Bitter Greens (28 page)

I did not sleep at all that night, the pain in my heart far worse than the pain of my burnt arms and breast.

When birds began to tweet and the cuckoo gave its sly cry, I went to my maid Filomena’s rooms, wrenched out a handful of hair from her brush and cast the swiftest cruellest curse I knew. No one could be permitted to betray me and get away with it. The next day, her foot slipped while getting off the barge to the mainland, where she no doubt hoped to escape my influence. She was crushed between the barge and the jetty. It took her days to die. It did not assuage my rage, however. So I cursed the Grand Inquisitor as well, and both his henchmen, and took pleasure in watching their slow decline.

Then I found myself another little red-headed girl – named Concetta, bless her. I wanted to take her away from Venice but found I could not leave it for more than a few days at a time. Sibillia had bound me to its stony labyrinth. So I travelled as far as I was able, searching for somewhere safe to hide Concetta.

I found the perfect place. An old watchtower built on a high rock near the tiny village of Manerba, on the shores of Lake Garda. It was infested with bandits, but Magli and I soon drove them away with spectral sightings,
wailings and a few eerie accidents. Concetta was as different as could be from Abundantia. She was glad to be released from the Pietà’s dreary round of prayer and domestic chores. She loved food and pretty things, and was happy enough to offer up her arm for me to cut in return for toys and playthings. Her hair was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, as full of changing colour as a fire of pine cones. She loved me to wash it and stroke it, and we spent many a happy hour combing and braiding each other’s hair. Each time I visited her, she would fall asleep snuggling in my arms, the soft touch of her lips on my cheek making me happier than any man’s thrusting tongue.

I came closer to loving that little girl than anyone since my mother had died.

Yet she too died. I came one day and found her lying cold in her bed. She must have been dead more than a week, for the room stank of her decay. Weeping, I laid her out in the lowest level of the tower and then I had Magli bury the door behind rocks. I sobbed all the way back to Venice, the first time I had allowed myself to weep since Abundantia had died. I did not go back to my empty immaculate palazzo. I did not go to Angela’s and drown my grief in drugged wine. Hardly knowing what I did, I went to Tiziano’s studio. He had got the house he wanted, a grand palazzo looking north towards the mountains. One of his apprentices let me in and I walked like a somnambulist towards his studio. Tiziano looked up as I stumbled in. He took one look at my red eyes, my tear-stained face, my disarrayed clothing and jumped up and guided me to a chair. He gave me wine and gently stroked back the hair from my forehead as I wept convulsively. When I was a little calmer, he took up his brush and began to paint me. Exhausted by then, I was content to sit as the daylight hours faded into twilight.

When it became too dark to see, he laid me down on his bed and made exquisite slow love to me. He was no longer a young man. His hair was silvered, he had a soft paunch instead of the hard muscled belly I remembered, and deep lines surrounded his eyes, but he still smelt of earth and pigments, and his broad rough hands still had the power to arouse me.

That painting became his first Mary Magdalene Penitent. It showed me half-naked, my breast peeping through the disorder of my long hair, my tear-wet eyes turned up to heaven. I hated it, hated being shown in all
my weakness, but Tiziano loved it. He sold it for a great many ducats and wanted at once to paint another. But I would not let him. ‘Paint me looking as beautiful as you can,’ I begged. ‘Please.’

For I had found a strand of grey in my fiery hair, a faint line scoring between my brows. Without being able to bathe in the blood of a virgin every full moon, my beauty would soon wither. I wanted him to capture me, once and for all, in the full glory of my loveliness.

So he painted me naked except for my tumbling red-gold hair, my hand cupping my pudenda as if about to pleasure myself, my eyes staring straight at the observer, my pupils dilated with desire. A small white dog frolicked at my feet. Behind me, two servant women began to lay out my gown for the evening. I do not think any more beautiful painting had ever been created.

