Light on Lucrezia - By Plaidy, Jean Page 0,94

to stop them, but when they were over she offered a few modest and well-chosen words as though she had not been ousted from her rightful place.

The ambassadors thought her meek and nervous, but there were some among them who believed that she considered the open animosity of her sister-in-law too foolish for her attention.

These too were Lucrezia’s thoughts; she was also reminding herself that Isabella had a home in Mantua. She could not desert that forever. And it was a happy day when Isabella and her retinue set out for Mantua. Lucrezia could not hide her pleasure.

But, as she went on her way, Isabella was smiling, well satisfied; she knew her parsimonious father would soon deprive Lucrezia of her Spanish attendants, and that Lucrezia’s patience was going to be strained to the limit by life in Ferrara.

VI

IN THE LITTLE ROOMS OF THE BALCONY

When the guests had departed Lucrezia relinquished the apartments in which she had lived in state and prepared to settle in the “little rooms of the balcony” (gli camerini del poggiolo) which had been reserved for her own special use.

She examined them in the company of Angela and Nicola, and all three were delighted with the cozy intimacy of the place. Here, Lucrezia realized, she could shut herself away from the main castle, receive her friends and make of the rooms a little corner of Rome in Ferrara.

Angela bounced on the bed to test it and as she did so there came the sound of tearing material. She saw that the bed covering had split; she touched it and tore it still further.

“It is perished,” she said. “It must be hundreds of years old.” She looked at her hands black with dirt; the grime of years was on them.

Lucrezia pulled back the coverlet. The sheets, she found, when she touched them, might have been made of paper.

“It is as though they made my bed a hundred years ago and it has been waiting for me all this time!”

Nicola had shaken the velvet hangings and a cloud of dust emerged to hang in the air.

“They are in tatters,” she cried.

In despair Lucrezia sat down on a stool and the brocade on its seat split as she did so.

“So these are the little rooms which Duke Ercole so magnanimously gives me,” she said.

“It is characteristic of your welcome,” cried Angela. “Lavish enough on the surface, full of enmity beneath. If I were you, cousin, I would go at once to your miserly father-in-law and demand to know what he means by giving you such miserable quarters in his castle.”

Lucrezia shook her head. “I doubt that would do me any good.”

“I should write at once to the Holy Father,” suggested Nicola. “He will send orders that you be decently housed.”

“I wish to live in peace,” explained Lucrezia. “If I complain of this it will only make trouble. No. We will strip off these ancient furnishings and put new ones in their place. We’ll have it gay and brilliant. We’ll have upholstery in morello and gold, and until it is finished I shall go back to the apartments I have occupied so far.”

“So you will do it at your own expense?” murmured Nicola.

“My dear Nicola, how else could I get what I want in Ferrara?”

Angela took Lucrezia’s hand and kissed it. “You look like an angel,” she said, “and verily I believe you must be one. Your husband spends his days and half his nights with other women; yet you greet him with a smile when he visits you. Your father-in-law insults you by offering you the dust and grime of ages, and you smile sweetly and say you will refurnish your apartments at your own expense. As for that demon, Isabella d’Este, your sister-in-law, she behaves to you like a fiend, and you behave—outwardly at least—as though you respect her. Nicola, what do you think of my cousin? Is she not an angel?”

“I think,” said Nicola, “that she is wise, and when you have to live on Earth it is doubtless better to be wise than an angel.”

“I trust I am wise,” said Lucrezia. “I have a strong feeling within me that I have need of wisdom.”

While she was making her plans for the little rooms of the balcony she received the first blow.

Duke Ercole visited her.

He said: “I see you have not yet occupied the rooms of the balcony which I allotted to you.”

“They are in sore need of refurnishing,” she told him. “When that is done I am