Secrecy (31 page)

On the first floor the rooms were laid out on either side of a wide corridor. Halfway along, a scythe leaned against the wall, like a thin man who had stopped to catch his breath. I chose a room above the kitchen, with a window that looked east, towards the village. I put a hand on the chimney-breast. It was warm from the fire I had built earlier. I went downstairs, dragged the bed up to the first floor and pushed it against the chimney, then I blew out my candle and pulled the blankets over me. As soon as I was lying still, the house came alive. All sorts of knocks and creaks and whispers. When would Stufa come? At midnight? Dawn? I kept thinking I heard someone moving around below. I must have left the bed a dozen times. The white land hovered in the darkness. The air had an edge to it, like glass. Once, I saw a light come and go in the thickets we had ridden through that afternoon. A poacher, perhaps. In this weather, though?

Morning came. The silence was so profound that I thought I had gone deaf. I stood at the window and looked out. Several inches of snow had fallen during the night, but there were no footprints. There had been no visitors. A sense of dread held me where I was; I couldn’t seem to move. At last, my bones
chattering
in the cold, I turned away. Wrapping the blankets round my shoulders, I crossed the corridor.

From a window at the front of the house I saw that the well was undisturbed. You wouldn’t have known it was there. I went downstairs. As I rebuilt the fire, I realized the deep snow wasn’t wholly in my favour. It would help Stufa too. He would be able to approach the house without me hearing. If I wasn’t to be caught off guard, I would have to keep watch from one of the windows that had a view of the track.

I lifted the bar on the door and stepped outside. The snow was smooth as milk, except for the little arrow-trails left by birds. Such stillness. Such a hush. It seemed possible that the world had been emptied while I was sleeping. All the souls had been gathered up, and I had been forgotten, overlooked.

Sometimes, when I thought about my mother’s unlikely
reappearance
in my life, I would see it as an opportunity, a gift, and I was tempted to turn to her and say, Tell me the truth about the past. But I had never quite managed it – and even if I had, I doubted she could have told me, not after what she had been through, not after all these years. The truth was a key on the floor of the ocean, its teeth mossy, blurred. Once, it might have opened something. Not any more. And perhaps, in the end, I didn’t want to hear it, anyway. The idea that Jacopo might have been right all along – or if not right exactly, not entirely wrong …

I set off round the house. Snow lay on the almond blossom, white heaped on white. The sticks marking the well were still in place, though far less obvious. Only the top two inches showed. When I reached the back of the house, the sky brightened a
fraction
. The sun like a small, worn coin, so dull I could look straight at it. The shadows bleak and blue. From the corner of my eye I saw a rabbit hopping through coarse grass near the barn. Then it stopped abruptly. Had it heard something? I glanced towards the track. When I looked for the rabbit again, it had gone.

Back on the first floor, I stared at the landscape until my eyes ached. Writing appeared on the blank page of the snow. Apologies, hypotheses. My own obituary. Cracks showed, pink at first, then deepening to red. A dog’s head lay on the ground, as if decapitated.

Once, the white surface burst apart, and Cuif sat upright, grinning.
Watch this!
Off he went, making a series of fluid
hoop-shapes
in the air. He left no prints – no marks at all.

The day passed in fits and starts. Time behaved like the rabbit. Leaping forwards, standing still.

I went downstairs and stoked the fire. I tried to eat. I listened.

He didn’t come.

I found it difficult to imagine what might be keeping him. Perhaps, as in a legend, he had fallen into a sleep that would last for centuries. Perhaps I would die waiting. Become another ghost.

This house, this snow.

This loneliness.

Towards the end of the afternoon there was a flaring on the horizon, a band of apocalyptic colour, which made the bare trees at the limit of the property look brittle, scorched. The sun wasn’t small and pale any more. As it dropped, it swelled and sagged, and the orange ripened to a bloody, bloated crimson.

It was then that I heard him.

‘My soul does not magnify the Lord,’ he sang, ‘and my spirit hath renounced God my saviour –’

I sank below the level of the windowsill, my sword flat on the floor beside me. I recognized the Magnificat, but it was a version all his own. He had bastardized it. Turned it upside-down.

