The Second Duchess Read Online Free PDF

me.
    My father insisted I was too young and delicate for a real nozze . He wouldn’t let Alfonso take me to Ferrara after we were married. Alfonso didn’t care—he didn’t want to marry me or go back to Ferrara anyway. Three days after the wedding, he galloped off to France, where he’d been living as a great favorite at the court of his cousin, the French king Henri, leaving me Duchess of Ferrara but still a child under my father’s thumb, and as much a virgin as I’d ever been.
    I hope Alfonso does cut out Maddalena Costabili’s tongue, the bitch. Hair the color of sunlight! Breasts like white peaches! I don’t know what she was up to, but someone must have paid her, or coerced her. She never had anything nice to say about me while I was alive, and nothing but gold or fear would make her say such things now, and on the emperor’s sister’s wedding night at that. Who? Any one of a dozen people who want Alfonso’s new marriage to come to nothing, that’s who.
    She was right when she said I was mad. In those last few days before Alfonso had me locked away, I was mad with a hundred different things. Fury, fear, frustration, passion, joy. Does he remember? Does he remember anything about me at all?
    Tonight especially, in bed with his new wife—is he thinking of me?

CHAPTER THREE

    T he next day at dinner we presided at the high table in the great salon as the Duke and the new Duchess of Ferrara. If one had a penchant for fantasy, we might have been cresting a wave in the midst of the sea, for the room had been transformed, top to bottom, into Neptune’s kingdom.
    Stylized waves, with sprays of sea-foam and fanciful plants and shells, had been painted on draperies covering the ceiling; branches of candles were upheld by coiled sea-monsters in silver-gilt. The topmost tablecloths were blue-green silk, swirled and gathered to look like the ocean’s surface, and the napkins were folded to look like fish, with silver spangles for scales. The high table was set apart inside a sea-reef of papier-mâché, painted in gold and blue.
    In contrast to all the blue and green, the duke wore dark mulberry-red velvet set off by pleated white linen, fine as silk and perfumed with sandalwood. In his hat there was a pigeon’s-blood ruby the size of a chestnut. I, on the other hand, was a blaze of brilliance in cloth of silver and diamonds. My hair was no longer loose but caught up in a silver headdress embroidered with starfish in pearls and coral, one of the duke’s morning gifts. It was both costuming for the celebration and a symbol of my new status as a married woman.
    Behind the bright opulence was the hot rosemary-scented darkness of the night. I could not look at him without remembering. Everything reminded me—the tug of the hairpins in my hair, the sound of his voice, the taste of the wine. He was toying with a fine clear glass from Murano, so thin the golden wine appeared to be floating free in the air. I watched his fingers. I remembered what they had done.
    I concentrated on my food. I had not been able to eat more than a bite or two of the wedding supper the night before, and prosaic as it might be, I was hungry.
    “You eat with good appetite, Madonna,” the duke said. “I am pleased. My cooks and vintners have outdone themselves in your honor.”
    He spoke as if the events of the night before had never happened. I breathed deeply, lifted my head, and made up my mind to do the same.
    “They have indeed, my lord. This little tart is delicious, and like nothing I have ever tasted before.”
    “It is called a torta di tagliarini , for the sweet pasta in the filling.” He smiled. “It was created for the wedding feast of my grandfather and his second wife, Lucrezia Borgia, in homage to the bride’s magnificent golden hair. I suspect you do not eat pasta in Vienna.”
    When he was in a good humor, when something gratified his pride as his great ancestry did, his smile was pleasant and his mien attractive. I found