His Last Duchess (26 page)

Francesca and the girls started as a great pounding shook the front door. Beata and Isabella stood behind the table and held hands as Francesca went to open it.

Alfonso's face was tight and closed. Francesca was shocked to see him—he rarely came to the house. She could not read his expression but, after what had happened before, she was not going to risk saying or doing anything unless she had to. She waited for him to speak.

The silence stretched out so far that it began to seem ridiculous. They were all just standing like statues, staring at each other and saying nothing.

Then Alfonso spoke. “Put on a cloak. I have a job I should like you to undertake.”

He handed her a piece of paper, folded and sealed. “Take this to Signor Carolei, the apothecary in the Via Fondobanchetto. Tell him that the substance I require is to be made up as quickly as he can provide it, but do not tell him who sent you. Bring the letter back with you. Whatever you do, don't leave it with him.”

Francesca frowned. “I will willingly run an errand for you, Alfonso, you know that, but I don't understand why one of your servants cannot—”

“This is not a job I wish to delegate to anyone other than you, Francesca. I will wait for you here.”

“In my house?” Francesca said, surprised.

“It seems preferable to being left in the street,” Alfonso said, with a faint smile. Francesca saw that his eyes were glittering strangely and felt distinctly uneasy.

“I want,” he said, “to hear the results of your errand straight away.”

“We will be as quick as we can.”

The girls flattened themselves against the wall as they and their mother left the house. Francesca could see they were afraid of the great black dog, which, some inches taller than they were, must, she thought, have seemed a truly formidable monster to them. As they walked away, she turned back, but Alfonso and the wolfhound had already entered the house and the door was closed.

Francesca and the two girls hurried up the street. “Would you rather go to Catelina's?” she asked them. They nodded. Francesca stopped outside Giorgio's house and knocked on the door.

Some seconds before Catelina appeared, they heard the baby crying.

She opened the door with the child in her arms. It was screaming, red-faced and sweaty, its tiny hands clenched into angry fists. Catelina's exhausted face lifted into an attempt at a smile when she saw her visitors. “I'm sorry,” she said. “As you can see, he's a little fractious. Did you want anything?”

“No,” said Francesca, seeing that her request would be unwelcome. “I was going to ask if I could leave the girls here for an hour, but I can see that…” She tailed off.

“Oh, Francesca, I'm sorry—” Catelina said, swaying from side to side in an attempt to soothe the furious baby, “—but…oh, God, that poor girl's so sick. It's getting worse. Worse every day. I hope I'm wrong, but I think it's childbed fever.”

“What about the baby?”

“He's not ill, just hungry. That poor little thing's far too sick to feed him. Giorgio's gone searching for a wet-nurse.”

“I'm so sorry. I'm…on an errand to an apothecary. I'll ask him if he has anything he can give me that might help her.”

“Thank you. Perhaps he'd come here and see her? We've tried everything, and nothing's working.”

“I'll see what he says,” she said, looking down at the girls, who were both staring huge-eyed at the howling baby.

***

It took Francesca and the twins a matter of minutes to reach the Via Fondobanchetto: a narrow, dirty street with a scummy ribbon of dank water trickling along its centre, and Francesca found the apothecary's house with little difficulty.

Signor Carolei himself opened the door when she knocked. He was of middling height and softly plump. His skin seemed unnaturally pale—like uncooked pastry—and his bulging eyes were the almost hueless colour of old dust. These eyes regarded Francesca and her children coldly for some moments before the apothecary either moved or spoke.

“Yes?” It was not much more than a whisper. The end of the word stretched into a hiss.

Although the apothecary's substantial bulk all but blocked the doorway, Francesca could see past him into a cramped chamber filled with boxes, crates, jars and bundles; they were stacked in neat piles that reached virtually up to the low, beamed ceiling and only a small narrow space was left clear, leading to a staircase that descended steeply out of sight.

“I have a letter for you,” Francesca said. “I have been told to let you read it and obtain a response, but to keep the paper myself and return it to its author. He says he wants the substance made up as quickly as you can manage it.”

Signor Carolei nodded and took the letter. He jerked his head to indicate that Francesca and the girls should follow him and led the way across the cramped room towards the stairs, reading as he walked.

