Chapter 1: The Letter
Title: Tullia at Ferrara
Ferrara, Winter of 1537
The heavy scent of myrrh and candle wax lingered in the air of the dimly lit chamber, where tapestries hung like frozen music on the walls. Outside, the crisp winter night hushed the sounds of the bustling court, save for the murmur of lute strings and the distant pealing of church bells.
Tullia d’Aragona stood at the center of the room, veiled in silken crimson, her dark hair falling in a cascade of calculated disorder, and her fingers idly toying with a posy of heliotrope. The gold embroidery on her bodice caught the candlelight like the fire in her eyes.
The man before her knelt—not with dignity, but desperation. Girolamo Muzio, poet and courtier, his doublet disheveled, his inkwell-stained hands trembling as he clutched the hem of her gown.
“Madonna,” he gasped, “you are not of this earth. You are the embodiment of Venus herself, no—something higher still. I am no longer a man of reason, of rhetoric. I am a man enslaved by love. Make of me what you will.”
Tullia arched a brow, one hand moving from the posy to her waist. She did not smile. She observed him as a hawk might observe a mouse trembling in its shadow.
“Signor Muzio,” she said, her voice a calm ripple across water, “you wrote of me as ‘Thalia’, the Muse of Comedy. Do I amuse you, then?”
“Nay, never! You inspire me, torment me, burn me! I would carve your name upon my flesh if the trees of the Po prove too few!”
She turned, her skirts brushing his shoulder like the brush of fate, and walked toward the window where moonlight poured in like melted silver. Her reflection shimmered faintly in the glass, shadowed by the trees where she knew Ercole Bentivoglio had recently scrawled her name in a fever of longing. Another soul undone.
“And yet, for all this suffering,” she murmured, “I find myself unentertained. Perhaps I am jaded, or perhaps I have heard this aria before—different voice, same plea.”
Muzio crawled forward on his knees. “I swear to you, Tullia, I shall devote every word, every breath to your divinity! Make me your slave! I renounce all liberty if I may but kiss the edge of your thought.”
At this, Tullia finally turned, slowly, deliberately. “Liberty,” she said, tasting the word as if it were honey poisoned with rue. “I heard Ochino preach last Sunday. He spoke of free will as God’s highest gift. And you offer me your soul as though it were a coin in a beggar’s hand.”
“Would you rather I withhold it?” he said, half-wild. “Shall I become cold, distant, pious? Must I play at being Bernardo himself to earn your favour?”
“You are not worthy to shine his boots,” she said, not cruelly, only with certainty. “Ochino seeks to elevate the soul; you seek to abase it before mine. One inspires. The other begs.”
Muzio’s face twisted. He could not tell if she had rejected him, or if she had simply cut him into smaller, more reflective pieces.
Tullia stepped closer, taking his chin between two cool fingers. “Love is not slavery, Signor Muzio. Nor is seduction conquest. What I desire is not obedience but understanding. I am no man’s goddess—only a woman who knows her worth. Come to me as a man, not a martyr.”
And then she turned once more and left him kneeling in her wake, shattered in worship, his ode to Thalia burning unwritten in his chest.
Outside, the bells of San Francesco tolled again. Vittoria Colonna, in another part of Ferrara, wrote verses on the crucifixion. Tullia sang instead, her laughter sharp as citrus, her mind alight with sonnets of free will, and a city of men willing to die just to be refused by her.
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