The Marriage Portrait, page 25
“She—”
“Did it cross your mind that you might already be with child? Did it? Anyone would think you do not wish to bear my heirs.”
Lucrezia is seized with a terrible and urgent desire to laugh, and has to lower her head so that he will not see the sudden grin on her face. Can he really believe that watching a storm will have an effect on pregnancy?
“I was merely—”
“You find this to be a source of amusement, I see.” His voice has reached an even lower pitch. He is not touching her now. “However can I trust that in future you will—”
Lucrezia can bear this no longer. What madness has possessed him? She does not deserve this: all she did was open a window to see the lightning. She lifts her head to tell him so. “Alfonso—”
“Do not,” he holds a finger aloft, closing his eyes, as if summoning all reserves of patience, “be foolish enough to interrupt me when I am speaking. Now or ever. Do you understand me?”
She bows her head again. “Yes, Your Grace.”
Her smile and the suppressed hilarity have vanished, as if they never existed; there is no danger now that she might laugh. She stands before her furious husband in the posture of a penitent. She pictures herself from the outside: a girl with her shoulders slumped, her head lowered, hands upturned. No one would think she was anything other than apologetic and remorseful, filled with regret for her misdemeanour. Only she knows that within, just under her chilled skin, something quite other is taking place: flames, vibrant and consoling, lick at her insides, a fire kindles, cracks and smoulders, throwing out smoke that infiltrates every corner of her, every fingernail, every inch of her limbs. Her hair surrounds her—all he can see of her is the top of her head. He must believe she is listening to his lecture, to his chiding, but no. She is stoking this conflagration, letting it blaze, encouraging it to sear every inside space. He will never know, will never reach this part of her, no matter how violently he grips her arm or seizes her wrists.
She wonders, however, over the roar of the flames, what will ensue. Will she be sent back to Florence, in disgrace, just as her father once predicted? Will she have to face her parents again, so soon after her departure? Better, perhaps, for her to contract a fever and die here than risk her father’s fury and her mother’s scathing disappointment.
Within the tent of her hair, she can see her feet, bare and wet, facing his, booted and polished. She can see the front panels of her zimarra, decorated with delicate threadwork, and her arms hanging by her sides.
She knows what she has to do but part of her baulks at it, wants to run from the room, down the stairs, across the courtyard, out of the villa, and into the forest, where she might conceal herself inside the undergrowth, shelter there with the porcupines and stone martens, with pine needles in her hair and moss matting her hem. She need never come out.
With a small sigh, she reaches out a cold hand and ventures to take one of his. This is what is required: this is the only exit from this scene. She cannot run to the forest, however much she would wish it. When he doesn’t resist, she raises his hand to her mouth, and kisses its hard bones, again and again.
“I’m so sorry.” She says these words like an actor reading lines. “Please forgive me. I’ll never do it again. I was so intrigued by the storm and the lightning. I wasn’t thinking. I cannot bear that you are angry with me.”
There is a pause. She cannot look at him, in case his face is still distorted by fury and incomprehension. She waits, still holding his hand to her face, sensible of the fire within retreating from her edges, dying down, the flames shrinking, and this gives her a feeling of such profound sorrow that actual tears—not conjured or affected ones—gather behind her eyes and spill down her cheeks.
At the touch of saltwater on the skin of his hand, his anger vanishes, like clouds cleaving apart to let in shafts of sun. His face of fury disappears, to be replaced by one of indulgence. His other hand rises up to cup her cheek. He wipes at her tears with the sides of his thumbs. It seems to her that he is, all of a sudden, himself once again, that for a moment he had been inexplicably replaced by a vengeful, irascible monster in human form, a devil in collar and cuffs. But now the beast is banished: Alfonso is back.
“Very well,” comes his voice, and it is once more his even, affectionate tone. He leans forward to kiss her brow, then her temple. “We shall speak no more of it. Do not distress yourself, dearest.”
