“It’s not much,” Giorgio said, sounding apologetic, as they went back down the stairs. “What do you think?”
Catelina’s eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, Lina.” Giorgio put big arms around her. He held her head against his chest and pulled her close.
Catelina pressed her face against his horse-smelling jerkin and felt the tears hot on her cheeks.
“It’s sooner than I had expected,” Giorgio began, “but I had already decided to ask you anyway.”
“Had you?”
Giorgio’s face cracked in a broad smile. “Yes. I had. So—what do you say? Will you?”
Catelina felt entirely certain. “Yes, Giorgio,” she said, “I will.”
Giorgio lowered his face to hers and kissed her with enthusiasm, then straightened. “I have to go up to the Castello now,” he said, “I’m expected back any moment. I’ll be here by sunset. Will you manage on your own?”
“Well,” Catelina said, “if we are…to be married, Giorgio, I shall have to get used to managing, shan’t I?” She felt the colour rise in her cheeks.
“Do you have any money?”
Catelina shook her head.
“Here.” Giorgio pushed one of his big hands down into a pocket and pulled out a few coins. “Could you find us something to eat? I’ve nothing in the house at all.”
Catelina nodded. Giorgio kissed her again, then opened the front door. A bulky silhouette in the doorway, blocking the light, he paused for a moment, then came back in and kissed her once more.
She pulled away from him, laughing. “Go on! I’ll see you this evening.”
***
Catelina spent an hour or so arranging Giorgio’s rooms to her satisfaction. She ordered the table and the chairs; she laid the plates and bowls out on the shelf in a more deliberate pattern; she straightened the hanging coats, and separated the boots into pairs, standing them neatly against the wall under the hooks. Finding a broom in a lightless corner behind the curve of the stairs, she swept the floor.
She climbed to the upper rooms, taking the broom with her. At the head of the bed in the larger room, two cords were nailed to the wall, one on each side; Catelina pulled back the bed-hangings and secured them with the cords, flapped out and straightened the blankets, then plumped up the rather uncomfortable-looking pillows.
The covers on the—obviously unused—bed in the smaller room were folded in a pile at the foot. Catelina refolded them and laid them back where they had been.
She opened the wooden trunk. In it she found several linen shirts, a couple of pairs of breeches, a woollen doublet and a tangle of limp and lifeless hose. She smiled, lifted out one of the shirts, held it to her face, then replaced it tenderly back in the trunk.
She swept the floor of each room, then went back downstairs and sat at the table. It was very quiet.
She sighed.
Yesterday already seemed unreal and distant. Her life at the Castello had ended so abruptly, snuffed out like a smoking candle.
Everything had happened so quickly.
The expression on the duke’s face as he had burst into the Signora’s chamber—Catelina shuddered. She had quite genuinely thought he might be about to kill them both. He had seemed—she struggled to find the words to describe it—as though he were possessed, haunted by something. Those great dark eyes of his had been stretched wide and he had been trembling so that Catelina had been able to see it from the other side of the room.
***
She stands shivering in the antechamber, listening to him shout at her poor mistress, then he bangs out of the room, stops in front of her and tells her to leave the Castello this very night. If she values her continued existence, he says. She does not think she will ever forget the look on his face as he says those words. Then he kicks the dog out of the way and whirls off in a flurry of flapping coat and clinking metal. The poor thing just stands with its tail between its legs, ears drooping like wilted cabbage leaves.
When she peers back into the bedchamber, the Signora is standing there, chalk-white, staring at nothing. A tear is trickling down her cheek; she does not brush it away, but leaves it to fall. It catches at the corner of her mouth and clings there. “I’m so sorry, Lina,” she says. “Where will you go?”
Catelina bites her lip. “I don’t know, my lady. Back to Mugello, perhaps, to my mother.”
Her mistress holds out her arms and they hug each other close. Catelina is crying too, by this time, but she thinks she hears the Signora say, “You’ll be safely away, Lina. We’ll be able to go, after all.” Her voice is muffled with tears though, so Catelina wonders if she is mistaken.
