The Marriage Portrait(61)
After an agonisingly long time, he seems to relent. He sits back, he takes another morsel of meat.
“I would never,” he says, as he chews, resting his head on the back of his chair, “talk to you about such matters. I wouldn’t wish to burden you with—”
“Oh, but you can. It would be far from a burden and—”
He allows a steely pause for her interruption. “It does not,” he continues, “fall within the role of a wife.”
“But it could. I am—”
“Perhaps I am not making myself clear,” he says, rising from his chair and coming to stand behind her. “It does not fall within the role of my wife, my duchess.”
“I see,” she says, trying to twist her neck so that she can see him, but he remains just out of sight, his hands resting on her shoulders.
“My wife,” he leans in close, and between each word, he presses a kiss to the skin beneath her ear, “has quite another role. And one I think she will be fulfilling very soon.”
As snow collects in a hollow, dread begins to fill her, forming great unseen drifts against her edges. She casts her eyes over the food spread across the table: roast meats, almond tarts, a milk pudding, apricots cut in half and filled with cheese, flowers fried in oil.
“Don’t you want to eat something?” she says. “Aren’t you hungry?”
“Not for food,” he murmurs. “Come. Let’s go.”
* * *
During her days at the delizia, nothing is asked of her; at night, however, a great deal is expected. She has to give and surrender herself, to hand over her being to another, to grant him access and ingress, each night, every night. He is like a man possessed, a man on a quest: to conceive an heir, to ensure the continuation of his line. He goes at the task in the same way he approaches everything, with determined concentration and focus.
He becomes, at night, in her chamber, someone quite other. He sheds the skin of the Duke—it drops off him, she believes, along with the clothes he tosses aside as he crosses the floor between doorway and bed. He likes to rip back the sheets and look at her. This she finds hard to bear—the sudden shock of night air meeting her bare skin. She must not squirm with the embarrassment, must not hide herself or shut her eyes: he doesn’t like to see her do this. He is no longer Alfonso, anyway, no longer the man who sat with her at the long table over dinner. He has changed, shifted his shape, discarded that guise. He is a creature from myth, all skin and sinew and shocking swathes of hair; he is a river god, a water monster, crawled up from the Po river that meanders along the valley floor, assuming human shape to make his way to her chamber, to her bed, sliding himself between her bedlinen, and seizing her with his webbed fingers, rubbing his scaled skin against hers, subduing her with strength gained in aquatic depths, in struggles with twisting currents, the hidden gills in his neck pulsing and pulsing, drawing in the alien air of the room.
At this point, she is permitted to shut her eyes, while he enters a state that is with her, yet not. He is there, unmistakably, overwhelmingly. And yet he is elsewhere. He is transported, his face unrecognisable, in those moments when she forgets and opens her eyes and sees the grotesque mask above her: a face of fury, of intent, of unslakable need. She is quite forgotten, she thinks. All she has to do now is wait, count down the moments. The river god is enacting his nightly ritual, seeking that mysterious and necessary relief, pursuing his urgent need for human congress, pushing and pushing, as if to make his mark within her, his skin expressing droplets of river water, which drip down on to her, as if he contains the silty depths within him, as if all he seeks is to release them into her, so that she, too, might become, like him, a water creature, a mer-girl.
She has learnt to breathe, to request her muscles not to resist, to press herself further into the mattress to find a small amount of space for herself, not to flinch at the touch of his hand or other parts of his body. She has found that Isabella is right, that it does hurt less as time goes on, that he does not like it if she makes her displeasure evident, that the act takes longer if she absents her body, if she lies there in passive stillness. He is happier, and it will be over sooner, if she mirrors his movements, his expressions, if she smiles when he smiles, if she sighs when he sighs, if she meets his eye.
She might be anyone, at these times.
But she is not anyone. She is his wife, bound unto him by the Church, by her father. She is the girl who took her dead sister’s place. She is the link between the House of Tuscany and the House of Ferrara, and will bear children who can lay claim to both provinces, both houses. This is the price to be paid for the freedom of the delizia.
She also knows that it will not always be so. They cannot remain at the delizia for ever. Soon, Alfonso will have to return to Ferrara, and she will go with him, and she will be expected to reside there, in the castello, alongside his mother and sisters. She has no idea how she will be received, how Alfonso’s family will treat her, whether they will be kind to her, or hostile, or suspicious, or whether the court itself will be a place of welcome or one of disharmony and distrust. The delizia and all its charms are just for now. Before long, their lives will be transported to Ferrara, her marriage will begin in earnest, and she will need to take up her role as duchess consort.
Soon, too, she knows that she will be with child. She may be already.
This thought resides within her, like the engraved brass button she once swallowed as a child, after a dare from Isabella and Maria, never to be seen again. She thinks of her mother, that pale body swelling and shrinking inside its garments, swelling and shrinking, over and over again, her spine weakened from the many pregnancies, the iron corset made for her by the physician, who said it was required to support Eleonora’s back. La Fecundissima. She thinks, too, of the women who do not survive the act of birth—the many cousins, aunts and wives of courtiers who drop out of sight, who are spoken of in hushed tones, who are prayed for in the chapel. Will she, Lucrezia, share this fate? Or will she be one of the fortunate, who lives through to the other side, able to watch her children grow into adults?