Pampolini had fallen asleep at his desk, his face turned sideways on his arm, drool blackening his cuff. His blond wig hung on the wall behind him like the pelt of some exotic animal.
Earhole bent over his master and spoke gently to him. Pampolini lifted his head. His eyes had a veiled, milky cast, and the folds and creases in his sleeve were faithfully recorded on his forehead and his cheek.
‘Zummo,’ he said.
‘How are you?’
‘My arm’s gone numb.’ He gave Earhole a reprimanding look. ‘You took your time.’
‘It wasn’t his fault,’ I said. ‘We were attacked.’
I explained what had happened in that dark, dank alley near the candle factory.
‘He fairly skewered one of the bastards,’ Earhole said, hands twitching frenetically. ‘Blood everywhere.’
Pampolini stared at me. ‘You’re shaking.’
‘Yes, well. I’ve never killed anyone before.’
‘You’re all right, though?’
I nodded.
He yawned, then rose to his feet and led me down a dimly lit passageway. ‘Busy night,’ he said, rubbing some life back into his arm. ‘Sixteen injured in that football game.’ He paused outside a metal door; his top lip glistened. ‘I think we’ve got something here that might interest you.’
I followed him into a long, cold room. Lying on a marble-topped table was the naked body of a girl, her skin mauve-white and damp-looking. Her hips and ribs were streaked with mud, and weeds had wrapped themselves around her legs. Her hair was an autumnal colour, not brown or red or gold, but somewhere in-between, and a few coiling ringlets had spilled over the edge of the slab and hung halfway to the floor. A small black pool of water had formed below. Every now and then the stillness of the pool was shattered by another tiny drop.
‘A beauty, isn’t she?’ Pampolini said.
Earhole slipped past me and occupied himself at the far end of the room.
‘What do you know about her?’ I said.
‘Not much.’
A dredger had brought her in. He had been working his way along the river-bank, collecting sand. As the light faded, he had drifted towards Sardigna. The smell of rotting carcasses was so pungent that he had to tie a rag over his nose and mouth. For that reason, perhaps, he had been alone on the water. The girl’s body was lying next to the remains of a dead mule. She was still warm when he knelt beside her. That frightened him. He felt the person who had done it might be close by, watching. He hadn’t seen anyone, though. He took the body straight to the hospital, where Pampolini had given him a few coins for his trouble. Pampolini had told him to forget everything that had taken place that evening. The dredger shrugged; you got used to all sorts, working on the river. Before he left, he admitted that the grazes on the girl’s body had happened when he heaved her into the boat. He regretted his clumsiness, he said, then he disappeared into the night.
‘That was quick thinking,’ I said, ‘to buy his silence.’
Pampolini chuckled. ‘I even surprise myself sometimes.’
‘Sardigna, though. What a terrible place to end up.’
‘You know it?’
‘Yes.’
He walked round the table. ‘We don’t have any idea who she is, or how she died. She might have been murdered – that’s what the dredger thought – but there’s no evidence of violence. She might have killed herself. It might even have been an accident – though there’s the small matter of the missing clothes …
‘It’s a shame about the clothes, actually. They would have told us a lot.’
‘Maybe that’s why they were taken,’ I said.
‘In any case, no one’s enquired about her yet.’ He bent down and studied the fingers of her right hand. ‘I have the feeling she’s a foreigner. I’m not sure why.’
‘But apart from the grazes, there are no marks on her?’
‘Now you come to mention it …’ Pampolini turned the girl’s body on to its side, and I saw patches of indigo across her thighs and the small of the back where the blood had pooled. ‘Lift the hair away from her neck.’
I did as he asked. Her hair was unusually heavy, perhaps because it was still wet. It felt eerie in my fingers.
‘See it?’ Pampolini said.
At the top of the girl’s spine, above the first cervical, the head of a dog had been carved into her skin. Judging by the pointed muzzle and the jagged rows of teeth, the person responsible had had a particular breed in mind.
‘It’s not an injury, is it?’ I said. ‘I mean, it doesn’t look like something that happened accidentally.’
‘No,’ Pampolini said.
‘Can you tell how long it’s been there?’
‘The wound’s still bleeding, and there’s no sign of inflammation. It looks recent.’
‘So it could have been done after she was dead?’
Pampolini looked at me. ‘Or just before.’
In that moment, a revelation flashed across the inside of my brain. Ever since that drink with Jack Towne, I had been aware of the need to build something ambiguous into the commission. I’d had no idea how to go about it, though. Now, for the first time, I thought I saw a way forwards. If I were to incorporate the dog’s head, I would be creating a piece of work which, depending on what Towne called one’s ‘angle of approach’, could be viewed on at least two different levels.
‘Have you ever seen anything like this before?’ I was trying to keep the excitement out of my voice.
Pampolini shook his head.
I let go of the girl’s hair and walked away from the table. ‘A dog …’
There was a sudden retching sound. Turning, I saw Earhole bent over a stone sink at the back of the room. I looked at Pampolini. ‘He’s not squeamish, is he?’
‘It’s not that,’ Pampolini said. ‘He was mauled by a dog when he was a baby. That’s how he lost his ear.’
He lowered the body on to the slab and stood back, rubbing the palm of one hand slowly against the other, then he fetched a bottle and two glasses, poured large measures, and handed one of the glasses to me. I downed the contents in a single gulp. An oily fire spread through my belly.
‘Quite fitting, really,’ Pampolini said. ‘It was an omen of the plague, wasn’t it, the constellation of the dog?’
‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘There’s no evidence of disease, though, is there?’
‘None.’ He looked down into his empty glass. ‘So – are you interested?’
‘How long’s she been dead?’
‘I told you what the dredger said. She was warm when he found her. And there’s no stiffening in the eyelids yet, or in the fingers. I don’t think she’s been dead for more than about three hours.’
