His Last Duchess (11 page)

Shaking
with
relief, burning with anger, she watches him go. “Never again,” she says, spitting the last of him into the dirt. “Never again will I do anything like that—without making damned sure I have my money in advance.”

***

“Come on, then,
puttana
,” Francesca muttered to herself. “Stop all this. It's time to get up.”

Sighing, she padded across the room and picked up her lawn shift from the floor; she pulled it on and ran her hands down her front, smoothing out the creases. Her bodice and skirt she put on with practised ease, tightening laces, wriggling her shoulders and shifting each breast into a more comfortable position within the stiff damask with her fingers.

She closed the window, raked the embers, straightened the bedcovers, pushed her feet into her shoes.

A bag of coins lay on the low table near the door. This Francesca picked up and weighed in the palm of her hand. “At least I command a better price today,” she said. Throwing the little bag up and catching it, then closing and locking the door, she set off for the city. It was a good half-hour's walk, but Francesca was used to travelling on foot and, in today's mild sunshine, she was happy to be out. Snatches of Alfonso's conversation repeated themselves insistently in her head, and, as she walked, a small seed of curiosity put out a little green shoot.

She
is
indiscriminate
, he had said, and
pleased
by
everything
. That either implied a particularly sweet and generous disposition, Francesca thought, or nothing more than a lack of judgement.
If
I
have
told
her
what
she
should
think, there can be no merit in her thoughts…
Not for the first time, Francesca wondered what this girl was actually like. She rather approved of someone who had to be “told what to think”: it suggested a certain waywardness with which she could easily identify, and she was quite impressed with those sentiments Alfonso had found so disturbing. “‘Whatever place in society God has chosen for them…'” she said to herself. God had not, she thought, chosen a very comfortable place in society for the duchess: it could not be easy to be married to the complex and controlling Alfonso.

She rubbed her reddened wrists, which still felt hot and sore, and wondered for a moment if he imposed upon his wife the same demands in his bed as he did upon her, and if he did, whether or not she was…
pleased
by them. He had told her several times that the duchess was
beautiful
and
charming
. Well, Francesca thought now, the girl's beauty and charm certainly did not seem to be
pleasing
her husband: Alfonso appeared to be increasingly at odds with her as the months went on. And the girl had not yet conceived. That had to be saying something.

“Do you know, after all this time, I think I'd very much like to see this woman for myself,” Francesca said aloud, suddenly aware of the singularity of the fact that she had not done so before.

An old man, dozing on a stone bench at the side of the road with a scrawny dog curled at his feet, started at the sound of her voice as she walked past him. Francesca smiled at them both; the dog thumped its tail in the dust but the old man made no response.

***

Seated on the floor in Francesca's front room were two small girls, some six years old, black-haired, huge-eyed, identical to the last hair. They were picking glass beads out of a bowl and carefully threading them onto lengths of thin twine.

“Girls, I want to go up to the Castello again,” Francesca said.

“Again?”

Francesca smiled. “Yes. Again. Of course, if you don't want to come too, you can go to Signora del Sarto's house.”

Both girls shook their heads, and so, for the fourth day running, they and Francesca walked up from their little house in the Via Vecchie, round the façade of the cathedral and on up to the wide piazza in front of the Castello.

“We'll do what we did yesterday and the day before, and walk right the way around the whole building,” Francesca said. “We might see her today.” She saw the twins glance at each other, but they made no comment.

They walked around three sides of the big red fortress, stopping every now and again for the girls to plip pebbles into the black water of the moat and count the ripples, and then, as they approached the gateway to the main drawbridge, they stopped, hearing the clatter of hoofs on the wooden bridge.

“Hold hands, and stand back,” Francesca said. They stepped backwards, away from the gateway, their fingers tightly laced.

Two horses appeared: a heavy black cob with a long fringe hiding its eyes, and a smaller bay pony. A grey-haired man rode the cob, but the pony was carrying a thin girl. She was finely dressed in beautifully cut, dark-green velvet, though Francesca could see that, despite her finery, the girl sat the pony with little confidence. The grey-haired man pointed across to the girl's hands and, gesturing with his own, said something Francesca could not catch, though she heard the words “my lady.” The girl shortened her reins and, somewhat gingerly, shifted her position in the saddle. The bay pony tossed its head; the girl caught her lip between her teeth.

