Secrecy (5 page)

‘How did you like the truffle?’

He seemed once again to writhe or coil beneath his clothes, a sudden, subtle oscillation that was over almost before it had begun. The first time I witnessed the phenomenon, in the parlour at the House of Shells, I had assumed it was a symptom of my own nervousness or disorientation, a temporary warping of my vision. Now, though, I wasn’t so sure.

I told him I had enjoyed the truffle very much. A taste like no other, I said. Impossible to describe. His plump lips parted; his tongue lolled and glistened between his teeth. He wanted to know if it had been my first. Indeed it had, I said. Throughout this apparently innocuous exchange, I watched for a flicker of amusement, or even of malice, but I saw nothing.

Bassetti introduced me to the Grand Duke’s physician, Francesco Redi. The Grand Duke had described Redi as a tyrant, but I had never met anyone less tyrannical; he was a docile man, with the sensitive, elongated face of a horse. I told him I was looking for an anatomist; I would be needing body parts, but I was also keen to resume my study of the art of dissection. Redi apologized profusely. He would be unable to collaborate with me himself. He had turned sixty-five, and his energies were failing. Besides, he was preoccupied with his research, what he called ‘the unmasking of untruth’. He recommended a
barber-surgeon
by the name of Pampolini, who practised at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova.

Not long afterwards, Lorenzo Borucher walked up to me.

‘How are your lodgings? Bearable? Oh, good.’

A hairdresser by trade, Borucher spoke fast, almost
breathlessly
, hands twirling on the end of powerful wrists. It was he who had called on me in Naples, informing me of the Grand Duke’s passion for my plague pieces, he who had delivered the letter of invitation.

I mentioned that Bassetti had been to see me.

You wouldn’t think so to look at him, Borucher said, but Bassetti came from humble stock. His father had worked as a coachman. His influence was not to be underestimated, though. He organized the Grand Duke’s political and social life, and he was also active in matters of morality. As the driving force behind the Office of Public Decency, he had encouraged the Grand Duke in his persecution of licentious behaviour. He came down particularly hard on sodomy and prostitution.

As Borucher talked on, I began to consider the significance of Bassetti’s appearance at the House of Shells. Given his lofty position, it surprised me. Surely a written summons would have sufficed? But perhaps I had learned something about the way he operated. He put no trust in the judgement of others. He insisted on seeing things for himself. There was no matter so small that it didn’t warrant his interest or attention.

And there had been someone with him, I remembered – a man with a strange, gaunt face … I was about to ask Borucher if he knew who that might be when the Grand Duke’s elder son, Ferdinando, appeared in front of me. He had been spared the exaggerated features his family were known for, but the deep vertical line between his eyebrows suggested a vexed, impatient nature.

‘I should warn you,’ he said. ‘My taste in art is nothing like my father’s.’

‘People say you have a wonderful collection.’

‘I own a Raphael and a del Sarto. In general, though, I prefer the Venetians –’

‘That’s right. You do.’ The man who loitered at the Grand Prince’s elbow wore a lilac robe and pink leather slippers.

Ferdinando rolled his eyes. ‘I was talking about artists, Cecchino.’

Cecchino was a singer, he told me. From Venice, obviously.

The singer turned to face me. He had painted his lips a shade of mauve that made his teeth look yellow, and his eyebrows were two astonished arcs. ‘Actually, I’m familiar with your work.’

Ferdinando looked at him.

‘Yes,’ Cecchino said, ‘I distinctly remember a bare-breasted woman. She was dying, I think – or perhaps she was already dead.’ He waved a hand; it didn’t matter. ‘What intrigued me was how
sensual
she was. It almost made me want to leap on top of her and ravage her.’ He appeared to hesitate. ‘Or rather, it
would
have,’ he added slyly, ‘if I were that way inclined.’ Cecchino sidled closer, and I was enveloped in his perfume, which was dense and sickly, like a lily when its petals go brown at the edges. ‘You’ve been so patient with my clumsy
compliments
that I feel I should reward you. Would you like to hear me sing?’

‘It would be an honour,’ I murmured.

