Free The Second Duchess by Elizabeth Loupas Page A

clearly?”
    “You forget yourself,” I said, in an even more icy voice. God knows if it really had any effect on the fellow, but at least he stepped back from me and looked away.
    “Domenica,” I said. “Sybille. Paolina. Attend me. Gather up the puppies, if you please, and let us go.”
     
     
    I COULD TELL la Cavalla a thing or two about Frà Pandolf. Now there’s one who has no business in a friar’s robes! I expected him to be a virgin, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. He told me afterward he’d had dozens and dozens of women, peasants and ladies, merchants’ wives and craftsmen’s daughters, even holy nuns—he’d had plenty of opportunity, because he came from a sunny island somewhere to the south where oranges and lemons grew year-round, and had wandered to Rome and other cities I’d never heard of before coming to Ferrara in hopes of catching Alfonso’s eye.
    He was nobody, a foundling, he said, but he always wanted to paint pictures. He laughed when I asked him why he became a friar. Visions? Callings? Prayers? Not Frà Pandolf. He took Franciscan orders because they gave him standing without requiring him to be confined to a monastery. Under the pretense of preaching—preaching!—he could travel anywhere, ask for charity from anyone, paint when it pleased him, and find ever richer and nobler patrons. He liked to fottere the women he painted, he said—it made his paintings better. When he was painting a great lady, he imagined himself in bed with her. I wonder what his imaginings were about la Cavalla.
    He didn’t have to depend on imaginings with me. Who seduced who? I’m not sure. I just know he made me look beautiful, so beautiful, with his paints and brushes. He said I was the most beautiful of all the women he’d painted, and I believed him. Oh, I could’ve lain in his bed forever with nothing but air on my skin and the smell of paints and turpentine sharp in the room.
    When he had his fill of painting me, though, he didn’t want me anymore. He began to paint a girl in the kitchen instead. Never mind how I found out. Was she more beautiful? He said it was just a way to get special food, special wine. I told him gluttony was a sin. He laughed. I laughed, too, but only because I didn’t want him to know he’d hurt me.
    Someday I’ll tell you more about him, and about all of them. Yes, I had lovers, so many that sometimes I lost count. Once you have one, it’s easy to move on to another, and then another, and one morning you wake up and realize there have been ten or twenty or more.
    At first I had to be careful—Alfonso would go weeks without touching me, and everyone was watching, and it would’ve been a disaster if I’d found myself with child when it couldn’t have been Alfonso’s. But Isabella had taught me ways to play with a man without the risk of catching a child. Oh, I had a lovely time, all that first year. I pretended to be sick, and I succeeded so well, my father sent his chief physician from Florence, and what awful purges and cuppings I had to endure! But it was worth it. Alfonso left me alone more and more, and for a while, at least, I was free to do as I pleased.
    I was shocked when I found out half the court had been whispering in Alfonso’s ear about my avventurini with other men. They were looking for favor, assuming he’d find out everything anyway and falling all over each other to be the first to tell him. I swear, there was a line of people from one end of the Castello to the other, waiting to tell Alfonso all my sins.
    It didn’t matter. I was young, I was beautiful, and I thought I would live forever.
    I was wrong.
    And Frà Pandolf, for one, could tell you: I was not ready to die.

CHAPTER SIX

    B efore I could go in search of the painting, I had to escape my ladies.
    That is one of the disadvantages of rank: a highly placed person is almost never alone. Emperors even have grooms of the closestool to attend them while they perform their most