to grow up at another court. And your father had many enemies at the time. I knew you would be safe with your grandfather.”
    “But why did Isabella and Alfonso come back with you, and not me?”
    “This is silly and inappropriate. You are the Duchess of Bari now, one of the most important women in Italy. Whatever your father and I did on your behalf as a child was to make you capable of the duties you now have as a woman,” Eleonora said as she plumped up Beatrice’s collar again. “You will understand when you have your own children. We always loved you as our daughter whether you were with us or not. And we always will. Now kiss me. Messer Niccolo is waiting.”
    “I love you, Mama,” Beatrice said, kissing her mother’s fleshy, almost lifelessly cold cheeks. But her mother simply turned and walked to her horse; she mounted with the ease of a woman half her age or girth.
    Like an ebbing tide the retinue fell away, trumpets blowing, gloved hands waving and wind-flushed faces bravely smiling, banners snapping in the snow-scented wind. Soon the piazza was empty and only Polissena and several Castello guards remained alongside Beatrice. She was not aware of them, or of the first glassy grains of sleet. She watched until the Via degli Armorai had consumed even the banners of her mother’s escort. Finally she turned and stared up at the gray walls of her new home. The three malevolent towers that faced the Via degli Armorai were the color of bruises against the grim sky. But Beatrice’s trudging mind retreated from whatever future it apprehended within those stone walls. Instead her benumbed consciousness made a lonely pilgrimage back to childhood. And there, like the poet Dante staring up at the monstrous visage of Satan in the frozen center of Hell, she confronted the terrible central doubt of her existence: Had Mama left her in Naples because Mama had never loved her?
     
    “Buongiorno, signore.” Il Moro gestured at the empty chairs, upholstered in mulberry velour embroidered with gold Sforza vipers, then settled back in his own chair, similarly upholstered but with a massive curving back and thick scrolled and gilded legs and arms. Behind him, his three secretaries sat at their tall, slant-topped writing lecterns, their three quill pens already bobbing across sheets of parchment like birds engaged in some frantic mating ritual. A large Persian rug had been spread over the patterned marble floor; the walls had recently been painted with a pattern of red, white, and blue lozenges punctuated with rows of vivid blue Sforza vipers. Two enormous arched windows overlooked the ducal park, but the view was obscured by the shower of wet snowflakes.
    The smaller of the two men who took their chairs opposite Il Moro was Count Carlo Belgioioso, the Milanese ambassador to France. Belgioioso was a sturdy-looking man in his early thirties, his youth and stout build well suited to the grueling routine of transalpine travel to which his job subjected him. The second man was the condottiere Galeazzo di Sanseverino, Captain General of the Armies of Milan. Messer Galeazz, as he was known, looked like Apollo as the ancients had carved him, all symmetry and grace, yet larger than life, his immaculately tailored embroidered tunic draped over preposterously expansive shoulders and chest. His features were Grecian as well, but sweeter, more boyish, the face the Florentine sculptor Donatello had given his lithe, adolescent David. He lounged with an athlete’s insouciance, for a moment extending a muscular leg sheathed in azure