I was woken in the night by the low, excited murmur of men’s voices. Lying with Faustina’s head against my shoulder, I listened to the riffle and snap of playing cards, and the delicate, bright chink of coins. Signora de la Mar had told me about the illegal gambling dens that operated in the ghetto after dark. It had been one of her husband’s many weaknesses.
At dawn I was woken again by the grating of iron bolts. The ghetto gates were being opened. I moved my arm from behind Faustina’s back. Her eyes opened, and she sat up.
‘There’s something I forgot to tell you,’ she said.
Every year, her uncle travelled north to visit his suppliers. He would cement old relationships, forge new ones. In the past, she had run the apothecary in his absence, but this time he wanted her to go with him. She needed to start learning the business, he had told her, or she wouldn’t be able to take over when he was gone. She would be away for a couple of months.
‘When are you leaving?’
‘Before the end of the year.’
I walked to the window. The fog had lifted, and the sky was a mottled silver-grey, like the skin of a fish. Perhaps my sense that things were temporary had not been so wide of the mark.
‘Think how much work you’ll be able to do,’ she said lightly.
I had sensed the secrets in her long before we ever spoke; in fact, I often thought it was the parts of ourselves we kept from others that had brought us together. As I stood looking out over the jumbled, clandestine rooftops of the ghetto, it occurred to me that she might have revealed her origins to me precisely because she was about to go away. She wanted to show me that I had earned her trust. She might also think the knowledge would bind me to her still more closely.
‘Is it really true,’ I asked, ‘what you told me last night?’
‘I think so.’ She shifted on the sofa. ‘Why else would my father have made me promise to forget everything he’d said?’
I turned and looked at her, and suddenly I was frightened.
Though it had only been light for half an hour, the narrow streets were already choked with Jews leaving the ghetto to sell their merchandise – Dutch linen, kerchiefs, and batiste – and we were carried along on the jostling stream of people, through the gate and out into the Mercato Vecchio. As we came to the junction of Ferravecchi and Pellicceria, a black carriage swayed round the corner. On the door I glimpsed Bassetti’s coat of arms. I told Faustina she should leave.
‘Just go,’ I said. ‘Quickly.’
By the time the carriage drew level, she had blended with the crowd, and I had done my best to tidy my hair and straighten my clothes. Bassetti’s face appeared, almost as if he had known I would be there. He was on his way to the palace, he said. Would I care for a lift? I thanked him and climbed in.
Once I was seated, he gave me a subtle, searching look. ‘You’re up early.’ His voice was all syrup and fur, as usual.
‘I was out walking, Don Bassetti,’ I said. ‘I like to watch the city wake.’
‘Florence inspires you?’
‘Yes.’
He was mortified, he said, on account of his continuing failure to visit my workshop. He felt he owed me an apology. He was doing me a great honour even to think of visiting, I told him. It would be a miracle if he could find the time, preoccupied as I knew him to be with such weighty matters. But Bassetti would not be mollified, or even sidetracked. He began to discuss the delights and dangers of works made out of wax. He was curious to learn my views on what he called ‘the disorderly imagination’. He had heard of wax figures being used in love spells, for example. Death threats too. An effigy had even featured in a plot to kill a king. One’s approach to wax was like one’s approach to life itself, I said. It depended entirely on your moral sense. Wax could lead you into temptation. Wax could deliver you from evil. Bassetti sank into a pensive silence, his forefinger laid on his moustache, his thumb beneath his chin.
He seemed to be worrying at the subject without quite knowing why. It was as if he sensed the existence of the secret commission, but couldn’t give it a name or a shape. In spite of that, I found him good company, genial but perceptive, and it was on that morning, as we jolted over the Ponte Santa Trinità, that I decided to take his amiability at face value. His conversation with Stufa after the banquet was the kind of conversation he would have had about any new arrival in the city. It was necessary vigilance. Standard procedure. I shouldn’t overestimate my own importance. And as for those disturbing, snake-like oscillations, I hadn’t noticed them of late.
