His Last Duchess (25 page)

Jacomo laughed again. “Sleepwalking all the way to the top of the Torre San Paolo? Come here!” He put the goblet down behind him, and placed the bottle and basket next to it. Shrugging off his doublet, he rolled it into a bundle and laid it at one end of the blankets, as a pillow. He began to kiss Lucrezia again, saying between kisses, “A sensible thought…very sensible…to say nothing of the fact…that…night clothes are considerably easier…to take off…”

Aware this that was the other—predominant—reason she had chosen to wear them, Lucrezia's face glowed warm.

***

Lucrezia opened her eyes. She must, she realised, have fallen asleep, despite the discomfort of the inhospitable tower room. For a brief, sleep-sodden instant, she was bewildered to find she could not move, and then she realised that Jacomo had curled himself up behind her: his body was pressed against her back, and his legs were crooked up under her own. A sleep-heavy arm was draped across both of hers, pressing them to her chest; she could feel his breath on her neck through her hair.

The candles had burned out and the silent room was in near darkness, lit only by the soft grey light of the moon. Lucrezia lay still for a moment, luxuriating in her lover's embrace. Now she was awake, though, the wooden floor felt horribly hard; the blankets did little to cushion the uneven boards, and her shoulder and hip felt bruised and stiff. As she did not want to wake Jacomo, she tried to shift as surreptitiously as she could. Her efforts were in vain: almost at once a drowsy voice murmured, “Stop wriggling—I was asleep…”

Lucrezia rolled over within Jacomo's encircling arm and his eyes opened—a gleam of moonlight reflected in the whites. He smiled, held her more tightly and kissed her mouth.

“Mmm…” Lucrezia said, detaching herself from the kiss. “I'm hungry now. Can we eat?”

***

Jacomo sat up and reached for his leather bag, pulling from it a rather battered tinderbox. He opened this, and picked out a few scraps of baked linen, which he laid in the lid; then he sliced at the little flint with the steel. A sputter of sparks showered red in the darkness; he bent over it and blew gently; the linen smouldered, glowed and ignited. He added a few wisps of feathered woodshavings picked from the box, then, still blowing, felt behind him for a candle. He lit this and sat up, and the tower room walls wobbled in the yellow flame-light. Taking up another two candles and lighting them from the first flame, Jacomo dripped a little wax onto the floor and set them all upright.

Lucrezia was wrapping one of the blankets around her bare shoulders. The candlelight threw her face and the fuzz of her tangled hair into deep-shadowed relief and the folds of the blanket stood out like thick, black brushstrokes. Jacomo pictured the image as a
chiaroscuro
woodcut, and wished he had thought to bring charcoal and paper with him this time. “Hungry now, are you?” he said, smiling at her. “Well…there's some bread.” He held up a round flat loaf. “Grapes. A couple of peaches. And a piece of cheese.” Picking each item out of the basket as he spoke, he laid everything on the blanket between them.

“Can you tear me off a piece of bread?” Lucrezia said. Jacomo tore the loaf in two and held out half. A small hand appeared from within the blanket and took it from him.

“Are you cold?”

She shook her head, her mouth now too full to answer. Reaching out again, she put down the rest of the bread and picked up a peach. For a few moments, neither spoke. They ate and drank, eyes fixed upon each other rather than upon their food. Jacomo remembered giving Lucrezia his bread that day in the North Hall—
What
about
you, Signora? Are you hungry?—
remembered the unprecedented, unexpected longing that had filled him as they had watched each other across the gallery, and his growing certainty that his feelings were reciprocated.

He picked a grape from the bunch and held it to Lucrezia's mouth. She took it from him, lipping the tips of his fingers. He offered her another, and this one she held between her teeth. She leaned in towards him, bringing her face close to his; as they touched, she bit through the skin and pushed the grape into his mouth with her tongue. For a second they both tasted the same sweet-sharp juice, and it seemed to Jacomo that this was as intimate as any more obvious moment of their couplings had been so far.

A candle guttered. He looked up at the window. It was noticeably lighter. “Nearly dawn,” he said. “We should go.”

“Not yet.”

