The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi Page 3

  She hesitated, as if troubled by what she had just said, then smiled cheerily and added, “I misspoke. You could hardly see your own head if it was on a pike, could you?” And, with a toss of her curls, she flounced off, giggling.

  Strange girl. Mind you, she did not seem to think any less of him for his bastardy. Of course, to a girl who cut her baby teeth on The Thousand and One Nights, secret paternity could hardly be a novelty. Come to think of it, if Danilo had to make a reckless disclosure to anyone, he couldn’t have chosen a better recipient. Still, he had revealed a fact that Judah del Medigo had not seen fit to share with his patron, the Sultan — the fact that his recently arrived son had been fathered by another man. And princes do not like to be lied to. Not that the doctor had actually lied, but the Sultan might not see it that way. And it was not his son’s place to reveal his father’s secret.

  The echo of his mother’s voice had undone Danilo. Hearing it in his head saying the name Harun al-Rashid had brought on a rush of longing so fierce that he had to bite his lip — hard — to hold back his tears. Then, as quickly as it had descended, his grief was overcome by fear. What if Princess Saida should happen to mention the identity of his true father to her grandmother, the Valide Sultan? And what if the Valide should mention it to her son, the Sultan? It would be a neat bit of gossip to pass on to him. And, in a world rife with plots and betrayals and deceit, the Sultan could easily get the wrong impression.

  First thing the next morning Danilo pulled the princess aside.

  “I shouldn’t have told you about my blood father, but I did,” he confessed. “Now I must ask you to keep the confidence.”

  To his surprise, she agreed without hesitation. That ought to have been the end of it. But that night he dreamed he was a boy again in Marchesana Isabella’s Roman salon, pressed into service as a page during his mother’s reading of the French romances that her patroness doted on. Even in the dream, he could feel the scratchy surface of the starched white camicia he wore on those occasions, and the weight of the heavy silver salver that it took all his boyish strength to hold steadily aloft as he offered glasses of spiced wine to the Marchesana’s demoiselles, to his mother (who liked to sip as she read), and to the great lady herself, fat and puffy but imposing nonetheless with her twisted strands of pearls and her bejeweled fingers.

  From the square below could be heard the muffled sounds of the sack of a great city. Screams, curses, and blasts of powder seeped into his dream. And through it all, his mother continued to read from Ariosto’s poem, Orlando Furioso. Poetry was read aloud daily in Madonna Isabella’s court in Mantova, and — sack or no sack — she insisted on maintaining the ritual in Rome.

  But suddenly, as happens in dreams, the drawing room was overrun with wild, black-haired Saracens who seemed to have climbed up the palace walls from the square below. They were led by the blackest and wildest of all: their leader, Harun al-Rashid. His mother had stopped reading. The demoiselles were screaming. Madonna Isabella swooned. Danilo woke up in a sweat.

  The next day, when he came again to the name of Harun al-Rashid while reading, Danilo broke off and found himself once more confiding in the princess.

  “It is the name that takes me back,” he explained. “When I read the name of Harun al-Rashid, I could hear it coming from my mother’s mouth. The Este family was very fond of French romances. They had a library full of them.”

  She seemed puzzled, and indeed he was hard put to find a Turkish equivalent for the term roman. But now that the floodgates of memory were open, he had no will to stop the flow.

  “You see,” he found himself telling her, “my mother was the private secretary to the Marchesana Isabella D’Este, wife of Marchese Francesco Gonzaga of Mantova.”

  “Marchesana?” Her query was more of a conversational courtesy than an expression of interest.

  “Marchesana is what you call the wife of a marchese.” Seeing no sign of comprehension, he decided that a degree or two of rank inflation was in order. “A sort of Italian princess,” he explained.

  Now he had her attention. Princesses were something she understood.

  “I was not aware that your mother was secretary to a princess.” She spoke with a new respect in her tone. “I thought she was just one of those clever Jewesses who go shopping for the ladies of the harem.”

