The Marriage Portrait(14)

Fortezza, near Bondeno, 1561





“And perhaps tomorrow,” her husband is saying, as he tips his bowl to scoop out the final dregs of soup, “we shall go for a ride along the river. The views further west are most pleasing to the eye. I will see to it that your saddle is adjusted—I noticed today that it was listing on one side. And the hoofs of your mare will need attention, I fear, when we return, and…”

The sense of his words disintegrates as Lucrezia stares at him, until what comes from his mouth reaches her as a string of babble and nonsense, the squawks of a beast. Why is he saying these things? How can he sit there, serenely eating his food, talking about groomsmen and horse tack when somewhere in his mind lurks a scheme to end her life?

Once again, Lucrezia seems to hear the rasping voice of his sister Elisabetta saying into her ear: You have no idea what he is capable of.

Despite the fire that growls and pops in the large grate, despite the breath that comes from her, from her husband, from the servants in the shadows, the air in the dining hall is as frigid as iron. It has been an unusually chill winter, which yet shows no sign of ending. Even the candles, standing in ornate brass holders, seem to shiver, casting an uncertain light that doesn’t reach the walls. Her husband’s face comes in and out of visibility. She watches, with fixed fascination, as his expression changes with every flicker of the candle: first thoughtful, then kind, now stern, now animated, now forbidding, now handsome, then amorous and then detached. It is true: she has no idea what he is capable of, and she does not want to find out.

Again, she feels her disbelief as a bubble of mirth, just below her ribcage. If she is not careful, she will burst out laughing at the absurdity of it all, his talk, his pretence, his dissembling, his lying looks.

Her husband, who means to kill her, either by his own hand or by his order to another, takes up the end of his napkin and dabs at his cheek with its pointed corner, as if a spot of soup on one’s face is a matter of importance. Her husband, who intends her death, spends a moment brushing a stray hair from his brow, then finally tucks it behind his ear. Her husband, the murderer, says, over his shoulder to the servants, that the cook should be told to add more salt. As if seasoning is important to them now. Her husband, who will kill her before long, reaches out, as if he means to fold her cold fingers into his palm. It is this that proves too much for her. She startles into life, moves her hand away, picking up her spoon and dipping it into her bowl.

And in an instant, her mirth shrivels and burns, alchemising into the purest, hottest form of fury. How dare he?

She moves her spoon from bowl to mouth, her hand trembling with the effort of not transmitting her thoughts to him. Concealment, here, is all. The broth’s surface is spangled with yellow circles of oil. She fixes her eye on these instead of on him. She has a feeling that if she were to see his face, his neatly parted hair, the whiteness of his teeth, her rage would boil over and she might shout or strike him or run from the room.

She will not allow him to kill her, to extinguish her. But how can she, a small-for-her-age sixteen-year-old bride with no friends or allies present get the better of him, a soldier, a duke, a man of twenty-seven? She recalls the lessons in combat her brothers received, the hours and hours they spent practising with swords and lances and spears, with ropes to strangle, clubs to batter, daggers to slash and stab, how they learnt to parry, thrust and maim, to block a blow with one hand while delivering a counter-blow with the other, to turn and duck, to wrest themselves from the grip of another, to kill and to survive. They were taught all this, as Alfonso would have been, while she, Isabella and Maria were cloistered upstairs, learning how to replicate flowers in threads of coloured silk.

“You need a plan,” she hears—or seems to hear—her old nurse, Sofia, say, from a place near her elbow. “To lose your temper is to lose the battle.”

A plan. A strategy. Sofia was always a woman with a plan. She would have made a wonderful condottiero, Lucrezia had often told her, had she been born a man.

So be it, she says to the invisible Sofia next to her. So be it.

She lets out her held breath, slowly, through her nose. Forces herself to smile at her husband, to lift her spoon, to take a sip of soup.



* * *





She had had a plan, three years previously, on the day she went to her father’s office (and look how that worked out, she would like to say to Sofia, if Sofia herself was actually in the room, and wouldn’t box her ears for such impertinence). She had stepped determinedly over the hallowed threshold, her hands gripped together, her head held high, her plan clear in her mind.

Several of her father’s secretaries and scribes glanced up, aghast to see her there, then bowed their heads studiedly over their papers. Beyond the windows was a featureless parchment-white sky. Fragments and snippets of sound floated up from the piazza, several storeys below: her sharp ears caught a group of people singing a somewhat bawdy ditty, the spiralling cry of a tired child, a high-pitched descending laugh of a young woman.

“Papa,” she said.

Her father was standing at a lectern, reading something, his fingertip moving quickly and precisely across the page.

“Papa?”

He didn’t look up. Vitelli was standing next to him, examining the document over his shoulder, and he held up a hand, blank palm facing her, to indicate that she must not interrupt.