His Last Duchess by Gabrielle Kimm Read Free Book Online

up.
    Her husband’s normally cheerful face, now creased with incomprehension, peered through the hangings after her. “What in heaven’s name do you mean?”
    â€œShe’s too young.” A heavy stress on each of the three syllables.
    Cosimo was angry now. He climbed out of bed. “Nonsense! Sixteen is a perfectly acceptable age to—”
    â€œI don’t care about acceptability! Quite apart from the fact that I’ve told you a dozen times or more that the average age for a bride—even in Firenze— is now seventeen or eighteen, I’m not talking about acceptability or averages! I’m talking about our daughter.”
    â€œAnd so am I! What else is this about?”
    â€œWhat else? I’ll tell you what else it’s about! It’s about your blinkered determination to maintain the ‘continuance of the Medici superiority’ at whatever cost…and your desperation to make your personal mark upon the annals of history and—”
    â€œOh, no, no, no! You go too far!”
    A sudden pause.
    â€œDo I?” Eleanora deliberately dropped her voice to just above a whisper. As she had intended, it wrongfooted her husband: he gulped back the shouted retort he had obviously been on the point of hurling at her, breathing heavily, as if he had been running for some time.
    After another pause, Cosimo said, clearly making an effort to sound calm and concerned, “Very well. Tell me then, cara , what is troubling you?”
    Feeling tears behind her eyes now, Eleanora struggled to keep her voice from trembling. “I don’t know, Cosimo. I don’t know. If I tell you it is a mother’s instinct, you will tell me I am being foolish.”
    â€œYou are being foolish.”
    â€œI know that I have no reason to feel like this. But…”
    â€œCome here,” Cosimo said. He held out his arms to her, but she remained where she was, her gaze fixed upon his. He walked over to her and hugged her, pinning her unresponsive arms inside his embrace. He spoke into her hair, and she felt his words buzz against her scalp. “Of course you are anxious. She’s your baby, your little girl, the little lark you have kept safe in a comfortable cage for sixteen years. And you are just about to open its door and tell her to fly free. Of course you feel anxious. You have been a good mother—but, Eleanora, he is a good man. He will take care of her. Trust him.”
    Eleanora imagined her lark flying from one cage straight into another, and said nothing.
    ***
    Lucrezia rolled over to the edge of her bed, tangling herself in her sheet, and turned onto her back across the width of the mattress. The muffled sound of raised voices she had heard from her parents’ room had stopped. She stretched her arms above her head and leaned backwards so that she could see her room upside-down; her hands hung down and she touched the wooden floor. Her hair lay tangled around her fingers. She watched the sky through the inverted window for a moment, enjoying the sensation of pressure in her face, then rolled back onto her stomach. The sheet became even more tangled until, after a brief struggle, she kicked it to the end of the bed.
    She pulled off her shift and walked to the window. A welcome breeze blew cool on her sweat-damp skin; she shook her hair off her face, leaned against the sill and stared up at the stars, shivering as the bricks pressed chill on her hot body and legs. The hair on her neck and arms lifted.
    He had smiled at her again, just before they retired for the night. A slow smile as though he desired her. His earlier coldness—which had perturbed her—had gone. Perhaps she had imagined it. She felt almost sure that he had wanted to kiss her. And, she thought, with a tight little smile, she would quite like to have kissed him, too. She had never kissed anyone. A soft laugh puffed in her nose as she thought of the few occasions in the past that