The Marriage Portrait(22)

She rested her elbows on the nursery table, in the rooms she had lived in all her life, but her very body felt unfamiliar to her, as if it wasn’t hers, as if these arms and legs and head belonged to another, as if she could no longer tell it how to sit in a chair, to raise a spoon to the lips, to breathe in and out. Dread began to cover her, like moss on a stone. There was a sense that something or someone had crept up unseen and now stood at her back. She sat there in front of her empty plate, with a growing horror of what was behind her. It was dark, this thing, and gelatinous, with an uncertain, shifting outline; it had no eyes but a wet, open mouth that emitted a damp, gaseous breath. It was, she knew, without looking around, her death. If this marriage went ahead, she would die, she suddenly saw, perhaps now, perhaps later, but soon. She would never get away from this spectre, this ghost of her own demise.

Lucrezia pressed herself into the edge of the table. The lights in the room seemed to blaze brighter, unbearably so, then die down. There was a cramped, airless feeling in her chest: the thing had her by the throat, it had already clamped cold fingers over her mouth.

Without warning, she slithered down between chair and table, groping her way under the cloth. It was the only way: she could not run from the table for the thing would stretch out an arm and seize her. No, she must evade it like this, diving from sight, then scrambling out between the chair legs and people’s feet on the other side.

Lucrezia resurfaced in the room. All around her were the cries of the nurses, Sofia admonishing her, saying, what in the name of all that is holy are you doing now? They could not see it, Lucrezia realised, the horrible thing, they could not see it or sense it as she could. She darted forward but someone caught her arm. Was it the spectre? Had her end come so soon? Would she now be nailed into a wooden box and placed in the family tomb, to lie next to poor Maria?

She yanked her arm away and made a dash for it, across the carpet, towards the door, but she could still get no breath into her body and her head was full of heat. The fireplace, the tapestries, the coffer, the door out seemed to float before her in a pool of fiery light. And then it all stopped, as if a curtain had been drawn across it, and Lucrezia fell to the floor.

When she returned, it was as if she had been deeply asleep for many hours. But then she saw that she was lying on the nursery floor and Sofia was standing above her, frowning, and the other nurses and her brothers were crowded around saying, is she dead, will she wake up, should we ask Papa to call the physician?

On seeing Lucrezia’s eyes open, Sofia snapped her fingers and hustled them all away. “Out,” she ordered. “All of you. Now.”

The nurses and the brothers milled reluctantly towards the door, and Sofia returned with a cushion in her hands. She lifted Lucrezia’s head, gently, ever so gently, and placed the cushion behind it. “Always the same with you,” she was murmuring. “Never know what’s going to happen next.”

She fetched some water from the table and held it to Lucrezia’s lips, lowering herself stiffly to the carpet, where she sat with her skirts puffed up around her, a pigeon on a nest. She loosened the ties of Lucrezia’s smock, and smoothed the hair away from her brow.

“So,” Sofia said, “tell me. What is all this about?”

Lucrezia shook her head and looked away, knowing all the while that Sofia would get it out of her.

Sure enough, when she looked back at the nurse, Sofia was regarding her with narrow eyes.

“Stomach ache?” she demanded. “Your head hurts? You ate no lunch, I saw. What is it?”

Lucrezia squeezed shut her eyes so that the tears wouldn’t fall but she felt them leaking out between her lashes. The story seemed so enormous, so unwieldy, that she didn’t know where to start: at the letter, at Maria’s death, at the man at the top of the tower?

“Come,” said Sofia, taking Lucrezia’s hand in hers, with unaccustomed kindness, “you can tell old Sofia.”

“They…” Lucrezia tried, curling her fingers into Sofia’s roughened palm “…I mean, my father…or perhaps Vitelli…I don’t know…they want…”

Sofia was looking at her very closely. “They want what?”

Lucrezia took in a gulp of air. She felt the proximity of the grey monster again but she knew it wouldn’t dare to come close if Sofia was there. “They want…the son of the Duke, the one Maria would have…that is, they…my father and Vitelli think the Duke’s father will…”

Sofia was listening, leaning in, as if every syllable Lucrezia spoke was a fragile airborne filament of gold, to be caught, not permitted to float away.

They were both silent for a moment. Sofia stared at her, brows drawn down. Then she said: “You?”

And, relieved that quick-witted Sofia had understood, that she didn’t need to speak the words, Lucrezia nodded.

“They want you to marry the Duke’s son? You heard them say this?”

Sofia seemed to consider the idea, lifting her head and working her mouth, as if she was tasting something for the first time. When she looked back, her face was enraged. For a moment, she lapsed into dialect, muttering a string of words that had the Madonna and the devil and something else in them.

“You are twelve years old,” she said, almost to herself. “And the heir to Ferrara is a man of twenty-four.”

She was silent for a moment or two. Then she tapped Lucrezia’s knuckles. “I suppose I should ask you how you found out about this,” she said, “but I won’t.”