His Last Duchess Read online

  “I know, cara.”

  “Is it quite certain that—?”

  Giulietta nodded.

  “But why? And why did nobody tell me until now?”

  No reply.

  Lucrezia held her breath, unsure whether she wanted to cry or to rage at her nurse. The enormity of the changes that were about to happen to her loomed up, unstoppable and inexorable as a battalion of soldiers on the march, real to her suddenly as they had not been before this moment. She had not even considered the possibility that Giulietta might not come with her to Ferrara. Lucrezia looked at the old woman and saw—perhaps for the first time ever—the infirmity of age. With a pinprick of shock, she imagined the skull beneath the lined skin, the bones within the meagre flesh, and then—as though it was her own pain—felt Giulietta’s anticipation of loss as keenly as her own.

  She put her arms around her nurse, aware of the old woman’s bony stiffness as she held her, and they embraced for a long moment.

  Breaking away, and making herself smile at Giulietta, Lucrezia said, with deliberate lightness, “Where would you like me to put the poor ruined dress?”

  Giulietta wiped her eyes with a small square of linen. “In that old chest by the door. Don’t bother to try to fold it, cara. It can’t be mended.”

  Lucrezia gathered the wrecked dress into her arms, went to the big carved box by the door and lifted the lid. Something unexpected caught her eye. “Oh!” she said. “Oh, Giulietta, see what I’ve found in here! I’ve been wondering where that was—I haven’t seen it for months!”

  ***

  Giovanni scratched his mare’s neck and grinned as she puckered her muzzle in pleasure, stretching forward and half-closing her eyes in lazy abandon. He glanced up as a stocky young man of about twenty-five walked into the stableyard, grinning at the pony’s expression. “Likes that, doesn’t she?” he said.

  “Pietro.” Giovanni nodded a greeting. Pietro reached out a hand, cupped it beneath the mare’s nose and tilted her head towards his face. “Just like women, mares are—all you have to do is scratch them in the right place and they’ll do anything for you,” he said, with an air of authority. Checking to either side to make sure they were alone, he added, “Spent a fair bit of last night scratching young Maria Fabbro in all the right places.”

  “Paolo’s daughter?”

  Pietro nodded, a smug grin on his face. Giovanni swallowed. An image of the saddler’s ripe peach of a daughter pushed into his mind. He caught his breath. He often saw Maria around the stables and each time he did, he found himself thinking rather too much about breasts. His face felt hot.

  “Hope her father doesn’t find out,” he said. “I wouldn’t give much for your chances if he does.”

  Pietro grinned again, hoisted a net of hay over his shoulder and strolled the length of the yard, whistling as he ducked under the low lintel into the feed store.

  Giovanni gave his pony a final pat. He began to walk slowly back towards the great house, kicking a single pebble along in front of him, scuffing dust up from the track as he went.

  He might well be nearly fifteen, but today everything was conspiring to make him feel like a child. When he had pulled Crezzi to her feet this afternoon, out by the vegetable garden, she had suddenly seemed quite different. So grown-up, even if she was so small and thin, and so beautiful—it had made him feel clumsy and stupid. As if his hands and feet were too big and didn’t fit him any longer. Normally, the year and a half’s difference in their ages was not so noticeable. Then, though, she had pulled that face at him, and she had looked like herself again, and it had been all right. And now Pietro—so confident, telling him about his conquests. Not that last night was much to boast about though—Maria would go with anyone.

  As he reached Lucrezia’s bedchamber window, he stopped.

  “It’s all your fault.” He heard her voice from this afternoon.

  “What is?”

  “Everything.”

  He snorted, and called up to her. Waited. Called again.

  There was a moment’s noisy fumbling with the fastenings, then the two shutters were banged back against the wall. Lucrezia leaned out of the window, face screwed up against the light.

  “I’m almost ready,” she said. “Don’t go away.”

  Giovanni flicked his head in acknowledgement.

  Lucrezia said, “Is something wrong?”

  He shrugged.