All the same, I was relieved he hadn’t seen me with Faustina. In recent months, the Office for Public Decency had become less tolerant, and the penalties for even the most innocuous transgressions were unremittingly harsh. Men found to have entered houses that were inhabited by unmarried women had been thrown into prison, and one youth had been sent to the galleys in Livorno, simply because he had stopped on the street and talked to a girl in an upstairs window. If you were in a tavern and you mentioned any kind of illicit behaviour, people would hold their hands out, loosely clenched, and make sinister rowing motions, and there was a renewed appetite for public floggings and other such brutalities. Even though I met Faustina secretly, in out-of-the-way places, I was under no illusion about the risks we were running. The fewer people who knew about us, the better.
What’s more, her latest revelations had triggered a whole new set of anxieties. How would the Grand Duke and his advisers react if they learned of her true identity? Given the intense speculation surrounding the succession and the fatalistic air that hung over the palace, it seemed likely they would view her as a threat. The last thing the Grand Duke would want in these troubled times was for his wife’s infidelity to manifest itself. At the very least, Faustina would be living proof of his dishonour, a reminder of his weakness – a source of shame. All things considered, maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea if she disappeared for a while.
When Faustina and her uncle left the city, towards the end of December, I occupied myself with the Grand Duke’s commission to the exclusion of all else, setting myself the target of finishing by the time they returned. The winter was cold and wet that year – the amphitheatre in the palace gardens flooded, and the Arno almost burst its banks – and I put in long days in my workshop.
I was embarking on the most difficult part of the process. After countless experiments, I decided to combine yellow beeswax with a more resilient wax imported from Brazil. Carnauba, as it was known, was hard and brittle, and it melted at a much higher temperature than other waxes. This was crucial. If the melting point of the first layer that I brushed into the moulds was too low, its integrity might be impaired or even destroyed by the next layer that was applied. To the blend of beeswax and carnauba I added lead-white, which I hoped would guarantee the pearly quality I had admired in the paintings of Correggio. Translucency was desirable in itself, but it would also allow subsequent and more heavily pig mented layers to show through from underneath. I would be able to conjure a shadow in some places, a blush in others.
So strange, Faustina being gone. Like a throwback to the days when I had no idea who she was or where she lived, when I had no hope of ever seeing her again. I would stare at the drawing I had made of her. Though it was a good likeness, it didn’t bring her any closer. If anything, in fact, a gap began to open up between the image, which was static, and the complex, fluid person I was only just beginning to know. She became distant, improbable, and there were moments when I suspected that our whole relationship was wishful thinking, and all the stories she had told me were invented – which, oddly enough, was how they had seemed at the time.
But there was an aspect to all this that was even stranger. Perversely, as Faustina became more insubstantial, and harder to believe in, the girl I was working on emerged, took shape. On the day when I gently prised the first completed mould apart and lifted out the unknown girl’s left arm, I realized there was an eerie correlation between my experience and that of the Grand Duke, a correlation that was bound, at some as yet uncharted level, to draw us closer: I missed Faustina, just as he missed Marguerite-Louise, and if Faustina’s story about her origins was true, then the object of my longing was the offspring of his.
Though I had preserved the carving of the dog’s head, both in the form of a mould, and as a specimen, in alcohol, I sometimes worried that it might not be enough to protect me. Or, to put it another way, I kept feeling there was a shortfall in the work itself, a connection I had failed to make.
Then, on a frosty January morning, the Grand Duke’s head gardener, Navacchio, appeared in the doorway to my workshop. He was a diligent, thoughtful man with thinning hair and abnormally large ears; whenever I saw those fleshy lobes, in fact, I was tempted to reach out and give one of them a playful tug. He was sorry to disturb me, he said, but he had been growing fruit out of season, in a glasshouse of his own design, and he would appreciate my opinion. He handed me a peach from the basket he was carrying.
I cut the peach in half, and as I stared at the dark-red stone at the heart of the fruit I felt something skip or catch inside me. I found myself thinking once again of Faustina’s scandalous conception. What had her father said? A small seed growing … I stood back, the halved peach lying on the table. Of course. Yes. That was it. I would place a baby in the belly of the girl. On the outside, she would be everything the Grand Duke was hoping she would be – an archetype, a beauty, a kind of Eve. Inside her, though, there would be a child that had grown to full term, and was ready to be born.
Navacchio was fiddling with the handle of his basket. ‘You’re not going to try it?’
I took a bite. The flesh was much crisper and more tart than I had expected.
‘Interesting,’ I said.
‘You don’t like it.’
‘I do. But it reminds me of an apple.’
If Navacchio was disappointed by my response, he gave no sign of it. He just nodded gravely, thanked me and turned away.