“The portrait will be finished a week tomorrow. We'll leave the next day. It's so soon. We can't afford to risk discovery now.”

“You're right, but surely—”

“We have to go,” Jacomo said, moving forward onto hands and knees. Lucrezia was still huddled in her blanket: this he now unwrapped. Holding her bare shoulders, he laid her back down and bent over her, elbows splayed wide. She squirmed and gasped, laughing as he ran the tip of his tongue from below her navel, up between her breasts, under her chin and round onto her mouth. One more swift kiss and then he was on his feet, scrambling into his clothes.

“That's all—come on! Get dressed!”

Lucrezia crawled across the blankets to retrieve her shift, which she pulled on over her head. She picked up the wrap and draped it around her shoulders as Jacomo put the remains of the food back into the basket and drained the last of the wine straight from the bottle. This he also put into the basket. He shook out and folded the blankets, then, pinching out the candles, he threw them into the basket, which he tucked into a dark corner. “I'll fetch it all later,” he said, seeing Lucrezia's quizzical look.

They went back down the many steps, slowly this time, hand in hand near the outer wall of the tower where the treads were widest. Jacomo carried his blankets under his free arm. “It's only a few days,” he said, as they reached the bottom. “Even if we can't see each other properly until the day we leave, it's not long.”

“No,” Lucrezia said. “Just as long as nothing happens in the intervening time.”

Lucrezia felt stiff, tired and faintly ridiculous. It was off-putting being scrutinized so intently by Fra Pandolf, who squinted as he stared at her, and she was also struggling to ignore Jacomo, who was drawing with a familiar frown of intense concentration.

She had found it most distracting over the previous two days—and it was no better today—to see at such close quarters the man she had come to love so much and not to be allowed to show any of her feelings in her face. It was all conspiring to bubble laughter up through her, like boiling water in a tightly lidded pan. She would not, she thought, have been surprised if wisps of steam had begun escaping from her ears.

At the first sitting, before the reverend brother had arrived, Jacomo had described to her more carefully his plan to paint her as Persephone. She had been bewildered.

“But—but because Persephone eats six of the seeds of the pomegranate, Dis says she has to stay with him for half of each year in the Underworld. In Hades. Oh, Jacomo, I don't know whether—”

He had kissed her, and explained that although he intended to paint her as Persephone, there would be one big difference: she would, he said, be holding the pomegranate in one hand, and the other would be open, palm up and empty. The twelve pomegranate seeds he would paint where they had fallen, lying uneaten on the ground.

“This time,” he had said, “the painting will show us that Persephone has
not
succumbed to temptation; she'll be able to escape the King of the Underworld and leave Hades intact and safe.”

The symbolism was perhaps a little unsubtle, Jacomo had admitted, but he had said that he was pleased with the idea.

***

Alfonso went straight up to the landing as soon as he arrived back from Bologna. After the unexpected changes to the design of the great fresco, he was taking no chances with this portrait. If there were any elements of which he disapproved, he wanted to ensure they were changed well before it was too late.

The friar and his assistant were drawing busily—Pandolf had seated himself surprisingly close to where Lucrezia stood. She was undeniably lovely, he thought, in that dress, the deep red one with the gold, which he had given her himself, last Christmas. He was pleased to see her in it: he had thought she did not care for it. He had seldom seen her wear it.

These few days away from her had calmed him, he realised, and, somewhat to his surprise, he found himself able to look at her now without the disquiet of the previous weeks.

Neither of the artists nor Lucrezia appeared to have noticed his arrival, and for some moments Alfonso stood silently in the shadows watching the artists at work. From where he stood, he could see Pandolf's paper. He was, it appeared, making studies of Lucrezia's hands, though he did not appear to have drawn much, which surprised Alfonso: the painting itself was progressing fast. On the wall behind Lucrezia, the cartoon of the whole design had been drawn across the plaster surface; the painted head and upper body were already complete. The depth and passion in her face were striking, he thought. It was going to be a most beautiful piece.

He wondered why Pandolf had asked Lucrezia to hold a pomegranate. There was little doubt that the colours of the exposed seeds were most attractive, set against the crimson of her dress, though the symbolism of the fruit escaped him. He determined to ask the friar after the sitting had finished.

