Secrecy

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘This is ridiculous. You’re the one who should be crying.’

I held her in my arms and stroked her hair. Her breathing deepened. She drifted off to sleep. Her book of spells and potions lay open on the floor. A draught from outside flipped a page, revealing a drawing of the crow’s feather. Above it, she had written a single word: featherspoon. I saw her crouching in the yellow grass, stirring the contents of the jar. Mimmo beside her, mesmerized. Her mother had given her up. So had her father. She had no idea of her true value. She even doubted her existence. Was it any wonder if she had looked for people who would believe in her? Was it any wonder if she had then felt compelled to test that belief, to push it as far as it would go?

She took a quick breath, as if she was about to dive beneath a wave, then turned over and laid her cheek against my chest.

The delicate, delicious weight of her.

‘Do you love me?’ she murmured.

She was talking in her sleep, or on the edge of sleep, but I answered anyway.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I love you.’



On returning to the House of Shells one evening, I found Signora de la Mar bent almost double outside my room. When she heard my footsteps, she straightened up. A letter had arrived for me, she said; she had been about to slip it beneath my door. I took it from her eagerly. I had been corresponding with van Leeuwenhoek about his microscopes, and also with a certain Mr Salmon, who had opened a wax museum in London, and I was expecting replies from both men, but when I had the letter in my hands I saw that it was discoloured – yellow in some places, brown in others – and that there were several diagonal slashes in the paper, all signs that it had been heated and then fumigated as a precaution against the spreading of disease. Looking more closely, I saw that it had been addressed to me care of the Grand Duke’s palace, and franked in both Naples and Palermo. My heart staggered; my face felt hot.

‘Is something wrong?’ the signora asked.

‘I think it’s from Sicily.’

I broke the seal. The letter was dated March the twenty-seventh, more than two months after the earthquake, and it was signed by my mother.

I began to read.

She assumed I had heard of the dreadful catastrophe that had devastated Sicily. By a miracle, she and her sister Flaminia had escaped with their lives, she said, but God in his wisdom had taken Jacopo, Ornella, and their three beautiful sons. Her own house – and much of Siracusa – had been severely damaged, and she could not have stayed there, even if she had wanted to. She had found refuge in Palermo, which had survived more or less intact. While there, word had reached her that I was living in Florence, and that I had done well for myself. She was writing to tell me that Sicily was ruined for her, and that she was on her way to join me. She trusted I could find it in my heart to welcome her. She hoped she wouldn’t be too much of a burden.

Though I had often imagined people surfacing from the past, they were shadowy presences – strangers who knew my story, and wished me harm. I had imagined Jacopo as well, of course, brimming with self-righteousness and anger. Not once, though, not in all these years, had I imagined my mother.

The letter rambled, and the handwriting was so shaky it might have been written during the earthquake itself. My mother had been thirty-three when she gave birth to me. She would now be seventy. How would she manage the journey from Palermo? What would I do with her when she arrived? I lifted the letter to my nose, as if for guidance. It smelled of ash and vinegar.

‘Well?’ The signora’s dark eyes showed above her orange shawl.

‘My mother’s coming,’ I said. ‘I’m going to need a place of my own.’



I called on Lorenzo Borucher. Once I had listened to him boasting about his latest exploits – he had done this person’s hair, that person’s hair; the names rarely meant anything to me – I told him I had decided to take his advice and look for a property to rent. My timing was impeccable, he said. He happened to know of a four-storey palazzo just off Via de’ Serragli, only a short walk from the Grand Duke’s palace.

‘It’s not what you’d call ostentatious,’ he went on. ‘In fact, it’s rather plain. You’ll probably like it.’ His cheeks dimpled. ‘But what about the signora?’

Like Pampolini, Borucher thought there was more to my relationship with Signora de la Mar than I was letting on, and I had done nothing to disabuse him. Since arriving in Florence, I had been mindful of what Gracián had written – namely, that one should always try and transform one’s defects into ornaments. Throughout my life I had been dogged by rumours, but only recently had I realized that the trick was not to deny them or rail against them but to add to them. The more talk that surrounded me, the less credence any of it would have. It might even help to conceal the truth.

‘What about her?’ I said.

‘Is it over?’

I smiled, but made no comment.

