The Marriage Portrait(110)
“Quick,” says Emilia, who is standing at her elbow, “eat this.” She hands her a morsel of cheese. “It will take away the taste.”
Lucrezia pushes the cheese into her mouth, its dairy blandness smoothing away the bite of the doctor’s herbs. She shudders, once, then hands the cup back to Clelia.
* * *
A secretary is sent up after the midday meal, with a reminder from His Grace that the Duchess must rest.
Lucrezia is put to bed by Emilia and Clelia; they pull the bedclothes tight and tuck them under the feather mattress. She lies there, feeling fury smoulder and build within her. To lie like this in the middle of the day, staring up at the bed canopy. It is insupportable. She cannot do it.
* * *
Clelia brings scissors with handles in the shape of long-billed cranes, and instructions from the Duke that her hair be cut, in accordance with the doctor’s advice.
Lucrezia takes the scissors and weighs them in her hand, slips her fingers into the vacancy created by the crane’s legs and dipped beak.
She will not let anyone perform this task: not Clelia, not Emilia, not Nunciata, who arrives intent on using the scissors, almost as if she relishes the idea of severing those locks from Lucrezia’s head. It is all for the best, Nunciata says, trying to snatch the scissors out of her hand, you will see. Soon you will be with child and you won’t miss all this hair one little bit.
She will do it herself, Lucrezia says, or not at all.
She stands before the glass, her hair loose. She can feel the luxurious length of it, covering her back, brushing against her legs, stretching from scalp to ankle. Her mother once referred to it as “her only asset,” gathering a hank of it in one of her hands, as if unable to believe that such hair had been bestowed on her least promising daughter. It was, Lucrezia knows, the envy of her sisters, who could never get theirs as long. Maria and Isabella would rub preparations of malvavisco and willow sprigs into each other’s locks but their hair wouldn’t grow past their waists before it began to split and dry. Lucrezia, on the other hand, who never did anything other than brush it once in a while, was possessed of a mane that grew lushly, thickly, with waves and meanders like the braided course of a reddish-gold stream. Maria used to grab it in her fist and pull it towards her own head, saying, “I’ll cut it off and use it for myself,” and this threat always made Lucrezia scream—the idea of Maria walking about with her hair clipped on to her head seemed violating and treacherous—and Sofia would have to come and separate them.
Maria never carried out her threat. And now Lucrezia must sever it herself, from her own head, and Maria will never be able to thieve it from her.
She regards her reflection. Her face is pale and bloodless, her eyes huge in their sockets. She looks fearsome, she looks determined. She sees the waterfall flood of her hair, the sunlight invading the kinks and curls, inhabiting its warm spaces. It heats her, the doctor had said, her cape of hair; it creates rebellious feeling, disturbs the natural order of her, causes her humours to become unbalanced.
She lifts the blades in one hand and a fistful of hair in the other. Behind her, in the mirror, she can see Emilia wince and cover her mouth. Nunciata is still twittering about pregnancies and continuing the family line, and how in life everyone must make sacrifices, and she sits forward, keeping Lucrezia keenly in her sights.
Lucrezia’s fingers tremble a little, not from reluctance, perhaps, but a kind of raw thrill. She is doing this; she is about to do it. She does not want to but she sees no other path open to her. If she doesn’t do it, someone else will, and she will not let anyone cut the hair from her head. If it must happen, she will take charge of it herself. It is her hair. It is her head. They can take away her pictures and her paints; they can fill her body with medicines and cold foods and other things besides; they can poke and palpate her stomach and peer down her throat; they can lock her up in her rooms, but she will cut the hair from her own head before she lets anyone else near her with shears.
She stretches open the scissors and slides their blades in beside her ear, readying herself to snap them closed.
No, cries Emilia, not there.
Not so close to the head, Nunciata calls out, there’s no need for it to be as short as that.
Emilia steps forward and indicates with her fingers a place on Lucrezia’s upper arm, glancing at Nunciata in the mirror for her assent. Nunciata shakes her head. Emilia raises her finger to just below Lucrezia’s shoulder, which is, Lucrezia reflects, about the length of Emilia’s own hair when released from her cap.
After a short, considering pause, Nunciata nods.
Lucrezia slides the blades of the scissors to the agreed place on her hair, and, without closing her eyes, she presses them together.
The noise is louder than she might have thought. A clean, metallic shuurassh.
The severed hair shies away from the forked blades. There it is, in her palm: a life’s worth of growth, the nearest and darkest part belonging perhaps to her early womanhood, the very furthest and fairest part her infancy. Extraordinary to think that these strands have been attached to her all that time, from when she was a small child in the nursery, to now, here, in this room, this moment, where her life has ended up.
She lays the strand carefully on the coffer beside her, and returns to the glass.
Snip, snap, snip, go the blades, working with and also against each other, and soon all her hair is gone, cut off so that the ends brush her shoulders, and her reflection shows not Lucrezia but someone other, a marionette or a woodland creature with large eyes and a white, shocked face. An invalid, a penitent.