‘All the same, there’s no time to lose.’
He said he could have the body delivered to my workshop immediately.
‘On this occasion, though,’ he added, ‘since these aren’t what you might call normal circumstances, I might need a little reimbursement.’
I looked at him steadily. ‘How much?’
He mentioned a price.
‘That’s a bit steep,’ I said.
He yawned, his jawbone cracking. ‘But then again, she’s exactly what you’re looking for, isn’t she? Just think how thrilled your client is going to be.’
I shook my head. ‘You’re such a Florentine.’
‘Actually,’ he said, with the smugness of a card player who is about to display a winning hand, ‘I was born in Padua.’
The black geraniums I had planted outside my workshop bent in the wind as the porters carried the stretcher down the track, the girl’s body blurred by the threadbare cloth that covered it. The dark shapes of the overhanging myrtle trees swirled above our heads, the flesh of the night sky peeled back to reveal the white bone of the moon.
Before leaving Santa Maria Nuova, I had come to an arrangement with Pampolini: I had agreed to pay what he was asking, but only on the condition that I could borrow his assistant. With rigor mortis looming, I would have to work fast, and I didn’t think I could do it on my own. Not only was Earhole accustomed to the dead, but he had also been party to the irregular circumstances in which I had acquired the corpse. In hiring him, I would be ensuring that the circle of confidentiality stayed closed. Earlier that night, he had asked me to trust him. This was his chance to prove himself worthy of that trust.
Once the porters had lifted the girl’s body on to the dissecting table, I asked Earhole to escort them back to the gate. As soon as they were gone, I removed the covering. Pampolini had put coins on the girl’s eyelids to keep them from sliding open. He had also fastened a piece of rag around her head to hold her jaw in place. I reached down and gently wiped away the mucus that had seeped from her mouth during her journey across the city.
Earhole reappeared. I showed him the metal-lined drawers I had built into the dissecting table. When packed with ice, they helped to slow the process of decomposition. I plucked the key to the Grand Duke’s ice house off the wall and gave it to him.
‘Take the handcart,’ I said. ‘Bring as much as you can manage. And hurry. Every second counts.’
While he was away, I cut off the girl’s hair and laid it in a wooden tray, then I shaved her head and removed the hair from her armpits and her groin. That done, I coated her body in a thin layer of hemp oil. She gleamed in the candle-light as if she had just broken out in a sweat, but I was the one who was sweating. I tested her fingers. Still no sign of stiffening.
In fifteen minutes Earhole had returned. Rigor mortis occurred four to six hours after death, depending on the temperature. In Pampolini’s opinion, the girl had died between seven and eight o’clock. It was now midnight. Even with the doors wide open and the ice-filled drawers, I didn’t think I had more than an hour to prepare the body for casting. After that, manipulation would prove impossible.
I propped my notebook open at the relevant page. Guided by drawings I had made during the summer, I bent the girl’s left arm at the elbow, leaving her hand resting on her belly. I liked the elegant, elongated diamond of air that opened up between her arm and her waist, and there was a kind of tenderness about the hand. A subtle sensuality as well. To keep the arm from moving, I fitted a small right-angled cushion filled with sand against the outside of the elbow. Walking round the table, I straightened the girl’s right arm so it lay flush against her body, her palm and the inside of her elbow facing upwards. Casting the delicately curling fingers wouldn’t be easy, but they were an integral part of the image I had in mind. I placed the hand in a three-sided wooden box, which would lock it in the chosen position. As for her legs, they needed to mirror or complement the arms. Leaving her left leg extended, I eased her right knee outwards a fraction, then brought her foot back in so that the sole almost touched the left ankle. I wedged more sand-filled pillows between the legs to stop them straightening, then I stood back. The girl looked natural, relaxed and – strange, this – solitary. The angle of her head was wrong, though. If I turned her face towards her left shoulder – if she appeared to be avoiding the viewer’s gaze, in other words – it would leave her poised between modesty and invitation, and I would be combining the dreamy grace of Poussin’s ‘Galatea’ with the boldness of his ‘Sleeping Venus’. That, at least, was my intention. I was conscious of Earhole in the shadows, watching.
‘Are you tired?’ I said.
‘A bit.’
‘Why don’t you sleep?’
Covering two lengths of string in pig fat, I fixed them to the girl’s left leg, one on either side, so they stretched all the way from her hip to her ankle, then I reached for the sack of powdered gypsum and heaped several scoops into a bowl. When casting Fiore’s hands, I had used lukewarm water, and the plaster had set too rapidly. This time I would use cold water and a sprinkling of grog – a pulverized burnt clay – which would slow down the chemical reaction and give me a little more control. I stirred the mixture until it formed a creamy paste, then started to apply it to the leg, careful not to dislodge the bits of string. I worked fast, methodically. My mind, unanchored, floated free.
I hear you’re making something special for the Grand Duke …
Stufa’s words.
That night in the carriage, I had thought at first that he was taking an interest. How naïve of me! All too soon, he had become dismissive, if not openly contemptuous. What had he called my work? Histrionic. Gratuitous. And it didn’t bother him if he upset me. Not in the slightest. In fact, he seemed to want to upset me.
Did I scare you?
His cheekbones sticking out like knuckles, a sharpness to his mouth, his tongue. That black flower again, its petals opening and closing …
My eyes grew heavy. I let my head rest on my arm and found myself returning to Siracusa. I was on horseback, the volcano behind me, its slopes the colour of a pigeon’s wing. I passed white convent walls, the air keen with ripe lemon and wild sage. Below me, far below, the soothing lap and flop of waves. The sea.
I came round a bend in the road and the town appeared ahead of me, the pink dome of my old college rising out of the clustered buildings, the wide bay of the Porto Grande glittering beyond.
My throat tightened.
