The Marriage Portrait(38)

Someone is at her bedside, talking in soothing phrases. A hand touches her brow; hair is cleared from her face, a cup is held to her lips and water invades her mouth. She swallows and feels it cut a cool trail through her.

“Not too much,” the person is saying, “just a little.”

For a moment, Lucrezia believes that it is Sofia, come to take care of her, come to save her, once more. Word of her malady must have reached Florence and Sofia will have mounted a horse and ridden through the night, over the mountains, her steed plunging through snowdrifts and ice floes, Sofia an avenging maenad, swollen joints forgotten, suddenly able to ride. She will tell Alfonso that Lucrezia is not to stay here, she will stand up to him, in that way she has, and together they will leave and go back to Florence—no, somewhere else. Urbino, perhaps, or Rome. Sofia and Lucrezia will go, together, and take up residence somewhere far away, in another region or another land.

But it cannot be Sofia. Lucrezia knows this. She cracks open her eyes and, despite the pain the light brings to her head, peers up through her lashes.

It is only her maid Emilia who is sponging her forehead, straightening the bedclothes around her, saying, “Oh, madam, you poor thing. Was it something you ate? You must drink a little water, only a sip at a time. Your stomach will not want any more than that.”

Emilia puts down the cup, rises, and starts dropping soiled linens into a bucket. Lucrezia watches her with dull, amazed eyes.

“I am so sorry I wasn’t here last night,” Emilia is saying. “The horses left and I thought we would be following straight after but then we were told the weather was bad and the roads weren’t safe and we were to stay behind. I was so worried about you, all alone, with no one to help you. I tried to get the groom to let me go but he said he had orders from Signor Baldassare and—”

“Baldassare?” Lucrezia repeats, through a mouth that feels as dry and cracked as scorched earth.

“Yes, madam. He ordered the servants to remain in Ferrara when he left so that—”

“He left?”

“Yes, at first light.”

“Where was he going?”

“Well, here, of course. His Grace, the Duke, never goes far without him so—”

“Baldassare is here?”

“Yes.”

“In this fortezza?”

“I think so.”

“He has already arrived?”

“I would expect so. He rode out early this morning, with a—”

“Who else was with him?”

Emilia is scrubbing at the floor with rags she has taken from under the bed. “Ah, now let me see, there was—”

“Who?” Lucrezia says, more sharply than she intended. “Think, Emilia.”

“Very few people, I believe, madam. There was Signor Baldassare, and some of the Duke’s men, three guards, one of the grooms. The cook sent a ham and—”

“And you came with them?”

“No, I told you…” Emilia pauses to wring out her rag. “They wouldn’t let me join them, so when, later on, I heard that there was another party of people leaving for—”

“Who knows you are here, Emilia?”

“Well, I suppose…”

Emilia’s story rattles on, with words and names and reversals and qualifications, so many of them that Lucrezia cannot grasp. She tries to follow but it feels as though she is filled with sand—soft, dry sand that collects in one corner and, if she tilts her head, slides to fill the other.

“…so I just slipped out,” Emilia is saying, cheerfully scrubbing the floor, “because I didn’t think anyone at the court would miss me and I knew that you would need me so I thought the best thing was not to ask permission. If you don’t ask then you can’t be—”

“Did you tell anyone you were coming?” Lucrezia demands, cutting across this deluge of words.

“I just told you—no.”

“Did anyone see you leave?”

“Don’t think so.” Emilia purses her lips. “Why do you ask, madam? Are you—”

“Think carefully,” she urges the maid. “Clelia? Nunciata’s women?”

Emilia shakes her head, frowning. “No. I don’t think so. I just packed a bundle and slipped away while—”

“The grooms? Any of them?”

“Impossible,” Emilia scoffs. “They broke into the wine last night, I heard, and they were all—”

“What about the horse you rode? Did anyone know you’d taken it?”

“But I’ve already told you, madam,” Emilia says, getting to her feet, “I didn’t come on a castello horse. They had a spare so I—”

“So no one knows you are here?”

“No.”

“Baldassare doesn’t know? Or His Grace, the Duke?”

“No,” Emilia says, with a baffled pout, releasing the window catch and tossing the foul water out—Lucrezia hears it, a moment later, land with a spatter on the fortezza’s lower walls. “Why do you ask so many questions? You look so pale. Are you feeling sick again? Do you want—”

“There isn’t time to explain now,” Lucrezia says, shutting her eyes. She is trying to gather her thoughts—Alfonso, the fortezza, the dinner last night, Baldassare leaving at dawn, the telling of Emilia not to come, forbidding her to follow Lucrezia. What does it all signify for her? What can she do? “I need…” She gropes about for something in the bedclothes—the sketches she did last night, her wrap, anything to give her a sense of anchorage in this strange morning, which seems so unmoored, so startling. “I need…” What does she need? Lucrezia tries to raise herself from the pillow. “I must…”