The Marriage Portrait(44)
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They travel up and over the Apennines in daylight, Lucrezia clinging to the pommel on the saddle, Emilia clinging to her, the oil painting of the stone marten strapped to a saddlebag. Lucrezia has painted mountains, many times, but only in miniature, shrunk down, as backdrop to a scene, as a means of giving perspective to a composition. She has never seen them up close, never ridden across one, never realised that what might appear green or grey from a distance proves, up close, to be a collision of colours and textures: thick black-brown mud, rich green conifers, trees whose leaves shudder and twist in the wind, revealing silver undersides, grey rock, the dank rust of a pool where the horses dip their heads.
Behind her, Emilia’s teeth chatter, either from fear or from the cold, and she intermittently whispers a prayer under her breath.
“Do not be afraid,” Lucrezia says to her, over and over.
“Yes, madam,” she replies.
But as they descend on the other side, and darkness begins to fall once more, and Florence feels very far away, and up ahead is a villa where a husband may or may not be waiting, and neither she nor Emilia can make themselves understood to these men who are leading them into the night, it is Lucrezia whose courage begins to fail her. Where is Alfonso? What kind of a man leaves his new bride alone like this?
They rest the horses; Lucrezia is given cheese and dry flat bread, studded with olives. When the servants gesture to her to remount, she feels fear engulf her with a slow creep.
“Ferrara,” she says again, hauling herself to her feet, and the servants nod and smile. “His Grace? The Duke?”
The servants let forth a slew of words. Lucrezia can discern the word “Ferrara” and “delizia” and “Duke” and something that could be “garden” or “game.”
She reaches for Emilia’s hand; the maid’s answering touch is steady. The two girls stand there, hands linked, facing the servants, Lucrezia sees how similar they are in height and colouring, how with the same clothes or mantle, they might, from the back, be taken for the other. She finds no comfort in this realisation; instead it feels like another strange and unaccountable trick being played on her.
“What do you think?” Lucrezia murmurs.
“We cannot stay here,” Emilia says. “It is getting dark.”
“If only I could be sure that they really mean to take us to the Duke, if only there was some way to—”
“Ferrara?” Emilia asks again, in a loud voice.
Yes, yes, the servants cry, echoing the word back to them, pointing to the mare, whose mane glows like marble through the dark. Lucrezia steps forward, towards the horse, keeping a tight grip on Emilia’s fingers.
“Come,” Lucrezia says, trying to take command of the situation, trying to behave as the duchess she now is. “We will go. We have no choice.”
She puts a toe into the stirrup and many hands rush to assist her but she hoists herself up on to the mare’s saddle, then holds out her arm to help Emilia. The girl is whimpering with unhappiness but Lucrezia turns the horse’s head, taps her heels against its flanks and takes once again to the path.
Night gathers itself around them, the darkness intensifying, as if black paint is being swirled into the air. They travel along a wide road, on either side of which are rows and rows of fruit trees—Lucrezia could, for a while, make out branches heavy with the round curves of peaches and perhaps the tear shapes of lemons. But now it is too dark to see anything at all. The servants at the back of the procession call to those at the front, and the call is returned, their voices arrowing past Lucrezia. She can feel the damp breath of Emilia on her neck, the clutch of the girl about her waist, and these are a small comfort. She hopes against hope that soon, from out of the darkness, some form of archway, perhaps in stone, will appear and it will be lit with flaring torches, and beyond it will be an open doorway, burnished and bathed in candlelight. There will be a bed, a chamber, a meal, warm clothes.
Instead, though, they turn into another, narrower, road, and there are no more fruit trees, just fields where low-growing crops rustle and whisper to them as they pass, or the numerous moist eyes of fenced cattle regard them; occasionally, the black shape of a roof appears in the distance and Lucrezia’s heart gives a hard knock, but they pass it, and she can see by its size that it is no place for a duke with an ancient name.
All at once, they turn off down a track, lined on each side by cypresses, and Lucrezia thinks that whatever will happen will happen now: she and Emilia will be carried off, ravished, stolen. She has stopped wondering where Alfonso is, whether she will ever see him again. But she will be—
Then she sees up ahead an archway, with doors thrown open, and people are approaching with torches, calling to the servants on horseback.
Lucrezia is helped down by unseen hands and led across a square courtyard and, in language she doesn’t understand, is ushered by two men in country clothes up a staircase and in through the door of a room. The men light a candle, which was waiting on a low table, and leave, with many incomprehensible words and smiles.
Still clutching each other’s hands, Lucrezia and Emilia advance into the room, Emilia holding the candle. The chamber before them is a dark cavern, in any corner of which may be waiting a monster as yet unknown to them. The trembling circle of waxy light pushes at the blackness. Lucrezia feels, within her, the rise of what she thinks of as her spirit—the unfettered part of herself to which no one, not even she, has access. It lives somewhere deep inside her, under the layers of costly palazzo clothes, mostly hibernating, as if under a covering of leaves, until called into action. Then it might uncurl, crawl out into the light, blinking, bristling, furling its filthy fists and opening its jagged red mouth. In this black and unfamiliar room, Lucrezia feels it, senses it stirring, raising its head, and starting to howl.