It does not take her long to pack her things: her two spare dresses, a couple of shifts, a pair of shoes, a few trinkets she has collected over the months she has been at the Castello. It all fits comfortably in the basket the Signora took into the town with Jacomo.
They stand back from the packing. Catelina feels suddenly awkward. She says, “I’ll go to Giorgio, my lady. He’ll ride with me to Mugello, if he is allowed the time away.”
“Lina…”
“No, my lady—I’ll just go. Don’t come down with me. It will make it worse.” She pauses then, her words catching in her throat, and then blurts out, “Be safe, my lady. Don’t let him hurt you.”
And after one more fierce hug, she grabs the basket and runs from the room, down through the castle and up to the stable block, where she finds Giorgio sitting on a mounting block, cleaning a harness with a horsehair scrubbing-pad.
“Lina! What is it? Why are you crying?” he says.
There is no point in pretending. She tells him.
“Dismissed?” He stands up, scrubbing-pad dripping in one hand. “But I don’t understand. You…but why? What could you have done to—”
She tries to explain.
“What will you do, Lina? Where will you go?”
She shrugs.
“Don’t go anywhere,” he says then, dropping the scrubbing-pad and the piece of harness and hugging her. “Stay here, with me. I have rooms in town.”
***
Now Catelina sat in Giorgio’s cramped downstairs room and thought how shocked she had been at the impropriety of his suggestion. “But, Giorgio, how can I?” she had said. “We’re not married!”
“That can be arranged,” he had said, very seriously.
Catelina picked up the basket containing her few belongings and carried it upstairs. She hesitated, unsure in which of the two rooms she should leave her things. Deciding upon the smaller, unused room as less presumptuous, she took out her dresses, shifts, shoes and trinkets, and put them all neatly on the bed.
She took the basket back downstairs, picked up the coins Giorgio had given her, and, swinging her cloak over her shoulders, she set out for the centre of the city in search of food.
She bought a rabbit at the little butcher’s in the Via delle Volte, some vegetables, salad leaves, a large bunch of grapes and a head of garlic from a stall in the Corso, and a flagon of ale from a small shop in the next street. That last purchase took her to within sight of the Castello; she stared at its heavy red-brick bulk, wondering what was happening within those walls, not knowing quite what she should be thinking.
Her basket was bulging and heavy as she made her way back to the little house in the Via Vecchie, pleased with her purchases. It had taken her some moments to reach the street—she had made two wrong turns before she recognized the brightly painted armourer’s shop at the end of the road—and by the time she turned the corner and could see Giorgio’s front door, she was tired and longing to sit down.
She had gone some two or three steps down the street when she heard a sound like an animal in distress. A low, guttural moaning. She looked about her but could see nothing. It came again, a little louder. Catelina moved towards where the sound had come from, and her scalp contracted in shock. A girl, filthy and dishevelled, eyes tightly closed, was slumped in an untidy heap in a dark alcove between two houses.<
br />
Catelina put down her basket, stepped forward and crouched in front of her. “Can you hear me?” she said softly.
There was no response. She reached forward with trembling fingers and stroked the girl’s hair back from her face. “Signorina, can you hear me?” she said again, and this time the girl opened her eyes. She moved position, and Catelina saw that her belly was hugely distended: the strings holding her filthy bodice together were loosened to their utmost.
“Here, let me help you to stand,” Catelina said.
The girl lifted her arm and Catelina took her hand. As she steadied herself to take the girl’s weight, she heard her suck in a ragged breath. The girl gripped Catelina’s fingers so tightly she feared they might break, and then the guttural moaning came again. For maybe a minute, the girl sat hunched over her belly, clinging to Catelina’s hand, and then her hold relaxed. “I’m sorry,” she said, hoarsely, panting as though she had been running.
“Come on, try to stand. I’ll not let you fall.”