Francesca stared. This had to be her—the elaborate, jewelled clothes, her companion's air of deference. The tawny hair and freckles matched Alfonso's descriptions of her. Surely this was the duchess.

Her idle wish to see Alfonso's wife for herself had fed upon itself for nearly a week now, and much to her daughters' annoyance, had had all three of them pacing the outskirts of the Castello for days. Now, somewhat to her surprise, Francesca found that her pulse rate was quickening at the sight of the duchess. Alfonso's description of his wife as “beautiful” was perhaps a little inaccurate, Francesca thought, but there was something arresting about the small, freckled face, while the slightness of the velvet-clad shoulders made her seem touchingly vulnerable.

Despite herself, Francesca began imagining this girl in Alfonso's bed and realised, with an unexpected jolt in her guts, that the emotion which hit her as the images played out in her mind was not jealousy but concern. Solicitude. He would be able to break this creature into pieces with ease. She drew in a sharp breath.

“What is it, Mamma?” Beata was holding her hand and looking up into her face.

“Nothing.”

But it was not nothing: it was the sudden cold dawning of a creeping disaffection.

Beata's fingers gripped her own more tightly. Francesca saw that the duchess was staring at the twins, a wondering smile tilting the corners of her mouth. Then she turned to Francesca, the smile widened and a bright look of unaffected sweetness broke across her face.

“Signor Bracciante,” she said to her companion, her eyes still on Francesca, “could you wait a moment, please?”

The grey-haired man reined in his mount.

“Forgive me, I did not mean to stare,” the duchess said to Francesca, “but I thought for a moment that my eyes were playing tricks upon me…”

“My girls are indeed very similar,” Francesca said.

“It's quite extraordinary.” The duchess turned to the girls. “And—not only are you so very much alike, you are both so very pretty!”

Beata and Isabella smiled shyly at her, wriggling with bashful self-consciousness.

Francesca was startled to see longing behind the duchess's smile and heard again the coldness in Alfonso's voice from a few days before: “
Yes. Well
.
She
has
not
managed
to
fulfil
that
task
as
yet
.” She had sometimes wondered if Alfonso's frustrations might stem from his wife's wilful withholding of her favours, but now, seeing that hunger in her face, it was, Francesca thought, quite clearly no fault of this girl's that she had not yet conceived.

The duchess was speaking again to the twins. “Wait a moment, don't move—I have something for you both…”

The little girls held hands and stared up at her. Francesca watched as she turned to her companion. “Signor Bracciante, can you hold his reins a moment?”

The man leaned across and took the bay pony's reins. The duchess tugged at one of the pearl-centred knots of grass-green ribbon on her left sleeve. After a moment it came loose, leaving a pulled thread and a tiny hole in the velvet. “There's one…” She leaned down and held it out to Beata. The little girl looked at Francesca, who smiled and nodded. Beata took the ribbon from the outstretched hand, and then the duchess jerked another free and handed it to Isabella.

“Thank you, my lady,” Francesca said. “Say thank you, girls!” She nudged Beata with her hip, and both children looked up from their awed contemplation of their new treasures to murmur their gratitude.

The duchess's smile widened. “Take care of them, won't you?”

Francesca fancied that this appeal was addressed as much to her as a mother, as to the new owners of the little green favours.

The duchess gathered up her reins, clicked her tongue and the pony began to walk, some two paces behind the cob. A moment later, both riders broke into a trot and were soon out of sight.

***

Alfonso, watching from a window in his apartment in the Torre dei Leoni, saw Lucrezia and the riding master turn south out of the piazza, heading no doubt for the open ground beyond the city walls.

He pulled on a doublet, snatched a couple of candles from a low table and left his chamber. Walking quickly, he made his way down through the Castello. At the entrance to the long, sloping corridor that led to the dungeons, he flicked a glance to left and right. Reassured that he was unobserved, he lit one of his two candles from a burning torch in a nearby wall bracket, and descended towards the Stygian gloom of the underground cells.

