His Last Duchess Read online

  “What do you mean, my lady?”

  “About what I said just now. About what Giulietta would think of us.”

  Catelina did not reply. She continued working.

  “Because you simply mustn’t. It’s my fault, isn’t it? I asked you to come here with me—”

  “But why did you, Signora?” The impertinent question slid out before she could stop it. Catelina dropped the hair and put her hands over her mouth as though to stop any more ill-advised words following in its wake.

  “Oh, Lina.” The Signora laid a small hand on Catelina’s arm. “It’s precisely because you could say something like that that I wanted you here.”

  Catelina’s fingers were still pressed to her mouth.

  “I haven’t told you, have I, about the people my mother suggested I might bring with me before I thought of you? After it was decided that Giulietta was too old to come to Ferrara, Mamma suggested seven or eight replacements. Oh, Lina! They were all horrible!”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh…” The Signora frowned, remembering. “One who was very grand—I felt like a naughty little girl. Then there was one who was terribly shy, wouldn’t speak—she made me feel I had to talk all the time. Even after a few moments, I had bored myself most dreadfully. The one my mother liked best was plump and dumpy and so fussingly motherly—oh, Lina, each one was so wrong. And then I remembered you, the expression on your face when you caught the pomegranate I threw to you, and I knew you would be just what I needed.”

  Catelina smiled shyly at her mistress. “I hope I shall live up to your expectations, Signora,” she said.

  The Signora took her hand and squeezed it. Catelina felt the rough skin of her fingers catch on her mistress’s soft palm.

  “Come on, Lina, finish these braids, and we can go down to the little room we found yesterday. Alfonso will be back soon—we can watch for him.”

  A few moments later, mistress and maid left the bedchamber and walked together through endless rooms and down a couple of flights of stairs. After one or two wrong turns, they arrived at a small room which overlooked the central courtyard. The walls were lined in silk; there was a mirror in a fancy gold frame on the wall opposite the window, and what must have been dozens of pictures lined the other two walls. It seemed quite unbelievable to Catelina that anyone would spend so much time and money decorating a little room like this that was obviously hardly ever used.

  She waited awkwardly just inside the door, and watched as her mistress crossed to the open window and climbed up onto the broad recess in front of it. She leaned out to peer down into the noisy bustle of the courtyard.

  “Do you want me to stay, Signora?” Catelina asked.

  “Oh, yes, Lina, please stay. Come here—there’s so much happening.”

  Catelina looked at her face and saw, as if in a mirror, all the anxiety and excited curiosity that was churning in her own head. Perhaps there wasn’t so much difference between someone like the Signora and a girl like her after all.

  She stood next to her mistress and together they gazed down into the courtyard. All was motion and haste. At least a dozen horses were being made ready; busy men scurried around collecting equipment and then, into the midst of this, a plain carriage drew up and a shabby, brown-clad figure climbed out. Short, stout, grey hair with a circle of sunburned skin on the top of his head. A Franciscan, probably. He was followed by a dark young man carrying several long rolls of heavy paper.

  “Maybe he is making a map of the duchy.” The Signora pointed at the young man. “Alfonso said he wanted a proper one drawn up.”

  Several people spilled out of the front doors to meet the new arrivals, who were quickly shown inside. The brown drab of the friar’s robes stood out, Catelina thought, against the bright colours of the castle servants.

  “Alfonso will be home soon, I expect. I’m not sure where he has been, but I imagine he has had important things to do. What do you think, Lina?”

  Catelina did not know what to say. She had a good idea of what sort of “things” the Signore might have been doing that morning but thought it inappropriate to share her ideas with his wife. The Castello was full of interesting sources of information, for people who were prepared to listen.

  ***

  Francesca Felizzi was on her hands and knees, her head and shoulders beneath the bed and her bare backside facing towards where Alfonso sat on the big elmwood chair under the window. It was, no doubt, a deliberate move, he thought, enjoying the sight, for she was certainly taking her time in finding her lost belonging.

  After a moment, however, she stood up, pushed her hair back from her face and sat on the edge of the bed. Stretching one leg out and flexing her toes, she bent her knee up and put on her newly recovered stocking. “So, are you going to tell me or not? What’s she like?” she said.

