The Marriage Portrait(113)

Nunciata, who seems delighted with her role as Alfonso’s sole remaining sister, only too happy to bustle into Lucrezia’s rooms several times a day in order to report back to him how his wife is passing her time, comes up behind Lucrezia to see what she is drawing.

When she sees the airborne babies, she frowns.



* * *





Lucrezia arranges a row of wineglasses on her windowsill, fills them with varying levels of water, and creates an entire musical scale by tapping their edges with a fingernail. She does this for hours, over and over, until she can pick out several tunes.

Clelia watches silently from the other side of the room, winding yarn off the back of a chair.

Lucrezia takes a handful of polished mineral pebbles, which had been left, forgotten, inside her credenza, and, finding their colours dulled, drops them into a dish of water.

The next day, the level of the water has sunk.

Have the pebbles been drinking it?

She kneels down, fascinated. She lifts one of the pebbles and shakes it, listening out for a tell-tale slosh.

Emilia tells her it is impossible, that pebbles don’t drink. It is the warmth of the air that draws off the water. Clelia says it is a fanciful notion. Nunciata sniffs and says she has never heard such nonsense in her entire life.

But Lucrezia is sure of it. The pebbles are drinking. She pours more water into the dish, and covers it with a cloth.

Sure enough, the next day, half the water has vanished.



* * *





She tells this to Alfonso, as he is dressing. She offers to show him the pebbles. He turns his neck and looks at her for a long time, standing between bed and window, stalled in the act of fastening the ties of his shirt. His face is inscrutable, fixed, his hair hanging down over one eye, his fingers remaining in position, still grasping his shirt edges. He seems almost sad, and she wishes to say to him, what is the matter? Why do you look like that?

Then he seems to shake off whatever it was that had passed through his mind. He fastens his shirt with haste, pushes back his hair and sits in a chair opposite the bed, arms folded, one leg crossed over the other.

“It seems to me,” Alfonso says, clearing his throat, “that you are not perhaps thriving under the regimen of this doctor. Would you agree?”

Lucrezia sits up straight; she has to clench her hands under the bedclothes to contain her eagerness, not let it show. Go carefully, she tells herself, appear calm.

“I hate it,” she hears herself say, despite all her intentions. “I cannot bear being shut up like this. It is intolerable. You have to let me out, you have to give me back my liberty.” She presses her fingernails into her palms—Do not appear heated, keep a cool demeanour. “What I mean is, I am not certain that the medicines are helping me. I feel that—”

“I have been in consultation with another doctor, from…” Alfonso makes a minute hesitation, as if trying to remember, and any such pause in the flow of his speech is unusual—later she will recall this “…Milan,” he opts for. “His advice is quite contrary. He recommends a change of air, plain food, and exercise. It is for this reason that I think we should go to the countryside, you and I, for a short period. So that you may regain your health. And we can rest…together. Away from the court. And all its pressures.”

Lucrezia stares at Alfonso. “The countryside?” she repeats. “You mean…” She cannot finish the sentence because her throat closes over with a surge of unaccustomed happiness. Her mind is filled with images of the delizia, the bright pathways of the garden, her rooms with angels on the ceiling, the kind villa servants bringing platefuls of pastries, riding her mule with the red bridle, the corridor where she dropped honey water into the inert mouth of a young man on the brink of death.

“Oh,” she says, unable to prevent the tears pricking at her eyelids, “I would love that. Yes, the countryside. Please. Let’s go there.”

We were happy there, she wants to say to him. Contrari had not happened, Elisabetta had not left, there were no doctors or medicines or prescriptions of rest, there was no Clelia sent to spy on her, no Nunciata to order her around, and Alfonso was an altogether different person—he had liked her then and she had yet to disappoint him. Perhaps it will be possible to return to a time when she and he were in harmony. Perhaps he means to recapture all that. Perhaps there her body will do what he wants, what everyone expects. Perhaps she can still make a success of this marriage.

“Very well.” He stands, pulling on his boots. “We shall leave tomorrow.”



* * *





If Lucrezia is surprised by his haste, she does not dwell on it. Emilia and Clelia pack boxes and bags with gowns, shifts and shawls. Lucrezia orders her paints and brushes to be returned to her; she packs these herself. For a moment, she looks about her, sure that she needs to wrap in cloth the golden fantail of a tiny glass fish, and perhaps an aquamarine fox, but she remembers this cannot be: the animaletti were lost to her, broken, a long time ago.

She is going to the delizia, she tells herself, over and over again, the delizia. There, she is able to wander at will, and perhaps she and Alfonso will gain some sense of unity. At any rate, she is getting out of these rooms; she will look upon something other than the glowering walls of the castello.

In the courtyard, she is surprised to see that there is no carriage ready for them, just a pair of guards, some donkeys with luggage strapped to their backs, and two horses—one for her, one for Alfonso.