He pulls her towards him and embraces her. Her face is crushed against his giubbone, his arms about her head. To disguise the strange shaking of her hands, she passes them around his waist and fastens them behind him. She breathes in and out, inhaling his scent; she finds she has to keep swallowing, as if she has eaten something she cannot digest; she wonders what will happen now.
But she doesn’t have to wonder for long. One of his hands is toying with her hair, letting its rippling length run through the palm. Then it removes itself. It drops lower, towards her waist. It pulls open the knot there and loosens the sash. It pushes aside the zimarra. It gestures towards Emilia.
“Leave us,” its owner says.
* * *
When he eventually departs, walking away from her and through the chamber door, she stays for a while on the bed, looking up at the frescos, allowing them to come into focus and recede from it, as gradually she lets herself comprehend his absence, permits herself to believe that, yes, he has gone.
Then she rises and moves about the room, stepping through the neat piles Emilia has made, the packing boxes, the trunks; she gathers up her shift, her slippers, her shawl, and puts them on.
Emilia knocks gently on the door, asking if she may do anything to help prepare for the journey tomorrow, if Her Ladyship needs her. Lucrezia says that she is fine, there is nothing she wants, Emilia should go back to bed.
Emilia waits for a moment, on the other side of the door; Lucrezia can hear her breathing, and she hesitates, thinking she might pull the maid into the room, pushing the door shut behind them, and ask her if she saw, if she understood, if she, too, thought that Alfonso morphed from one person to another, before their very eyes, and what does it mean, and will it happen again? Emilia might say, yes, she saw it, too; she might soothe her and tell her that all men are thus sometimes, it signifies nothing. Lucrezia is reaching for the door handle but then she hears the maid tiptoeing down the corridor.
She fastens her attention instead on practical matters. She opens the box of her art materials; she counts the brushes, the bottles of oil; she rubs her fingers around the pearly insides of the painting shells; she touches the wrapped parcels of minerals and pigments. She checks that the marble pestle and mortar are safely padded in straw.
She doesn’t bother to open the trunks to check the gowns, the tunics, the shoes, the veils, the scarves, the jewels, the mantles, the giorneas, the collars, the belts. Emilia will see to those, folding them carefully along their seams, interleaving them with paper and cedarwood chips.
Catching sight of the mirror, she freezes, her heart leaping like a fish in her chest: for a fleeting second, she sees her sister Maria staring back at her. The high forehead, the anxiously drawn eyebrows, the slightly pouting bottom lip. Then, of course, she realises that it’s not Maria at all, she is not experiencing a visitation from the world beyond: it’s just her, Lucrezia, but seeming suddenly so much older.
He will always need to triumph, to be seen to win: she admits these words to her mind as she turns her head this way and that in the mirror, to be completely sure the reflection is her. There will never be a time or a situation in which he can readily accept defeat.
She thinks of Maria, how she lay in the bed for days, fever raging through her, her lungs filling with deadly phlegm. She thinks of how, had this not happened, had Maria not contracted the disease, it would have been Maria in this room, in this bed, in this marriage, in this mirror, not her. She, Lucrezia, might still be in the palazzo, taking the air on the battlements, visiting Sofia in the nursery, taking riding lessons with her brothers in the courtyard, learning songs on her lute, watching from the salon gallery as her parents host a pageant.
But she knows that had it not been Alfonso it would have been someone else—a prince, another duke, a nobleman from Germany or France, a second cousin from Spain. Her father would have found her an advantageous match because that is, after all, what she has been brought up for: to be married, to be used as a link in his chains of power, to produce heirs for men like Alfonso.