I should have been thanking him. For the next two weeks, I worked on the new idea, adapting a mould I had brought from Naples. Though the child would be hidden, and might never be seen, by anyone, it would have to be as beautiful as the girl who was going to carry it. I gave it flawless skin and sleek black hair. Its hands were tucked beneath its chin, its knees drawn up towards its chest. The umbilical cord, whose blood vessels were visible as strands of turquoise and orange, coiled under its left wrist, then over its upper arm, and vanished behind its back. Its gender would be concealed, indeterminate. I modelled the lower half of a uterus, its dusty purple-red inspired by Navacchio’s experimental peach, then I placed the child inside. What thrilled me most about what I was doing was the contrast between the girl’s flat belly and the fully grown baby it contained. An anatomical impossibility. Unnatural. Just plain wrong. Perhaps I had learned from Marvuglia after all! And yet … Though the work might appear to contradict itself, both the size of the baby and the shape of the girl’s belly were authentic, true. They were simply taken from different stages of her existence. I was showing the present and the future in the same breath. I was collapsing time.
Was I worrying too much? Was I including too many layers of protection and defence? I didn’t think so. As I had said to Cuif once – and it had made him laugh out loud – I’d never lived in a place where paranoia was so completely justifiable. What’s more, this wasn’t only about protecting myself. This was about meaning. To the Grand Duke, the baby would symbolize his family’s immortality, the continuation of his blood-line. His heir. To me, it represented the child his wife had already given birth to, in secret. The child no one could ever know about. To me, the baby was Faustina. Here, at last, was the kind of ambiguity I had been looking for.
On March the first I left my lodgings at dawn. It was a humid, stagnant morning, and I was glad I had not been drinking. I passed the Uffizi and set off across the Ponte Vecchio. I was eager to look once again at the commission, which I had finished only a few hours before. I had spent the previous day removing flaws and runnings, disguising joins, and applying a final layer of varnish. At midnight I had left her in the back room, under a sheet of muslin. I looked to the west and saw birds spiralling in the grubby air above Sardigna. What an unlikely journey, from that savage wasteland to the Grand Duke’s palace … A sudden yawning in the pit of my stomach. A kind of vertigo.
I slipped past Toldo, who was dozing by the gate. Dew blackened my boots as I walked down the track. The ancient myrtle trees, the distant fountains. The clarity of the air. Always a sense of sanctuary, of entering a sacred space. In the stable yard I stopped and listened. Nobody about. It was too early even for Navacchio.
Once inside my workshop, I locked the door behind me, then took the dust-sheet and lifted it away. She looked so solid – so human. She was carrying a child, of course, but I had also filled the other hollow spaces – thighs, chest, skull – with a loose weave of burlap, which I had cut into strips and soaked in wax. The scrim, as it was known, behaved like ballast: it gave her substance, integrity. In the white morning light, her stillness was unnerving. She reminded me of a game we used to play as children, where we pretended to be dead.
I moved closer.
Her dark-brown eyes, opaque and yet intelligent, had been made by a glass-blower in Murano. Her lips had been painted with two coats of Parisian lacquer, and around her throat she wore a string of imitation pearls. Though the idea for the necklace had originated in Fiore’s story about the murdered countess, it also had a practical function, which was to conceal the place where her head joined her body. Her hair was her own. One shade lighter than her eyes, with suggestions of bronze and copper, it tumbled in a loose, lustrous rope past the polished curve of her right shoulder, coiling over ribs that were more hinted at than visible, through the gate formed by her thumb and forefinger, and on to her upturned palm. What pleased me most, though, was her skin. It wasn’t white or rose or cream, nor was it gold or ochre, yet all those colours were involved. The tones altered in the most delicate and elusive of ways, from the cool ivory of her forehead and the milk-blue of her armpits to the hot coral of her nipples, as if blood were circling inside her, real blood, sometimes rising to the surface, sometimes holding back, staying deep. I had paid attention to the most obscure and seemingly insignificant details – the particular hue of an eyelid or a fingernail, the special pallor of the parts of her that rarely saw the light. I had worried she might be too much of an aphrodisiac, and I had been right to worry. The way she looked off to one side, inviting my gaze while averting her own. The way her lips parted a fraction to reveal her teeth. The way her left leg lifted to afford a glimpse of the supple inner thigh. Even in the stark spring light, her beauty was carnal. Had I gone too far?
