The Marriage Portrait(48)

“Some time ago,” he continues, “my people sent to your father to request a likeness of you. And your father,” he says thoughtfully, turning her face gently to one side, then the other, “sent a portrait, done in oil, finely framed. It was, I believe, a copy of one in your father’s possession, perhaps done by an apprentice. The figure in it is depicted in a black dress, with pearls around the neck, one hand raised like so. A somewhat gloomy background. Do you know it?”

Lucrezia gives a single nod. It is an awful copy of a portrait for which she has no affection. Even the original by the master artist Bronzino, for which she sat long hours, her raised arm aching, her back rigid, her neck turned painfully, came out badly. She sees nothing of herself in it and cannot bear to look upon it.

He is examining her at close quarters, eyes narrowed, as if discerning her thoughts, as if reading them like words on a page.

“Do you know what I said when I saw it?” he asks.

She shakes her head.

“I said, ‘This cannot be the same girl. Either she has been very ill since then or this is a terrible portrait of her.’?”

Lucrezia is so surprised she lets out a laugh, then covers her mouth with her hand. “I have always hated it,” she whispers, and it is an immense and novel relief to be able to voice this.

His mouth curls with amusement. “Really?”

“Even the original. It is better than the copy you were sent, but not much. I look so sallow and sullen when—”

“When you are nothing of the sort. Why did your father not demand that it be repainted?”

She tries to think of the words to choose in reply, but the answer is too great, too visceral. My father doesn’t care enough, is what she wants to reply. It doesn’t matter to him whether it is a good likeness or not. The original hangs in an unvisited corner of the palazzo, unloved, unlooked on. Her brothers and sisters all had two or three portraits done, as children and also as young men and women; she was often told that she was too restless and fidgety to sit for an artist, so she only ever had one, painted in an unseemly and humiliating hurry, just after her betrothal. She feels the sudden pressing ache of this old injury, somewhere below her ribcage.

“If it had been me, I would have sent it straight back to the workshop. Do your father and mother not value the veracity of portraits?”

“Oh, no,” Lucrezia burst out, “they do. My sisters were painted several times, as children, and then more recently. My brother Giovanni had a portrait made when he was only a year old. You may have seen these on the walls of my father’s rooms. My mother sat with my brothers for Bronzino, twice, and my father—”

“But only once for you?”

The question is like a sliver of ice entering her skin, and his eyes, which have unusually wide pupils, take this in. She is sure of that. He sees the answer before he hears it; he grasps its myriad implications.

“Only once,” she mutters.

His response is to catch her face between both of his hands. “I find that astonishing,” he says, in a confiding murmur, “and the height of stupidity. We shall rectify this, you shall see, before long. You shall be painted, and by a master, by the best of my court artists. And if it turns out to be anything less than exquisite, I shall insist that it be done all over again until it is perfect.”

She is reeling from this speech, from the idea that he attached the word “stupidity” to her father, that he would dare to say this of Grand Duke Cosimo I, that anyone would criticise him and his judgement in this way.

“Very well,” she gets out.

“You are afraid,” Alfonso says, one of his fingers grazing her cheekbone.

“No, I—”

“Of me.”

“Not at all.”

“You are. But you do not need to be. I will not hurt you. I promise you this. Do you believe me?”

“I…”

He regards her for another long moment, then says: “I will not come to your bed now. You understand me? I am not an animal. I have never forced a woman and I never shall. You need not be afraid. We will take our time, you and I. For now, you will get up and I will send for your maid and you will take a meal. Yes? Then you will explore the villa and see what there is to see.”

Abruptly, he stands, releasing her, and goes to the window, where he throws open the shutters.

“Look at this sun,” he exclaims. “Shining down on the land. Does it not beg us to be out in it?”

He strides towards the door, his shirt inflating with air, then quickly doubles back, as if he has forgotten something, pacing across the floor to her again. He bends at the waist and, sliding a hand around her neck, stoops and presses his lips to hers—a brief, emphatic pressure. It reminds her of her father, bringing his seal down on top of a document, marking it as his.



* * *





She is walking, in soft shoes and a flowing yellow dress. She has a pale blue cap on her head, on which the sun throws down gentle, probing arrows; they land on her crown, her forehead, like the pats of a tame animal.

She holds out a hand on either side of her, each palm brushing against the upper leaves of the box hedges that line the path. The sun finds her hands, too—such a thorough, tireless sun, this—making the skin prickle and seethe.

Her footsteps are slow and measured. She can walk, with every footstep pressing a print into gravel, at her own pace, in any direction she chooses, for as long as she wishes. There is nobody here to bother or pester her or put her in danger. She can go where she pleases: Alfonso told her so, using these exact words. Where she pleases.