A log in the fire shifted, crumbled and fell.
She sat up, touched her cheek with the tips of her fingers and winced. Running her tongue along her lip, she tasted blood. Then, feeling giddy and disoriented, as though she had a fever, she rose from the bed, went to the chest and picked up the little bag of coins. She held it for a moment, then with a wordless, yowling cry, she flung it across the room. The contents scattered over the floor.
***
“Have you been crying?”
“Your dress is torn, Mamma.”
“What did you do to your eye?”
Francesca bit the inside of her lip to quell the tears that threatened again, and found a smile from somewhere to reassure her little girls.
“It’s nothing—I tripped and banged my face. Has it left a bruise?”
Little fingers gently probed and stroked, and four small arms encircled what parts of their mother they could reach. Francesca felt inexpressibly comforted.
They lit candles, scrambled a fire together and cooked pasta and beans. Food, warmth and the mindless chatter of her daughters finally began to banish the hovering tears, and as the girls played and bickered happily in front of the fire, Francesca reflected on what had happened. She knew that her relationship with Alfonso had irrevocably changed.
She thought back, rather sadly, to the day they had first met.
She had been in Ferrara for some six months, scratching a living. Since the day she had retched in the mud beside the cathedral, her life had been an exhausting continuum of bruised breasts, aching thighs and the drunken breath of men in seemingly constant need of satiation, unvarying and demanding, until the day she had entered into a conversation with the baker in the Via Frizzi.
***
“Rushed off my feet, I’ve been, these last few days!” he says grumpily, as Francesca waits for him to wrap two small loaves.
“Why’s that, Alberto?”
“Banquet!” He rolls his eyes, in irritation.
“What banquet?”
“Over in the Castello—day after tomorrow.” Alberto jerks his head towards the ducal palace. “Not had an order this big in years and, of course, it has to come just when my wife is as big as a house with child and that great lump of a lad who’s supposed to be my apprentice has broken his wrist punching one of the miller’s boys. He tries that again, I’ll break the other one for him…”
He grumbles on and Francesca looks up at the great red fortress. An idea forms in her mind.
***
Two days later, in a pale grey silk dress she has quite shamelessly stolen from a seamstress’s workshop, Francesca steps into the long banqueting hall in the Castello Estense and stares about her, trying not to laugh at her own audacity.
She has, by means of copious lies and wheedling offers of future sexual favours, gained entry through the servants’ quarters into this glittering, sumptuous celebration, and she is determined not to waste a second of it.
She largely keeps to herself as the evening progresses. She watches and listens more than she attempts to speak, but when pressed, she tries to imitate the accents and phrases of the exalted guests and she invents family and background, history and circumstances, which seem, for a time, to be plausible enough to delude her companions.
***
Perhaps, she thought now, it was just that they had been too caught up in the excitement of the occasion to pay close attention to individual parts of the whole. Or perhaps she had been more adept at deceiving than she had imagined she could be.
Francesca thought of herself as she was now. She had learned much from Alfonso, she knew: she realised now that she had unwittingly taken on his accent, adopted much of his vocabulary. Maybe she was more of a mimic than she had thought. She no longer sounded like the Crespino slut she had once been, that was for certain. Whatever the truth of it, though, until the host himself approached her that evening, Francesca did not think she had been suspected by anybody; although she had never actually asked him, she thought Alfonso had probably seen through her before he even spoke to her.
***
He has been watching her for some moments. She thinks him attractive and interesting, and wonders briefly how likely it is that she will find her way into his bed tonight. With no more than a brief raise of an eyebrow and a hint of a deliberately arch smile, she acknowledges the glances he has been casting her way, but makes no other response than this.
Some moments later, he takes the bait and, walking away from a finely dressed, furious-looking woman who, until now, has been hanging on his every word, he crosses the room to where she stands. “Signora, forgive me, I do not remember having had the pleasure of speaking to you before,” he says, as he reaches her.