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.
After passing a series of rooms the servants called ‘The Eyes’, on account of the large, round windows that gazed impassively out over the city, we arrived at a locked door. Beyond it was an unused passage, the tiled floor so thick with dust that we left footprints, almost as if we were walking on snow. We started up a steep flight of stairs. I made sure that the servants kept the packing case horizontal, one holding his end above his head while the other walked backwards, bending low, his hands down near his feet. We came out into a modest, unfurnished apartment. One half-open door gave on to a strange, empty space that had a rough grey convex floor, and I realized we must be above the flamboyant rooms with vaulted ceilings where the Grand Duke held court. Covert and neglected, the apartment felt like the kind of place where I would meet Faustina. I sneezed twice. Here, too, the floors were voluptuous with dust.
At last, we reached the chamber mentioned in the note. I unlocked the door, and we passed into a circular, domed room. The walls were painted duck-egg blue, and the floor was a vanilla marble, veined with brown and grey. The only windows were narrow and high up, where the dome gathered to a nipple. An oak table stood in the middle of the room. Nearby were two chairs, their gilt arms shaped like lions’ paws. The servants looked at me, waiting for instructions.
‘On the table, please,’ I said.
Once they had gone, their voices fading in the corridor – a murmur, a stifled laugh – I lifted the sliding panel. Slowly, carefully, I eased the shrouded girl from her container. I removed the hessian, but left the final layer of muslin draped over her naked body like a veil. It was late afternoon. The Grand Duke was due at any moment. Sitting down, I fell into a kind of reverie. I was outdoors, on a smooth, green hill. I couldn’t tell what country I was in. England, perhaps. There were wild animals nearby, but I didn’t feel in any danger. The air was warm, the ground soft and yet resilient. To be alive was such a blessing, such a –
‘Zummo?’
Dazed, I sprang out of the chair. The Grand Duke was standing by the door. He wore a cream-coloured wig and scarlet clothes, the fabric glittering with gem-stones and trimmed with little clouds of fur. He must have come straight from an important engagement. I apologized for having dozed off.
‘You work harder than any of us,’ he said. ‘You put us to shame.’
‘I doubt that very much, Your Highness.’
He was weary too, he told me. He had spent most of the afternoon with an Austrian diplomat, one of Leopold I’s advisers, who was intent on involving him in a political manoeuvre that didn’t interest him in the slightest.
‘But let us put all that aside.’ Sinking down on to a chair, the Grand Duke eyed me from beneath his heavy lids.
I took hold of the muslin and pulled it in such a way that the girl was gradually revealed. The Grand Duke’s plump lips parted, and he gripped the arms of his chair as if frightened he might be swept away. His knuckles had whitened over the lions’ paws. Not wanting to break the spell, I stood quite still.
Finally, the Grand Duke rose to his feet. He advanced on the reclining figure cautiously, on tiptoe. She appeared to have made a child of him. He stopped beside her, one hand wrapped around his mouth and chin.
‘But this is perfect,’ he murmured.
Only then, as the air rushed out of me, did I realize I had been holding my breath. I hadn’t betrayed him or embarrassed him. I wouldn’t be required to defend myself.
‘This is better than I could ever have expected.’ He turned away, and the look he gave me when he reached the far side of the room could almost have been mistaken for pity. ‘You’re a master.’
‘For weeks, Your Highness,’ I said, ‘I worked on nothing but the colour of her skin.’
‘I can imagine.’
I had used a wide range of pigments, I told him, some organic, some man-made. I had used lead-white for her face. Gold-leaf too. And champagne chalk from Northern France. I had used smalt and malachite for her armpits, dragon’s blood and fustic for her thighs.
‘But the texture was no less important,’ I went on.
I had experimented with Turkish wax, which had a vivid orange-red colour to it, and wax from Madagascar, which was sandy brown and alluringly aromatic. I had imported wax from Senegal, but it smelled so pungent that I found myself recoiling. I had even worked with wax extracted from cabbages and plums. I had adulterated my waxes with fine resins, animal fats, kaolin, ochre, marble dust, and tallow. After hundreds of hours of trial and error, I had produced a wax the like of which had never been seen before, a wax both tactile and resilient, a wax as fleshy as flesh itself.
