The Marriage Portrait(41)
They stare at each other: Lucrezia at Alfonso, Alfonso at Lucrezia.
It is the first time they have ever been alone together.
“Are you well enough to travel?” he says softly.
“Yes, of course.
“Can I fetch you anything? What do you need?”
“Nothing. I promise.”
“Here is some food for the journey. I noticed you ate very little at supper.”
He lays a knotted cloth in her lap and, startled, she puts her hands around it. She can feel the mound of a loaf, the hard sides of the cheese they make in the kitchens, and the soft orb of a fruit—apricot, perhaps.
“Thank you,” she says.
He takes her fingers in his and raises them to his lips. She observes this, as if the hand belongs to someone else. His mouth brushes her skin; she feels the press of it, the sharp sting of his emerging stubble, the heat of an exhalation.
“So,” he tilts his head, “if there is nothing you need, we shall begin our journey, yes?”
And without waiting for a response, he leans forward, out of the carriage, and hands the lantern to someone just outside. She hears him murmur his orders: make everything ready, check that all the luggage is secure, ask them to open up the gates.
He pulls the door closed and sits beside her. Lucrezia tries to steady her breaths: in, out, in, out. The gates of the palazzo are opening. It is nearly dawn. She is leaving. Outside, she can hear the groomsmen gathering up the reins, snapping a whip in the air. Alfonso is telling her that they will take the carriage through the city and beyond, after which they will switch to horseback because the road over the mountains is too rocky for anything else, and she does not say that her father has already told her this, but she listens, to his voice, to his words, to his talk of the mountainous ascent and the wild beauty of the Apennine peaks, and then the flat plain of the Po valley, where their journey will end.
The gates rattle as they open, and Lucrezia wants to push at the carriage door, one last time, to say goodbye to the courtyard, to the white figure of David, the battlements around the campanile, as they pass by, but she dares not. The coachman whistles now and she braces herself for the forward jolt of the wheels.
But instead there is a call from outside, a shout: “Stop! Wait! Stop!”
Alfonso turns his head. Although it is dark, Lucrezia knows he is frowning. This was not part of his orders.
“Wait!” the voice calls, ending on a wail. The next moment, the carriage door is wrenched open, and Lucrezia is startled to see Sofia, a shawl over her nightgown, her hair in a twist over her shoulder. Her face is flushed and stricken, her eyes wet. She gropes a hand towards her and Lucrezia seizes it. Then the nurse is in the carriage with them, enveloping her in an embrace that is desperate and strong.
“Goodbye, little Lucrè, goodbye,” the nurse is saying. “May he be good and kind to you, for you deserve nothing less. Never forget that.” She fumbles under her shawl and then Lucrezia feels something pressed into her hand; it is hard and flat; Sofia curls her fingers over it. “You left this,” she says, “upstairs in the nursery. I thought—”
“It’s for you,” Lucrezia is able to say, pushing the tiny painting back into her hand. “I made it for you, to keep.”
Sofia nods her thanks, her cheek pressed to Lucrezia’s, as if she is hoping to draw into herself some part of the girl’s essence.
“Live a long life,” Sofia whispers fiercely, into Lucrezia’s hair, “be happy.”
Then she pulls away and gives Alfonso a stern, searching look. For a moment it seems that she will speak, she will say something to him. But she doesn’t. It is enough, for her, to cast her eye on him, to examine him as a scholar will a manuscript.
She leaves.
It is only after the carriage door closes, and the coachman snaps his whip, and the horses startle in their harnesses, stepping forward, and they pass under the archway and into the deserted piazza, Alfonso saying, who on earth was that person, that Lucrezia realises something. For the first time ever, Sofia had spoken to her in Neapolitan dialect, which meant that Sofia had always known that Lucrezia could understand it.
“What was it she tried to give you?” Alfonso is asking, as they weave their way through the city, her father’s battalion riding alongside them, the sounds of hundreds of horses’ hoofs clattering against the streets.
She tightens her fingers around the rosary, once more, and thinks of the small painting she has been working on for weeks: a nurse standing in the middle of a rug, looking defiantly up at a tall adviser; rabbits, many of them, gambol delightedly around her feet, their silver-brown coats glinting in the light. If looked at very closely, it could be seen that the nurse has her fingers crossed. Lucrezia made it specially for Sofia, the keeper of all her secrets.
“Nothing,” she says.
* * *
The carriage trundles through a deserted Florence. Lucrezia presses an eye to the gap around the door and, flickering past in the weak light, sees houses, windows, shutters, small squares, water troughs, bridges, the wooden door of a church, a dog asleep on a doorstep, a guttering lantern on a balcony. Her father’s city, still in a state of slumber.
The walls cast deep shadow on the streets around them; the horses pass through the narrow gates like a knife through bread: the only sense Lucrezia has of this is a momentary darkening of the carriage as they travel beneath the walls, and then they are out the other side, and she is clasping her hands together, the wedding rings unfamiliar hard circles.