The Marriage Portrait(101)

“Me?” Lucrezia replies. “It’s you who—”

“No, no.” Elisabetta sighs, straightening a fold in her shift. “I am leaving. As soon as day breaks. I will go to Rome, to Luigi, my other brother. I may never come back here. Alfonso is not my husband. I can leave. You cannot.”

Lucrezia has again that sense of an erratic, unpredictable wind, pulling her in opposing directions. “I am quite content with—”

“Listen to me, little Lucrè,” Elisabetta croons, crooking a finger towards her, drawing her so close that their foreheads touch. “You have no idea what he is capable of,” she breathes, pressing her forehead so hard into Lucrezia’s that it hurts, “and that to rule as he does, so well, so decisively, you need to be entirely heartless. He has brought this court under his control in so short a space of time, but at what cost? The things I have seen him do!” She curls her hand into a fist and bangs it against her chest, making Lucrezia wince. “He has nothing here. Nothing at all. And you know what else?”

“What?”

Elisabetta’s face cracks into a pained, ugly smile. “He has never,” she hisses, “got a woman with child. Not a single one, not—”

“Perhaps you—”

“—not any of his women here, or any woman anywhere. Never! Not once! Do you understand me? It is rumoured that he will never produce an heir, that the duchy cannot remain in our lineage, which of course makes him angry beyond reason, because he always knows what is being said about him, I don’t know how, but what I do know is that one person will be blamed for this, and you know who it is?”

Lucrezia feels overcome, by the pressure of Elisabetta’s forehead on hers, by the unwashed and unkempt scent of her.

“You,” Elisabetta breathes, maliciously, almost delightedly. “You will be blamed. So be careful, Lucrezia. Be very, very careful.”

Then she pushes Lucrezia away from her and signals to the woman standing in the corner. “I am tired,” she says. “Show her out.”



* * *





Lucrezia goes into her chamber; she locks the door; she lights a candle and brings it into bed with her, drawing the curtains; she does not answer when Emilia or Clelia knocks. She does not open it when they bring her breakfast, when she hears the rattle of what must be Elisabetta’s carriage leaving, when they cajole her through the keyhole, or even when Nunciata raps with her knuckles, demanding that Lucrezia let them in.

Only when Emilia whispers through the keyhole that His Grace, the Duke, and his consigliere Baldassare have left for Modena, and will be gone for several weeks, does Lucrezia pull back the bolts.

She asks Emilia to bring her furs: she has a notion that what she needs most is to be outside, in the air. She cannot bear to be in this chamber, enclosed by walls, and Alfonso is not here to tell her to remain in her rooms. She must have sky above her head; she must have wind tugging at her hair. She knows she will not be permitted to leave the castello—the guards at the gates will never let her through, not without Alfonso’s express permission—and so she seeks out every outdoor space available to her. She takes to the orangery, walking from one of its walls to the other, weaving in and out of the trees, bare and leafless and blossomless now. She climbs the stone stairs to each tower, in turn, and strides round and round each battlement. She paces from terrace to terrace, looking out over the city, its roofs and gutters, and beyond, to the flat valley on one side and the peaks of the Apennines on the other.

She is assailed, from nowhere and for the first time, by a longing for home. She is swamped by it, drowned by it, as if a wave has crashed over her head. There is, suddenly, nothing she wants more than to be in the corridors of the palazzo in Florence, to be passing through its rooms and terraces. She misses, with a pain sharp and distracting as toothache, the view from the top of the walkway, down into the piazza, the tops of the statues, the hidden scent of the Arno. She cannot fathom that the onset of a winter in Florence is happening in her absence. Can the trees be shedding their leaves? Can the citizens be putting on their woollen caps? Can the Swiss Guards be donning their warm cloaks? In her mind, as she moves compulsively from one castello terrace to the next, she marks the passage of her family’s days, thinking, Now they will be clearing the nursery table for their midday meal. Now my father will be taking his exercise. Now my mother will walk out with her ladies. Now she will be calling for Isabella to come and join her in the salon. Now Sofia will be easing off her shoes and putting her feet up on a stool by the fire.

How can all this be taking place without her? It makes no sense, as she paces round and round the orange trees, that they are there and she is here. She is one of them; she has the same-shaped eyes as her father and brothers, the same brow and nose as her mother and her sister; they all grew up at the same table; her portrait hangs among theirs. She is one of them. She is not one of these people, who maim and fight, banish and imprison each other, who kill and scheme, depart and plot.

Towards the end of the first day of Alfonso’s absence, Emilia and Clelia become wearied by Lucrezia’s constant movement. Clelia, who doesn’t like heights, will not come out on to the battlements; she remains inside the tower, whimpering, imploring Lucrezia to come down, come inside, to take some food and rest, His Grace wouldn’t like her to be out in the cold for so long, he will not be pleased if he hears about it on his return. Emilia, although not keen on the narrow stone battlements, will not leave Lucrezia’s side. She shivers in her thin shawl; Lucrezia tries to get her to wear one of her furs but Emilia will not. It wouldn’t be right, madam, she says. She clings to the wall, edging along as best she can in Lucrezia’s wake, eyes averted from the drop, patting Lucrezia’s clenched fists, pushing her wind-tangled hair from her eyes, trying to persuade her to go back to her rooms, where she might eat some broth and drink a little wine.