His Last Duchess (6 page)

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 down 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.

With a toss of her head, the mare jerked Alfonso's arm and he dropped the rat. Putting the toe of his boot underneath the body, he flipped it to the side of the road and remounted. Man, horse and dog walked slowly through the streets of Ferrara, unobserved by passers-by, and arrived at the castle just before noon, clattering across the bridge that spanned the moat.

***

“There he is! Quick, Lina, I don't want him to see me.”

The Signora slid off the window recess. Catelina saw the Signore, with his big black wolfhound, striding away from his horse. He turned his gaze upwards and she stepped back quickly from the glass.

“Why not, my lady?” she asked.

The Signora was fiddling with her hair, and biting colour into her lower lip. “I don't want him to think I have nothing better to do than to sit and wait for him,” she said. “I want it to seem as though I just happened to be passing downstairs. Do you think—?”

“Just go!” Catelina flapped her hands towards the door, as she had so often shooed the chickens out of the Cafaggiolo kitchens, and then stopped, mid-flap, horrified again by the way she had spoken to her mistress. But the Signora smiled a tight, anxious smile and scurried away towards the stairs.

Catelina followed more slowly. She was not sure she wanted to see the Signore. If he caught her eye, she was afraid she might betray her suspicions about his morning's activities. If her face were to redden, he would be sure to guess that she knew. She descended the staircase, deliberately taking her time, pausing by the great bronze statue that stood on a ledge at the corner. A big bearded figure with a muscled chest and a fish's tail rose out of angry metal ripples, pointing a three-pronged fork at a strange sea creature, his free hand raised above his head. Catelina ran the tip of one finger along the edge of a wave. She was not sure she liked the stern expression on the figure's face and decided, as she moved on, that she felt rather sorry for the little fish, which seemed to be entirely at the bearded man's mercy.

At the foot of the stairs, Catelina found she could see quite clearly into the entrance hall without, she hoped, being noticed. She leaned against the edge of the archway and peered round.

Her mistress had dropped into a curtsy and was looking up at the Signore, her eyes bright, a smudge of colour in her cheeks. He proffered a hand and smiled as she straightened, though there was something uneasy about his expression, Catelina thought, something forced. Perhaps it was embarrassment. Well, if he had just been in some other woman's bed, that would be more than well deserved.

“I was not expecting you till later, Alfonso,” her mistress said.

“Nothing but the most urgent business could have kept me from you, madam.”

Urgent business? Catelina almost snorted.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs above. Standing away from the wall, and hoping that whoever it was had not noticed her eavesdropping, she took a step back. One of the Signore's men appeared and strode past her at speed. With his shock of white hair and his close-set black eyes, he reminded Catelina fleetingly of a fretful egret. He pecked a perfunctory nod in her direction, then walked out into the entrance hall towards her mistress and the Signore.

“Er…my lord? Signora?” he said.

They turned to him.

“Franco?”

“Fra Pandolf is here, with the initial sketches, sir, when you have a moment.”

Alfonso said, “Excellent. When did he arrive, Franco?”

“A few moments before you did, Signore. I have shown him into the small chamber by the North Hall.”

“Good.”

Alfonso reached for Lucrezia's hand, and together they followed Franco Guarniero, the chief steward, back towards the stairs. Both men walked fast, Lucrezia taking two steps to every one of Alfonso's long strides.

“Who is Fra Pandalf?” she asked.

“Pand
o
lf,” Alfonso said. “He's a painter. A Franciscan friar, from Assisi itself. The man is a genius—very popular in court. He has works in several royal palaces and—”

“Why is he here?”

Lucrezia saw what she thought might be irritation on Alfonso's face, and the familiar clutch of anxiety tightened across her scalp. She bit her lip. Not again. Was it because she had interrupted? Was it her ignorance? Since the disastrous wedding night, and the repeated failures since, she had begun to dread displeasing Alfonso, and an uncomfortably heavy consciousness of every word she said hung over her now, each time she spoke to him. She had determined to try to make up for whatever was so wrong in their bed by attempting to smile, be attentive and engage him whenever they were together during the day, but so often, as now, she seemed only to manage to annoy him.

She saw his gaze move to her mouth, and then he said, “I have been talking for some time about commissioning a fresco to be painted along the wall of the gallery in the hall on the north side of the castle. Pandolf is here with his first drawings.”

“What is the painting to be about?”

“Wait until you see the drawings.”

***

The aforesaid Fra Pandolf, Lucrezia discovered, was a grey-haired, plump little friar, whose unremarkable appearance and expressionless eyes gave no indication at all of the extraordinary artistic talent Alfonso had described to her. He seemed, she thought, particularly dull and colourless. As she and Alfonso entered the room, Fra Pandolf stopped the muttered conversation he had been having with a tall, black-haired young man of some twenty years and bowed to them.

