The Marriage Portrait(32)
Her mind is sheer and startled. Whatever is in her will come out. She crouches on all fours, like an animal, coughing and vomiting until her stomach is hollow, until she is spitting blood and bile from a sore, scalded mouth.
She calls out again, but the thickness of the walls mocks her, throwing back a voice so feeble and irrelevant that she is silenced. She eases off her sodden shift and, not knowing what else to do, steps back into the bed. Never before, it distantly occurs to her, has she been so alone: there has always been someone to call, someone to summon, all her life.
Moments later, she starts to shake. It begins at her feet, a tremble that seizes her ankles then her legs, causing the blankets to be disturbed, releasing pockets of warm air, making her whimper and curl into herself. Then it is as if the malady has taken her by the scruff of her neck. It is angry with her—this much is clear. It is furious. She has done something terrible and unforgivable to it, something that has riled it to a towering temper. It rattles her back and forth in its grasp, it shakes her teeth in their gums, it makes her arms and legs flail and thrash. The bedclothes are tossed to the floor, her hands are knotted into themselves, wrists turned back, the muscles in her legs convulse and solidify. She is unrecognisable to herself; she is a creature entirely at the mercy of a stronger power, a flea on the back of a rabid beast, a plucked quince in a pot of bubbling water.
There is nothing she can do. She is powerless, entirely at the mercy of a heartless force. She is thrown one way, then the other; her head is pressed down into the pillows, snapped forward, then back. Her arms are pulled rigid, her fingers retract into claws. It is difficult to get breath past her frozen throat, down into her petrified lungs.
She might die. This fact presents itself to her, like a gull flying out of a storm, and she examines it, dully, through the churning mists of the sickness. She might. She recognises this; she accepts it. She has reached a place where all she craves is an end to the torment, the bodily suffering. Any end at all.
The Duchess Lucrezia on Her Wedding Day
Palazzo, Florence, 1560
The chamber is filled with people and the wedding gown waits for her on the bed.
Lilies stand tall in a vase on the mantel, their stems offering up blooms as if for scrutiny. The air moving in and out of her is heavy with their scent. When she’d woken, just after dawn, the buds had been closed but now the full complexity of their petals and stamens is open for all to see. The sweet, cloying smell of them fills her chest, leaves it, fills it again. A rust-red shadow of pollen encircles the base of the vase.
Behind them, servants come and servants go, their shoes rushing one way and the other. Someone knocks at the door, delivering a wooden box; another person opens the box and takes out jewels from inside it, one by one. Someone else lifts Lucrezia’s arm and places bracelets on it, pushes earrings through her lobes, fastens her betrothal ruby about her neck. Lucrezia is the only motionless being. She sits at the centre of this activity, a reed caught in the eddy of a stream.
Three maids are stationed around her, each unknotting a section of her hair, tugging and pulling at the scalp with combs. One of them, a girl of about Lucrezia’s age, with a puckered scar curving from the corner of her mouth to her neck, has a particularly gentle touch, disentangling the knots with careful fingers, instead of yanking the comb through them, and Lucrezia would like to tell her how grateful she is for this.
Lucrezia has been occupying herself, as she sits here, with planning how she would paint the lilies, how she could capture the flecked pink stains of their interiors, the swan-white of the outer petals, the stamens sticky with nectar, their simultaneous strength and fragility. Her leg, beneath her camiciotto, is bouncing up and down, up and down. She cannot stop it: sitting still for so long is intolerable for her. She wants to leap up, to bat these women away from her, to yank her hair out of their grasp and move about the room, pulling off the clinking bracelets, rolling her shoulders in their sockets, stretching her neck from one side to the other. Most of all, she would like to clear everyone from the room with a loud cry, so that she might have a moment to gather her thoughts.
But there will be no sketching today. The wedding gown is waiting and the lilies will be bound and placed in her hands, and she will carry them before her, like a shield or a lance, all the way to the altar.
A long triangle of light, an exact yellow replica of the window behind it, makes a sudden appearance at her feet, spreading itself out across the floor, as if reaching for her ankle. Lucrezia observes how it bends around objects in its path, drapes itself over a pair of shoes, a dropped cloth, a discarded shift.
Near the bed, two servants are arguing in impassioned whispers. Something about the dress, and the order in which it must be donned. Lucrezia sees one of them pick up a sleeve and say, This, in a peremptory tone, and the other shakes her head, bringing her hand down emphatically on the bodice. The first servant clutches her forehead dramatically, and says if they weren’t taking so long with the hair she would already be dressed. They are anxious because Eleonora has instructed them, in commanding tones, to make Lucrezia look like a duchess because this, she said, with a rare smile on her face, is what she will be. The old Duke, the father, has died and Alfonso is now the Duke of Ferrara; Lucrezia has heard rumours that this is why he has returned from France, to assume control of his court, and not, as Eleonora says, to claim Lucrezia as his bride. Either way, she will become a duchess today, from the moment she is married. She sometimes says this word to herself—duchessa, duchessa—over and over, when she is alone, rendering the word into a slurry of sound. Its three syllables seem to battle against each other, the peremptory du, the harsh che and the final susurrating ssa. How strange that it will soon be forever part of her name.