His Last Duchess Read online

  “Do you want an apricot?” Giovanni said. “My pockets are too full.”

  Irritation tightened like a band around Lucrezia’s head. After her scolding from her nurse, she badly wanted to pour out her frustration at the injustice of Giulietta’s anger; she wanted Giovanni to champion her, to agree that what she had done this afternoon had been entirely selfless, and not the “rash action of a thoughtless baby,” as Giulietta had so vehemently assured her it was. The distress she had felt at the thought of losing her nurse was now coupled with relief that she would be escaping the old woman’s relentless iron grip for the first time in her life.

  She took the apricot Giovanni held out, but, rather than eat it, she put it into her pocket.

  The two cousins stood in the shadows of a corridor, peering around the open door of a long, wooden-ceilinged hall, down the middle of which stood a great pathway of a table. Its polished surface was now hidden by draped and layered linen, plates and glasses, flowers, fruit, candles and ribbons—enough for at least thirty diners.

  At the far end of the room, her mother and father were giving final orders to the servants who would be welcoming in the party from Ferrara. She imagined the bustling arrival of the duke and his retinue, and her irritation faded.

  “Aunt Eleanora looks beautiful,” Giovanni said. Lucrezia’s mother was dressed in deep blue damask; the sleeves, slashed many times, showed little puffs of gold, and, as she raised an arm to point across to one of the windows, a glitter of tiny pearls caught the light from the torches blazing in their brackets on the walls. Even from her vantage-point in the corridor, Lucrezia could hear the soft whisper of the blue silk skirts as Eleanora de’ Medici moved.

  She watched her mother’s gaze wandering over the flowers, which tumbled down the walls like many-hued waterfalls, over the four huge bay trees, standing sentinel at each corner of the hall, over the deep red, white and green silk hangings that trembled in the breeze where they hung between the windows. Those, Lucrezia knew, were the Este colours—her mother must have chosen them to please her prestigious guest. She, Lucrezia, was the ultimate prize that awaited the duke, she supposed, but her mother was making sure that the gift was well wrapped.

  She watched as her mother spoke to her father, gazing up into his face as though seeking reassurance. He put big hands on his wife’s shoulders and smiled down at her, then laid a palm against her cheek. Lucrezia swallowed, sure they were discussing her, anxious suddenly at what appeared to be her mother’s unease.

  “Come on, let’s go before they see us,” Giovanni said. He took Lucrezia’s hand. She turned away, lip caught between her teeth, and they walked the length of the corridor and out onto an open balcony, which overlooked the central courtyard.

  “They’ll have to come through here, won’t they?” Giovanni said. He sat down on the tiled floor between two large terra-cotta pots of clipped box. He fished in his pocket, brought out a couple of walnuts and cracked them together in his hands.

  Lucrezia nodded and sat down next to him.

  “So if we just wait here, we’ll see them.”

  Another nod. Giovanni held the crushed walnuts in one palm; he picked out the kernels and threw the shells over his shoulder. Lucrezia, meanwhile, retrieved the apricot and held its velvety skin to her closed lips. Fragments of images and nonsensical broken sentences danced through her mind as she smelt the warm, summer-sweet fruit; her eyes slid out of focus and, as she pressed her forehead against the iron bars of the balustrade, she could feel her body moving infinitesimally with her pulse-beat.

  A sudden clatter of hoofs and wheels, and sharp voices calling for immediate action made her start. Giovanni scrambled to his knees, walnut shells scattering untidily around him.

  “They’re here, Crezzi,” he said.

  They folded their arms on the balustrade, chins resting on their hands, looking, Lucrezia imagined, like a pair of eager gargoyles. She still held the apricot, now hot and damp, in one hand.

  The heavy doors from the entrance hall slammed open. Some half-dozen Cafaggiolo servants backed out into the sunshine. Lucrezia saw her mother and father, walking arm in arm; both were smiling at a tall man dressed in black, who strode beside them.

  “That’s him, isn’t it?” Giovanni whispered.