  “My mother was no bundle-woman,” he hastened to assure her. “Her name was Grazia dei Rossi. She translated many books into Italian from Latin and French and was renowned as a scholar.”

  “And this princess she served?”

  “Isabella D’Este is daughter to the Duke of Ferrara. In Europe they call her La Prima Donna del Mondo, the First Lady of the World.”

  Saida nodded approvingly. Titles were something she also understood.

  “The Lady Isabella and her family used to commission works of poetry.” He paused, then added, “As your father does.” Again he was greeted by a nod and a smile of approval.

  “And my mother was in this lady’s service,” he went on, “when Ariosto dedicated his poem, Orlando Furioso, to Lady Isabella D’Este in honor of the birth of her first son. He even gave her name, Isabella, to one of his heroines.”

  Better and better. The Ottomans were even more enthusiastic dynasts than the Estes, if that were possible.

  In all the months since he had arrived at Topkapi Palace, Danilo had spoken to no one about his life in Italy, about his escape from Rome, or about his mother’s death. Now, having begun, he could not stop himself.

  “I had a dream last night,” he found himself confiding — confiding! — in this girl. “I saw Harun al-Rashid breaking into Madonna Isabella’s salon during the sack of Rome.”

  “I have heard of that unfortunate event,” she chimed in. “My father told me of it. But you are mistaken. Harun al-Rashid is not the villain of the piece. The attacker was King Charles of Spain, who calls himself the Holy Emperor even as he attacks his own Pontiff, Pope Sir Clement the Seven.”

  She spoke this garbled version of these European titles with such assurance that it took all his patience to refrain from setting her straight.

  But, this time, he took the high road. “Quite so, Princess,” he agreed. “Quite so.”

  To which she responded, “Please tell me more about your dream.”

  At this point, he might have excused himself from further confidences. But instead he went on.

  “In my dream, I confused Harun al-Rashid with the true villains of the sack of Rome, the Emperor’s German soldiers, his landsknechts.”

  “The so-called emperor,” she corrected him sweetly.

  “I was brought up to think of Charles the Fifth as the Holy Roman emperor,” he advised her.

  “The Venetian bailo told my father that people in Venice say that this Charles is neither holy, nor Roman, nor an emperor,” she said.

  “They also say that in Rome,” he admitted, “but they still bow down to him. It all depends on how you look at him, doesn’t it?”

  She sniffed.

  Not about to be intimidated, he went on. “What my dream taught me is that you and I live in the same world, Princess. Although we speak different languages, our stories are inhabited by the same heroes and villains. We may see them differently, but we share them in our dreams.”

  This was clearly a new thought to her, and she took several moments to consider it before she spoke. When she did, her voice was quiet and modest. “I would like to know some of these romances that you speak of. Especially the favorite story of your mother’s patroness — the Princess Isabella D’Este.”

  “I could read that story to you,” he ventured. “My father, the doctor, keeps my mother’s manuscript of Orlando Furioso on his shelf.”

  Again, she took a moment to consider, and during the silence a plan formed in his mind.

  “What if I translate the story of Isabella from Italian
into Turkish and read it to you?” he asked. “Then you can correct me as you do when I read stories aloud from The Thousand and One Nights. That way” — he was finding himself increasingly at home with the idea — “I will still be doing my Turkish lessons and you will be hearing one of my stories.”

  By now, his hours spent with Princess Saida had given him a fair notion of what would suit her: the simple account of an event studded by incident, few digressions, and jeopardy lurking at every turn. And he seemed to have found these requirements in Ariosto’s tale of Princess Isabella — a story that had been Madonna Isabella D’Este’s favorite, a story with a heroine that the poet had named after the great lady herself. He set to work that very evening, full of zeal for the project and blissfully unaware of the pitfalls that lay in wait for him buried among Ariosto’s doubled quatrains.

