His Last Duchess Page 4

  After a moment the duke said, “I must thank you for my tour of the house—you have a most refreshing set of opinions on your father’s collection, Signorina.”

  “Papa loves his paintings, and—I think particularly—his sculptures, Signore,” Lucrezia said. “Perhaps his enthusiasm is infectious—I’ve always enjoyed them too.” She glanced towards her father, who was engrossed now in conversation with a tiny woman to his left; although reassured that he was not listening, Lucrezia nonetheless dropped her voice. The duke bent towards her, his eyebrows raised, and Lucrezia felt her heart race at his closeness. She said, in little more than a whisper, “He has told all of us about each piece so often that I would be a poor student indeed if, after such frequent repetition, I did not remember at least some of the details.”

  She expected a smile, but to her dismay, the duke’s eyes were suddenly cold. Unsure of what she had done to offend him, she began to fiddle her food with her fork, but her throat seemed to have swollen and her appetite had quite disappeared. The duke turned away from her and began to speak again to her father.

  Lucrezia ate little of the meats that followed the eels and only picked at the salads—the broad beans and Parmesan cheese, which she liked very much, but somehow no longer felt like eating. (“Damned peasant food that the nobility like to think illustrates their broad-mindedness!” she remembered Angelo the cook sneering, last time her mother had requested the dish.)

  The duke—and his dog—seemed happy with their meal: the great wolfhound sat pressed against its master, their heads almost level. From time to time, it would rest its muzzle upon the linen table covering, and stare at its master’s plate, the fringes of hair over each eye twitching as it watched the progress of each mouthful of food. The duke seemed to enjoy passing titbits to his pet, and they both appeared pleased by what they ate.

  Lucrezia picked up a piece of bread and began to shred it. The soft crumbs scattered across the table and onto her lap. What could it have been in her remarks that had so quickly discomposed him? Perhaps what she had intended as no more than an affectionate mockery of her much-loved parent had been interpreted by Signor d’Este as disrespect. Glancing sideways at the duke, she saw that he was still talking earnestly to her father, both hands held up before him in emphasis.

  “…and to my mind it is unaccountable that such a reaction should even have been tolerated, let alone encouraged,” he was saying.

  “Oh, I could not agree more, Este!” she heard her father say in reply. “In fifty-six, if you remember, just after the abdication, it was just the same when Charles’s opponents attempted to interfere.”

  “Indeed it was.”

  Lucrezia listened to the political discussion with little understanding, her eyes upon the duke’s mouth. Within weeks, she thought, running the tip of her tongue over her teeth, she would know the feel and taste of that mouth, would have been caressed by those hands. How easy would this man be to please? Or perhaps, given his reaction to her just now, perhaps the question would best be phrased: how easy would he be to displease?

  ***

  Most of the guests had left: the insistent blare of voices that had so vividly filled the evening had died to a rumble, and now only a few sporadic conversations still held sway in the statuary-filled loggia behind the great house of Cafaggiolo. The scratching buzz of the late-evening crickets zigzagged up and over the dome of the starfilled sky.

  Alfonso d’Este raised Lucrezia’s hand to his lips and kissed her knuckles. “Thank you for your company at dinner,” he said, still holding her fingers. “I shall look forward very much to seeing you in the morning.”

  He watched a faint flush bring colour to her cheeks as she smiled at him, her eyes shining. Gold lights flickered in her hair in the lamplight. She was very pretty, he thought. He wanted to look at her breasts—he could see the square neck of the rust-coloured dress rising and falling as she breathed, and it pulled like a kite-string at his concentration—but he would not let himself do it. To be seen so doing would be shamefully undignified.

  “Perhaps you would care to see something of the land around the castle tomorrow, Signore,” Lucrezia said.

  Alfonso felt the smallest of pulse beats in her fingertips. He said, smiling, “I should be more than delighted to explore the countryside that has been your home for so many years.” Then, giving her fingers a brief squeeze, he released her hand.

