The Marriage Portrait(58)

And how will she send it? There is no one here to take a letter, no courtier who would be on her side, who would take the risk of dispatching a letter of hers without taking it first to Alfonso. There are only herself and Emilia, her sole ally, whose presence is a secret that no one else must know.

The person she really wants to write to is, of course, Sofia. She wants to say: Tell me what to do, how best to face this, how do I escape, I need a plan. She wants to say: Help me, please.

Even though she is aware of the letter’s futility—she cannot send Emilia with it, for she would be seen by one of the Duke’s men—she presses ahead because she must, because there is a modicum of comfort in writing this down, in scratching a small record of what is happening, in forming letters that are bolder now, surer, in the script of the Ancient Greeks she and her siblings studied together as children, in a schoolroom under the eaves of the palazzo: I fear for my life. There is very little time. He means to kill me. She signs the letter with a single flourishing initial, L, and writes To my sister, Isabella, at the top.

Emilia takes the letter from her and sets it on the mantelpiece, just as she does with Lucrezia’s letters at the castello. As if this is a perfectly normal situation, on a perfectly normal day: a mistress writing her correspondence, which her maid will ensure is sent.

With her face averted, Emilia says she will deal with the letter later, and Lucrezia sees that she, too, knows it will never reach Florence.

With effort, Lucrezia raises herself from the chair and goes to the window, where she can watch the course of the river. She needs to think, to weigh options, to come up with a way to get herself out of here.

The river is wide here, complacent and slow, taking a curving meander around the base of the fortezza. Its surface is opaque, blistered by deep and unseen currents, its edges lapping at the banks with lassitudinous ochre tongues. It pulls along with it, snared in its current, leaves, twigs, the swollen bellies of small and drowned mammals, particles of mud; the grasses on the bank it tries to yank out and carry along, but they resist, holding firm to the soil with their long-reaching roots, their green stems supple and playful, bending with and against the currents’ wishes.

This Po is unrecognisable from the slender, quick-moving tributary of the city or the murmuring shallow waters near the delizia. Impossible to believe it is the same one, that what she sees here, below this window, will pass through the channels of Ferrara and the villa, and will go on, towards the coast, where it will become erased, swallowed by the mighty, all-powerful sea.

Lucrezia is back on the bed, lying propped on the pillow, her eyes shut, when there comes the sound of horses moving over the drawbridge.

“Who is that now?” Lucrezia says, trying not to listen to the hopeful whispers telling her: palazzo soldiers, her father’s guardsmen, here to rescue her. Impossible that news of her situation has reached her father’s ears, of course, but still her heart beats hard against her bones as she imagines Isabella magically receiving her Greek pleas—which remain on the mantelpiece—raising the alarm, and her father dispatching a whole regiment to come to her defence.

Emilia puts down the stocking she is darning and stands to peer out of the narrow window. “Oh,” she says, “it’s only…them. Finally.”

“Who?”

“You know…” She circles her hand in the air. “What’s his name, the artist?”

“What?” Lucrezia lifts her head, wondering if she’s heard correctly.

“Yes, him, you know,” Emilia says, uninterested, moving back towards her sewing, “the one I came with.”

Lucrezia tries to assimilate this information. “Do you mean Sebastiano Filippi?”

“Who?”

“Il Bastianino?”

“That’s him. He—”

“You came here with Il Bastianino? The painter?”

Emilia nods, wetting the end of the thread on her tongue, then poking it through the needle’s end. “I told you that,” she says.

“When?” Lucrezia demands. “When did you tell me?”

“Earlier, when you were in bed. I said that Baldassare left court, with a small group, but he refused to let me join them. And then that Il Bastianino fellow turned up at the castello unannounced, with your portrait, but no one was there to receive him because, naturally, the Duke was here, and Baldassare on his way. And then—”

“Just a moment,” Lucrezia says, holding up her hand, struggling to follow this account. “How do you know all this?”

Emilia shrugs, as if the answer is obvious. “Because I was in the courtyard, of course, trying to persuade one of the grooms to let me have a horse, so I could come after you. When I realised he was intending to find the Duke—and you, of course—I intercepted him. Il Bastianino, that is. I told him I knew where the Duke was, and where you were. At some fortezza out in the middle of nowhere beyond a village called Bondeno.”

“How on earth did you find that out? I didn’t even know where—”

Emilia bites off her thread with sharp teeth. “I eavesdropped on Baldassare when he was telling the secretaries. I said to Il Bastianino that if he was so desperate to see the Duke, and to give him the finished portrait, he could take me with him. And if he agreed to that, in return I would tell him where to find you all. To tell you the truth,” Emilia adds, “I think he is after money—his payment for the work of the portrait. I have a feeling that he is—”