Stufa glanced at me, and then away again.
‘Those boxes of yours,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen them. They remind me of nativities.’
I had never thought of my plague pieces as nativities. It was a troubling interpretation, subversive even; in Stufa’s eyes, I had replaced the divine with the human, birth with death. Turning to the window, I was relieved to see that we were approaching the palace.
‘I find them gratuitous. Histrionic.’ Stufa paused. ‘It’s not art at all, really, is it? It’s showmanship.’
I opened the carriage door and stepped out.
‘Thank you for the lift,’ I said.
On entering the Grand Duke’s apartment, his major-domo, Vespasiano Schwarz, told me His Highness was bathing, and that I should go straight in. In the bathroom doorway I hesitated. The Grand Duke’s voice emerged supernaturally from the swirling clouds of steam.
‘Zummo? Is that you?’ Once he had apologized for the lateness of the hour, he asked me how the commission was going.
‘Rather slowly, I’m afraid,’ I said.
The Grand Duke nodded, as if this was the answer he had expected. ‘I have been thinking about my wife. And love — I have been thinking about that too.’ Through the steam I saw his eyebrows lift; though the words were his own, they seemed to have caught him unawares.
He began to talk about the day he first set eyes on Marguerite-Louise. It had been his intention to meet her when she landed at Livorno. He had wanted to show his support for her, he said, as she entered unknown territory. Not just Tuscany, he meant, but wedlock. He had been recovering from measles, though, and his mother thought it wiser if he waited at the Villa Ambrogiana, near Empoli. Things went wrong from the outset. He sprained an ankle as he left the palace. One of his dogs was sick in his carriage. Then it began to rain. Not knowing what to do with himself when he arrived at the villa, he ate lunch twice. Instant stomach pains. He took to his bed, where his dreams were mundane, exquisite tortures of his own devising, a catalogue of missed appointments and lost possessions. He woke in a cold sweat, convinced his bride-to-be was pacing up and down in an adjoining room. Not so. She had been delayed on the coast. Some irregularity in the health papers of certain of her entourage. He threw on the fashionable clothes he had ordered from Paris in the hope that he might impress her. A wide-brimmed beaver hat with flowing plumes and ribbons. High-heeled dancing shoes.
‘Such a fool! But I was only nineteen …’
Marguerite-Louise was even younger — fifteen and a half — and what he didn’t know was that she was already in love with someone else — her cousin, Charles. When Charles heard that she was to be married, he travelled to Marseilles, but he didn’t have the power to challenge, let alone overturn, the king’s decision. They must have cursed their fate. They must have kissed. They must have wept. And then she sailed out of his life, on a boat carpeted in velvet, a boat that had its own private garden of violets. How those sweet-smelling flowers must have turned her stomach! And the Tyrrhenian sea, which stayed calm until the last day of the voyage, as if to speed her passage to the dreaded Livorno, must also, paradoxically, have sickened her.
‘And I was waiting in my dancing shoes,’ the Grand Duke said, ‘knowing nothing of all this. Later, she told me, of course — in no uncertain terms.’
I murmured something about cruelty.
‘Zummo, you have no idea,’ he said. ‘She took one look at me and turned away. I don’t know what she said to the people with her — my French was never very good, not a patch on my English — but I saw her whole face shrivel, as if she had just swallowed a mouthful of vinegar. I was so apprehensive, so hurt, that I couldn’t kiss her. I didn’t even take her hand. Everyone was disappointed, though they tried their best not to show it. Imagine: two noble families, a prince and a princess, a fairy-tale wedding — all a sham …
‘We rode to Florence in the same carriage. She sat on one side, staring out of her window. I sat on the other, staring out of mine. Only once did she pay any attention to me. Looking me up and down, she asked me where on earth I’d got my clothes. I muttered the name of a haberdashery in Paris. I thought so, she said, and turned her back on me again. The strange thing was, I’d already fallen in love with her by then, and that made what was happening all the more excruciating.’
Servants filed past me with jugs of hot water and tipped them into the bath. The steam thickened.
‘The festivities began a few days later,’ the Grand Duke went on. ‘There had been nothing like it in Florence for at least a century. On our wedding day she travelled to Santa Croce in a coach drawn by eight white mules. White mules! Heaven knows where we found them. Her embroidered silver gown was overlaid with diamonds and strings of pearls, and a gold cloth was suspended above her head to shield her from the sun. In the church twelve choirs sang for us, but she couldn’t even raise a smile. I don’t think she smiled once all day. Then it got worse.’
‘Worse?’
He nodded gloomily. ‘I was so undermined by her hostile attitude but at the same time so in awe of her that I often couldn’t bring myself to sleep with her. Beauty can be terrifying, don’t you think?’
‘Sometimes it leaves you powerless.’
‘Exactly. And even if I did manage to sleep with her, I would return to my bed as soon as it was over. I was so upset by the whole thing. Sick with nerves. Redi advised me to limit the number of my visits to her bedchamber, but there was such pressure on me to produce an heir.’ He let out a short, bitter laugh. ‘I spent so little time with her that people began to suspect I was homosexual. Me!’ The steam thinned, and I noted the look of horror on his face, his eyes bulging, his mouth agape. ‘Me,’ he said again, ‘when it is I who have decreed that sodomites should be decapitated.’
Ah, I said to myself, but that was later.
‘The more reticent I was,’ he went on, ‘the more antagonistic she became. She would insult me, right in front of her servants. They thought it was amusing. They were all French, of course. They used to help her move from one bedchamber to another, so I wouldn’t be able to find her. Sometimes I would walk the corridors for hours — in my nightshirt! It’s a wonder I didn’t catch my death.’ He sighed, then reached for a glass and drank. ‘You know what her servants did? They set traps so she would know when I was coming. Bells on door handles, chamber pots in the middle of corridors. That sort of thing. For a while she had a dog. Some fancy French breed. Infuriating creature. It would start yapping whenever it heard my footsteps or my voice. Once, her servants rigged up a trip-wire outside her bedchamber and I fell and almost broke my collarbone …’
‘Forgive me, Your Highness,’ I said, ‘but it’s a miracle she got pregnant at all.’
‘There were nights when she relented. I never understood what prompted her sudden changes of heart, and I could never ask. If I raised the subject, she would tell me not to be so vulgar, so distasteful — what was I, a peasant? — and that would lead to an impassioned diatribe about Florence, what a backwater it was, and how her life had become a purgatory, if not a hell, and she would finish off with a sarcastic, disparaging reference to Dante, just to show how well-educated and civilized she was.’
‘And you still loved her …’
He lay back in his bath and stared at the ceiling for so long that I didn’t think he was going to answer. ‘You should have seen her, Zummo,’ he said at last. ‘She was exquisite, even when she was angry. Especially when she was angry. Dark eyes, auburn hair. Wonderfully delicate features. And she could be so charming, if it suited her. But always, in the end, this look of mingled boredom and disgust would appear on her face, and then the fighting would begin again, and she would start to scream at me: our marriage was a travesty, she was no better than a concubine, and all our children were bastards. Her screaming could be heard throughout the palace, and I would have to send her to Lappeggi or Poggio a Caiano, along with her entire, enormous retinue of servants.’ He peered at me across his chest. ‘I became the symbol of everything she hated.’