  To his left, he saw Eleanora de’ Medici watching their conversation. Her eyes were wide and black in the lamplight; she seemed, more than anything else, he thought in surprise, wary. Suspicious. Catching his eye, she started, and smiled, though the smile seemed uncomfortable and lasted barely a second.

  Her husband, arm draped across her shoulder, patted her on the back and said, in a carrying voice, “Well, Eleanora, carissima, it is time our honoured guests were offered the respite of a bed.” Snapping his fingers a few times, he summoned a number of servants from shadowed corners. Striding ahead of them, he stopped before Alfonso and nodded briefly. “Sir, it has been a great pleasure to have your company this evening. I do hope you have enjoyed yourself. I trust that your sleeping arrangements will suit you, and that you will have a restful night.”

  “I have been charmed by the experience,” Alfonso said. He glanced at Lucrezia, who dropped her gaze to the floor, then looked up at him through her lashes. Alfonso arched an eyebrow at her. She twitched down a smile.

  A few moments later, accompanied by a bright-liveried manservant, Alfonso climbed the three flights of stairs which led to his allotted suite. Assuring the anxious servant several times that he was more than adequately provided for, and finally bidding him good night, he closed the door of the chamber, crossed the room in a few long-legged strides, pulled back the bed-hangings and sat down on the edge of the mattress.

  The shutters were still open; a thin moon like a wide smile hung low and yellow in the night sky.

  Alfonso lay back and closed his eyes. Apart from the increasingly sporadic chirrups from the crickets outside, all was silent. He ran both palms up and over his face, pressing the heels of his hands onto his eyes; flickering patterns of light and dark erupted beneath the pressure and his thoughts, surprisingly calm for most of the day, exploded into their usual clamouring confusion.

  In through an eye and out through an ear…like a child unable to resist picking at a scab, he returned to this horrible image yet again: the moment at which, a fortnight before, the resisting firmness of King Henri’s eye had given way and the wooden shard had pushed inexorably through into the softness within. He imagined, with a nauseous squirm of the guts, the white-hot, panicked agony of it. The speed and the sharpness. Sharp. You would have to respect someone, wouldn’t you, with a reputation for ferocity and an impressive skill with a knife? She seemed, he thought, to have a modicum of a sense of humour, which was to be encouraged, though somewhat to his disquiet, this appeared to be allied with an unsettling and disrespectful tendency towards independence. That must be contained. How best to do it, though? The image he was beginning to build of his perfect duchess had to be maintained. How would this child compare with his whore? Would she—could she—be happy to accept from him what Francesca so energetically enjoyed? Would she be as accommodating as his pleasure-loving wanton with her ripe-peach breasts and that backside that would make Aphrodite weep? What was it Francesca had said? Shall I be redundant now, after your marriage? Will you still need me? Would he? Would he need Francesca once he had this girl in his bed? Once the resisting firmness of Lucrezia’s maidenhood had given way and he had pushed inexorably through into the softness within? Inexorable. Exceptionally inexorable. Exceptionally productive, Este, exceptionally productive. Would Lucrezia be so? An heir was imperative, after all. Imperative.

  Alfonso’s thoughts climbed over each other, frantic to reach the top of the pile; the images that accompanied them danced ever more frenetically, and snatches of music from the evening’s meal wove their way in and around it all. Alfonso gripp
ed his skull with his fingers. “Stop it!” he said aloud.

  The wolfhound shifted in its sleep at the sound of its master’s voice.

  He made himself breathe slowly. He would walk through the maze again. Taking himself on the familiar journey through the ill-lit, tortuous passages in his mind, he would concentrate on counting his footsteps as he moved slowly through the darkness towards the inevitable final door. He would not go through, though. Could not. He would wait outside it, looking at it, leaning against it, knowing what lay on the other side, both entranced and repelled by his awareness of what he wanted, but needing the respite from the chaos.

