His Last Duchess (31 page)

August 1562

Ardea: a short distance south of Rome

The cicadas chirred in the heavy evening heat. The sun was sinking visibly; its lower edge seemed to bleed out beyond the circular rim as it touched the horizon. Deep purple shadows were lengthening and thickening as the light faded, and the encroaching evening began to take on a warm, soporific lassitude.

A young woman was sitting on a wooden bench against the outside wall of a small cottage. A heavily laden vine grew up and over the uneven stone at the back of the house and branched out across a rough trellis under which the young woman had seated herself. She was suckling a tiny baby; her head bent and tilted as she watched the child with an expression of rapt fondness. Dappled blotches of blue shadow fell across her face and the baby's head through the tangle of vine stems and leaves above them.

The child appeared to be asleep. The young woman slipped the tip of her little finger into the corner of his mouth to detach his grip on her nipple, but at her touch, he batted a small hand, which had been resting on the slope of her breast and began to suck again. His ear, a pink curl of pale ham, moved back and forth as he sucked. His mother smiled at the renewed enthusiasm of her little son and looked up to share her pleasure with her companion. He was perched on a low wall, which ran at right angles from the side of the main house, out and round, forming a small enclosed yard; on seeing the young woman look up at him, he lowered the board on which he had been resting a sheet of paper and tucked a stick of charcoal behind his ear. “Can you keep still?” he said.

“Will you be long?”

He shook his head, lifted the board once more and began again to draw. A lock of black hair fell across his eyes and he blew upwards to get it out of the way. When this failed, he pushed it back off his face with an impatient hand, leaving a smear of charcoal across the crimson stain that coloured his left cheek. He frowned in concentration as he lifted his eyes from the sketch to the woman and the baby.

Some moments later, he appeared satisfied, for he laid the board on the wall, put the charcoal next to it, walked across the yard to the bench and sat down. He draped an arm around the woman's shoulders, stretched long legs out before him and smiled. Closing his eyes, he tilted his face up towards the vines that hung in tangled clumps above him. The young woman laid her head against his shoulder and twisted herself around so that she could lean her weight more comfortably against his body than against the hard back of the bench.

The baby stopped sucking again. This time his head drooped sideways and he slipped off the nipple. A slow line of milk trickled from the corner of his soft, curled-petal mouth as he lay in satiated ecstasy in the crook of his mother's arm. The young man stroked the little head gently with the fingers of the hand that hung loosely across the woman's shoulders. They sat in silent contentment for some moments. Then the girl spoke. “Will you be going out with Cristoforo on the boat again tomorrow?”

“Mmm, I'll have to. Can't say I want to, but it was such a good catch today; he asked if I'd help him again.” He sounded sleepy and reluctant to think about the activity to come.

“What about Signor de Lavallo, though? When will you have to go back into the city for his next sitting?”

Eyes closed, the young man murmured, “He's away until next Friday, he said. I'll go after that. We can all go, if you'd like—the three of us.”

The girl tilted her head up towards his face, and he smiled at her fondly and kissed her, cupping her face in his free hand. Then he tipped his head back towards the vines.

“I should make us something to eat,” the girl said. “Are you hungry?”

The young man nodded again, eyes still shut.

“Will you take him?”

He smiled assent.

The girl tucked the bodice of her dress back around her breast, one-handed, and pulled the laces loosely back into place again. Then sitting forward, she slid her free arm up and under the baby's body. Scooping her son up in both hands, she held him out to his father, who smiled again, and took the baby from her. He laid the child along the length of his chest, so that the little head was tucked in under his chin; he held the baby in place with one brown hand.

The girl refastened her hair, which was too short to stay comfortably in place, and before moving into the cool of the interior of the house, bent to kiss the back of her sleeping son's downy head. As she straightened, the young man lifted his free hand and caught her wrist. Pulling her back towards him, he kissed her mouth with an unhurried thoroughness.

After a moment's compliance, she laughed into the kiss and drew back from him. “Enough. If you want to eat before it is completely dark, I should go in and begin.”

The young man raised her hand to his lips. “What will you make?” he said indistinctly, over her knuckles.

“What would you like?”

“I don't know.” He paused. “Anything but fish.”

She laughed again, and looking with love at her son and his father, she turned and went inside.

***

The candle sputtered: the wick was drowning. The duke picked up another and lit it from the guttering flame, then set it upright in a soft little pile of dripped wax upon the stone floor. The ceiling of the cell was covered in writing: big, untidy, scrawling lines of black words, painted in candle-smoke over the low, curving vault—the final thoughts of countless past occupants. Perhaps, he thought, as he had so often before, some of these words had been penned by whoever had howled down here in such agonized despair that day when he was ten. He wondered, too—he wondered this every day now—what the duchess's final thoughts had been. She, of course, unlike all those incarcerated down here across the years, would not have recognized her final thoughts for what they had been; she had been unaware of the imminence of her demise. Her last words had been distinctly mundane: “
It
was
a
sensible
idea
of
yours
to
bring
it
.” She had been mistaken, though, the duke thought now: it had not been sensible—it had been
essential
. He had had no choice. He had only done what he had had to do.

A charred, stick-armed figure, its claw-like hands held out in entreaty, dragged itself into his mind and he shuddered, muttering to it to go—to leave him alone. Even down here now, he saw it. This had been the last place he had been able to escape it, but it had found him out. Followed him. Now there was nowhere. He bent forward, put his head between his knees and pressed it between his hands, trying to force out the unwanted image, but it stayed where it was and then, as it always did, it opened its eyes. He knew that they would be shining with tears in its blackened face.