The Grand Duke was nodding. ‘She looks so real. If she were to sit up, or turn over, or even speak, somehow I wouldn’t be surprised.’ He laughed in disbelief at what he was saying, then seemed to shiver. Was he after all aware of a transgression of some kind? ‘Remind me how long this has taken.’
‘More than a year.’
‘It was worth the wait.’
I thanked him.
‘One thing.’ With a thoughtful expression, he moved back towards the girl. He seemed bolder suddenly, and more complacent, as if in the brief moments he had spent on the far side of the room he had become accustomed to her existence. As if, by removing himself, he had taken ownership. The speed of the transition startled me, but perhaps it illustrated his sense of prerogative. As the Grand Duke, he was used to receiving extraordinary gifts. I watched as he traced the dip in the muscle of her upper arm, the slow curve of her jaw. ‘Could you give her some hair?’
‘She already has hair,’ I said. Then, feeling foolish, I added, ‘On her head.’
‘But not,’ he said, ‘elsewhere …’
I found myself staring, but he was gazing up at the domed ceiling.
‘I used to play in here when I was young,’ he said. ‘I would hide from Bandinelli.’
‘He was your tutor, wasn’t he?’
‘My mother likes to say he was the one who made me what I am.’ The Grand Duke smiled bleakly, then looked beyond me, at the girl, and in a different voice, one that was far more practical, he said, ‘It should be real hair, from a woman.’
‘Of course.’ I hesitated. ‘But otherwise you’re satisfied?’
‘Satisfied? I’m astonished. Overwhelmed.’
His voice was trembling, and tears had welled into his eyes. It was my turn to look away.
I promised to make the necessary modifications as soon as I could.
The Grand Duke nodded. ‘I’ll see that you’re handsomely rewarded.’
I murmured that his approval was all the reward I needed, then I bowed and left the room.
I opened Faustina’s bedroom shutters a few inches to let some cool air in. The afternoon sun fell through the gap and lay on the floor like a thin, bright strip of brass. I wouldn’t normally have risked visiting Faustina in the daytime, but her uncle had travelled to Livorno to receive a shipment of spices from the south of Spain. Also, since I had successfully delivered the Grand Duke’s secret commission, I had begun to feel more confident. There was no reason, I thought, why his good will might not extend to cover every aspect of my life, including my unorthodox relationship with Faustina. Before too long, we might have privileged status, if not actual immunity. Though everything was forbidden in Florence, anything was possible.
I turned from the window and sat down on the edge of the bed. She was lying on her back with nothing on, the linen damp and crumpled.
‘So how much did he give you?’ she asked.
I told her, and saw her eyes widen.
‘Some of which I’ve already spent,’ I said, ‘on you.’
When I first arrived, we had kissed and then undressed each other, and the present I had brought had been forgotten. Now, though, I took a wide, flat box out of my bag and handed it to her.
She sat up on the bed and lifted the lid. Inside, under crisp sheets of tissue paper, was a cream silk gown with lilac petticoats. She took a quick breath and fell quite still, her face filled with light reflected from the dress. ‘I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.’ She leaned over and kissed me again. ‘But I’m too hot to try it on just now. Do you mind?’
‘Of course not. In fact, I need you to stay as you are.’ I reached into my bag a second time, producing a pair of scissors. ‘You remember the favour I asked you about?’
Faustina leaned back and looked at me drowsily, one hand cushioning her head so I could see the small round bone on the inside of her elbow. ‘What favour?’
‘I asked if I could have some of your hair.’
‘That’s right. From the private places.’
I nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what it’s for?’
‘I can’t.’
‘What if I tried to guess?’
‘You couldn’t.’
She rolled on to her side, cheek propped on one hand, and watched as I produced three tiny packets, each of which I had labelled in advance: ARMPIT HAIR (LEFT), ARMPIT HAIR (RIGHT), PUBIC HAIR.
‘You’re very well prepared,’ she said.
‘Where should I begin?’
She touched her left armpit. ‘Start here,’ she said, then she moved her hand down between her legs. ‘And finish here.’
I bent over her and laid the blades of the scissors flush against her skin.
She drew the air in past her teeth. ‘That’s cold.’
‘Do you trust me?’
She nodded.
I began to cut the hair, which was straight and dark, though not as dark as the hair on her head. The smell that rose out of her armpit was delicate and bitter, like chicory.
