The Marriage Portrait(118)
Ducking down, Lucrezia steps through the door and stands on the stone ledge of the threshold. She is at the outer skin of the fortezza, several feet above ground, at the furthest point of one of its star arms. It is the side wall of the building, facing away from the river and the drawbridge and the main entrance. A secret hatch for servants, for tradespeople, for the apprentices of a court artist.
She grips the edges of the door frame, the loaf of bread making her apron sway. The night is cool and frosty, with a gusting wind that stampedes through the trees, tipping them towards each other, then apart. Above her, blue-fringed clouds are pushed along, like boats on a black sea, revealing and concealing needlepoints of starlight, unreadable maps in the sky.
At her back is death, her death. She is certain of this, as she is certain of the colour of her eyes and that her hair grows in a peak slightly off-centre to her face. To her fore is the unknowable. Death again, she is sure, but a different one. If she goes, if she leaps off this ledge, to the ground and runs towards the trees, Alfonso will come after her. He will dispatch soldiers and guardsmen and she will be hunted down, like an animal.
Her choice, as she sees it, standing there clinging to the outer wall of the fortezza, is death by poisoning, by stealth, death in her chamber, perhaps with a fever, with spasms of pain, unbearable and unsupportable, vomiting into a basin. Or a death out here, somewhere in the woods or out on the road, in the open countryside, with Alfonso bearing down on her on horseback, perhaps wielding his sword. She will turn and face him, she will look him in the eye, daring him to do it, defying his mastery of her. This is what she will do, if it comes to it. She will.
* * *
What Lucrezia does not know, as she stands on the ledge, is that Alfonso will never come after her. He is, at that very moment, with Baldassare, climbing the spiral staircase to her chamber, extinguishing their lantern when they reach the top. He is pushing open the door and crossing the room, which is so dark he has to pause for a moment until his eyes adjust. Baldassare, next to him, indicates the form in the bed, barely visible in the gloom. There is her hair, fanned out, her hand uncurled in sleep, the covers pulled up high. Alfonso kneels. He kisses the ends of the hair, he crosses himself, he pulls back the blankets, he takes a pillow and together, he and Baldassare suffocate the young Duchess.
It will not be an easy passing. She will scream and struggle. She will fight. She will flail at them with fist and nails and feet. She will claw at the pillow; she will thrash and buckle beneath their hands. She will, at one point, get her mouth out from under the pillow and they will, through the thick darkness, hear her yell, hoarsely; she will nearly struggle away from them. Baldassare will curse and swear; he will throw his body across hers, to subdue her, to get her to lie still. Who would have thought the little Duchess had such strength and fight in her?
She is, however, no match for the two of them. They are men in the prime of their life, their bodies trained and lethal. They are used to working together; they trust and know each other so well that they can each anticipate the other’s next move. The Duchess cannot win but still she fights. Alfonso has always said that she had within her an untameable element to her spirit. It takes them longer than they had anticipated, but of course they triumph in the end.
When she is finally still, after Baldassare has crushed her face and torso beneath his weight for many minutes, until he is certain the breath has left her, they stand up, they brush themselves off, they straighten their clothes in the dark. Baldassare mops his face with a handkerchief by the fireplace; Alfonso smooths back his disarrayed hair, adjusts his sleeves. Then they leave, closing the door behind them. It is only outside the chamber that Baldassare relights the lantern. They do not look at each other as they descend the stairs. Neither of them speaks.
A kitchen servant discovers the Duchess, dead in her bed, the next morning, and raises the alarm. Great consternation fills the fortezza. None of the country servants, bar the two who served at dinner, have ever seen the Duchess, but still, they weep and lament over her young body, which is so battered and abused by the seizure that killed her, her face quite ravaged. They put the bed to rights, they tidy her hair and shift, before sending word to the Duke.
The Duke shuts himself up inside his room, immobilised by grief, the poor man, the servants whisper to each other; the only person allowed in or out is his consigliere and cousin, Baldassare. Letters are sent, to Ferrara, to the Pope, and to Florence. The Duke Alfonso himself writes, broken-hearted, to her parents, with the terrible news of their daughter’s death. A short illness, an ague, a seizure, a fever of the brain, the damp air. He is devastated and commends her soul to Heaven.
A coffin is brought by carriage to the fortezza. Nobody wishes to lay out the body, for it has been so brutalised by illness—unrecognisable, the servants say to each other. No one would ever know it was the same woman as in the portrait still propped up in the dining hall. Someone suggests that the task should be given to one of the Duchess’s ladies-in-waiting but unfortunately, Baldassare tells them, they remained behind in Ferrara. In the end, three women come from the village and lay out the Duchess in the dining hall, under the gaze of the portrait, which, the women say to each other, is too tragic to look upon.
The Duchess’s body is then conveyed to Ferrara, accompanied by the Duke and his men, who ride behind it, heads lowered.
Meanwhile, an emissary is dispatched from Florence, accompanied by the court physician. They have been sent by the Grand Duke, and commanded to make haste. Cosimo tells the physician to find out exactly why and how his daughter died, so suddenly, so unexpectedly: Cosimo wants information, he wants to know who is to blame for the death of a healthy young woman. The physician carries a letter, addressed to Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara, stamped with the crest of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, requesting that they be permitted to examine the corpse. They ride the route Lucrezia herself took, not quite a year ago, over the Apennine mountains, and along the valley floor.