A few months later, I spied a gorgeous red-headed girl skipping along beside her mother, her lustrous hair shining in the sun like a gilded banner. I had to have her. I sent Magli to steal her from her bed. We opened up the tower again and locked her away in the highest room, concealing the trapdoor beneath a rug. I wove Abundantia’s and Concetta’s hair into hers, so that I would have my dear ones close to me still. Each month, Magli tied a rope to the tail of an arrow and shot it up to the window with a longbow I had bought for him. Bonifacia – for that was her name – tied the rope to the hook so I could climb up to her. Each step I took up the high wall of that tower was made with a fast-beating heart, afraid the knot would slip and I would fall to my death. I began to think of a better way.

Bonifacia gave me many hours of joy, but in the end she too died, and so – weeping – I gave Tiziano another Mary Magdalene Penitent to paint.

When the preaching of the heretical Martin Luther spread like wildfire through Europe, Tiziano’s paintings of Mary Magdalene Penitent became his studio’s most popular production, as Catholics everywhere found their faith renewed in face of the Protestant uprisings.

Each time a little red-haired girl died in my tower, I would go heartbroken and inconsolable to Tiziano. Seven red-haired girls. Seven paintings of Mary Magdalene.

Let me remember my little loves.

Abundantia, whose body I kept enshrined in my cellar for years, before transferring her to the tower.

Concetta, who seemed to have died by choking on her own hair. When she rotted away, I found a great hank of it in the pit below her ribs, shaped like a gourd. She must, I thought, have been eating her own hair till it clogged her digestive system and killed her.

Bonifacia, my most beloved, whose gentle hands and mouth brought me such peace and comfort. She stopped eating, and no amount of delicacies would tempt her. She died in my arms, and the lines of sorrow carved on my face stayed for months, as I could not bear to replace her.

But then I stole Giovanna, who jumped to her death from the tower height.

Theresa lived the longest, content to spend her days sewing me religious samplers in the hope of saving my soul. I came to dread my visits to her and almost strangled her out of sheer boredom a few times, but her hair was the most magnificent golden colour, so I forgave her stupidity. She eventually died of what had been no more than a little sniffle to me.

Alessandra hanged herself from her bedhead, her first month in the tower.

Vita choked on a piece of apple.

Yoconda died of the plague. Which I took to her from Tiziano, all unknowing. For, in 1576, at the astoundingly old age of eighty-eight, Tiziano died of the plague that chewed through Venice like a pack of rabid rats. He was a bent old skeleton by the end, his sparse hair silver, his teeth all gone, yet still I loved him. One of the very last paintings he ever did was a portrait of us both, me as fresh and young as ever, Tiziano looking like something an owl would spit out. Called ‘Tiziano and His Mistress’, it was burnt by his son, Orazio, who had always hated me. Only an engraving made by the Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck survived. He had visited Venice just before Tiziano’s death and had been so struck by the contrast between the besotted old man and the voluptuous young mistress that he had made a copy.

Tiziano was buried in the Friari church, a great honour for a mere painter. Yoconda was laid out in the crypt of the tower with the other small skeletons, her hair chopped off at the roots and woven into the long braid that I had made from the hair of all my other little loves. And the hair of
my father, that pathetic little lock that my mother had died clutching, that was the hair I used to bind all the others.

After Tiziano’s death, I stayed in my palazzo for months, staring at myself in the mirror, smelling the whiff of decay in my own mouth, stretching the skin at my eyes, trying to hold back the inexorable sag and crease. I did not weep. My grief made me feel as if a hole had been torn in the fabric of the universe, a hole that could never be mended. All day and night, I heard the tolling of the bells, ringing out the changes in the hour, and there was nothing I could do to hold time back.

My coffers began to empty, so I numbly took up my work again. Many of the men I had once serviced were dead, and it was their sons and even their grandsons who came flocking to the salons of my new procuress, Cecilia. I drank too much, I ate too much and I smoked far too much opium. It was the only thing that seemed to loosen time. Sometimes, in my dreams, I’d be a little girl again, sitting in the bath while my mother washed my hair. Or I’d be in Tiziano’s studio, binding him to me with bonds of love instead of black magic. I wondered what life would have been like if we’d aged together and died together. But I had sworn once to never feel regret, so I pushed such weak longings away from me.

