The Marriage Portrait(26)
Vitelli continued to look from the bird to her, and back again.
“Hmm,” he said, eventually, weighing the tavola in his hand. The starling’s wings were tucked, feet drawn up, head drooping in defeat, in acceptance of its death. Lucrezia had put a border of ivy and mistletoe around it. “May I keep this?”
It was not a question. He was already turning away, placing her miniature painting inside his leather book and tying the straps, so that the bird could never fly away again, even if it had lived.
This Journey’s True Design
Fortezza, near Bondeno, 1561
Without warning, Lucrezia receives a signal, a glimmer of this journey’s true design.
Alfonso has shifted himself off her and fallen into a shallow slumber, one hand still buried in her shift. The candle has been snuffed out and the room is thick with a dark that feels almost animate—a breathing presence, with heavy, furred flanks.
But, all of a sudden, in this unfamiliar room, something descends upon her. It has the quality of a vision but it is frailer than that, and brighter in its urgency, arriving unbidden in her head.
What has come to her is a painting, entire and robust in its untested perfection. A painting on an elongated rectangle of tavola—she will cut herself the exact size she needs, at the precise angle she favours—at the centre of which will be a castle. No, a white mule. No, a stone marten, with streaks on its face. Or a centaur? Or all of them. Not one painting, then, but a series, all miniature, all ornate, the confines of the wooden boards filled with details and clues and decorations. She will cut the board now—no, it will have to be tomorrow, for she shouldn’t wake Alfonso with the sawing. But did she pack the right tools? The small handsaw, the planing knife? She thinks she did not.
The disappointment is keen. It leaves sharp icicles in her chest. To have this idea but no means to act upon it: the thwarted frustration of it. No matter. She will sketch the ideas tomorrow. Or perhaps now, this minute. She will ease herself from the bed and strike the tinder, relight the candle and take up the roll of vellum she knows is in the travelling box.
All is not lost. She knows this. She slips her feet out of the bed and, wrapping herself in the furs discarded by her husband, she moves towards the candle.
Everything is working out, and life is continuing after all. Alfonso is not the murderer or monster she perceived him to be at dinner—what temporary madness was that, what devils whispered all that in her ear? She has been told, over and over again, by her mother, by Sofia, that she is far too fanciful, far too susceptible to strange imaginings and fears, and that she should show more sense. Perhaps they are right. She will recover here, and so will this marriage. He has brought her to this place for the simple reason that he has loved it since childhood and wants to share it with her. She will spend the days with him, so that he feels attended to, taken notice of, and she will work at night. All, she thinks, as the candle catches at first try, will be well, and she sits, placing her hands, palm down, on the surface of the desk, and she smiles.
Something Read in the Pages of a Book
Palazzo, Florence, 1557
Sofia managed to keep Lucrezia’s secret, and delay the wedding, for almost a year. Any soiled clothes or bedding, she scrubbed in a bowl and dried in a cupboard. She tossed anything irreparably stained on to the fire with a quick flick of her wrist, and together they watched the flames devour the evidence. If the other nurses knew, they never said anything: they were both fierce in their loyalty to Sofia.
Betrothal and dowry negotiations between the two families continued, at a distance. Lucrezia learnt, from listening to a conversation between Vitelli and a clerk, that her father desired the terms of her potential marriage to match those of Maria, but the House of Ferrara was asking for an increase in the settlement, due to the delay. Loitering in an antechamber near the offices, while waiting for an audience with her mother, she heard Vitelli recommend that perhaps a certain amount of scudi be held in reserve, until such time as a male heir was produced, and then that portion of the dowry could be considered paid. Lucrezia saw her father nod, reach for the latest letter from Ferrara and hold it close to his face.
Winter began its slow tilt towards spring, the snows melted, a new nano arrived at the palazzo and was named, like all the others, Morgante, and word was that Eleonora was much diverted by his antics. The citizens in the streets below laid by their woollen caps and shawls, and the children, leaning over the palazzo parapet, were pleased to see the flower-seller return to the western corner of the piazza, her basket filled with thickly fleeced lilac blooms. Their father resumed his daily swim in the Arno; it was reported that another attempt had been made on his life but he and his Swiss Guard had seen off the assassins. He was called away to attend to an uprising in Arezzo. Eleonora held a party, the first since Maria’s death, at which acrobats put on a display, and musicians played while guests danced. The food was said to have surpassed anything Eleonora had served before. Lucrezia studied accounts of Greek military tactics, painted a scene from Homer and walked whenever she was allowed to around the battlements of the tower, watching great nets of starlings spill themselves one way then the other above her head. Her brothers were taught the rules of calcio in the courtyard below; Garzia received an injury to his arm when Ferdinando tackled him too hard; Pietro took to biting his brothers, if provoked, and the doctor was summoned to bleed him twice a week in an attempt to rebalance his humours. One of the guard’s dogs gave birth to puppies. The silkworms in Eleonora’s insectarium continued to ingest mulberry foliage; their gossamer trails, stretching from leaf to leaf, sparked into visibility in the morning light.