The Red Lily Crown (6 page)

The Palazzo di Bianca Cappello

THAT SAME NIGHT

“A
n alchemist's daughter!” Bianca Cappello's bosom quivered in the deep-cut neckline of her gown, dark crimson silk embroidered with pearls and rubies. She had thrust a living rose between her breasts, white barely tinged with pink and gold, almost exactly the color of her abundant flesh. The petals had begun to fall with the heat of her rage. “A mountebank's daughter, more likely. You are one breath away from the crown, my lord, and you spend your time abducting girls from the gutter?”

The prince found it distasteful when his mistress worked herself into such a sordid passion of emotion. He said in his coldest voice, “I spend my time doing what I please.”

He meant to warn her, but she was clearly too frenzied to hear him. Galen had written a treatise on just such a frenzy, which he called
hysteria
and associated with a deprivation of fleshly satisfactions in the female. The prince had every intention of dealing with that deprivation in Donna Bianca's case, but in his own way and at his own leisure.

She continued her tirade. “I am a noblewoman of Venice, and I will not be set aside with a few sweet words from one of your gentlemen, while you go off with that sorcerer of yours and a ragamuffin girl.”

She stumbled a bit over her description of herself. Understandable. She may have been born a noblewoman of Venice, but she had lost any reputation she might have had when she ran off with a Florentine banker's clerk at fifteen. When she bore her daughter only six months after her hasty marriage.

When she became his mistress, in the very midst of the celebrations marking his marriage to Giovanna of Austria.

“You will be set aside when I say you are to be set aside, Madonna. I do not care for great ladies, as you well know, or for raised voices.”

She stood panting, her curling red-gold hair beginning to tumble down from its jeweled combs. She knew perfectly well that Bianca Cappello, the notorious runaway noblewoman of Venice, would never have been more than a moment's amusement for him, conquered and abandoned like all the others. It was another woman who had held his heart and mind and body in her hands for nine years now, another woman who brought light to the dark, melancholy curiosity-cabinet of his soul.

Bia. His Bia.

Bia, who was Bianca, and at the same time was not.

“I do not want to be
her
,” Bianca said. She was clearly struggling to make her voice more temperate. “For one evening with you, my lord prince, I beg you, let me be myself.”

The prince smiled. “Yourself?” he said. “Have you not told me, over and over, that Bia is your true self, and that it is your joy and her joy to please the humble workman Franco?”

It was his own elaborate and deeply satisfying conceit, that he was a simple laborer named Franco. Franco worked every day with his hands, with minerals and acids, noble metals and glassworks and fine porcelains, and when the day was finished and he had no more work to do, he needed only to come home to his adoring and compliant little wife Bia, and she would tend to his every desire. Francesco, the prince—he had been the eldest, the heir, but even so he had never been the favorite, never been clever and charming and affable as his brothers and sisters had been. From the day of his mother's death and his father's descent into self-indulgence, his responsibilities had never ended. His wife, the emperor's sister—she was pious and proud and never forgot who she was, not even when they came together in their interminable quest to beget an heir. It was all too much. It was so much easier to be Franco, even if it was only for a few hours.

And as for Bia, well—Bianca had been happy enough to play the game at first. Anything to become the prince's mistress. She had tired of it quickly, he knew that, but he did not care. For him, for Franco, his nights with Bia were like air and water, dreamless sleep and good plain food. They were the only things that kept him sane.

“Fetch my clothes,” he said. “And change into your own proper clothes at once.”

She refused to obey him for a moment longer, her full glossy brows slanting in a scowl, her eyes stormy. He stepped closer to her and cuffed her across the mouth, not really hard enough to hurt her. Not yet. She sucked in her breath and closed her eyes for a moment.

He picked up the kitchen-knife that lay on the table. “Turn around,” he said.

She did not open her eyes. Like a woman in a dream, she turned. He cut the stitches of her embroidered bodice and the corset beneath it, revealing her fine silk camicia clinging damply to her skin. Through it he could see red marks on her back, imprinted by the corset's steel stays. The marks were beautiful.