I rode across the shallow harbour, then past a group of fishermen and up Via Dione, high-sided, sunk in shadow. I stopped outside our house. Someone had dropped a melon, and it had split open, a gash of crimson showing in the dark-green rind. I climbed the steps and went inside. The smell of dried roses, beeswax, flaking plaster. The tiles earth-brown, vein-blue. The doors ajar, the rooms peaceful, cool.
And then an image that seemed lifted from my memory. My father in his study, bars of gold light laid out on the floor. The nobleman he worked for – Gargallo – was standing close to him and talking in a low but forceful voice. Gargallo with his lavish clothes, his head of dark-brown curls …
I saw my father’s mouth twist. He turned his back on his employer and spoke to me without so much as a glance in my direction.
Go and find your mother.
As I backed out of the room, Gargallo looked round, and his expression, which had been affronted, softened into a smile I neither understood nor trusted.
Come here a moment, he said.
I ran for it.
Then I was downstairs, under the pear tree. From a distance, my mother looked the same, but when I stepped forwards, into the sun, I saw how she had changed, and it was hard not to burst into tears, thinking of all the moments I had lost, all the time I had used in other ways. And I had aged as well. There were lines on my forehead, around my mouth. I had no grey hair as yet, but the whites of my eyes were muddy, no longer the pure egg white of a child’s. I told her what Jacopo had been saying. I had wormed my way into the family. I was a leech, a misfit. I didn’t belong. He said all that? she murmured. I do belong, I said, don’t I? Of course you do, she said. He’s wrong, then? Yes, he’s wrong. But I’d had to prompt her, lead her, and I couldn’t shake the feeling there was something she wasn’t telling me, something she couldn’t say. I held her close, and the years since we had last seen each other unrolled before me like a wave breaking, the years kept unrolling, over and over, the ache I had thought I was used to, the wound I carried no matter where I went …
The waves grew louder, and I lifted my head and looked around. Earhole was asleep on the divan, his knees drawn up towards his chest, one hand beneath his cheek. The night was quiet but for the push and pull of his breathing; it was his breathing I had heard inside my dream. I stood up and crossed the room. His fretful face, his poor mank relic of an ear. I fetched a blanket. Drew it over him.
The flames of the candles paled and then became invisible as the window high above me brightened. The moulds for the legs and feet were finished, and I was working on the girl’s right arm. The casting of her right hand alone had taken more than an hour, requiring seven interlocking piece-moulds. As I straightened up and stretched, I heard Earhole shift behind me.
‘I’ve been asleep!’
He sounded amazed, as if sleep was a feat he had attempted many times, but had never quite achieved.
The ice had melted, I told him. Could he fetch another load?
I began to mix a new batch of plaster.
Usually, when you had a votive image made, you chose the part of the body that was injured or diseased. You reproduced the part you wanted cured. In this case, though, her whole body had become a votive image. Whether her death had been accidental, self-inflicted, or the result of an assault, she would almost certainly have suffered. In recreating her, I wasn’t seeking a cure – obviously it was too late for that – but I was restoring her to her former self, before whatever happened, happened. I would be preserving the dog’s head, though, so I would be capturing the moment of violation too. There was that hidden hint of a dark future. When the time came to cast the back of her neck, I would blow on the wet plaster to make sure it absorbed every detail, no matter how minute. Later, I would brush a glistening scarlet wax into the cuts and scratches I had so faithfully recorded. Since the girl would be lying on her back, the dog’s head would remain a secret. At the very least, it would constitute a homage to her anonymous existence. At best, it would act as evidence. If the girl was an object of beauty, she was an object of violence as well. She was youth, but she was also death. Perhaps the piece would have more in common with my other work than the Grand Duke had imagined: it would be a vision of what lay ahead, even though, on the surface, it appeared to be the opposite. Would it be enough to protect me? Would it really be enough? I had to hope so.
By mid-morning, I had cast the limbs. Out in the stable yard, I plunged my head into a bucket of water to jolt myself awake, then went for a walk in the gardens.
October. A crisp blue sky, a heap of leaves smouldering nearby. Such a stillness after the wind of the night before. I thought once again of the man I had killed. His stink in my nostrils, the blood seeping from the wound …
I began to tremble.
The narrow street, the shadows swooping. Then the knife. It had all happened so fast. What else could I have done, though? I shook my head, then crossed myself.
I remembered looking at my father after he was dead. Jacopo had insisted on it. My father’s body had been laid out in a back room in our house. He was uncovered, perhaps because he had just been washed. I tried to turn away, but Jacopo wouldn’t let me. No, look. He forced me closer. Smell. It was a hot day, and my father’s belly had begun to bloat. A fly stood on the white of his left eye. He didn’t blink. I watched as the fly rubbed one leg against the other, unhurried, finicky. My father stared past it, at the ceiling, intent on something only he could see. Jacopo was breathing noisily behind me. You did it, he whispered. It was you.
Smoke floated past, a blue shawl in the air.
Though I barely had the stomach for it, I had decided to dismember the girl. I was under no illusions about how difficult it was going to be. What’s more, I didn’t feel she deserved further mutilation. As a rule, I worked with the bodies of criminals, and there was the feeling that dissection formed part of the punishment. But this girl was innocent – a victim even before I set eyes on her. And anyway, was it strictly necessary to dismember her? Could I cast the torso without removing the limbs? I had no time to think it through. She had been dead for at least fifteen hours. In twenty-one hours – or less – her body would begin to decompose. I had to make a decision, and then stick to it. Any hint of vacillation would be fatal.
As I stood on the grass, I heard a cry. Turning, I saw a vulture scramble across the path with the zookeeper, Crevalcuore, in pursuit. He was about to close his gloved hands round the creature when it spread its wings, hauled itself into the air, and flapped away across the gardens. When Crevalcuore noticed me, he lifted his arms out sideways as if to say, What can you do? In the meantime, the vulture had settled in a distant ilex tree. It looked like a broken black umbrella, blown high into the branches by last night’s wind.