His windowless workroom was underground, lit with torches that burned in brackets. It was a spacious chamber: large and low, smelling of an acrid mixture of spices, rotten eggs and a sweet metallic tang, like the smell of blood. A heavy table stood in the centre. Made of a coarse-grained wood, it was pitted and crosshatched with knife-cuts like a butcher's chopping block, and a variety of different coloured stains spattered its surface. Bunches of leaves of many shapes and textures lay upon it, beside a number of jars of varying sizes. Some were glass and the contents could be seen through the sides—yellow, green, white and a deep brick red—and others were of fired earthenware. The walls were lined with shelves containing dozens—perhaps hundreds—of similar jars. A delicate set of brass scales stood to one side on the table, gleaming in the torchlight. One of its small, flat pans contained a heap of white powder, which had unbalanced the scales so that one side hung lower than the other; the graded weights the apothecary would use to measure his ingredients lay scattered around beneath the mechanism. Francesca presumed it to have been the act of weighing that she had interrupted when she had knocked at the door.

It was hot and airless and she shuddered at the thought of spending long hours in a room like this, away from the light; now she understood Signor Carolei's pallor. Beata and Isabella stood on either side of her, their fingers gripping her skirt. They were still and silent, and Francesca knew they were afraid. The apothecary read Alfonso's letter again.

“Tell him yes. Tell him it will be ready for collection tomorrow night after sunset. I can see that he already understands the need for…discretion. And in answer to the last question in the letter—tell him it works almost instantly. In little more than…moments.” The bulging eyes widened as he spoke this last word, and he held out the note, slightly creased now and torn where the seal had been broken.

“Thank you, Signore,” Francesca said, taking it from him. Her fingers touched his hand. His flesh was chill and pale, damp with cold sweat, and she recoiled as though the touch had burned her.

***

“Are we going home now?” Isabella asked, as they emerged into the street, all three blinking in the brightness. Francesca hardly heard her; she was struggling to control a cold, swelling feeling of panic. Flapping open Alfonso's note, she read it and, with a sickening rush of comprehension, understood all too clearly the import of her “commission.” Alfonso had had good reason not to entrust it to a servant. He was planning to end a life. And, though he did not identify his intended victim in these lines she read here, Francesca was in no doubt of her identity. Perhaps it was the mad glitter she had seen in Alfonso's eyes as he had handed her the letter—something she had only seen before on the occasions he had spoken to her of his tearing unhappiness with his wife. As she stood in the street outside the apothecary's, she pictured the freckled girl with the sweet smile, sitting so uncertainly on the bay pony. “Oh, dear God, I won't let him do this,” she said. “I can't. I have to get word to her.”

“Who, Mamma?”

Francesca was startled to discover that she had spoken aloud, and that the twins had heard her. She answered honestly, but briefly. “A lady, at the Castello Estense. The kind lady who gave you the ribbons. But I don't know how best to reach her.”

She was so frightened, and so bound up in the horror of Alfonso's intrigue, that she did not hear Beata say, “Giorgio works at the Castello.”

When she did not respond, Beata said, “Mamma—he does…”

“What? Who are you talking about?”

“Big Giorgio who lives next door. He works with the horses at the Castello. He told me.”

Giorgio. Catelina. That baby. Oh, God, she had completely forgotten about them…

She said, “Giorgio works at the Castello?”

“Yes. And Catelina said she used to work there too. She worked for a lady, she said, but not any more.”

Francesca stopped mid-stride, startling the children. She said, “When the man who is waiting in our rooms has gone, I want you to stay quietly in the house whilst I go to Catelina. You are not to say anything to the man about this. It's very important. Do you understand?”

They both nodded.

Some moments later, they arrived home and Francesca hesitated on her doorstep, one hand on the wall beside the door, thinking fast.

***

Alfonso stood immobile as Francesca held out his letter and said, “It will be ready tomorrow night after sunset. He says he is sure you understand the need for discretion. He says it…works in moments.”

Her voice was expressionless, but she was trembling, and Alfonso knew she understood what lay behind the commission she had just undertaken.

“I will collect it for you,” she said. He watched as his beautiful whore seemed to struggle with herself—it took her some seconds to utter the words she then dropped into the silence like pebbles into a well. “And shall I…shall I have you back again…as you were, when this is…over?”

