The Marriage Portrait(6)
The cry again! It was not so much a roar, no, which is what Lucrezia had expected: this had a yearning, desperate rasp to it. The sound, Lucrezia thought, of a creature captured against its will, a creature whose desires have all been disregarded.
Lucrezia disentangled herself from the sheets and the folds of Maria’s nightdress, and slipped from the bed. For all her clumsiness in dancing class—for which she was regularly castigated by her teacher—she was always able to glide noiselessly through the nursery, her feet finding the right tiles, never the ones that clinked or wobbled. She tiptoed past the bed where her brothers lay heaped together in a tangle of limbs, past the narrow truckle where the baby, Pietro, was held firm in the arms of his balia. Near the door slept two other nurses but Lucrezia stepped over them and eased back the two bolts on the door.
Slipping out, she moved along the corridor, pausing to check that Sofia, the oldest nurse, was snoring with her usual regularity, then passed a small hand along a panel in the wall. She missed the brass catch the first time, but found it the second. The panel swung inwards and Lucrezia disappeared from the corridor, through a narrow opening, no bigger than herself.
The palazzo was riddled with numerous hidden passages: Lucrezia sometimes pictured it, this enormous, thick-walled building, as an apple eaten through by worms. She had heard it said—by Sofia, who had no inkling that Lucrezia could understand a great deal of the Neapolitan dialect the three nurses spoke among themselves—that these passageways were there for the Duke and his family to escape, if the palace were attacked. Lucrezia had wanted to ask, attacked by whom, but had the sense not to: it was useful to understand what the nurses said to each other, over the children’s heads, and this was not a skill she should divulge.
This particular passage was a shortcut to the larger courtyard, via a winding, slippery staircase of uneven steps. Lucrezia was not afraid; she was not. But she held her breath, the hem of her shift bunched in one hand, so she did not trip. Who knows how long it would be before she was found, if she were to fall and injure herself here, closeted behind the walls? How would they hear her call?
The steps curved around and around on themselves, like a coiled rope. The air was stagnant and moist, as if a living entity had been trapped there for a long time. She forced herself to keep her chin lifted, her feet moving; she had, she told herself, faced worse. And the thought of the beast spurred her on. She would see that tigress—she must.
Just as the darkness and the smell were becoming too much, a thin slice of light told her she had reached her destination. She groped for the door handle—a small, cold latch—pressed it and there she was, on the covered stairway, with slanted windows overlooking the courtyard. There were no guards or servants to be seen at this velvet-black time of night; Lucrezia checked and checked again. Then she ventured out.
From below, she could hear the nervous whinnying of the mules, the skittering of their hoofs, and then a furious rumble, like distant thunder.
Placing her hands on the marble sill, she peered over.
The courtyard was a dim vault below her, illuminated only by torches that flared from sconces on the pillars. There were the mules, six of them, lined up in harness. Around them milled a group of her father’s men, dressed in their red-and-gold livery. They were circling the cart, each holding a sharpened stick, and they were calling to each other. Get back, they were saying, not so close, steady now, mind your hand there, hold the bridle, easy.
One reached up and took a torch from its sconce; he swung it at the cart, making a fiery arc through the darkness. And there came an answering hiss, the creature responding to the flames. The men laughed. The torch was swung again and Lucrezia heard once more the creature’s furious fear.
And then Lucrezia, hands gripping the windowsill, saw it: a lithe, sinuous shape, moving from one side of the cage to the other. The tigress didn’t so much pace as pour herself, as if her very essence was molten, simmering, like the ooze from a volcano. It was hard to distinguish the bars of the cage from the dark, repeating stripes on the creature’s fur. The animal was orange, burnished gold, fire made flesh; she was power and anger, she was vicious and exquisite; she carried on her body the barred marks of a prison, as if she had been branded for exactly this, as if captivity had been her destiny all along.
The mules were struggling in their harness, tossing their heads and rolling up their lips in terror. Even though they couldn’t see the tigress, so blinkered were their eyes, they could sense her, smell her; they knew she was there, and they knew they were in a confined space with her. They knew that, if not for the wooden cage, she would slay everyone and everything in this courtyard: mule and man.
All at once, the mules jerked forwards and the cart and cage were swallowed by an arch, like a mouth accepting food. Lucrezia was left staring down into an empty courtyard, the braziers still flickering and flaring, as if nothing significant had happened there.
* * *
The palazzo of Lucrezia’s father was a changeable building, unstable as a weathervane. Sometimes it felt to her like the safest place in the world, a stone keep with a high garrison perimeter to enclose the Grand Duke’s children like a cabinet for glass figurines; at others it felt as oppressive as a prison.
It occupied a corner of the largest piazza in Florence, its back to the river, sides soaring above the citizens like great cragged cliffs. Windows were high and narrow so that no one could ever see in. A square tower rose from its roof, with gigantic bells that tolled on the hour, giving time to the whole city. Battlements, bristling with crenellations, ran around each side of it like a brim on a hat; only rarely were the children allowed up there. Instead, they went every day with Sofia to the covered walkway to take the air. Their mamma, she would tell them, believed that children thrived with exercise, so they were encouraged to race each other there, to run from one open airy vent to the next, watching the comings and goings in the piazza far beneath their feet.