The Marriage Portrait(9)
Lucrezia was puzzled by this. She cast a look at the wet-nurse, who was now buttoning her smock, Pietro draped over her shoulder. Would her teeth fall out? Did it happen all at once? Babies and teeth, milk and siblings. Had she and Maria, Francesco, Isabella and Giovanni all cost the balie a tooth or three?
Sofia bent to hoist Garzia on to her hip and Lucrezia watched as her next-in-line brother seized Sofia around the neck, babbling sounds to her.
“But,” Lucrezia began, “why is—?”
“Enough questions,” Sofia said. “Lessons now. Off you go.”
Lucrezia wandered into the schoolroom, where their antiquities tutor was unrolling maps and charts, talking on and on, pointing with a cane. Francesco was staring out of the window; Maria was bent studiously over her slate, inscribing what the tutor was saying about the Trojan war; next to her, Isabella was pulling faces at Giovanni whenever the tutor turned his back. Grimaces, Lucrezia observed, which Isabella supplemented with curled, claw-like fingers, and she realised with a faint dismay that she was still being mocked for her unwitting growl.
Lucrezia slid into her place at the back of the room, a small desk behind the larger one shared by Maria and Isabella. She had been attending lessons for only a few months, since she turned seven, the age her father deemed correct for education to begin.
The antiquities tutor, a young man with a pointed beard, stood before them, a hand outstretched, his mouth moving on and on, as he spoke. After this, Lucrezia knew, the music tutor would arrive, and they would be obliged to take out their instruments, and after that, the drawing tutor would take his place, and she would be assigned the dull task of inscribing the alphabet while the others had their drawing lesson. Lucrezia had asked if she could join this lesson—it was the one that interested her most, the transferring of the world on to flat paper, conducting what a person sees through the eye, the brain, into the fingers and then the chalk—but she was told she must wait until she reached the age of ten. The days ahead, and the months and the years, seemed to jostle before her, repetitive and utterly predictable.
Lucrezia was still turning over thoughts about the feeding of babies. And Sofia’s lost teeth. And the tigress. And her various longings—to see the beast, to be allowed to take part in the drawing lessons, to go once more to one of the country villas where she and her siblings were taught to ride and permitted to run about the gardens. Somehow, her mind unlatched itself from the tutor’s words and drifted sideways. Lucrezia was imagining that she was an infant again, milk-fed by a fang-free tigress, a gentle creature with silken fur and caressing paws, and this baby Lucrezia spent all her days in the lion house, tucked into the warm flank of the tigress, where no one ever came and no one ever looked for her—
A crack of the cane on a map jerked her away from this vision, forcing her to focus briefly on what the antiquities tutor was saying.
“And where was it that the Greek ships were becalmed, on their way to Troy?”
Francesco was blinking, Maria twisting her lips together, as if some disparaging thought was passing through her mind; she was resting her elbow on Isabella’s sleeve, and Isabella was whispering something in her ear.
Aulis, Lucrezia thought. She picked up her stylus and, on the back of the paper in front of her, drew the long line of a horizon, punctured by the masts of stationary ships; she made them tall, their sails furled, with ropes from their bows stretching to hidden anchors below the water. She then drew an altar, with people standing on its steps. And as she drew, she was recalling the lecture on perspective the art tutor had delivered to her siblings the previous week, when she was meant to be practising her letter forms. The theory was that the world had different layers and depths, like an ocean, and could be constructed from lines that converged and intersected. Lucrezia had been wanting to try this out.
“Isabella?” the tutor was saying, narrowing his eyes.
Isabella turned her head away from Maria. “Yes?”
“The place where the Greeks were becalmed, if you please.”
Aulis, Lucrezia thought once more, as she drew. On the pathway to the altar, she added a girl in a long robe, walking towards it, and she frowned as she tried to make the lines of the path draw closer together, as required by the laws of perspective, towards what the drawing tutor had called a vanishing point.
Isabella was giving a great show of considering the matter. “Does it perhaps begin with y?” she asked, putting her head prettily on one side and giving him her most winning smile.
“No,” said the tutor, unmoved. “Giovanni? Maria?”
They both shook their heads. The teacher sighed. “Aulis,” he said. “Remember? We went over this only last week. And how did Agamemnon, the great king, persuade the gods to give him a favourable wind?”
A pause. Isabella put a hand to her hair, tucking a stray strand behind her ear; Francesco twitched at his sleeve.
Sacrificed his daughter, Lucrezia knew. She added curtains to the altar, hanging as limply as the rigging of the ships. She would not draw Achilles, pretending to wait at the altar, she would not.
“What did Agamemnon do,” the tutor tried again, “to get a wind so that the Greek fleet could sail on to Troy?”
Slit his daughter’s throat, Lucrezia said to herself. She recalled every word of the story the tutor told them last week—it was the way her mind worked. Words pressed themselves into her memory, like a shoe sole into soft mud, which would dry and solidify, the shoe print preserved for ever. Sometimes she felt filled up, overstuffed with words, faces, names, voices, dialogues, her head throbbing with pain, and she would be set off-balance by the weight of what she carried, stumbling into tables and walls. Sofia would put her to bed, curtains drawn, and make her drink a tisana, and Lucrezia would sleep. When she woke her head would feel like a cupboard that had been tidied: still full but more orderly.