‘It tickles,’ she murmured.
‘Try not to move,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’
Once I had removed all the hair from her left armpit, I folded the packet shut. Faustina altered her position on the bed. As I started work on her right armpit, I could feel her watching me with a mixture of amusement and curiosity. It was as if I had an obsession, and she had decided to indulge me. Not so far from the truth, perhaps.
The right armpit was soon finished. As I moved down her body and knelt between her legs, Faustina turned her face to one side. I bent over her pubic mound. The blood rushed to my groin. Faustina had closed her eyes, and her breasts rose and fell with every deep, slow breath. From where I crouched, between her knees, she looked foreshortened, reduced to a succession of erotic places. *oris, nipples, lips. I wondered if she could sense my erection. Trying to ignore it, I began to snip at the dark inverted triangle.
‘Strange,’ I murmured, ‘how this hair differs from your other hair.’
‘Which do you prefer?’
‘I prefer it all.’
Eyes still closed, she smiled.
‘There’s no part of you,’ I said, ‘that I don’t prefer.’
‘You’re not making any sense.’
The coiled springs proved hard to cut, and all the time I was aware of her cunt below me, and its aroma, which was the aroma of love-making – a new mingling of her juice and mine, a recent, ripe concoction of the two of us. To give myself a better angle, I decided to kneel beside her, next to her right hip. Turning my back on her, I aimed the scissors downward, towards that little knot of tissue that gave her so much pleasure. As before, I tried to cut as close to the root of each hair as I could. Slowly, I filled the last of the three packets.
Though I was facing away from her, I heard her breathing quicken, and when I glanced over my shoulder I saw that her left hand was up against her mouth. I kept snipping at her pubic hair, getting ever closer to the place where the skin parted. Once the packet was full, and I had laid the scissors to one side, I climbed over her right leg and slid my prick into her cunt. Eyes still closed, she sank her teeth into the edge of her hand, just below the little finger.
I closed my eyes as well and moved inside her, imagining the ribbed flesh, the supple rings of muscle. Mauve and yellow flowers filled the blank screen of my eyelids, the petals loosening and drifting downwards on to smooth grey stone. I kissed the soft bristles in the hollow of her armpit, then I kissed the smaller hollow of her clavicle. I moved up to her mouth, which smelled of ripe melon. Not the wound-red Tuscan water-melon, but the pale-green variety I had bought in Naples once, and which had grown, so I was told, on the wild coast of Barbaria. I breathed her breath, I licked her lips. When I reached beneath her and held her buttocks in my hands, she trembled all over, her cunt seeming to flutter, and I thought of a fish in the bottom of a boat, a fish just lifted from the water, then she tightened round me and I came. The force of it threw me sideways, and my head struck the ceiling where it slanted above the bed. I must have cried out because she opened her eyes and asked if I was all right.
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I hit my head.’
‘The ceiling is rather low.’ She began to laugh, despite herself. ‘Does it hurt?’
I was laughing too. ‘Only a bit.’
She lay back.
‘I came too quickly,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it.’
‘No, no. It was good. I liked it.’
‘I saw flowers. Huge mauve and yellow flowers, all massed together, and falling slowly through the air –’
‘When you hit your head?’
I laughed again. ‘No, before. When I was inside you.’
‘Flowers?’ she said. ‘I never heard of anything like that.’
It was a happy time, the happiest I had ever known. Later, though, when I looked back, I saw that I had been living in a kind of dream state. But perhaps that’s what happiness is: a suspension of disbelief or a willed ignorance, which, like held breath, cannot be sustained beyond a certain point.
By the first week of April, I had put the finishing touches to the commission. In the end, I didn’t use the contents of the three packets. Working with scissors had been a mistake, perhaps, since many of Faustina’s hairs were too short to implant successfully. Instead, I resorted to hair plucked from a corpse provided by Pampolini. I had, in any case, begun to feel uncomfortable about the idea of involving Faustina, not least because she claimed to be the bastard child of the Grand Duke’s wife. When confronted with the adjustments I had made, the Grand Duke declared that I had, once again, more than fulfilled his expectations, and presented me with a dark-brown doe-skin coat which he had bought in London, and whose cuffs, pockets and hem were discreetly embroidered with silver thread. I also began to be invited to the most exclusive gatherings, and met many luminaries of the age, people like Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who had developed the microscope, Hayyim Pernicca, a Kabbalistic scholar from Livorno, and Govert Bidloo, an anatomist who had written a musical work known as an opera, the first of its kind. What’s more, when I attended court, I was allowed to within a few paces of the Grand Duke, perhaps because we now had a whole new area of common ground; after all, when it came to a certain subject, I was the only person in the world he could talk to. In company, I took care to underplay the change in my fortunes. In private, though, I felt valued as never before.
