The Marriage Portrait(46)
The villa prepares breakfast; it consumes it. Floors are scrubbed, windows are thrown open, tables are dusted, dogs are let outside, bread is baked, then eaten, then baked again, loggias are swept, door handles are polished. The midday meal is cooked; it is eaten; it is cleared away. Dishes are washed, dried, then put back into the cupboard. The dogs take to the shade, to doze with lowered muzzles; the farmers seek shelter from the hottest part of the day, under the trees, in the cool of their houses. Servants sit in a chair, if they can find one; the cook puts her feet up on a barrel.
When Lucrezia wakes, she finds herself in a room filled with light the colour of honey. Everything seems burnished, tinted with its warm, dappled glow: the bed curtains, their gold ties, a coffer near the door, a table with a bowl of yellow roses on it, two chairs on either side of a fireplace, the carved dryads who dance and chase each other along the lintel. Lucrezia lies there, taking it all in.
It is as if she has travelled during the dawn, as if she has left the room where she fell asleep—that black and perilous cavern—and been transported, by witchcraft, to this place of sun and heat and beauty. Emilia is nowhere to be seen; that side of the bed is smooth, the pillow plumped, as if no one had ever been there. Above her head are celestial creatures with trumpets and lyres, flying across the plaster of the ceiling, wings outstretched to catch the heavenly zephyrs. Neptune, with a long, damp beard and a weed-draped trident, stands guard over the doorway, his hips tailing away into foamy sea. Only the sight of the yellow-haired Iris, still spilling a rainbow from her palm, convinces Lucrezia that this is the same room, that she hasn’t been spirited away by night.
She sits up, raises one arm above her head, and then the other. She has no idea what the hour is or how long she has slept: cicadas are pulsing outside the window, her stomach feels hollow and empty. Heat seems to be filtering through the gaps in the shutters, but it cannot be past midday. Can it? She never sleeps this late.
She is about to push back the sheets and stand up, when there comes a knock at the door, and because she is sure it is morning, and this must therefore be a servant, most likely Emilia, with breakfast and clothes, she says: “Come in.”
The door is flung open and, with confident strides and the tap of heeled boots, a man enters the room. Lucrezia is so taken aback that he is halfway across the floor before his name pushes its way into her mind. The Duke of Ferrara. Alfonso. It is he, entering her chamber, looking suddenly so different, with his hair tied back and in shirt sleeves, which fill and empty as he moves towards her.
“Y-your Grace,” she stammers, sitting straight and casting about for a wrap or a mantle, anything with which she might cover herself. She has never, in all her life, been seen in her nightshirt by anyone other than her mother or her sisters. “You’re here. I didn’t know…I was…I…Let me just…”
He arrives at the bed and, without the slightest hesitation, sits down upon it, as if it belongs to him. Which, Lucrezia is able to reflect, it does. The mattress shudders and tilts as it accepts his weight.
“Your Grace?” he exclaims. “Are we to address each other thus?”
“I…” Lucrezia’s fingers find the neck ribbons of her nightdress and draw them together “…that is, I was always taught to—”
“Never mind what you’ve been taught,” he says. “My given name is Alfonso, as you know, which is what my family and my friends call me—those who love me. Among whom I hope I may now number you.”
There is a pause. He raises his eyebrows with an expectant air. She is having trouble following the circling pathways of his sentences. Did he ask her a question? She can’t recall, and is it her imagination or is he edging closer to her, along the side of the bed?
“May I?”
“May you what?” Her confusion is making her stupid, when all she really wants to know is what happened at court and why he abandoned her like that. He had been talking about names, hadn’t he? But what is he asking of her?
“May I number you among those who love me?”
Lucrezia stares at him. She sees a stranger with an unlaced shirt, sitting close to her on a bed, in a deserted room. She sees muscles stretched beneath the skin of a chest that is damp and beaded with perspiration, a pair of hands with broad knuckles and long fingers, elegant yet strong, the nails clipped to clean half-moons. He doesn’t look like someone who has just been faced with an emergency at his court. There is a distinct smell coming off him—sweat and heat and the outdoors and something vegetal and fresh, like leaves or bark or sap. It is an overwhelming odour, both pleasant and unpleasant. She would like to draw nearer to sniff it out; she would like to draw back, to pull up the sheets to cover her face, to dive down into that cocoon of linen and never come out.
He has asked her a question, again, for the second time. And she must answer: her mother’s lessons in manners and etiquette surge through her mind. Answer any query put to you promptly, with a pleasant expression on the face, with a light voice, with an affirmative response, if required.
“Yes,” she replies, “naturally.” She almost adds “Your Grace” but manages to stop herself.
He gives her a smile and there is something playful, something irreverent in it; his eyes glint with suppressed glee. She has the distinct feeling that the whole conversation has been a diversion for him, or perhaps some kind of test.