If the marchesa felt love (a difficult conception to understand), excepting always the love she felt for her daughters, it was for status. She had waited and toiled for it for many years, working her dignity and self-respect to the bone to get it. But always it had eluded her, until the night Cosimo di Medici had come to her house for the first time. When she thought about the struggles to get within striking distance of the money; she felt momentarily exhausted and empty and she experienced a wistful romantic need to fill all of Cossa's consciousness with herself. She dealt with this aberration by reasoning that it was men who were the romantics, that for all time women had only been trying compassionately to give men what they needed so badly; that, glorious mirror-sense, that achievement of looking into another's heart and seeing oneself with the eyes of the adorer. Not that Cossa was much of a romantic. His experience with women had been constant and compulsive, enjoying the physical profits of one body then moving on to the next. However, as she worked with him, as she managed him and he became more dependent upon her, she sensed his deepening need for her approval; and she knew he would finally recognize the need to call upon love, the blank-eyed mopery of romantic love, to build the echo chamber lined with mirrors, so that as he yearned for her his yearning would be self-fulfilling and he would be able to penetrate his own dreams of self by projecting them upon her, who, by her sighs and her sheep's' eyes, would make him more adoring of Cossa. That was the man's way. It didn't seem possible, but that was the way they wanted it to be.
She would need to build him up to love slowly so that it would be the more lasting. When love occurred to him, it would be what he wanted and it would be useful to her.
In a relatively short time – a pitiably short time, she thought Cossa conditioned himself to become obsessed with love for her. Even he was aware of the wilfulness of this, but he had reached a plateau on his long climb. The power he carried with him kept increasing in weight until some unconscious race memory he possessed, as all men possess, told him that he must find someone worthy enough to be allowed to admire his power and his set He pined for her when he was away from him and, sighed over her when she was near.
Nonetheless, he had to be sure she was worthy. He lived with her, in the present, reflected her into the glass of a fanciful future, and brooded about the possibility of her past. She was the Marchesa di Artegiana, but what did that signify? Who had been the marchese who had brought her to that title? Where were her lands. Where did she go when she told him that she must make long journeys to visit her daughters in Florence, in Paris, and in Mainz? When he gradually came to realize that he knew nothing about her, that made him fearful. He knew only that she had come to him from the Duke of Milan, and he knew it was inevitable that she had been the duke's lover; but where had she been before she knew him? What experience could have trained her to achieve such a man? She told him she was an associate of Cosimo di Medici, and Cossa had been careful to make Cosimo confirm this which Cosimo did with detached admiration and relish. He had asked the marchesa about Cosimo.
`What about him?' she said. 'I am fortunate enough to be paid a small commission from him for bringing new business to his bank.'
`That is all?'
`Cossa! He is intensely married! Besides it was I who brought him together with his only mistress.'
`What about Gian Galeazzo?'
`Whomever I met before I knew you should be meaningless to you. All I really can remember about Gian Galeazzo now is that he would have taken Rome and Italy were it not for your power against him.'
`The plague was the power against him.'
`No! You were in his stars. I – saw you there. Gian Galeazzo was guided by the stars. I served him in many ways, but he believed my real power was that I could read his stars and his fate was there to he seen. You were. there to be seen. How else do you think I knew to go to you if I had not seen it in Gian Galeazzo's stars, the stars which foretold that you would keep him planning in Pavia at the centre of the plague?'
`So you arranged his death with astrology?' he said with mockery, himself greatly confused again.
`Cossa! Who can know who will survive any plague? I ate the same food, drank the same wine, breathed the same air, but I survived it while it killed him. His generals survived it but we were only the appendages of his power. I served him well and he was so grateful that he gave me an estate in Perugia to house me and my family.'
`Why did not your husband, the marchese, provide a house for his family?”
`Ah my dear – he has long been dead and that was in Germany.' `A marchese in, Germany?'
She made an impatient sound. `He was a margrave. Would you prefer me to call myself the Margraviate di Artegiana in Italy?'
`Artegiana isn't a German name.'
'All right! I will insist – since you insist – that you introduce me as the Margraviate di Koenigskuenstgewerbler!' She bugled her indignation so forcefully that he barked with laughter.
He brooded most about her when she went away from him on the long visits to her daughters. While she was away, he threw himself into a frenzy of activity to block anxiety from his mind about what she might be doing.
To force her out of his mind and to fill his time, he moved against treason inside Bologna, ferreting out plots within plots which, always led to Nanne Gozzadini, a man to whom intrigue was as nourishment. Cossa put Gozzadini's brother to death but the succeeding plot exposed Cossa's own trusted captain, Vanello da Montefalco, so he had to die. Cossa drove Gozzadini out of Bologna to Rocca di Cento, where he ran him to earth. Gozzadini's own son, Cossa' s godson, was taken to the plain in front of the fort where Gozzadini was hiding. Cossa stood beside the boy and called out, `Gozzadini! See who is here! It is your only son, Gozzadini: Shall he live or die? Come out, Nanne. Surrender the fort or I will kill our little Gabbione, the son of your heart.'
There was no answer. When a quarter of an hour had passed, Cossa smiled sadly at the small boy, Gabbione, shrugged, turned to Luigi Palo, who was holding, the boy, and said, `Cut his throat.'
Nanne Gozzadini fled to Ferrara. The populace of Bologna sacked his palace at Cossa's orders. Bologna had peace.
As if in an exchange of justice, on the night following Gabbione's execution, Cossa was stricken with ague and fever. He was fearful that his troops would hear of this and judge that God was punishing him because he had, put the boy to death. While he was rational he ordered me to keep everyone out of his tent. He swooned into a coma. The Marchesa di Artegiana had been in Florence conferring with Cosimo about means to consolidate the bank's growth in Bohemia. She returned to Bologna to be told by Bernaba that Cossa was dying. The marchesa went into Cossa's tent in the blackness of the early morning with her satchel of herbs and potions. She and I bathed Cossa, and I was not ashamed to say that I could not stop weeping. '