His Last Duchess Page 12

The duchess gathered up her reins, clicked her tongue and the pony began to walk, some two paces behind the cob. A moment later, both riders broke into a trot and were soon out of sight.

  ***

  Alfonso, watching from a window in his apartment in the Torre dei Leoni, saw Lucrezia and the riding master turn south out of the piazza, heading no doubt for the open ground beyond the city walls.

  He pulled on a doublet, snatched a couple of candles from a low table and left his chamber. Walking quickly, he made his way down through the Castello. At the entrance to the long, sloping corridor that led to the dungeons, he flicked a glance to left and right. Reassured that he was unobserved, he lit one of his two candles from a burning torch in a nearby wall bracket, and descended towards the Stygian gloom of the underground cells.

  Ducking his head, he turned left into a short passage, whose ceiling was no higher than his shoulder. He walked awkwardly, bent-backed, some half-dozen paces and stepped down into a low, vaulted room. Had he chosen to reach upwards, his fingers would have touched the stone ceiling with ease. The door to this room, made of heavily banded iron, stood wide open. There were no windows, instead, a single square aperture, into which Alfonso might have been able to squeeze himself, had it not been crossbarred, led steeply upwards, narrowing like a funnel, up beyond the level of the moat to allow the access of air. No light penetrated.

  Alfonso sat on the floor with his back against one of the walls, and, holding the lit candle sideways, allowed a few drops of wax to fall onto the stone flag. He placed the candle upright in the soft blob, and laid the second nearby. Crossing back to the door, he pushed it, two-handed, until it was barely an inch from closure, then returned to the candle and sat back down.

  Tipping his head back, he closed his eyes and rested his arms across his bent knees, fingers loosely touching.

  The silence in the cell was thick and soft and it pressed in around him, blocking his ears and filling his throat. Here, in this smothering quiet—for a matter of minutes, at least—his mind was still.

  10

  Lucrezia was surprised at the lack of ceremony when the painters arrived. Infected by Alfonso’s growing excitement over the previous week, she had expected drama, an impressive number of people, something significant to indicate the eminence of Fra Pandolf’s reputation. But when the group from Assisi reached the central courtyard of the Castello in the second week of April, she was a little disappointed to find that the entire party consisted of the friar, his apprentice and another lad, who seemed to be there solely to take charge of the three horses and the shabby little tilt-cart. It did not seem appropriate for the creators of what she understood was to be a significant new work of art.

  Alfonso, however, was smiling broadly as he stepped forward to greet the new arrivals. Fra Pandolf climbed wearily from the cart, the apprentice and the boy dismounted from their horses and they all stretched cramped limbs and looked about them.

  “Fra Pandolf, all of you, welcome to the Castello,” Alfonso said.

  The friar beamed, holding out his arms as though in benediction. The tall apprentice with the crimson-splashed cheek sketched a brief bow, and the boy bobbed his head embarrassed at thus being acknowledged.

  Pandolf took one of Alfonso’s hands in his own, bowed to Lucrezia, and then said over his shoulder to his companions, “Tomaso, can you take charge of the horses? Jacomo, bring the box of pigments and the brushes, will you? I want to get them in and put away as quickly as possible.”

  Tomaso began to do as he had been asked, and Jacomo reached into the tilt-cart and hitched a large wooden box into his arms, leaning a little backwards to accommodate its considerable weight. Lucrezia smiled at him, as he followed the friar and his hosts into the Castello, but Jacomo was looking at the ground around the side of the box as he picked his way across the uneven cobbles and did not see her. She quickly straightened her face, and made a play of tucking a wisp of hair behind an ear, feeling foolish and hoping that no one else had noticed.

  ***

  Of the new arrivals, only Fra Pandolf attended the evening meal on that first night. Lucrezia wondered briefly why Alfonso had not invited the apprentice or the boy, but presumed that some incomprehensible castle protocol lay behind his decision. Fearing his displeasure, she had decided not to ask him.