I felt Faustina pass behind me, touching the nape of my neck with cool fingers. She asked me how I was.
I’m all right, I said.
You must be exhausted. Don’t you want to come to bed?
I smiled.
Then Earhole called me. The water had boiled, and he had laid out all the tools.
I picked up a boning knife and cut into the upper thigh. Though soft, the tissue was surprisingly tough. On I went, into the layer of fat. A shocking yellow-orange. Who would have thought such vivid colours could be hidden inside our bodies? I sliced through one of the main veins. Out seeped a thin, transparent liquid, a sort of serum. This was followed by a dark-red jelly, which oozed lazily across the dissecting table’s chilly marble top. Hip joints were always a test of both technique and stamina. Wrapped in a weave of muscles and tendons, and sealed in a capsule made from the most resilient type of membrane, the bones dovetailed in a tightly fitting ball-and-socket construction. Once I had broken into the capsule, I would need a mallet and chisel to disarticulate the two component parts. As I stepped back, wiping my forehead on the inside of my arm, a bolt of pure exhilaration surged through me. In that moment I somehow knew I was going to produce a piece of work that would exceed my capabilities. A contradiction in terms, perhaps. But that was how it felt.
Some three hours later, in the early afternoon, I loaded the severed limbs into the handcart, then asked Earhole to take them to the lazaretto, where the bodies of the diseased and derelict were burned. Left over from the plague years, the building was south of the city walls, about half a mile beyond the Porta Romana. When I last visited, I had been greeted by a man I recognized, but could not place. We had met last spring he told me, in a tavern. I had bought him wine. Back then, he had earned his living at the Campo della Morte. Belbo was his name. I told Earhole to ask for Belbo, and be sure to treat him with respect. The man had an easy-going manner and a slice-of-melon smile. In his time, though, he had worked as an executioner.
That evening, as I lifted the mould away from the girl’s neck, I was confronted once again by the image of the dog, the scratched lines white with plaster now, and a fierce anger crackled through me, like a stack of pine needles catching fire. All of a sudden I was back in our house again, in the turret room. My mother stood with her back to me, staring out over the harbour, the long blue ridge of Monti Climiti in the distance.
Not a word from you in years, she said.
There was a crash three floors below. Boots struck sparks off the tiles in the hall, then grated on the smooth stone of the stairs. Jacopo came striding down the corridor. His complexion had coarsened, and his hair had thinned, but the old antagonism was perfectly intact.
I heard you were here. He was panting from the climb. I can’t believe you had the nerve.
Why not? I said. It’s my home.
His laughter was an abrupt and violent displacement of the air, less like a sound than a blow. He went and stood at the window, and when he spoke to our mother his back was turned, and his voice was hard and cold. You shouldn’t have let him in.
He’s my son, she said.
Is he? Is he really?
Yes.
Because there are stories –
Jacopo … She was reproaching him.
What’s wrong with everyone today? He was still gazing out over the rooftops. Your son, as you insist on calling him, has brought nothing but shame on this family.
That was a long time ago, she said. And besides, we’re not even sure what happened.
Nothing, I said. Nothing happened.
Jacopo swung round. You keep quiet.
You haven’t changed, have you? I said. Still throwing your –
He seized me by the collar and whirled me, one-handed, along the corridor and down the stairs. Though I struggled, I knew I had no chance of freeing myself; it was his fury, I thought, that kept him strong. He hurled me down the front steps with such force that I landed on my back and bit my tongue.
Get out of my house, he said, and stay out.
Your house? It was difficult to speak through the blood that was welling up in my mouth. It’s not your house, it’s our mother’s, and you have no right to –
I have every right, he said. I’m head of the family, and I know what’s best. What’s best is that you’re not here, not ever. What’s best is that you’re far away – or, preferably, dead.
Is this about Ornella?
His face flushed. Don’t bring my wife into this.
It’s because I knew her first.
He began to stroll, loose-shouldered, down the steps, a swagger he had perfected at his military academy. I scrambled backwards, towards my horse. Reaching sideways, I pulled an arquebus out of its holster. I had just noticed it was there. Or perhaps, as in a dream, it had only materialized when it was needed.
Jacopo stopped in his tracks and smiled – partly, I suspected, out of shock, but partly, knowing Jacopo, with a kind of relish. It was as if I had just raised the stakes in a game he was confident of winning. Put that thing away, he said.
I aimed at his legs and fired.
Jacopo’s head flew backwards, and he dropped to the ground so heavily that the paving stones appeared to shudder. Blood soaked the right leg of his breeches.
Coward! he yelled.
No, Jacopo, I said calmly. You’re the coward.
The colour left his face. Sodomite, he muttered. Degenerate. Then, almost as an after-thought, Necrophiliac.
These were no longer accusations. These were facts.
I slid the gun back into its holster and vaulted up on to my horse. My mother was standing at the top of the steps, by the front door. Her mouth opened, then closed again. I said I was sorry for what had happened, and that I loved her, but she was shaking her head. I’m glad your father isn’t here to see this.
Would he have protected me? The venom in my voice surprised me. Well, would he?
She looked away.
I tugged on the reins, which were warm from the sun, and rode off down Via Dione. Then north, towards Catania.
It was a fantasy, of course.
All fantasy.
I glanced at my hands, white with plaster. I could taste blood, and I was shaking. At least I knew why I felt such anger, though. Could Jacopo have told me the origin of his? I doubted it somehow. Probably he had been born with it. Probably he had been tugged, red-faced and raging, from the womb.
The door opened, and I jumped.
‘It’s only me,’ Earhole said.
