The duke calls for Petrus on a day of blue sky, of orange leaf; a day in which it is a pleasure to stride out from their garden house, to make his way to the palace proper. Through the courtyard, over colored stone floors that gleam with polishing, with the labor and aching knees and shoulders of servants. Under ceilings tipped with gold, past frescos of naked revelry, bodies at play, at dance, at love.
Petrus feels the pull of muscles in his thighs as he walks, hears the slap of his shoes against marble. He is shown into the duke’s office, where the man himself sits frowning over a book of numbers, lips pulled to one side, a luminous quill twisting between his fingers, the sooty feather of a crow, with its fine point.
The duke looks up as Petrus bows. “Ah, Don Pietro!” he says, smiling as if Petrus’s presence is a happy surprise, as if he did not order him to come here. “Come, come, sit. I have something to discuss with you.”
Petrus sits, conscious of the creaking of the chair under his weight. A leopard from the duke’s menagerie, recently dead, now crouches beside a tall shelf stuffed with books and papers, its yellow glass eyes fixed somehow upon both men at once.
The duke folds his hands together under his chin. “The Marchesa di Soragna,” he says, still smiling, “is enchanted by our little Antonietta.”
“Well,” says Petrus—and he can hear the courtier’s drawl to his voice, the arch inflection—“she is an enchanting child, if you’ll forgive a doting father saying so himself.”
Another smile, a chuckle. “I can hardly fault you.” He runs a palm over his head. “The marchesa was so enchanted that I have decided to give Antonietta to her.”
His words are senseless. There are more of them, but Petrus cannot comprehend them. He stares, narrows his eyes; shakes his head and tries to understand. “I,” he says, but no more, for the duke is rising, is gesturing for Petrus to rise as well, to make his way to the door. Petrus does—he is halfway across the rug, halfway gone, before the duke’s words become something like corporeal inside his head, as if they have just been scrawled there in ink with the duke’s sharp-tipped quill.
“Your Excellency,” he says. He feels the press and give of the rug under his heel as he turns. The duke has already sat once more, taken up his quill, bent his head to the book he had been studying. He raises his brows when Petrus approaches once more, hands behind his back, clenching, clenching.
His throat is dry and sour, as if he had only just woken after a stretch of fevered sleep. He says again, “Your Excellency,” but cannot fumble quickly enough for words to finish the thought. You cannot mean it. It cannot be true. I cannot allow—you cannot make her—
Cannot. Cannot. Cannot. Mad words, to speak to power. To the man upon whose generosity Petrus has thrown himself and his family. Who has fed them, clothed them richly, housed them, denied them no luxuries. The children have had toys, books. Antoinette has chosen a pup from the duke’s own kennels, a speckled thing so small its eyes are still squeezed closed, its wee feet paddling the air. She is to have it in a few weeks, when it is weaned.
His mouth fills abruptly with saliva, and he has to swallow and swallow. The duke strokes his quill along the bearded line of his own jaw, scritch, scritch, scritch, as Petrus stands immobile. There is a swelling in his chest, in his throat. He remembers the roar that came from him in Basel, how he charged bull-like at the woman who held Antoinette’s hands. How he stopped her.
But roaring will not serve him well here, now. He speaks softly instead, his tone, his manner a courtier’s delicate balance of strength and deference.
“I would wish—I would like to keep Antonietta with us a little longer, Your Excellency,” he says. “She is young, yet—not even ten years old. She loves the vineyard, the farm, at Capodimonte. I would like her to have that, the open space she so enjoys.” His heart thumps, and he fears his voice has lost its courtier’s drawl; that it pleads, wheedles, begs. “There is so much time ahead for court life.”
The duke sets his quill down slowly, deliberately. His face, usually so genial, puts Petrus in mind of Henri’s face when he was a still child, scowling when thwarted. “The marchesa is well connected; her husband is powerful. They have offered your daughter a place with them, a place where she will be appreciated for her remarkable self. Your refusal, Don Pietro, smacks of selfishness, of ingratitude. Have I not treated your family with respect? Did I not take you in when you had need of a home; have I not provided you with a house of your own, with work when you requested it? Is Maddalena not pleased with her new home, her husband? Does Enrico not enjoy traveling with, learning from, my brother?” His Excellency’s voice rises with each word, until he is nearly shouting. A flush of red rises from under his beard, smearing his cheeks and brow.