  Alfonso watched her for a moment before he replied. “The new Signora?” he said. “Lucrezia is beautiful, of impeccable stock and is quite charming.”

  His words sounded cool and confident, but Alfonso could hear the deliberate omissions screaming their accusations into the silence that followed his pronouncement. A hot wave of shame washed over him as he contemplated the pitiful fiasco that constituted his experience of the marriage bed so far. It would have been a relief, he thought, to pour out to Francesca his bewilderment at his humiliation. His uninhibited whore, after all, knew his capabilities better than anyone, and this morning, thank God, he had proved them again to her with a vigour that had at last silenced the mocking voices that had infiltrated his dreams since his unexpected incapacity of a few nights previously. But he knew he would not do it. Could not.

  He said, hoping he sounded unconcerned, “Yes—it seems that I have married a beautiful child. Her lineage and nobility are faultless and her family have clearly understood the importance of the alliance we have forged with this union. Particularly since Cateau-Cambrésis—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t start talking politics!”

  As usual when Francesca spoke with so little regard for propriety, Alfonso felt a shudder of shock at being spoken to in a manner none other of his acquaintance would dare to adopt. “You are impolite,” he said coolly.

  “I know,” she said, tying her garter, “and you are far too fond of the sound of your own voice. But you make up for it in other ways, Alfonso, as do I, which is, after all, why we put up with each other.” She crossed the room and bent to kiss his mouth.

  “Perhaps, though,” she said, her smile fading, “you will tire of me now, with such competition in your legitimate bed.”

  She spoke flippantly, but there was an edge to her voice. Alfonso stood up, slid his hands down her back and held her by the buttocks. Her head tilted back and her arms went up and around his neck.

  “She’s beautiful, Francesca,” he said, “but she’s a child. She has little sophistication, and I doubt very much she will be able to compete with so…experienced a rival. You are very necessary to me.”

  And you have no idea quite how true that is just now, he thought.

  Francesca said nothing, but seemed reassured. Pulling away from Alfonso, she took a blue damask cloak from the back of another chair and swung it around her shoulders, then kissed him again. The kiss was brief, but arousing: had he not been sorely pressed for time, Alfonso thought, it might well have resulted in his detaining her at the cottage some while longer. Her lips lingered against his for a moment, and then she was gone.

  He looked around the room as he finished dressing. The largest room in the little villetta, it was simply furnished: a wide, canopied bed dominated, but several other charming pieces of furniture gave it an old-fashioned appeal. Alfonso ran his fingers over the carving on a small wooden chest at the foot of the bed. This in particular gave him great pleasure, worked as it was by none other than Filippo di Quercia.

  Alfonso recalled the women with whom he had coupled in this room—over a period of more than ten years, he realised. Some he remembered more cl
early than others. Lisabeta, sweet-faced paragon of all the virtues of the bedchamber; the appalling Agnese and now Francesca, his—He stopped himself. He had been about to say “courtesan” but in fact the only word that would serve adequately to describe the redoubtable Signorina Felizzi was “whore.” A seemingly limitless lack of inhibition. A sharp mind, though, to accompany the exquisite body, and a refreshing—though at times disarming—honesty, which Alfonso always found reassuring in a world where sycophancy and flattery were almost universal.

  He shrugged on his coat, gathered up the rest of his things and left the villetta. Collecting his mare from where she had been stabled, he quickly readied her for riding. Folletto yawned, stretched long legs and got lazily to his feet from where he had been curled in the hay, as Alfonso swung up into the saddle. He turned the mare towards the Castello and the wolfhound loped beside the horse, keeping pace with ease.

