His Last Duchess Read online

  She felt his hands on her shoulders again; he turned her back to face him. Exquisitely and entirely exposed now, she held his gaze, wide-eyed, fearing that if she should so much as blink, he would look away from her eyes, and—would look at her body. At the thought, her nipples contracted and a hot thread from her throat hooked itself deep in her belly, where it jerked like a fish on a line.

  But without taking his eyes from hers, Alfonso reached behind him and blindly picked from a small table a carved rosewood box. He held it in one hand, unlocked it and opened it with the other. Lucrezia drew in a sharp breath, and the hot thread tugged again as Alfonso pulled from the box a long, long rope of dark red, glittering stones. He stepped forward and began to wind it around and around Lucrezia’s throat, sliding it each time underneath the mass of her hair. Each time he slid his hand across her neck, his face drew near to hers and the stuff of his doublet brushed against her breasts but, still, he did not speak.

  Once fastened, the rope hung heavily around the base of Lucrezia’s throat. Alfonso stood back and gazed at her, apparently entranced. The stones were cold and heavy against her skin, and she shivered.

  Seeing this, Alfonso picked her off her feet and into his arms. Startled, she smothered a gasp. He walked swiftly across the room, pausing to blow out the candles as he passed them. As the flames went out, Lucrezia saw the wood-panelled walls and the gilt-framed pictures all but disappear; only the thinnest lines gleamed along the pictures’ edges as the moonlight caught them. In the candlelight just now, the colours of the room had glowed as warm as late-evening embers, but now the moonlight turned this, in an instant, to silver.

  The bedcovers had been folded back in readiness. Alfonso placed Lucrezia carefully on the linen sheet and, without comment, stepped back into the shadows. She pulled the covers over her, watching him in the dark, feeling the linen chill against her skin.

  A moment later, Alfonso sat down on the edge of the bed, pushed back the blankets so that Lucrezia was once more quite uncovered, and then, slowly and deliberately, began to explore her body with his hands and his mouth. At the first touch she stiffened, her whole body prickling with shamed embarrassment, and with what in her confusion she hoped might be desire. She wondered what she should do. The silence seemed to be growing more and more robustly elastic between them, increasingly hard to break. The only sounds in the room were those of her new husband’s breathing and the paper-smooth whisper of his hands on her skin.

  She reached towards him, wanting to touch him, but he grasped her wrists and pressed them back onto the bed without comment, returning straight away to his own searching, insistent caresses. She tried again, twice, with the same result. Alfonso did not speak or look at her face and, to Lucrezia’s bewilderment, seemed determined that she should take no active part at all in what was transpiring.

  She began to feel increasingly unconnected with her body. Alfonso’s touch excited her, but it was like trying to hold an image from a dream: as fast as she acknowledged the sensation she was feeling, so it retreated from her, disappeared into nothingness, leaving her bemused, confused and hungry.

  It was not long, though, before Alfonso’s hands became more insistent; her heartbeat began to quicken, and anxiety pushed thick fingers up into her throat, as she realised that the loss of her maidenhood must be fast approaching. She had been longing for this moment for months, but now, as she faced its immediate arrival, a suffocating feeling of panic began to tighten around her chest.

  Even as she thought this, Alfonso lifted his mouth from her breast and, eyes black in the almost-dark, ran the tip of his tongue over wet lips. He did not smile, and Lucrezia shivered.

  Alfonso shifted himself up her body and pushed one knee in between her thighs. At first she tried to hold her legs together, resisting him, her face cold and hollow at this unprecedented sense of exposure, but Alfonso edged his leg more firmly into place, crooking her knees upwards with his hands. Lucrezia closed her eyes and held her breath, expecting the stabbing soreness she had once been warned might come. Alfonso pressed down against her hips, but although she could feel a blunt nuzzling, as though of some hot-nosed animal, she was surprised that, in the event, it seemed quite soft and made little impression.