Unable to speak, Alfonso let all the air out of his lungs in a long, shivering sigh. He nodded. “I shall spend the night at the
villetta
after…after it is over,” he managed to say. His voice sounded hollow and distant, as though he was hearing it from the far end of a tunnel. “Perhaps you would care to accompany me. I do not plan to return until later the following day.”

Without replying, Francesca nodded slowly.

“Be then outside the main drawbridge from midnight tomorrow, Francesca.”

She crossed the room to where he stood. Tilting her head sideways, she kissed his mouth languorously, sliding her tongue over and around his own. He put his arms around her, but she drew back. Her mouth was wet.

“No,” she said. “Not with the girls here. You will have to wait until tomorrow night.”

And saying nothing more, she turned from him and padded up the stairs.

Many years before, a friend who had travelled through the lands of the Bedouin had described to Alfonso the night he had once spent in a sandstorm. His vivid description of the howling inexorability of the sand, the demonic wailing of the wind and the fierce, stinging pain of the grains on skin and in eyes seemed to Alfonso at that moment to be the only thing that might come close to describing the turmoil that was fast pushing him to the edge of the precipice. Terror at what he had just set in motion, an aching desire for the voluptuous calm of that shadowed chamber in his mind, a new stab of longing for his whore, and a horrible, dragging weariness at the shaming humiliations of his blighted marriage. He screwed up his eyes and gripped his skull with his fingers, the heels of his hands pressing hard into his eye-sockets as it all raged through his head.

Then it quieted and he saw an exquisite image of the creature he had brought from Cafaggiolo. He still wanted her more than he had ever wanted anything—he had ached with the wanting of her ever since the ignominious failure of the wedding night. She had to be destroyed—he had made the decision. If the duchy were to survive, he had no choice. But he had, too, to get her out of his head. Whatever Lucrezia was, whatever she had done, whatever danger she represented, he knew that if he were ever—ever—to be able fully to exorcize her from his mind, it was imperative that he possess the image completely—just once—before he destroyed it. Now, with the key gripped tightly in his hand, he thought he knew—at last—how he could achieve that possession.

Alfonso crushed his letter into a ball in his fist and threw it into the fireplace. A fat little flame licked around the ball and then ignited it. The paper shifted as it blackened, burned and disintegrated.

Oh, thank goodness you're here!” Catelina stood back and Francesca came inside. Catelina saw her glance up the stairs. “Giorgio couldn't find a wet-nurse,” she said. “He's had to go back up to the castle, and I've just given the baby some goat's milk. First time he's stopped crying in hours, poor little thing.” She paused. “Did the apothecary say he would come?”

Now she looked properly at Francesca and was taken aback by her expression. “What? What is it? What's wrong, Francesca? What did he say?”

Francesca hesitated. “I'm so sorry, I didn't ask him because…because…”

“Please—what is it?”

“The girls…they said you used to work up at the Castello…”

Catelina frowned at her. “Does it matter if I did?”

“No, of course not, but—oh, God, I have to know—is it true that you used to work for the duchess?”

“Why do you ask?”

Francesca stared at her for several long seconds before she began to speak. Catelina listened, and every word she heard sent icy threads of terror across her scalp.

“I don't understand,” she said. “Why you? Why would the Signore ask
you
to deliver his message for him? How does he know you so well, as to trust you with…?”

Francesca flushed.

“Exactly who are you?” Catelina said slowly, realising that she had never thought to wonder before now.

“Isn't it obvious?”

Catelina thought of the twins, and their vague familiarity made sudden sense. “You…and him?”

Francesca nodded.

“Since when?”

“Nearly nine years.”

“And those little girls, are they…?”

Another nod.

“Oh, dear God, my poor lady. But…” Catelina was suddenly angry. “But I don't understand. If you and he have…well, why are you telling me this? Why do you care? Surely your loyalties lie with him. What's she to you?”

“Why do I care?” Francesca's voice cracked. “Oh, God, if you had seen him contemplate this
loathsome
thing with such utter heartlessness you wouldn't even think to ask
why
!” She paused, and then said, “He is no longer the man I have known for so long. I don't know what has happened, but…I'm afraid he is losing his reason.”

Catelina saw that there were tears in her eyes, and she believed her.

Francesca said, “The duchess has to be warned. I cannot go to the Castello myself, but I understand that your Giorgio works there and…”

It was obvious. “Yes. We must tell him. He can get word to Jacomo. Jacomo will get her out.”

