Lucrezia's battle for survival

This heart-stopping the award-winning historic novel from author of Hamnet is set at the heart of the treacherous Italian Renaissance. Here the naive and beautiful Lucrezia de' Medici journeys from her family home to a country villa, where she fears her enigmatic husband, Alfonso, intends to kill her.

- MAGGIE O'FARRELL

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive. Robert Browning "My Last by Dlichess.

In 1560, 15-year-old Lucrezia di Cosimo de' Medici left Florence to begin her married life with Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara. Less than a year later, she would be dead. The official cause of her death was given as "putrid fever", but it was rumoured that she had been murdered by her husband.

A wild and lonely place Fortezza, near Bondeno, 1561

Lucrezia is taking her seat at the long dining table, which is polished to a watery gleam and spread with dishes, inverted cups, a woven circlet of fir. Her husband is sitting down, not in his customary place at the opposite end but next to her, close enough that she could rest her head on his shoulder, should she wish; he is unfolding his napkin and straightening a knife and moving the candle towards them both when it comes to her with a peculiar clarity, as if some coloured glass has been put in front of her eyes, or perhaps removed from them, that he intends to kill her.

She is 16 years old, not quite a year into her marriage. They have travelled for most of the day, using what little daylight the season offers, leaving Ferrara at dawn and riding out to what he had told her was a hunting lodge, far in the northwest of the province.

But this is no hunting lodge, is what Lucrezia had wanted to say when they reached their destination: a high-walled edifice of dark stone, flanked on one side by dense forest and on the other by a twisting meander of the Po river. She would have liked to turn in her saddle and ask, why have you brought me here?