  Alfonso swore quietly and pushed his hand down between Lucrezia’s body and his own. His arm jerked awkwardly against her stomach, and then he tried again. She felt the hot nudging once more, then Alfonso’s hands pulling and probing—she was startled as his fingers slid inside her, and let out a sharp mew of surprise. She was unsure what he was doing and did not dare to ask him, for her husband now seemed quite oblivious of her, other than as an obstruction to his achieving fulfilment.

  He tried a third time, muttering angrily to himself and, as he failed yet again, Lucrezia’s eyes filled with tears that ran, scalding, down the sides of her face and into her ears. After all the months of expectation, it seemed now that her new husband did not truly want her after all. He had seemed to at first—her body had appeared to please him—and she had thought him so assured, so grown-up, so experienced as he had begun to make love to her. It had to be her own failing, something she was or had done, that had debilitated him like this.

  Despair draped itself around her like a wet sheet.

  Alfonso rolled away from her to lie on his back on the far side of the mattress. Lucrezia sat up, dragging the covers up and over herself. With the untidy linen clutched in white-knuckled fists, she could just make out his profile, staring up at the ceiling. The whites of his eyes caught the light from the window. A sob swelled in Lucrezia’s chest and she tugged the sheet nearer to her chin. Say something to me—please! she willed Alfonso. Tell me you are not angry with me. Hold me!

  And then, after a few long seconds he turned, but he did not hold her, and still he said nothing. He reached forward and unfastened the rope of red stones, unwinding them slowly from Lucrezia’s throat. Then, with the jumble of crimson clasped in one fist, he sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood.

  Stiff with misery, Lucrezia watched him. It was now so dark in the room that she could not properly see what he was doing, but she heard the click of a tiny lock and the muted rattle of what sounded like glass. A rustle of material followed.

  With a pinprick of shock, she realised he was dressing. “Are—are you leaving?” she said.

  The words sounded horribly loud, whispered into the silence. There was no reply. Lucrezia watched her new husband cross the dark chamber. The lower edge of the door caught on the floor as it opened, then again as it closed. There was a scraping of claws as the waiting wolfhound scrabbled up to standing in the corridor outside the bedchamber, and then Alfonso was gone.

  Left in the dark, Lucrezia sat up and hugged her knees, feeling those first tears itch in the creases of her ears as they began to dry. Her eyes stung. She blinked and bit her lip, feeling it tremble under her teeth, and then she began to weep again, unrestrainedly, overwhelmed with a bitter sense of failure.

  She became aware of feeling cold, as she wept, and, rubbing her eyes, she climbed out of the bed. She knelt on the floor in the dark and ran her hands over the boards, searching for her chemise. Finding it, she pulled it on, then scrambled back under her bedcovers, curling up tightly with the blankets tucked close around her.

  Her thoughts raced. She had, she realised miserably, pictured many versions of her first encounter with her new husband. In the teeming, childish images that had filled her mind as she had contemplated her first night in her marriage bed, she had seen the then unknown Alfonso as being perhaps gentle and tender, maybe forceful—even brutal—perhaps wild, and funny and unpredictable. Her imaginings had been vivid and entertaining, and she had thought she had touched upon every possibility.

  But there was one thing she realised she had not envisaged: in none of her dreams had he ever been absent.

  ***

  Lucrezia awoke after a short, unsatisfying sleep, just after dawn, with eyes so dry and puffed from crying th
at they would not easily open, but, unable to sleep further, she rolled onto her back and gazed through stiffened eyelids up at the canopy of the bed.

  She felt quite numb. For months her focus had been almost entirely upon this first night. She had spared almost no thought for the weeks, months, years before her, so entirely had her mind been trained upon this exciting realisation of her newly emerging womanhood. There came to her now the prospect of a whole life unfolding ahead of her in the company of a husband who seemed unable to love her—an image quite terrifying to her in the potential of its bleak loneliness.

  Tears leaked again from her still-swollen eyes. She wanted to go home, for everything to be as it had been. She wanted her mother. She wanted Giovanni, and the uncomplicated warmth of their undemanding friendship. She wanted to be a child again, having so manifestly failed in her first attempt at becoming a woman.