Then, one sultry morning towards the end of that month, I discovered that my gnawing sense of the unrepeatability of things had been justified, and even, to some extent, prophetic, though not at all in the way I had imagined. I was in my workshop, with the doors open to the stable yard, when Vespasiano Schwarz appeared. Sweat had blackened his armpits, and he was panting. The Grand Duke wanted to see me at once, he said. I asked if something was wrong. He didn’t know.
The shutters were closed in the Grand Duke’s apartment, and it was much cooler than outside. After consulting with a Dutch engineer, he had built a number of circular recesses into the floor, which could be packed with ice and covered with iron lids. It was one of his more ingenious initiatives. Before my eyes could properly adjust, though, he was in front of me, and gripping my right hand in both of his.
‘Oh, it’s awful, just awful.’ He peered into my bewildered face. ‘You haven’t heard?’
There had been reports of a catastrophic earthquake in Sicily, he told me. The south-east, in particular, had suffered enormous devastation; whole towns had been razed to the ground. He had no details as yet, but he understood that the death toll was high.
‘It’s where you come from, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Your family are there.’
Objects swam slowly up out of the gloom. A moon-shaped marble table, a porcelain vase. A sprawling lead-grey hunting dog.
‘Yes,’ I said.
The earthquake wasn’t recent, he told me. It had happened some time ago; news had taken a while to filter through. Spanish troops had just arrived in the city, on their way from Messina to Milan. They would have the most up-to-date information. In the meantime, he insisted that I go to the chapel and pray with him.
Later that day, I walked down to the barracks where the Spaniards were billeted, but it was almost sunset before I could find a soldier who could tell me about Siracusa. He was drinking on his own in a tavern by the river. His wife’s family came from Noto, he said, and he confirmed what the Grand Duke had told me. Large sections of my city had been destroyed, and at least three quarters of the population had been killed. As for Noto, it had been flattened. Wiped out. There were no survivors. Augusta and Catania had disappeared too. Of the dead that had been recovered, most had been shovelled into vast holes in the ground. The fear of contagion was such that there had been no time for niceties. Blessings had only been said once the mass graves had been sealed.
‘I don’t suppose you know what happened to my family?’ I said.
I gave him my name, then told him where I was from.
Keeping his eyes on the table, he said that the part of Siracusa where I had grown up had been reduced to rubble.
‘My mother lived there,’ I said. ‘My aunt as well.’
The Spaniard rubbed at his whiskery cheeks with both hands, then shook his head. ‘I didn’t hear anything about them.’
‘And my brother, Jacopo? Any news of him?’
Was my brother was a military type? I nodded. If the Jacopo he was thinking of was the right one, the Spaniard said, he had built himself a villa out of town, on Plemmirio. During the earthquake, the sea had swept inland, annihilating everything in its path. Jacopo, his wife, and his three children were all missing, presumed dead.
‘Three children,’ I murmured.
‘Did your brother have children?’
‘I don’t know.’ I took a gulp of wine. ‘His wife was blonde. Ornella.’
The Spaniard looked at me steadily. ‘Is there anyone else you want to know about?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Nobody else.’
No matter how often I had imagined my return, it had never quite felt real. There had been a silvery, liquid edge to everything I saw, a heightened, almost supernatural quality, as if, deep down, I knew I was picturing a scene that could not occur. At the same time, I felt involved or even implicated in what had taken place: some kind of payment had been exacted on my behalf – some strange, disproportionate revenge …
‘I’m sorry,’ the Spanish soldier said.
‘Did you lose people too?’
He was staring down into his wine. ‘Everyone. Like you.’
It was after midnight. Though I was sure no one had seen me smuggle Faustina through the gate that led to my workshop – we had waited until the guards were off duty – I thought it safest if we sat in the dark. Faustina faced the open door, her bare arm stretched along the back of the chair, her hand dangling.
