Secrecy (20 page)

Hardly having slept the night before, I lay on my divan and closed my eyes, only to be woken what seemed like moments later by a loud knocking. I hauled myself over to the door. It was the men from the local lumber yard, delivering the wood I had ordered. The girl would need some kind of plinth or
platform
if I was to show her to her best advantage.

As I paid for the timber, I was aware of her behind me, and my stomach tightened with apprehension, but I knew what I would do should I be challenged or attacked. I had allowed for that eventuality. I would open the lid of her belly. I would unveil the child. I would tell the Grand Duke that I had been influenced and moved by his constant agonizing over the succession. What I was giving him, I would say, was what he had been missing – at every level. Not just a woman, but a child. Sometimes you have to picture what you wish for. Will it into being. What I had made was a petition. It might be art, but it was also prayer.

I wrote to Bassetti the following day, requesting an audience with the Grand Duke, but it was almost a week before he sent for me. As I approached the apartment, the doors swung open, and Vittoria della Rovere emerged. It was the first time I had seen her close up. A great, bristling galleon of a woman with at least three chins, she had servants on either side of her to help her walk. According to Borucher, she seldom appeared at court; her legs simply couldn’t take the weight. She seemed to survey me as she drew level, her eyes cold, almost brazen, and then, without addressing me at all, she moved on.

Magliabechi was with the Grand Duke that morning, as was Stufa, and they had been joined by Paolo Segneri, a Jesuit scholar, and a number of Alcantarine monks from Montelupo. First to leave was the palace librarian, who muttered the words ‘nest of vipers’ as he passed, then bit voraciously into a
hard-boiled
egg he must have been holding, concealed, in one hand. He was soon followed by the others. Stufa paused in front of me, his big, spare frame and oddly hoisted shoulders blocking out the light. He said my name, then smiled. As before, his smile filled me with unease, perhaps because it seemed directed at some point in the future that only he could see, a time when my star had fallen. There was no amusement in it, and no
benevolence
. On the contrary. It revelled in the prospect of disaster.

‘How long have you been in Florence now?’ he said in his usual harsh whisper.

‘Two years.’

‘And when will you be moving on, do you think?’

I watched him carefully, but didn’t answer. After our last awkward encounter in the carriage, I had decided there was little to be gained from talking to him. I didn’t want to give him any more power and leverage than he already had. As Salvator Rosa had written beneath his atmospheric self-portrait:
Either remain silent, or speak better than silence.

‘Rumour has it,’ Stufa said, ‘that you don’t stay anywhere for very long.’

‘There are all kinds of rumours about me,’ I said. ‘Only the other day, I heard that I was sleeping with my landlady.’

Stufa’s head tilted. ‘It’s not true?’

‘People like us tend to attract rumour,’ I said, ‘don’t you find?’

‘People like us?’ Stufa said.

I shrugged.

He left the chamber, the dry scrape of his voice still in the air, his black cloak billowing around his ankles.

At last, I was alone with the Grand Duke. He seemed distracted, though, if not irritable, and even the news that I had completed the commission wasn’t enough to alter his mood. He was about to depart for Rome, he told me. I should arrange delivery to coincide with his return.

Faustina was away for longer than expected, but in the middle of March I received a small packet filled with pomegranate seeds, her way of signalling that she was back. We arranged to meet on a Sunday outside the Porta al Prato. That morning there was a light breeze, white clouds tumbling over Empoli, and I wasn’t the only person who had thought of going for a walk in the Cascine, the lush, densely forested area to the west of the city. It wasn’t a feast day, but the air had a tingle to it – the beginning of spring, warm weather round the corner – and all sorts of hawkers and peddlers lined the streets. One had a stack of little cages and a banner that said
GOOD LUCK FOR SALE
. Not wanting to be late, I didn’t stop to investigate.

The crowds carried me along, people shouting, shoving, and my heart began to rock and tilt, as if only loosely moored inside my body. It had been almost three months since I had seen Faustina, and though I had often looked at the picture I had drawn, I no longer trusted it. It was just a fragment. It gave me nothing. It was like being shown a drop of water and asked to imagine a breaking wave.
She was back.
Such apprehension swept over me that I nearly turned around and fled.

