The Marriage Portrait(42)

She is thinking about the man next to her, his head leaning back on the cushions, and about the parcel of food he brought her, and also about the portrait of a stone marten and the dancing and music from earlier. Her mind is restive, flittering from images of blue silk to lilies bound by string to a bristling fistful of hairpins to a brush moving to and fro across a piece of paper to a lantern on a balcony to a flat river cutting through a green and fertile plain.

When she wakes, much later, she finds she is lying on the seat, alone, with buttons pressing uncomfortably into her cheek. A blinding sunbeam is illuminating the carriage, entering through the open door. They have stopped; outside is the murmur of conversation, bird calls, and the sound of horses cropping grass.

“Alfonso?” she says timidly, then wonders if she is permitted to address him thus. Perhaps he would prefer her to use his title. “Your Grace?” she tries, a little louder.

Someone outside the carriage makes a noise of surprise; she hears feet crunching over stones and then a person appears. It is a guard, dressed not in the red livery of her father’s soldiers but a green-and-silver tunic; he bows his head to her, saying something in an unfamiliar tongue, holding out his hand. It is clear that she is meant to descend from the carriage.

So she does. She takes the hand of this guard who is speaking to her confidently and fluently in Ferrarese dialect—for what else can it be?—and she steps down to the ground.

They have stopped at a point where the road vanishes under a clear, pleated brook. The carriage horses have lowered their heads into it, their harnesses clanking as they drink. Ahead are mountains, layered peaks and slopes violet against the sky, the road disappearing and reappearing over their rumps. The heat of the day is rising around them. Her shadow at her feet is foreshortened, a folded-up version of her. Moisture is rising from the damp stones at the river’s edge; a bird with a blue stripe on its wing skims along the surface of the water, turning a tight circle, then retracing its route.

The carriage is surrounded by guardsmen and servants all dressed the same, in silver and green. They are talking eagerly, bowing to her, their faces animated, delighted even. Some seem to be holding boxes and packs belonging to her. She smiles at them, inclining her head, and they gesture to her, beckoning.

“Alfonso?” she asks, keeping her fingers hooked into the door of the carriage belonging to her father. “The Duke?”

The servants nod enthusiastically, still gesturing.

“His Grace?” she says. “Ferrara?”

Yes, yes, they seem to say. Ferrara, yes. And, beckoning, this way, come this way.

There is no sign of Alfonso anywhere. Lucrezia looks to her left, then her right, then turns in a circle. A guard is coming towards her, leading a horse the colour of fresh cream. Saddlebags adorn each side of it. This must be the biddable mare, sent from Ferrara to carry her; her father’s soldiers have disappeared, and the carriage is preparing to return to Florence, without her.

Lucrezia swallows. She isn’t sure how to behave. Nothing in her mother’s advice, Sofia’s stories, her schooling has prepared her for this, being abandoned at the side of a road, with people speaking a language she cannot understand. Where is Alfonso? How can he have gone?

The pale horse is tall, its flanks high above ground. How will she ever get up there?

The urge to climb into the carriage and be conveyed back to Florence courses through her. But Lucrezia takes a step away from it. She looks at the familiar packs on the ground, at the twisting surface of the water, at the glint of the eager faces of these men, at their ornate green uniforms, at the bridle of the horse, which is decorated with gryphons and eagles.

“Ferrara?” she says again, and the word is like magic. It is the only word both she and they mutually understand.

“Ferrara!” they cry back to her. Ferrara! And, animated, they nod and beckon.

One springs forward, saying something, exhorting her in some way. He claps his hands and calls the word again, and around the side of the carriage comes a woman. For a moment, Lucrezia cannot tell who it is—a relative of Alfonso’s, a sister, come to accompany her across the mountains? But there is something familiar about her gait, that brown dress, the apron. It is, Lucrezia is staggered to see, the maid from the palazzo, the one with the scarred face.

“It’s you,” Lucrezia says. It seems unaccountable to see her here, in this lonely spot in the lee of the Apennines.

“Your Highness,” the girl murmurs, dropping a curtsey.

“What are you doing here?”

“I am to travel to Ferrara, my lady.”

“You are?”

“With you,” the girl adds deferentially, her eyes cast down.

“Who said this?”

“Your father, if you please.”

Lucrezia turns away from her, and finds the Ferrarese servants and the horse all staring at her, so she turns back.

“What is your name?” Lucrezia asks.

“My mother called me Emilia, my lady.”

“Emilia,” Lucrezia repeats, and only then does she realise the joy of speaking Tuscan, the flow of the familiar words between them, “do you know where the Duke is?”

Emilia shifts uneasily from foot to foot, then thrusts out a hand, pointing towards the mountains.

“He has…” Lucrezia struggles to find a reason why he might have deserted her like this “…gone ahead?”