  ***

  “Will you stop this, Eleanora—I simply cannot understand why you are making such a fuss.” Cosimo de’ Medici pulled the sheets up to his chest and jerked the bed-hangings shut. “The man is obviously cultured and intelligent—his opinions on the Ghiberti bronze panel—”

  “Oh, Cosimo! I simply couldn’t care a fig if he knows everything there is to know about every artist in Italy,” Eleanora snapped. She glared at her husband. “You’ve been refusing to listen to my worries ever since you first suggested this alliance, and now that it has gone too far to retract—”

  “Why on earth would I want to retract?”

  Eleanora felt a shout of frustrated anxiety fist itself in her throat. “Because I don’t think this marriage is going to make her happy. That’s why.” She flung back the bedcovers, flapped aside the hangings on her side of the bed, swung her legs out and stood up.

  Her husband’s normally cheerful face, now creased with incomprehension, peered through the hangings after her. “What in heaven’s name do you mean?”

  “She’s too young.” A heavy stress on each of the three syllables.

  Cosimo was angry now. He climbed out of bed. “Nonsense! Sixteen is a perfectly acceptable age to—”

  “I don’t care about acceptability! Quite apart from the fact that I’ve told you a dozen times or more that the average age for a bride—even in Firenze—is now seventeen or eighteen, I’m not talking about acceptability or averages! I’m talking about our daughter.”

  “And so am I! What else is this about?”

  “What else? I’ll tell you what else it’s about! It’s about your blinkered determination to maintain the ‘continuance of the Medici superiority’ at whatever cost…and your desperation to make your personal mark upon the annals of history and—”

  “Oh, no, no, no! You go too far!”

  A sudden pause.

  “Do I?” Eleanora deliberately dropped her voice to just above a whisper. As she had intended, it wrongfooted her husband: he gulped back the shouted retort he had obviously been on the point of hurling at her, breathing heavily, as if he had been running for some time.

  After another pause, Cosimo said, clearly making an effort to sound calm and concerned, “Very well. Tell me then, cara, what is troubling you?”

  Feeling tears behind her eyes now, Eleanora struggled to keep her voice from trembling. “I don’t know, Cosimo. I don’t know. If I tell you it is a mother’s instinct, you will tell me I am being foolish.”

  “You are being foolish.”

  “I know that I have no reason to feel like this. But…”

  “Come here,” Cosimo said. He held out his arms to her, but she remained where she was, her gaze fixed upon his. He walked over to her and hugged her, pinning her unresponsive arms inside his embrace. He spoke into her hair, and she felt his words buzz against her scalp. “Of course you are anxious. She’s your baby, your little girl, the little lark you have kept safe in a comfortable cage for sixteen years. And you are just about to open its door and tell her to fly free. Of course you feel anxious. You have been a good mother—but, Eleanora, he is a good man. He will take care of her. Trust him.”

  Eleanora imagined her lark flying from one cage straight into another, and said nothing.

  ***

  Lucrezia rolled over to the edge of her bed, tangling herself in her sheet, and turned onto her back across the width of the mattress. The muffled sound of raised voices she had heard from her parents’ room had stopped. She stretched her arms above her head and leaned backwards so that she could see her room upside-down; her hands hung down and she touched the wooden floor. Her hair lay tangled around her fingers. She watched the sky through the inverted window for a moment, enjoying the sensation of pressure in her face, then rolled back onto her stomach. The sheet became even more tangled until, after a brief struggle, she kicked it to the end of the bed.

  She pulled off her shift and walked to the window. A welcome breeze blew cool on her sweat-damp skin; she shook her hair off her face, leaned against the sill and stared up at the stars, shivering as the bricks pressed chill on her hot body and legs. The hair on her neck and arms lifted.

  He had smiled at her again, just before they retired for the night. A slow smile as though he desired her. His earlier coldness—which had perturbed her—had gone. Perhaps she had imagined it. She felt almost sure that he had wanted to kiss her. And, she thought, with a tight little smile, she would quite like to have kissed him, too. She had never kissed anyone. A soft laugh puffed in her nose as she thought of the few occasions in the past that she and Giovanni had—as children do—made brief, giggling forays into each other’s privacy: damp little moments of probing fingers and explosive snorts of laughter. She had no doubt that what awaited her in October would be as different from this as silk from sacking.