Petrus can feel himself shrinking away, closing up. When he blinks, he sees their place in Capodimonte, the vastness of the hills, the broad sweep of the lake, the vines and groves. So beautiful; and not really theirs. Nothing is truly theirs. All that beauty could be snatched away with a single word from this man’s mouth, this man in front of Petrus who has always, as he said, treated Petrus and Catherine and their children with respect, with kindness and generosity.
But then Petrus thinks of the pulpy fruit, the oranges the duke sent upon Ercole’s death, the sickly sweet scent of their juice as they smacked against the wall, one after another. A sack of sweetness offered upon his death, but nothing except sullen silence at his birth, at the smooth evidence of Petrus and Catherine’s failure, their one task so spectacularly bungled.
He breathes out. Shadows, like those cast by the high stalks of sugarcane, close over his head. The illusion of escape from the life he so easily might have had, if Isabel had not rescued him, if he had been bought, at that market, by anyone other than a man who wished to give a gift to a king—it is slipping, that illusion, falling away, revealing the truth that he has never wanted to acknowledge, and all at once he is dizzy with it, so dizzy that he nearly puts out a hand to steady himself upon the duke’s broad desk. His enslavement might be different from the one so many of his people have lived; it might come with clothes of velvet, bearing books bound in leather for him to read, figs for him to eat, wine to drink. But it exists, still. It stole him away from his almost-grandmother, just as her brothers, her mother, were stolen away from her. And it has come now for his child.
Helplessness is a rope around Petrus’s lungs, crushing all his ability to roar. And as if he can sense that the fight has left his wild man, the red recedes from His Excellency’s face, and his lips take an indulgent turn.
“Think of it as fostering out,” he says, gentle now. “If I am blessed with children, I’ve no doubt some of them will travel to other courts for education, for social opportunities. Eight, nine years old—this is not so young. Younger children than Antonietta have been sent away from home, and they grow up the stronger for it. And Soragna is not so very far from Capodimonte—only a few short hours by coach. It is possible that you and your lovely wife can visit Antonietta very often.”
Petrus nods, a jerky, instinctive motion. The ropes tighten and tighten.
“She will not be far, as I said. And the marchesa keeps the very best company—senators and scholars and artists. Antonietta will no doubt be a great favorite of them all.”
Petrus staggers like a man drunk back through the gleaming halls and out into the autumn sunlight. He flinches away from it, makes for the gardens with their sheltered, shaded copses.
Every word His Excellency spoke was true. The children of courtiers are forever being sent—younger than Antoinette—here and there, for education, for finishing, for the alliances they might form. That he and Catherine have had so many years with their small brood, so many years of their strange and wonderful life—it is a gift, and one that Petrus realizes, hand to chest, breath wheezing, that he has not fully appreciated. Tucked away from all the world, except when they are asked to stand before it, that others might have the benefit of seeing their sublime hair.
When he and Catherine and their children first arrived in Rome, they pressed tight together in the coach, taking in the dizzying rush of the city, the grandeur and the squalor of it. They presented themselves at the Palazzo Farnese, and oh, the widening of the duke’s eyes when he saw them, the breadth of his grin. How eagerly he read Nevers’s letter; how immediately he invited them to stay forever at his palace.
To grace my gardens with your illustrious presence, Don Pietro, he said, and bowed, as one nobleman to another.
Every night on the road, while his wife and children slept, Petrus felt himself caught once more in the grasping arms of the pirates; but this time, he clung to them as they tried to fling him out to sea. Clung with his hands, his fingers, his toes, his nails, leaving hot red furrows behind on their skin when they finally succeeded in releasing him to the waves. And then he was kicking, moving his arms, his legs, trying to keep his head up, gulping in air against the inevitable closing of the water over his face. As it finally overcame him, dark and cold, stinging his eyes with its saltiness, almost he wanted to let himself sink.
And then his sleeping limbs would spasm, and he would come awake; would touch the soft leather case in which he kept Ludovico’s letter safe, close to his breast. If it did not work—if the Duke of Parma refused to have them—
But then they arrived; and the duke bowed to him; and all felt safe.