I had imagined an intimate recital for certain privileged guests in the gardens of some ducal villa – Pratolino, perhaps, or Lappeggi – but as Cecchino stood in front of me his mauve lips parted, and he released a high-pitched note of such concentrated power that it seemed to obliterate not only the room and
everybody
in it but the world outside as well. When the note ended, it left a void. Then the world returned, a little paler and more unsteady than before.

Cecchino turned to the Grand Prince. ‘There are tears in his eyes.’

‘You frightened him.’

‘Really? Don’t people sing in Sicily?’

‘Not like that,’ I said.

Ferdinando began to laugh, and once he had started he couldn’t stop. The Venetian was laughing too.

‘You’re very funny,’ Ferdinando said when he had himself under control again. ‘We must see more of you.’

The steps outside Santa Maria Nuova were packed with people seeking admission to the hospital. As I drew near, a man seized me by the arm. He had a deep gash on his cheek, and his eyes swam with some sort of rheum or glair. I couldn’t help him, I said. I wasn’t a physician. He began to rant about how clerics received preferential treatment, and how the poor were left to fend for themselves. Though his grip was fierce, I managed to shake him off, but not before he had bled all over my sleeve.

I found Pampolini in a small green room with a high ceiling and a single barred window. A stocky man, with a head that was wider at the jaw than at the temple, he was crouched over a wooden desk, making hurried notes. Pinned to the wall behind him were a number of anatomical drawings.

When he sensed my presence, he stopped writing and looked up. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘What?’ I glanced at my sleeve. ‘No, no. One of the people outside mistook me for a surgeon. He wouldn’t let go of me.’

‘You’ve got the hands of a surgeon – or a cook.’

He was referring to my scars and burns, the legacy of twenty years of working with wax.

‘Francesco Redi sent me,’ I said.

Pampolini nodded. ‘A good man, especially if you’re
interested
in worms.’

‘Which I am.’

I introduced myself. I had recently been taken on by the Grand Duke, I said. Pampolini asked me what I did. As I described my little theatres filled with the graphic, tortured bodies of the dead and dying I saw his eyes brighten.

‘Some people think my work’s a little –’ I hesitated – ‘extreme …’

He let out a sudden, full-throated laugh. ‘In that, sir, we’re alike. And yes – though you’ve been too delicate to raise the subject – you’ve come to the right place. I know what you’re after, you see. Cadavers!’ He had climbed to his feet and was rubbing his hands. This, clearly, was a man who loved his job. ‘We have a plentiful supply here at Santa Maria Nuova, and I’d be happy to help you out.’

Just then, a boy put his head round the door. He said there were three people waiting to be bled. Before he withdrew, I noticed that one of his ears was missing. That was Nuto, Pampolini said. Nuto’s mother was employed by a
slaughter-house
for pigs near Via Frusa. She was a frightful drunk. He had been teaching Nuto the rudiments of his trade. Some grammar too.

‘I call him Earhole,’ he said, ‘for obvious reasons – though he is also, coincidentally, a wonderful source of information and gossip.’

We talked for another hour, and by the time I left the hospital I felt I had found a barber-surgeon I could rely on. Not only that, but I had met someone who shared many of my arcane enthusiasms.

By the end of July the conversion of the stable block was complete. In Naples, silence had been in short supply – the city seemed to reverberate, like a jar filled with bees – but once I arrived at the gate on Via Romana, and had been cleared by the guards, one of whom, Toldo, was a native of Messina, I found myself on a grass track that had a stone wall on one side and a row of myrtle trees on the other, and all I could hear was the occasional grunt or screech from the menagerie, and the faint click and trickle of a fountain, which reminded me of Fiore’s murdered countess and her ghostly, bouncing pearls. After a few steps, the track forked left into a paved courtyard with out buildings on three sides. I had more space than ever before. The old tack room, which looked north and backed on to a bank of earth, was cool even in hot weather, almost like being underground, and was ideal as a place in which to carry out dissections, while the south-facing stalls had been transformed into an airy studio where I could melt and model wax.

I worked hard for the rest of the summer. Keen to prevent my techniques from becoming common knowledge, I turned down various offers from would-be assistants or apprentices. I didn’t need help, and I resented all forms of interruption. There was something private, almost sacred, about wax: it demanded vigilance, devotion, subterfuge. Secrecy could be imposed from without, like a punishment or an affliction, but it could also be cultivated, or even willed. It could offer comfort. Provide a refuge. According to Herodotus, the Persians used to cover their dead in wax before they placed them in the ground. Wax was, in itself, a form of protection, a kind of veil.

