The Marriage Portrait(100)

She doesn’t care, she doesn’t care. Let him see, let him know. She doesn’t care.

She is saying these words to herself as she runs, the hood falling back off her head, as she bangs on the door of Elisabetta’s chamber, as she pushes past the lady-in-waiting who answers, who is saying that she is sorry but Elisabetta is not receiving anyone.

Lucrezia, panting, bursts into Elisabetta’s rooms. Tonight, the berry-pink wall hangings seem to have harvested the darkness around them, taking on a lowering, purplish hue.

The lady-in-waiting is trying to get Lucrezia to leave, her voice twittering entreaties and apologies. She won’t touch her, Lucrezia knows, but she holds her arms wide, as if to shield the room from Lucrezia’s burglarising gaze.

Lucrezia knows how to deal with this situation—she is, despite everything, her mother’s daughter. She raises her chin, she looks down her nose at this woman. I am duchess of this castle, the stance says, and you are in my way: Lucrezia knows this; the woman knows this.

“Stand aside,” Lucrezia says, “please.”

The woman, with a sigh, steps towards the wall, still murmuring apologies.

There is a slight rustle in the room, and the sound of something like a cough or a grunt. What Lucrezia had, in the dim light, assumed was a heap of clothing on the settle makes a sudden movement.

“It’s you,” says a voice, flat and displeased.

Lucrezia flies to the side of the settle and kneels on the floor. In the gloom, she sees a face, puffy and sallow, round as a moon. For a moment, she thinks there has been a mistake, and this is Nunciata lying here, but she recognises the rings on the hand she has seized as Elisabetta’s, the high brow, the black eyes, which are the same as—

“How dare you come here?” Elisabetta says, in her new hoarse voice. “What do you want?”

Lucrezia presses Elisabetta’s hand. “I had to see you. I heard…I am so sorry—so very sorry…I cannot believe it, I cannot—”

“Then you are even more of a fool than I took you for,” Elisabetta snaps, pulling her hand out of Lucrezia’s, and turns away, pressing her face into the cushions.

Lucrezia draws back, stung. She waits for a moment, still kneeling. She is aware of the lady-in-waiting, hovering somewhere behind her, ready to escort her away.

“You are grieving,” Lucrezia says. “I understand, and—”

Elisabetta lets out a short, bitter laugh. “Do you? Do you really? They made me watch. They held me down as they murdered him with their bare hands.”

“I cannot begin to—”

“Tell me, do you love my brother?”

“Of—of course I do,” Lucrezia falters.

“Really?”

“I—”

Elisabetta pushes herself to a sitting position. Lucrezia is shocked, all over again, at the change in her appearance. Her hair is matted and hangs in a clump on one side of her face; it seems much shorter than Lucrezia would have expected, and she realises that the high crown of hair that Elisabetta wears must be a false extension, taken from the head of another woman. The skin around her eyes is red and angry-looking, as if scrubbed with rough cloth.

“You don’t have the faintest idea of what love is,” Elisabetta is saying. “You are just a child.” She reaches out and cups Lucrezia’s cheek, her fingers pincering her earlobe. “A pretty, silly child dressed up in jewels and silks. Like a pet monkey.”

Lucrezia feels like a flag on a windy parapet, pulled one way then another. She has no sense of where this conversation is going, of what might happen within it.

“I am so sorry,” she says, “for what happened, for—”

Elisabetta puts her face close to hers, breathing sour metallic exhalations on her. She is, Lucrezia thinks, like a shattered windowpane, her whole being splintered into crazed fractures.

“You told him, didn’t you?” she whispers, at their new proximity, her eyes boring into her. “Why would you do that? I thought we were friends, you and I.”

“We…we are friends,” Lucrezia stutters, appalled. “I didn’t tell him! I promise you.”

“Is that true? Somebody told him. And I believe that it was you.”

“It wasn’t me. I would never have done that. Never.”

“Do you swear?”

“I swear it, Elisabetta. He…” Lucrezia tries to think of how to put it “…he has a way of seeing the truth, the crux of a situation. I don’t know how he does it but he can gaze on someone and see whatever it is they most want to keep hidden. He can peel away the layers people use to clothe their secrets, he—”

Elisabetta makes an involuntary noise of revulsion and jerks back, away from her. “You are right. This is exactly how he is.” She puts her hands to her face, closing her fingers over it, and stays like that for a moment or two. When she removes them, her beautiful face is still ravaged and ruined, but it is no longer bitter.

“I believe you,” she mutters, and takes Lucrezia’s hand, with an abstracted air. A tear collects in her eye and slides quickly down her cheek, followed by another, and another. She makes no move to wipe them away but lets them drip off her face into dark circles on her shift.

Lucrezia kneels before her, gripping her hand. And then Elisabetta says something unexpected. “Poor Lucrezia,” she murmurs, still looking away from her.