He stood up.

He would go and look at the portrait.

It was an astonishing likeness. Everyone who had known the duchess said as much. A work of astounding skill. Although he had not spoken a word to Pandolf after the day of the fire, the castle servants had told the duke that the old man had been devastated by the events of that night and had struggled to complete the painting. Alfonso supposed it was fortunate that in the event the portrait had almost reached completion before the loss of the sitter.

Gently detaching the candle from its little wax pedestal, he opened the iron door and stepped out of the cell. The bobbing flame threw untidy black shadows over the low ceiling of the passageway, distorted and twisted like burned limbs.

She was smiling at him as he pulled back the red curtain and sat down, a few steps from the bottom of the upper flight in the Entrance Hall, and in the face of that smile, the black-limbed creature crept away. He could see in her countenance now the look with which she had favoured him when first they met. A look of flushed delight, like a woman warmly nourishing fond memories of euphoric coition, she bestowed upon him again, unable to tear her painted eyes from his fixed gaze. This was how it should always have been, he thought, her profligate and consummate promiscuity controlled and silenced. She was held in silence now, within the very fabric of the walls of the Castello itself, and that spot of joy in her cheek, so faithfully reproduced here, burned now at last for him alone.

It had finally been contained.

He loved to see her smile for him.

Even when some other person looked along with him, he thought, it was her husband alone upon whom her eyes remained.

Others could see her only when he chose to allow them, of course. It had been the clever deception with the great fresco that had given him the idea of the curtain, and now none put by the damask he had hung before the portrait but he. He found himself drawn here increasingly frequently, but most often, as at this moment, it was when he was alone.

He preferred to keep her to himself.

He stared at the portrait. He had never asked the painters the significance of the pomegranate, he realised. Scattered on the floor before the duchess, below where her other hand was held, palm up and empty, lay a trail of scattered crimson seeds, which looked for all the world, he thought, as though she had just let fall the Red Rope to lie snake-like at her feet.

***

The young emissary from the count of Tyrol was tall, thin, very nervous of his new position, but extremely proud of having successfully—he hoped—completed his first official assignment. Some of what he had seen and heard during his short stay in Ferrara, however, had quite discomposed him.

He knew he had followed his instructions to the letter.

“Present the duke with these tokens of my estimation, Udo,” the count had said, handing him two objects. Udo had, upon arrival in Ferrara, duly handed over, with trembling anticipation, a calf-bound folder containing a watercolour by Albrecht Altdorfer, and a plain wooden box, in which lay a tiny masterpiece: a maquette, in gleaming elmwood, by none other than the great Veit Stoss. He had been told much of the duke's reputation as a patron of the arts, and had looked forward with pride and some trepidation to presenting him with these gifts.

They had been well received.

Udo had been impressed with the duke's command of German, which he had employed almost effortlessly.

“I must write and thank the count, your master. His known munificence is amply illustrated by such generous gifts—though his fair daughter's self is to be, of course, the greatest gift of all.”

Something about the duke's dispassionate anticipation of the imminent acquisition of a new bride raised the hairs on the back of Udo's thin and rather pimply neck. He brushed aside his momentary discomposure, though, as the duke suggested a tour of the works of art he already had in place in the Castello. Udo was anxious to please, for his master had been most insistent upon stressing the importance of such an alliance between the House of Tyrol and the Duchy of Ferrara. Udo did not want to be the cause of a change of heart on the part of the prospective bridegroom. His master's young daughter was a charming and sweet-natured girl, he had always thought, and it would break her heart if her newly betrothed were to retract his proposal.

So he duly exclaimed and admired, and absorbed his host's prodigious explanations of his works of art, with very little understanding but much appreciation.

After some time, they stopped at the top of a flight of steps and stood before a floor-length crimson damask curtain. The duke reached forward and pulled back the hanging to reveal a painting of a woman, dressed in deep red, with a pomegranate in her hand.

This time Udo was truly moved, for the woman was beautiful and seemed to look at him—only him—with desire in her shining eyes.

He forgot his companion and gazed, entranced, upon the image painted into the plaster on the wall. As he stared, however, he became aware—as if in his peripheral vision—of a change in his host's demeanour. There was a catch in the duke's voice as he spoke again, and Udo pulled his gaze away from the painting to look at his companion. For a brief moment, the duke looked quite distracted and Udo began once again to listen more intently.

“That's my last duchess,” said the duke, blinking slowly, “painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive…”

Robert Browning

Ferrara

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf's hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will't please you sit and look at her? I said

“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read

Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

But to myself they turned (since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you but I)

And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,

How such a glance came there; so, not the first

Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 'twas not

Her husband's presence only, called that spot

Of joy in to the Duchess' cheek: perhaps

Fra Pandolf chanced to say, “Her mantle laps

Over my lady's wrist too much,” or “Paint

Must never hope to reproduce the faint

Half-flush that dies along her throat: such stuff

Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough

For calling up that spot of joy. She had

A heart—how shall I say—too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Sir, 'twas all one! My favour at her breast,

The dropping of the daylight in the West,

The bough of cherries some officious fool

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule

She rode with round the terrace—all and each

Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

Or blush at least. She thanked men—good! but thanked

Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame

This sort of trifling? Even had you skill

In speech—(which I have not)—to make your will

Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this

Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,

Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let

Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set

Her wits to yours, forsooth and made excuse,

—E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose

Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

As if alive. Will't please you rise: we'll meet

The company below, then. I repeat,

The Count your master's known munificence

Is ample warrant that no just pretence

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;

Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed

At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!