His Last Duchess Read online

  He pushed back the bedcovers and walked across the chill brick floor to the window. The villetta overlooked flat fields, ditch-edged, fringed with regiments of rushes. Regiments, Alfonso thought sourly. An apt image. It seemed to him now that inside his embattled head, his thoughts were continually pushing their relentless way forward like massed legions. Knock one down, defeat another and infinite numbers of replacements would mobilize and continue the onslaught.

  “What’s the matter?” Francesca said.

  Alfonso did not reply.

  “What is it? Did I not please you today?”

  He turned back into the room.

  “You seemed content enough just now,” Francesca said. She rubbed her still chafed and reddened wrists somewhat ruefully.

  “It is nothing you have done.”

  Alfonso knew that Francesca would not question him, but he could see that she was stifling her curiosity. The great mass of unspoken truths lay heavy in his chest and the need to unburden himself swelled up into his throat like rising nausea.

  “Lucrezia,” he said at last.

  The four syllables hung in the air. Alfonso sensed Francesca stiffening. She said nothing, but sat up and raised both arms to her hair, which she piled on top of her head. Alfonso watched, holding his breath, as her breasts quivered with the movements of her fingers. Holding her hair with one hand, she reached out to the table next to her pillow and picked up a long ivory pin, which she pushed through the pile. She lowered her arms, her eyes fixed upon Alfonso’s face. He breathed out slowly, trying to decide which of the myriad unpalatable truths he could bear to reveal.

  “She is…indiscriminate,” he said at last.

  “Other men?” Francesca said, sounding astonished.

  He shook his head. “You misunderstand me. She is—is a gracious consort, and many of my guests continue to congratulate me on my good fortune in obtaining a wife as beautiful and charming as Lucrezia. But…”

  The horrible truths were jostling for release, like flotsam building up behind a dam. For it was, Alfonso thought, not only in his bed that Lucrezia humiliated him so effectively. No, it was far more than that—her eviscerating influence upon him had become increasingly insidious and wide-ranging. She still seemed to have no sense of the signal eminence of the position he had bestowed upon her with their marriage. No, that was not right, it was not that she was unaware…

  “Do you know what she said to me the other day?” he said.

  ***

  Lucrezia looks at him, perplexed, and irritation tightens around his throat like a garrotte.

  “It can hardly be difficult to understand,” he says. “You have married into a family considerably older and more prestigious even than that into which you were born.”

  “I know.” She sounds suspicious.

  “Do you not think,” he says, “that, given the position in society into which you have now been placed, a certain sobriety of disposition might be seen as appropriate?”

  She frowns. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “It is…” Alfonso searches for the apposite word “…it is—to say the least—unfortunate for the Duchess of Ferrara to be seen about the Castello by all and sundry, behaving little better than a street urchin.”

  “I still don’t know what you mean.” Her voice is a little louder this time.

  “You were begging food from the head cook in the kitchens again the other day, were you not? And this morning I find you doubled over with laughter in the central courtyard in the company of one of the stewards.”

  “He’s very funny.”

  “He is a servant, Lucrezia!”

  ***

  “Do you know what she said? Hear this, Francesca, this is my duchess! The most prestigious woman in the House of Este! ‘Surely,’ she says to me, ‘surely, if a person is funny, or clever, or in any other way talented, they should be valued as such, whatever place in society God has chosen for them?’”

  Francesca said nothing.

  Alfonso continued. “She is pleased by everything! And everyone.”

  Francesca frowned. “What’s wrong with that? I don’t understand. Is that not good?”

  “It could be seen to be so, I suppose, but my duchess seems as pleased by the simplest and least worthy gift she is offered by a transient guest, by a smile from a kitchen drudge, by her elderly and foul-smelling mule as she is by the honour of my lasting gift of a place in the ancient Este lineage. It’s—it’s—” He stuttered in frustration. “It’s…humiliating.”

  “Have you told her how you feel?”