Though I knew where I was, I could sense the blue sea at the end of the street, between the buildings, and I could feel the jolt of the gun in my trigger hand – a gun I hadn’t even realized I owned! – and I imagined that my brother would walk with a limp for the rest of his life, or even lose his leg altogether, like Faustina’s friend. He would become a bitter man – a bully to his wife and mother, an ogre to his children. I had done nobody any favours. I should have shot him full in the face and sent the back of his head careening sloppily across the street. I should have ended it, once and for all.
I heard a cough. Looking round, I saw Earhole with another barrow full of ice.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was miles away.’
The girl’s body had been delivered shortly before midnight on Friday. At dawn on Sunday, and without entirely understanding why, I surgically removed the section of skin with the dog’s head carved into it. I pinned it to a flat piece of cork and placed it in a jar of alcohol. As I returned to the body, I noticed a green blush or stain on the right side of the abdomen, a sure sign that the process of decomposition was under way. I had finished just in time.
Since then, Earhole had made a second journey to the lazaretto, where Belbo had seen to the burning of the body. No trace of it now remained. In its place on the marble slab lay the fruits of thirty hours’ almost uninterrupted work. As always, I was struck by the contrast between the crude, grubby shapelessness of the moulds and the specific, subtle secrets I knew them to contain. Looking at the outside, you wouldn’t have been able to guess the first thing about the girl’s appearance – except, perhaps, for her height – but there was this eerie, magical fact: the space inside would look exactly like her. Every detail of her physical being had been captured, stored – immortalized. Though she might seem to have gone, she was actually still there, suspended between two different forms of existence, made of air.
I sent Earhole home happy, with a handful of quattrini in his pocket, then I walked back to my lodgings. I could feel the sun on my shoulders, but darkness kept bleeding into my field of vision, and the world wobbled and swirled around me, as if it were being blown out of molten glass and had yet to solidify. Though it was two in the afternoon, I climbed into bed and went straight to sleep.
I woke to an uncanny hush. My wrists ached, and my whole body felt stiff, unwieldy. I lay quite still. The city sounded as if it had been smothered. Even with my eyes closed I could tell that it was light. Was it Monday already?
Later, standing at the window, I saw that a fog had descended, a fog so dense that the lopsided shutters on the building opposite were only vague suggestions of themselves. I thought of the moulds lying in a cupboard in my workshop, and my heart speeded up as I remembered the feeling of lightness that had flowed into me during the dismemberment, that flare of exhilaration for no reason. I sat at my desk and wrote to Faustina, asking her to meet me by the column in the Mercato Vecchio, as usual.
When I arrived that afternoon, there was a man with a brazier of glowing coals in the corner of the square. I watched him twirl a pair of blackened tongs, the blue smoke emptying into the fog. He was roasting chestnuts. It was the feast of San Simone, he told me.
‘Doesn’t the air smell wonderful?’ Faustina stood at my elbow. Over her shoulder was a bag that clinked every time she moved. ‘You disappeared again,’ she said. ‘Did you have another fever? Did you nearly die?’
I smiled. ‘It’s only been three days.’
‘It felt longer.’
‘To me too.’
We began to walk.
‘There’s something that’s been troubling me.’ I paused. ‘I’ve been feeling awkward about what I said last time I saw you. I feel I disappointed you.’
‘You’re not to think about that.’
‘But –’
‘No.’ She looked around to see if anyone was watching, then moved a step closer. ‘You haven’t kissed me yet. You haven’t even said hello.’
That evening Faustina took me to the ghetto. I had only been there once before, with Fiore, and I had forgotten how cramped and derelict it was, the streets no wider than corridors, and often blocked by piles of waste or rubble. The buildings towered above me, their dark-grey façades scarred and mottled, their eaves lost in the fog. Since the ghetto could not expand sideways, it had to go upwards, into the sky. It was all done illegally, with no controls. Some buildings were eleven storeys high.
We passed the well in the Piazza della Fonte. The whole area was dense with smells – smoke, fat, piss, and damp. Underneath, though, like a recurring theme, I thought I detected something which reminded me of ash or cinders, fainter than the other smells but much more acrid. I asked Faustina if I was imagining it. She shook her head. Twenty years ago there had been a fire, she told me, and part of the ghetto had burned down. The place was still being rebuilt.
Later, as she emerged from a shop with two tallow lanterns, the bell for the night hour began to ring.
‘If we’re not careful,’ I said, ‘we’re going to get –’
My sentence was cut off by the thud of the gates closing and the metallic crash of iron bolts being slammed into their sockets.
Faustina only grinned.
She led me to a grand, grim building in the ghetto’s north-east corner. Looking up at the windows, I saw that each storey had been divided horizontally. You could fit more families in that way. Some of the apartments had such low ceilings, she said, that only small children could stand up straight.
By the time we reached the fifth floor, the murmur of voices had died away. The upper storeys were uninhabitable, she told me. As we climbed higher, she advised me to watch my footing. There were stairs that had rotted clean through.
We came out at last into a drawing room or salon. I crossed to the window. The street was so narrow that I could almost have stepped on to the roof of the building opposite. I faced back into the room. A sofa stood against one wall, its springs and stuffing showing, and an iron chandelier lay on its side in the middle of the floor. These traces of splendour didn’t surprise me; before the buildings had been requisitioned by the Grand Duke’s family, they had belonged to some of the most famous names in Florence – Pecori, Brunelleschi, Della Tosa.
‘No one’s going to find us here,’ I said.
‘And if they do, they’ll probably be criminals,’ Faustina said, ‘like us.’ She lifted her lantern higher. ‘Did you see the fresco?’
On the far wall was a pastoral scene, with groups of nymphs and goatherds arranged against a landscape of pine trees, streams and hills. The clouds above their heads were edged in pink and gold. At first glance, it looked like a thousand other frescoes, but then I noticed that the figures were all looking to their left, and that their expressions varied from nervousness and apprehension to outright alarm. It wasn’t possible to know the reason, though. At some point in the past a wall had been built across the room, and half the fresco was missing.