Francesca drops into a deep curtsy. “No, Signore.”
“Remind me—forgive my forgetfulness—exactly who you are, madam. I do not immediately recall…”
“The Countess of Crespino,” Francesca says glibly.
“Ah. Not a name I recall on the list of my invited guests. No doubt—what an abominable oversight—it has just slipped my mind, Signora.”
He is playing along with her, she is sure. She says nothing, but smiles up at him and waits to see what will happen. He speaks with her for some moments and she answers as best she can, but at last, it seems, he can no longer endure teasing the situation out. He is like a fisherman, she thinks, with an enticing catch upon the line, finally knowing that the moment to haul in has arrived.
“Perhaps you would enlighten me, Signora—I should be extremely interested…” he drops his voice to a conspiratorial whisper “…to know your real name. I may be mistaken—and will have to make quite humiliating reparations should this be the case—but it occurs to me, firstly, that you are no countess and, secondly, that you have gained ingress into my banquet under preposterously false pretences.”
Francesca knows instinctively that he will respond best to the truth. She says, “You are quite correct, Signore.”
“Who, then, are you?”
A pause. She resumes her usual accent. “A street harlot from the Via Pozzo.”
There is not even a flicker of a smile. His face remains impassive and serious. He says, “How, then, do you come to be at my party?”
“I lied and bribed my way in, Signore,” Francesca says serenely. Her heart, though, is racing and she is wondering whether she is now only minutes away from being thrown either out onto the streets or down into one of the palace dungeons.
“Indeed,” he says. “Why?”
“Curiosity and a sense of adventure, Signore.”
The rest of the guests continue their braying, chattering, laughing enjoyment of the evening, but something seems to be separating her and the duke from the bustle of the banquet.
He leans towards her and whispers in her ear, “How much, then, harlot, do you normally charge for a night spent in your company?”
She doubles her usual fee.
“I have a house—a little villetta, just beyond the city walls,” he says. He describes how to find it. “I shall be there an hour after the end of the banquet. Do not plan any other work for a week.”
The week becomes a month, and then the month stretches out indefinitely.
At first, this man’s wild, extravagant brutality takes Francesca by surprise. Despite her whore’s apprenticeship, she has not come across anyone who demands quite as much from her as he does, but from the first she fights back with vigour and unexpectedly finds that she and Alfonso enjoy each other immensely. From the very beginning he demands her total exclusivity and, certainly at the start, she complies.
As their relationship develops and matures, Francesca realises that only with her is Alfonso ever truly himself. The dignified persona that everyone else thinks they know falls away during the hours he spends in her bed. From what he has always said, she believes that none but she ever sees the raw, uncovered seed of degeneracy he can never entirely suppress, and though he is unable to express any warmth or affe
ction towards her, she soon comes to see that beneath his cool detachment lies much more than desire.
He needs her.
***
As she sat in front of her fireplace and fingered her swollen eye, feeling the pain of the bruised graze on her cheek, Francesca feared that the rage which Alfonso kept suppressed and chained at all times had finally broken its bounds. Its new unpredictability now truly frightened her. Their relationship, such as it had ever been, was irreparably shattered.
Until now, even in her most disaffected moments, she had never seriously thought of leaving him: she had borne him two children, and his continuing patronage was their best chance of future security. She had always planned—when the time was right—to pressure him into finding their daughters either husbands or employment, had always hoped that his natural fastidiousness would recoil at the prospect of his own flesh and blood, albeit a couple of bastards, whoring on the streets of his city.
But now…
She held her hands up in front of her; they were still shaking. Curling them into loose fists and pressing them into her lap to stop the trembling, she looked over to the children, who, heads together, were proudly comparing the little green knots of pearl-embroidered ribbon that they had been given by the duchess.
The duchess.