Ducking his head, he turned left into a short passage, whose ceiling was no higher than his shoulder. He walked awkwardly, bent-backed, some half-dozen paces and stepped down into a low, vaulted room. Had he chosen to reach upwards, his fingers would have touched the stone ceiling with ease. The door to this room, made of heavily banded iron, stood wide open. There were no windows, instead, a single square aperture, into which Alfonso might have been able to squeeze himself, had it not been crossbarred, led steeply upwards, narrowing like a funnel, up beyond the level of the moat to allow the access of air. No light penetrated.

Alfonso sat on the floor with his back against one of the walls, and, holding the lit candle sideways, allowed a few drops of wax to fall onto the stone flag. He placed the candle upright in the soft blob, and laid the second nearby. Crossing back to the door, he pushed it, two-handed, until it was barely an inch from closure, then returned to the candle and sat back down.

Tipping his head back, he closed his eyes and rested his arms across his bent knees, fingers loosely touching.

The silence in the cell was thick and soft and it pressed in around him, blocking his ears and filling his throat. Here, in this smothering quiet—for a matter of minutes, at least—his mind was still.

Lucrezia was surprised at the lack of ceremony when the painters arrived. Infected by Alfonso's growing excitement over the previous week, she had expected drama, an impressive number of people, something significant to indicate the eminence of Fra Pandolf's reputation. But when the group from Assisi reached the central courtyard of the Castello in the second week of April, she was a little disappointed to find that the entire party consisted of the friar, his apprentice and another lad, who seemed to be there solely to take charge of the three horses and the shabby little tilt-cart. It did not seem appropriate for the creators of what she understood was to be a significant new work of art.

Alfonso, however, was smiling broadly as he stepped forward to greet the new arrivals. Fra Pandolf climbed wearily from the cart, the apprentice and the boy dismounted from their horses and they all stretched cramped limbs and looked about them.

“Fra Pandolf, all of you, welcome to the Castello,” Alfonso said.

The friar beamed, holding out his arms as though in benediction. The tall apprentice with the crimson-splashed cheek sketched a brief bow, and the boy bobbed his head embarrassed at thus being acknowledged.

Pandolf took one of Alfonso's hands in his own, bowed to Lucrezia, and then said over his shoulder to his companions, “Tomaso, can you take charge of the horses? Jacomo, bring the box of pigments and the brushes, will you? I want to get them in and put away as quickly as possible.”

Tomaso began to do as he had been asked, and Jacomo reached into the tilt-cart and hitched a large wooden box into his arms, leaning a little backwards to accommodate its considerable weight. Lucrezia smiled at him, as he followed the friar and his hosts into the Castello, but Jacomo was looking at the ground around the side of the box as he picked his way across the uneven cobbles and did not see her. She quickly straightened her face, and made a play of tucking a wisp of hair behind an ear, feeling foolish and hoping that no one else had noticed.

***

Of the new arrivals, only Fra Pandolf attended the evening meal on that first night. Lucrezia wondered briefly why Alfonso had not invited the apprentice or the boy, but presumed that some incomprehensible castle protocol lay behind his decision. Fearing his displeasure, she had decided not to ask him.

She looked around the room, seeing it now with Pandolf's eyes, wondering what his artist's mind would make of his surroundings. The Long Room: Alfonso usually called it the Room of Mirrors, for a dozen great Venetian looking-glasses—four on each long wall, two at each end—created a sensation of endless repetition as they reflected upon themselves over and over. Though only four sat at the table that evening, around the walls a crowd appeared to be enjoying their meal: a dozen friars, as many black-clad dukes; a flock of shimmering, silk-gowned duchesses, and a clutch of brightly dressed noblemen. Lucrezia blew softly at one of the candles, and watched the dipping flame multiply and replicate itself a hundredfold in the glittering glass, like evening sunlight on water.

“Father Guardian at Assisi is indeed generous in allowing his most gifted son to bestow his extraordinary talents upon the Castello Estense,” said Francesco Panizato, inclining his head towards the friar.