  She looked around the room, seeing it now with Pandolf’s eyes, wondering what his artist’s mind would make of his surroundings. The Long Room: Alfonso usually called it the Room of Mirrors, for a dozen great Venetian looking-glasses—four on each long wall, two at each end—created a sensation of endless repetition as they reflected upon themselves over and over. Though only four sat at the table that evening, around the walls a crowd appeared to be enjoying their meal: a dozen friars, as many black-clad dukes; a flock of shimmering, silk-gowned duchesses, and a clutch of brightly dressed noblemen. Lucrezia blew softly at one of the candles, and watched the dipping flame multiply and replicate itself a hundredfold in the glittering glass, like evening sunlight on water.

  “Father Guardian at Assisi is indeed generous in allowing his most gifted son to bestow his extraordinary talents upon the Castello Estense,” said Francesco Panizato, inclining his head towards the friar.

  The friar blushed deeply at this unctuous comment—to Lucrezia’s delight, even the patch of pink scalp inside his tonsure had reddened. “Gracious Signore, you misunderstand,” he replied, in his flat, Genovese accent. “Do not forget, we Franciscans are mendicants—beggars. We wander where we choose and we praise God with whichever talents He has seen fit to bestow upon us.” He bowed towards Alfonso. “Signor d’Este is merely allowing me a more than welcome opportunity to praise my Lord with brush and with plaster…”

  A picture pushed its way into Lucrezia’s mind of a jostling crowd of cheerful winged seraphs, ineptly wielding paint and plaster-laden brushes, sending splashes and wet lumps flying around the gates of Heaven. A furious St Peter stood, hands on hips, keys clinking, glaring at them, a splash of vivid blue across his nose, chin and down the front of his gleaming white robes. She smothered a laugh. Then, glancing up into one of the mirrors, she saw the imagined anger of the guardian of the gates reproduced on the face of her husband. Alfonso’s eyes were blazing and his mouth was no more than a thin line. Lucrezia dropped her gaze to the table, her cheeks flaming and tears threatening.

  Picking up her fork, she began to push her food around her plate. Orange-poached sardines. One of her mother’s favourites. Her own choice, this evening. She sighed. For once she had actually been given the task of choosing the food, as Alfonso had been preoccupied with the arrival of the painters and had unexpectedly delegated the responsibility. She and Catelina had constructed the evening’s menu earlier that week.

  ***

  “I had thought,” she says to Catelina, in an unguarded moment, quill in hand as they list possible dishes, “when I left Cafaggiolo, that this would have been one of the tasks for which I would be responsible as the new duchess.” Her voice sounds—even to her—stilted and unnatural as she fights not to betray her anger. “Mamma always chooses the food for the more important meals at home. She often showed me what to do. How to construct an interesting range of dishes. I think I could probably do it quite well. She and I talked about it several times when I went home to see them a few months ago, and she was very surprised that I hadn’t really begun to make an impression upon life in the castle yet. She was quite unhappy about it.”

  Catelina looks anxiously at her.

  Lucrezia says, and there is a sharp note of bitterness in her voice, “I didn’t like to tell her that Alfonso is not confident in my abilities to do very much at all.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s not that, my lady.”

  And then it bursts from her. “But it is, Lina! He has told me quite clearly! And he continually makes sure I don’t go behind his back and accidentally display any unexpected ability that he has not personally sanctioned. What—of any note—have you ever seen me do in this plac
e?” She glares at her maid, then answers her own question. “Nothing! I do nothing! What point is there in my being here at all? Why does he want me here?”

  The tip of her quill cracks as she presses it too hard into the paper, and ink spatters across the list of dishes she has already written down. The obvious answer to her question screams itself into the silence. The obvious, horrible answer. She has been traded between families like a brood mare—but is it not the case, she thinks bitterly, that a brood mare which continually fails to excite the stallion is of little use to anyone as anything other than dog meat? Perhaps it is because she is so signally unsuccessful in this most fundamental role that Alfonso has no wish to trust her with any other tasks.

  She and Catelina stare at each other, not speaking.

