The Marriage Portrait(63)

The idea seems to infiltrate her from below, like a plant drawing up water, rising through her legs, into her torso. It feels revelatory, phenomenal. She wouldn’t be surprised if she looked down and discovered she was an entirely different person.

“Leave it,” she says, pulling her hand out of Emilia’s grasp.

“But…” Emilia looks puzzled, holding the stripped hazel-twig, with which she is preparing to push down Lucrezia’s cuticles “…I was always instructed that—”

“Just attend to my hair, please.”

Emilia’s hand puts down the twig, letting it go with reluctance, and hovers over the bottle of bean-flower water.

“Shall I…?”

Lucrezia shakes her head. “Just the hair.”

She sits resolutely on the stool, blood pumping through her veins.

“And don’t put it into the scuffia. It’s too hot today for that. Plait it loosely and let it be free to hang down my back.”

Emilia looks as if she may speak, but then thinks better of it. She takes the brush and combs, and begins to divide the hair into sections.

“It is permissible for a woman to wear her hair uncovered for the first year of marriage,” Lucrezia says, lifting her chin and staring at herself in the mirror, as if daring her reflection to disagree.

“Yes, madam.”

“The Duke told me that. It is the custom in Ferrara.”

“Yes, madam.”

“We are not in Florence now.”

“No, madam.”

She shifts her glance to the serving girl in the mirror; their eyes meet briefly and Lucrezia sees that Emilia is suppressing a smile; a short giggle escapes Lucrezia.

“I don’t know what Her Highness, your mother, would say,” Emilia mutters, through a mouthful of pins.

“She’s not here.”

“True.”

Lucrezia continues to look at herself and Emilia in the mirror. “We have similar colouring,” she says, “you and I, do we not?”

Emilia shrugs. “Your Grace’s hair has more red, and is finer. Much longer, too. My father was a guard from Switzerland and my mother said I got my fair hair from him.”

“Was he a nice man?”

“I never knew him, madam.”

Lucrezia thinks about this, about the Swiss Guards and their barracks in the basement of the palazzo: broad, strapping men, they are, with pale blue eyes.

“Why is it,” Lucrezia says, fiddling with a hairpin, “I never saw you at the palazzo before my wedding day?”

Emilia seems to hesitate a moment, then resumes brushing with doubled effort. “I don’t know, madam.”

“Were you perhaps a servant elsewhere?”

Emilia looks up, surprised. “No, not at all. I was born in the palazzo. I lived there all my life.”

“So why did we never see each other before?”

Emilia brings the brush down through the hair, twice, before answering. “I used to see you, madam, quite often,” the maid speaks with care, as if choosing her words, “when you were a very little girl, but it’s likely you don’t remember. And I used to see you again, when you were bigger, from time to time. I worked in the lower floors, alongside my mother, so was not often in your presence.”

“Where does your mother work?”

“In the kitchens.”

The terseness of this reply makes Lucrezia lift her eyes from the brass pin in her fingers to the servant standing behind her in the mirror. Emilia’s beautiful, ravaged face is shuttered, deliberately blank.

“Is your mother…?” Lucrezia says tentatively.

“She died, madam.”

“Oh, I am so sorry, Emilia. I—”

“Three months past.”

“May God have mercy on her soul.”

“Thank you, madam. I…she…” Emilia frowns and bites her lip, then speaks in a rush: “My mother was particularly fond of you. When Sofia asked for me to be trained as your maidservant, she was so pleased. It made her…very happy to know I would be with you.”

“Your mother was fond of me?” Lucrezia repeats.

“Yes…she…” Emilia hesitates again, the brush aloft. “Did Sofia never say?”

“Say what?”

“My mother was…your balia. Your milk-mother. You didn’t know that?”

“I did not.” Lucrezia stares at Emilia in amazement. “I knew it was a woman in the kitchens but I was never told…I’m sorry, I had no idea. So, you were…?”

Emilia smiles at her as she gathers the mass of her hair and, with practised movements, separates it into three.

“I am, I think, two years older than you. I remember you as a young baby. I used to play with you. You were there when I…” Emilia gestures towards the scar on her face “…when I was injured.”

“How did it happen?”

“You and I were playing a game of hide-and-seek. We’d been told not to play near the fire. A boiling pot fell. It missed you by this much.” Emilia holds up a hand, finger and thumb indicating a tiny space between them. “You screamed when it happened, as if you had been the one hurt, and you hugged me very tightly. I’ve never forgotten that.”