  And then a noise startled her; she stifled a sob.

  The door to the bedchamber opened.

  Alfonso was carrying a candle, one hand cupped around the flame, which glowed crimson through his fingers. He was wearing a long robe and an intense expression Lucrezia could not determine. She watched him, unblinking, as he placed the candle down on the table. He took off the robe, and draped it over the end of the bed.

  Lucrezia’s eyes widened. It had been dark before, and she had been unable to see what the candlelight now revealed. As she saw the indisputable proof of Alfonso’s new readiness to attempt the consummation of their marriage, an alarming image of herself as a pig impaled on a spit pushed its way into her mind. She put her hand over her mouth. The child she had been wanted to laugh. The woman she hoped to become felt a wash of relief that she appeared to be—at least a little—desirable.

  ***

  Alfonso saw Lucrezia cover her mouth with her fingers as she flicked a covert glance at his prick. Her eyes were coin-round; her hair had fuzzed and tangled around the white, freckled triangle of her face. She had put her shift back on, he saw—the linen was sleep-rucked, and one small shoulder protruded from the gaping neckline. The bedclothes she held gathered up in both hands at chest height. She looked wary and frightened and terribly young, and he realised that he wanted her very much—his groin ached with the wanting—but as much as he intended to try again, so a pinching feeling of unprecedented anxiety held him back.

  It had never happened before.

  Never with any woman he had bedded in the past—not with the castle servants he had once “persuaded” to indulge him as a boy, not with the harlots he had paid for more adventurous activities as he grew up, not with the libidinous countess with whom he had tumbled for several years under the nose of her unintelligent husband, and certainly never with Francesca. Never.

  The thought of his failure this evening frightened him. Accusations and misgivings whined in his head. What if it happened again? Now? Another time? Every time? Why had it happened earlier? What if—Alfonso swallowed uncomfortably and then spoke aloud to drown the doubts. “Take off your chemise, Lucrezia.”

  He would not give it a chance to happen again.

  Lucrezia said nothing, but knelt up on the mattress, crossed her arms in front of her and grasped the hem of her shift. In one fluid movement she pulled it over her head, and then sat back on her heels, her arms folded across her breasts, her eyes on his. His cock twitched.

  Alfonso climbed onto the bed; he held her shoulders. She unfolded her legs and lay back. Compliant. He liked the word. Searched for another: obedient. He ran a hand up over her belly and onto her breast. She stiffened again as she had before. He felt as though he had a fever: his skin was burning but the flesh below it was chilled and shivering. He looked at Lucrezia’s body. The perfect image. His to possess. His to enjoy. He slid one knee up and over her legs. The swollen heaviness in his groin tightened again. He moved her breast under his palm, then pushed his other hand downwards, between their two bodies.

  Lucrezia sucked in a shuddering breath. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry if I…” Her voice cracked and died away.

  At the sound of her voice, the softening began and, as it did so, a knot of anxiety tightened around his throat like a noose. Determined not to fail again, he closed his fingers more firmly on Lucrezia’s breast. Too firmly: she made a small noise of distress and squirmed away from his grip.

  It was like trying to stop water trickling away into sand. The tightness in his cock subsided. Retreated. Faded. Shrivelled. He closed his eyes, almost suffocated by a black drench of defeat and swore under his breath. He turned away and sat on the edge of the bed with his back to her.

  There was a long pause.

  Lucrezia whispered, “Please—don’t leave.”

  “No,” he said, still facing away from her. “The servants would talk, should I not be here when they arrive in the morning.”

  He felt her flinch, as though he had made to hit her.

  Alfonso wanted to leave the room—as desperate for the silent safety of his own chamber as is a drowning man for air. With the humiliation of this second failure sneering at him from one side, and the thought of his servants’ shocked reactions if he were to abscond taunting him from the other, he forced himself to remain in the room. He walked slowly to the window.

  He stood motionless for what seemed like hours, sightlessly staring at nothing, his mind numb. Then, too tired to stand any longer, he returned to the bed and lay on his back next to Lucrezia. She made no move to touch him, and so they remained, side by side—like two stone effigies from the great cathedral—until the grey light of morning filled the room.