There was a sudden keening wail from the baby upstairs.

Francesca glanced up the staircase. “You need to stay here. The twins can deliver a message. Once they've gone, I'll go and find what help I can for that baby. Do you have paper and a pen?”

“Yes, but you'll have to write the note. I'm afraid I don't know how.”

***

Giorgio saw the neighbour's two children waving to him from the gateway. He smiled and waved back. One of them flapped a hand, beckoning him over, and Giorgio strode across the yard towards them.

“What a surprise to see you two here,” he said, squatting on his heels in front of them.

“We have a note for you.”

One of the two wriggled a hand inside the neck of her bodice and pulled out a now crumpled piece of paper. She handed it to Giorgio. He took it from her, smiling, and read it, expecting something inconsequential, but what he saw smothered his smile and sent a cold drench of shock down his spine. He felt suddenly nauseous.

“Thank you, girls,” he said, trying not to let his anxiety show. Now you'd best get off home quickly. Tell Catelina and your mamma that—that I'll do everything I can. Will you do that?”

They nodded and ran back towards the town, hand in hand once more, glancing over their shoulders and waving at Giorgio as they went.

***

Giovanni glanced up from where he had been examining Brezza's newly shoeless hoof, and watched the two pretty little girls leave the stableyard. Giorgio's face was blank—almost as though someone had just hit him. Giovanni patted his mare, and walked across the yard. “What is it,
amico
?”

“I have to go…I must find…” Giorgio seemed quite distracted and unaware of what he was saying or doing. Whatever had been in that note had shocked him, Giovanni thought, now more alarmed than curious. “What's happened, Giorgio?” he said.

Giorgio was now, visibly shaking. “Signore, I have to tell you—she's your cousin.” Suddenly Giovanni was no longer alarmed—he was frightened. “What's wrong? Quick—tell me!” His heart was banging as he looked at Giorgio's white, drawn face. He took the note Giorgio held out to him, and read it. “Oh, God!” he said. “I must get her out—now.”

“No. You can't. First of all, she's out with the riding master—I harnessed the horses not an hour since, and I don't know where they went. The Signore said he would meet her back here in an hour or two—and if he suspects that we know anything about
this
, I believe he'll stop at nothing to silence us all.”

A long, loud pause.

“We have to tell Jacomo,” Giovanni said, more to himself than to Giorgio. “No time to explain, but just believe me, he needs to know.”

“I'll go back to our house,” Giorgio said, and he told Giovanni how to find it. “Bring this Jacomo there now.”

Giovanni made his way into the Castello, trying not to look as though he was hurrying. He found Jacomo on the landing above the entrance hall, working alone on the portrait. Giovanni only vaguely registered what an astounding likeness he had created in so short a time—the head and much of the body were already complete, and he was crouched in front of the second hand. The first, clutching a partly peeled pomegranate, was also finished.

Jacomo sensed his presence and turned, peering up at him quizzically from where he was half-kneeling on the floor.

“Can I talk with you—urgently?” Giovanni muttered.

Jacomo stood without a word, put down his brush, and followed him.

Giovanni told him everything. “I'll go and get her now,” Jacomo said. His face was set and pale but his voice was steady.

“No, you can't. She's not here. She's out riding, and
he'll
be there when they get back, Giorgio says. We wouldn't stand a chance of getting her out undetected. Come with me now to Giorgio's and we can try to work out if there is any way to get her away from here without
Il
Duca
knowing you've gone.”

***

As Jacomo and Giovanni went into the little house, a baby was crying. It was a wire-thin, desolate sound, the only sound in the house; it seemed a noise of utter hopelessness, and panicked, flapping wings began to beat inside Jacomo's head.

He looked around him. Giorgio was standing in the shadows against the far wall, shoulders hunched, arms folded, his face stretched and stiff, one leg twitching. Seated at the small table in the centre of the room were three people Jacomo had never seen before: an astonishingly beautiful woman with a greenish bruise under one eye, and, on either side of her, two identical small girls.

Giorgio stepped away from the wall. “Signori, this is Signora Felizzi,” he said, indicating the woman at the table. Jacomo and Giovanni inclined their heads towards her. The little girls shuffled closer to their mother.