She pulled the girl to her feet. Her dress was filthy, her face streaked with dirt and tears; the great belly protruded incongruously. Catelina wiped the girl’s face with the edge of her sleeve, and tried to sweep some of the dirt from her clothes. Turning her around, intending to brush down her shoulders, she saw that the back of the creased and crumpled skirt was sodden, encrusted with the dust in which she had been sitting.
“Is this—oh, God, has it started?” Catelina said, appalled.
“I…I think so.”
“Well,” she said, “you had better come with me, hadn’t you? You need to lie down.”
She picked up the basket, took the girl’s arm and together, step by faltering step, they walked the last few yards to Giorgio’s house.
24
The little peregrine snapped her dark wings open and flapped them irritably; underneath, the feathers were the same soft, freckled cream as the plumage on her breast. Alfonso felt the yellow talons grip the thumb of his gauntlet as he fastened the thin red straps of the jesses to the metal ring at the end of the leash; he wound the leash around the fourth and fifth fingers of his gloved hand. The falcon ducked and dipped her head in an effort to avoid the hood he now held out—her wings flapped open again and she bated. But, fastened as she was to his hand, she could do little to avoid it, and in an instant she was blindfolded and calmed, and sat suddenly quiet in her enforced darkness, the terrible pale beak curving out from under the scarlet kid of the hood. Alfonso drew the strings close around her head, pulling one with his right hand and holding the other taut with his teeth. His face came within inches of the dagger-sharp beak, but the peregrine sat still now, in blind dignity, and took no notice.
Alfonso stretched his left arm towards the falcon’s tall wooden block. Tilting his fist, he encouraged her to stand down, off his hand and onto the block so that, hawking glove held by its tassel between his teeth, he could use both hands to fasten the little hunting bells onto her legs. He had always found these tiny straps too delicate to tie successfully one-handed.
“Are you nearly ready with that peregrine, Este?”
Francesco Panizato sounded amused, Alfonso thought. He knew that his friend took little care over these preparations, preferring to leave them to his—or Alfonso’s own—falconer. For himself, though, Alfonso found that much of the pleasure he took in hawking came from the time he spent with his birds, preparing them for work. This one, Strega—the witch—had always been his favourite. Wild-caught, she had been an instinctive bird since she was in the down, and now she could wait-on higher than any other falcon he had come across; she regularly brought back more game than he felt he had the right to expect from any bird. He was looking forward to seeing her fly that afternoon.
“You know perfectly well that you cannot hurry a bird, Francesco,” Alfonso said, leaving the falconry at last. “It will not serve you well if it resents your haste.”
He held his free arm up and across his eyes as the June sun dazzled after the gloom of the almost windowless stone shed. Strega sensed the light, even through the hood, and turned her head away from the glare.
Panizato was mounted; his pale, hooded goshawk bobbed her head angrily and shifted her grip on his glove. “Like women, eh, Este?” He laughed. “If you ask me, you spend more time attending to that bird’s needs than you do your wife’s.”
Suppressing a shudder, Alfonso thought of the previous night and made no reply.
“Am I to understand by your scowl, sir, that I scored a valid touch there with the very tip of my rapier?” Panizato persisted. “Perhaps you should employ some of your falconer’s techniques with your duchess, Alfonso, teach her not to bate—”
“You go too far, Panizato.”
Alfonso saw the laughter die in his friend’s eyes; Panizato had the grace to look abashed. Teach her not to bate. Alfonso heard the words again in his head and was gripped by an arresting image. It was not of Lucrezia that he thought, though, but of Francesca: wild, vicious and very like his Strega.
Francesca had been angry with him today, he knew, and their noontide assignation had been wordless, humourless and physical. But as he looked with pride now at his peregrine, who, though daily given a sky in which to roam, would always return to him, he knew that he held his whore, too, in bonds stronger than jesses, leash and lure. It seemed to Alfonso at that moment that Francesca might, perhaps, be all that stood between him and madness. He forced a smile.
“Perhaps you are right, Francesco,” he said. “Perhaps the falconer’s skills might be gainfully employed in the bedchamber, though I think it—perhaps—beyond the remit of our friendship for you to suggest it to me quite so disrespectfully.”