  “Wait!” She moved back inside. Giovanni stood with his weight on one foot, looking up at the window. After several moments, Lucrezia reappeared with a small straw basket in one hand; a long, rather hairy length of twine was looped over the other. She leaned out, bottom lip caught between her teeth, and began to lower the basket. Giovanni raised his arms as it reached him; he peered inside and, despite his unease, grinned to see a knot of flame-coloured ribbon, twisted into curls like a small orange lily. He picked it out and began to fiddle with it.

  “Don’t spoil it!” Lucrezia said. She jerked the basket back up, hand over hand. “It’s supposed to be a favour. As if you were a knight. I’m…I’m practising being a duchess.”

  Giovanni gave an exaggerated bow in apology and, head near his knees, heard a soft laugh from above him. He straightened.

  “I found my basket again just now in an old chest. Do you remember it?” Lucrezia called.

  “Of course.” He tilted his head back to see her better and the sun caught his eyes. He raised a horizontal hand to shade them.

  “After Papa was so angry that time—about the roof.”

  “I didn’t know you still had it.”

  “Neither did I. It was a good game, though, wasn’t it?”

  Giovanni looked back down and fingered the ribbon, remembering how fiercely his buttocks had been stinging, the last time he had taken this basket in his hands. Lucrezia might have been confined to her chamber, but he had been beaten, the day they had both climbed out onto the roof of the castle, stupidly reckless in their search for adventure. It had been her suggestion—she had admitted as much to Uncle Cosimo—but it was he, Giovanni, who had been the more soundly punished for it. The injustice still rankled after two years.

  Crezzi was right, though: it had been a good game—the only one available to them for the three days of her confinement. He had searched for little treasures, he remembered, and had stolen food from the kitchens, and put it into Crezzi’s basket for her to pull back up to her room, and she had sent back silly scribbled messages for him. It all seemed a very long time ago.

  “Don’t go away,” Lucrezia said. “I’ll be down in a moment.” Her voice sounded thick, as though she had been crying, Giovanni thought, or perhaps more as though she was trying not to cry now. He wondered why.

  The shutters were pulled together once more and the noise of the cicadas was loud again as Giovanni sat down with his back against the wall, knees bent, hands hanging loosely over them, turning the knot of orange ribbon over and over in his fingers.

  2

  The two cousins stood just inside the door of the vaulted kitchen, unnoticed in the steamy chaos of the banquet preparations. Lucrezia’s mouth was dry: watching this bustling activity, a fizzing feeling of anticipation was starting to disperse the gloom that Giulietta’s news had cast over her. She ran her tongue over her lips, then nudged Giovanni and pointed to a long table. “Go on, Vanni—take one!” she whispered.

  “Why me?”

  “Because Angelo likes you more than me, and if he sees you taking it, he won’t be as cross as if he sees me.”

  “You do know that this is why everything is always my fault—because you make me do everything for you.” He sounded cross, but stepped across to the table and took one of a dozen or so large pomegranates from a wooden bowl. He handed it to his cousin. Lucrezia traced around its spiked crown with the tip of her middle finger, lifted it to her nose, then pushed a thumbnail down into the skin, making a small crescent-shaped hole. Picking with one finger, she chipped away at it, revealing a round patch of
gleaming, pinky-red seeds, then she hooked a few out and dropped them into Giovanni’s outstretched hand. He grinned at her and lifted his palm to his mouth. She scraped out a few more for herself.

  They stood for a while, eating their pomegranate seeds, watching and listening.

  The great grey stone hood of the furnace stood scorched and glistening above the flames. Smoke wisped and curled out around the jut of the stone, as if, Lucrezia thought, from the mouth of a drowsy dragon; it glowed blue as it tendrilled up into a shaft of light from a high window. The fire was fierce and the three men tending it seemed blurred at the edges, sketched in bold slashes of orange and darkest blue. One of them leaned back from the heat and wiped sweat from his face, grimacing. Up in the eaves, linen-wrapped joints of meat hung from racks, kippering in the billows; an unsettling suggestion of the gallows hung about them as they dangled from their wicked iron hooks. And, at the far end of the room, two squat oak barrels stood open under a window. Lucrezia shuddered. The surface of the liquid within them was seething. She tugged at Giovanni’s sleeve and pointed. “Eels,” she said, pulling a face.

