The Marriage Portrait(96)

Emilia, realising that she intends to go out, tries to stop her. “Your Highness, no, you mustn’t, you—”

“Let go.”

“Don’t go out there.”

“She may need help.”

“But something bad is happening and—”

“Let go, I tell you,” Lucrezia commands.

Emilia releases her grip. Lucrezia pulls back the bolt, opens the door, and steps out.

For a moment, all she can hear is the rush of her own blood. Then she is conscious of a scuffling, perhaps coming from the floor below, the clink of weapons, the scrap-tap of many feet, moving rapidly about, in and out of a doorway, up and down a corridor. There is a rumble of male voices, talking in urgent tones to each other.

Then a female voice, cracked, pleading, choked with tears: “I implore you.”

Lucrezia is about to go down the stairs, to see who this woman is, to try to help her, in whatever way she can—there must be something that can be done for the poor creature. But then she hears, quite distinctly, the woman say, “Alfonso, please.”

The name raps against Lucrezia’s head, each vowel striking a blow against her temple. Alfonso is down there? He is present? Is he trying to stop whatever is happening or is he witnessing it, perhaps even partaking in it? Lucrezia cannot believe it. She must have misheard.

The woman’s voice comes again: “Alfonso, I am begging you. Please don’t do this.”

On the floor below, a door slams, there are footsteps going down a flight of stairs. Then silence.

Lucrezia stands for a moment in the corridor, the icy breath of the castello moving about her. Then she stumbles towards her door and, ignoring the questions of her maid, pushes the bolts into their locks, one after the other.



* * *





The next day, the castello has a suspended stillness, its corridors and salons filled with a silence that presses at the walls, a pressure from within. Lucrezia doesn’t take her morning walk around the terrace; Elisabetta doesn’t send for her, requesting she come to her rooms; she doesn’t see Nunciata putting out her spaniel on the loggia for its morning air. Even the city, or the slices of it visible from Lucrezia’s high windows, seems subdued, with swirls of grey fog lingering at street corners and the edges of the piazza.

Breakfast is left outside Lucrezia’s door. The usual bowl of warmish milk, with its yellowing puckered skin on the surface and its silky, opaque texture, turns her stomach. She replaces it, undrunk, on the tray.

Emilia tiptoes around, straightening the wall hangings, wiping dust off Lucrezia’s paintings, the packets of pigment, the bottles of linseed oil. Clelia sits in an armchair by the window, sighing heavily at intervals, stitching inept petals along the edge of one of Lucrezia’s smocks.

Lucrezia sends her down to Elisabetta’s rooms with a message: Would Elisabetta care to take a turn around the terrace?

Clelia comes back saying that there was no answer at the door.

Towards the middle of this long morning, a servant from the lower floors knocks on the door to ask that the dress for the portrait be boxed up so it can be taken away, and also to deliver a message that the Duchess is to remain in her rooms today until further notice.

Lucrezia rises from her chair and goes to the door, where Clelia stands, talking to the man.

“Why am I to remain here?” Lucrezia asks. “Who sent this order?”

The servant bows low and says, “It was the request of His Grace, the Duke. He sends his regrets that he was not able to deliver this message himself but—”

“The Duke said this?” she asks. “Why?”

The servant looks panicked, unable to find a place to rest his eyes. “I…I cannot say, my lady, I was just told to…” His speech peters out, and he bows again, his face scarlet with embarrassment.

She wants to reach out and grip this man by his sleeve, to demand what he knows, what this signifies. But she tugs at the front of her bodice, mustering an appearance of calm.

“Why is the dress to be taken?” she asks him. “Where is it going?”

“To the…” the servant stammers, “Sala…the Sala dell’Aurora, where His Grace will be waiting. I believe…it is for the purpose of…Her Highness’s portrait.”

“The portrait?” She presses her lips together, mind whirring. “You are dismissed,” she tells him. “I shall bring the dress myself.”

The servant blanches. “But His Grace said that—”

“I know what he said. But, nevertheless, I am coming down.”

Inside, she tells Emilia and Clelia to prepare the gown. She watches the lid go down, sees the final flash of the plum-coloured silk, the black lattice design, which this morning seems to occupy the foreground, standing dominant over the delicate red. Then she tells Emilia and Clelia to bring the box; she walks ahead of them, head high, down to the Sala dell’Aurora.

The square room is empty, the painted faces of the deities and skies looking down on nothing. Lucrezia walks to the vacant space at the middle, estimating where the very centre might be. Just as she believes she has reached it, the door opens.

She turns and sees her husband, accompanied by three of his advisers and Leonello. There is something stern and forbidding about the five men, the way they walk in formation, as if they are carrying something heavy between them.