  The handsome Signor d’Este would have much to teach her, she felt sure. The raising of his eyebrow as he had kissed her fingers just now had been knowing, playful—even teasing. Lucrezia felt a warm, prickling sensation in her belly. She sat back down on her bed and with searching fingers that suddenly seemed as detached from her as though they were no longer her own, she explored her skin. Her hands were lover’s hands—his hands: the right traced up and over her left wrist, forearm, elbow, shoulder; the left moved back down the right arm. She put a hand over each breast and held them, and then, flat-palmed, stroked one hand down her belly, searching and curious. She lay back across the bed. Her breath caught in her throat as raw, inexplicable sensations ignited and burned, fierce and sweet inside her expectant body.

  An owl called in the still night air and a fox barked twice. The castle was silent; Lucrezia wondered if she were now the only person awake in the entire building.

  Part Two

  Castello Estense, Ferrara

  October 1559

  Three months later

  4

  The candle guttered and its bobbing flame sent shivering shadows across the room. The red bed-hangings seemed to flutter and points of candlelight flickered in every one of the diamond panes of the two windows.

  Lucrezia watched her new husband close the chamber door. He leaned with his back against it, facing her, his eyes fixed upon hers. Lucrezia’s skin tingled, as though she had been running, though she had only climbed a flight of shallow steps—and that, slowly. She realised she was trembling. She tried to smile, but the smile died before it could reach her lips. Until a moment ago she had been sure that she felt elated and happy—as she knew she should today, her wedding day—but at the same time everything seemed insubstantial and unreal, as though she were playing an exciting, but clearly fictitious, part in a play. She felt detached from reality, an observer of her own emotions, aware of herself as though she were a separate third person hidden somewhere in the room, eavesdropping on what was about to unfold.

  Alfonso said nothing. Leaning lazily against the bedroom door, weight on one leg, the other crooked up with the sole of his foot flat against the wood, he just stared at her with his head tilted to one side. As though, she thought, he were observing a painting or admiring a piece of sculpture. The corners of his mouth lifted as his eyes left hers and wandered from her face, down to her feet and back, slowly, slowly; appraising—approving, she imagined, for his smile broadened as he looked back into her eyes.

  “You’re be
autiful,” he said at last.

  Lucrezia tried to swallow. A burst of music from downstairs, and the sound of voices still celebrating, pushed its way through the open casement making her start.

  “If you remember, I told you that my household was awaiting your arrival with great anticipation,” Alfonso said softly. “They are merely demonstrating their pleasure at your presence in the Castello. Come here.”

  She knew this to be a command.

  She walked a few steps and stopped in front of him. Alfonso looked at her mouth. Lucrezia realised it was slightly open: her lips were dry and she could feel her breath on them—cold in, warm out. Alfonso put his hands on her shoulders, then turned her so that she faced away from him. He ran the fingers of one hand up into her hair, and a shiver ran down her spine. She tipped her head back, pushing against his touch. Then, slowly and deliberately, much as she had imagined in her other life, back in her old chamber with Giulietta that summer, Alfonso began to unfasten her laces. In the event, he did not sing, but his breathing deepened and quickened as he worked.

  First came the sleeves, which he slid from her arms like a caress. Then the more complicated laces of the bodice. He was taking his time, Lucrezia thought, apparently unaware of her trembling, seeming to enjoy flipping the long, thin cords through their stitched eyelet holes. She closed her eyes as Alfonso—still standing behind her—reached around her. With his head next to hers, his cheek against her ear so that he could see what he did, he eased her shift from her shoulders and let it drop. Her clothes fell from her, piece by piece, until everything—skirt, overskirt, bodice and shift—lay in jewel-bright folds around her feet, and she was naked in the mass of material, like Venus in her floating shell.

  She stood quite still, watching the points of light dance in the windows, aware of Alfonso’s warm bulk behind her, afraid to move, afraid to breathe.