He was right when he said I would like the palazzo, though. Its rooms were modest and austere, just as he had suggested, and there was a paved courtyard in the middle that recalled the one in the house where I had grown up. Situated on a dead-end street – in Siracusa we would have called it a ‘ronco’ – it was quiet too. If I missed the House of Shells – I had become so accustomed to Cuif’s nocturnal somersaults that I found it difficult to sleep at first – I also relished my new privacy.



Not long after the move, Fiore took me to the firework factory again. The biggest festival of the year – San Giovanni – was looming, and the Guazzi twins were rushed off their feet. Doffo explained how they had combined spirit of nitre with oil extracted from caraway seeds to create what they called ‘liquid gunpowder’. The dragon they were in the process of building would swoop across the river, he told me, on an invisible, greased wire. Once it had dived beneath the surface, spitting flame – that was where the liquid gunpowder came in – it would soar into the air again, to a great height, and then explode. Ambitious, I said. The two brothers looked at each other and burst out laughing. That’s us, they said.

On our way back through the city, a dreary, insistent rain began to fall, a rain more typical of January or February than June, and by the time we reached my workshop we were drenched. I lit a wood fire and hung our wet clothes over a rail. To keep Fiore happy while they dried, I gave her one of the smocks I wore when I was casting, a small lump of beeswax, and a few of my old tools. Some time later, I heard footsteps in the stable yard, and Stufa walked in.

I straightened up. ‘This is a surprise.’

Stufa wiped the rain off his face, then began to inspect the shelves that lined the walls.

‘I didn’t think you had any time for art,’ I said.

‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘Obsession fascinates me, though.’

He had stopped in front of my pigments, but I doubted it was the pots of mercuric sulphide and chrysocolla that had caught his eye. On the same shelf, at head-height, was the thick glass jar that contained the dead girl’s skin. In a desperate attempt to distract him I asked if he wanted me to show him round. Either he didn’t hear me, though, or he ignored the offer.

‘People tell me you’ve been working night and day,’ he said, his eyes still fastened on the floating piece of skin.

Fiore spoke from the corner of the room. ‘What’s obsession mean?’

Stufa glanced round. He had assumed we were alone, perhaps. Also, clearly, he wasn’t used to being interrupted, least of all by a child.

‘This, Fiore, is Padre Stufa,’ I said. ‘He’s a very important man.’

Fiore stared at him, her mouth ajar.

‘She doesn’t appear to have any manners,’ Stufa observed.

‘She’s shy,’ I said.

‘Witless too, by the look of it.’

I felt my stomach knot with fury. ‘If you’ve seen enough,’ I said, ‘maybe you’d be good enough to let us get on with our work.’

Fiore had edged closer, and was gazing up at Stufa, as if some aspect of his appearance mystified her. Brought up short by my dismissive tone, however, he hadn’t noticed. I watched as Fiore arrived at a conclusion.

‘You’re not very important,’ she said. ‘You’re not important at all.’

Stufa lashed out with the back of his hand and knocked her to the floor. She was so shocked that she forgot to cry. Instead, she stared at him, wide-eyed, as if he had just swallowed a sword or pulled a white dove from his sleeve. Then her mouth opened, and she let out a piteous wail. I crouched down. Put my arms round her.

‘I don’t think it’ll do her any harm.’ Stufa calmly adjusted the emerald he was wearing. ‘Actually, I’m more concerned about my ring. It was a gift from the Grand Duchess. It’s rather valuable.’ He held his hand away from his body, the better to admire the stone, then turned and walked out into the drizzle.

‘My face feels different,’ Fiore said.

A sharp-edged dark-blue mark had appeared on her right cheek, below her eye.

‘You’ll have a bruise,’ I said.

‘For ever?’

‘No. Just for a few days.’ I stood up. ‘Wait here.’

I ran across the stable yard and out into the gardens. Stufa was ahead of me, on a path that led back to the palace. He was moving at a slow, almost ceremonial pace, like somebody in church.

I was only a few yards away when he sensed my presence behind him. Startled, he backed up against a high laurel hedge.

‘You think you can do something like that and walk away?’ I said.

Stufa laughed, his laughter no louder than exhaled breath. ‘Of course.’

‘She’s a child –’

I had been about to say that she was backward, but Stufa interrupted.

‘She’s meaningless,’ he said.