  What Danilo had not realized was that although Ariosto’s epic was a collection of many separate stories, the Italian poet had chosen to tell his stories not sequentially as in The Thousand and One Nights, but by picking them up and putting them down throughout the text the way a knitter saves out bundles of stitches for occasional use throughout a pattern. The task of sorting out a single story demanded patience and scholarship. And, in spite of his mother’s efforts to train him, Danilo del Medigo was neither patient nor scholarly.

  Damn Harun al-Rashid! Damn Isabella! Damn the poet! Why had he made such a rash offer? He had been better off with Scheherazade, who turned out to be not nearly as boring as he had expected. Still, he could not bring himself to give up and admit failure, certainly not to a girl. Besides, something else held him to the task. He might be a bastard, but his mother was no puttana. Grazia dei Rossi had been a respected scribe and a true scholar, and in some way he had taken on this impossible task to honor Grazia the Scribe. Why?

  Maybe because this was the kind of task his mother would have tackled readily and accomplished brilliantly. So he kept at it.

  Meanwhile, Princess Saida was getting impatient. He began to work at his translation secretly, under a quilt, while his father was asleep. One night his candle set fire to his quilt. One day he fell asleep on the back of his horse. But when he finally reached the tragic end of the romance of the doomed Isabella and her lover, Zerbino, he was as certain as one who is in thrall to royal whims that this tale was just the bait to entice Saida into his world.

  3

  THE PRINCESS

  AND THE PALADIN

  The princess had made it abundantly clear that what appealed to her about Ariosto’s epic was purely and simply the love story of Isabella and Zerbino. Any reference to the larger tale of which it was a part, or to its origins in the world of French chivalry, she met with a barely disguised yawn. He knew that if he was to capture her attention and hold it, he must jettison Ariosto’s opening cantos and leap into the middle of Canto 13, where the knight-errant, Orlando, out for a gallop in the French countryside, discovers a maiden being held prisoner in a cave. She is not much older than fifteen, and even though her eyes are tear-swollen, such is her beauty that she makes her filthy prison look like a paradise.

  “Full well do I know that I may suffer for having spoken to you,” she tells her rescuer, “but I will tell you my story even if I pay for it with my life.”

  Danilo could not resist sneaking a peek at his princess to see if she had taken the bait and was rewarded with an expression of rapt attention. So far, so good.

  “I am Isabella, daughter of the King of Galicia,” the captive maiden goes on. “Once I had a happy life. I was young, beautiful, rich, and esteemed. Now I am poor, wretched, and debased.”

  “Young, beautiful, rich, and esteemed,” Saida repeated. “How does that sound in your language?”

  He checked his text. “Felice, gentile, giovane, ricca, onesta e bella,” he read.

  She repeated the strange words slowly, turning them over in her mouth as if to taste them. “And now she is?”

  “Povere, infelice e vile,” he read. “Poor, wretched, and debased . . .”

  “Poor princess . . .” She dabbed at her eyes.

  This was going even better than he expected. “She tells Orlando that although she used to be the daughter of a king, she no longer is,” he continued.

  “How can that be?” Saida loved a puzzle.

  “Because she is now the daughter of grief, misery, and sadness. And it is all the fault of love.” He hesitated before continuing. “That is not quite right. The Italian words are colpa d’amore. There is a suggestion of her being heart struck.”

  Saida clutched her breast.

  “Shall I go on?” he inquired. Need he have asked?

  He continued: “The damsel sets off to seek refuge in a convent to dedicate the rest of her life to the service of God. Not that she will ever forego either her love for Zerbino or the possession of his mortal remains. Wherever she is, wherever she tarries, his corpse accompanies her and is with her night and day.”

  The delicacy of this final detail brought new tears of admiration to Saida’s eyes.

  It had been months since the tutor and the pupil returned to The Thousand and One Nights. And now Saida was the one begging for more, and Danilo was the one parceling out his daily readings in miserly increments.