I had passed through the western gate and was making for a path that led off into the trees when I felt somebody take my arm, and I knew, without looking, that it was her.

‘Keep walking,’ I told her, ‘then we won’t stand out.’

She had been gone for so long that I thought she might have forgotten the tight grip the city had on all our lives.

‘Have things been bad?’ she said.

I nodded. ‘It’s got worse.’

The world darkened as a cloud hid the sun.

‘A while ago,’ Faustina said, ‘you asked me about the sign outside the apothecary. Do you remember?’

‘You told me, didn’t you?’

‘Not everything.’

We were talking as if she had never been away. I glanced at her. Her forehead’s curve, her downcast eyes. The lustre of her skin. It was just as I had suspected: in person, she outshone any memory I might have of her.

The stones in the wall above the door were actually a kind of map, she said. They described a passage that conspirators used to use. If you passed the apothecary, heading north, you came to a dead-end alley on your left. Halfway down the alley was the entrance to the passage. Walk in and you would reach a gap that echoed the gap in the arrangement of the stones. It was a deep ditch or drain, and since it was pitch dark in the passage, you wouldn’t see it until it was too late. It proved fatal to all but the initiated. Once you had jumped over it, you followed the path suggested by the main body of the question mark, turning right, then left, then left again, and emerging at the rear of the
apothecary
. The key to the back door was attached to a piece of wire that hung against the wall.

‘I’m telling you this in case you need it one day,’ she said.

‘Your uncle won’t mind me knowing?’

‘I don’t think so. But remember, you’re the only person who does.’

We walked in silence, arm in arm. It seemed enough just to be touching.

‘There’s a tradition associated with this time of year,’ Faustina said at last. ‘It’s something lovers do.’

‘What’s that?’

‘They get lost – deliberately.’

We left the path and struck off at an angle, into the trees. The ground sloped upwards, became uneven. A slender shaft of sunlight leaned down through the mass of foliage, as if to remind me of our second fleeting encounter, Faustina reaching past me for a plate. There were fallen branches, ferns with serrated leaves. Soft beds of moss. Faustina removed her arm from mine, and we held hands instead.

After a quarter of an hour, the woods thinned out, and we came to a wide, canal-like stream called the Mugnone. In the distance, beyond the fields, I could just make out a range of scrubby, grey-green hills. It was out there somewhere that Faustina had been conceived – on horseback …

Far from the eyes of strangers, lost at last, we kissed. The smell of her hair, the feel of her shoulder blades beneath my fingers.

‘You’re still here,’ she murmured. ‘I was afraid you’d leave. I was afraid I’d come back to find you gone.’

We kissed for so long that my mouth tasted of hers.

‘You’re thinner,’ I said.

‘Too thin?’

‘No.’

We sank to the ground, and made love fast, clutching at each other, as if to make quite sure that we were really there. When we came, we came at the same time. My shuddering seemed part of hers. The edges of our bodies overlapped; I had no sense of where I ended and she began.

Later, I asked about her travels. She had been to many places – Trieste, Ferrara, Milan – but it was Venice that excited her most. She had been ferried about in a golden gondola. She had eaten duck ragout, a delicacy made from small black waterfowl known as ‘devils of the sea’. She had been to a bull hunt, a gambling hall. She had seen a horse dressed as a child. A fortune-teller had whispered to her down a long wooden pipe. He told her that she was loved, and when he saw her smile he rang a little silver bell to signify that he had guessed the truth.

‘One night,’ she said, ‘I went to a masked ball disguised as you.’

The look on my face made her laugh.

She rented dark, sober clothes, and had a mask made up. Brown eyes, a pointy chin. A slightly worried expression. She hid her hair under a wig of dark-brown curls. It was normal at carnival. The poor masquerading as the rich, the young
pretending
to be old … Everything was mixed up, the wrong way round. But also true, somehow.

‘I danced as you,’ she said, ‘even though I’ve never seen you dance.’

‘I’m terrible.’

‘People wear masks all the time, not just at carnival. In the theatres, the cafés – everywhere. No one can judge you.
Everyone
is equal. Free.’