  “What about the swans, then?” Giovanni said. He gestured towards another long table. Plates, dishes and tall pots were stacked at one end, huge bowls of fruit and piles of peeled vegetables stood ranked in the middle, then came mounds of artichokes, orange and pink squashes and a colourful majolica bowl full of green beans. At the end, near to where the two cousins stood, lay the limp bodies of a pair of enormous swans. They lay sadly side by side, their slender necks crumpled and lifeless. One head hung heavily, blank eyes staring at the floor.

  Lucrezia crossed to them and touched one with the tip of a finger. The flesh felt chill, like unbaked clay, beneath the velvet feathers. Swans mate for life, she thought. Had these two died together, their lifelong partnership continuing into death, or was their proximity here coincidental? Did two other swans now mourn the loss of their mates as they swam alone on unknown waters?

  She turned from the swans and saw on yet another table a startling array of sculptures, carved from what she knew from other occasions was sugar. Poking Giovanni in the ribs, she pointed at the display.

  “Aren’t those—” he began.

  She interrupted him. “Copies of Papa’s favourites? Yes. The ones from the back courtyard. Aren’t they lovely?”

  Giovanni rubbed at one of the sculptures with two fingers, then put the fingers into his mouth. “Mmn. You’re right. They’re lovely,” he said.

  “Don’t, Vanni! If Angelo sees you, he’ll kill you!”

  Giovanni snorted, then rubbed the damp fingers back over the carved backside of the simpering sugar nymph. Sucked them again. Smiled.

  “You’re disgusting!”

  Giovanni opened his mouth to retort, but before he could say anything, a scream startled them both. They swung round.

  Lucrezia gasped.

  The moment hung frozen. The chaos of the kitchen was a painted tableau, a silent second, hanging suspended and motionless.

  A kitchen girl, one hand wrapped in sacking, was grimacing with pain as boiling water from the huge pan she had been struggling to move out of the embers slopped out in a glittering lump across her wrist. The sacking she had shaken from that hand had fallen into the flames beneath the pan and caught alight, flaring brightly, underlighting her distorted face. Though few in the kitchen seemed to have noticed what had happened, the three cooks had turned from the furnace as one, and were gaping at the girl, identical shock on each face. One of them held a dripping ladle; soft gobbets of soup fell to the floor around his feet.

  Lucrezia was transfixed.

  And then noise surged back through the room and the scream became a panting whimper; the girl stumbled backwards, burned hand held out and back, her other hand snatching her heavy skirts away from the flaming sacking. In a sudden panic at the inactivity, Lucrezia ran forward and stopped in front of the girl. “Quick! Hurry! You must put it into cold water!” She reached for and held the unharmed hand, but the girl gasped, trying to snatch it back out of Lucrezia’s grasp. Lucrezia, however, held fast. “No! Come with me—you have to—Vanni, where is the nearest water?”

  Giovanni was hovering anxiously near the door. She said again, “Where? Where should we go, Vanni?”

  “The well in the outer courtyard?”

  “No—too far.”

  And then an idea occurred to her, though her insides shrivelled at the thought. She held the kitchen girl’s good arm and pulled her through the bustle of the kitchen into the shadows at the furthest end. “Come on,” she said. “This way.”

  They stopped in front of the two squat oak barrels. A nauseous lump rose in Lucrezia’s throat as she watched the slimy tangle twisting and writhing below the surface.

  “Put your arm in here. They won’t hurt you and the water is cold.”

  With a whimper, the girl shrank back, twisting her arm to try to free her hand from Lucrezia’s grasp. The scalded arm she held up against her chest.

  “I’ll put mine in with yours,” Lucrezia said and, gritting her teeth, she took the girl’s red, angry arm by the fingers, shut her eyes and plunged both their arms down into the barrel before the girl had a chance to fight against her.

  The water was thick, opaque and slimy, and the eels slid around each other in silky knots. Lucrezia’s sleeve covered most of her arm, but they slithered horribly around her hand; she felt the occasional graze of unspeakable sharp teeth, though nothing that really hurt. The girl’s fingers were tense and stiff and she was pulling hard against Lucrezia’s grip, breathing in shallow gasps through an open mouth, her eyes huge and dark as she stared into the seething barrel.

