A letter from Donna Lucrezia Maria Albizzi to her aunt Donna Beatrice Albizzi-Strozzi at Florence, written from the Casa Albizzi at her return from Venice. The hand is the bride's, the Italian a young woman's. Posted by the household carrier the iijrd of March, anno 1484. Preserved in the Strozzi correspondence at Santa Maria sopra Minerva.
Florence, the iiijth of March, 1484.
Dearest aunt,
I am returned. You will not be surprised; you will perhaps be relieved. I am, in candour, also relieved, and the relief is the thing of which I am most ashamed, and which I will say to you and to no one else.
The Signora Caterina is a woman of great force and small kindness. She is not pleased that her son will not be marrying me, but she was not pleased that he was going to either, which I had thought was the easier thing to read, when I read it. Her son Signor Pietro is — to his credit — a man who does not bear his mother's force easily; he was kind to me, in his way, the four days I was in the Casa Venier, and on the morning my father raised his voice at the breakfast-room I saw on his face an expression of which I can only say it was the expression of a man whose mother had just chosen for him.
I will not write here what was said at the breakfast-room. Ser Niccolò the notary has put certain weighed words into his deed and I will not be the second writer of them. What I want to put down, before I forget it, is the colombina.
I wore it to the dinner of the xivjth, as the Signora Caterina notes correctly; but she does not note that I removed it before the secondi, the chain having been catching at the embroidery of the gown, and gave it into the hand of the Signora herself, who set it upon the table beside her own plate and did not return it to me at the end of the meal. I did not ask her for it then, the dinner having gone as it had gone; I assumed she would give it to me at my leaving. She did not. I did not ask her at my leaving. I did not ask my father to ask her. I did not ask the Signor Pietro. I thought, in the carriage from Venice, that I was glad to be without it; the colombina was my great-grandmother's and she was a Greek and they say she was a slave-girl bought out of a Christian house in Crete when our great-grandfather did business in those waters, and I have always worn it knowing that I did not entirely have the right to wear it. Perhaps it has gone home in some small way, by remaining in a Venetian house instead of a Florentine one. The Venetians, for all their faults, are nearer the sea.
The Signora Caterina, if she keeps it, will keep it for the reason I keep my silver-gilt cross — which is that a woman of a certain age keeps the things that have been put into her hand by women she did not know, because to put them down is to admit she has spent her time arranging things she did not choose. She will not give it back. I think she knows the Greek says Lord have mercy and I think she will have heard it before, at her own throat, when she was a girl. The colombina is hers now. The notary may write what he likes.
I will marry, eventually, the man my father next finds for me; I trust to my father, and to his sense, more than I trusted to the negotiation that has just failed. I have, in any case, my reading and my embroidery and the new psalter you sent me at Epiphany, and I am whole and twenty years old and the spring is coming.
Give my love to my uncle and to little Maddalena.
Your loving niece, Lucrezia