The Marriage Portrait(7)

From the furthest corner of the walkway, it was possible to get a view of the statue that stood beside the palazzo door, a white figure who looked off to the side, as if avoiding the eye of all before him, a slingshot over his shoulder. Lucrezia might catch a glimpse of her parents, stepping around the base of the statue towards their covered carriage, her mother swathed in furs, if it was winter, or coloured silks in summer. Yellow, red, the purple of grapes were the hues of her gowns. If she saw the carriage draw up, Lucrezia leant as far over the parapet as she dared, trying to catch the sound of her parents’ footsteps: the light tread of her mother, the decisive stride of her father, the plume in his hat dipping and bowing to the rhythm of his walk.

Sofia, who claimed she had been all over the palazzo, told them that the walls were as thick as three men laid head to toe. There was a whole room just for weapons, she said, with swords and armour lined up along the walls, and another full of books. Book after book, she told them, as she rubbed their faces with a washcloth or buttoned their smocks, filling shelves that stretched far above her head. It would, the nurse said, take a whole lifetime to read them all, maybe more. Another salon was decorated with maps of every place in the world and of all the stars in the sky. There was a vault lined with iron, with a many-bolted door, where their mamma’s jewels were kept, all those that had come with her from the Spanish court and all the ones their papa had given her, although the nurse had never seen this with her own eyes: no one had, for the only hand that unlocked it was their papa’s. And there was a great long room as large as a piazza, its ceiling covered with decorations. Of what? Lucrezia would ask, ducking away from the washcloth to look at the nurse, to ascertain if she was telling the truth, if she had indeed seen these frescos. Oh, angels and cherubs and great warriors and battles, the nurse said, shoving Lucrezia’s head back into place, that kind of thing.

If Lucrezia had trouble sleeping—and she often did—she would think about these rooms, stacked like the blocks of the towers her little brothers liked to construct. The weapons room, the map room, the painted room, the jewels room. Her sister Isabella said she would most like to see the jewels; Maria said she would like to see the gilded cherubs on the ceiling. Francesco, who would one day be duke, said, loftily, that he had in fact seen all these rooms. Several times. Giovanni, born within a year of Isabella, rolled his eyes, which in turn made Francesco kick him in the shins.

Nobody asked which room Lucrezia would like to see, and she didn’t say. But, if questioned, she would have said the Sala dei Leoni: the room of the lions. It was said that their father kept a menagerie in a specially reinforced room somewhere in the basement. He liked to display the lions, in particular, to honoured guests and sometimes to pit them against other animals, for sport: bears, boars, once a gorilla. A servant who brought up their food from the kitchens told them, in a whisper, that these lions loved the Duke so much they would permit him to enter their enclosure. In he would go, a spike with meat impaled upon it in one hand and a whip in the other. The children had never seen inside the Sala dei Leoni—although Francesco insisted he had—but if the wind blew in a certain direction, they could hear the muffled yowls of the animals. On hot days, a very specific smell would waft up to the walkway, especially at the back of the palazzo, which looked out over the via dei Leoni—a heavy, overpowering scent of ordure and sweat. It made Maria and Isabella complain and wrap scarves about their faces but Lucrezia hung about in the walkway above the street, hoping against hope that she might catch a glimpse of a flicking tail or a dark shaggy mane.



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When Lucrezia woke on the morning after the tigress arrived, it was to a bedroom so silent she thought for a moment that her ears must be stopped with wax. Her face was pressed deeply into the pillow, and when she raised her head, she found herself stretched out in the middle of the bed, alone. No sisters to push her to one side. And no brothers, either, in the bed across the room. No babies on the truckle.

Stunned by the peace, she took in the room: the lime-washed walls, the folded bedcoverings, the stone steps up to the window seat, the jug of water standing on a shelf.

From the open doorway, she could hear the sounds of her siblings at breakfast: the shrieks and cries of the three youngest, the clatter of spoon and plate.

Lucrezia moved her arms and legs through the cool, empty sheets, like a swimmer. For a moment, she was tempted to turn back into the pillow, to see if sleep would overcome her once more, but then she recalled an image of a rolling, loose-jointed shoulder, imprinted with black marks. A clear resolve formed in her head: she had to see that animal up close. She must. There was no other option for her. She wanted to stand before it, to see the way the black of the stripes merged with the orange of the fur. Could she sneak down to the Sala dei Leoni? There was no passage leading there, that she knew of, and someone was bound to apprehend her if she went via the walkways and corridors. How, how, how could she manage it?

Invigorated by this thought, she slid from the bed. The tiles seemed to arch their cold, gritty surfaces into the undersides of her feet. She dressed hastily, pulling her woollen sottana over her shift, pushing her feet into her shoes. The air in the room was frigid and still; moving across it felt, to Lucrezia, like wading through an icy lake.

At the threshold to the other room, with possible means to see the tigress flickering through her head, she paused. Along one side of the table were seated her older sisters and brothers—four children with identical red-brown hair, in neatly descending height. They were exactly a year apart in age: Maria was twelve, Francesco eleven, Isabella ten, Giovanni nine. Each followed the other like steps in a staircase. This morning, they were leaning close, their heads almost touching, as they whispered over their bread and milk.