My knife was in my hand before I knew it, the sharp point probing the underside of Stufa’s chin. That flimsy membrane would offer little or no resistance. One swift upward thrust and the knife would pierce the soft tissue of the palate, then pass through the maxilla, or the nasal passages. After severing both the facial artery and the optic nerve, it would penetrate the spongy frontal matter of the brain. I could imagine the precise path that it would take. I could predict the damage it would do. Not without foundation was it sometimes said of me that I had studied anatomy in more detail than was strictly necessary for a sculptor.

‘You dare to threaten me?’ Stufa barely moved his lips, not wanting to disturb the tip of the blade.

‘If you ever do anything like that again,’ I said, ‘I’ll strip the skin off your body while you’re still alive and hang it on the back of your door like an old coat.’

He gasped. The air that came out of him had a fermented smell, like compost.

Stepping back, I put away my knife.

Stufa touched his chin, then looked at his fingers, which were delicately smeared with blood.

‘It’s only a scratch,’ I said.

His dark eyes lifted until they locked on mine. ‘I’m looking at a dead man.’

‘Then you must be looking in the mirror.’

As I walked back to my workshop, I realized I was trembling, not with rage or fear but with a kind of wild hilarity. Probably it had not been wise to draw a knife on Stufa, but I had had just about enough of his needless provocations.



It was the day after San Giovanni, and the sky was scorched and smoky. Doffo and Simone Guazzi had excelled themselves: the appearance of the dragon, an interlude they had called ‘The Defeat of Satan’, had been the high point of the firework display. I felt restless that morning, and slightly sick. Instead of making for the palace, I set off along the river, heading east. The air smelled of gunpowder, and also of burnt sugar, and I could hear a constant, thin whining, as if a mosquito were trapped inside my skull. Every now and then, I saw Stufa’s ring connect with Fiore’s cheek, or I remembered how the hilt of the knife had warmed in my hand as I held it to his throat, but beyond that, nothing. I couldn’t seem to think even one straight thought.

I crossed the river by the Ponte Rubaconte, then followed the road that ran along the inside of the city walls. Irises had flowered on the stonework, their fleshy petals mauve and purple. Near the Porta a Pinti, I stopped to watch a man throwing buckets of water over a horse. Its coat gleamed like glass in the summer sun. Further on, I saw people lying in rows under the mulberry trees at the edge of the road. These would be peasant families who had travelled in from the countryside for the festivities. I made sketches of a mother and her baby. They were asleep, but they could just as easily have been dead.

By the time I returned to Via de’ Serragli, it was past midday, and my feet hurt – I must have walked ten miles – but at least my head was clear. Then I heard iron-bound wheels behind me, and I understood why I had been feeling so unsettled. I stepped aside to let the carriage pass. It turned into my street, as I had known it would. Just before I reached the corner, I stopped and rested my forehead against the wall. I was thirty-seven years old, but, like a child, I wanted to make her wait. It even crossed my mind to walk away.

Dressed in a derelict black gown with a high collar and frayed cuffs, she was peering up at my house. Her hair was the stained yellow-white of old ivory, and she wore a pair of dark lenses held in place by weighted cords that looped over her ears and dangled on either side of her thin neck. Here she was, my mother, yet she seemed a hastily assembled and eccentric version of the woman I had visited so often in my head. Like the figures I had seen in the processions for San Giovanni the day before, she appeared to have been knocked together out of sticks and cloth.

Her maid spoke to her, and she turned and looked in my direction.

‘Gaetano …’

My name sounded fragile, wounded.

I took her in my arms. I couldn’t feel her hands on my back, and I suddenly remembered how she would never hold us when we were children – not me, not even Jacopo. She would only ever hold the air that surrounded us.

‘It’s a nice house,’ she said. ‘A bit gloomy, but nice. Do you live alone?’

‘Yes.’

She nodded, as if she had guessed as much.

‘You wear glasses,’ I said.

‘The light hurts my eyes. Since – since –’

It was the word ‘earthquake’ that she could not say.

‘I bought them from a Chinese man,’ she went on. ‘In Palermo.’

I asked if I could have a look.

She lifted the weights over her ears and passed them to me. Her eyes, which I could have sworn were once dark-brown, had faded to the colour of dead leaves at the bottom of a pond. Her gaze was questing, stunned.

‘They’re made from tea-stone,’ she was saying. ‘It’s a type of quartz, I think.’

When I put on the glasses, everything became muted, almost poetic. I felt I was looking at the present from some point in the distant future. Not the present at all, then, but the past. A world that was already gone. A memory.

I handed them back to her.

‘I’m glad you thought of me,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you came.’