  The duke was looking around the courtyard. He took off his feathered cap and coat as he walked and handed them to a young man just behind him. Beneath the coat, his clothes were very plain, and simple in their cut. His presence was impressive enough, Lucrezia thought; he did not need to resort to ribbons and slashes to make an impact. He was taller than she remembered, but she had not in the least degree forgotten the dark, slow-blinking eyes.

  A black-brindled dog loped at his side—a tall, rough-coated creature with a long, thin tail. Lucrezia’s eyes widened at its height. The duke’s hand was resting on the dog’s head as they walked—and his elbow was bent.

  Lucrezia watched the newcomer as he crossed the courtyard with the rest of the party. He was taking in every detail of his surroundings, it seemed, until suddenly he raised his eyes to the balcony and his gaze met hers. He stopped speaking. Lucrezia dropped the apricot she was holding. It rolled through the balustrade and fell to the ground, landing on the flags with a soft splat not six feet from where the little party was standing. The dog growled softly, but the ghost of a smile flickered across the duke’s face. Lucrezia’s cheeks burned. The duke made no other sign that he had seen either her or the apricot, but resumed his conversation with her father and mother.

  As the party reached the far side of the courtyard, her father turned back and glared at her.

  ***

  “You do promise you’ll come straight down, now, Signorina?” Her mother’s youngest waiting-woman shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Awkward and embarrassed, the girl added, with ill-thought-out honesty, “Only my lady said I was not to go until I had seen you actually start moving.” She hesitated. “They are all waiting for you.”

  Giulietta opened her mouth, but Giovanni said quickly, “Don’t worry—I’ll make her hurry.”

  The girl bobbed a curtsy, flushed as Giovanni smiled at her, then disappeared.

  “How do I look?” Lucrezia said.

  “Quite lovely, cara,” Giulietta said, giving her a kiss on the cheek.

  “Vanni?”

  Giovanni considered. The rude, unthinking response he would usually have offered seemed inappropriate in the face of his cousin’s startlingly unfamiliar appearance: she was like a beautiful stranger. He decided upon the truth. “You do look lovely,” he said, feeling foolish.

  Lucrezia smiled, bottom lip caught between her teeth. She kissed Giulietta and left the bedchamber, and went along the corridor that led to the main staircase. Giovanni followed, caught up with her quickly and walked by her side. His arms seemed to belong to someone else—he felt irritated by their swinging.

  A new and uncomfortable image had pushed its way into his mind earlier that afternoon. He could not get rid of it, although it embarrassed him very much that it was there. Somehow it was acceptable when it was Pietro, with Fabbro’s whore of a daughter; it was positively entertaining when it was himself with—well, he did not know who it might be, in the end—but to think of Crezzi and—and that man! Giovanni shuddered. He felt a hot buzz of shame in his belly to be thinking such things, but the image was insistent.

  He did not really understand why it was that he felt so uncomfortable about it. It was not simply what Crezzi said—that he seemed to think about, well, the activities of the bedchamber more than anything else, these days. No. There was just something about him that made Giovanni feel like a dog, nose to nose with an enemy—hackles up, ears back, growling, shoulders hunched. In fact, when they had been introduced a few hours before, the hair on his arms had actually prickled. He could not explain it, but he just knew that he did not like the duke.

  “Do you remember that day we put cloaks and hats on all the statues in the loggia, Vanni?” Lucrezia i
nterrupted his reverie.

  “How could I forget? I had another whacking for that, didn’t I?”

  Suddenly Lucrezia stopped. They had reached the doorway to the courtyard. “Oh, cielo! There they all are,” she whispered.

  Aunt Eleanora, Uncle Cosimo and a few of their friends, whom Giovanni vaguely knew, were standing out in the loggia. With them were some ten or so men he had never seen before and several of Aunt Eleanora’s waiting-women. And, there, deep in conversation with Uncle Cosimo, was the tall man in black. Curled at his feet, tail thumping occasionally on the stone flags, lay the great brindled dog.

  Lucrezia walked outside and the sun gleamed on her hair so that it shone like copper. Like one of the statues come to life, Giovanni thought. Conversation died. She stopped in front of the duke and sank into a deep curtsy, head bowed, dress crumpled around her on the floor, and then she turned her face up to his, still sunk in the curtsy. He held out a hand, which Lucrezia took in hers.

