I pray you, adjust your ideas and consider it so, for it is all you will get.”
“I cannot accept it,” said Lucrezia. “It would be penury.”
“I doubt it not, if there must be so many gowns, so much costly scent. You have many of these luxuries. Be more careful with them, and they will last you a very long time.”
Lucrezia’s expression was blank. She said: “I am and my household cannot live on 8,000 ducats a year.”
“How vulgar is this talk of money,” sighed the Duke. “Now that you belong to our noble family you should learn that we speak only of such matters with discretion.”
“I have heard you speak of them with fervor many times,” retorted Lucrezia.
The Duke looked pained. “Then I beg of you, let us drop the subject.”
“That,” said Lucrezia, “I cannot do until you agree to give me at least 12,000 ducats a year. It is the least I can live on.”
The Duke rose abruptly and left her. He was murmuring something about upstart families who married into the aristocracy.
It was an open break.
Lucrezia very soon became certain that she was pregnant. She called her women to her and imparted the news.
They were delighted.
“Now,” said Angela, “you will be in a position to bargain with the mean old Duke. He will surely not deny the income she deserves to the mother of his grandchild!”
“I doubt it,” cried Adriana. “He is a miser, that man; and he is even now wondering how he can best rid the court of us.”
“I’d die rather than leave,” declared Angela, thinking of handsome Giulio, who was her lover.
“I’ll not let you go,” declared Lucrezia. “Moreover I shall not accept a ducat less than 12,000.”
Alfonso was delighted when he heard the news. He strutted about the castle declaring that he would have been very surprised if she had remained barren longer.
His habits changed slightly; having achieved his object he no longer came so regularly to her by night.
The old Duke was, as had been anticipated, delighted with this early proof of Lucrezia’s ability to bear sons for Ferrara, and he relented a little. “I think,” he said, “that we might allow you an income of 10,000 ducats.”
But Lucrezia was unimpressed. She told him firmly that she could not possibly live on less than 12,000 and she considered even that beggarly.
The Duke stumped away in anger, reiterating that this preoccupation with money was downright vulgar.
One would need to be insensitive, thought Lucrezia, to endure meekly this new state of affairs in the Este palace. The continual haggling with the old Duke over money was indeed undignified; it was being made perfectly clear to her that she had been accepted into the family merely because her wealthy father was willing to buy her position; Alfonso, now that she was pregnant, showed clearly that he preferred his low-bred mistress. There was continual bickering between her intimate attendants and the Ferrarese, and the little rooms of the balcony became like a separate court.
Lucrezia then decided that she would do what she had done once before when she had found her position intolerable.
It was Easter week and she decided to find refuge in the quiet of convent life; there she could be at peace; she could meditate on her position; she could look at her life clearly and make up her mind how she should act.
So, a few weeks after her wedding, she entered the Convent of the Poor Clares, and in the quiet cell allotted to her and among the gentle nuns she considered her problems.
It was not possible for the wife of the heir of Ferrara to remain shut away, and Lucrezia’s spell of peaceful contemplation with the Poor Clares was brief.
Soon she was back in the rooms of the balcony to find that nothing had been changed by her absence. There were still the same conflicts between her attendants and the Ferrarese; her husband’s visits remained spasmodic and he showed quite clearly that he had no intention of trying to smooth out matters between herself and his father; and that his duty, which was to get her with child, had been expeditiously performed.
The Duke visited her in his somewhat ceremonious fashion but he did not come to discuss her income. He had, he considered, been quite magnanimous when he offered 10,000 ducats a year; he implied that, if he had taken a great deal from her father, it was because Este dignity was impaired by accepting a Borgia into its intimate family circle, and