She lay back and stared up into the canopy of leaves, her eyes serious, her hair laid over the raised root of a tree.

‘Such freedom,’ she said, ‘in Venice.’

By the time we left the woods, it was getting dark. Walking back along Via al Prato, I saw the man with the cages and the banner. This time I went over, curious to know what he was selling. Each little cage was made from sorghum stalks, and contained both a cricket and a mulberry leaf. They brought good luck, the man said, and were popular with children. Thinking of Fiore, I bought one.

I said goodbye to Faustina on Porta Rossa, and as I watched her disappear into a narrow, lightless gap between two grimy buildings I had the feeling, once again, that she had slipped through my fingers. Even though she was back, and we had spent the best part of a day together, I hadn’t had enough of her, and I was tempted to run after her, but I knew at the same time that it wouldn’t change anything.

Back at the House of Shells, Fiore was sitting on the floor in the parlour, arranging some bits of metal that she had found. A rusty spoon, what looked like a terret from a bridle. One half of a pair of scissors. I handed her the cricket, explaining that it would bring her luck. She thanked me, then suggested that we give it to Ambrose Cuif.

The signora glanced up from her sewing. She wanted to know if the Frenchman’s nocturnal antics disturbed me. I had got used to it, I told her, though I was still intrigued by his
voluntary
withdrawal from the world. She didn’t think it was entirely voluntary, she said. Cuif had appeared at court on stilts with a broomstick strapped across his shoulders and black robes down to the ground. Putting on a mask that made him look
cadaverous
, he had delivered a sermon on the value of hypocrisy and the benefits of fornication. It was clear that he was mocking a member of the Grand Duke’s inner circle. It was also clear that he had overstepped the mark, and the Grand Duke’s mother saw to it that he was banned from performing in the palace ever again. I nodded slowly. Cuif’s attitude to Stufa was beginning to make sense. Equally, I had learned something about Stufa himself. I wasn’t sure if it was true that Vittoria had found him by the roadside and taken pity on him, but she certainly
protected
him as if he were one of her own.

Fiore pulled at my sleeve. ‘We can still give him the cricket, can’t we?’

‘Not a bad idea,’ the signora said sourly. ‘If he’s really making a comeback, he’s going to need all the luck he can get.’

As I climbed the stairs with Fiore, I decided to pretend I didn’t know the real reason for Cuif’s reclusiveness. The last thing I wanted to do was to humiliate him.

When he opened the door, he was unshaven, and his hair lay flat against his skull, like grass flattened by the rain. I suspected that he had been asleep, though he denied it.

Fiore handed him the cage, which he took gingerly, between finger and thumb.

‘It’s for good luck,’ I said.

Fiore looked from the Frenchman to the insect and back again. ‘It’s just like you, isn’t it – shut in its little room.’

He scowled. ‘Thanks very much.’

Setting the cage down in the corner, he mentioned that several months had passed since he had seen me. No one had seen me, I told him. I had been working.

His eyebrows lifted high on his forehead. ‘I’ve been busy too, actually.’

He described the new act he had been rehearsing, but the language he used was so vague and abstract that I found it impossible to follow. He lapsed into a sullen silence and began to pick at his fingers.

In an attempt to lighten the mood, I told him about the German I had seen at court the previous summer. Fiore was laughing, but Cuif only gritted his teeth.

‘So that’s what I’m up against now, is it?’ he said. ‘Armless Germans?’

On the Grand Duke’s return from Rome, I received a personal note from him, instructing me to deliver the commission to a chamber high up in the east wing of the palace. He was at pains to reiterate the confidential nature of the undertaking. He would dispatch his most reliable servants, he said, but they must not know what they were carrying.

To transport the girl from my workshop to the palace, I wrapped her in numerous layers of muslin and hessian. Then, with Toldo’s help, I slid her carefully into an oblong packing case.

The day came.

As I followed the Grand Duke’s servants through the garden, it struck me that we resembled a funeral procession, with a closed coffin, two pall-bearers, and a solitary mourner, and I had the sense, once again, that I was honouring the dead girl. I glanced up at the back of the palace. More than one hundred windows reflected the raw spring light. So far as I could tell, though, nobody saw us.