  From where he was standing, Giovanni could not see whether his cousin was smiling, but the tall figure in the black doublet certainly was.

  Giovanni’s hands tensed into fists. With one disgusted glance, he turned away and walked back into the darkness of the corridor.

  3

  The wolfhound scrabbled up to standing, its claws scraping on the stone flags; it shook itself and a shudder ran from nose-tip to tail. It crossed the loggia to where its master sat deep in conversation and pushed its muzzle up and under his hand. Without breaking off from what he was saying, the duke began to fondle the dog’s great head, stroking around its muzzle and up behind its ears. The dog leaned heavily against the side of the chair and the long tail swung.

  “No, you’re right,” the duke said. “It has been—what? just over three months—since Cateau-Cambrésis, has it not? And despite all the dire warnings that followed the signing of that appalling treaty, I have to admit that I haven’t noticed any overt French interference.”

  Cosimo de’ Medici nodded. “But I think you have been lucky in Ferrara, Este. Here in Tuscany we are fast becoming almost entirely hidebound by objectionable ‘interference’ at every turn.”

  “Who knows what will happen, though, now Henri is dead?” said Este.

  De’ Medici sighed. “I have to admit that I’m relieved he’s gone: his influence in Spain and England was rather too…colourful for my liking—but to die like that! What a pointless way to go!” He grimaced.

  Este said nothing. His skin crawled as he pictured the scene: the late French king, pierced through the eye by a shard from a jouster’s shattered lance. In through an eye and out through an ear, they had said. “Yes. Quite horrible,” he said quietly.

  Then de’ Medici’s frown cleared—so quickly it was almost comical, Este thought.

  “But to happier things,” his host said, now positively beaming. “How entirely satisfactory to think that by our forthcoming alliance we will be thwarting—even in the smallest degree—this infernal imposition of bloody French hegemony!”

  “It is certainly an unadulterated pleasure to be taking such a step, sir.” Este inclined his head. This was not an exaggeration. He saw in his mind the slight figure of his future duchess, gazing up shining-eyed from the depths of her graceful curtsy, earlier that afternoon. The sun had flamed in her hair, her skirts had billowed around her as though she was bathing in them, and a small spot of colour had risen on each cheek. It had been an arresting sight. Lucrezia’s was not a traditional beauty, he thought: her figure was unformed and boyish, but she had a certain naïve, elfin, freckled sweetness about her, which—though of course quite unlike Francesca’s sybaritic voluptuousness—was nonetheless charming.

  Lucrezia’s inexperience was obvious.

  Este felt a moment’s unease at this thought, remembering the exuberance of his most recent wild coupling with Francesca. His hedonistic whore, he thought, positively encouraged him in his more abandoned pursuits, but until now, he realised, he had never lain with a virgin—had never been given the opportunity to discover the pleasures of cracking through unblemished perfection, making his mark upon untouched territory. He imagined the sensation and, feeling himself stiffen, shifted position in his chair.

  “Lost in thought, eh, Este?” Cosimo de’ Medici’s voice punched into his mind like a fist. “Contemplating the future delights of marriage, perhaps? Why don’t we walk before we go in to eat? The women will be down soon and no doubt we shall be bidden to the table before long.”

  Alfonso d’Este stood up. The dog stretched and wagged its tail as it, too, got to its feet. Cosimo de’ Medici held out an arm, gesturing away from the statue-filled loggia towards the knot gardens. The two men walked slowly along the narrow paths, and the smells of the sun-baked lavender, basil and thyme were heavy in Alfonso’s nostrils. One of the beds was crushed and its clipped-box edging flattened and broken. The wolfhound dropped an inquisitive nose to the wreckage, but Alfonso snapped his fingers. “Folletto!” he hissed. “Here! Leave it!”

  “Oh, let him explore!” Cosimo de’ Medici said cheerfully. “No idea what happened to that poor bed, but the dog cannot make it worse than it is already. I’ll tell the gardener tomorrow. It will certainly need fixing before—oh, we have been summoned!”