  The hours he spent with Francesca, Alfonso reflected, were perhaps the most honest he passed anywhere. Her enthusiastic response to his preferences was pleasing: few women seemed genuinely to derive the enjoyment she did from an appetite as demanding as his own. He knew, though, that he had just been considerably less than truthful with her about his new duchess. Hot shame broke over him again, and he saw in his mind an image of Lucrezia back in Mugello in August. He had been enchanted by her naïve charm at the start of that visit, and had begun, he knew, to believe that he was acquiring a truly admirable consort. Despite the worrying evidence of that potentially troublesome streak of inappropriate independence, he had thought his new wife to be someone who might not only bestow prestige upon the House of Este by virtue of the nobility of her own family, but who would—Alfonso searched for the right word—become another conduit for his not inconsiderable energies. Energies he had never before questioned.

  When he lay with Francesca, he was always utterly and completely overwhelmed by a soaring sense of physical abandonment, and for those moments his normally chaotic mind was subsumed by the sensations that invaded his body. He had never expected his whore to meet any but his baser needs, and he knew that Francesca was aware of how effectively she fulfilled those demands. But—he could hardly bear to articulate it, even to himself—something about his new wife had…unmanned him. Alfonso clenched his fists, and the mare snatched at the tightening reins, tossing her head irritably.

  Images of Lucrezia jostled in his mind. He had found her captivating in Mugello. The vivid smile. The boyish figure and the obvious innocence. Her unformed and instinctive responses to the artistic treasures that had surrounded her since childhood—surprisingly impressive. All charming. All adding to the sum of the various elements he had hoped to combine in the creation of an admirable duchess, even if something indistinct and unfathomable about her had been needling him since the banquet.

  But none of this explained that first night—God! How could it have happened? Yet again, he tried to think back through the events, to unpick the impossible knot. He had entered Lucrezia’s bedchamber, candescent with anticipation. Having undressed her, he had been entranced by what he had seen—he had congratulated himself on his luck at his acquisition. And then it had all begun to slip away from him. Unexpectedly, he had found himself unable to conjure the words with which to woo her. The aggressively bawdy phrases with which he regaled Francesca had elbowed their way into his mind, pushing and catcalling like a bunch of drunken delinquents into a church, making it impossible to find the words he sought. So he had remained silent.

  He had brought out the garnets then. The red of the stones against the skin of her throat—vivid as a knife-cut—had been quite exquisite, but even as he had marvelled at the sight, he had felt some essential vitality continue to ebb from him. Something about Lucrezia—he did not understand what it was—had screamed at him that he would be ill-advised to impose upon her his usual vigorous preferences; but he had realised with dismay that if he were to be forced to stifle his instincts each time he lay with her, he had no idea how he would ever achieve a satisfying union with a woman whose charm had nevertheless entirely seduced him.

  Alfonso was deep in the mire of these unpleasant thoughts when, with a scrabble of paws, Folletto barked and broke away. Startled, the mare bunched her quarters under him and sidestepped as the dog wheeled off to one side and disappeared into a gap between two houses. Alfonso reined her in and patted her neck, murmuring soothing nonsense to calm her. He could hear scuffling and snarling, but before he could make any move to follow his dog, Folletto reappeared, head high, tail wagging, a dark shape squirming between his jaws.

  Dismounting, Alfonso called him and he came at once, proudly displaying his catch. An enormous grey rat writhed in his mouth; black eyes bulged beneath a gaping gash in its head. Folletto dropped his prize. It landed at Alfonso’s feet and convulsed in the dust, squealing. Sickened by its obvious distress, he picked it up, gripped the body with one hand, grasped its bitten head in the other and, with a sharp twist, wrung its neck. There was a soft, gristly crack and the sleek body hung limp across his hand.

  Alfonso was surprised, and unexpectedly moved, to see how the stillness of death lent to this pitiful, broken thing an unwonted dignity. His own hands had brought an end to an agony. With ease he had released a creature from pain. He ran a thumb along the grey fur of its side. Clumps of hair were matted and wet from where the dog’s jaws had held it; Alfonso gently raked them straight with the tips of his fingers. It was, he thought, as though he were ordering the body, laying it out for burial.

  The mare snorted softly. Folletto sat on his haunches on the cobbles, the fringes over his eyes twitching as he watched his master expectantly.

  Alfonso’s skin crawled. With disgust, or a tingle of excitement? To his shame, he realised he was not sure he could tell the difference. The little animal seemed in death to embody a transition that he loved to contemplate, a transmutation he frequently yearned to understand: that of chaos to tranquillity.