  “Of course, Princess Isabella is destined never to reach her refuge. Not far from the convent she encounters a savage Saracen, an African king named Rodomonte, who does not immediately kill or dishonor her. But Isabella knows that every hour she spends with this man increases the peril she is in. She conceives a plan . . .” Danilo stopped his tale, unable to voice the words he was about to read. “I cannot go further. The end of Isabella is too cruel for your young ears. Even Madonna Isabella D’Este could not bear to have it read to her. And she is a grown woman.”

  Saida said nothing. She simply pursed her lips in that stubborn way she did when her mind was made up.

  Reluctantly, he began to trace Isabella’s downward spiral into the arms of death.

  “In the brightness of the early morning, before Rodomonte’s head is clouded by wine (a habit against his religion that the villain has picked up in France), Isabella makes him a provocative proposal,” he said. “‘If you leave my honor safe,’ she says, ‘I will give you something of far greater value. Search and you can find a thousand comely women to possess, but no one in the world can give you what I have to offer.’ Artfully, she leaves the precise nature of this priceless gift shrouded in mystery.

  “Intrigued, Rodomonte accepts her offer, knowing that once he has the gift, he can easily break his word and take the woman along with it. Isabella takes Rodomonte out into the woods to search for a certain herb that when boiled with ivy and roasted over a fire of Cyprus wood, and then pressed between innocent hands, produces a magic juice. ‘Whoever bathes himself with this juice three times,’ she tells him, ‘so hardens his body that he will become proof against fire and steel.’

  “‘I shall bathe myself with it from the crown of my head down to my breast,’ she tells him. ‘Then you must turn your sword upon me as if you intend to cut off my head, and you will see the wonderful result.’

  “Whereupon she bathes herself in the juice three times, then steps forth to offer her bare neck to be severed. Completely convinced by her charade, Rodomonte unsheathes his sword and in one slice lops her fair head clean from her shoulders.”

  “No!” The cry escaped Princess Saida’s lips like a moan.

  “Yes, three times. The poet is specific,” Danilo insisted. “And from that head a voice can clearly be heard calling the name Zerbino.” He paused. “Shall I read what the poet has to say about this?”

  She nodded, dumb with grief.

  “Here is Ariosto’s benediction: ‘Depart in peace, beautiful spirit, and take thy seat in the skies,’” Danilo intoned in a sepulchral voice. “‘If my verses had the power, I would work to the limit of my poet’s skill to give
them such endurance that, for a thousand years, the world would have knowledge of the illustrious name Isabella.’”

  “I will pray for her.” Saida folded her hands under her chin and lowered her head. Then, after a suitably solemn pause, she raised her head and announced briskly, “Now we must begin again.”

  “Again?”

  “Yes. We go back to the beginning of Isabella’s story. Let us begin this very day, leaving out no detail. But this time” — he noted that her mouth was set in the now familiar, determined pout — “this time, I will speak for Isabella. You may read all the rest. But I will be Isabella. And you must teach me her words.”

  So they began again to recite Ariosto’s poem, the two of them now. Then one day Saida, quite overcome by the perils of Isabella, tossed away her notes and began to act out her part, embellishing it as her fancy dictated.

  From then on, the Princess and the Paladin became a kind of mode that they slipped in and out of whenever the inclination and the opportunity permitted. Gradually, the game insinuated itself into the riding ring, the archery court, and the ball field in the form of brief intervals of wordplay, teasing, and tag. They acted out Isabella’s rescue by Orlando, Zerbino’s death, Isabella’s sacrifice, sometimes complete, sometimes in part, depending on the time available.

  Although secrecy was never mentioned, none of their fellow students was ever included in this play. And when the fine weather came and the class was rewarded with weekly picnics on the little island of Kinali, the Princess and the Paladin found their perfect setting surrounded by a dense forest that eerily resembled those so prominently featured in Orlando Furioso. Saida was very good at melting away from the others undetected, and Danilo became an expert at picking up her signals and following her surreptitiously.