Oh, dear God, she thought, that poor girl. Francesca had been touched by her kindness to the twins that day. She had, she had thought, seemed sweet and vulnerable, and an unlikely match for Alfonso’s precarious volatility. Francesca touched the graze on her cheek, and a cold worm of fear writhed in her guts as she imagined Alfonso’s return to the Castello.
22
Alfonso stopped in the candlelit hallway to admire the bronze of Hephaistos. Of all the objects that had accompanied Lucrezia from Mugello, this, he thought, was the piece that gave him the greatest pleasure. He ran a hand over the muscled forearm, its dark patina smooth and gleaming. The lights from the candelabra caught it at wrist, knuckle and elbow as the hand of the great lame blacksmith gripped the hammer. His sinews were stretched, his gaze focused upon the shield—Achilles’s shield—which his left hand held firm across the anvil. The bearded face was contorted with the effort of swinging the hammer up, over and down; the downward swing had just begun. The piece, Alfonso thought, had a tremendous sense of motion.
His own hand was dwarfed by the huge bronze arm, and he could see a thin dark cut across the knuckles where it had caught on Francesca’s earring. Putting his hand to his mouth, the blood tasted thinly metallic. He thought briefly of Francesca: hers was a body with which he knew he frequently took many liberties. Tonight had perhaps been one liberty too many, he thought, though, of course, Francesca’s predilections were such that she was no stranger to violence. The red clouds that had blotted out reason in Lucrezia’s bedchamber had had to find vent in some direction, though—and Francesca had often been happy to aid him in the banishment of his dark demons.
Lucrezia was wayward, he thought. She was unthinking, indiscriminate, promiscuous, lacking in respect for him or for the duchy. The thought of its imminent destruction seemed actually to amuse her.
He had brought from Mugello an impressionable child, whose vivid animation and beauty had unexpectedly captivated him. And, much to his chagrin, it still did. The tantalizing glimpses of the vitality and passion he had first seen in her had been offered frequently enough to make him believe they were exclusively meant for him, but, he thought now, he had been deceived. Indiscriminate. She was indiscriminate—she continually shamed him by acting like a whore, smiling and laughing and making eyes at anyone, with no regard for the position she had espoused, caring nothing for the fact that the shameful failures in their marriage bed would inevitably lead to the end of the nine-hundred-year line. Alfonso pressed a hand to his forehead as humiliating words pushed through into his thoughts and sneered at him. Eunuch; she has married a eunuch; you won’t sire an heir with a gelding; thought you should be made aware of the gravity of the situation; no legitimate issue; the end of the might of the Estes…Lucrezia was little better than a common doxy. She bestowed warmth and affection like profligate largesse upon—it seemed—anyone she passed, regardless of position, rank or entitlement. Except himself—the current last link in the nine-hundred-year-old chain. If Lucrezia had her way, the final link.
Alfonso stood at the foot of the great staircase. He had told Lucrezia he would return, and he intended to keep his word. The vigour released in him after his encounter with his whore still surged in his blood and it gave him to believe that at last, tonight, he might be able to escape his usual humiliations. He would end it all tonight—they would consummate this marriage, conceive the heir, and he could thus force his wife into conformity. Once with child, she would have no choice.
He made his way up to her bedchamber, the great blackbrindled wolfhound padding behind him, and opened the door. It was dark, and the light from his candle bobbed and swagged as he turned to close the door behind him, leaving Folletto in the corridor.
Lucrezia was no more than a hunched shape under the bedcovers; she made no sign that she had heard his entrance.
He turned the key in the lock.
Unlacing and pulling off his doublet, Alfonso walked to the ebony table that stood by the side of the bed and picked up the carved rosewood box. Opening it, he drew out the string of garnets; he let them run through his fingers with a soft clicking sound, like cold, angular pebbles.
As he fingered the stones, he thought of his mother, their original owner, and remembered, from when he was a very small child, the excitement he used to feel when she allowed him to open this same box, and bring out the Red Rope.