I asked Faustina what she thought they were frightened of.
‘It could be a wild animal, I suppose.’ She studied a girl in a lilac dress who had thrown up an arm as if to fend off what was coming. ‘But I like not knowing, actually. It’s more powerful that way.’ She looked at me, her face glowing in the burnt-orange light of the lantern.
‘You’re beautiful,’ I said.
She made a joke about the fact that I could hardly see her.
I went and stood by the window. When I was with Faustina, I always had the feeling that this was something that wouldn’t happen again – that this was all there was, or ever would be. I found it exhausting to have to treat each new encounter as though it might well be the last. It was partly the times we lived in, of course, which had made criminals of us, as she had said, but it was also specific to her, it arose out of her character, and if I paid her too many compliments – something she had noticed, and seemed to feel ambivalent about – it was perhaps because I was trying to bring her nearer, trying to turn what we had into something a little less unstable.
‘I think you’ve ruined other women for me,’ I said, staring out into the fog. ‘I used to look at women all the time. Since I met you, though, I don’t do it any more. What’s the point? I know there’s no one who’ll come close.’
She came up behind me. ‘You almost sound sad.’
I smiled. ‘I’m not sad.’
‘I told you before. If you keep on like this, you’ll run out of things to say.’
I turned to face her. ‘I’ll never run out.’
We sat down on the sofa, and Faustina loosened the drawstring on the goatskin bag that Vespi had given her, the bag she had used for her spells and potions. She had brought some of the wine that was traditional on San Simone, a loaf of bread, green olives in a twist of paper, and half a dozen slices of porchetta. She uncorked the bottle and poured us both a cup. The wine was so young I could taste the grapes in it.
‘This is what my father drank,’ she said, ‘the last time I ever saw him.’
It was around the time of her thirteenth birthday, and Remo stayed for three whole days. One afternoon, he went out hunting with another man from the village. When he returned, his lack of awkwardness with her and his exaggerated attempts to appear alert told her that he had been drinking. That evening, he settled at the kitchen table with a bottle of wine. Leaning against the wall with her hands trapped behind her, she watched him so closely that she could see the pulse beating in his neck. He had entered Tuscany illegally, he said, through the hills near Chiusi. He had risked everything to see her. If the authorities found out he had crossed the border, he would be thrown into prison, or even hanged. In the past, she had always let him speak, but this time she interrupted. She didn’t understand, she said. Why wasn’t he allowed to cross the border?
He drained his glass and poured another, then he said something that sent a thrill right through her.
‘You don’t know it, but you’re asking how you came to be born.’
When he was in his early twenties, he said, he had worked as a groom on one of the ducal estates. This was during the time of the Grand Duke’s famously tempestuous marriage.
‘It was a magnificent villa,’ he went on, ‘with its own private theatre, formal gardens, and a river nearby, but it was in the middle of nowhere – at least, that was how it seemed to the Grand Duke’s wife. She had become increasingly hysterical in Florence, and the Grand Duke thought that if he sent her to the country she might calm down, but she felt lonely and frightened. She was at the height of her beauty, and she was being buried. What if her light went out, the light that made her who she was? It was around that time that she started wearing black; she was in mourning for her life. She would come down to the stables every day – riding was her only consolation – and we would talk. She told me not to call her “Your Highness”. She wanted me to treat her like anybody else.’
Faustina asked what they had talked about.
Remo laughed. ‘Well, actually, she did all the talking. I just listened.’
She told him about visiting the court at Fontainebleau, and how she had fallen in love with her cousin, Charles. She showed him the ring Charles had given her. It was an opal, she said, a stone that stood for passion and spontaneity. I lost my wedding ring in the first week of my marriage. I still have this one, though. What does that tell you? How she had loved Fontainebleau! There was boating at midnight on candle-lit canals, dancing on carpets of rose petals. There were banquets that lasted from dusk till dawn. They drank snow-cooled wine, and dined on peacocks’ tongues and teal soup with hippocras and pies that sang because they were filled with nightingales. Beef was served in a gold leaf sauce. You ate gold? Yes. To make us strong. She talked about those days as old people talk about their youth – and she was only twenty-one! But it was a time when she had been happy – deliriously happy – and she seemed to know that it would never come again.
One wet afternoon, while he was polishing saddles in the tack room, the curtain of rain in the doorway parted to reveal the Grand Duke’s wife, a lilac umbrella open above her head, her eyes glowing underneath.
‘I’ve given Malvezzi the slip,’ she said.
Malvezzi, her chamberlain, had been instructed to follow her everywhere and report on her behaviour. Ever since his arrival at the villa, she had delighted in torturing the poor man by going on walks that lasted hours, knowing full well that he was overweight, and had no chance of keeping up.
She lowered her umbrella. ‘How long have we known each other, Remo?’
In his opinion, they hardly knew each other at all, but he wasn’t in a position to say so.
‘About two months.’
‘And what do you think of me?’ she said. ‘Do you find me boring? I’m always talking, after all – talking my head off.’ She walked in a tight circle just inside the stable door, water dripping from the tip of her umbrella. ‘You know, I’m not sure I’ve let you say anything, not in all the time we’ve spent together. Look at you now. You’re just standing there. You can’t get a word in edgeways.’
Remo smiled. ‘I don’t find you boring.’
‘No?’
‘Quite the opposite.’
‘What do you mean by that, Remo? Put it in words, so I can understand.’ She issued her commands with such a light touch that they felt like invitations, and she had moved closer, close enough for him to be able to see the drops of rain on her black dress, close enough to sense the warmth of the skin beneath.
‘You –’
She moved closer still. No woman, it seemed, had ever stood so close.
‘Your voice –’
‘What about my voice?’
There was such a sweetness to her breath that he thought she might have eaten an apricot or a peach while crossing the garden. Though neither apricots nor peaches were in season.