“Fetch my clothes,” he said again. His voice was calm and pleasant. “Bia.”

“Yes, Franco,” she whispered.

She went into the other room. The prince began to undress himself. His opulent clothing was like a monk's habit to him, penitential: a fine black silk doublet, a padded pearl-embroidered jerkin blazoned with the red lilies of Florence, slashed trunk hose and tight stockings, a gold ring in his ear and a dark sapphire the size of a moscatello grape in his hat. He took it all off, even his underdrawers. They were embroidered with black work, thousands of tiny stitches made by a dozen Benedictine nuns. He preferred plain coarse linen, sewn by his Bia's own hands.

She came back into the room, wearing a simple camicia and overgown, her jewels stripped away, her hair tied up in a white coif. She kept her eyes lowered and said nothing as she offered him the folded clothes that were always prepared and waiting for him, a plain linen shirt and drawers, leather breeches and a jerkin of russet cloth. He put them on. When he did, he felt taller, stronger, freer. He felt as if he could breathe.

“That is much better,” he said. “Now, I will have my supper and a cup of wine before we go to bed. I am tired from a long day's work.”

He took his seat at the plain wooden table, Franco did, and smiled fondly as his Bia served him. The faint red mark across her mouth where he had struck her only made her lips softer, slightly swollen and more alluring than ever. The doors were locked; outside six Medici guardsmen stood watch to prevent any interruption or disturbance. If a messenger came from the Villa di Castello with news of his father's death, well, the messenger would have to wait.

“I have baked bread for you, my Franco,” Bia said. Her voice had become high and childlike. The bread, of course, had come from a shop in the bakers' quarter. They both knew that.

“Tut, my Bia, it is a little burned, here on one side,” Franco said. He began to cut slices of the bread with the same knife he had used to cut the stitches of her fine jeweled gown and the laces of her corset. “You must be more careful. Flour is expensive this year.”

The bread was not really burned, but Franco liked to find some small fault and inflict some suitable punishment. It was part of the rich, rich pleasure of being Franco. She did not contradict him. She was sinking into the intense trancelike state he loved, compounded of fear and submission and anticipation and sensuous arousal.

He ate the bread, and soft
giuncata
cheese from a plaited rush basket, and a handful of apricots. He drank a cup of cheap wine, well-watered. A good supper. Bia stood beside the table, her hands clasped under her apron like a nun's.

“The alchemist's daughter you speak of,” Franco said. “She is to be the prince's
soror mystica
, and assist with the great work of creating the Philosopher's Stone.” Franco, of course, would not use the proper Latin name. “She will be—”

“What is a
soror mystica
?”

“Do not interrupt me, my Bia.”

She lowered her eyes again. “I am sorry, Franco.”

“A
soror mystica
is an alchemist's feminine counterpart, his sister in the mysteries. This girl will be put to the tests of virginity before she is initiated, and she will be strangled if she fails. She will never be the prince's mistress, my Bia, only his
soror
. Virgin she will be in the beginning, and virgin she will remain, under holy vows.”

He could see her struggling with herself. After a moment she burst out, “If the prince wanted a feminine counterpart, why did he not choose me?”

“You? You know nothing of alchemy, my Bia. And in any case—you belong to me. I would never share you with the prince.”

She folded her lips together and said nothing more. Her golden lashes concealed her eyes. He ate another apricot and drank the rest of the wine.

“I think,” he said when he had finished, “that you will have no supper tonight, as part of your penance for burning the bread, and for interrupting me. Go and undress. I would like to enjoy my Bia's flesh, well and thoroughly.”

She obeyed him without a word. It pleased him. He left the dishes on the table and followed her to the second room, where there was a plain wooden bedstead, its frame strung with rope and piled with three straw mattresses. The sheets were linen, washed and bleached in the sun, and the pillows were stuffed with sweet dried grass. A length of extra rope lay coiled by the side of the bed. Bia averted her eyes from it, but Franco looked at it with deep satisfaction. He was intimately familiar with the thickness and texture of the rope, and how it looked when it was knotted around Bia's wrists, or her ankles, or her soft white throat.