***

Fra Pandolf seemed to have lost the rhythm of his drawing. He fiddled with his drawing implements, dropped something, bent with difficulty and picked it from the floor. For a moment, Lucrezia wondered what was wrong with him, and then she saw Alfonso at the far end of the landing. He was still in his riding clothes, his hair dishevelled by the wind. She caught his eye but, in a pretence that she had to sustain her serene expression for the portrait, did not respond to him.

Fra Pandolf was frowning now, obviously trying to regain his concentration, she thought, though the fleeting glances he was giving behind him gave away the unease he clearly felt at the presence of his patron. Suddenly, he got to his feet, drawing board clutched in his thick fingers, and stepped towards her, smiling artificially and saying almost to himself, as he moved the tasselled edge of her wrap away from her right hand, “Your mantle laps over your wrist too much, my lady. It has slipped down since I began…”

Lucrezia tried to catch his eye, hoping to put him more at his ease, for his anxiety was unsettling, but he would not look directly at her. Within moments, he was back in his seat, twitching the folds of his brown habit out of the way of his drawing and adjusting the white, knotted cord that hung at his waist, freeing it from where it had caught on the leg of the chair.

It was then that Lucrezia unexpectedly met Jacomo's eye.

She had been trying to avoid doing so, in fear that she would somehow betray their intimacy. He was now leaning back in his chair, flexing cramped fingers and brushing a lock of hair out of his eyes. Seeing Lucrezia watching him, the crescent-creases deepened in his cheeks; the corners of his mouth lifted in a smile. His eyes danced mischievously and then, suddenly, he ran the tip of his tongue across his top lip. Lucrezia was instantly filled with a melting rush of longing; she thought of his parting gesture in the room at the top of the tower, and a traitorous flush burned its way across her cheeks.

***

In stunned disbelief, Alfonso saw the colour rise in Lucrezia's face. He had, he thought in fury, returned from Bologna just in time. He had thought himself able to look at his wife without disquiet? A foolish misapprehension. A cataract roar began in his ears, colour seemed to fade from the scene in front of him and a red mist threatened to engulf him where he stood. It was unaccountable. Fra Pandolf had left his seat, crossing to rearrange a fold of Lucrezia's mantle, lingering just a little too long, Alfonso thought, with his hand upon hers. He had watched the friar return to his seat, looking distinctly awkward. He had listened to the man's muttered comments about her mantle and had seen Lucrezia's wide-eyed gaze follow him as he walked back to his place. He had watched Pandolf pick up his charcoal and begin once again to draw. And, in utter disbelief, he had seen Lucrezia—her gaze still in the friar's direction—flushing vividly and quite obviously suppressing a smile.

She had told them! She must have told them! A ribbon of ice twisted through his guts. They must all now be exquisitely aware that the future of the entire nine-hundred-year-old duchy was to be determined solely by a shameful lack of rigidity in his prick.

Perhaps the whole castle knew it.

His humiliation was absolute.

But even as the thought scoured through him, he saw again the spot of colour in Lucrezia's cheeks and was almost felled where he stood by a drench of desire so strong it all but paralysed him.

She sensed his gaze. He saw her eyes widen with—was it fear? Was it indifference? Whatever it was, the look she gave him unequivocally extinguished the desire that had threatened to engulf him; left in its sizzling remains were great jagged lumps of a screaming anger Alfonso could feel was fast becoming more powerful than he was. Closing his eyes tightly for a moment, he stood still, feeling giddy.

His head cleared. With icy clarity he knew what he would do. She had to be silenced. Immediately. It was obvious now. Whether or not she had told the painters—and he felt quite certain that she had—it was imperative to ensure that she tell no one else. He had been given the key—and the moment had arrived to use it. Turning on his heel, he hurried down the steps and out of the main door, Folletto at his heels.

***

Jacomo felt a cold thrill of shock as the duke strode away. By that one thoughtless gesture, he might have undone them both. His heart raced with fear, and he could see from Lucrezia's face, suddenly white, that she, too, was afraid.