The Marriage Portrait(62)

She wants to ask him this, sometimes, in the middle of these nocturnal couplings, when he is shifting her into one position, then another and another, as if her body is a puzzle he needs to solve, or a tract of land he must conquer, when he is on the verge of emptying himself into her, when he clings to her as if he is drowning or choking in the warm, dry air of the chamber and she is his last hope of returning to his rightful river state. She wants to turn her face towards the shell whorl of his ear and whisper: What if I don’t survive? What if this kills me? Do you ever think of that?

If he hears her, silently mouthing such things, he is never moved to make a reply.



* * *





It is mid-morning in the villa and Lucrezia is wandering about her chamber, picking things up and putting them down: a brush, a beaded purse, a carved wooden bowl, a horn cup. She drifts to the window overlooking the courtyard, then to the one on the opposite wall, with a view to the mountains. She puts on her zimarra. Then, finding it too hot, she lets it slide to the floor.

Alfonso did not stay in her bed last night. Sometimes he falls straight to sleep afterwards, and lies there, insensible until morning, sprawled across the sheets. Other times, the act seems to make him restive, fills him with a peculiar energy; she has learnt that if she feigns sleep at this moment, he will rise from the bed carefully, put on his clothes and leave the room. Always, before he goes, he will lean over, press a light kiss to her temple. The first time he did this, she flinched from the shock, and almost reared up from the mattress; now, however, she has learnt to expect it, even to look forward to it. No one, she believes, has ever kissed her in her sleep before. She likes to place a palm over the place, after he has left the room, as if to keep it there, to stop it floating off into the air, like pollen.

Lucrezia stands at the window, gazing out over the ornamental gardens, with their mathematically angled hedges and raked paths. Beyond them is the dense forest of Alfonso’s hunting grounds; beyond that the flat plain of the valley and, far beyond, the mountains. Beyond them, she knows, is Florence, her family, the palazzo, but she will not think about them, refuses to picture them all there, without her.

She allows her eyes to focus instead on the glass of the window where, she sees, a girl is looking back at her. She has a flushed, well-slept appearance: eyes bright, cheeks pink. The shadowy crescents that have always lurked under her eyes, giving her a sleepless and watchful aspect, have vanished. Lucrezia has never considered herself to be pretty, like Isabella or Maria. She has a look of both: the heavy-lidded eyes and pronounced bottom lip. But, somehow, the arrangement of her features has never been as pleasing as theirs. The difference is subtle but there—her eyes are deeper set, her cheeks thinner, her chin narrower. She has an unsettled, pensive air; even in repose, her face harbours a look of preoccupation. This girl in the window, however, might be thought attractive. Beautiful, even.

Lucrezia turns one way, then the other. What is this change that has come over her? She no longer appears so sallow and pasty; her mother could not now pinch her cheek and say, You look as though you live under a stone.

Swift as an arrow, a thought streaks through her head, pulling a disquieting suggestion after it. Surely not. Lucrezia lifts both hands and presses them to her abdomen. Can it be that? But such a state is said to rob a woman of her beauty, not the other way round.

She is assessing her stomach, its muscular spring, wondering if it feels any different, deciding it does, then that it doesn’t, when she is startled by a knock at the door.

Immediately, she snatches her hands away from her middle. Is it him? Alfonso? Is he back to—?

She smothers the thought. Not when the sun is high in the sky, when there is work to be done, letters to answer, documents to attend to.

She clears her throat, clasping her hands in front of her, then moving them quickly behind her, then placing them on her hips. How do her hands and arms usually look? Where do they naturally fall? She cannot for the life of her remember.

“Come in,” she calls.

The door is pushed open and Emilia steps into the room. Her appearance is so welcome that Lucrezia lets out an involuntary sound of relief.

“If you please, madam,” Emilia begins, clearly confused by this reception, “His Highness asked me to come and prepare you for the day. I told him you might be sleeping but he said he has something to show you and—”

“Very well,” Lucrezia says. “Thank you, Emilia. Let us begin.”

Emilia nods, then takes a square of linen and rubs it over Lucrezia’s skin. Then she warms violet oil in her palm, massaging it into the legs, chest and back. Lucrezia submits to these ministrations in silence, lifting an arm, turning a wrist, bending at the knees, twisting her neck one way, then the other. This series of preparations always makes her think of her mother: it was she, after all, who devised them, who decreed the strict order in which they should happen, who insisted that all palazzo handmaids be taught them, so that all the daughters be turned out to their best advantage.

Lucrezia sighs. She knows, and Emilia knows, that after the violet oil must come the foot washing, then the nail cleaning, then the bean-flower water on the face, then the hair brushing. How tedious it is, all this upkeep, all this tending, as a gardener must weed a flowerbed or trim a hedge. Why must she and Emilia enact this ritual every day? Does it make that much of a difference? It occurs to her, for the first time, that she need not submit to this, if she doesn’t want to. There is no one here to check, no one here to inspect her.