She took off her clothes quickly, without feigning modesty. Her skin was milky pale; she spent hours, he knew, rubbing it with perfumed oils and lotions so it would be pleasing to him. Her hair was reddish-gold, the color of copper allowed to oxidize for a day or two, falling in silken curls to her hipbones. Not that he could see her hipbones. She was lushly fleshed, magnificently soft, a woman just as he loved women.

Perhaps he would not punish her too harshly for the pretended burned crust on the bread, for interrupting him with questions about the prince's
soror mystica
.

Naked, she helped him undress, taking his jerkin and hanging it from its special hook, accepting his shirt when he pulled it over his head. She knelt before him to unfasten his breeches. It was the moment when he felt more a man than any other, more than when he sat on his father's grand-ducal throne in the Palazzo Vecchio, more, even, than when he condemned a criminal or a revolutionary, man or woman, to torture and death.

But that was Francesco, slipping into his thoughts. He was Franco. Franco.

Bia drew his breeches down over his hips and he stepped out of them. She pressed her face against his belly for a moment, kissing him, adoring him. Then she got to her feet and stood before him. They were of a height, she pale and rounded, he swarthy and sun-burned from hunting. But all the power was his, and none of it hers.

“May I lie in the bed, Franco?” she whispered.

“First,” he said, “you will kneel at the prie-dieu. You must do the rest of your penance.”

The prie-dieu had been his mother's. He knew its carvings by heart—his mother's impresa, a peahen and her chicks, neatly referencing both his father's splendor and his mother's fertility. The wooden kneeling-bench was worn from Eleonora of Toledo's devout knees, and from the knees of her children—of Francesco, the prince, most of the time—who had been compelled to kneel there for whippings when they failed to fulfill her exacting standards of behavior. Bia walked over to it without a word and knelt, pulling her hair forward over her shoulders, putting her forehead down against the sloping shelf where his mother's praying hands had rested every day, all her life in Florence.

She was trembling, Bia was, and in the flickering candlelight he could see the sheen of sweat on her smooth pale skin. Her hands clutched at the sides of the shelf, her knuckles white with anticipation.

He opened the lid of the chest that always stood beside the prie-dieu and selected a doubled leather strap. He let her wait for a while, breathing in the scent of her fear and arousal and the pleasure of her being so utterly at his mercy. When he saw her relax a little, perhaps thinking he had changed his mind, he drew back his arm and struck her, hard.

She gasped, jumping and pressing forward against the wood. A reddened stripe glowed across her back, from her left shoulder to her right hip. She began to tremble uncontrollably. He struck her again, with calm and perfect control, and she cried out—she knew he liked to hear that he was hurting her. He gave her six blows in all, sufficient to finally force a scream from her, quite sufficient for her transgression. Four stripes from left to right, two criss-crossing them in the opposite direction. They were beautiful, rosy and slightly swollen. She lay over the prie-dieu's shelf, sobbing, quivering helplessly with sensation.

He put the strap away and closed the chest.

“I think,” he said calmly, “I will lie down first. I will make myself comfortable, and then you may set yourself to please me.”

She said, “Yes, Franco.” Her high Bia-voice was husky with tears and, he knew, her own pleasure, the pleasure-in-pain he had taught her. He lay down on the bed, splaying out his arms and legs, breathing deeply. He felt hard and strong. By the gold and copper mines of King Solomon, it was good to be alive.

Bia rose from the prie-dieu and ran her fingers through her hair, letting the rich curls tumble over the sensitized skin of her back. For a moment she simply stood there, allowing him to gaze his fill, as subject to his desires as a
marionetta
on invisible strings. Then she turned and walked to the bed. Without a word she knelt over him, her hair spilling forward over his face, her heavy breasts brushing deliberately against his chest as she mounted him. She knew what he liked. He thrust up with his hips, and reveled in her shudder and whimper of sensation.

“Now,” he said. “You do the work, my Bia. Show me you are sorry for your carelessness, and grateful to your Franco for correcting you.”