One of the challenges of writing historical fiction is that readers may already know the broad contours of your plot. Authors can sidestep that challenge by picking an obscure subject, as we saw Lauren Groff do in Matrix. Or they can embrace the challenge, making it part of the pleasure of the book—like watching Houdini escape from the box while bound and blindfolded.

That’s the option Maggie O’Farrell chooses in her novel The Marriage Portrait, which is about Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici. The transfixing portrait of Lucrezia, featured in the novel’s cover design, not to mention her relationship to the notorious Medici family, has made her story fairly well-known, but O’Farrell makes sure all of her readers know it.

The historical note before the first chapter tells us:

In 1560, fifteen-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.

We know, then, the end of Lucrezia’s story: dead at sixteen. But notice that O’Farrell positions that information in the middle of the note, ending instead with a mystery: Did her husband murder her?

In chapter 1, O’Farrell seems to sweep away that mystery as well, taking us almost immediately to the moment Lucrezia realizes her husband plans to murder her. Here’s the opening paragraph:

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.

Notice what O’Farrell is doing with her verb tenses here. Not only is she writing in present tense, she’s using progressive verb forms: “is taking,” “is sitting down,” “is unfolding”. The progressive is used to show an ongoing action, one that is unfinished. This choice puts the reader inside this moment with Lucrezia, with no gap between what we are seeing and what she is experiencing.

Here’s how the passage would read if it were written in the simple past tense instead:

Lucrezia took her seat at the long dining table, which was polished to a watery gleam and spread with dishes, inverted cups, a woven circlet of fir. Her husband sat 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 unfolded his napkin and straightened a knife and moved the candle towards them both when it came 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 intended to kill her.

See how we feel more distant from her in this version? In particular, notice how that specific moment of her realizing her husband plans to murder her stands out less. In the original, that’s the moment the progressive verb form resolves into the simple present: “he is unfolding . . . he is straightening . . . he intends to kill her.”

After that first paragraph, we get some flashes of backstory as Lucrezia thinks about their journey to this remote hunting lodge:

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?

Here, too, O’Farrell marshals torturous verb tenses and moods to make us feel Lucrezia’s constraints. She “had wanted to say”; she “would have liked to turn”. She cannot, does not do either one. Not even the backstory is told in simple past tense.

If we know that Lucrezia dies not very long after this scene, and if we now are convinced, as she is, that her husband murders her, what mystery is left? Lucrezia herself takes us directly to that question at the end of the chapter: “How will he do it?” She imagines a few possibilities, sure that her husband would be capable of any of them. And here are the final words of the chapter:

She sets down her cup; she lifts her chin; she turns her eyes on to her husband, Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, and wonders what will happen next.

After all of those complex verb forms, the verbs here ring out with the clarity of church bells: “sets,” “lifts,” “turns.”

That last clause, she “wonders what will happen next,” is a clear challenge—and enticement—to the reader: here is this self-possessed girl—still a girl at sixteen—calmly contemplating the man she is convinced will murder her and wondering what will happen next. O’Farrell has managed to move the suspense from the basics—will she live or die? who murders her?—to the specifics: How will it happen? And what will Lucrezia’s experience be in the weeks, days, or perhaps mere moments before her murder?

Do you want to keep reading? I do.