I had written her a note about the earthquake, and she had offered to come and keep me company. It seemed likely, I told her, that everybody in my family was dead. What I was saying sounded grandiose and hollow; though I was telling the truth, I had the odd feeling that I was exaggerating. Actually, I went on, the news made no sense to me. I had become so accustomed to the idea of never seeing my family again that it was hard to believe anything had changed.
She understood, she said. As a child, she had spent whole days trying to visualize her father. He would scale the village walls under cover of darkness. He would wear outlandish disguises. He would bring her presents from exotic places. His visits would be magical, and utterly compelling. So much so that on the rare occasions when he appeared in person he could never quite compete. It would all seem awkward. Understated. What was different about her story, though, was that she had wanted to see him. Longed to see him.
I rose to my feet and stood in the doorway. Outside the air shifted slowly, but with a kind of determination, like someone turning in a bed. I looked up into the sky. The soft summer darkness. The chalk dust of the stars.
‘Strange, isn’t it,’ I said, ‘how we’ve spent our lives imagining things that other people never even have to think about?’
‘I brought something to show you.’ Faustina reached for her goatskin bag and took out a notebook with a faded red cover. Dating from the years when Mimmo Righetti was her friend, it was a record of all the charms and potions she had invented. She leafed through page after page of spells that had been designed to conjure up her father. ‘None of them worked, of course.’
‘But he came. You told me.’
‘That was just coincidence.’
She turned the page again, and there was the flying spell. She had even drawn the ingredients – the rose-and-silver clove of garlic, the crooked splinters of the spider’s legs, the grey hair discovered by the altar. The book was detailed, conscientious, almost as though she had known she would one day work in an apothecary.
Later, when we were half-sitting, half-lying on the divan, her head against my shoulder, I asked if she had ever seen Mimmo again.
‘Two years ago,’ she said.
Since moving to Florence, she had only returned to the village once, and that was to visit Sabatino Vespi, who still worked the land below Ginevra’s house. One morning, Faustina had emerged from La Cura, the church Ginevra used to attend, and had run straight into her old friend coming up the street.
‘Mimmo! How are you?’ Her delight sounded shallow, artificial, but he had caught her unawares.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you know …’
He steadied himself on his crutches and looked at her, and all she could see in his face was a kind of slow pleasure. His gaze, though direct, made her feel valuable, and she found it far easier to be with him than she had imagined it would be, and suddenly regretted having avoided him for so many years.
‘You’re pretty good on those crutches,’ she said. ‘You almost knocked me over.’
‘Lucky escape.’ He smiled faintly.
‘I think you’re even quicker than I am.’
‘I’m used to them now. It gets sore, though. Under my arms.’
‘Is your leg sore too?’
He glanced down at the place where his leg once was. ‘Not too bad. It sort of aches sometimes.’
‘I’m sorry I never came to see you.’
‘You’re seeing me now.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘You didn’t want to upset yourself. I would have done the same.’
She didn’t believe him. He would have perched on the end of her bed, and told her stories about what was happening in the village. He would have brought apricots and figs. He would have cared for her. She stared at the ground.
‘I did something no one else has ever done,’ Mimmo said in a low voice. ‘I flew.’ He looked off up the street, and his tongue moistened one corner of his mouth, something he used to do as a boy when he was unsure of himself. ‘Well, just for a moment, anyway.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I was there, remember?’
‘So,’ he said, and he was still looking past her, back into the village, ‘are you a witch yet?’
Their eyes met, and they began to laugh.
Not long afterwards, he told her he had to be going, and she understood that he was releasing her from an embarrassing situation, one she wouldn’t necessarily have known how to resolve. She also saw it as yet another example of his selflessness, his grace.
She watched as he laboured through the small piazza and up the slope to the castello. He wasn’t quick on his crutches, as she had claimed, or even particularly competent. His progress was awkward, and in the end she had to turn away.
For years she had asked herself why he had leapt off the roof. She knew the answer, of course. Because he had faith. Because he trusted her. Because he would have done anything for her. But even though she knew the answer, it seemed important to keep asking the question.
She fell silent.
‘He loved you,’ I said. ‘He probably still does.’
‘He lost his leg.’
‘You were just children –’
‘I ruined his life.’ She lowered her head. A tear spilled down her cheek. ‘I ruined it.’
‘It’s all right,’ I murmured.