The Marriage Portrait(78)
“Leave us,” its owner says.
* * *
When he eventually departs, walking away from her and through the chamber door, she stays for a while on the bed, looking up at the frescos, allowing them to come into focus and recede from it, as gradually she lets herself comprehend his absence, permits herself to believe that, yes, he has gone.
Then she rises and moves about the room, stepping through the neat piles Emilia has made, the packing boxes, the trunks; she gathers up her shift, her slippers, her shawl, and puts them on.
Emilia knocks gently on the door, asking if she may do anything to help prepare for the journey tomorrow, if Her Ladyship needs her. Lucrezia says that she is fine, there is nothing she wants, Emilia should go back to bed.
Emilia waits for a moment, on the other side of the door; Lucrezia can hear her breathing, and she hesitates, thinking she might pull the maid into the room, pushing the door shut behind them, and ask her if she saw, if she understood, if she, too, thought that Alfonso morphed from one person to another, before their very eyes, and what does it mean, and will it happen again? Emilia might say, yes, she saw it, too; she might soothe her and tell her that all men are thus sometimes, it signifies nothing. Lucrezia is reaching for the door handle but then she hears the maid tiptoeing down the corridor.
She fastens her attention instead on practical matters. She opens the box of her art materials; she counts the brushes, the bottles of oil; she rubs her fingers around the pearly insides of the painting shells; she touches the wrapped parcels of minerals and pigments. She checks that the marble pestle and mortar are safely padded in straw.
She doesn’t bother to open the trunks to check the gowns, the tunics, the shoes, the veils, the scarves, the jewels, the mantles, the giorneas, the collars, the belts. Emilia will see to those, folding them carefully along their seams, interleaving them with paper and cedarwood chips.
Catching sight of the mirror, she freezes, her heart leaping like a fish in her chest: for a fleeting second, she sees her sister Maria staring back at her. The high forehead, the anxiously drawn eyebrows, the slightly pouting bottom lip. Then, of course, she realises that it’s not Maria at all, she is not experiencing a visitation from the world beyond: it’s just her, Lucrezia, but seeming suddenly so much older.
He will always need to triumph, to be seen to win: she admits these words to her mind as she turns her head this way and that in the mirror, to be completely sure the reflection is her. There will never be a time or a situation in which he can readily accept defeat.
She thinks of Maria, how she lay in the bed for days, fever raging through her, her lungs filling with deadly phlegm. She thinks of how, had this not happened, had Maria not contracted the disease, it would have been Maria in this room, in this bed, in this marriage, in this mirror, not her. She, Lucrezia, might still be in the palazzo, taking the air on the battlements, visiting Sofia in the nursery, taking riding lessons with her brothers in the courtyard, learning songs on her lute, watching from the salon gallery as her parents host a pageant.
But she knows that had it not been Alfonso it would have been someone else—a prince, another duke, a nobleman from Germany or France, a second cousin from Spain. Her father would have found her an advantageous match because that is, after all, what she has been brought up for: to be married, to be used as a link in his chains of power, to produce heirs for men like Alfonso.
Her brothers, by contrast, were trained as rulers: they have been taught to fight, to argue, to debate, to negotiate, to outwit, to outmanoeuvre, to wait, to spot an advantage, to scheme and manipulate and consolidate their influence. They have been schooled in rhetoric, in narrative, in persuasion, both written and verbal. Every morning they are drilled in running, jumping, boxing, weightlifting, fencing. They have learnt to handle a sword, a dagger, a bow, a lance, a spear; they are taught how to fight on a battlefield; they have studied military tactics. They have been instructed in hand-to-hand combat, with their fists and their feet, in the event of their needing to defend themselves on a street or in a room or on a staircase. They have been taught the fastest and most efficient ways to end the life of another person—an enemy or an assailant or an undesirable.
Lucrezia is conscious that such knowledge will also occupy space in her husband’s head, that he will have undergone similar training. Like her brothers, like all rulers, Alfonso will know where resides the weakness in a human form, where to press his fingers or apply a tight grip, between which ribs a knife should be inserted, which part of the neck or spine is most frangible, which veins, if pricked, will bleed most copiously.
She looks at the reflection, which seems, in the thick, syrupy glow of the lantern, half her and half Maria, and wonders what her dead sister would have done, how she might have coped in this marriage. She cannot, no matter how hard she tries, imagine her haughty, pithy sister submitting to this life, to this man. But, then, Maria would never have stood like that, watching a thunderstorm: she would have been sitting composedly in a chair, wrapped in shawls and woven blankets, perhaps turning the pages of a religious text or creating a canvaswork hunting scene with coloured silks. She would, in this way, have made a better wife for Alfonso, would not have angered him as Lucrezia did.
Lucrezia suddenly sees that some vital part of her will not bend, will never yield. She cannot help it—it is just the way she is built. And Alfonso, possessed of such a swift and perceptive way of reading people, must have sensed this. Why else would he have become so furious with her, if not to try to break down the walls of that citadel, capture it and declare himself victor?