The Marriage Portrait(45)

She lifts her chin, seizes the candle from Emilia and thrusts it out at arm’s length. She is not afraid, no, she is not. A beast—muscled and brave—lives within her. She tells herself this over the cantering of her heart. Let the ghouls that hover in the corners of the room see what they are dealing with: she is the fifth child of the ruler of Tuscany; she has touched the fur of a tigress; she has scaled a mountain range to be here. Take that, darkness.

She edges forward into the chamber. She sees walls of the palest distemper, veering off into shadows. She looks up and there is the lofty curve of the ceiling and it is alive with writhing frescos. Above her head, a man with a rippling beard and a bright staff drives a chariot through pearly storm clouds; next to him, dryads in scant robes disport themselves in a waterfall; in the corner, Lucrezia sees a goddess casting a prismatic streak of rainbow with a languid turn of her wrist, her golden curls blowing about her shoulders.

Lucrezia feels a tug on her hand and, with effort, she tears away her gaze. Emilia is pointing at something to their right.

A square structure is looming out of the darkness. Lucrezia stares at it. It is higher than her, with a long flat base and a lid above. For a moment, in her fear and exhaustion, she cannot tell what it is. A box, her disturbed mind hisses to her, a cage.

She raises the candle, the rim of its light circle trembling, and when she sees what it is, she lets out a short, high laugh.

It is a bed. Of course. What else would be in a bedchamber? It is a bed, nothing more, with swollen goose-feather pillows, a coverlet of padded rose silk and thick bed curtains, held back by twisted gold ropes.

The sight of something so ordinary, and so welcome, is such a relief that both girls laugh and, spontaneously, grip each other in an embrace.

“I thought it was—” Lucrezia says, unable to get out the words.

“I know,” Emilia cuts in.

“A cage!”

They laugh. Then Emilia, almost as if she has remembered her role, steps behind her mistress and begins to unlace the travelling dress. Lucrezia realises that there is no more welcome sight at this moment than a bed: it is what she needs more than anything else. She puts down the candle on the bedside table, then holds out her arms for Emilia to remove the sleeves. The maid folds back the bedclothes, then walks to the door, where she turns the big iron key; both girls hear the clunk of the lock.

They are safe: Lucrezia permits these words to ripple through her mind.

She exhales a long breath that feels as though it has been held since Florence. She allows herself to sink down to the bed. She is so tired that it feels like too much of an effort to lift her feet under the sheets. But she does. The pillow cradles the back of her head; she hears the narrow shafts of the feathers crack and resettle under its weight.

Emilia moves about the dim room, lifting discarded clothing and placing it on a chair. Lucrezia closes her eyes and sees, behind the lids, the drape of a horse’s mane, the sight of trees flashing by, a windy mountain pass, so she opens them again.

Emilia, she sees, is lying on the floor, not far from the foot of the bed, arranging her cloak so that it covers her, cushioning her head from the bare boards with her shoes.

“Emilia,” Lucrezia says.

The maid lifts her head. “Yes, Your Highness?”

“You can’t sleep there.”

“No, it is fine, I am—”

“Sleep here.” Lucrezia pats the space next to her.

“No, madam, it would not be right. I assure you that I am—”

“Emilia, please. It is…this room is so big and I…I won’t sleep anyway. Please. I want you to. I’m scared to be alone.”

Emilia raises herself up and tiptoes across to her. Lucrezia feels the mattress sag as Emilia climbs into bed.

Lucrezia blows out the candle.

“Good night,” she whispers to Emilia’s back.

It is the dead of night. Outside, she can hear the strange rustles and hoots of forest creatures, the occasional shriek. Lucrezia pictures some small mammal being caught by a predator. Next to her, she hears the breathing of the maid, slowing, deepening. But she, Lucrezia, will not sleep. She cannot: it is impossible.

And yet she does. Quite without warning, Lucrezia drops, like someone falling from a high wall, into a deep and profound unconsciousness. The forest, at night, seems to come right up to the walls of the villa and press itself close, encircling the inhabitants in its green, quickening world; it wreathes into their dreams the snap of branches, the creep of lichen, frail light-seeking shoots, with web-veined foliage. Its sharp, loamy air penetrates their slumbering lungs.

Lucrezia sleeps as a deer emerges from the tangle of the forest, picks its way on soft hoofs across the driveway of the villa, lifting its head at the sound of a fruit dropping from a nearby tree. She sleeps as wild boar bludgeon their bristly, squat bodies, heavy as travelling boxes, through the thorned underbrush, snouts held to the ground. She sleeps as the dawn birds unfold their wings, as a porcupine snuffles along a pine-needled path known only to itself, as the servants wake, pile kindling into the stoves and strike flints and lift pots and scatter yeast into flour. She sleeps as the farmers pull on their clothes, clap on their hats and take to their fields. She sleeps as the pot boys are sent out to draw water from the well, as the first fragile light is seen in the valley, as its first heat is felt.

She sleeps off the long preparation for her wedding, the hair combing, the dress on the bed. She sleeps off the Mass, the feast, the dancing, the acrobats. She sleeps off the farewells with her parents, her indifferent sister, with Sofia. She sleeps off two wakeful nights. She sleeps off many months of disquiet about her marriage. She sleeps off the carriage ride with Alfonso through Florence at dawn, the discovery of his vanishing, the ascent of the Apennines, the journey at dusk down the other side to the valley. She sleeps and sleeps and sleeps and, as with all good sleeps, everything bad is sloughed off her.