  On many occasions, when his thoughts became too tumultuous, Alfonso knew he could often steer himself from the one to the other from within the labyrinth, walking though the ill-lit corridors of the maze in his mind, counting his steps, striding into shadow, confronting and subduing each image as he moved towards the centre.

  The labyrinth, unsurprisingly perhaps, resembled for Alfonso the subterranean passages in the Castello, dank corridors that led, ever narrower, ever darker, below the level of the moat to the dungeons. The time he spent down there now was oddly restorative, though as a boy, he had thought the actual dungeons the very lair of the Minotaur itself. His father had forbidden him to go near them, but he had on several occasions defied the injunction. He remembered the first time he had decided to disobey this most vehemently issued order. He must have been about ten years old.

  ***

  He is creeping along a low-ceilinged corridor towards a heavy iron door. There is a sharp smell of damp, of mould, of decay. He is surprised to see that the door is not much taller than he is himself, though it looks impossibly heavy. It has a tiny window in its centre, with a little hinged shutter lying closed over it. The door is fastened with two great bolts, each as long and thick as his forearm; they gleam with grease. He reaches out and touches the grease, looks at the black smear on his fingertips, puts his hand to his nose and grimaces at the smell of it.

  The silence of the place seems to wrap itself around his head as he stands there, muffling and smothering him, and he can feel his pulse still twitching in his ears. The only sound is that of his own tentative footsteps, but then he hears a soft shuffling and a long, indrawn breath from the other side of the door. Someone is behind the door, inside the cell. And whoever it is, is moving, back and forth, a few steps at a time. Alfonso’s skin crawls; he is intrigued and frightened at the same time, at the thought that a person as real as himself, someone he cannot see, is only feet from him on the far side of that door. He has never seen inside any of the dungeons, cannot imagine what it could be like to be locked away d
own here in this lightless world below the moat. He reaches out towards the tiny window, wanting to lift the little shutter, wanting to see the inmate of the cell.

  And then a noise slices out like a blade into the silence—a horrible, howling cry of despair.

  Alfonso snatches his arm back and puts his hands over his ears, but the sound pushes in through his fingers, on and on, wordless, incoherent, desolate. Too frightened to run, he stands facing the door, his hands still clutching his head, eyes screwed shut, legs trembling, until the terrible cry falters and fades. Then his paralysis lifts and, retching and whimpering, he runs.

  ***

  That sound had stayed with him for months, he remembered. It had woken him, sweating and terrified, night after night, from nightmares he had endured alone, never able to describe or exorcise them—to do so would have forced confession of his disobedience and incurred his father’s anger.

  Looking down at the rat now, he wondered whether that moment in the dungeon had ever truly left him. He heard the echo of that cry often, in and amongst the jumble of fragmented conversations in his head, the remembered expletives, imagined narratives, snatches of music—and now the squeals of Folletto’s mangled victim. A confusion of cries, from those in the throes of what might be ecstasy or despair. Alfonso pondered the similarities. The sounds a woman makes from the depths of passion, he thought, do not change noticeably when you beat her. That slide up the scale from moan to howl always quickened his pulse, however he induced it. In fact, he thought, the more energetic the induction, the wilder the resultant intoxication.

  There were times when the inside of his head was little more than a cacophony.

  But the labyrinth always led to the same end: through Babel to chill perfection. As though behind a locked door, lay the chill perfection of death. For a long time now, Alfonso knew he had been strangely enamoured of the notion of finality—he craved relief from the tumult of his imagination. He stroked the rat’s damp fur. The silence of the dungeons was perhaps the only place he knew that brought him close to quiescence, but perhaps, he thought, the deeper peace he found himself seeking from the heart of the labyrinth might come not from his own death—as he had so often imagined it would—but from the taking of another life. A heavy heat slid down through his guts and the hair rose on his arms. Shame or excitement? Which was it? Were the two distinguishable? Until that moment it had always been his own death he had contemplated from within the maze. But now the occasioning of it in another creature had happened in his hands—and the sensation was, he realised, not unpleasant.