Catelina appeared on the stairs with the now sleeping baby in the crook of her arm. Behind her, much to Jacomo's surprise, stood an elderly man with an almost hairless head and white-fluff eyebrows: Alessandro Giglio, the apothecary. Catelina was exhausted, Jacomo thought, her face pale and tear-stained. Holding the baby close to her chest, she picked her way down the steep steps with care; Signora Felizzi motioned to her children to stand so that Catelina could sit.

Alessandro followed Catelina, shaking his head sadly. Seating himself on the other empty chair, he ran a gnarled finger over the baby's head.

“Francesca,” Giorgio said, and everyone turned to him. “Francesca, tell the signori what you told me.”

Jacomo watched the beautiful Signora Felizzi nod at Giorgio, then look from Catelina to him and Giovanni. She hesitated a moment, then said, in a low voice, “The duke has commissioned the apothecary in the Via Fondobanchetto to produce…a substance with which I think he means to…to rid himself of a problem he can no longer endure.” She took a long, slow breath. “I have no proof, but I believe he means to poison the duchess. He has ordered a phial of
La
Cantarella
. I am…to pick it up for him tomorrow evening after sunset.”

Her words took Jacomo's breath away. She was unearthly, he thought, a beautiful sorceress from the realms of the Styx. He had no idea who she was, or why she should be thus errand-running for the duke, but he could see that she spoke with honesty, and he found himself unable to take his eyes from her face.

Giovanni said, “But what can we do? How can we stop him? We can't just sit here and let it happen.”

A taut silence stretched across the room.

Nobody spoke.

Then Catelina said, glancing at Alessandro, “There is something we could do. Signor Giglio suggested it just now. He said it ought to work. Tell them, Signore.”

The old apothecary spoke softly into the silence.

“Dear God—we'll all go to hell!” Giorgio said, his voice cracking.

Catelina hugged the baby closer to her and said, “But now that the poor creature is dead—”

“Lina—that child has been motherless for less than half an hour. The girl's still warm!”

Catelina said, “I know it sounds terrible, but it's the only chance we'll have to get my lady out without the Signore knowing she's gone. I think it's the only way.”

***

Francesca, Jacomo, Giovanni and Alessandro Giglio walked quickly and silently through the streets of Ferrara. At the fork in the road where they were to part, they stopped.

“Jacomo, should I tell Crezzi what's going to happen?” Giovanni asked quietly.

“No. She'd be frightened. If the duke sees her fear, that might alert him to what we're intending to do. If we're to succeed and get her away, he has to believe implicitly that his plan has worked.”

Giovanni swore. He looked, Francesca thought, very young and very scared. “But what if his plan
does
work?” he said.

“I shall do everything I can to make sure that it does not, Signore,” Alessandro said. “But I must hurry—there is a great deal to prepare.”

Francesca laid a hand on Giovanni's sleeve. “We must trust Alessandro. He knows his trade better than anyone. And the duchess is safe enough until tomorrow night, in any case.”

Giovanni nodded and wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand, breathing through an open mouth for a moment, as though he had been running. Then he said, his voice thick with anxiety, “It just has to bloody work,” and, turning towards the Castello, he broke into a run.

The other three began to walk fast towards the river, Alessandro and Francesca almost trotting to keep up with Jacomo's long strides.

***

Catelina laid the baby gently upon a lambskin rug in the wooden trunk and tucked a blanket around him. Tightly swaddled now, he slept, his tiny belly at least partially filled with the goat's milk she had so painstakingly fed him with her fingers, drop by drop. She watched him for a moment, painfully moved by his minuteness, and then she sighed and her eyes went to the little figure on the bed. The dead girl was small and pale and insubstantial, and looked unbearably fragile, Catelina thought sadly, like a bruised petal fallen from a flower.

“I'm so sorry, Chiara,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed and stroking the hair back from the waxy-white face. “You worked so hard to bring your little boy into the world. It's unfair that this should have happened. I'm so terribly sorry that I couldn't help you properly. I did try. And Signor Giglio tried too. If anyone could have saved you, I think he could. You deserved better than this, though. I'll take care of him, I promise you, as well as I can. I'm going to call him Paolo, because it means ‘small.' He's so tiny…”

The baby snuffled and whimpered. Catelina bent across him and rested a hand on his belly. “I hope you're not too shocked by what we've proposed,” she went on. “I know it does all sound so very dreadful, but…but I think it's the only way to save my lady so—please—forgive us.”