His Last Duchess (30 page)

“Mutton tallow,” Giorgio said. “It was all I could find in the kitchens. I hope there'll be enough.”

Giovanni crossed to the studio. “Are there any spare candles, Giulietta?”

Wordlessly, she opened a long box on a window-ledge and brought out two new, yellow beeswax tapers. Giovanni took them from her and returned to his task. Breaking the largest into three pieces, and sliding them off the wick, he handed the fragments to Giorgio, who placed them gently up against Chiara's yellow-white face. The second candle, also broken into fragments, Giovanni laid in the crook of Chiara's other arm, which he had positioned to lie across the pillow. Giorgio took the greasy piece of sacking, shook the remaining crumbs of tallow over the bed and flattened the cloth across Chiara's body. Then, crossing the room, he opened one of the windows wide. The breeze lifted the bed-hangings, which billowed softly in towards the bed.

They stood back and stared at what they had arranged. Turning to Giorgio, Giovanni saw that he was shaking.

“Oh, God,” Giorgio said, “what are we doing? We'll all go to hell…”

Giovanni said nothing. Giulietta had to leave the studio, he thought. Fire is unpredictable. He went back to her and took her hand. “Giulietta, you must come out of here. It's time to make sure Crezzi is safe from that bastard for good.”

Shivering, Giulietta followed him back into the bedchamber, looking open-mouthed at the figure sprawled on the wide bed, the little lumps of white tallow tucked around her face and body. “Oh, dear God, Giovanni…”

“Just think, Giulietta,” Giovanni said, to convince himself as much as the old lady, “she'll have more than a Christian burial in the end. This little homeless waif, instead of ending her days in lime-spattered sacking, dumped into an anonymous mass grave, will leave this world with all the pomp of a sumptuous state funeral.” He paused, and then added, “The state funeral that would have been Crezzi's.”

Giulietta smothered a sob.

“Giorgio…” Giovanni said.

Giorgio picked up the candlestick from the table next to the bed and placed it nearer to where the dark bed hanging was moving in the draught from the open window. Then he put his fingers under the base of the candlestick and lifted, as though the candle was being tipped by a billowing fold of the curtain.

At that moment Giovanni saw that the duke had unwittingly left them the finishing touch to their set piece: an almost empty wine bottle and two silver cups.
Il
Duca
had provided them with a perfect excuse for why their “duchess” had failed to wake when the wind had knocked her candle into her bedding.

The candlestick tipped sideways. The candle rolled from it and fell onto the pillow; the flame touched one of the lumps of tallow that lay around Chiara's head. For a moment, flame licked from lump to lump, around the upper edge of her head and it seemed to their horrified eyes as though a bright halo had just glowed. Then suddenly, the tallow was blazing and Giulietta turned her head away with a whimper. Giorgio put his hands over his mouth and Giovanni felt as though he were suffocating.

Chiara's hair caught then and burned with a fizzling flare, just as a flicker of flame ran along the length of her outstretched arm, across the pillow and over to one of the bed-hangings, which ignited almost immediately. As the material scorched, flamed and began to drop in blackened fragments down onto the already burning rushes on the floor, Giovanni looked back at the supine figure and saw that, as Catelina had imagined, the flames were now licking around the thin face, already rendering it quite unrecognizable.

It was almost time to leave, he thought, and for Giulietta to raise the alarm, as though she had just discovered this horrible scene—too late to save the person they wanted all to believe to be Lucrezia.

The room was hellish as Giovanni turned at the doorway. The bed-hangings were ablaze and flames were now cradling Chiara's body. Her face and hands had blackened and her fingers had contracted, as though in supplication.

Even as Alfonso crossed the central courtyard of the Castello, he heard a howling scream from somewhere inside the castle, begging for assistance. His heart raced, and for an instant he stood torn, his thoughts fragmenting, unable to leave, but unwilling to return to face whatever was happening within.

Then Francesca was beside him. “Is it over?” she said.

Alfonso found that he could not answer, but he nodded once.