‘What about my voice?’ she said again.
‘The way you speak. I suppose it’s because you’re French.’
‘You think I sound funny.’
‘No, I like it.’
A horse stirred behind him. The whisk of a tail. Hooves shifting, clumsy, in the straw.
‘I’ve never seen anyone as beautiful as you,’ he said. ‘It’s impossible, at times, to believe it. I think I must be dreaming. Imagining things. But then I realize that I’m awake, and that you’re real.’
‘How do you know I’m real?’
She was so much cleverer than he was. She knew how to manipulate a conversation, how to give it a different shape, a new direction. Six words was all it took.
‘How do you know?’
Her pupils widened suddenly, and he felt he was falling towards her, into her.
Her breath against his face.
‘Touch me,’ she said.
He stepped back.
‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘I’m not good enough for you?’
That lightness again.
The rain hung behind her, as hard to see through as a piece of gauze. The world lay beyond – inaccessible, remote. Or maybe it was right there with them, where they stood.
He did as she had asked.
Early the next morning, he saddled two of the finest horses in the stable, and they rode west, towards Pisa. The lead-grey air, the dull copper of the sun. The mist so close to the ground that a farmhouse seemed to float on it like an ark. They had not discussed what they would do when they reached the coast. He assumed she had a plan. She didn’t seem like somebody who would ever be short of ideas, though all of them would involve a gamble. Perhaps she would charter a boat, and they would set sail for the south of France. That, he thought, was her immediate aim: to escape the prison of her marriage. He was happy, for the moment, to be with her, but he didn’t dare to think too far ahead.
Just as well.
The authorities caught up with them in the wooded hills not far from Lake Fucecchio.
‘All right,’ Malvezzi wheezed. ‘The fun’s over.’
The Grand Duke’s wife was escorted back to the villa. Remo, suddenly alone, expected to be punished. The galleys at the very least. Even, possibly, execution. Instead, they sent him into exile, with a warning that he should never set foot in Tuscany again. Perhaps they knew the Grand Duke’s wife was responsible, and that he was no more than a pawn in one of her many games.
‘What they didn’t know,’ Remo told Faustina, as she listened open-mouthed, ‘what no one knew, not even me, was that you were already alive inside her – a small seed growing …’
Faustina stared at him. ‘The Grand Duke’s wife was my mother?’
He looked right through her, back into the past. He seemed to be having trouble believing it himself. It sounded like a story, even to the story-teller.
‘My mother,’ she said again.
‘You were conceived on horseback!’ Remo laughed in delight, then shot her a wary glance. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you that.’ He hit the side of his head and groaned. ‘I shouldn’t have told you anything. I’m an idiot.’ He hit himself again.
‘Don’t.’ She went round the table and held his head against her chest. She smelled woodsmoke on him, and dried sweat, and fifteen or twenty glasses of young red wine. And distantly, ever so distantly, she thought she could smell horses.
‘You must forget,’ he said, his eyes closed in a kind of agony. ‘I’m drunk. I got carried away. I’ve been talking nonsense.’
‘You’re drunk all right.’
He looked up at her and touched her cheek. ‘Sometimes, you know, you’re just like her. You’ve got the same spark –’
Just then, a woman’s voice interrupted Faustina’s story. It was coming from the window. We crept across the room and peered out into the night. On the flat roof of the building opposite, a woman was pacing up and down, her face tilted skywards, her hands in front of her, clutching at the air. She was talking to herself in a language I took to be Hebrew. A man stepped out on to the roof, moving with such caution that it might have been a frozen pond. On his suit of dark clothes I could just make out the yellow badge all Jews were supposed to wear. The woman began to shout at him, then seemed to tear her hair out by the roots and fling it on the ground. For a moment, I couldn’t believe what I had seen. Then I understood. It must have been a wig. The man tried to reason with the woman, but she shook him off and pushed past him, back into the building. The man remained where he was, head bowed.
We returned to the sofa. Some Jewish women were required to shave their heads when they married, Faustina told me, so they did not tempt other men. Those women tended to wear wigs. It was an extreme custom. You hardly ever saw it in Florence.
‘Why did you decide to tell me who you are?’ I said. ‘I mean, why tonight?’
‘I’m not sure.’ She paused. ‘Maybe it’s to do with the lovely things you said earlier. It reminded me of what my father said to my mother – in that stable, in the rain …’
My words echoing the words that had brought her into being, the words that had made it necessary to pretend she didn’t exist.
My love like a poultice, drawing out that sweet, sweet poison.
*
‘Actually, it’s a miracle I was born at all,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I can’t believe I’m here. Surely I must be imagining it all. Them. This. Even you.’
When her father opened the second bottle, she went on, he jumped nine months to the next part of the story. Banished from Tuscany, he had crossed into the coastal state of Piombino, where he had found a job in a lead mine. It was hard work, and he would console himself with memories of the Grand Duke’s wife – and all the time, though he did not know it, she was pregnant with his child. Then, in the depths of winter, a letter arrived from her lady-in-waiting, telling him that she had given birth, and that he was to come for the baby. He arrived at the villa five days later, his mind whirling. The lady-in-waiting told him that the Grand Duke’s wife was indisposed, and could not see him. She asked what his intentions were. He said his sister would take the child. She seemed to approve of the idea. He set off for his sister’s house in the south-east of the duchy. A wet nurse – Vanna – travelled with him. When they stopped to feed the child – in lonely places, usually: mountain passes, forest glades – Vanna told him about the pregnancy, and how it had been concealed from all but the most trusted servants. Fortunately, the Grand Duke had been abroad for most of the year, in Germany, almost as if he were co-operating with the deception, but his prolonged absence had prevented his wife from claiming that the child was his, which would have saved everyone a great deal of trouble – though it was Vanna’s impression that she hadn’t wanted the baby to grow up as a member of the Grand Duke’s family. Anything but that.
