The Marriage Portrait(68)
His voice and his words are tender but Lucrezia knows that something else runs beneath them, an underground stream with black, corrosive intent. She feels herself shying away from his touch, as if it burns her.
“I have to remind you, however,” he continues, in the same tone, “that I do not tolerate challenges to my rule, to any of my decisions or actions. If anyone does so, I punish them. Swiftly and severely. Am I making myself clear?”
Lucrezia cannot grasp what he is saying. Who is to be punished? Is he talking about the boy? All he did was drop a box.
“Leonello,” Alfonso says smoothly, “is my representative. He is my instrument. My father selected him and trained him for one purpose: to be my consigliere. He is, if you like, the quill in my hand, the sword at my side. He speaks my words, he carries out my actions. If you question his authority, you question mine. Do you understand me now?”
“Yes,” Lucrezia gets out.
“You are young, I know, and new to this court, so naturally I forgive you this transgression. But it must be the last. You must never, ever again undermine Baldassare. Particularly in front of others. Do you hear me?”
She doesn’t trust herself to speak the words he desires—she fears that other words, ones he won’t like, will come out—so she confines herself to a single nod.
“Good.” He leans forward and kisses her on the mouth. “I am glad we are in agreement. Let us return, then, to the courtyard.”
Alfonso jerks the bridle, turning the mule back the way they came.
The boughs of the hazel tree, stirred by gentle gusts of air, make tortured, evanescent shapes against the lapis sky.
* * *
Alfonso and Leonello leave as soon as the heat of the day has passed. Lucrezia steps out into the courtyard to bid them a safe journey. Alfonso is mounted on a black stallion with high haunches and a rolling, liquid eye. Lucrezia stands well back, one hand curled around a column of the loggia.
Leonello rides the same horse he was on that morning when Lucrezia met him coming out of the forest. No hares are strung from the saddle now, but bulging leather sacks and a wineskin. She keeps her eyes averted from him.
It will take an hour or two to reach the castello, Alfonso has told her.
“Goodbye,” he calls, “goodbye, and God bless you.”
His stallion prances sideways on its shining hoofs, shifting the metal bit inside its mouth, turning towards Lucrezia, as if it needs to get a look at her, as if it has some message for her; Alfonso gives the reins an answering peremptory yank and the horse snorts, twisting its head against its tight restraint, trying to wrest control from its master. Lucrezia wishes she could tell the horse that it’s no use, that Alfonso never will let him do as he pleases. And, just as she expected, Alfonso lets out a warning tsk, shortens the reins even more so that the stallion’s head is tucked almost completely under its neck.
“Goodbye,” he calls again.
Lucrezia holds a handkerchief in her fingers, waving it back and forth in the still, humid air. The hoofs of the horses clatter and skid as they canter away from the villa gates.
* * *
He is gone for a whole day, and another, longer than she had expected. She does not know if this is a bad sign or a good one. At night, she pushes the bolt across her chamber door and sinks into an undisturbed, dreamless sleep, lying with arms extended either side of her, in a restful cruciform.
She makes enquiries about the injured serving boy, and is told that the child has a broken nose and several cracked teeth, but is making a good recovery. She asks that he be given poppy syrup and nourishing broth, to aid his healing. She sends Emilia with some coins to cover the expense.
She walks about the ornamental gardens, the flower bowers, the walkways. With her guardsman shadowing her, always, she treads between the light-shot trunks of the forest. She gathers bright petalled blooms, springy handfuls of moss, thick and veined leaves, the frilled yellow caps of mushrooms, the shed spines of porcupines. She searches the branches above her head, endlessly, for a stone marten, for she does so desperately want to see a real one, but her guardsman tells her they are rarely here any more—too many of them were taken by hunters, he says. She soaks her wrists in the cool waters of the fountains. She visits her mule every day, taking an apple, a pear, to feed her. She asks for her to be saddled, then rides her around the loggia and into the gardens. Her guardsman steps forward to lead if the terrain becomes rough, even though Lucrezia is more than capable of managing. But she does not wish to hurt his feelings so accepts his aid with a nod. She lets the mule nibble at the bushes of sage and thyme, so that when she returns it to the stables, the animal smells of a meadow, of summer.
She wears loose gowns, much like the sottane she had as a child; she discards her shoes; she leaves her hair unbound down her back for most of the day.
Instead of heavy food, like the meat and fish Alfonso favours, she orders milk puddings from the cook, fresh bread with a salted crust, figs cut open and served with soft cheese, the juice of apricots in a dainty cup.
On the third morning of Alfonso’s absence, Lucrezia is in the salon, a hempen smock over her clothing. She is shuffling along the perimeter, looking again and again at the fresco depicting the twelve labours of Hercules: the toil and sweat of the man, the way his muscles strain beneath the skin. She leans close to the wall and sees tiny brushstrokes in the grainy surface of the tempera, signs of the long-ago artist trying to wield authority over his pigments, his egg-yolk paste, his fast-drying mixtures. The indigo and the azurite he must have mixed, here, in this very room, under commission by one of Alfonso’s ancestors, have faded and softened with time; it is almost as if the colours have retreated into the wall, to hide themselves, to wait out the centuries. Lucrezia imagines them springing back, all at once, in collusion, to their original vibrancy, with some magic signal, with the utterance of some secret shibboleth. Hercules’s eyes will once again be sky-blue, his loincloth startling red, instead of faded pink, the mountains beneath his feet the green of new growth. Lucrezia leans close to the fresco and inhales its smell of dust and rust and faint decay.