‘Because he hath regarded the sins of his handmaiden –’

I thought I knew what he was doing: he was twisting the Virgin Mary’s words and putting them in the mouth of the Grand Duke’s wife.

‘For behold,’ he sang, ‘from henceforth, all generations shall call me cursed –’

As I peered over the rough stone sill, he came through the gap in the hedge and down the slope, a swirl of mist or smoke drifting off him, as if he were a gun that had just been fired. He was mounted on a piebald stallion with a great blunt head, its black lips frothing where they chafed against the bit. Attached to the saddle were the tools of a torturer’s trade – a pair of metal pincers, a brazier, an array of gouges, pliers and branding irons, and a wooden structure with straps and buckles which I took to be a rack. The whole assembly creaked and clanked as if to accompany his sacrilegious chanting. I stood to one side of the window, out of sight, but I needn’t have bothered. He didn’t even glance in my direction as he rode by. He knew I was there, and he obviously thought Faustina was with me. Round the house he went, his eyes half closed, his words flung in exultation at the sky.

‘And verily he shall smite me down, and I shall feast on dirt –’

He wasn’t making the slightest attempt at camouflage or stealth. His triumph was a foregone conclusion, and it was easy, looking at him, to believe in his invincibility. But all at once my apprehension was overtaken by a purely practical concern. If he kept circling the house, he might stumble into the trap I had laid. His horse would suffer injury, but he would probably be thrown clear, and my only weapon – my one advantage – would be lost. I had no choice but to confront him. I needed him on foot.

The next time he came round the corner of the house I was waiting for him, the concealed well in front of me, the peach trees at my back. When he saw me, he brought his stallion up short.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The Sicilian.’

I kept my mouth tight shut. My teeth clicked and rattled behind my lips.

‘But where’s the whore?’ He cast a theatrical look around him, as if she too might suddenly appear.

‘Who are you to call her a whore?’ My voice sounded weak; I wished I hadn’t spoken.

‘He’s got a tongue in his head – but not, I fear, for much longer.’ Stufa climbed down off his animal.

My heart surged. Good.
Good
.

‘Once you’ve told me what I need to know,’ he went on, ‘I’m going to reach into your mouth and tear it out.’

He drew his sword. A harsh grinding, like some terrible, discordant music. The last of the sun collected on a blade that must have been four feet long, the metal glowing a livid pink, the colour of intestines.

‘I’ll roast it over a fire, then I’ll devour it. I’m rather fond of tongue.’ He struck out sideways at the almond tree; snow wolfed the severed branch. ‘Who knows, perhaps I’ll acquire your pretty way with words.’

I moved to my left. I had to keep an eye on the three sticks; at the same time, I couldn’t afford to arouse his suspicion. He stood with his feet wide apart, sword pointing at the ground. His breath turned to smoke as it poured from his mouth. His black cloak was a hole cut in the world.

‘Judging by your defence of the whore, I’d say you’re in love with her. Are you in love?’

The well stood between us, though Stufa was stepping
sideways
, towards the house, as if he sensed the existence of a trap and was circumventing it.

‘I hope you’ve sampled her already. Because you’re not going to get another chance.’

Cuif appeared on the land to my right, Cuif as he had been when I first met him – sardonic, mischievous, preoccupied – and in that moment all my fear and indecisiveness fell away.

‘You don’t half talk a lot,’ I said. ‘Maybe people are right when they say you’ve lost your mind.’

He began to advance on me, both hands on his sword. He was keeping close to the front wall of the house, hoping to
minimize
the number of surprises that could occur. For all he knew, I could have accomplices. The trap I had set was my only hope, and it now seemed desperate, ludicrous, impossibly naïve.

‘Did you tell anyone you were coming?’ I asked him.

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Surely you cleared it with Bassetti?’

Stufa laughed.

I knew then that he had acted on his own.

But he had managed to bypass the well, and as I backed away he came after me, his shoulders hunched, cold light silvering his blade.