  “As best I can,” he said.

  “Perhaps the situation will improve when…” Francesca hesitated “…when she produces an heir. Perhaps she will rethink her position then.”

  Alfonso winced. “Yes. Well. She has not managed to fulfil that task as yet,” he said sourly. Inwardly he cringed at his words, knowing how unjust he was being in reapportioning the blame, merely to ease his own sense of shameful culpability.

  Francesca said nothing. She sighed and Alfonso wondered if she was thinking of her daughters. The two bastard children he never could, or would, acknowledge. They were beautiful, though, he thought. Beautiful, wilful, clever little sluts—just like their mother.

  “What will you do?” Francesca said, at last.

  “Nothing. As I say, I do not care to make her change her ways. I need her to understand and appreciate her position without my intervention. If I have told her what she should think, there can be no merit in her thoughts.”

  Alfonso was surprised to see a scowl on Francesca’s normally passive face, but he realised almost at once that it was a reflection of what she saw on his own countenance, for when he deliberately relaxed and softened his own expression, he saw the sulky lines vanish from her brow.

  Crossing to the untidy pile of his clothes, Alfonso picked up his shirt and pulled it over his head.

  Francesca sat up. “Don’t go yet, Alfonso,” she said. “Perhaps before you leave—if you have time—I can…” The triangular tip of a pink tongue moistened her lips. “I can…raise your spirits a little.”

  Alfonso checked to see how high the sun had climbed, and decided he might linger another hour before his presence would be required back at the Castello. Francesca came to where he stood and crouched on her heels in front of him, her hands on his hips. Alfonso closed his eyes and pushed his fingers into her hair as she bent forward.

  ***

  A little later, Francesca knelt up on the bed and watched through the window as Alfonso swung his mare round and clattered away on the road to the city, then she lay back down and ran her palms over her face. She screwed her eyes shut and gently kneaded her jaw with her fingers, easing out the stiffness, then ran her tongue over her lips, which felt swollen and hot. She lay quite still for several moments, the faint draught from the window raising the hairs on her arms, legs and belly.

  At least he had left in a better mood.

  “One quick suck and he’s smiling again,” she muttered aloud, remembering the first time she had ever been asked to perform that particular trick. On her first evening as a whore.

  ***

  She is seventeen years old, newly arrived from Crespino, standing outside a tavern near the cathedral: penniless, hungry, warily anxious, but nonetheless happy to have escaped the prospect of replacing her late mother as the preferred target for the undisciplined fists of her frequently drink-sodden father.

  “God, you’re beautiful, mignotta! What a mouth! How much would you want…just for a…?” the man says, pushing his tongue into his cheek and waggling it back and forth. He glances meaningfully at his breeches, then strokes her hair, cupping her chin in his hand. He is young, fair-haired, slack-jawed and smells strongly of grappa.

  She has been expecting something like this for days. The idea frightens her, but from the moment of her arrival in Ferrara, she has presumed that whoring will be her probable source of income. Feeling sick, she suggests a price, trying to
sound unconcerned, experienced. He puffs out his cheeks in surprise, but then he nods, jerks his head away from the tavern and mutters, “Well, come on, then…” Taking her wrist, he leads her to a dark alcove beside the furthest of the little covered shops that nestle in under the long protective side wall of the great cathedral.

  And then she is on her knees in the mud and his iron fingers are gripping her shoulders; she grabs fistfuls of his doublet to steady herself. He puts a hand behind her head, beginning to enjoy himself, and in the next few blind moments of gagging panic, she is afraid he will choke her.

  ***

  Francesca rolled onto her stomach on the big bed in the villetta, the never-forgotten nausea of it thick in her throat again. She remembered the fair-haired man finally groaning, releasing his grip and jerking away from her; remembered falling onto all fours, retching into the dirt, remembered the final humiliation.

  ***

  “Well,” he says, “you certainly rate yourself a lot more highly than you deliver, stronza. I wouldn’t suggest you ask for a fee like that again.”