The friar blushed deeply at this unctuous comment—to Lucrezia's delight, even the patch of pink scalp inside his tonsure had reddened. “Gracious Signore, you misunderstand,” he replied, in his flat, Genovese accent. “Do not forget, we Franciscans are mendicants—beggars. We wander where we choose and we praise God with whichever talents He has seen fit to bestow upon us.” He bowed towards Alfonso. “Signor d'Este is merely allowing me a more than welcome opportunity to praise my Lord with brush and with plaster…”

A picture pushed its way into Lucrezia's mind of a jostling crowd of cheerful winged seraphs, ineptly wielding paint and plaster-laden brushes, sending splashes and wet lumps flying around the gates of Heaven. A furious St Peter stood, hands on hips, keys clinking, glaring at them, a splash of vivid blue across his nose, chin and down the front of his gleaming white robes. She smothered a laugh. Then, glancing up into one of the mirrors, she saw the imagined anger of the guardian of the gates reproduced on the face of her husband. Alfonso's eyes were blazing and his mouth was no more than a thin line. Lucrezia dropped her gaze to the table, her cheeks flaming and tears threatening.

Picking up her fork, she began to push her food around her plate. Orange-poached sardines. One of her mother's favourites. Her own choice, this evening. She sighed. For once she had actually been given the task of choosing the food, as Alfonso had been preoccupied with the arrival of the painters and had unexpectedly delegated the responsibility. She and Catelina had constructed the evening's menu earlier that week.

***

“I had thought,” she says to Catelina, in an unguarded moment, quill in hand as they list possible dishes, “when I left Cafaggiolo, that this would have been one of the tasks for which I would be responsible as the new duchess.” Her voice sounds—even to her—stilted and unnatural as she fights not to betray her anger. “Mamma always chooses the food for the more important meals at home. She often showed me what to do. How to construct an interesting range of dishes. I think I could probably do it quite well. She and I talked about it several times when I went home to see them a few months ago, and she was very surprised that I hadn't really begun to make an impression upon life in the castle yet. She was quite unhappy about it.”

Catelina
looks
anxiously
at
her
.

Lucrezia
says, and there is a sharp note of bitterness in her voice, “I didn't like to tell her that Alfonso is not confident in my abilities to do very much at all.”

“Oh, I'm sure it's not that, my lady.”

And
then
it
bursts
from
her. “But it is, Lina! He has told me quite clearly! And he continually makes sure I don't go behind his back and accidentally display any unexpected ability that he has not personally sanctioned. What—of any note—have you ever seen me do in this place?” She glares at her maid, then answers her own question. “Nothing! I do nothing! What point is there in my being here at all? Why does he want me here?”

The
tip
of
her
quill
cracks
as
she
presses
it
too
hard
into
the
paper, and ink spatters across the list of dishes she has already written down. The obvious answer to her question screams itself into the silence. The obvious, horrible answer. She has been traded between families like a brood mare—but is it not the case, she thinks bitterly, that a brood mare which continually fails to excite the stallion is of little use to anyone as anything other than dog meat? Perhaps it is because she is so signally unsuccessful in this most fundamental role that Alfonso has no wish to trust her with any other tasks
.

She
and
Catelina
stare
at
each
other, not speaking
.

Lucrezia
remembers
being
so
curious
on
her
arrival
at
the
Castello
that
simply
absorbing
her
new
surroundings
had
seemed
stimulating
enough. For weeks she had been happy to be little more than a fascinated bystander. But as the months have passed, she increasingly wishes to take a more active part in her new life. Try as she might, though, she finds her ideas crushed almost before she utters them, her opinions ridiculed or ignored, and her interactions with the servants continually controlled and limited by her husband
.

It
is
all
so
very
different
from
the
life
she
knew
before
her
marriage
.

Alfonso
seldom
speaks
to
Lucrezia
of
his
own
childhood, or of his parents and his upbringing in the Castello, but from the fragments of memory he occasionally allows her to grasp during their rare conversations, she imagines a boyhood almost unbearably bleak in comparison with her own experiences. She feels a surprising lurch of sympathy for him, as she pictures a lonely little boy, friendless in this great rambling, city-bound fortress. His father, by Alfonso's own admission, was a distant, unloving man, and Lucrezia discovers that Alfonso had spent much of his early youth without his mother
.