Eyes shielded once more, she looked beyond me. ‘We had nowhere else.’

Later, when I had shown them round, her maid, Lapa, spoke to me. ‘The earthquake, then the journey – she’s not the woman she was.’

We both glanced across the room. My mother was peering into a trunk of clothes, as one might peer over a cliff.

‘You know something, Lapa?’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I can remember the woman she was.’



That same week, just before sunset, I passed a dead horse lying in the street, ringed by a horde of tramps and beggars. The horse had careered over the Ponte Santa Trinità, one of them told me, riderless and wild with fear, mane standing vertical. As it came down off the bridge, it skidded on the greasy paving stones, lost its footing, and broke a leg. Since it was worth nothing lame, they had decided to butcher it and parcel up the meat.

I was watching them dismantle the carcass, impressed by their dexterity, when a door opened further down the street and a priest stepped out. He looked left and right, then set off along the river. It was getting dark, and I only saw his face for a moment, but I was sure it was Padre Paone. A wave of dizziness: the world slid sideways. First my mother, now Paone. What could it mean? Circling the sticky lake of blood, I hurried after him.

I quickly closed the distance between us, and by the time he turned left, into Chiasso dell’Oro, he was only a few yards in front of me. I followed him down Via Lambertesca, through the Uffizi, then along the side of the Palazzo Vecchio. His walk seemed familiar. Not measured and solemn, as when he celebrated Mass, but halting, even a little obsequious. I was reminded once again of the day he appeared as Jacopo’s accomplice.

We passed Via del Corno, the House of Shells visible halfway down. Was it my imagination, or did he hesitate? I slowed too. Then he moved on, turning the corner into Borgo de’ Greci.

‘Father?’

The word had left my mouth before I could suppress it.

Startled, the priest looked round.

He had Paone’s slick black hair, but his face was rounder, and more cherubic. And he was far too young. Paone would be approaching sixty. This man was forty at the most. Perhaps that explained my mistake: it was Paone as he had been when I last saw him – Paone as I remembered him.

‘Can I help you?’ the priest said.

I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.’ Then, surprising myself, I added, ‘I thought you were the priest from my hometown. I haven’t seen him for years.’

‘I’m sorry to disappoint you.’ He smiled.

‘Oh, it’s not a disappointment. If anything, it’s a relief.’

The priest’s smile became uncertain. ‘Are you in trouble?’ Hands clasped, he moved a step closer.

‘There’s no need to concern yourself.’

I saw that he was tempted to probe further. In the end, though, he chose not to.

‘Go in peace,’ he said.



It was two or three weeks before my mother would talk about what had happened.

‘I was buried in the rubble,’ she said. ‘I could hardly breathe.’

I held her hand. Its swollen knuckles, its thin black veins. ‘You’re safe now.’

Her eyes veered round the room, as if the walls might tumble at any moment.

I had put her on the ground floor. I had covered the cold tiles with bright wool rugs and installed a stove made of white majolica. The first days had been difficult, though. She ate very little, and could not sleep. Unfamiliar sounds upset her – and almost every sound was unfamiliar. My sleep was broken too. When I woke I would often hear her talking to Lapa, her voice subdued and tremulous. Once, towards dawn, I heard the front door slam, and found her on the street-corner, warning a passerby not to go home, but to stay outside, in the open.

There had been several earthquakes, she told me later, occurring over a period of three days. The one that had frightened her most had come during the night. She remembered a rumbling that sounded like thunder, but in the ground rather than the sky, and a wind that was like no wind she had ever heard before. She was shaken from her bed. Plates and glasses smashed, and a wardrobe toppled over, landing on its face. She ran out on to Via Dione. There was no moon. In the darkness people’s screams were silver. She couldn’t explain what she meant by that. A neighbour knelt in the middle of the street. He was crushed by falling masonry. The bell rang in the steeple opposite, even though there was no one pulling on the rope. She watched a woman run past with a bird-cage, its tiny wire door flapping, nothing inside. She remembered her sister, and hurried back into the house. It was then that the ceiling collapsed. They were trapped in what remained of the hallway, not far from the front door. Luckily, it rained. They took turns drinking the black water that dripped down the walls. Later, after they had been dug out, they heard the ground had opened like a mouth. Modica, Ragusa and Scichilo were swallowed. Nothing but stinking, brackish pools where they had been. The sea had risen up; shoals of fish were found miles inland. She had seen a dead donkey in an orange tree.

