The Marriage Portrait(95)

When Lucrezia glances back at them from her saddle, they look like ancient sylvan spirits, faces tinged green by the ever-moving leaves of the forest.



* * *





Unable to sleep one night, Lucrezia parts the curtains, rises from her bed, walks about her chamber, and into her salon. She passes the closet where Emilia is sleeping, closed in. She draws back the bolt on the door and leans out into the stairwell.

It is not quite midnight, she estimates. The castello feels active still, albeit in a minor way. There is a distant sound of footsteps receding from her; perhaps a servant, summoned late to a chamber. There are hushed voices out in the courtyard.

She feels the sensation she has had all her life, for as long as she can remember: a draw towards exploration, towards movement. She thinks for a moment, then pulls her head back inside the door. She walks backwards, several paces, then eases open the door to Emilia’s bed. The maid is lying on her front, face pressed to the rush matting, an arm curved about herself.

Lucrezia lifts from the floor next to her bed a brown dress, a linen apron, a cap.

She pulls the dress over her head—not too small, not too big, just a little loose around the shoulders—then the apron. She settles the cap on her hair; it is a capacious coif, shaped like a fleur-de-lis; it can be pulled right over the face, obscuring the wearer’s features.

Silently, carefully, she steps out into the stairs, the clothes of the maid chafing her ankles. She is careful to walk quickly, her head bowed, her hands clasped in front of her. She is a maid; she wears coarse cloth next to her skin; she has an explanation ready, should anyone ask. Her mistress, unable to sleep, asked her to fetch some milk and honey from the kitchen.

Milk and honey, milk and honey. Lucrezia incants these words to herself as she walks down the stairs, along a corridor, past a row of windows that look out over the moat, its surface glazed with ice. She passes two guards, one of whom says something ribald, which makes the other laugh. She passes another maid, an older woman, who is staggering under the weight of a bowl of water, above which shivers a veil of steam. She grunts at Lucrezia in acknowledgement but doesn’t stop.

Lucrezia walks all the way from one tower to the next. She walks in the opposite direction, then goes down a floor, and then another. She hears the spaniel yapping behind a door, and Nunciata crooning to it, giving it morsels from her plate. She walks past three courtiers jealously discussing a posting, and why that man was favoured over them. She sees the woman who wears birds in her hair leaving the chamber of an equerry in the early hours, her gown awry, her feet bare.

None of them looks at her beyond a brief glance. It is the perfect disguise. What liberty she gains by casting off her identity, by donning Emilia’s clothes, what fortuities are hers! She can go anywhere, be party to anything. These people do not see servants, do not recognise them as vessels of judgement or emotion. A maid in a brown dress might as well be a table or a sconce on the wall. She has access suddenly to the private, hidden life of the castello, the wrong side of its embroidery, with all the knots and weave and secrets on display.

She returns to her room, after an hour or so, breathless, invigorated, her skin tingling, her mind fed and soothed, all at the same time. She will replace Emilia’s clothes and return to bed, withdrawing into that private space, to think about all she has seen.



* * *





She is sleeping, however, on the night she hears the terrible noise—she is not conscious of having fallen asleep but she must have because suddenly she is lurching out of a dream, like a drowning person from water. She finds herself not circling the walkway in Florence, as she had thought she was, but crouched in a dark, cold place. For a moment, she cannot tell where she is, so profound is the blackness. She gropes around. Is Alfonso in the bed? Is he in the room? But she encounters space, a blanket edge, then the brush of the bed curtains.

What was it that woke her? Lucrezia twists her head, one way then the other, trying to ascertain what she had heard and if it was real.

The answer arrives in the form of a noise: a scream, high-pitched, desperate, torn from the depths of a person’s very soul. It stabs through the castello’s night-time silence, again and again, razoring the air, dragging sharp, serrated teeth against Lucrezia’s ears.

Whatever could have happened? She lurches from the bed, through the curtains, through the chamber door. In the darkness of the salon, she encounters Emilia, blundering towards her, hair tangled, face contorted with fear.

“Did you hear that?” Emilia says.

“I did.”

“What was it?”

The two girls grip each other by the arms. The maid is trembling, a hand held to her chest, as if to still her heart.

The scream comes again, louder this time, and with words attached: “No, no, no!”

It is a woman, frantic with distress. Lucrezia moves towards the door, Emilia clutching her hand.

“Please,” the woman is sobbing, “please, no!”

Lucrezia presses her ear to the wooden panels of the door.

“Who is it?” Emilia whispers.

“I don’t know.”

“What should we do? Should we call the guards? Should we—?”

“Ssh,” Lucrezia urges, still listening.

The woman, whoever she is, is asking for mercy, saying stop, please stop.

Lucrezia’s fingers find the bolt and slide it back.