The Marriage Portrait(112)
* * *
She must walk down a flight of stairs, along one loggia, then another, and across the orangery to reach the chapel. She passes the entrance to the Sala dell’Aurora and also the smaller hall. She does this very slowly, as instructed by her physician. She must not rush, must preserve her strength. Often, she catches glimpses of courtiers, the servants who are employed to run between kitchen and hall, between salon and gatehouse. She can very easily see between fifteen and twenty other faces.
When she gets back to her room, she sketches these faces, quickly, with the ink and paper intended for letters, then burns the evidence.
* * *
The physician comes regularly to check on her. At first, Lucrezia hates these visits, the way his fingers probe her body, grip her pulse point, place heated glass cups on her back, draw information from her skin and neck and tongue.
After a week or two, however, it begins to be a welcome change, a distraction from the monotony. Lucrezia asks him about his family, the names and ages of his children, has his whelping dog given birth to her puppies yet, and how does his wife? Are her leg pains improved? Does his eldest son still show signs of melancholy? Is his daughter still refusing to practise her music?
* * *
Her monthly bleeding arrives, on the expected day. Alfonso does not visit for over a week.
* * *
If the tedium becomes too much, Emilia will play a game with her. The cards are ones Lucrezia brought from Florence; they are painted with images of towers, bridges and trees. Their edges are softened from the many times they were used in the palazzo nursery: Lucrezia brushes these against her cheek, then sniffs them, just in case a hint of Sofia, Isabella or her brothers remains on the surface.
After the game ends—and Emilia does well, picking up rules and strategies with alacrity—Lucrezia will sit at the window and lay bets on which way the people in the streets below will turn: left or right? Emilia will bring her paper and ink, and turn away, pretending not to see if Lucrezia starts to sketch instead of writing a letter.
And if Lucrezia cries in the night, Emilia will come and hold her, tight, just as Sofia used to. She will smooth the hair on Lucrezia’s brow, she will dab her face with a handkerchief, and say, There now. She will relate stories her mother told her—tales of fairies who grant wishes and goblins who possess a magic iron sword. She will tell her that, in the palazzo in Florence, the servants were in awe of Lucrezia, that some feared her.
This makes Lucrezia stop weeping. Why? she will want to know.
Because, says Emilia, there was a rumour about you. Someone swore that, when you were a little girl, he once saw you touch a tiger. And the tiger didn’t harm you, it let you stroke it. It was always said that you had charmed the beast, like an enchantress. Impossible, of course, but—
Not impossible, says Lucrezia, not at all.
Then she closes her eyes and falls asleep. In and out of her dreams shifts the barred orange flank of a distantly remembered beast, with large paws and a simmering amber gaze.
* * *
She cannot settle on how she feels about becoming pregnant. She wants this confinement to her rooms and swallowing of herbs and visits from the doctor to end and, it seems, conceiving is the only way to achieve that.
But if she thinks about her body swelling with the growth of a baby, about the concept of birthing that child, about overseeing its education, health and life, then being expected to produce another, she feels overwhelmed and unready. A male child would be greeted with rapture and relief, she knows, but then it would be moulded for one single destiny: a duke. And a female child would be required to do as she has done, to be uprooted from her family and her place of birth and bedded down in another, where she must learn to thrive and reproduce and speak little and do less and stay in her rooms and cut off her hair and avoid excitement and eschew stimulation and submit to whatever nightly caresses come her way.
What would she feel if she were pregnant? How would she greet the news? She would be permitted to leave her chamber, to take part again in life at court. But her body would bud a person, an entirely separate being, on whose head would be heaped all manner of expectations. Alfonso’s son, Alfonso’s heir, a future Duke of Ferrara.
* * *
Her monthly bleeding arrives again, several days early, with an air of insolent disregard.
* * *
At this calamity, the doctor is summoned. He requests to examine the cloths. Lucrezia waits on the edge of her chair, head averted, hands tucked beneath her, while the doctor informs a displeased Nunciata, who sits on the settle, and Alfonso, who stands by the window, his back turned, that her menstrual blood is “thin” and, yes, “too hot.”
* * *
She is given a new herbal preparation, this one with an acidic aftertaste and a yeasty smell.
The doctor instructs that she be allowed to sketch babies, no more than once or twice a day. Strong, healthy babies, he says, and male.
* * *
She covers page after page with children. Their supple, unguarded faces, their pearly limbs. Children seen from the windows of the castello, or those from her dream, walking along a canal or over a small arching bridge. Babies on the backs of their parents, babies in cradles, babies on horseback, babies taking flight on outstretched feathery wings, to mingle in the blue and skim over treetops.