The Marriage Portrait(94)

He meant “beautiful” all along. She is certain of it.

By the time her attention returns to the room, Alfonso has left. Clelia and Emilia sit on a window seat, the latter stitching at something white with a blue trim, the former making apathetic stabs of a needle into what looks to Lucrezia like the embroidered rose, once Isabella’s, once hers, now Clelia’s. Il Bastianino has lapsed into silence, concentrating on his canvas, on his paints and perspectives. And Jacopo is sometimes drawing and sometimes writing on a large board that he holds balanced between his waist and his arm. He works, Lucrezia sees, with his left hand, glancing up at her, then down.

At one point, he comes right up to where she is sitting and looks, she thinks, at the fall of the gown over the knee, the way it peaks, then cascades towards the hem. She wants to say this to him, to ask: Is it the folds of cloth you are studying, the variation of colour, the way the pattern is interrupted by a pleat and then resumes in a different place? Do you hate this pattern? Because I do. It makes me feel confined, as if its symmetry and curlicues imprison me. Do you see that, do you? I am sure you do, though I cannot exactly say how I know this. I just do.

She watches him as he stands there, right by her, the paint ingrained in the skin of his right hand, the hemispheres of colour under his nails, like separated bands of a rainbow, the ever-moving left hand, curled backwards around the stylus, the way he presses the tip of his tongue to the corner of his mouth when he is thinking. That tongue intrigues her, the human instrument, which, with him, lies dormant, unused. How like any other tongue it looks. You would never know, from its pink and speckled appearance, that it was in any way different from—

Jacopo goes to rub at something on his page, fumbles, and the stylus drops to the floor. A tink-tink-thud as it bounces off the hexagonal tiles, first one end, then the other, and comes to rest by her foot.

And her ears, always sharp, always alert, pick up something else. Jacopo murmurs, quite distinctly, in self-castigation, in a language she knows, a dialect she grew up hearing, in the palazzo nursery, from the mouths of her Neapolitan nurses: “Clumsy idiot.”

He kneels, still holding his board, without looking at her, and searches on the floor for his stylus.

Lucrezia glances around her. Her maids are right at the other end of the room, Clelia yawning, Emilia bent over her darning. Il Bastianino is behind his easel. The guards are by the door, propped against the wall, faces glazed with boredom.

Lucrezia takes a light inhalation. “You are from Naples?” she whispers, barely enunciating, her lips almost static, in the same dialect.

Jacopo’s head jerks up. She had forgotten the shifting maritime blue-green of his eyes, the sharp angles of his face, features cut from marble.

“I am,” he says, in a tone so quiet it is as if he breathes the words, rather than speaks them. “I was. How do you—?” He breaks off, sending a swift look over his shoulder.

Lucrezia shifts her foot sideways, an incremental movement, and presses her toe down on the stylus, which she then pulls in beneath her skirts. Jacopo sees this and, after a moment’s hesitation, he continues the pretence of looking.

“My nurse,” she whispers, by way of explanation. “So you speak only this dialect?”

Jacopo casts about on the floor, his hands sweeping semicircles on the tiles. “I can speak like them, more or less,” he tips his head towards Il Bastianino, “should I choose to. But,” he looks up at her and, for a moment, she recalls the feel of his weakening pulse under her fingers, the struggling rasp of his breath, “I do not choose to.”

“How is it possible,” Lucrezia begins, “that—”

She is interrupted by Il Bastianino, calling, “Jacopo? Whatever is the matter? Why are you grovelling on the floor like that?”

Lucrezia lifts her toe off the stylus; Jacopo’s hand disappears in a flash under her hem, then emerges, holding it between two fingers. The moment is over, their chance to speak gone; their final words have been said.

Jacopo, however, as he moves from crouching to standing, breathes into the air near her, in Sofia’s language: “I shall never forget that you saved my life.”

Then he leaves, walking away, down the long room. She watches, observing the spring of his gait, the way one foot seems to turn in slightly. Tucked under his arm is a board filled with images of her wrists, her neck, the plane of her cheek, the socket of her eye. He has them, has taken possession of them: he will keep them safe, will ensure no harm comes to them. This thought makes a small, spreading warmth percolate through her.



* * *





Lucrezia rides out with Elisabetta and their guards, along the straight road leading from the castello to the city walls, and out to the hunting grounds. The first frost of the year has encased each branch, each blade of grass, the bolts and handles of the castello door as they depart. The air carries an iron-like chill that hints at winter’s arrival. The forest seems unusually still, as if silenced by the cold. Lucrezia urges her horse to a canter: she wants to feel the world reel by, wants the bright gaps between the trees to meld into one entity.

Elisabetta, in a fur-lined riding cloak and feathered cap, allows her horse to fall back; Contrari rides beside her, his reins held in one sure hand. They will converse like that, heads inclined towards each other, for hours.

There is something in the way they are that brings Cosimo and Eleonora to Lucrezia’s mind. The way Contrari hooks his finger into Elisabetta’s sleeve. The tenderness in his eyes when he looks at her, the way a love like this can render a man of great physical strength to gentleness. The way Elisabetta seems to know before Contrari speaks that he is about to say something; she is able to intuit what he will utter. Lucrezia sees all this, and it is familiar to her; it fills her with a longing to have such a connection with someone; she would like someone to look at her as if she were a rare and valued thing, to wear absurdly in their hat band a sprig of holly she gave them, to ask what is her opinion of this or that.