His
formality
and
lack
of
warmth
is, she supposes, understandable, though to her it seems both alien and horribly restricting. Only with Catelina does she truly feel unconstrained, but the intimacy and informality she cannot suppress with her maid, she keeps well hidden from Alfonso
.

“He makes me feel so powerless, Lina,” she says, pressing the cracked nib against the ball of her thumb. “What sort of woman am I growing into? I am given no opportunity to manage my house, I am forbidden to communicate with my servants—and at the merest glimpse of my naked body, my husband's prick wilts like yesterday's picked daisy.”

Catelina
blushes
scarlet
at
the
intimacy
.

Lucrezia's voice sounds hard. “To be still a virgin after a year and a half as a wife—how shameful is that? I can only imagine that it must hurt Alfonso as much as it hurts me—but how will I ever know? He never talks to me.”

She
falls
silent, recalling the embarrassing attempts at consummation that she and Alfonso still sometimes endure. Inevitably, she thinks, these moments are ever more awkward, silent, loveless. On each occasion she has begun to feel as though the as yet unconceived heir squats, like an incubus, in a corner of the room, watching, accusing, demanding to be given the opportunity to exist, pouring angry scorn on their repeated failures
.

***

Fra Pandolf scraped the last fragment of sardine from his plate, and turned to Lucrezia, a gilded Murano glass in his hand.

“What think you, my lady, of the idea of having a fresco painted here at the Castello Estense?”

Lucrezia pulled her thoughts back to the present. “If the promise of the drawings I saw before is borne out in the fresco itself, it will be a truly magnificent achievement, sir,” she said, smiling at the doughy figure, and longing to remove the tiny fragment of fish that clung to his lower lip. She thought back to the day she had seen the extraordinary preliminary sketches, and said, “Shall you be working together on the fresco, you and your apprentice?”

For a moment, Lucrezia thought she detected a tightening in the friar's face, but then he smiled, and said, “Oh, yes, Signora, Jacomo is indispensable. I have not had such a capable apprentice in years.”

“Where did you find him?” Alfonso asked.

“His father approached me several years ago now—and asked if I might take him on. Said he thought the lad had talent. I admit now that I was not expecting much—you would be surprised, Signore, at the number of doting fathers who are quite convinced their children are budding Buonarottis…”

Alfonso and Francesco Panizato smiled.

“But,” Fra Pandolf continued, “in the event, he proved to be quite a remarkable artist. Quite remarkable. In fact, I have—oh, yes, thank you…”

The friar broke off as he was offered a plate, laid with grilled bream. Lucrezia's plate was placed before her. She knew she should eat. The wine she had drunk was fuzzing her thoughts and her head felt woolly. She was losing the thread of the conversations that flashed across the table like contestants in a fencing competition. She picked at the fish and watched Alfonso and Francesco vying happily with each other to prove to Fra Pandolf that each was the greater connoisseur of the arts.

They were both bright-eyed and flushed, though Lucrezia could see that Alfonso was striving to maintain his dignity, despite the energy of the conversation. However passionately he felt about something, Lucrezia reflected, she knew he preferred not to show it; even now he was probably struggling to contain his animation. He would want to appear deeply knowledgeable, she thought, but he would be constantly checking to make sure he was not revealing too much of the emotion behind the enthusiasm.

Panizato made a strong contrast with his black-clad host—his red and gold doublet and breeches sparkled in the candlelight and gave him an impish air. He was slight and thin, and had soft, curly hair that wisped into tendrils around his rather elfin face. His eyes, which were set close to his nose, were alight with pleasure in the conversation and a boyish, excitable grin crossed his face each time he felt he had scored a point.

Lucrezia turned then to Fra Pandolf, who was regarding the two men with mild interest, answering all the questions put to him with detachment and an unworldly calm. His robes were shabby and a drab earth brown, his small plump hands protruded from the frayed cuffs, and lay clasped on the white linen table covering. Though fleshy, they were hard and brown, and flecks of different-coloured paints clung around the nails, which were short and tidy. These, Lucrezia thought, were hands that had spent a lifetime praising God—in prayer and in paint. The next day they would start work on the great fresco.