One day, I saw a young girl crouching in the street outside my garden. She wore a tangled wreath of meadow weeds upon her glorious red-gold hair. She was hungry and desperate, but, I’m afraid, no virgin. Still, in all my long life, I had seen that red hair and blue eyes were often passed like heirlooms through the generations. I began to imagine what it would be like to have a girl of my own again, to wash my hair and kiss my cheek, to offer up her delicate blue-veined wrist to me to cut. I looked in my mirror and saw a face I wished not to have. I looked at the painting Tiziano had given me, sixty-four years earlier. I wanted that face again. So I opened my gate and let that red-haired girl in, already plotting how to trap her into giving me her daughter.

For a daughter she would have, if I had to use all my black arts to make it happen.

How was I to know her daughter would be my nemesis?

The one to destroy me and the one to save me.

Love can take many strange shapes, I knew all too well.

As I filed into church with the other novices, my thoughts were full of the story that Sœur Seraphina had told me. For once, I did not dwell on my own unhappiness but wondered instead about that poor child locked away in the tower, and the witch who was afraid of time. That was a fear I understood. At the abbey, every hour of every day was accounted for by the ringing of the great bell. We knelt and rose and ate and slept by its toll, each stroke taking us closer to our deaths.

I looked down the line of novices, their heads bowed. Framed by their white wimples, their faces were so young and smooth and innocent. Sœur Olivia was not yet eighteen, her face as perfect as a cameo. Her beauty made my heart ache. She would never feel a man’s mouth on hers, or feel her skin naked against another’s, or watch the clock hands creep forward to the time when she could be in his arms again. Did she feel regret for her lack? Was her young body prey to longings and desires, like mine had been at her age?

I slowly became aware that Sœur Emmanuelle was also gazing at the young woman. There was such naked yearning on the novice mistress’s face that I had to drop my eyes, in fear she would feel my gaze and know
that I had observed her. In that moment, I felt a stir of sympathy for Sœur Emmanuelle that I never would have expected. I, at least, had loved and been loved, even if in the end I had lost it all.

My first love affair came about because of a death.

It was dusk in winter, and Paris was covered with a mantle of white snow. All the mounds of garbage were hidden beneath that white cloak, so that the alleyways seemed as immaculate as the domes and spires of the chateaux and cathedrals.

The court was on its way to the Palais-Royal to see a performance of the Troupe de Roi at the Duc d’Orléans’ private theatre. I walked from the Louvre, delighting in the crisp cold air and the sight of the golden lanterns strung all along the Rue de Rivoli. My boots – crimson-dyed and fur-lined – sank deep into the snow, and I kept my hands buried in my muff.

‘Mademoiselle de la Force, welcome.’

As I came through the doors into the vast entrance hall, I heard the heavily accented voice of Elizabeth Charlotte, the Duchesse d’Orléans, the new wife of the King’s younger brother, Philippe. Nicknamed Liselotte, she was a squat little figure, badly dressed, with a broad nose and a round red face, coarsened from never wearing a veil when she rode to the hunt.

‘So you walked, did you?
Gut gemacht.
All these fine ladies who cannot bear to walk more than six paces. No wonder they’re all so fat. You know I’ve been confined to a sedan chair myself? Yes, I’m afraid all the rumours are true and there’s a bun in this oven.’

I laughed and offered her my congratulations, stripping off my fur hat and cape to pass to a footman.

‘I have to say, it makes me believe in miracles after all,’ Liselotte went on in her loud German voice. ‘Who could believe my pathetic fop of a
husband could be such a man? You know, of course, that he has to drape himself with rosaries and holy medals to get it up at all …’

‘Sssh,’ I said, for the King was only a few paces away, greeting his brother with an inclined head, a mark of highest favour.

