His Last Duchess Read Online Free Page A

head towards the door. Lucrezia began to move with him, but saw as she did so that the part-eaten pomegranate still sat on the long table where she had dropped it. She picked it up, smiled at Catelina and threw her the fruit. Then she and Giovanni slipped out through the narrow kitchen door. Catelina caught the pomegranate one-handed and waved it at Lucrezia in shy farewell.
    ***
    â€œOh, for heaven’s sake !” Giulietta stared in disbelief. “Not much more than half an hour ! Can you not stay clean and tidy for more than five minutes ? What is wrong with you?” She paused, her pulse thudding uncomfortably in her ears. “Come here!”
    Lucrezia began to cross the room.
    â€œAnd you can give me that for a start!” Giulietta added crossly, snatching the sodden lump of silk from Lucrezia’s hand. She flapped it out and held it up, clicking her tongue.
    â€œI’m sorry, Giulietta, I truly am, but if you had seen—”
    Giulietta raised her hands, palms forward, to silence her. “Don’t tell me! Don’t speak! I don’t want to hear it. Is it any wonder I am not coming with you to Ferrara? Much more of this and you really will be the death of me.”
    She unfastened the strings of the clean sleeve and pulled it from Lucrezia’s arm with one sharp tug. “You can find another pair for yourself, my girl. I am not getting down on my knees a third time for you today. Any new waiting-woman you choose to come to Ferrara with you had better be warned that she should expect to lead a very difficult life.”
    Lucrezia said nothing, but Giulietta watched her go to the smaller of the two chests, and kneel in front of it. Lifting the lid, she rummaged inside, then sat back on her heels, a pair of ember-orange sleeves in one hand. Wordlessly, she handed them to her nurse.
    ***
    Lucrezia clicked a handful of walnuts in her pocket, rolling them over each other between her fingers. “I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had slapped me, Vanni—she was so angry.”
    Giovanni shrugged. “She simply wouldn’t listen to a word I had to say—I tried to explain that I—”
    â€œDo you want an apricot?” Giovanni said. “My pockets are too full.”
    Irritation tightened like a band around Lucrezia’s head. After her scolding from her nurse, she badly wanted to pour out her frustration at the injustice of Giulietta’s anger; she wanted Giovanni to champion her, to agree that what she had done this afternoon had been entirely selfless, and not the “rash action of a thoughtless baby,” as Giulietta had so vehemently assured her it was. The distress she had felt at the thought of losing her nurse was now coupled with relief that she would be escaping the old woman’s relentless iron grip for the first time in her life.
    She took the apricot Giovanni held out, but, rather than eat it, she put it into her pocket.
    The two cousins stood in the shadows of a corridor, peering around the open door of a long, wooden-ceilinged hall, down the middle of which stood a great pathway of a table. Its polished surface was now hidden by draped and layered linen, plates and glasses, flowers, fruit, candles and ribbons—enough for at least thirty diners.
    At the far end of the room, her mother and father were giving final orders to the servants who would be welcoming in the party from Ferrara. She imagined the bustling arrival of the duke and his retinue, and her irritation faded.
    â€œAunt Eleanora looks beautiful,” Giovanni said. Lucrezia’s mother was dressed in deep blue damask; the sleeves, slashed many times, showed little puffs of gold, and, as she raised an arm to point across to one of the windows, a glitter of tiny pearls caught the light from the torches blazing in their brackets on the walls. Even from her vantage-point in the corridor, Lucrezia could hear the soft whisper of the blue silk skirts as Eleanora