The smile was audible in Alfonso's voice as he spoke to his visitor. “Fra Pandolf, what a pleasure to see you in Ferrara again.”

“Signore, I am honoured,” Fra Pandolf replied, in a flat, reedy tone. Turning to the dark boy, he said, “Jacomo, find the drawings for the Signore…”

The young man called Jacomo nodded and unrolled a length of heavy oiled cloth, which was protecting several large sheets of ivory-coloured paper. It must have been rolled for some time—it kept springing back on itself, and curling itself up again and the young man struggled to flatten it.

“Can I help?” Lucrezia asked, stepping forward.

“Th-thank you,” he stammered, too involved with what he was doing to look at her. But Alfonso snapped his fingers and Franco Guarniero stepped out of the shadows at the edge of the room with a heavy candlestick in one hand and a large book in the other. Bowing, he edged in front of Lucrezia and, between the two of them, he and the boy called Jacomo managed to tame the unruly papers.

Fra Pandolf held out a pudgy hand and Alfonso stepped forward. He stared intently at the drawings for some minutes, brows puckered in a frown, breathing audibly. Lucrezia craned her neck to see around his shoulder. He appeared to have forgotten she was there: he did not move, and offered no opinion on the drawings in front of him for several long seconds, but then he began to nod, almost imperceptibly.

“Mmmn,” he said, at last, in little more than a whisper. “Brilliant. It is a conception of pure genius, Pandolf.”

Lucrezia felt rather than heard the room give a barely audible sigh of relief and she saw Fra Pandolf close his eyes for a second, as though offering up a brief prayer.

Alfonso turned to her. “Lucrezia, come and see the drawings,” he said. “Tell me what you think of them.”

She slid between him and the edge of the table, and Alfonso placed a hand on each of her shoulders.

The image she saw was astonishing.

It was the story of Jason and his quest for the Golden Fleece. The sketches were vivid and powerful, simply drawn in fine charcoal but, Lucrezia thought, showing a passion and animation unlike any drawing she had ever seen. She looked up from the paper to the face of Fra Pandolf and struggled to imagine such a dull, doughy man creating this extraordinary epic tale. She tried to picture him, charcoal stick gripped in his plump fingers, drawing vigorously—feverishly, even—flushed with pleasure at having captured the inspiration that had just sparked into life in his mind, but found herself only able to see the friar gazing into space before a blank sheet of paper, the charcoal lying unused on the table before him, his eyes unfocused.

Fra Pandolf did not meet her gaze; he was smiling anxiously, eyes fixed upon Alfonso. Lucrezia returned to the drawing.

The story was broken up into several stages. The image on the far left of the picture, Lucrezia saw now, was of the
Argo
setting sail. A noble Jason stood up in the prow, arm companionably draped around the neck of the figurehead, apparently unaware of the mutinous expressions on the faces of his crew. The waves had been depicted with little more than a few free strokes of the charcoal, yet their motion and power had great energy. She marvelled at the artist's skill.

Further on, the
Argo
was anchored off Talos's island. The great metal giant was stirring, and the Argonauts were running for their lives across a rock-strewn beach. Jason was in the lead, racing out of that scene and into the next, towards the figure of Medea, who pointed behind her at the gleaming fleece with its golden, curving ram's horns, hanging in the sinuous branches of a leafless tree. She was slim as a wraith, with wild hair and graceful limbs, and she was watching Jason with unmistakable desire.

Lucrezia smiled as she imagined the finished painting, in full colour, running the length of the North Hall gallery, from where it would be seen by anyone entering from the main entrance hall. “Oh, it's wonderful! It's going to be a
beautiful
fresco,” she said, briefly forgetting her preoccupied anxiety.

Alfonso gripped her upper arms more tightly and the corners of his mouth crooked upwards as his gaze met hers. “You like the idea, then, Lucrezia?” he said. “I hoped you would.”

“I can't wait to see it take shape. I love it!” Lucrezia turned back round to smile her appreciation at Fra Pandolf and, as she did so, caught sight of the dark young man, Jacomo. She had only seen him in profile until that moment; but now he was facing her and she noticed, with a jolt of surprise, a crimson stain splashed untidily down the side of his nose and across one cheek—like blood spots, she thought, but perhaps more the colour of crushed berries than of blood. Her skin prickled with aversion—she had never seen such a blemish up close before—but then she looked at his eyes and forgot the crimson mark. Jacomo was staring at the friar from the far end of the table. His expression was difficult to read, but in it she saw what seemed to be anger, frustration, longing and a fierceness that surprised her. A muscle twitched in his cheek and his eyes blazed. When he caught her eye, he started and flushed. The tension in his face relaxed—by design, it seemed to Lucrezia; he held her gaze for a long moment, then looked away.

She continued watching him, and wondered what he had meant by that stare. It had not been the usual deferential glance of the hireling, she thought—it had been steady and searching, and it had raised the hairs on her arms.