  ***

  Lucrezia shifted her weight a little onto one buttock, and ran a flattened palm under her thigh, easing out a crease in her skirts. The noise from the thirty or so diners was considerable: the insistent clatter of conversation punctuated by the sharp scraping of cutlery and the clinking of glass.

  She glanced down the length of the table. Right in the centre lay the two great roasted swans, re-feathered, stiffened necks twined together in what now seemed to Lucrezia little more than a miserable parody of courtship. Plate after plate was pyramid-piled with fruit, vegetables, sweetmeats and oysters, and drooping sprays of flowers fell on, over, behind and around the displays.

  A quartet of musicians stopped playing, and a cackling troupe of dancing dwarfs bowed to the assembly and ran from the room. Lucrezia watched them leave, without enthusiasm. She had never liked them, though she knew they were favourites with her parents. They unnerved her: their oddly proportioned legs were comical, their steps too quick and short for an adult, but too heavy for a child.

  “Your father has gone to a great deal of trouble and expense, Signorina,” the duke said.

  “He has simply made sure that the banquet is fit for the occasion, sir.”

  The duke inclined his head.

  “You must attend so many feasts and banquets,” Lucrezia went on, “that it must be difficult to remember one from another after a while.”

  “Some remain in the memory longer than others.”

  Her face hot, Lucrezia looked down at her plate. Eels. She flicked a glance at Giovanni and smothered a laugh. The duke looked at her curiously. “The eels amuse you?”

  “It’s nothing, Signore—something that happened this morning. Nothing of any importance.” Her cheeks were flaming now. The duke drew a short breath, as though about to speak, but before he had uttered a word, a booming voice to his right said: “These eels are from your marshes in Comacchio, Este—absolutely the best in Italy.”

  Cosimo de’ Medici’s face was split in a broad smile; as he caught Lucrezia’s eye, he winked. Loud and cheerful as ever, he continued: “You are indeed fortunate to have the lands around the Po in the Duchy of Ferrara—an exceptionally productive part of the country, Este, exceptionally productive!”

  “I have excellent men managing the area.”

  “And it has been a good summer so far, too.”

  Servants in bright livery appeared through several doors; they bustled around the table, took away the eels and cleared the used glass and silver, creating space along the length of the table. Guests turned towards the end of the hall expectantly, as the musicians began again. This time, their music was haunting and plaintive, and filled the room with a sweetness that Lucrezia felt sure was supposed to reflec
t the grace of the swans “swimming” along the flower-strewn table. Poor things, she thought.

  The guests applauded and the head carver set to work.

  “His name is Girolamo Tagliente,” Lucrezia said to the duke. “He was only promoted to head carver last year, but he’s been with us since I was little, both here and back in Firenze.”

  The duke was watching Tagliente and seemed, Lucrezia was pleased to see, at least a little impressed.

  “He was always someone with whom we felt safe begging for titbits when we were small,” she said, and the duke smiled.

  “Our head carver in Ferrara has a ferocious reputation,” he said, “though I am not entirely sure from where it sprang, originally. His temper, so I have been told repeatedly, is legendary—but I have never actually known him to lose it. As is so often the case with legend, it seems, the facts rarely live up to the fiction.”

  Lucrezia said, “You would have to treat someone with great respect, though, wouldn’t you, if they had both a reputation for ferocity and an impressive skill with a knife?”

  The duke laughed. “You would indeed!” he said, and his gaze slid from her eyes to her mouth and back. Her words and his appreciative laughter sounded again in her head; she caught her lip between her teeth to stop her smile becoming too broad.

  “Thinking of our head carver,” the duke went on, “we entertain frequently in Ferrara. At this time of year, we often eat outside in the central courtyard. Torchlit, it can be most attractive, and if we are lucky enough to dine at a full moon, it can be quite enchanting.”

  “I look forward very much to seeing the castle and its grounds, Signore.”

  “And the household holds its collective breath, awaiting your arrival,” the duke said with a slow smile. Lucrezia held his gaze. He blinked slowly at her, almost lazily, and Lucrezia looked down at her hands.

  There was a long pause. The silence, Lucrezia thought, bulged between them, threatening to burst like an overfilled wineskin.