The Marriage Portrait(17)
She spent several weeks alone in the lower chamber, seeing only the palazzo physician and the servant who was charged with giving her soup and changing her linens. She began to rally only when her mother came to visit her. Lucrezia swam up from a fitful sleep to find Eleonora at her bedside, the lower part of her face behind a scarf, to prevent inhalation of the sickness. She gazed up, stunned, at her mother, who was unwrapping tiny parcels tied with paper and string, inside which were numerous glass animaletti, in different colours. Eleonora was placing them around the bedsheets—a blue fox, a yellow bear, a fish with a golden fantail—saying that she herself had ordered them especially for Lucrezia, from a city famous for glass. And also that the art tutor had seen a drawing Lucrezia had made, and he had shown it to his master, the court artist, Signor Vasari. He, in turn, had brought it to Eleonora’s attention. It was Signor Vasari’s opinion, she said, that Lucrezia should be allowed to join in the drawing lessons. Eleonora’s eyes, above the mask, seemed to gleam with a desperate hope. Would you like that, Lucrè? she asked, dancing the little glass bear up and down in front of Lucrezia’s face. Lucrezia could not think what drawing her mother was talking about, could not understand what was being said to her. But she said, Yes, Mamma, thank you, because she knew that this was the reply to make her mother happy. Then, Eleonora said, with a catch in her voice, You must get well, yes? So you can begin your art tuition?
When Lucrezia returned to the nursery and schoolroom, she was thinner and quieter than ever before. She spent hours arranging and rearranging her animaletti on the nursery windowsills. She was allowed to take part in the drawing lessons; after several weeks, the art tutor began to stay behind after his lesson to tutor her, and only her. He didn’t so much teach as sit next to her while they drew together, and occasionally he said, Like this, do you see that, is that what a horse or a butterfly looks like to you, think again, look again, really look, and now does it perhaps seem like this or this?
She never saw the Sala dei Leoni again.
She could tell Alfonso all this, thereby giving him keys to certain gates and alleyways inside her. So she will not. She will not permit him access. She will not say that without the art tuition, which continued until her marriage, she doesn’t think she would have recovered or survived, but would instead have sunk beneath some hidden surface. She will keep these words safely inside her, where no one may look at or pore over them.
So when Alfonso asks what happened to the tigress, she gives him a bland smile and says: “I’m afraid I’ve no idea. My father may have sold her. My mother hates the menagerie—she complains about the smell and the noise, and my father is always eager to make her happy.”
He looks at her for a moment longer, then reaches out and takes her hand, lacing his fingers between hers.
“You are cold, my darling,” he says. “Have some more of the venison. It will warm you.”
Seven Galleys Laden with Gold
Palazzo, Florence, 1550s
When she was young, Lucrezia had a curious habit of asking her parents, whenever she could, to tell her the story of their initial meeting. She would beg Eleonora, then Cosimo, then Eleonora again, until they became exasperated by the demand. In truth, Eleonora and Cosimo liked to relate it, and they were pleased that their troublesome fifth child appeared attached to the narrative: it was romantic, it showed the feminine sensibility so often lacking in her. But Lucrezia’s reasons had nothing to do with sentiment or romanticism. Her desire to hear about them first catching a glimpse of the other was a groping towards an understanding of the mysterious and glamorous people from whom she had sprung, and with whom she felt so little in common. She would listen to one version from Cosimo, then compare it to another she was told a few days later by Eleonora, then demand a further version from Cosimo, so she could see how they all measured up. It was a way for her to puzzle out what marriage meant, what this contract between a man and a woman entailed.
In bed, at night, lying awake, or kneeling on the floor during Mass, she would consider the pieces and fragments of the story she had heard, like a gambler sifting through game counters, weighing them up, trying to put them into order. As her little brothers snored or sighed in their sleep, or her family murmured responses in Latin to the priest, she would be picturing her father, a visitor to Naples, aged fifteen and a mere page, at the house of the Holy Roman Emperor’s Spanish viceroy, glancing through a thin curtain and seeing the youngest daughter: Eleonora, just thirteen years old. Lucrezia, in her mind, gave the room columns, and heavy drapes on either side of a carved fireplace. The young Eleonora’s hair was perhaps in a shining plait down her back and Lucrezia imagined her chin would have been raised a notch or two higher than was strictly seemly, eyes wandering not dreamily but restlessly about the ceiling. Lucrezia knew each of the story’s elements so well they were like familiar, over-handled gems, their corners softened, their gleam dimmed.
She knew how curious and alluring Eleonora would have appeared to her father: the foreign style of her dress, the decorated braiding of her hair. How her father returned to Florence and for two years held the image of this young Spanish girl in his heart, and when chosen to be the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and head of the dynasty, he asked for this girl to be his wife. No, he would not take the politically advantageous hand of a Dutch princess or the daughter of neighbouring rulers: he wanted the girl he had seen in Naples. The Spanish viceroy considered his plea, then offered his elder daughter but, no, Cosimo would not have her: he would marry for love and the only woman he wanted was Eleonora. Eventually the viceroy agreed and they were married by proxy; Eleonora began to learn Tuscan so that she could write to her husband rather than using a translator to transcribe their letters.