Francesca stood in front of him. Her mouth should have been irresistible, he thought. Its ripeness was unchanged, and its latent invitation obvious. But an unprecedented weight and weariness were seeping through him and, with a shock, Alfonso found himself for the first time contemplating his whore without stiffening. The fear-sodden torpidity that had suffused him as he had gazed at the body of the duchess still hung around him like a wet cloak. He could see, though, that Francesca sought a kiss and he bent his head to hers, but he found with distress that he had no sensation in his lips. He could not feel his mouth upon hers at all.

“Don't go back in, Alfonso,” Francesca said. “It is better if you are not seen until tomorrow. Come with me.” Taking his hand in hers, she led him away from the Castello and the unfolding catastrophe.

***

It is as well, Francesca thought, as they walked, that a whore's training allows her to look with believable desire upon someone whose very proximity makes her want to vomit. To look up into Alfonso's eyes that night and offer to kiss him, knowing what he had intended to do, knowing what he would have done had they not prevented it, knowing what he believed himself to have achieved…it had been, she thought with a shudder, very nearly beyond her.

When they arrived at the
villetta
, after a silent walk through the streets of Ferrara, Alfonso seated himself in the elmwood chair under the window by the bed. Francesca lit the fire and opened one of the many bottles of wine. Pouring a generous glassful, she handed it to him and he took it from her without a word. He seemed hardly aware of her presence, and she saw, when she looked closely at him, that what she had at first taken to be the effect of the flickering firelight, was in fact a slow tremor right through his body.

“Come to bed, Alfonso,” she said. She had told them she would hold him here for the night, and she intended to keep her word.

He looked up at her with blank eyes, as though uncertain what he should do next. Francesca took his coat from him, then unfastened doublet, breeches, boots and hose. He submitted to her ministrations without response. For the first time since she had known him, he made no attempt to touch her. She had to undress herself.

Even given her new antipathy to her former lover, Francesca was shocked, in the event, to see the disintegration in Alfonso. After caressing him and attempting to engage his attention for some moments, she saw him at last focus upon her face. He seemed to register her presence, and even attempted to kiss her, but then, as his hand closed upon her breast, he stopped, shivering and motionless. He seemed utterly consumed by what appeared to be panic, Francesca thought, like a child who suddenly realises that, after running and playing thoughtlessly in an unfamiliar place, he is entirely lost; and with a soft noise as of despair, he clung to her. Though she could hardly bear to offer him any semblance of comfort, she felt, as she put unwilling arms around his shaking shoulders, a kind of bitter satisfaction in the contemplation of this unprecedented, helpless distress.

***

They stayed in the little house throughout the following morning. Alfonso was silent and tense, and sat before the fire, clasping a glass of wine in both hands and staring into the flames.

At around noon, he professed himself tired, and Francesca suggested that he sleep. A distracted nod was the only sign he gave that he agreed with her suggestion, and, putting down the now empty glass, he crossed the room, lay on the bed and closed his eyes. He slept almost immediately.

Francesca waited and watched him for a while, and then, as soon as she was certain he was truly unaware of her presence, she covered him with a blanket, collected her belongings and left the house.

She walked quickly, wanting to get back to the twins and take them away from Ferrara as soon as possible. Before Alfonso woke and came after her. She was certain that her life—and theirs—would now be vulnerable, were he ever to learn of her duplicity. She had little doubt of his reaction should he ever discover the truth of her visit to Alessandro's workshop with Jacomo: how they had waited while the apothecary created a means of saving the life of the duchess. She and Jacomo had talked of an antidote—something they could administer once she had removed Alfonso from the scene—but Alessandro's substitute had been better, Francesca thought now. Safer.

She would go to Napoli, she thought, as she crossed a bustling piazza. She would take the girls to Napoli. That would be far enough away from Ferrara. They would set out that afternoon.

***

Alfonso woke with a start as a frantic knocking shook the door of the
villetta
. He reached for Francesca but, to his surprise, she was not there. His heart pounding, he lay still. The knocking came again, louder now. He pulled on shirt and breeches and went to open the door.

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.