Light on Lucrezia (36 page)

“I have no time for your women’s quarrels. Over four hundred guests! Calculate the food that means! And four hundred guests is not all. What of their horses?”

“Those dresses of hers are half-Spanish. All that gold. It is Spanish, I tell you. Spanish! Do you know she wears zaraguelles?”

“What is that?”

“Zaraguelles. Those silk pantaloons, all richly embroidered. She wears them beneath her dresses. It is a Spanish custom. It should be stopped. Father, you will have no peace with that woman and her Spanish attendants.”

“Oh, let her be and help me devise a means of ridding myself of these guests who are making of me a poor man.”

“Father, if you sent away her Spanish attendants you would have fewer mouths to feed. She has too many attendants.”

The Duke was thoughtful, and Isabella smiled. She had made her point.

The loss of her friends was going to hurt Lucrezia more than any of the pin-pricks which Isabella had been able to inflict. She wished she could rob Lucrezia of her more intimate circle—that watchful Adriana, sly Nicola and the saucy Angela. But to go so far as that would certainly bring down the wrath of the Pope. For the moment she must content herself with banishing the Spaniards.

She wrote to Francesco telling him that she was tired of Ferrara and was longing for Mantua. She wished to be with her husband and her little son Federico.

Reading the letter Francesco laughed.

He guessed that the young Lucrezia was holding her own against Isabella, and wondered why he should feel so pleased.

At last the
ceremonies came to an end and the guests began to depart. The ambassadors came to make their farewell speeches to Lucrezia, but Isabella
contrived to be present with Elizabetta, and it was she who answered them, Elizabetta following her, although the thanks and good wishes of the ambassadors had been directed at Lucrezia.

Lucrezia did not attempt to stop them, but when they were over she offered a few modest and well-chosen words as though she had not been ousted from her rightful place.

The ambassadors thought her meek and nervous, but there were some among them who believed that she considered the open animosity of her sister-in-law too foolish for her attention.

These too were Lucrezia’s thoughts; she was also reminding herself that Isabella had a home in Mantua. She could not desert that forever. And it was a happy day when Isabella and her retinue set out for Mantua. Lucrezia could not hide her pleasure.

But, as she went on her way, Isabella was smiling, well satisfied; she knew her parsimonious father would soon deprive Lucrezia of her Spanish attendants, and that Lucrezia’s patience was going to be strained to the limit by life in Ferrara.

W
hen the guests had departed Lucrezia relinquished
the apartments in which she had lived in state and prepared to settle in the “little rooms of the balcony” (
gli camerini del poggiolo
) which had been reserved for her own special use.

She examined them in the company of Angela and Nicola, and all three were delighted with the cozy intimacy of the place. Here, Lucrezia realized, she could shut herself away from the main castle, receive her friends and make of the rooms a little corner of Rome in Ferrara.

Angela bounced on the bed to test it and as she did so there came the sound of tearing material. She saw that the bed covering had split; she touched it and tore it still further.

“It is perished,” she said. “It must be hundreds of years old.” She looked at her hands black with dirt; the grime of years was on them.

Lucrezia pulled back the coverlet. The sheets, she found, when she touched them, might have been made of paper.

“It is as though they made my bed a hundred years ago and it has been waiting for me all this time!”

Nicola had shaken the velvet hangings and a cloud of dust emerged to hang in the air.

“They are in tatters,” she cried.

In despair Lucrezia sat down on a stool and the brocade on its seat split as she did so.

“So these are the little rooms which Duke Ercole so magnanimously gives me,” she said.

“It is characteristic of your welcome,” cried Angela. “Lavish enough on the surface, full of enmity beneath. If I were you, cousin, I would go at once to your miserly father-in-law and demand to know what he means by giving you such miserable quarters in his castle.”

Lucrezia shook her head. “I doubt that would do me any good.”

“I should write at once to the Holy Father,” suggested Nicola. “He will send orders that you be decently housed.”

“I wish to live in peace,” explained Lucrezia. “If I complain of this it will only make trouble. No. We will strip off these ancient furnishings and put new ones in their place. We’ll have it gay and brilliant. We’ll have upholstery in morello and gold, and until it is finished I shall go back to the apartments I have occupied so far.”

“So you will do it at your own expense?” murmured Nicola.

“My dear Nicola, how else could I get what I want in Ferrara?”

Angela took Lucrezia’s hand and kissed it. “You look like an angel,” she said, “and verily I believe you must be one. Your husband spends his days and half his nights with other women; yet you greet him with a smile when he visits you. Your father-in-law insults you by offering you the dust and grime of ages, and you smile sweetly and say you will refurnish your apartments at your own expense. As for that demon, Isabella d’Este, your sister-in-law, she behaves to you like a fiend, and you behave—outwardly at least—as though you respect her. Nicola, what do you think of my cousin? Is she not an angel?”