Her jaw shifted, as if her teeth hurt. ‘All our family documents were lost. The record of who we are, and what we own. All gone. And people too – so many people …’

‘Flaminia’s all right, though?’

‘She’s in Palermo.’

‘Father Paone?’

‘Gone.’

There was nothing left of the house that Jacopo had built, she went on. Not a single stone. She had told him not to live out there. She had said it was dangerous. He wouldn’t listen, though. He never listened.

‘It was so brutal – so thorough.’ A shiver shook her. ‘But that isn’t what stays with me. What stays with me is that bird-cage, with its wire door flapping …’ She looked at me; her pupils had shrunk, and white showed above and below her irises. ‘I can see it now.’



Two months after my mother’s arrival in Florence, Jack Towne invited me to his villa near the Fortezza da Basso. On a hot, late August night I was shown into a parlour and asked to wait. With its muted furnishings and its padded walls, the room had the deep, airless silence of a mausoleum. Though I barely knew the man, somehow this seemed in character.

A quarter of an hour passed, and still Towne did not appear. I opened the door to the adjoining room and stepped inside. The silence intensified. There were three sofas upholstered in dark velvet – chocolate, damson, aubergine – and fixed to the ceiling was a large round mirror. The tapestry at the far end of the room depicted a scene of such complex debauchery that I had to turn myself almost upside-down to make out what was going on. In the corner, on a pedestal, stood a life-size sculpture of a goat. The burnt vermilion glaze told me it was Marvuglia’s work.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting.’

I swung round.

Towne came forwards, smiling. ‘You went to see Marvuglia, didn’t you? He told me.’ One hand on my shoulder, he guided me back into the other room. ‘What did you think?’

I spoke about Marvuglia’s colours, and how they conveyed injury and torment.

‘And the man himself?’ Towne said.

‘I imagine he’s got enemies.’

Towne nodded.

Our conversation turned to the prints and drawings that were his stock-in-trade. I was curious to know what sort of work the Grand Duke had bought from him. Towne looked at me steadily. A two-headed calf, he said. A dwarf. Anything deformed or freakish. I remembered the armless German and fell silent, wondering what place I occupied in the Grand Duke’s collection, but when Towne produced a folio of drawings of people who had contracted syphilis I was suddenly glad that I had come. I had been planning a series of pieces based on pleasure and its consequences, and the drawings would be invaluable as reference. Towne was a hard bargainer. At last, though, we agreed on a price.

To celebrate our transaction – the first of many, he hoped – he insisted that I dine with him. In my opinion, we had less in common than he supposed, and I was eager to get away, but he wouldn’t listen to my excuses. He took me to the Eagle, an eating-house near Via Tornabuoni. To my dismay, the first person I saw when I walked in was Stufa. He was sitting at a table with Bassetti. Before I could suggest a change of venue, though, Towne had called out a greeting. It appeared he knew them both.

After the initial courtesies, during which Stufa acted as if I wasn’t there, Bassetti turned to me. ‘I hope your mother’s settling in.’

‘She is. Thank you.’ I hadn’t told the Grand Duke about my mother’s arrival, let alone Bassetti, but this was his way of reminding me that nothing escaped his attention.

‘She was lucky to survive,’ he said.

‘Yes, she was.’

‘And lucky to have someone to turn to, someone to take her in.’

‘I’ll do my best for her.’

‘Apparently,’ Stufa said, his eyes still lowered, ‘she’s a bit unhinged.’

I faced him. ‘I would like to apologize for what happened in the gardens.’

Though Bassetti was still eating, the angle of his head had altered.

‘I shouldn’t have threatened you,’ I said.

‘You were upset by the news of the earthquake.’ Stufa’s delivery was unconvincing, flat; he might appear to be making allowances for my behaviour, but he was keeping his true feelings hidden.

‘All the same,’ I said.

Stufa studied me. ‘I don’t think you’re being entirely honest with me.’

‘No?’

‘You haven’t forgiven me for what I did.’

‘What did he do?’ Bassetti’s voice was mild, almost uninterested.

I looked at the red silk curtains that hung against the windows. When I told Signora de la Mar what had happened, the blood had rushed to her usually pallid face. You should have slit the bastard’s throat right there and then. Fiore’s father hit her when she was little, she said later. Fiore was never quite the same after that. I had promised her that Stufa would answer for his actions. As yet, I had no idea how to keep that promise.