‘Oh, His Majesty knows all about his brother, don’t you worry. Who doesn’t know?’ Liselotte brooded on this for a moment, her thick brows pinched together. I looked at her in some sympathy, because the whole court did of course know that Liselotte was forced to live in a
ménage à trois
with her husband’s lover, the beautiful and depraved Philippe, Chevalier de Lorraine.

‘Nasty creature, that catamite of my husband’s,’ Liselotte said. ‘Come, sit with me. You know I cannot bear to be near him or my husband, unless I absolutely have to, and I utterly refuse to sit with the King and his whores.’

I stifled a laugh, for the King was settling down in his silver chair with his squat little queen, Marie-Thérèse, beside him, and his two gorgeous blonde mistresses vying to make sure they sat on his other side.

These three women travelled everywhere with the King in his coach, and it was said he usually managed to bed all three at some point during the day. Louise de la Vallière had been his first mistress but had recently fallen out of favour. Her usurper, the voluptuous Athénaïs, the Marquise de Montespan, was now considered the true queen of France, and predictably it was she who won the silent tussle of the chair, sinking down beside the King in a soft explosion of pale silk and speaking to him in such a low voice that he had to bend his ear to her mouth in order to hear.

Athénaïs was, of course, a nickname. Her real name was Françoise, like half the women at court, and the Marquise de Montespan could never bear to be like other women. We all were given nicknames in the Parisian salons in those days, probably to distinguish between all the Louises, Maries, Annes and Françoises. She had adopted the nickname Athénaïs, derived from Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. I was called Dunamis, which was the Greek word for strength and so a play on my surname.

‘I’m so glad you’re here, Mademoiselle de la Force. I like people who laugh at what I say. I am looking forward to the play, aren’t you?’ Liselotte said.

‘All of Paris is!’

‘It’s a new play tonight,’ Liselotte said. ‘This is only the fourth time it has been staged. Molière himself is to play the lead role.’

‘Oh, that’s wonderful. I heard he was unwell.’

Liselotte twinkled at me. ‘Consorting with actors again, are we?’

I put my nose in the air. ‘What can I say? One comes across all kinds of interesting people in the salons.’

‘Including, I have heard, a certain young actor …’

‘Many actors,’ I said firmly, though I felt myself blush. It was true that I had become friendly with one particular young performer, a protégé of Molière’s named Michel Baron, who was playing the role of the hero in the play tonight. He was not at all handsome, having a long thin face with a long thin nose, but he was very amusing. Michel could mimic anyone. With a twitch of an imaginary skirt, the wave of an imaginary fan and the lift of a haughty chin, he would become Athénaïs. Or he would droop his eyelids and let his hand flop from the wrist and mince forward a few steps and
voilà!
The Duc d’Orléans.

I had met Michel at the salon of Marguerite de la Sablière, a rich and brilliant woman whose house was always filled with writers and actors, including Jean de la Fontaine, who had written the
Fables
I had so loved as a child. We were among the youngest at the salon, Michel being only twenty and me two years older, and both of us had ambitions to be writers. I introduced him to the court salons, so he could charm and flatter some rich court lady into being his patron, while he took me to the cafés and cabarets of Ménilmontant and Montmartre, two villages outside Paris where wine was exempt from city taxes and so much cheaper for our poor thin purses.

The theatre was filled with the rustling of silk, the fluttering of fans, the flapping of lace and the nodding of feathers. Six tinkling chandeliers, each holding aloft six tall candles, illuminated the stage while another thirty-four candles were arranged in rows along the front, filling with air with a haze of smoke. Footmen carried about silver goblets of the King’s favourite wine, an effervescent rose-coloured concoction from Champagne
that was the new craze at court. It was said that the wine-maker Dom Pérignon had cried to his fellow monks, ‘Come quickly, I am drinking stars!’ True or not, that story alone made me love the sparkling new wine.

The curtains were dragged back and a roar went up, for there sat Molière in a high-backed chair, dressed in a long-tailed green coat. He had a muffler about his neck and a damp cloth held to his brow, and his desk was littered with various bottles of medicines and pills. With the help of an abacus, he was adding up an immensely long bill, which scrolled down his lap and onto the floor.