“I think,” said Nicola, “that she is wise, and when you have to live on Earth it is doubtless better to be wise than an angel.”

“I trust I am wise,” said Lucrezia. “I have a strong feeling within me that I have need of wisdom.”

While she was making her plans for the little rooms of the balcony she received the first blow.

Duke Ercole visited her.

He said: “I see you have not yet occupied the rooms of the balcony which I allotted to you.”

“They are in sore need of refurnishing,” she told him. “When that is done I am going to find them quite delightful. I am grateful indeed to you for having given me such charming rooms.”

“Refurnish them!” cried the Duke aghast. “That is going to cost good ducats.”

“I have already decided on my color scheme. And refurnishing is necessary. It must be years since it was done.”

“The wedding has cost me a great deal,” grumbled the Duke.

“I know.
I
intend to pay for the refurnishing of these rooms.”

The Duke looked somewhat placated. He went on: “I have come here to tell you that on account of the great cost of the wedding I can no longer afford to feed and house so many of your attendants, so I am sending your Spaniards back to Rome tomorrow.”

Lucrezia felt a cold touch of fear. These were her friends, and he wanted to deprive her of them.

She said: “They need cost you nothing. There is, I believe, a clause of the agreement between us which provides that I pay my own household expenses.”

“There is,” agreed the Duke quickly. “But you must keep within your income here. Moreover Spaniards do not fit well into Ferrara. I have decided they shall go.”

She was fighting for control. She had been able to face the hostility all about her because she had been surrounded by her friends. Was this a plot to rob her of them one by one? A terrible feeling of longing swept over her. The Vatican seemed far away and how different was this grim hostile old man—her father-in-law—from the benign all-loving father who had shielded her during all those years which had preceded her journey to Ferrara.

She would not let him see how deeply moved she was. She had dropped her head. He must have thought the gesture one of submission, for he rose and laid a hand on her shoulder. “You will soon learn our ways,” he said. “The Spaniards are an expense you cannot afford, and we do not like extravagance in Ferrara.”

To whom could
she appeal? There was, of course, her husband. He visited her nightly, so he must be pleased with her, and surely she might ask some favor of him.

She lay in the bed waiting for him. He would arrive soon; he had visited her every night since she had been in Ferrara. She guessed she was different from the women with whom it was his custom to associate, and that difference evidently provided a fillip to his passion.

He came singing, as he so often did. Surprisingly he had a good voice. She had not yet ceased to marvel that one, in other ways so insensitive, should have such a good ear for music and an apparent love of it.

He never wasted time in conversation, and there were nights when scarcely a word passed between them. He would undress, leap into the bed beside her, indulge in his animal passion and be gone when she awoke in the morning; but this night she was determined to talk to him.

She sat up in bed. “Alfonso, I have something to say.”

He looked surprised, raising those heavy brows as though reproving her for suggesting conversation at such a time.

“We scarcely ever speak to one another, let alone indulge in conversation. It is simply not natural, Alfonso.” He grunted. He was not giving her his full attention, she realized. “But tonight,” she went on, “I am determined to talk. Your father has said that my Spanish attendants are to leave Ferrara in the very near future. Alfonso, I want you to stop that happening. These are my friends. Do not forget that although I am your wife I am a stranger here. It is difficult to live in a strange land even when one’s friends are about one. There are different customs to which I must adjust myself. Alfonso, I beg of you, speak to your father. Alfonso, you are listening?”

“I did not come to talk,” said Alfonso reproachfully.

“But are we never to talk? Are we always to meet like this and nothing else?”

He looked at her in some surprise. “But what else?” he asked.

“I do not know you. You visit me at night and are gone in the morning. During the day I scarcely see you alone.”

“We do very well,” he said. “You’ll be with child before long. Perhaps you already are.”

There was a flash of spirit in Lucrezia’s voice as she retorted: “In that case would you not be wasting your time?”

“We can’t be sure yet,” said Alfonso speculatively.

Lucrezia felt hysterical. She began to laugh suddenly.

“You are amused?” asked Alfonso.

“It would seem I am a cow … brought to the bull.”

Alfonso grunted. He was ready now. He blew out the candle and got in beside her. She felt his heavy body suffocating her, and she wanted to cry out in protest.

But there was no one who would heed her cries.

The next day when the Spaniards left Ferrara, she did not protest. She accompanied the Duke and his court on a hunting expedition, which he had had the good taste to arrange for her so that she should not see the actual departure of the Spaniards.

She was docile, and Ercole, watching her, believed that he had discovered how to treat his daughter-in-law.