The Marriage Portrait(55)

Lucrezia, however, is awake. She is also adept at making herself unobtrusive: a childhood of mapping out hidden passageways has taught her this, if nothing else. She steps back from the bright lip of the loggia, into the recesses, and glides noiselessly along by the villa’s wall.

Through the first courtyard, skirting the kitchens and the gaggle of housemaids who are clattering brooms and dustpans as they throw open windows. She evades them, sliding once more into the shadows. She has no clear idea of where she is going, but when she turns the corner, she knows.

There, before her, is something she has never seen in her life. Something she has really never thought of as possible. Something so thrilling and unexpected, her hands fly to her mouth.

The heavy wooden doors to the villa stand open.

Nobody guards the entrance. There are no soldiers with weapons, no men in livery; no hasty slamming of the doors is about to take place; no weighty bar will be replaced to repel enemies and assassins. Nothing, no one. Just a portal, flung wide, for all to see. It is the act of a household expecting no threat, no attack, no thieves, no interlopers. Here is a building with no need to assert its might, a delizia intended only to delight, a place at ease with itself and with its hinterland.

Beyond the shape of the gateway—rectangular with a peaked arch—she can see a gravelled path winding away from it, a row of cypress trees, their pinnacles piercing a sky that is blush-streaked by dawn. Wildflowers cluster along the pathway and they nod their heads at her, blue, red, yellow.

Lucrezia takes a step forward, then another. She darts a look behind her. Will anyone stop her? Will a battalion surge forward the minute she sets foot outside the villa walls, ready to drag her back and slam the doors?

She hesitates on the threshold, casting her eyes over the thick wall of trees. Then she steps out.

The wind from last night is here again, but she doesn’t want to think of last night or anything to do with it, she will not, because thoughts such as those cannot be allowed on a morning like this and, anyway, the wind has changed, shrunk itself down, civilised itself; it is behaving; it has remembered its place. It moves low to the ground, like an animal on its belly, it stirs the flowers that line the track, it rustles the lower branches of bushes, it toys with the hem of her wrap, with the tassels of her hair.

She steps away from the villa, her slipper soles scuffing along the path. She moves with an increasing pace, suddenly aware of a lightness or relief within her. She has done it. She has been through it—the thing she dreaded, the act she feared. She had thought it might be terrible, unendurable—and, in truth, it was—yet, look, here she is, on the other side of it, walking in the sun. She has done what she was meant to do; she has not let down her family. What she wishes she had asked either Sofia or her mother or Isabella was how often it would be expected of her. Now she has endured it once, perhaps it will be a good long while before she must do so again.

The sky above her head is vast, stretching from the tops of the cypresses all the way to the distant peaks of the Apennines, which can be seen, far off, in the purple-grey haze. As she walks beneath it, she is aware of its spectrum shifts, from the pink of sunrise, to red, to orange.

This, she thinks. All this. The cypresses like rows of upended paintbrushes, waiting for the giant hand of an artist, the low and subjugated wind, the jagged line of mountains drawn in charcoal on the horizon, the muted calls of servants to each other, somewhere behind her, the open doors of the villa, the clink of bells around the necks of cattle, the lines and lines of fruit trees that open into avenues as she walks by. She wants this. She feels the bliss of it all on her skin, like the graze of drizzle after a parching drought. She can take the other, she can bear it, if it means she can have this. She will exchange that for this. She will, she can.

From somewhere off to her side comes a crack, then a rustle, and she whips round. It is not, as she feared, some wild beast come to devour her. Instead a shape clarifies itself against the trees of the forest. For a moment, her alarmed mind perceives it as a centaur, half man, half horse, a creature sent by mythical forces with some message for her, perhaps. She backs away, clutching her wrap around her.

Then the head of a horse appears, bridled and reined, with a rider mounted above. No centaur, after all, but a hunter, out in the early morning, tracking his quarry, carrying bow and knife and a blunt club through his belt.

It is Leonello, friend and consigliere of Alfonso. She recognises the bright hair under the hunter’s hat. Slung over his saddle, suspended from their heels, are the slack, loose bodies of three hares, eyes resolutely shut, forepaws defenceless and dangling.

He brings the horse to a standstill and rests his hands on his pommel, looking down at her. She looks back. The eyes under his hat are unsmiling, expressionless. She is filled with an urge to say to him: why do you dislike me so, whatever did I do to displease you? The words are there, ready, in her mouth. It baffles her, this instant and instinctive hostility; she has come across its like before and it is always perplexing, why someone should hate her on sight. She has done nothing to warrant it; it causes her a small but nagging injury, like the sting of a nettle.

She says none of this, of course. She raises her head and looks him in the eye, as she has been taught—she can feel her Spanish mamma’s pride as she stands undaunted by this man on a horse—and wishes him a good day.

He nods at her, once, the horse shifting under him. Its flanks, she notices, are damp, its sides heaving.