‘Item One, on the 24th, a small, insinuative clyster, preparative and gentle, to soften, moisten, and refresh the bowels of Mr Argan,’ he moaned in the plaintive tones of a chronic invalid.

A shout of laughter went up from the men at the word ‘bowels’, and women pretended to hide their faces behind their fans in shock.

As if encouraged, Molière went on to mention bowels, bile, blood and flatulence several times in the next few moments, until the audience was weeping with laughter.

The play rolled on till the final scene, where the character played by Molière pretended to die so that he could tell who truly loved him: his beautiful daughter or his beautiful second wife. With his green coat torn loose at his throat, Molière sank back on his chair, saying piteously to his maid, ‘Is there no danger to counterfeiting death?’

‘What danger can there be?’ the maid began.

Molière suddenly lurched up, coughing convulsively.

‘What an actor,’ Liselotte said.

‘Brilliant,’ the Chevalier murmured. ‘I wonder what they put in his maquillage to make him look so grey?’

The actress playing the maid had recoiled, one hand to her mouth, then darted to support Molière. He coughed as if his lungs were wet paper, then suddenly gasped and clasped his handkerchief to his mouth. We were close enough to the stage to see the white cloth suddenly turn red and sodden.

‘A vial of pig’s blood hidden in the handkerchief?’ Liselotte wondered uneasily.

‘I think … I’m afraid …’ I started half out of my chair.

The maid turned to the side wings, calling for help. Michel ran onto the stage and supported Molière as he coughed up more blood. The crowd was beginning to stir and murmur. Molière heaved himself upright. ‘Enough. On with the play!’

‘But, sir …’ Michel protested.

Molière thrust the bloodstained handkerchief into his hand and waved him away. Reluctantly, Michel withdrew from the stage.

The maid stammered through her next lines: ‘Only stretch yourself there, sir. Here is my mistress. Mind you keep still.’

Molière lay out on the couch, looking ghastly, as first his stage wife came in to find him supposedly dead (‘Heaven be praised!’) and then his stage daughter (‘What a misfortune! What a cruel grief!’). The conniving stepmother was banished, the beautiful daughter won her true love (Michel doing his best to look ecstatic while all the time shooting Molière looks of the deepest anxiety). The curtain fell with unusual haste upon the scene, and we were all left to look at each other and marvel and wonder.

‘Do you think he is really ill?’ Liselotte wondered.

‘I fear so,’ I answered, close to tears.

The King ordered a servant to go and make enquiries. I waited with Liselotte for news, while the rest of the crowd slowly dispersed, going back to the Louvre or to their own apartments nearby. The two Philippes – the prince and his chevalier – wandered off, and Athénaïs drew the King down to talk to him, his dark head bent over her golden one.

‘I might go back to my room,’ Queen Marie-Thérèse said.

‘Very well, dear,’ her husband the King said vaguely, not looking up.

The Queen hesitated. ‘Shall I see you soon?’

The King lifted one hand. ‘Later, dear, later.’

Queen Marie-Thérèse waddled out to her sedan chair, accompanied as always by one of her dwarves and a smelly little dog. I should have gone with her – I was one of her ladies-in-waiting and it was my job to make sure she was comfortable and happy – but Marie-Thérèse paid little attention to me, as her French was poor and my Spanish even poorer. I did the absolute
minimum of my duties possible, although I always made sure I was around between supper and bedtime. That was when Queen Marie-Thérèse liked to play cards. As she always played for high stakes and always lost, my income was greatly enhanced by this vice of hers. Her latest round of losses had paid for my fur cape and hat.

Truth be told, I could hardly bear the Queen. She spent half her day on her knees mumbling prayers to God to make the King be kind to her and the other half lounging around drinking innumerable cups of hot chocolate, surrounded by her dwarves and her dogs. The latter were far better treated. Her dwarves slept on the floor outside her bedroom door and ate whatever scraps she thought to fling them. Her dogs had their own valets and carriage, and their own room in their palace, and often sat at the table with the Queen and ate from her plate.