“I stand chided, Alfonso.” Panizato held up his free hand in apology.
Alfonso took Farfalla’s reins from the horseman and handed him the peregrine as he mounted. The horseman lifted the falcon back onto his hand, and Alfonso and Panizato left the yard, their two dogs trotting at their heels, heading for the hunting ground that lay outside the main walls of the old city, where it had stood since Alfonso’s great-grandfather Ercole had planned it, ordered its construction and enjoyed it until his dying day. Alfonso had frequently had occasion to bless the old man’s energy and enthusiasm and often wished he had known him.
They jogged in silence for some moments, and Alfonso found his mind filled again with Lucrezia. When they had first met in Mugello, he reflected, he had seen his future duchess as a perfect image in a flawless mirror. Since their marriage, though, each forcible reminder of her failure to live up to the exquisite reflection he so longed to possess had damaged the mirror’s surface: cracked it, chipped and distorted it until ultimately he found himself wholly unable even to glimpse the reflection he had seen at the start.
He had been so sure of success last night. So determined. But now that he was certain Lucrezia knew about His Holiness’s intentions, now that he knew she stood before him as a potential agent of the destruction of all he held so dear, she was not only more unreachable than ever, but dangerous. It was not so much that he could no longer see her in the glass, it was more that the cracks and distortions were now twisting the image until it resembled nothing so much as a laughing, tormenting little fiend.
To his shame, though, he knew that he still wanted her as much as ever. As a man bent upon self-slaughter might gaze at the jewelled dagger with which he means to stop his own heart, and, in a last moment of unexpected stillness, find its craftsmanship irresistibly beautiful, Alfonso knew he still longed to possess Lucrezia. He had to have her. He had thought last night that if he reinvented the image—tried to force himself to see his duchess as nothing more than a whore—he might somehow break down the inexplicable barriers that still stood so resolutely between them. But—humiliatingly—his plan had been entirely unsuccessful.
It had been exhausting, undignified, ugly—and a complete failure. The hunting party reached open ground, and Alfonso and Panizato both broke into a fast canter. Aft
er a while they stopped, tethered the horses in the shade of some trees, and walked away from the cover onto higher ground. Both dogs—Folletto and Panizato’s hound, Lontra—raced away from them across the heath.
There was a strong breeze. Alfonso was pleased: he knew Strega liked to feel the wind beneath her—it seemed to give her courage, entice her higher into the air. At times, he thought, his little falcon seemed to be waiting-on in the very clouds themselves.
Over in the tops of the nearby trees were the ragged twig-ends of a number of rook nests. If he was lucky today, he might get Strega to pull a couple of rooks. There would be no game on the heath at this time of year, so he had brought a lure in his hawking bag and would at least be able to let Strega stretch her wings and lose some weight—no bird has much of an appetite for hunting without an edge of hunger.
He and Panizato took the hoods off their birds. Both the peregrine and the goshawk blinked in the light and looked around them, sizing up the terrain they now saw. Panizato’s bird, Foschia, was, Alfonso thought, a moody, difficult creature, and he doubted that his friend would succeed with her that day. A creature like Foschia needed endless time and the patient repetition of instructions if she were ever to become more reliable. Francesco’s excitable, energetic nature was too exuberant for hawking, Alfonso thought.
He released the jesses from the leash and Strega immediately pushed down with her feet and soared from his arm, spiralling up and up, until she was no more than a motionless speck in the vivid blue. Foschia, too, took off, but flew in sweeping arcs some few feet from the tussocky grass. Panizato appeared unconcerned at her lack of height, however—he turned to Alfonso and spoke. “Has your cousin returned from France yet?”
“No, not until August.”
“Does he know of the—er—situation, with regard to the titles?”
“Not yet. It is not the sort of information I feel I should trust to a letter.”
“No. I can see that. Rather delicate. And no—er—progress?”
His Last Duchess Page 23
