The Marriage Portrait(66)
“So you wish me to remain here?”
“You will be quite safe. I am taking Leo but everyone else stays. You will have all the guards, and the servants, the padre, and…”
He steers her around a corner, then removes his hands, placing them instead on her waist.
She blinks. The light is brighter than ever, beating down on their heads.
Before her is the shape of something, its outline pulsing against the light, its shadow hinging away from it on the ground. A beast of some sort—an enormous dog. No, a horse. What is it?
She holds up a hand to shade her face. There, tied to a hazel tree, is an animal like a horse, but smaller, with a graceful, sloping head and a long, whisking tail. It is pure white, from the long mane that drapes over its neck, down to the smooth fetlocks. Strapped around its middle is a red leather side-saddle, embossed in gilt, with gold bells on its fringes.
“This is…for me?” she whispers.
“For you,” Alfonso says, embracing her from behind, his chin resting on her head. “She is a rare creature, this. Half horse, half donkey. She was bred by a farmer near here. A white mule. They come along perhaps once every hundred years or so. As soon as I heard about it, I arranged to buy it. And I want you to have it, my gift to you.”
Without further discourse, he lifts her from the ground, his hands encircling her waist, and carries her from the loggia step towards the mule, placing her on the red saddle.
“There,” he says, lifting her leg so that it fits over the support, adjusting the stirrup so that her foot rests comfortably in it. “And there.” He puts the slender red-and-gold reins into her hand. Then he seizes the bridle and clicks his tongue. The mule moves forward, startling into life.
They make their way around the lower courtyard, around the hazel tree, flickering in and out of the shadows cast by the villa’s roof. The mule’s rhythm is steady and lulling; she lifts her legs high, with the graceful gait of a dancer. Lucrezia grips the reins, straightens her back, allowing her spine to sway with the beast’s steps. She smooths the white velvet of the mule’s flank with her palms, leans out to watch the pale hoofs pick their delicate way over the earth.
Alfonso leads her one way, then the other. They pass Leonello and the emissary, who fall silent as they approach. The emissary gives a low bow as Lucrezia rides by, the embossed saddle squeaking, the little bells jingling. Alfonso is talking about the mule and how she will be stabled with the horses, that horses are calmed by the presence of a mule, and Lucrezia may order her to be saddled whenever she likes.
Lucrezia watches the back of her husband’s head as he walks beside the beast, the movement of his shoulders beneath his shirt, his loose and assured grip on the bridle, the way he pats the mule’s milk-white neck and lowers his face to kiss the soft nose.
They are conversing like any husband and wife. He is talking about how she has a good seat on the animal; she is replying that she was given riding lessons as a child, on a pony, by the groomsmen in the palazzo, that her father considered it part of their education. Alfonso is saying, that was very sensible, and he will do the same with his own children, get them riding from a young age. Lucrezia feels a blush fire her cheeks, and Alfonso, glancing back at her, seems to decide to raise his stakes by adding that the mule will be ideal for her when she is with child. He would not have the woman carrying his heir up on a horse—what man in his right mind would?—but a mule would provide appropriate exercise, gentle and not too excitable.
He is running his hand over the mule’s mane as he says this. She notices, irrelevantly, that he has an ink stain on his wrist, and another on his index finger. She is trying to keep her thoughts away from heirs and their riding lessons, from the idea of this mule being bought in preparation for her pregnancies. She watches him insert his thumb beneath the bridle straps, as if to check it isn’t chafing.
A man who cares about the comfort of a mere beast could not possibly threaten to have his mother and sisters captured and whipped. It is unthinkable.
She wants to ask him about the problem he is facing, whether it is true that his mother is disobeying his orders and returning to France without his permission, what he will do to prevent it, and will his sisters really leave his court and pledge allegiance to another. She wants to suggest that he might try requesting that his mother stay, telling her he would miss her and his sisters if they left. Have you, she wants to ask him, tried kindness instead of commands? It would, she knows, be a scandal for him if they were to leave court when he has ordered them to remain: she has witnessed her father and his advisers talk in derisive tones about men who fail to wield power over their families or their wives. What kind of authority can a man have over a province if he cannot keep his women in check? It gives a fatal impression of weakness to one’s enemies, who are always watching. She has heard her father say this. Much can be gleaned from the way a man resolves family problems: this mantra has been repeated to her, by her mother, by Sofia, by various courtiers, with a hint of pride, for Lucrezia’s father stood for no disloyalty or rebellion, within either his house or his province. She is sure Alfonso is the same.
What will Alfonso do? How will he stop his mother and sisters leaving? Does he really expect his orders to take precedence over those of the Pope? She feels these words jostling inside her, fighting to get out into the air, in whatever order they can manage.
“Very soon,” he is saying, as he steers the mule away from the loggia, towards the open gates, and it is unthinkable to her how he can appear so composed and unruffled, “work on your portrait will begin. Preliminary sketches and so forth.”