The Marriage Portrait(99)

Something has happened, she says to them, over and over again. I know it has.

Emilia avoids her eye, focusing instead on the broth, the fetching of blankets, the building-up of the fire.

I know, is all Lucrezia can say to them.

How can she know? Clelia mutters to Emilia.

Don’t think about it now, Emilia tells her, patting Lucrezia’s arm. Don’t think about anything.

But when Clelia leaves to order water from the kitchens, so that they may bathe her, Lucrezia turns to Emilia, she grips her by the shoulder, she makes her sit down next to her, and she says: Tell me what has happened. I know you know.

Emilia begs, No, do not ask. It is better you don’t dwell on it.

Lucrezia says, Tell me.

Emilia suggests they play a game of cards or that Lucrezia does some drawing. Would her mistress like her to bring some paper?

Lucrezia says: Emilia, your mother nursed me, we are milk-sisters, you and I. You have known me longer than I have known myself. We have come a long way together. Please tell me.

Emilia touches the scar on her face, with first one finger, then another; she lowers her eyes; she speaks falteringly. She heard, she tells Lucrezia, from a kitchen maid who heard it from a man who serves in the Duke’s office that His Grace, the Duke, discovered that Ercole Contrari had—and here Emilia hesitates, choosing her words—had compromised the honour of the Duke’s sister the Lady Elisabetta. The Duke had condemned Contrari, head of the guardsmen, to death.

Here Emilia’s story stops, with what Lucrezia immediately sees as an inconclusive suddenness.

Go on, she says.

No, Emilia whispers, shaking her head.

Yes, Lucrezia says. Tell me.

So, Emilia says, her voice wavering, because the Lady Elisabetta showed no remorse, and refused to condemn Contrari, saying that she loved him and that he loved her, the Duke ordered—Emilia pauses, swallows—he ordered that Contrari be strangled to death and the Lady Elisabetta be forced to watch.

Lucrezia listens to every word, to the separate sound of each, their syllables, the gaps between them. She runs them through her head, sentence by sentence. She picks over them, with care, with her full attention, so that she is sure of their meaning, their significance, so that she completely comprehends what Emilia is saying.

And, Lucrezia begins, while unsure of what she means to ask, but she hears her voice continue without her knowledge or consent, this has…been done?

Emilia nods. The Duke ordered two of Contrari’s men to do it. This afternoon, in the Salone dei Giochi. But they…could not. So Baldassare did it.

Baldassare? Lucrezia repeats. Leonello Baldassare?

Yes.

And Lady Elisabetta…?

She was there.

My husband?

He was watching. He commanded the guards to hold her fast, so that she could not get away.

Lucrezia makes herself speak. She bids her mouth and tongue to make sounds. She tells Emilia and Clelia, who has arrived back, that she has changed her mind about bathing; she wishes to be alone, please.

They leave, Emilia backing out of the door, then closing it behind her.

Lucrezia stands in her salon, watching the curlicues of steam write themselves on the air above the basins of hot water, brought up from the kitchens by Clelia. They twist and writhe, like serpents responding to pipe music, finding their way to the windows, their shed skins adhering to the cold panes. In the space of a moment, the views down on to the piazza are obscured, and Lucrezia is no longer standing in a tower room but in a box, shuttered off from the world.

Then she walks quickly through the steam, to the chamber, where she dons her mantle and shoes. She fastens a cloak around her neck, pulling the hood up over her head. Then she goes through the door and out into the corridor.

She moves quickly over the brick floor, gripping the edge of the hood to keep it from falling back, stepping from one circle of brazier-light to the next, a dusky-winged moth. When she hears voices in a corridor perpendicular to the one she is in, she takes a sidestep into an alcove, flattening herself to the wall.

Tasso the poet is coming along, with a woman beside him; Lucrezia recognises her as one of Nunciata’s ladies-in-waiting. She hangs off his arm, her shawl sweeping the floor; he looks lugubrious, downcast, almost indifferent to the presence of his companion.

“…he has summoned the physician,” the woman is saying, peering up into Tasso’s face, “but she will not see him.”

“It is a terrible situation,” Tasso says, in his rumbling voice. “Tragic, grim.”

“Let us make haste,” the woman says, shivering, looking over her shoulder. “Come. It feels wrong to be walking about on a night like this.”

They disappear around a corner and Lucrezia steps out. She has an instinctive dislike of that woman but, at the same time, knows what she means. The castello has a strange feel tonight: the air that fills its rooms and passageways seems malodorous and heavy, as if weighted down with all that has taken place within it. There is an unnatural quiet, which is broken at odd intervals with strange noises, some muffled and mysterious, others amplified by distance. Lucrezia’s footfalls, as she descends a staircase, seem to ricochet off the walls, their tap-tap-a-tap splintered and distorted into a monstrous beat, which sends needles of alarm into her chest.

She hurries, almost runs, along the lower floor. If Alfonso were to see her, if Baldassare or any of his men were to cross her path, if Alfonso goes to her chamber and finds it empty—then what? She has no idea.