The Marriage Portrait(107)

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Lucrezia dreams she is in one of the paintings that hang on her father’s walls, walking shoeless over dark, leaf-strewn soil, which is studded with spring blooms—white, red, delicate yellow. She worries, in the dream, that her feet will crush the flowers, so she steps carefully, choosing her path, dreading the sensation of a stem snapping beneath her or the cold crush of petals against her sole. Through the thick foliage, she can hear the voices of women singing; she catches glimpses of their thin, pale robes as they circle each other in a loose, improvised dance. But they themselves remain elusive, always ahead or to the side of her. Somewhere in the branches is a presence malign and predatory: she either knows this or recalls this, she cannot say which. But an icy breeze threads from him, through the tree trunks, to lick insistently at the bare skin of her arms. The awareness that she must keep watch, must avoid this being at all costs, swirls about her mind like smoke. He is a demi-god, perhaps, or the personification of an element or some tree-spirit intent on revenge or capture. He seeks the women in the pale robes, or perhaps it is her he has come for. It is impossible to know. Can the women save her? Lucrezia cannot tell. She clears the ivy and branches from her path with her cold, cold hands, and keeps walking, hoping for the best. It is important to step around the flowers, not to touch the low-hanging fruit above her head: this is all she knows.



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Around her, the castello is quiet, Lucrezia in her bed, curled into herself, Emilia on her pallet, mouth open, emitting soft snores. On the floor below, Nunciata sleeps, turned on to her side, her spaniel cradled in her arms. Far, far below them, in the moated gatehouse, a guard is woken by a single rap to the vast wooden door, then another. Barely conscious, he shakes his companion awake and they raise themselves, yawning, stumbling from their rush mats.

The chains of the drawbridge do not rattle as the guards lower it: the mechanism is oiled several times a week. It is part of their duties. Important, the consigliere has always told them, for the drawbridge to be opened and closed without waking anyone, for the Duke, if it pleases him, to be able to come and go without alerting others.

The guards, still half asleep, remove their caps and bow low as two horses enter the castello.



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Lucrezia is dreaming again. This time, she is standing in a round structure, a mill perhaps. There is a sound of grinding, of stone rasping on stone. To her left, she sees Sofia bending over, turning and turning a wheel with her hands. It is a strenuous task and Sofia’s face is slicked with sweat; her hands grip the wheel and she pants with the effort. Lucrezia walks towards her, wanting to assist, but Sofia shakes her head. Without looking at her, she says, “You know what you have to do.”

The grinding around them intensifies and Lucrezia, in the dream, wants to put her hands over her ears. “I don’t know,” she shouts, over the noise. “What do I have to do?”

Sofia turns to give her a stern look. “You know,” she says.



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Lucrezia jerks awake, yanked into consciousness, her mouth forming the words: Tell me, tell me.

The room is empty. A clean, white light is softening the outlines of the furniture, leaching the colour from the fabrics. A charred scent like resin hangs in the air and the walls look oddly bare.

She turns her head and there is Alfonso, sitting on the edge of the bed, close to her, his hand resting on her hip. He is back, apparently, from Modena, but why, when she has been told he would be away for another fortnight? What is he doing here? She has not seen him since she handed over her dress for the portrait, and he ordered her to stay in her chamber. How long ago was that? A week, or perhaps more?

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he murmurs. “Did you sleep well?”

She watches, dumbfounded, as he leans towards her, closer and closer. What does he mean to do to her? His face and torso are getting nearer and she shrinks back into the pillows but there is no escape, no possible way she can put distance between them.

He places a brief, dry kiss on her temple, then leans back, apparently unaware of her reluctance.

“You were dreaming,” he is saying, “and muttering something—I couldn’t tell what. It sounded very serious.”

He talks on, about the way his dog twitches in sleep, apparently convinced that it is hunting rabbits, the way Nunciata was prone to nightmares as a child, and how this drove their nurses to distraction, because she would wake them all up every night with her shouting. How strange it was, how Nunciata struggled and screamed.

Lucrezia is stunned, by his presence in her room, after a long absence, by this flow of chatter. Has he forgotten what happened with Contrari, what passed between them? Has he no memory of ordering her to remain in her rooms? His appearance is no less startling for he is, once again, the Duke she first met, on the arm of her sister, on the battlements that day. The man who pulled the face of the mouse. He is the man who married her at the altar of Santa Maria Novella, not quite a year ago. He has many incarnations and she is not sure she has yet met them all. There is this man—amusing and amused, his head on one side, able to chat, to take her hand, to conduct himself with kindness and concern, to roll up the sleeves of his giubbone, revealing the brown skin of his wrists.

She thinks of all the things she wishes to say to him: that she would leave and go back to Florence, that what he did to Elisabetta, to Contrari, was barbaric and inhuman, she can never love him, ever again, that she hates what he does to her at night, that she is filled with horror at the thought of giving him a child, that she wants to be far, far away from him. These utterances stream through her head, like the cold wind through the forest of her dream. But she cannot catch hold of them, cannot voice them, not now, when he sits here so amiably, so affectionately, holding her hand, and asking her how she is feeling, saying he is so sorry she has been unwell, that he has summoned the physician to see her because he, Alfonso, does not want her to ail in any way at all.