He was astonished to see the shock of white hair and the birdblack eyes of Franco Guarniero. It was not difficult, he thought, to guess the import of Guarniero’s visit, but until this moment Alfonso had been unaware that his steward even knew of the villetta’s existence.
“Oh, Signore!” Guarniero’s voice was higher-pitched than usual, and Alfonso watched him struggling visibly as he sought for a way to tell his master the untellable. “I am so sorry to come here, Signore. So dreadfully sorry—it is quite inexcusable! An unwarranted intrusion…I would never normally…But I did not know what to do. The du—the duchess!”
Alfonso feigned disquiet. “What, Franco? What about her? Is she ill? You seem—tell me! What is it?” Even as he spoke, Alfonso felt a warm slither of pride at the authenticity of his counterfeit consternation.
“A—a fire, Signore.” Guarniero stared at him, wide-eyed with remembrance of recent horror, and now the disbelief in Alfonso’s gaze was genuine. A fire? he thought, bewildered. What fire? He did not understand.
“Oh, my lord, the duchess is dead.”
The words hung in the air between the two men like the reverberation of a tolling bell after the sound has ceased to sing.
Neither man spoke for several long seconds.
Then Alfonso said tonelessly, “How did you know where to find me?”
Guarniero reddened and did not reply. Alfonso was shocked that his private business seemed to have become public property within the Castello. He said, “Where is the duchess now?”
Guarniero’s voice was shaking. “Still in her poor burned chamber, my lord. We did not know what we should do…We wanted to wait for your arrival, Signore. We—we couldn’t find you…thought you might be here, and…oh, Signore—your dog.”
The steward was almost gibbering in his distress—Alfonso had never seen him so discomposed.
***
Someone had moved Folletto. Alfonso felt chilled and rather sick as he passed the untidy black body, which lay like an abandoned puppet against the wall of the corridor. He stared at the dog for a moment, then turned, a few steps ahead of Guarniero, and pushed open the door to Lucrezia’s bedchamber.
The acrid smell of scorched wood, burned feathers and charred flesh hit him like a fist in the face, and he flinched. He looked around the room in breath-held disbelief at what remained of the wooden wall-panels, the cracked window-panes and the black ceiling.
And then he saw her.
Some images, he had thought many times before, can sear themselves instantly into the mind at first sight—white hot, scarring the memory indelibly, exquisitely ineradicable. The twisted, blackened body on the ruined bed, its stick arms bent in grotesque entreaty, was like an image from a Bosch nightmare and Alfonso knew that what he saw now would never leave him.
In fact, he thought, were it not for the portrait, he might have lost her entirely. Thank God for the portrait! She would have been quite lost to him! The scene in front of him was even now chasing his remembered image of Lucrezia’s loveliness from his mind. He should never have left the candle burning.
Turning away without comment, Alfonso pushed past Guarniero and the other half-dozen servants who had accompanied them into the chamber, and strode out into the corridor. Averting his eyes from Folletto’s body, he drew in several deep breaths, then walked swiftly down through the Castello to the Entrance Hall.
She gazed out at him from the wall.
He sat on the stairs, a few steps up from the bottom of the upper flight, and looked at her for a long time. He had been right, he thought. There was nothing else he could have done. Too many elements had conspired for too long to push him to the edge of Dante’s “lamentable vale, that dread abyss that joins a thunderous sound of plaints innumerable.” One thing or another he could perhaps have endured, but not all combined. The displays of affection she had so frequently bestowed upon all as unmeasured largesse; the eviscerating power she had had to reduce him to the status of a eunuch in her bed—this would surely have been enough in itself, without the appalling new knowledge of the fate of the duchy should he be unable to produce an heir. His Holiness thought you should be made aware of the gravity of the situation. No, he thought, avoiding Lucrezia’s gaze now: for that he would never forgive her.
He would have to make enquiries about other potential consorts. To retain Ferrara was of paramount importance.
***
It seemed to Eduardo Rossi that the whole of the duchy must have flocked to Ferrara to see the spectacle. The streets were lined five or six deep along the route that the funeral cortège would take. They were not taking the duchess straight from castle to cathedral, they had said that morning—the distance was no more than a few hundred yards. The procession would wind around a looping maze of streets: a longer route, he had been told, to exalt the occasion and to give the people time to honour the passing of their duke’s tragically young wife.
Tragically young. Not much older than his Chiara. Even as he thought this, Eduardo felt tears sting behind his eyes again. He pushed his lime-pitted hand up against one eye and the side of his nose, and held his breath, willing himself not to sob. Barnabeo gripped his arm, while Antonio and another two of the guildsmen grunted in awkward sympathy.
The procession filed past and the crowd’s soft murmurings died to silence.
Some thirty clergymen led the way, behind a dozen caparisoned horses: the archbishop of Ferrara, a dozen or so priests and a drab brown huddle of Franciscan friars, one of whom—plump and elderly—appeared to be weeping. The bier, draped and canopied in a purple so deep it was near to black, was carried by six young men. The little body on the bier was uncoffined, wrapped in a lighter purple silk. So small, Eduardo thought, his tears spilling unchecked now. Poor little thing—for all her privileges.
As he stared at the close-wrapped figure, he found himself swallowing down a now horribly familiar bloated throatful of guilt, and the cold weight of his ignorance of Chiara’s fate dropped once more into his belly like a block of lead.
Behind the bier walked the relatives. The duke, upright and expressionless, then at least twenty men of varying ages—one he imagined must be the girl’s father, given the tragic bleakness of the poor man’s expression. The youngest, tall, thin, dark-skinned, could be no more than seventeen, Eduardo thought, dressed in his finest, his face set and closed, holding the older man’s arm. Torchbearers, men holding banners, a group of musicians, more horses. As they passed, the crowds bowed their heads, made fervent signs of the cross; some fell to their knees. Eduardo imagined the women, back at the Castello, left to bear their grief in private.
He took a step back, and knocked against a tall, round-faced young man, who had his arm around the shoulders of a darkhaired girl. She was dressed in yellow and was carrying a baby. Eduardo saw that the back of one of the girl’s wrists was red and puckered—not unlike a lime burn, he thought inconsequentially. Apologising for his clumsiness, he looked at the baby and the emptiness of his loss yawned wider. The young woman smiled at him, mutely accepting the apology, then turned back to watch the procession.
Epilogue
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.
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