The Secret Supper Read Free

arrival in the world without anyone foreseeing such a contingency. For the first time in her life, Beatrice was frightened.
    The doctors took longer than expected to reach the palace that day. The midwife had to be fetched from outside the city walls, and when all the staff needed to assist the duchess finally congregated at her side, it was too late. The umbilical cord that fed the future Leon Maria Sforza had wrapped itself around the baby’s fragile neck. Little by little, neat as a rope, it tightened until it throttled him. Immediately, Beatrice noticed that something was amiss. It seemed to her as if the baby, who seconds earlier had been pushing vigorously to emerge from her belly, had all of a sudden stopped his attempts to come into the world. First he trembled violently and then, as if the effort had drained him, he lost all strength and became stone still. Seeing this, the doctors cut the mother open from side to side, while she writhed in anguish, biting into a vinegar-soaked cloth. But their gesture was useless. Horrified, they discovered a bluish, lifeless baby, his eyes glassy, hideously strangled in his mother’s womb.
    And that is how, in terrible pain, without even a moment to come to terms with the loss, Beatrice herself breathed her last a few hours later.
    In his report the Father Prior said that he arrived in time to see her agony. Bloody, with her innards exposed and drenched in an unbearable pestilence, she seemed delirious with the torment, crying out for confession and extreme unction. Fortunately for our brethren, Beatrice d’Este died before receiving the sacraments.
    I say “fortunately” advisedly.
    The duchess was barely twenty-two years old when she left our world. Bethany was well aware that she had led a sinful life. Since the days of Pope Innocent VIII, I myself had had occasion to study and store a number of documents concerning her debauchery. The thousand eyes of the Secretariat of Keys of the Papal States knew well the kind of person the Duke of Ferrara’s daughter had been. Within the walls of our general quarters on Mount Aventino, we could boast that no important document issued from the European courts was unknown to our institution. In the House of Truth, dozens of readers examined daily missives in all languages, some of them encrypted by means of the most abstruse devices. We would decipher them, classify them according to their importance and store them in the archives. Not all, however. Those which referred to Beatrice d’Este had long held a priority in our duties and were kept in a room to which few of us were allowed access. These irreproachable documents showed that Beatrice d’Este was possessed by the demon of occult science. And, worse still, many alluded to her as the principal instigator of the magic arts practiced in Ludovico il Moro’s court. In a country traditionally prone to the most sinister heresies, this piece of information should have been weighed very carefully. But no one did so at the time.
    The Dominicans of Milan—among them, the Father Prior—had several times held in their hands proof that Donna Beatrice, as well as her sister Isabella in Mantua, collected amulets and pagan idols, and that both women professed an immoderate passion toward the prophecies of astrologers and dissemblers of every kind. But the Dominicans never did anything about it. The teaching that Isabella received from those deceivers was so wicked that the poor woman spent her last days convinced that our Holy Mother Church would soon disappear forever. Often she would say that the Papal Court would be dragged to the Last Judgment and there, among archangels, saints and pure men, the Eternal Father would condemn us all with no pity.
    No one in Rome was more aware than I of the activities of the Duchess of Milan. Reading the reports that arrived concerning her, I learned how devious women can be, and I discovered to what extent, in barely four years of marriage, Donna Beatrice