His Last Duchess by Gabrielle Kimm Page A

The lower edge of the door caught on the floor as it opened, then again as it closed. There was a scraping of claws as the waiting wolfhound scrabbled up to standing in the corridor outside the bedchamber, and then Alfonso was gone.
    Left in the dark, Lucrezia sat up and hugged her knees, feeling those first tears itch in the creases of her ears as they began to dry. Her eyes stung. She blinked and bit her lip, feeling it tremble under her teeth, and then she began to weep again, unrestrainedly, overwhelmed with a bitter sense of failure.
    She became aware of feeling cold, as she wept, and, rubbing her eyes, she climbed out of the bed. She knelt on the floor in the dark and ran her hands over the boards, searching for her chemise. Finding it, she pulled it on, then scrambled back under her bedcovers, curling up tightly with the blankets tucked close around her.
    Her thoughts raced. She had, she realised miserably, pictured many versions of her first encounter with her new husband. In the teeming, childish images that had filled her mind as she had contemplated her first night in her marriage bed, she had seen the then unknown Alfonso as being perhaps gentle and tender, maybe forceful—even brutal—perhaps wild, and funny and unpredictable. Her imaginings had been vivid and entertaining, and she had thought she had touched upon every possibility.
    But there was one thing she realised she had not envisaged: in none of her dreams had he ever been absent.
    ***
    Lucrezia awoke after a short, unsatisfying sleep, just after dawn, with eyes so dry and puffed from crying that they would not easily open, but, unable to sleep further, she rolled onto her back and gazed through stiffened eyelids up at the canopy of the bed.
    She felt quite numb. For months her focus had been almost entirely upon this first night. She had spared almost no thought for the weeks, months, years before her, so entirely had her mind been trained upon this exciting realisation of her newly emerging womanhood. There came to her now the prospect of a whole life unfolding ahead of her in the company of a husband who seemed unable to love her—an image quite terrifying to her in the potential of its bleak loneliness.
    Tears leaked again from her still-swollen eyes. She wanted to go home, for everything to be as it had been. She wanted her mother. She wanted Giovanni, and the uncomplicated warmth of their undemanding friendship. She wanted to be a child again, having so manifestly failed in her first attempt at becoming a woman.
    And then a noise startled her; she stifled a sob.
    The door to the bedchamber opened.
    Alfonso was carrying a candle, one hand cupped around the flame, which glowed crimson through his fingers. He was wearing a long robe and an intense expression Lucrezia could not determine. She watched him, unblinking, as he placed the candle down on the table. He took off the robe, and draped it over the end of the bed.
    Lucrezia’s eyes widened. It had been dark before, and she had been unable to see what the candlelight now revealed. As she saw the indisputable proof of Alfonso’s new readiness to attempt the consummation of their marriage, an alarming image of herself as a pig impaled on a spit pushed its way into her mind. She put her hand over her mouth. The child she had been wanted to laugh. The woman she hoped to become felt a wash of relief that she appeared to be—at least a little—desirable.
    ***
    Alfonso saw Lucrezia cover her mouth with her fingers as she flicked a covert glance at his prick. Her eyes were coin-round; her hair had fuzzed and tangled around the white, freckled triangle of her face. She had put her shift back on, he saw—the linen was sleep-rucked, and one small shoulder protruded from the gaping neckline. The bedclothes she held gathered up in both hands at chest height. She looked wary and frightened and terribly young, and he realised that he wanted her very much—his groin ached with the