But Stufa was talking again. ‘You haven’t forgiven me, and you’re not going to. It’s not in your nature. I know what you’re like, you people from the south.’

‘In my opinion,’ I said, ‘it’s usually a mistake to generalize.’

A smile registered on Bassetti’s lips.

‘It means you have an overly simplistic view of the world,’ I went on. ‘It can affect your judgement. Lead to mistakes.’

Stufa adjusted the position of his fork. ‘But you’re not denying it.’

‘I’ve said what I wanted to say.’ I stepped back from the table. ‘Enjoy your meal.’

When we were seated, Towne gave me a look of mingled admiration and surprise. ‘There aren’t many who would speak to Stufa like that.’

‘I’m sorry. Was I rude?’

‘You don’t need to apologize to me.’

‘Aren’t you a friend of his?’

Towne’s laugh was no louder than a sniff. ‘Friend? I doubt the word’s in his vocabulary.’ He reached for the wine. ‘What was that all about, anyway?’



We drank heavily that night, and were the last to leave the place. By the time I turned off Via de’ Serragli into the side street where I lived it was after midnight and a steady rain was coming down. I was so tired that I decided not to look in on my mother. Instead, I climbed the stairs, thinking I would fall straight into bed. As I reached the first-floor landing, though, I sensed that something wasn’t right. In my drawing room the candles had burned down, but not so low that I couldn’t see the chair that was lying on its side. I stepped warily through the half-open door. The locked drawers in my writing desk had been forced, and my notebooks lay scattered across the floor. At first glance, it didn’t seem as though anything had been taken. My most precious possession – a terracotta statue of Artemis from the Hellenistic period – still stood by the fireplace, and there was money on the mantlepiece. I realized it was my personal papers that had interested the intruder. In one of my notebooks there was a ragged edge where a page had been torn out. I looked at the preceding page, and the page before that. It was my portrait of Faustina that was missing.

Sober suddenly, I crossed the room and stared at the palazzo opposite, its shutters fastened, rain tipping off its eaves. What would somebody want with a drawing of Faustina? Of everything I owned, why that? As I stood at the window, it dawned on me that my mother might be responsible. Gripped by anxiety, perhaps, or terror, she might have been looking for something that belonged to her, something she had lost in the earthquake. She might have rifled through my possessions, not knowing whose they were, or where she was … I hurried back downstairs. In her room, there were lighted candles on every surface. Though it was stifling, she was lying in bed with the covers pulled up so high that only her face was visible. Eight fingers showed beneath her chin, as if she were clinging to a precipice.

‘Jacopo?’ she said.

‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘Gaetano.’

Her eyes darted about, and the tip of her tongue kept flickering over her top lip.

‘Are you all right?’ I said. ‘Where’s Lapa?’

She looked at me, her gaze unfocused, vague. ‘I thought it was them again.’

I lowered myself slowly on to the bed. ‘Has someone been here?’

‘There were three of them – or maybe four. I can’t remember. I didn’t see.’

‘Who were they?’

She looked beyond me. ‘They knocked loudly – so loudly. Lapa answered the door. Then they were in, like a whirlwind.’ She tightened her grip on the covers. ‘They were monks.’

‘What kind of monks?’

She shook her head.

‘Please try and think,’ I said. ‘What were they wearing?’

‘Black. And white.’

‘You’re sure?’ The flames of the candles swerved as a draught went through the room. ‘Have you seen any of them before?’

‘I don’t think so. But they were past me before I knew it – and there were so many.’

‘They didn’t harm you?’

‘No. They told me to stay in here, and I did, but I could hear them upstairs, laughing –’

‘I’m here now.’

‘They were laughing.’ My mother closed her eyes.

Back upstairs, I righted the furniture and put my papers in order. As I crossed the room I caught sight of my face in the mirror, and was surprised how calm I looked. In the past, if something like this had happened, I would have started packing immediately. I would have been gone before dawn. North to Bologna or Genoa. Or on to a different country altogether. France, perhaps, or even England. But there was a new stubbornness in me: I was no longer willing to do anything to avoid a confrontation. What’s more, people I cared about were implicated, and I didn’t feel I could abandon them.

Black, she had said. And white.

Dominicans.