  Flipping a couple of small silver coins onto the ground in front of her, he walks away, whistling and refastening his laces as he goes.

  Shaking with relief, burning with anger, she watches him go. “Never again,” she says, spitting the last of him into the dirt. “Never again will I do anything like that—without making damned sure I have my money in advance.”

  ***

  “Come on, then, puttana,” Francesca muttered to herself. “Stop all this. It’s time to get up.”

  Sighing, she padded across the room and picked up her lawn shift from the floor; she pulled it on and ran her hands down her front, smoothing out the creases. Her bodice and skirt she put on with practised ease, tightening laces, wriggling her shoulders and shifting each breast into a more comfortable position within the stiff damask with her fingers.

  She closed the window, raked the embers, straightened the bedcovers, pushed her feet into her shoes.

  A bag of coins lay on the low table near the door. This Francesca picked up and weighed in the palm of her hand. “At least I command a better price today,” she said. Throwing the little bag up and catching it, then closing and locking the door, she set off for the city. It was a good half-hour’s walk, but Francesca was used to travelling on foot and, in today’s mild sunshine, she was happy to be out. Snatches of Alfonso’s conversation repeated themselves insistently in her head, and, as she walked, a small seed of curiosity put out a little green shoot.

  She is indiscriminate, he had said, and pleased by everything. That either implied a particularly sweet and generous disposition, Francesca thought, or nothing more than a lack of judgement. If I have told her what she should think, there can be no merit in her thoughts…Not for the first time, Francesca wondered what this girl was actually like. She rather approved of someone who had to be “told what to think”: it suggested a certain waywardness with which she could easily identify, and she was quite impressed with those sentiments Alfonso had found so disturbing. “‘Whatever place in society God has chosen for them…’” she said to herself. God had not, she thought, chosen a very comfortable place in society for the duchess: it could not be easy to be married to the complex and controlling Alfonso.

  She rubbed her reddened wrists, which still felt hot and sore, and wondered for a moment if he imposed upon his wife the same demands in his bed as he did upon her, and if he did, whether or not she was…pleased by them. He had told her several times that the duchess was beautiful and charming. Well, Francesca thought now, the girl’s beauty and charm certainly did not seem to be pleasing her husband: Alfonso appeared to be increasingly at odds with her as the months went on. And the girl had not yet conceived. That had to be saying something.

  “Do you know, after all this time, I think I’d very much like to see this woman for myself,” Francesca said aloud, suddenly aware of the singularity of the fact that she had not done so before.

  An old man, dozing on a stone bench at the side of the road with a scrawny dog curled at his feet, started at the sound of her voice as she walked past him. Francesca smiled at them both; the dog thumped its tail in the dust but the old man made no response.

  ***

  Seated on the floor in Francesca’s front room were two small girls, some six years old, black-haired, huge-eyed, identical to the last hair. They were picking glass beads out of a bowl and carefully threading them onto lengths of thin twine.

  “Girls, I want to go up to the Castello again,” Francesca said.

  “Again?”

  Francesca smiled. “Yes. Again. Of course, if you don’t want to come too, you can go to Signora del Sarto’s house.”

  Both girls shook their heads, and so, for the fourth day running, they and Francesca walked up from their little house in the Via Vecchie, round the façade of the cathedral and on up to the wide piazza in front of the Castello.

  “We’ll do what we did yesterday and the day before, and walk right the way around the whole building,” Francesca said. “We might see her today.” She saw the twins glance at each other, but they made no comment.

  They walked around three sides of the big red fortress, stopping every now and again for the girls to plip pebbles into the black water of the moat and count the ripples, and then, as they approached the gateway to the main drawbridge, they stopped, hearing the clatter of hoofs on the wooden bridge.

  “Hold hands, and stand back,” Francesca said. They stepped backwards, away from the gateway, their fingers tightly laced.