Behind the house, he tripped on something buried in the snow and almost fell. Swearing, he freed his right foot from the remnants of a ladder. Was that the ladder Faustina had climbed with Mimmo on the day he broke his leg? It seemed like an omen. Of what, though, I could not have said.

I spoke again. ‘That girl you killed – who was she?’

He turned his head to one side and spat into the snow. ‘There are things you’ll never know.’

Once at the front of the house again, he stopped to scan the ground. Perhaps he thought my retreat had been strategic, planned. Perhaps he suspected an ambush. To my right, where the copse was, the ivy-choked trunks and branches black against the rust of the sunset, the Guazzi twins were bent over, lighting a touchpaper. A snake with glowing red scales glided across the snow towards me. I watched it plunge into a drift and then emerge again, sparks crackling from its mouth.

‘Liquid gunpowder,’ I said.

Stufa looked at me. ‘Who are you talking to? There’s no one here.’

I walked backwards slowly, keeping the hidden well between us. Once again, I felt Cuif’s spirit near me, impish, combative. ‘Actually, it’s not the murder that interests me, not any more.’

‘No?’

‘Murder’s nothing special. I’ve killed people myself.’ Well, one anyway. I crossed myself. ‘No, what interests me,’ I said, ‘is what went on between you and the Grand Duke’s mother …’

Stufa’s gaunt face tightened. ‘What?’

‘What interests me,’ I said, ‘is what you two
got up to
when you were alone together –’

With a roar, Stufa hurled himself towards me. Then he was gone. His oddly abbreviated shout hung on in the air.

A black hole in the snow. The brown glow of the sun behind the trees.

And nothing else.

I don’t know how long I stood there for.

By the time I approached the well, it was dark. As I was looking down into the shaft, a movement behind me nearly stopped my heart. Stufa’s horse was peering over my shoulder.

I kneeled down, hands gripping the edge, and thought I saw a faint gleam far below. Was that his sword? His teeth? The emerald? I had watched him drop through the surface of the world as surely as if a trapdoor had opened under him. No one could survive such a fall. And yet …

Given his almost supernatural hostility, I felt I had to make quite certain. I remembered the shattered mill-wheel by the track. Digging into the snow, I dragged the pieces across the ground, then tipped them, one by one, into the well. The first piece fell without a sound. The second rebounded off the walls on its way down. I heard the third piece land – the dull, distant crack of stone on stone.

I fetched my food from the kitchen, then went to the barn and mounted up. I rode out to the track, leading Stufa’s piebald stallion on a long rein.

As I passed through the gap in the hedgerow, I looked over my shoulder. I could just make out a black line in the snow. The lip of the well. He was buried deep, deeper than any grave.

I was trembling all over, but not with cold. Not to go back to Mimmo’s house, where she was waiting. Not to tell her that I had saved her, that she was safe. Not to hold her again, or even see her. To do that would be to implicate her, though. I had to disappear from her life as abruptly as Stufa had disappeared from mine. I had to leave her with the beginning of a story, but no middle, and no end. He left in the afternoon, she would say. It was snowing. He did not return.

I rode back through the village. On the main street, at the top of the slope, two boys were building a snowman.

‘He could use a nose,’ I said, ‘don’t you think?’

I threw them a carrot from my bag.

In the future, if someone came to Torremagna, asking
questions
, the boys would remember me. Their version of events would be sketchy, incomplete – filled with enough unlikeliness to be believable. Yes, we saw him. He gave us a nose – for our snowman. They would grin at each other. He was riding one horse, leading another. Black and white, I think. No, no rider. With those words, the trail would go cold.

If
someone came.

Because if Stufa had been telling the truth – if he had really acted on his own – no one in Florence would have the slightest idea where he had gone.

I headed east along a white dirt road. Over a range of wooded hills and down into the nearby market town. Then north, up a wide, bleak plain. The Val di Chiana. I had lived my life on the run – it was a habit, a necessity – but no journey had ever been more difficult. I tried not to think about Faustina – I tried not to think at all – but she appeared anyway. She stood at the edge of the village in the dress that reminded me of olive leaves, the skin smudged beneath her eyes, her forefinger touching her lower lip.

Where is he? she said.

I don’t know.

But that’s his horse …