Light on Lucrezia - By Plaidy, Jean Page 0,115

Duchessa,” he cried. “But … you should not have come.”

“How could I do otherwise?” She took his burning hands and kissed them.

His eyes, wide with fever and passion, looked into hers.

She sat by his bed. “Now,” she said, “you must tell me exactly how you feel. I have brought herbs and ointments with me. I know how to make you well again.”

“Your presence is enough,” he told her.

“Pietro, Pietro, you must get well. How could I endure my life without you?”

“Take care, my beloved,” whispered Pietro. “There is plague in the city. It may be that I suffer from it. Oh, it was folly … folly for you to come here.”

“Folly,” she said, “to be with you?”

They held hands and thought of the dread plague from which he might be suffering and might impart to her. To pass together from this life in which they had loved with all purity and an emotion of the spirit, seemed a perfect ending to their perfect love.

But Lucrezia did not want to die. She wanted both of them to live, so she refused to consider this ending and busied herself with the remedies she had brought.

His eyes followed her as she moved about his apartment. He was sick—he believed himself to be dying—and he knew that he loved her with a love which was both spiritual and physical. Had he been less weak there would have been an end to their talk of Platonic emotion. His sickness was like a flaming sword which separated them from passion. He could only rejoice in it because it had brought her to his side, while he deplored it; and as he looked into her face he knew that she shared his thoughts and emotions.

“It will be known that you have been here,” he said.

“I care not.”

“We are spied on night and day.”

“What matters it? There is nothing to discover. We have never been what would be called lovers.”

They looked at each other longingly; then Pietro went on: “I shall never know the great joy now. Oh, Duchessa, Lucrezia, my love, I feel our love will remain forever unfulfilled.”

She was startled, and suddenly cried out in an access of passionate grief: “You must not die, Pietro. You shall not die.”

It was a promise. Pietro knew it, and a calmness seemed to settle upon him then; it was as though he were determined to throw off his fever, determined to live that he might enjoy that which so far had been denied him.

Pietro’s recovery was rapid.

Within a few weeks he was ready to leave Ferrara, and Strozzi was at hand to offer his villa at Ostellato for the convalescence.

Before he left, Lucrezia had decided that she too would leave Ferrara for a short rest in the quiet of the country. Alfonso was once more visiting fortifications; Ippolito had his duties at court; and Giulio was the only member of the family who was free to accompany her. This he did with the utmost pleasure, since Angela was of the party.

So Lucrezia set out for the villa of Medelana, which was close to Strozzi’s at Ostellato; thus during that convalescence the lovers could frequently enjoy each other’s companionship.

There, in the scented gardens or under the cool shade of trees, they could be together undisturbed. Lucrezia would set out for the Strozzi villa with Angela and Giulio in attendance; but when they arrived and Pietro came out to meet them, Guilio and Angela would wander off and leave Pietro and Lucrezia together.

Thus in those golden days of August they mingled the spiritual with the physical, and Lucrezia believed that she had come at last to perfect happiness.

During those warm days in the gardens at Ostellato she lived solely in the present, taking each day as it came, refusing to look beyond it, because she dared not.

She would treasure, as long as she lived, the scents of the flowers, the softness of the grass at Ostellato; she would remember the words he had written for her, the words he spoke to her.

“If I died now,” he told her, “if so great a desire, so great a love were ended, the world would be emptied of love.”

She believed him; she assured him that the love he felt for her was no greater than that she felt for him. Each was conscious that there was so much to be lived through in a short time.

And so passed the happy days of Pietro’s convalescence and Lucrezia’s escape from Ferrara.

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