  Two horses appeared: a heavy black cob with a long fringe hiding its eyes, and a smaller bay pony. A grey-haired man rode the cob, but the pony was carrying a thin girl. She was finely dressed in beautifully cut, dark-green velvet, though Francesca could see that, despite her finery, the girl sat the pony with little confidence. The grey-haired man pointed across to the girl’s hands and, gesturing with his own, said something Francesca could not catch, though she heard the words “my lady.” The girl shortened her reins and, somewhat gingerly, shifted her position in the saddle. The bay pony tossed its head; the girl caught her lip between her teeth.

  Francesca stared. This had to be her—the elaborate, jewelled clothes, her companion’s air of deference. The tawny hair and freckles matched Alfonso’s descriptions of her. Surely this was the duchess.

  Her idle wish to see Alfonso’s wife for herself had fed upon itself for nearly a week now, and much to her daughters’ annoyance, had had all three of them pacing the outskirts of the Castello for days. Now, somewhat to her surprise, Francesca found that her pulse rate was quickening at the sight of the duchess. Alfonso’s description of his wife as “beautiful” was perhaps a little inaccurate, Francesca thought, but there was something arresting about the small, freckled face, while the slightness of the velvet-clad shoulders made her seem touchingly vulnerable.

  Despite herself, Francesca began imagining this girl in Alfonso’s bed and realised, with an unexpected jolt in her guts, that the emotion which hit her as the images played out in her mind was not jealousy but concern. Solicitude. He would be able to break this creature into pieces with ease. She drew in a sharp breath.

  “What is it, Mamma?” Beata was holding her hand and looking up into her face.

  “Nothing.”

  But it was not nothing: it was the sudden cold dawning of a creeping disaffection.

  Beata’s fingers gripped her own more tightly. Francesca saw that the duchess was staring at the twins, a wondering smile tilting the corners of her mouth. Then she turned to Francesca, the smile widened and a bright look of unaffected sweetness broke across her face.

  “Signor Bracciante,” she said to her companion, her eyes still on Francesca, “could you wait a moment, please?”

  The grey-haired man reined in his mount.

  “Forgive me, I did not mean to stare,” the duchess said to Francesca, “but I thought for a moment that my eyes were playing tricks upon me…”

>   “My girls are indeed very similar,” Francesca said.

  “It’s quite extraordinary.” The duchess turned to the girls. “And—not only are you so very much alike, you are both so very pretty!”

  Beata and Isabella smiled shyly at her, wriggling with bashful self-consciousness.

  Francesca was startled to see longing behind the duchess’s smile and heard again the coldness in Alfonso’s voice from a few days before: “Yes. Well. She has not managed to fulfil that task as yet.” She had sometimes wondered if Alfonso’s frustrations might stem from his wife’s wilful withholding of her favours, but now, seeing that hunger in her face, it was, Francesca thought, quite clearly no fault of this girl’s that she had not yet conceived.

  The duchess was speaking again to the twins. “Wait a moment, don’t move—I have something for you both…”

  The little girls held hands and stared up at her. Francesca watched as she turned to her companion. “Signor Bracciante, can you hold his reins a moment?”

  The man leaned across and took the bay pony’s reins. The duchess tugged at one of the pearl-centred knots of grass-green ribbon on her left sleeve. After a moment it came loose, leaving a pulled thread and a tiny hole in the velvet. “There’s one…” She leaned down and held it out to Beata. The little girl looked at Francesca, who smiled and nodded. Beata took the ribbon from the outstretched hand, and then the duchess jerked another free and handed it to Isabella.

  “Thank you, my lady,” Francesca said. “Say thank you, girls!” She nudged Beata with her hip, and both children looked up from their awed contemplation of their new treasures to murmur their gratitude.

  The duchess’s smile widened. “Take care of them, won’t you?”

  Francesca fancied that this appeal was addressed as much to her as a mother, as to the new owners of the little green favours.