Free Blood & Beauty by Sarah Dunant Page A

back on to dry land. ‘And it shall be given.’
    She shakes her head but in the dark it is hard to read her eyes. ‘There is nothing else, my lord.’
    They stay still for a moment. Then, gently, she takes his hand and guides it back to where it was before. And as his fingers connect with her moistness she gives a little sigh.
    ‘You are all I want,’ she murmurs, shifting her hips to accommodate him better. ‘Before you go…’
    And because he wants to believe her, he does.
     
    It is a strange sound, harsh, high-pitched, like a fox or some other animal in pain. In the gardens and lands surrounding the castle at Subiaco where they stayed as children to get respite from the summer plagues, she would hear something like it in the night and it always made her think of death.
    But it is not an animal and it is not dying. Lucrezia knows that well enough. It is the sound of her father in bed with Giulia. She turns her head further into the pillow to muffle it. It comes again. She waits to hear if Giulia’s voice will join in; she makes a sweet warbling noise sometimes, a songbird rising out of a tree. It is love, not violence, she is hearing. She knows that too. She has seen the two of them together, felt the tenderness as well as the desire. But she also knows that what they are doing is forbidden. That Giulia is another man’s wife. That by the rules of the Church this is a sin. Yet the man is her father. And her father is the Church. More than that: without this same sin she would not be here. Not her, nor Cesare, nor Juan, nor Jofré. For their mother had been married to someone else as well. Does that make all of them sinful too, they who are loved so much and treated so well? Or does that mean that sin itself changes, depending on who commits it?
    Lucrezia thinks about these things more since the convent. Before, when she was a child, everything that happened around her was simply life; she barely remembers her mother – maybe the warmth of a body or a broad smile – but her father she has always adored, always known to be a great man who served God in ways that meant that sometimes he was with them, and at others not. All this was normal. When Cesare talked back with icy insolence to his tutors, or Juan walked around the house howling at anyone who disagreed with him, she thought it was the behaviour of boys. In contrast, she learned early that sweetness would bring her everything she wanted. Which was not such a trial, since so much of what she might want she had anyway, and it was her natural disposition to smile rather than scowl.
    ‘Come – let me see my burst of sunshine’ was how her father would greet her when he arrived back weary from whatever tasks God had given to him. What else could she do but smile for him?
    Cesare had once put it differently. It was before he was sent away to study and already there had been a fierce rivalry between him and Juan: Cesare provoking with quick clever words and Juan responding with fists, a fight that the younger would always lose. Adriana would deal with Juan, a mix of comfort and bribery, soothing his pride along with his bruised flesh. But Cesare, even in victory, held on to the anger for longer, as if it was a splinter festering in the skin. At such times she would go and sit with him, slipping her hand into his and waiting, like a dog at his side, until he was ready to notice her. Which he always did.
    ‘I think there is some alchemy inside you, ’Crezia,’ he had said as she coaxed a smile from him. ‘Where others have poison, you have balm.’
    Except she seems less full of balm these days, more plagued by doubt. Recently she has started bleeding and with it have come storms of feeling over which she has no control: a sudden crossness, or impatience with the world, tears for no reason. Even her skin, once down-smooth, erupts at times, as if these small fountains of pus are the only way to let such things out. Adriana follows her round the house with