The Marriage Portrait(20)

Glimpses of Lucrezia’s four elder brothers and sisters were brief: the sound of their footsteps as they moved along corridors, a flash of fabric as they descended a staircase, Isabella’s laugh at a gathering in the salon, Francesco’s dry cough coming through the walls of the state room, where he was attending their father. They never came up to the nursery. Lucrezia, sidling along passageways, caught snippets of information: that Maria’s wedding would be lavish, with the church of Santa Maria Novella bedecked in myrtle branches; later in the evening, a hundred Florentine ladies would dance the length of the great hall, and there would be masques, and acrobats from the Orient. Nothing, however, Lucrezia heard, as she loitered behind the panels of her mother’s chambers, would surpass in opulence the dress Maria would wear. It would be spun from pure gold, overlaid with silk from her mother’s insectarium. Eleonora would herself oversee the whole process. Maria would glow as she walked up the aisle of the church, the gold chosen to enhance her creamy complexion and the blue to bring out the chestnut glints in her hair: a gown such as this would never have been seen before.

The day that everything changed was damp and thunderous. It had rained all night and all morning, the palazzo roof giving off a staccato thrum. The piazza, when Lucrezia gazed down at it from the nursery windows, was slick with water, flagstones gleaming and reptilian, fallen leaves choking the gutters. The Arno, she knew, would be swollen and silt-saturated. The usually healthy and robust Maria had caught a contagion of the lungs, Sofia had told them a few days before, and had been put to bed. The air is bad today, she said, waving a hand before her, as if her palm and fingers had the power to clear terrible miasmas from the room.

Lucrezia was in the schoolroom, copying a map of Mesopotamia, filling the wide oceanic spaces with cresting waves. She was sketching a sea monster, giving it sinuous coils that rose out of the water, and she was imagining how much more of it there might be below the surface when she heard the noise. A long keening howl that made her lift her head. At first, she thought it was one of the dogs, perhaps injured or beaten, but it tapered off with a human cry, a repeated word: No-no-no-no.

Lucrezia half rose, the stylus slipping from her fingers. Her mother? Isabella? It came from the floor below, she could tell, rising through the walls and ceilings.

There it was again. No-no-no. Then a screaming sob.

Lucrezia ran across the room, through the door, and leant into the stairwell. “Mamma?” she called.

There was silence from below. Then a door slammed. The sound of feet coming quickly along a corridor, the sweep of a robe or a gown hem.

“Isabella?” Lucrezia tried. “Is that you?”

There was a low murmur, then a door opened, and the noise of sobbing drifted up towards her, like smoke, over which could be heard the rumble of prayer: the palazzo priest, Lucrezia realised, intoning in Latin.

“Mamma?” Lucrezia tried to call again but all that came out was a croak. She was seized with the feeling that something dreadful had happened: this certainty clamped its jaws around her. From somewhere below came the thunder of several people descending the stairs at speed. Someone was crying, where is His Excellency? Have you seen him? Fetch him here now.

Sofia found Lucrezia, a little later, clinging to the stair-rail. She had to prise her fingers off the carved stone and pull her back to the nursery. Lucrezia’s younger siblings had been made to kneel before the wooden statue of the Madonna and, as was her custom, Sofia had opened all the windows, to let Maria’s soul fly to Heaven.

The rug pressed its fibres into Lucrezia’s knees. She placed her palms together; she said the words of the prayer; she avoided the painted eye of the wooden Madonna but instead looked at the windows, flung wide, and the city beyond. The sky was an uneasy grey, swollen with more rain. It made Lucrezia shudder—she did not want Maria to fly from this place, alone, from these windows, up towards that forbidding sky. This was where she belonged. Lucrezia wanted to turn her head and find Maria there, walking into the room, her chin firm, her arms folded, talking about the fabric of her wedding dress, the arrangements for the dancing. How was it possible for someone to be there one day and gone the next?

Lucrezia felt Sofia tug on her sleeve, which meant, she knew, that she was expected to face the Madonna, whose expression was mournful and universally forgiving, her feet ringed by quivering candle flames. But Lucrezia was unable to remove her gaze from the windows and their framed oblongs of sky, their twisting skeins of birds.

She could see nothing that might have been Maria’s departing soul. No breeze, no motion, no flicker of light. Only the rain, which continued to fall, thousands and thousands of silver needles, dropping from above, flecking the nursery sills and the floor and the greenish panes and the streets and the houses all across the city.



* * *





A month or so after Maria’s burial, an ear pressed to the splintery wood of a passageway that ran behind the Grand Duke’s private rooms might have heard the following sounds: the muffled tap of boots, pacing meditatively from one side of the chamber to the other, the scratch of a quill on paper, a smothered throat-clearing, the breathing of someone just on the other side of the panelling. And then the voice of Vitelli, adviser to the Grand Duke Cosimo: “It is highly regrettable,” he said, and then after a moment continued: “But nothing, of course, compared with the tragic loss of Lady Maria.”

There was a pause and a noise of assent: Cosimo.