  Lucrezia remembers being so curious on her arrival at the Castello that simply absorbing her new surroundings had seemed stimulating enough. For weeks she had been happy to be little more than a fascinated bystander. But as the months have passed, she increasingly wishes to take a more active part in her new life. Try as she might, though, she finds her ideas crushed almost before she utters them, her opinions ridiculed or ignored, and her interactions with the servants continually controlled and limited by her husband.

  It is all so very different from the life she knew before her marriage.

  Alfonso seldom speaks to Lucrezia of his own childhood, or of his parents and his upbringing in the Castello, but from the fragments of memory he occasionally allows her to grasp during their rare conversations, she imagines a boyhood almost unbearably bleak in comparison with her own experiences. She feels a surprising lurch of sympathy for him, as she pictures a lonely little boy, friendless in this great rambling, city-bound fortress. His father, by Alfonso’s own admission, was a distant, unloving man, and Lucrezia discovers that Alfonso had spent much of his early youth without his mother.

  His formality and lack of warmth is, she supposes, understandable, though to her it seems both alien and horribly restricting. Only with Catelina does she truly feel unconstrained, but the intimacy and informality she cannot suppress with her maid, she keeps well hidden from Alfonso.

  “He makes me feel so powerless, Lina,” she says, pressing the cracked nib against the ball of her thumb. “What sort of woman am I growing into? I am given no opportunity to manage my house, I am forbidden to communicate with my servants—and at the merest glimpse of my naked body, my husband’s prick wilts like yesterday’s picked daisy.”

  Catelina blushes scarlet at the intimacy.

  Lucrezia’s voice sounds hard. “To be still a virgin after a year and a half as a wife—how shameful is that? I can only imagine that it must hurt Alfonso as much as it hurts me—but how will I ever know? He never talks to me.”

  She falls silent, recalling the embarrassing attempts at consummation that she and Alfonso still sometimes endure. Inevitably, she thinks, these moments are ever more awkward, silent, loveless. On each occasion she has begun to feel as though the as yet unconceived heir squats, like an incubus, in a corner of the room, watching, accusing, demanding to be given the opportunity to exist, pouring angry scorn on their repeated failures.

  ***

  Fra Pandolf scraped the last fragment of sardine from his plate, and turned to Lucrezia, a gilded Murano glass in his hand.

  “What think you, my lady, of the idea of having a fresco painted here at the Castello Estense?”

  Lucrezia pulled her thoughts back to the present. “If the promise of the drawings I saw before is borne out in the fresco itself, it will be a truly magnificent achievement, sir,” she said, smiling at the doughy figure, and longing to remove the tiny fragment of fish that clung to his lower lip. She thought back to the day she had seen the extraordinary preliminary sketches, and said, “Shall you be working together on the fresco, you and your apprentice?”

  For a moment, Lucrezia thought she detected a tightening in the friar’s face, but then he smiled, and said, “Oh, yes, Signora, Jacomo is indispensable. I have not had such a capable apprentice in years.”

  “Where did you find him?” Alfonso asked.

  “His father approached me several years ago now—and asked if I might take him on. Said he thought the lad had talent. I admit now that I was not expecting much—you would be surprised, Signore, at the number of doting fathers who are quite convinced their children are budding Buonarottis…”

  Alfonso and Francesco Panizato smiled.

  “But,” Fra Pandolf continued, “in the event, he proved to be quite a remarkable artist. Quite remarkable. In fact, I have—oh, yes, thank you…”

  The friar broke off as he was offered a plate, laid with grilled bream. Lucrezia’s plate was placed before her. She knew she should eat. The wine she had drunk was fuzzing her thoughts and her head felt woolly. She was losing the thread of the conversations that flashed across the table like contestants in a fencing competition. She picked at the fish and watched Alfonso and Francesco vying happily with each other to prove to Fra Pandolf that each was the greater connoisseur of the arts.

  They were both bright-eyed and flushed, though Lucrezia could see that Alfonso was striving to maintain his dignity, despite the energy of the conversation. However passionately he felt about something, Lucrezia reflected, she knew he preferred not to show it; even now he was probably struggling to contain his animation. He would want to appear deeply knowledgeable, she thought, but he would be constantly checking to make sure he was not revealing too much of the emotion behind the enthusiasm.