  “How does it feel now?” Lucrezia said. They were pressed together, so close she could feel the girl’s hair against her neck. She smiled, but the girl did not smile in return.

  After a few more moments, Lucrezia said, “Perhaps it has been in the water long enough now. My hand’s frozen. Let’s see.”

  She pulled her arm out of the barrel, letting go of the girl’s fingers. The plum-coloured silk sleeve was a sodden dark brown to a line above her elbow and clung to her like a second skin, glistening with the eels’ slime. Thick droplets fell from it, staining the russet skirt, so Lucrezia bent forward and held her arm out to the side. With her other hand, she picked at the laces on her shoulder, then, lips squared with disgust, she peeled the soaked sleeve over her hand and off. Holding it away from her in both hands, she squeezed it out, and more viscous drops splattered onto the dusty floor.

  The kitchen girl began to examine her scald. The red stain was less vivid, and beads of glistening water clung to the hairs that stood up through the red on her thin wrist. She gingerly touched the place with a trembling finger, then raised her eyes to Lucrezia. “It is a little better,” she said. “Thank you, Signorina. You did not have to do that for me.”

  Lucrezia saw the girl eyeing the russet dress, jewelled and beautiful—now stained with eel-slime. She watched her take in her bare arm, and the crushed and sodden sleeve in her hand, and wondered what she was thinking. How did she see her? As a benevolent, compassionate young noblewoman, prepared to sacrifice part of her sumptuous wardrobe to aid a stricken castle drudge? As a silly girl, dressed like a duchess but reckless and babyish, spoiling her fine clothes on a whim? Or, worse still, as nothing more than an interfering busybody?

  She opened her mouth, trying to think of something to say that might reassure both the girl—who looked frightened—and herself, but before she could utter a word, an angry yell cut through the buffeting background noise of the kitchen, making her jump.

  “What are you playing at, Catelina, you lazy trollop? Get back here! That accursed pan will have boiled dry by the time you’ve finished your pointless prattling!” The enormous and corpulent Signor Angelo, hands on hips, mouth like a rectangular hole in his unbaked loaf of a face, was glaring at them from the far side of the kitchen. “And you—you two children!” He flapped a hand. “Get
out of here—before I call for the Signora!”

  “Come on!” muttered Giovanni. He jerked his head towards the door. Lucrezia began to move with him, but saw as she did so that the part-eaten pomegranate still sat on the long table where she had dropped it. She picked it up, smiled at Catelina and threw her the fruit. Then she and Giovanni slipped out through the narrow kitchen door. Catelina caught the pomegranate one-handed and waved it at Lucrezia in shy farewell.

  ***

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Giulietta stared in disbelief. “Not much more than half an hour! Can you not stay clean and tidy for more than five minutes? What is wrong with you?” She paused, her pulse thudding uncomfortably in her ears. “Come here!”

  Lucrezia began to cross the room.

  “And you can give me that for a start!” Giulietta added crossly, snatching the sodden lump of silk from Lucrezia’s hand. She flapped it out and held it up, clicking her tongue.

  “I’m sorry, Giulietta, I truly am, but if you had seen—”

  Giulietta raised her hands, palms forward, to silence her. “Don’t tell me! Don’t speak! I don’t want to hear it. Is it any wonder I am not coming with you to Ferrara? Much more of this and you really will be the death of me.”

  She unfastened the strings of the clean sleeve and pulled it from Lucrezia’s arm with one sharp tug. “You can find another pair for yourself, my girl. I am not getting down on my knees a third time for you today. Any new waiting-woman you choose to come to Ferrara with you had better be warned that she should expect to lead a very difficult life.”

  Lucrezia said nothing, but Giulietta watched her go to the smaller of the two chests, and kneel in front of it. Lifting the lid, she rummaged inside, then sat back on her heels, a pair of ember-orange sleeves in one hand. Wordlessly, she handed them to her nurse.

  ***

  Lucrezia clicked a handful of walnuts in her pocket, rolling them over each other between her fingers. “I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had slapped me, Vanni—she was so angry.”

  Giovanni shrugged. “She simply wouldn’t listen to a word I had to say—I tried to explain that I—”