Her brothers, by contrast, were trained as rulers: they have been taught to fight, to argue, to debate, to negotiate, to outwit, to outmanoeuvre, to wait, to spot an advantage, to scheme and manipulate and consolidate their influence. They have been schooled in rhetoric, in narrative, in persuasion, both written and verbal. Every morning they are drilled in running, jumping, boxing, weightlifting, fencing. They have learnt to handle a sword, a dagger, a bow, a lance, a spear; they are taught how to fight on a battlefield; they have studied military tactics. They have been instructed in hand-to-hand combat, with their fists and their feet, in the event of their needing to defend themselves on a street or in a room or on a staircase. They have been taught the fastest and most efficient ways to end the life of another person—an enemy or an assailant or an undesirable.
Lucrezia is conscious that such knowledge will also occupy space in her husband’s head, that he will have undergone similar training. Like her brothers, like all rulers, Alfonso will know where resides the weakness in a human form, where to press his fingers or apply a tight grip, between which ribs a knife should be inserted, which part of the neck or spine is most frangible, which veins, if pricked, will bleed most copiously.
She looks at the reflection, which seems, in the thick, syrupy glow of the lantern, half her and half Maria, and wonders what her dead sister would have done, how she might have coped in this marriage. She cannot, no matter how hard she tries, imagine her haughty, pithy sister submitting to this life, to this man. But, then, Maria would never have stood like that, watching a thunderstorm: she would have been sitting composedly in a chair, wrapped in shawls and woven blankets, perhaps turning the pages of a religious text or creating a canvaswork hunting scene with coloured silks. She would, in this way, have made a better wife for Alfonso, would not have angered him as Lucrezia did.
Lucrezia suddenly sees that some vital part of her will not bend, will never yield. She cannot help it—it is just the way she is built. And Alfonso, possessed of such a swift and perceptive way of reading people, must have sensed this. Why else would he have become so furious with her, if not to try to break down the walls of that citadel, capture it and declare himself victor?
If she is to survive this marriage, or perhaps even to thrive within it, she must preserve this part of herself and keep it away from him, separate, sacred. She will surround it with a thorn-thicket or a high fence, like a castle in a folktale; she will station bare-toothed, long-clawed beasts at its doors. He will never know it, never see it, never reach it. He shall not penetrate it.
* * *
The next day, when Emilia wakes her, she learns that the apprentices left early, saddling their ponies just after dawn.
Lucrezia and Alfonso, and the household retinue, ride out after midday. The air is washed clean by the storm, with a hint, Lucrezia thinks, of autumn’s chill. She wears a fine wool shawl about her shoulders as they ride, Alfonso on his stallion, she on the cream mare; her mule, Alfonso has said, will be brought later, by a servant. It would be inappropriate for the court or the citizens of Ferrara to see her mounted upon it.
High on the back of her long-maned mare, Lucrezia turns in her saddle as they depart from the villa. She wants to etch its square red roofs and the symmetry of its fountained gardens on to her memory. She grips the reins, overcome with a peculiar certainty that she might never see it again, might never be as happy or as free as she was here. Life at court awaits her, and her role as duchess consort is about to begin.
With Her Head Held High
Fortezza, near Bondeno, 1561
Emilia is laying out a velvet dress and the jewelled cintura but Lucrezia shakes her head. “Not that one.”
“But, madam, there will be people for you to receive—courtiers and the artist and—”
“Doesn’t matter. Give me the woollen one. I’m so cold.”
With a truculent flounce, Emilia turns her back on the velvet dress and starts to fiddle with the woollen one Lucrezia discarded last night. Can it have been only a few hours ago? It feels as though she has been in this place for weeks, perhaps months. She is a different person from yesterday, from the girl who rode from Ferrara, from the duchess who sat down to eat dinner last night. She has changed her shape, shed her skin, been painted over, or remade in a new form.
“We need to hurry,” Lucrezia says, seizing the bodice from Emilia and wrestling it on to her body.
“I still don’t see why you need to go down. You ought to be in bed, you ought to…”
Lucrezia lets Emilia’s words run over her. She bundles her hair into a scuffia and, without pausing to let the maid fasten the cintura around her waist or thread earrings through her lobes, she snatches up her furs and makes for the door.