  5

  Waiting-woman to a duchess? Catelina stroked the corn-coloured woollen skirts of her newest dress and stifled a disbelieving grin. She picked up an ivory comb and began trying to work it through the Signora’s hair. It felt strange to be standing so close to someone so grand, someone dressed in such beautiful clothes, actually being asked to touch her lovely hair. Catelina looked at her own hands. They were red, and the skin on her fingers was scratchy and rough, despite the oils she had been given to soften them. There was no avoiding the fact that they were still kitchen hands and they still looked bad—particularly the burned one. Even if it no longer hurt, there was a big crimson patch, right across her wrist and the back of her hand, where the skin was softly puckered, like a turkey-cock’s wattle. It looked horrible, but Catelina knew it might well have been much worse if the Signora had not done what she did that day in the kitchen, with the eel-barrel.

  Catelina breathed in. She smelled nice, the Signora—of roses, and some other, sharper flower Catelina could not name—not like most of the people she had lived among so far. Until a week ago she had shared her life with people who were far more likely to smell of mutton fat, sweat and stale woodsmoke than of flowers. Catelina thought she had probably washed more often in the week and a half she had been in Ferrara than she had done in five years at Cafaggiolo.

  “Will it be long before you’ve finished? Is it dreadfully tangled?” The Signora’s voice interrupted her musings.

  Catelina started. “Oh—I’m sorry, my lady—have I hurt you?”

  “No, no—not at all.” The Signora turned round. She was smiling. “I was just thinking it seemed to be taking rather a long time. Shall I have a try?” She took the comb from Catelina and began to work with it, her head on one side, a hank of hair clutched in her fist. “Ouch! We should have done this last night, Lina,” she said, grimacing.

  Lina. No one had ever thought to shorten her name before. Catelina sat down on a carved chest.

  The Signora continued her struggle with her hair, and then laughed, saying, “What on earth do you think Giulietta would say to see you sitting there and me fighting with my own hair?”

  Catelina bit her lip.

  “Oh, don’t look like that! I didn’t mean to make you feel guilty…”

  That morning in the kitchens at Cafaggiolo…Catelina could still hardly believe it had happened: there she had been, sitting in he
r usual corner, peeling vegetables, one hand all prune-wrinkled and chilled from being too long in the water and the other still sore and stiff and wrapped in bandages, when the big door to the upper floors had slammed back on its hinges and the Signora had burst in, followed by that gangly cousin of hers.

  “Angelo, where is she? Where’s that girl who burned her arm a few days ago? Catelina, I think her name is.” She had been all out of breath from running. Catelina remembered how her name had cut right through the noise of the kitchen. She had looked up at once and seen Signor Angelo jerk his head towards her corner. The Signora had pushed her way across the room, through all the bustle and noise, and had stopped in front of her. Then she had just come out with it—asked her to come with her to Ferrara. Catelina hadn’t understood. It hadn’t made sense at all.

  But, sense or not, here she was, with little or no idea of how to be a waiting-woman, working for a girl who (though Catelina felt guilty even thinking it) seemed to have not much more idea of how to be a duchess. A week they had been here, now, and to Catelina’s way of thinking, the Signora seemed as ill at ease and out of place in this great castle as she did herself.

  There had been all the bubbling excitement of the wedding—well, that had been quite an event, and Catelina had been proud to play even a small part in it—but then, the day after the celebrations, she had seen her mistress deflated and miserable, moping about her chamber like a sad little ghost, refusing her food and so pale she was almost transparent. Homesick, probably, Catelina told herself. She had cheered up a little in the week since that day, it was true, but there was a—she searched for the right word—a breakableness about her now that had not been there back in Cafaggiolo.

  “Lina,” the Signora said, “I have finished the tangles. Could you try to braid it for me?”

  “Of course, my lady,” Catelina said politely, hoping very much that she was telling the truth.

  “You don’t feel guilty, do you?” the Signora asked, as Catelina separated the copper hair into sections.