***
He does not understand why, but there is something secretively visceral about the sinuous redness of the stones, an illicit something that squirms in his belly, dries his mouth and quickens his pulse. Sometimes—the most special times—when his father is away from home and he is not afraid to go to his mother’s chambers, she lets him climb upon her (at other times forbidden) lap, to wind the garnets about her neck. “Make me beautiful, chéri.” His fingers are too small to manage the clasp, so he kneels up against her gem-embroidered chest, his face close to hers, breathing in her faint, peppery scent, and she fastens the Red Rope herself. He holds her wrists, feeling them twist under his fingers as her hands move behind her head. She sings softly in her native French, songs he does not understand, but whose very strangeness renders them entrancing to him.
***
But that, of course, he thought, with a stab of remembered pain, had been before his mother had been sent away from court by his father, for a misdemeanour he was not fully to understand until he had reached adulthood. She had taken the garnets with her when she left, and it had been years before Alfonso saw them, or his mother, again, by which time he had come to understand how very much greater would be the allure of the Red Rope if it were seen against unclothed skin.
Lucrezia sat up as Alfonso fiddled with the garnets. She propped herself on one arm and pushed her hair from her face with the other hand. “Go away,” she said, and Alfonso heard a hard anger in her voice. She had never spoken to him like that before and he was shocked.
“I wish to be on my own,” she said. Her eyes flashed with a fury he had never even glimpsed in her, and colour rose in her cheeks. “I wish to be on my own,” she said again, her voice trembling. “Put the garnets away, Alfonso, and leave me alone. I don’t want—”
He dropped the garnets. They rattled as they fell onto the wooden floor.
She fought him with more strength than he would have expected from a creature so small and slight, but he soon found that her frantic resistance aroused him quite as much as Francesca’s well-rehearsed—and often-repeated—pretence of the same, and an anticipation of imminent ingress swelled in his head, pulsing in his ears and pushing up like hot fingers behind his eyeballs.
He had her on her back. Crouching on all fours, gripping her hips between his knees, he held
her wrists and pressed them onto the pillows on either side of her head, feeling them twist within his fingers, small as a child’s.
And then—
***
“Kiss me,” Lucrezia heard him say, his words indistinct, as though he spoke through the sound of running water. She turned her head away from him and tried to pull her wrists from his grasp. As his fingers tightened, and his knees dug into her, a flash of a memory—of heat and laughter and chirring crickets, and the pungent smell of crushed thyme—flickered into her mind, vanishing as fast as it had come.
“Kiss me, Lucrezia,” he said again, and this time there was a neediness in his voice. Almost a plea. She shook her head. He let go of one of her hands and clutched at her face with hard fingers, beneath her chin, tipping it towards his own. His mouth covered hers, filled it; his cheek was against her nose, blocking her breath—for too long. Pinpricks of light flashed. She clutched and tugged at his wrist. The water ran louder and faster, deafening her.
Almost too late, he let go and knelt up, and she sucked in a cold slab of air that hurt her throat. She wiped the wetness away from her mouth with her palm, her chest heaving.
Feeling sick now, she saw Alfonso fumbling with his laces, tugging at a knot in the fastening of his breeches, pulling them open, muttering, still with his knees vice-tight around her hips.
“No…no, no,” he was muttering through clenched teeth, his hand over the opening in his breeches. “No. Too many times. Not tonight…it can’t happen again. I won’t let it. Merda! You won’t ridicule me again, Lucrezia. We’ll do this tonight and then never again will you have the audacity to sit there with the whores and the servants and the hirelings, spilling out secrets and laughing at my inadequacies. There’ll be no more of it. I won’t—won’t—lose it all because of you! Get up!”
Alfonso snatched up her hand, held it by the wrist, pushed her fingers in through the opening in his breeches, where he pressed them onto a soft little mound of hot, clammy flesh that twitched at her touch. She tried to pull back, but he curled her fingers round beneath his own, his breathing quick and urgent. As his other hand reached for her breasts, she froze.
His Last Duchess Page 21
