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By Root 401 0

that the Duke wouldn’t have lifted a finger in the matter himself: he was far too snobbish to have bothered with any of the actual poisoning. I gave commands, he said, later on in the poem. (I’d skipped ahead.) The dirty work would have been done by some thug with a name like First Murderer – as in plays by Shakespeare – while the Duke himself was elsewhere, dropping names and paying phony compliments and showing off his costly artworks. I had a picture of how he would look: he’d be dark and suave and insultingly polite, and would wear a lot of velvet. There were movie stars like that, such as James Mason. They always had classy English accents. The Duke would have had an accent like that, even though he was Italian.

“Well?” said Miss Bessie. “The subject is as if. We don’t have all day. Marilyn?”

“Maybe she’s dead,” said Marilyn.

“Very good, Marilyn,” said Miss Bessie. “That is one possibility. The attentive reader, I said attentive, Bill, this does apply to you, unless you have some other more important engagement to attend to – no? – the attentive reader would certainly wonder that, and might wonder also – if the Duchess is indeed dead – how she might have died.”

At the sound of Bill’s name I found myself blushing, because Bill was my boyfriend; to be on the receiving end of Miss Bessie’s sarcasm was humiliating for him, and therefore by extension for me. It was true that Bill was not an attentive reader, but he regretted it, or else he resented it, I wasn’t sure which. I could visualize him now, two rows behind me, going red in the face with shame and anger as his friends smirked at him. But Miss Bessie didn’t care about that. She trampled right over you if she thought you were fooling around – if you got in the way of her teaching.

“Of course we often say of a portrait, ‘It’s very lifelike,’ ” she continued. “That would be the other possibility. Perhaps this remark of the Duke’s is merely a comment on the verisimilitude – the lifelikeness – of the portrait itself. The entire poem is told from the Duke’s point of view – therefore nothing he says may be taken as objective truth. We will return to this question of point of view later.”

Verisimilitude, I wrote in my notebook. Lifelike. The Duchess is almost alive. Point of view.

Miss Bessie was the best English teacher in the school. Possibly she was one of the best in the city: our parents said we were lucky to have her. She drove us briskly through the curriculum as if herding sheep, heading us off from false detours and perilous cliff edges, nipping at our heels when we slowed down in the wrong places, making us linger in the right ones so we could assimilate the material of importance. She described our task of learning as a race, a sort of obstacle course: there was a lot of ground still to be covered before the final exams, she said, and it had to be covered rapidly. This ground was strewn with hurdles and rough parts, and other difficulties. The days were speeding by, and we still had Tess of the d’Urbervilles looming up ahead of us like – we felt – a big steep hill of mud. It was true that once we got to the top of it, Miss Bessie – who’d been up there many times before – might show us a view; but meanwhile there would be a lot of slipperiness. We’d tangled with Thomas Hardy in the form of The Mayor of Casterbridge the year before: it was going to be heavy slogging. Therefore we needed to polish off the Last Duchess before week’s end so we could catch our breath over the weekend and then get a good run at Tess.

“That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now; Frà Pandolf’s hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will’t please you sit and look at her?”

“Now, class. ‘Will’t please you.’ To whom do you suppose the Duke is speaking?”

Line by line, Miss Bessie hauled us through the poem. It was an important poem, worth – said Miss Bessie – a full fifteen marks on the final exam. English was a compulsory subject: we couldn’t get out of high school without passing it. But Miss Bessie wasn