Autumn came. Leaves scuttled across the stable yard, and a keen, metallic smell drifted down from the Casentino. The first snows had fallen in the mountains. One morning I was brushing fast, thin strips of molten wax into the inside of a mould when the Grand Duke appeared in the open doorway. He was alone. In his bottle-green silk and gold brocade, he reminded me of one of the beetles I had studied on a visit to Redi’s laboratory. I hesitated.

‘Please don’t stop,’ he said.

After watching for a moment, he remarked on the quickness of my hands.

‘You have to be quick, Your Highness,’ I said, ‘or the wax dries on the brush.’

While I covered the mould with a piece of muslin to protect the cooling wax, the Grand Duke surveyed the large round window I had installed in the southern wall to let in light.

‘It all looks so different,’ he murmured.

I asked if he approved.

He nodded. ‘I prefer it.’

I led him across the courtyard to my office, where we would be more comfortable.

‘I don’t usually set foot outdoors at this time of year.’ He gave the clouds a rapid, fearful glance, as if they might be capable of violence, and pressed a handkerchief over his mouth and nose.

Once in the office, I threw a log on the embers that were glowing in the grate.

The Grand Duke coughed. ‘It was my wife who used to keep her horses here.’

I watched him carefully. All I knew was that he had been married to Louis XIV’s cousin, Marguerite-Louise of Orléans, and that the marriage had failed, but I remembered what he had said about horses, and how he no longer found it pleasing to keep them. I had thought it an odd remark, even at the time.

‘They were French, of course,’ he went on, ‘like everything she surrounded herself with.’ He sniffed at the air. ‘I’m not sure I can’t still smell them. Can you smell them, Zummo?’

I inhaled. Woodsmoke. Plaster.

‘Possibly,’ I said.

‘Our marriage was torture, from beginning to end.’

The words had burst out of him, as if they couldn’t be contained any longer, but I had no idea why he had chosen me as an audience. I rather wished he hadn’t. The wrong kind of knowledge could be dangerous. People were always being
persecuted
for what they knew.

He sank down on to a chair. ‘You wouldn’t believe some of the things she said to me.’

Beyond him, between two outbuildings, the gardens sloped uphill, the foliage on the trees a muted gold. ‘Didn’t she
appreciate
these beautiful surroundings?’

He trained his heavy-lidded eyes on me for so long that I felt I must have spoken out of turn. ‘You don’t know? I thought everybody knew.’

After her father’s death, Marguerite-Louise had lived in Paris, which she thought of as the cradle of civilization, the centre of the world. Her marriage had taken her away from all that. When she arrived in Tuscany, she was only fifteen, but she already had strong opinions. She saw herself as having been banished to some dismal backwater, as she never tired of telling him.

‘I got a letter from her once. Do you know what it said? I remember the exact words.
I swear by all that I most hate, that is yourself, that I enter into a pact with the devil to drive you mad.
Her handwriting was huge, and it slanted across the page like rain. Torrential rain. The word “hate” took up the whole of one line.’ He gulped, then shook his head. His eyes had filled with water.

It sounded to me, I said, pouring two glasses of red wine, as if his wife had taken leave of her senses.

The Grand Duke blinked back his tears. ‘There were those who thought she drifted in and out of sanity. My mother, for one. My physician, Redi, too. And some of the reports that reach me from the convent in Montmartre which is now her home seem to confirm that view. She has become a compulsive gambler, appearing in Versailles in rouge and a blond wig. She’s quite capable of losing an entire fortune in a single night. No wonder she’s always asking me for money. Did you know she tried to steal my family jewels?’

I shook my head.

‘Not so long ago, she chased the Reverend Mother through the cloisters with a pistol in one hand and a hatchet in the other. When some attempt was made to restrain her, she threatened to burn the convent to the ground.’ He laughed, but more in horror than amusement.

I suggested, gently, that he might be better off without her.

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ he said. ‘But there’s
something
I haven’t told you. I fell in love with her the moment I saw her, and I have loved her ever since – despite everything.’