The Marriage Portrait(69)

She turns and regards the arrangement she has placed on a table by the window: a bowl of peaches, a pitcher of water, and a honeycomb on a green dish, sitting in a pool of its golden ooze. She tilts her head one way, then the other. The dark purple cloth is good—the way the colour sings with and against the orange of the peach skin and the gold of the honey and the way it drapes and folds. The sun is placing fingers of light over the curved rumps of the fruit. She should make haste, she realises, as the light may go, the colours change. Alfonso may return at any moment and she will need to set this aside to attend to him. She will need to grind saffron, cochineal, the heart of an iris flower, and—what else? Lucrezia steps back to the easel, where she has set up her usual planed square of tavola, her brushes, a mortar with its pestle resting on the lip, oyster shells filled with linseed oils, ready to absorb the powdered pigment.

She is about to paint over a scene she did last night, of an aquatic creature, half man, half fish, crawling up out of the shores of a river, silvered tail glistening in moonlight. She feels, not for the first time, a pulse of sadness that this image will disappear, will become just an underpainting, never to be seen by anyone other than her.

But it must be so. No one should see this. An underpainting it must be. So she will conceal it with this most innocent and appropriate still life of fruit and honey. What could be a healthier pastime for a young duchess than that?

She is about to take a length of chalk and make her first mark on the tavola—the ovoid shape of the bowl, with the echoing curves of the peaches above, will bisect the gleaming scaled tail of the mer-man—when a peculiar noise reaches her ears.

A sudden thwack, as if something heavy has hit the floor, several rooms away: a sack, perhaps, or bale of cloth, thrown down. Lucrezia listens for footsteps, walking away from whatever it was.

But there’s nothing. No sound. No footsteps. No movement at all.

Lucrezia looks at the chalk in her hand, at the undulating ripples of the river she painted late into the night, at the faded but frank eyes of Hercules on the fresco, as he raises his sword to the many-faced Hydra.

She lets the chalk stick fall from her hand; she wipes her fingers on a cloth; she walks across the salon, through the atrium, her footfalls leaping from the floor to the ceiling and back again, through a chamber with an alabaster relief of Athena emerging from a grimacing Zeus’s head, through an antechamber where a table is spread with what appears to be drying rushes, and into a corridor that leads from the central courtyard to an arched window looking out over the valley.

And, here, lying on the floor, is the body of a man.

Lucrezia blinks, then ventures forwards. A man, lying there on the tiles, as if dropped from the sky, his shirt very white against the terracotta.

“Signore?” she says hesitantly. “Can you hear me?”

She taps him with the very tip of her foot. Nothing. She crouches beside him and places a tentative hand on his shoulder. “Signore,” she says again, and shakes him gently.

He doesn’t respond but the motion turns him on to his back, and Lucrezia can see right into his face.

It is not someone she recognises. He has a crown of light brown curls; there is a capacious leather bag strung about his shoulder. His clothes and shoes are not those of a nobleman—no embroidery adorns his cuffs; no jewels encircle his fingers; the cloak spread out behind him is of a coarse weave. But, equally, he doesn’t have the aspect of a servant either: his shoes are stout but also have intriguing webs of stitching; his hands aren’t roughened by labour but have long, expressive fingers.

Where did he come from? Lucrezia looks up and down the corridor. She calls, but nobody comes. It is clear that this man has just arrived here—his clothes are dusty from the roads, his bag is laden with whatever he is carrying or delivering—but where has he come from, and why?

What is also clear to Lucrezia is that the man is gravely unwell. He is completely unconscious, sunk into an unresponsive state, his eyes rolled back in his head, the lids heavy, his jaw slack. When she touches his hand, she finds the skin is marble-cool and clammy, slippery with icy sweat. This is no fainting fit, from hot weather or lack of water: this is something quite other.

“Signore!” she says again, more sharply. She slaps his cheek, trying to rouse him, but his head lolls alarmingly to one side. His breathing, she sees, is shallow and fast.

She isn’t sure how but she somehow knows that this man, this stranger, is close to death. That he is dying, right in front of her, here, on the tiled red floor of the villa. She can feel it via the contact of her palms: his life is ebbing away; he is drifting off to a place of no return.

Panic seizes her. She shakes him, hard, by both shoulders. She inflates her lungs and shouts: “Help! Somebody, please! We need help!”

The skin on his face is turning a greyish colour, his eyes seeming to sink back into their sockets, his lips bloodless. Frantically, she loosens the ties at the neck of his shirt, hoping that this will allow more air to pass into him. Some part of her mind registers how strange it is to be handling the body of a stranger, her fingers on his throat, his clavicle, the stuttering pulse in his neck; his body is so different from Alfonso’s, which is hardened by fencing and riding and hunting and lifting weights. Alfonso is all muscle and bone under burnished brown skin. This man, or boy perhaps, is softer, the flesh more yielding, pale like distemper.

“Please,” Lucrezia whispers, into the stranger’s unconscious face, “please. Wake up.”