  Panizato made a strong contrast with his black-clad host—his red and gold doublet and breeches sparkled in the candlelight and gave him an impish air. He was slight and thin, and had soft, curly hair that wisped into tendrils around his rather elfin face. His eyes, which were set close to his nose, were alight with pleasure in the conversation and a boyish, excitable grin crossed his face each time he felt he had scored a point.

  Lucrezia turned then to Fra Pandolf, who was regarding the two men with mild interest, answering all the questions put to him with detachment and an unworldly calm. His robes were shabby and a drab earth brown, his small plump hands protruded from the frayed cuffs, and lay clasped on the white linen table covering. Though fleshy, they were hard and brown, and flecks of different-coloured paints clung around the nails, which were short and tidy. These, Lucrezia thought, were hands that had spent a lifetime praising God—in prayer and in paint. The next day they would start work on the great fresco.

  11

  Chiara Rossi opened the door that led to the yard and called to her father. He did not appear to hear her at first, being deep in conversation with a tall young man in a scuffed deerskin doublet. The two men were standing by one of the lime-pits. Her father had peeled back the hessian covering and was squatting on his heels. The young man said something Chiara could not hear; he made a wide, measuring gesture with both arms, then indicated a height with one hand crooked horizontally above his head. Her father nodded, calculated something on his fingers, then both men smiled. They shook hands.

  “Papa!” Chiara called again.

  This time her father turned to her and raised his eyebrows in response. The dark young man turned too; Chiara wondered if the crimson stain on his cheek was a lime-burn.

  “Will you be wanting dinner, Papa, or have I enough time to take the bread up to Anna’s?”

  “Go, if you want to, cara. Signor Pennetti and I need a few moments to discuss quantities and dates for delivery. We’ll probably be…” he looked at Signor Pennetti “…about half an hour?”

  The young man nodded.

  “Thank you, Papa. I will be back as soon as I can.”

  Chiara shut the door, crossed the kitchen to the little entrance hall, pulled a coarse linen wrap from a hook on the wall and shrugged it around her shoulders. Picking up a basket in which were several small loaves and a block of cheese, she left the house.

  It took her no more than a few moments to reach Anna’s little cottage—so
shabby it might well have been described as a hovel. She did not bother to knock, but pushed open the door and walked into the main downstairs room. A small fire was burning in the furthest corner. An iron pot stood on a trivet over the flames, steam puffing gently from under the loosely fitting lid, and an elderly woman was hunched in front of it on one of two stools, a clay pipe wedged between her teeth, her hands clasped between splayed knees.

  “Anna?” Chiara said quietly. She put the basket on a table near the door.

  “Come and sit down, child,” Anna said. She unclasped her hands and patted the second stool, still staring into the flames.

  Rather awkwardly, Chiara lowered herself onto it.

  “Well? Have you told him yet?” Anna said.

  “No.”

  “Do you not think he has noticed?”

  “I’m quite sure he hasn’t.”

  “The man must be blind. Or stupid. How are you feeling?”

  “Better, in the last couple of weeks. At last.”

  “And that Niccolò?” Anna said, somewhat sharply.

  Even the sound of his name gave Chiara a sharp little pain in her chest. “I haven’t seen him. I still don’t know where he’s working now.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Chiara stroked her rounded belly with both hands, as if to soothe the child within. “I don’t know.”

  “Now, listen. Stupid or not, your father will know soon enough, child. You have no more than a matter of weeks now. It’s only because your belly has stayed so small that you have been able to hide it so long. You must tell him.”

  “But I don’t know how. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Do you want me to do it for you?”

  Chiara stared at the old woman, round-eyed. She did not know how to answer. She was lethargic with chronic anxiety, drowsy, detached.

  Anna clicked her tongue irritably. She patted Chiara’s cheek. “Wake up now, Chiara! One of us has to do it. We have to make arrangements for the birth, cara. Time is running out. A lime-pit is no place to bring a child into the world, and a group of ignorant slakers cannot be given the responsibility of attending your confinement. I am not well enough to do it—we must to arrange for you to go to the city.”