The Marriage Portrait(88)
She cleans the brushes with a rag; she tidies the desk; she props the now-blank tavola against a vase to dry; she extinguishes the candle and, after ensuring that all traces have been eliminated, returns to bed.
* * *
Alfonso’s routine at the castello is obscure to her; she knows only that he is much busier here than he was at the delizia. He rises early, for exercise, usually accompanied by Leonello and two or three other young men. They ride in the hunting ground outside the city walls or fence together in the courtyard. He then goes to his offices, to read his correspondence, to write letters and directives, to hear pleas and commissions, to give orders to his guards and secretaries and officials and advisers and politicians and architects and cardinals and councillors, to work tirelessly and determinedly at bringing the region under his control. Emissaries, courtiers, military personnel and ambassadors arrive and depart all day long. He often takes his midday meal there, if he is particularly busy. Emilia reports on what she has heard, via his under-secretaries, who talk to the grooms, who in turn talk to the guards, who talk to the kitchen servants, who then talk to the maids: that Alfonso has stationed spies in all parts of his region, and also in neighbouring ones, that the province is reasonably peaceful but the court itself is another matter.
Lucrezia can pass a whole day without seeing him, beyond a brief glimpse as he crosses the courtyard, with a stern and preoccupied air, flanked by officials, or a wave from him to her, as she takes the air on the loggia and he rides in through the gates on an exhausted horse, or a hasty farewell in the morning as he leaves her bedchamber.
He visits the chapel on the lower floors once a day, he has told her, not so much for Mass or confession, but to sit at the back to hear the choral master put the evirati through their practice. This master, he said to Lucrezia, is one of the best in the world: an Austrian sent from Vienna, who insists on a strict two hours every morning devoted to vocal exercises and harmonic improvisations. In the afternoon, they rehearse musical performances, to be presented at court gatherings, according to Alfonso’s wishes. Alfonso tells Lucrezia that he likes to sit there and listen; it clears his head, he says, lulls his mind. If ever he has to make a difficult decision, regarding policy or finance or family, he finds that being in the chapel during their practice helps him reach a solution.
After four or five days at the castello, Lucrezia realises that what she will have here is long periods of liberty. She cannot believe it. The days offer so many hours in which she might do as she wishes. She can sit at her desk and sketch what she sees from her window or inside her head or whatever items she has arranged beside her—a globe, a leather glove, a telescope, a dead pigeon from the kitchens, the skeleton of a squirrel that she found near the delizia—and consider how best to transpose them to paint and canvas. She can dispatch Emilia to the apothecary to purchase a certain weight of cochineal or verdigris; the maid returns with waxed paper twists filled with pigments, tightly wrapped conical parcels from which spill the ingredients for a rainbow, for bears and beasts and rain and leaves and hair and flesh, for anything in the world, if only she is able to find the exact mix, the perfect brushstroke. She can take the private stairs down to the ducal apartment and make use of the orange-tree terrace, where she can gaze out at the city streets through the diamond-shaped openings in the walls. Everything feels, during the first week in Ferrara, attainable and possible. There is something about these days spent within the castello that fills her with a molten sense of potential: she might do anything, paint anything. All she needs to do is put out her hand and grasp what she wants.
Alfonso’s sisters, however, have other plans for her. After several days in which Lucrezia shuts herself into her rooms, intent on experimenting with miniature bird’s-eye perspectives of different buildings—the delizia, the palazzo—Elisabetta begins to send for her, most mornings. Her rooms are draped in deepest pink, like the interior of a soft fruit, and Lucrezia is obliged to sit and watch while her sister-in-law finishes her hair or covers her face and hands in a beautifying paste, as she consults with her ladies-in-waiting about this gown or that letter or this recital or an upcoming festa.
She will then link her arm through Lucrezia’s and they will walk together along one side of the castello, one room opening into another, down a staircase or up to the private loggia. Elisabetta might beg Lucrezia to pick some of the orange blossoms that grow on the terrace in the ducal apartments.
“These blooms,” she will say, when Lucrezia brings her a basket of them, “are so good for brightening the skin. Not,” she will add with a smile, “that you need it, dearest.”
She asks Lucrezia about her childhood, about her brothers and sisters, about the city of Florence, where Elisabetta has never been but has heard much of its charms and its exquisite buildings. She listens carefully to Lucrezia’s answers, and remembers the details of her family, their names, ages and predilections.
“Perhaps,” Lucrezia ventures, because it becomes rude not to, “you will go there one day.”
Elisabetta’s mouth turns up into a smile. “I should like that very much.”
Lucrezia tries to picture Elisabetta in her parents’ palazzo: her narrow dresses sweeping the tiled floors, her observant eyes gazing upon the gilt ceilings, the crackle of her ruff-lace as she turns her head this way and that, her modulated tones conversing with Isabella, with Eleonora. She cannot picture it and she wonders, with a stab of unease, if Nunciata would insist on coming, too, and how she would cast her eyes critically over her parents’ opulent frescos and statues, how she would wince at the noise of the musicians as they played rousing tunes to accompany the acrobats. She hates the idea of Nunciata telling her ladies what a garish place the Florentine court is. The thought of Nunciata and her snappish spaniel there makes her, for the first time, feel protective of her parents, of the world they have built around themselves.