It took Remo and Vanna more than a week to reach Torremagna, and snow fell as they rode. He was afraid his daughter would catch cold. He was afraid she would die. He kept looking down into her face, which was no bigger than a saucer, her eyes a misty, marbled blue. She hardly made a sound, even when she was hungry. It was as if she understood her predicament, and knew better than to give herself away.
The snow had eased by the time they arrived at Ginevra’s house. During the journey, Remo had grown to care for his daughter, and as he stood on the narrow, curving street something hot poured through him at the knowledge that he could not keep her, a kind of scalding of his heart. He whispered all sorts of things to her in their last moments together, as much to strengthen his resolve as anything else. It’s not because I don’t love you. You won’t remember any of this. I’m sorry, my little one. He knocked on the door, then looked down once again. Her mouth, which didn’t know how to smile. Her eyes, which still couldn’t shed a tear. A single snowflake landed on her forehead like a blessing. She blinked. She didn’t cry. He was glad she wasn’t any older.
The door opened.
When Ginevra saw her brother standing on the doorstep she understood that he was about to ask an enormous favour, and she shook her head angrily, not because she was going to turn him down, but because it confirmed her low opinion of him. He was feckless, spoiled. Impossible. But it was impossible to say no to him. His charm got him into trouble, and then out of it again.
He handed the baby to his sister.
She became a mother.
‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked.
‘A girl.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘I don’t know.’ He glanced at Vanna, the wet nurse. ‘She hasn’t got one yet.’
‘You haven’t named her?’
He stared at the ground. He couldn’t believe how empty his arms felt. How light.
‘I’ll call her Faustina,’ Ginevra said.
‘Faustina?’ he said. ‘Why Faustina?’
‘It means “lucky”.’
Was this sarcasm, the scathing part of her character, or had a seam of compassion opened up in her? At some deep level, he couldn’t help but feel she might identify with the child she had inherited. After all, she too had been rejected once.
Remo was about to continue with his story when the front door opened and Ginevra walked in. He grinned. ‘I was just talking about you.’
‘A lot of rubbish, probably,’ she said, ‘judging by the amount of wine you’ve drunk.’
Remo turned to Faustina. ‘You see? I told you I was talking rubbish.’
The next day, as he prepared to leave, he told her that Ginevra had always been disapproving. It was her way.
‘I know,’ Faustina said. ‘But it doesn’t make her any easier to live with.’
Her candour startled him. ‘She was very kind, you know, to take you in …’
Just then, Faustina came close to siding with Ginevra against her father – she was suddenly aware of how weak and slippery he could be – but she saw him so seldom that she couldn’t bring herself to voice the barbed words that were lining up inside her. She couldn’t ruin the rare and precious moments they had together, nor could she risk saying something that might make him think twice about returning. She loved him so much that she could never be herself.
Not that it would have mattered greatly, as things turned out. Crossing the Maremma di Siena in an attempt to avoid detection, Remo contracted a fever and died later that year.
‘So,’ Faustina said, ‘now you know the whole story.’
I ran my hand over the sofa’s shabby velvet. ‘Do you believe what he told you?’
‘Why? Don’t you?’
‘I’m only asking.’
‘It’s all I know about myself. It’s all I’ve got.’ The flame in one of our lanterns fluttered and went out. In the dim light, Faustina looked at me across one shoulder, as apprehensive as one of the figures in the fresco. ‘You’re not going to take it away from me, are you?’
‘Of course not.’
She stood up and walked to the window. ‘There have been times when I’ve doubted it myself. The whole thing could be one of my father’s fantasies – the stable, the rain, the wet umbrella … The trouble is, I don’t have anything to replace it with.’ She was facing away from me, the fog drifting past her, into the room. ‘What makes it seem possible is the fact that Marguerite-Louise had lots of affairs. They still talk about it here. And there’s something in me that seems to belong elsewhere, to come from far away …’
‘Does your uncle know?’
She shook her head. ‘My father wouldn’t tell him. He thought it was safer. He didn’t even tell Ginevra.’
‘He was probably right,’ I said.
The second lantern flickered and then died.
When Faustina spoke again, she was just a voice in the darkness.
‘You asked me once what I was doing on the night of the banquet,’ she said. ‘I was there because I wanted to see the Grand Duke close up. I wanted to see the man my mother loathed, the man she left – the man who could have been my father, but never was.’
I joined her at the window.
While serving the pasta con le sarde, she went on, she had caught the Grand Duke staring at her, and when she met his gaze he seemed to jerk in his chair, as though somebody had pricked him with a pin. She thought he had recognized her – or if not her exactly, something in her – but had convinced himself that he must be mistaken or deluded, since he immediately shook his head, adjusted the position of his cutlery, and then turned to the jewel-encrusted woman on his left and started talking about the extraordinary freedoms enjoyed by the female sex in England.
‘You think you reminded him of Marguerite-Louise?’ I said.
‘I don’t know. That’s what it felt like. It was strange – like being two people at once.’
‘He talks about her all the time – to me, anyway. He claims he still loves her. You know what he told me? He can’t see any trace of her in his children. He thinks she did it deliberately. Because they were his.’ I paused. When I took a breath, I could feel the fog collecting in my lungs. ‘Did you know she tried to kill them, before they were born?’
She was looking at me now. I could see the chips of silver where her eyes were.
Pennyroyal had been involved, I said, and elaterium, and nights of drinking and dancing. Snake root. Artemesia. Long rides on the fastest horses. None of it worked. Later, Marguerite-Louise tormented the Grand Duke by telling him their marriage was a travesty, and that they had committed fornication, and that all their children were bastards –
‘And then she had a real bastard,’ Faustina murmured. ‘Me.’
I reached out in the darkness and found her hand. ‘You might be the only child she ever really wanted.’