Free His Last Duchess by Gabrielle Kimm Page A

creation of an admirable duchess, even if something indistinct and unfathomable about her had been needling him since the banquet.
    But none of this explained that first night—God! How could it have happened? Yet again, he tried to think back through the events, to unpick the impossible knot. He had entered Lucrezia’s bedchamber, candescent with anticipation. Having undressed her, he had been entranced by what he had seen—he had congratulated himself on his luck at his acquisition. And then it had all begun to slip away from him. Unexpectedly, he had found himself unable to conjure the words with which to woo her. The aggressively bawdy phrases with which he regaled Francesca had elbowed their way into his mind, pushing and catcalling like a bunch of drunken delinquents into a church, making it impossible to find the words he sought. So he had remained silent.
    He had brought out the garnets then. The red of the stones against the skin of her throat—vivid as a knife-cut—had been quite exquisite, but even as he had marvelled at the sight, he had felt some essential vitality continue to ebb from him. Something about Lucrezia—he did not understand what it was—had screamed at him that he would be ill-advised to impose upon her his usual vigorous preferences; but he had realised with dismay that if he were to be forced to stifle his instincts each time he lay with her, he had no idea how he would ever achieve a satisfying union with a woman whose charm had nevertheless entirely seduced him.
    Alfonso was deep in the mire of these unpleasant thoughts when, with a scrabble of paws, Folletto barked and broke away. Startled, the mare bunched her quarters under him and sidestepped as the dog wheeled off to one side and disappeared into a gap between two houses. Alfonso reined her in and patted her neck, murmuring soothing nonsense to calm her. He could hear scuffling and snarling, but before he could make any move to follow his dog, Folletto reappeared, head high, tail wagging, a dark shape squirming between his jaws.
    Dismounting, Alfonso called him and he came at once, proudly displaying his catch. An enormous grey rat writhed in his mouth; black eyes bulged beneath a gaping gash in its head. Folletto dropped his prize. It landed at Alfonso’s feet and convulsed in the dust, squealing. Sickened by its obvious distress, he picked it up, gripped the body with one hand, grasped its bitten head in the other and, with a sharp twist, wrung its neck. There was a soft, gristly crack and the sleek body hung limp across his hand.
    Alfonso was surprised, and unexpectedly moved, to see how the stillness of death lent to this pitiful, broken thing an unwonted dignity. His own hands had brought an end to an agony. With ease he had released a creature from pain. He ran a thumb along the grey fur of its side. Clumps of hair were matted and wet from where the dog’s jaws had held it; Alfonso gently raked them straight with the tips of his fingers. It was, he thought, as though he were ordering the body, laying it out for burial.
    The mare snorted softly. Folletto sat on his haunches on the cobbles, the fringes over his eyes twitching as he watched his master expectantly.
    Alfonso’s skin crawled. With disgust, or a tingle of excitement? To his shame, he realised he was not sure he could tell the difference. The little animal seemed in death to embody a transition that he loved to contemplate, a transmutation he frequently yearned to understand: that of chaos to tranquillity.
    On many occasions, when his thoughts became too tumultuous, Alfonso knew he could often steer himself from the one to the other from within the labyrinth, walking though the ill-lit corridors of the maze in his mind, counting his steps, striding into shadow, confronting and subduing each image as he moved towards the centre.
    The labyrinth, unsurprisingly perhaps, resembled for Alfonso the subterranean passages in the Castello, dank