The Marriage Portrait(31)
Lucrezia said nothing, just pulled a piece of parchment towards her. It was the only way to deal with Isabella’s fits of temper: ignore them, let them run their course. Securing the page with one hand, she held her pen poised. How to begin? Dearest Alfonso? Your Excellency? L’Altura? My dear?
Lucrezia bit her lip, aware of the ink drying on her quill, of the empty page, of the emissary waiting for this reply, of Isabella on the bed, now singing a breathy song about husbands with tight purse strings and small—
Lucrezia shut her ears and mind to everything around her. She propped the painting of the stone marten in front of her, leaning it against a vase. She gazed at it, gazed and gazed. She had the strange and unaccustomed sensation of having been observed and, perhaps, understood. How odd it was that the person who seemed to comprehend her, to see into her very soul, should be a man who had glimpsed her only once.
She thought for a moment of her father spying her mother, through a diaphanous hanging, in Naples, and how he had resolved there and then to take that girl as his wife. Could it be possible that this duke’s son had held her image in his heart, a child on a battlement, holding a mouse? And when Maria, his first betrothed, had died, might his affections have turned towards Lucrezia?
In a day or two, Lucrezia would tuck the oil painting of the stone marten under her arm and, accompanied reluctantly by one of her mother’s ladies, go in search of her art tutor, who was often at work somewhere in the palazzo. She would find him eventually, up a ladder in a corridor, with Signor Vasari himself, making an initial sketch on the ceiling for a fresco of the goddess Juno in a peacock-drawn carriage. Lucrezia would place the painting on the table next to their chalks and watch as their eyes seemed to fasten upon it, like cats with prey. The tutor descended his ladder, reached for it and held it carefully in both hands, keeping his fingers clear of the painting’s surface, while Vasari came to look over his shoulder. This, the tutor would tell her, is the work of a skilled master. Do you see the gradation of colour here, the careful brushmarks there, how the animal appears to be in motion? Vasari would nod and say, Exceptional, in his grave voice. She would ask them what she had come to find out: why the paint was so thick, why the artist had applied so much of it. Vasari and the tutor would consider this for a moment, still taking in the stone marten, its animated face, its raised paw, and Vasari would take the painting from the tutor, tilting it so that he could look at it from its side. Then he would describe for her the practice of underpaintings. An artist might paint a scene or a portrait, then cover it with an entirely different painting. It happened all the time, if an artist was unsatisfied with the first attempt or was short of money to buy materials or if he wished to conceal the work he had produced, for whatever reason, or desired merely to give the finished work a sense of light and shade. A tavola or a canvas, Vasari explained, might have three or four different paintings on it, all existing in secret layers. As with this one. I want to try, she would say to the young tutor. Please show me how. The tutor would glance at his master, and Vasari would sigh, then wave them away. The tutor would wipe his hands with a rag. Come, he would say, let’s begin.
In her chamber, with Isabella still lying on the bed, and her canary regarding Lucrezia from its cage with a single glistening eye, Lucrezia straightened her page, readied her quill, and inscribed the letters of his name, for the first time: Dear Alfonso.
Somewhere in the Darkness
Fortezza, near Bondeno, 1561
When she wakes, later, it is with a swooping sensation, as if she is moving up a slope at speed or passing from one realm to another.
She lifts her head from the pillow and peers into a thick, oppressive dark. Where is she and what place is this? She looks for the geometric castello windows, to her right, but there is nothing. She turns her head to see the high opaque panes of the palazzo but, again, nothing. She wonders, Where is the painting of la faina, why is it not on the mantel?
Then she sees a single bed curtain, pulled back, as if someone has left in haste, and beyond it, the angled slant of a wall, cast in midnight gloom, and she remembers: the fortezza. She is at the fortezza.
But where is Alfonso? Nowhere to be seen. He has gone. The bed is empty. Over to the left will be the table, spread with sketches for the painting she conceived last night, and then to the other side—
She is beset, with a horrible swiftness, by the knowledge that she is about to be sick.
She lurches upright, scrabbling for the edge of the bed. If she can just get clear of the curtains, of the mattress—
“Emilia?” she calls, and her voice is unfamiliar to her, rasping and indistinct, seeming to come from a long way off. “Clelia?”
Then she remembers that they are not with her, that they were left behind in Ferrara.
Her head pulses with pain, as if her jaw is hinged too tightly to her skull. The muscles in her neck have snarled themselves into bright, fierce knots that press at the passages of blood through her head. She can feel the bone sockets of her eyes, the roots of her back teeth, the cavities of her nose—they seem to be inscribed on the darkness in glaring ink; they seem to sing with a high-pitched agony.
She gropes for the curtain and yanks it back, falling from the bed to the floor. She retches, her stomach convulsing, pushing bitter acid into her mouth; she retches again, and this time a flood of liquid pours from her, burning and foul. It is like lava from a volcano, forcing its way out of the ground, bubbling up and erupting forth.