Lucrezia's Garden

The gardener wanted her opinion on the roses. Lucrezia crouched by the bed anyway, knees be damned, and turned a bloom toward the light. "Cut this one back harder next year. It's spending everything on flowers and nothing on the cane."

"Yes, Duchess."

"And stop calling me that out here. Out here I'm just a woman who likes to know why her roses die."

He didn't stop calling her that. No one ever did, in Ferrara or anywhere else, and Lucrezia had given up expecting it forty years' worth of husbands ago. She straightened, brushed the dirt from her hands, and walked the row toward the bench where her secretary was waiting with a stack of letters he clearly hoped she'd get through before the light failed.

"There's another one," he said, holding up a pamphlet rather than a letter. "From Venice this time. It claims you kept a ring with a hollow compartment for—"

"I know what it claims. I've read four versions of that ring by now. In one of them it's a hairpin." She sat, took the pamphlet, glanced at the woodcut on its cover, a woman's face rendered with more menace than any painter who'd met her had ever managed, and set it down on the bench between them. "Burn it or don't. It won't matter either way."

"It might matter to your reputation."

"My reputation was decided before I was old enough to have earned one. My father decided it, and my brother improved on it, and I have spent every year since arranging flowers and running an estate and trying to convince exactly the handful of people who actually know me that the woman in the pamphlets isn't real. I've stopped trying to convince the rest." She picked a dead leaf off the nearest rose and turned it in her fingers. "Do you know what I actually did today, before you brought me Venice's opinion of me?"

"Tell me."

"I settled a dispute between two wool merchants who'd have ruined each other in court for a year over a contract that took me twenty minutes to read correctly. I approved the new roof for the hospital. I told a gardener to cut back roses that are flowering themselves to death. None of that will appear in any pamphlet, in Venice or anywhere else, because none of it is interesting enough to sell."

Her secretary was quiet for a moment, the particular quiet of a young man deciding whether a question is his to ask. "Does it trouble you? That this—" he gestured at the garden, the estate, the ledgers waiting behind them "—will disappear, and the pamphlets will be what's remembered?"

"It used to." She said it plainly, without the theater she knew some people expected of her when the subject came up: the tragic duchess, wounded by her name. "I spent years wanting someone to write down the true version, thinking if the true version simply existed somewhere, it would eventually win. It doesn't work that way. A dead husband and a family famous for poison will always be a better story than a woman who read a wool contract correctly. I've made my peace with which version travels further."

"Then why keep the garden records so carefully? The ledgers, the roof, all of it — if none of it will be remembered—"

"Because I'll know it happened. That turns out to be enough, most days." She stood, gathered the letters, left the pamphlet on the bench for the wind or the gardener to deal with. "Bring the wool merchants' contract back tomorrow — I want to check my own reading of it once more before it's final. And tell the gardener I meant what I said about the roses. Cut hard. They'll flower better for it next spring, whatever anyone in Venice decides to say about me between now and then."