She will walk into that room with her head held high. She will do it. The fever still clings to her as mist lingers on the surface of a lake: a film of sweat chills her brow, and there is a dull, pervasive ache in her lower spine and in the places where her bones fit into their sockets. Her ankles, as she descends the winding stairs, feel tender and spongy. But she will do this. She grips the rough grain of the stone walls with certainty, with a crystalline, righteous anger.
Sisters of Alfonso II, Seen from a Distance
Castello, Ferrara, 1560
As they depart from the delizia, her husband rides next to her. He has fitted leather gloves over his hands; his cap is set back on his head, so that she can see his face when he turns to address her. The air, after the thunderstorm, is cool and clean, the ground still damp. There is a sense, as they pass through the fields, that it is possible to hear the roots of the fruit trees thirstily drawing up this sudden gift of rainwater. Leonello is behind them somewhere, the guards out in front.
When they reach the city, there are lines and lines of Alfonso’s men waiting outside the walls for them, bearing swords and flags; there are musicians, who herald their arrival by raising instruments into the air and sounding loud notes. The noise is harsh and atonal, and it is all Lucrezia can do not to wince. Then crowds of people surge out of the city gates, spilling into the street around the horses, calling, cheering, waving handkerchiefs and hats. Lucrezia’s horse skitters anxiously sideways, whisking its tail, and Alfonso reaches out to seize the bridle, yanking it back into line. Leonello shouts an order to the soldiers who push back the crowds, clearing the way for them. As they pass through the arches of the gates, the porters bow, pulling off their hats, while covertly casting their eyes up to look at their new duchess. There are yet more people lining the streets, faces turned towards Lucrezia and Alfonso as they make their way along a straight road with trees and high, symmetrical buildings along its edges. The Ferrarese put down their bundles, abandon their stalls or pull their children by the hand, so that they might rush to stare at her, or cheer, or throw into her path flowers and handfuls of grain. Windows of houses open and figures lean out, calling greetings and felicitations, making the sign of the cross in the air. She isn’t sure if she should smile or wave; Alfonso, when she casts a look at him, keeps his eyes ahead. She tries to arrange her face into a pleasant yet dignified expression, neither too prim nor too joyful. How should a duchess look? She cannot help but glance into the faces of these people, who celebrate her appearance here with such glee. She sees: a man with a small child on his shoulder, the child waving its hand vacantly, as if it has been instructed to greet the new Duchess but has no idea why. A young boy holds the collar of a brown dog, which is crazedly barking at the horses and the soldiers; the boy’s face joyous, delighted by the spectacle. An elderly couple, arm in arm, stand by a vendor selling woven baskets, the man leaning towards his wife, speaking into her ear, as if explaining what is before them. As Lucrezia rides by, she sees that the woman’s eyes are occluded, sightless, her face turned up towards the sky, as if appealing to its power, as if its brightness is the only thing she can see. At a street corner, there is a girl with a sack balanced on her head, her feet bare and filthy, and here is a mother with a baby tied to her back, and by a small fountain, a group of children are tossing beads of water into the air, calling to each other. When they see the procession, they run from the well, clapping and shouting, jumping up and down, their thin limbs contorted with excitement. Lucrezia raises her hand and waves to them—she cannot resist—and the children burst into laughter, throwing their arms into the air to wave back, crying La Duchessa, La Duchessa!
Her smile falters when they turn a corner by a cathedral into a large piazza, overshadowed on one side by an imposing structure rearing up from an expanse of green moat, with tall towers at each corner. The castello is waiting for them, its drawbridge lowered in readiness.
It is vast, fortified, the walls thick, the battlements high—it is easily three or four times the size of her father’s palazzo. Its foundations stand in water and the tops of its towers pierce the clouds. Rectangular windows interrupt the red brickwork on the upper floors, and a walkway runs from one tower to the next. Nobody could get in here if uninvited, and nobody could get out without permission. It is less of a castello than an edifice of power, a building that has its defence prepared in advance.