I lay awake in bed, one question leading to another. Was Stufa behind the break-in? If so, was he acting on his own? Was he getting back at me, in other words, or was it something more orchestrated, more sinister? But why had the monks taken a drawing of Faustina? Could it have been a whim? No, it was more far more likely to be part of a campaign to gather evidence. They were attempting to identify an area in which I might be vulnerable. I didn’t like where this was leading. Did they know about Faustina? If so, how much did they know? And so on, and so on – for hours … Faces loomed and gaped. Plans formed, then fell apart.



The next morning my mother woke up complaining that she couldn’t breathe. I sat by her bed and held her hand.

‘It’s the dust,’ she gasped. ‘It’s all the dust.’

I looked at Lapa, who rolled her shoulders fatalistically and turned away.

My mother gripped my hand so hard that her nails left a series of tiny crescent moons imprinted on my palm.

‘Don’t go,’ she said.

I had only slept in snatches, and my head ached from all the wine I had drunk with the Englishman. I was still struggling to make sense of the break-in and the missing page, but my questions had become mundane, prosaic. Who had the drawing? What did they want with it?

My mother’s grip loosened, then tightened again. ‘Thank you.’

‘What for?’

‘For letting me live here. For taking care of me.’

‘You’re my mother –’

She looked at me, and something shifted deep down, at the bottom of her eyes, and I remembered all the insults Jacopo had flung at me.

‘You are my mother, aren’t you?’ I said.

Her gaze tilted, then flattened, like the slats on shutters. She seemed relieved, even grateful, and I had no idea why that might be so.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

Towards the end of the afternoon, Francesco Redi appeared with his physician’s green leather case, his long, almost womanly face more solemn than usual. He had just been subjected to another of Vittoria’s infamous tongue-lashings. She didn’t believe he had studied medicine. He knew nothing. Nothing. He wasn’t even fit to tend an animal. He opened the saphenous vein just above my mother’s ankle and bled her, then he administered a sedative. Of course, he ought to be used to the Grand Duchess by now, he went on. He’d been treating her for long enough.

Later, as I showed him out, I asked if he thought she might be dying.

‘There have been moments,’ he said, ‘when I almost wished that were the case.’ He crossed himself, then stepped into the street.

I returned to my mother’s bedside.

‘I behaved badly,’ she murmured.

‘Don’t worry about that now.’

‘I was weak …’

I sat with her until she fell into a shallow sleep. Her eyes flickered beneath their lids; a pulse beat feebly in her neck. She had not defended me. She hadn’t even realized I needed defending. I no longer blamed her for that. No one had stood much of a chance against Jacopo. I would rather have chosen my life than had it shaped by somebody who wished me harm, though who was to say it would have been better?



As I prepared to set out for the apothecary I was filled with an agitation that verged on panic. I felt paralysed by even the smallest decisions – what coat to wear, which route to take. I hurried down Via de’ Serragli and over the nearest bridge. The moon that hung above the Grand Duke’s granary was red and swollen, almost close enough to touch; it looked as if it might burst at any moment, soaking the streets of Santo Spirito in blood. On Porta Rossa, I came across two men locked in such a struggle that they had become a single, staggering beast. Edging past, I saw an arm break loose and land a fierce blow. The creature, having harmed itself, let out a bellow. A nearby puddle shivered.

By the time I reached Via Lontanmorti, it was after eleven. At the end of the street, in a high recess in the wall, was a statue of the Virgin, illuminated by a single candle. That was all the light there was. I didn’t want to wake Faustina’s uncle, nor could I afford to draw any attention to myself. Remembering the passageway she had told me about, I moved beyond the apothecary, passed beneath a low, grimy archway and turned left into a cul-de-sac. She had said the entrance was halfway along. I ran my hands over the wall until I located it. No wider than my shoulders, it had the dimensions of a small door. I entered, inching forwards, one step at a time. The ground sloped downwards, beneath the building, then disappeared. I had reached the ditch or drain that she had spoken of. I stopped and looked behind me. A ghostly grey rectangle shimmered in the blackness. The alley. It didn’t seem as if I had been followed.

I faced back into the dark. A cold, sour smell rose out of the drain. Far below, I thought I could hear running water. Bracing one hand against each wall, I reached out with my right foot. I judged the gap to be about the length of one long stride. My left foot placed at the very edge of the drop, I stepped back with my right and then sprang forwards, into nothing. When I landed on the other side, I felt I had crossed a bottomless pit filled with the predatory, the unwitting – the dead. It was peculiar to think that Machiavelli might have done the same.

I turned right. In complete darkness, I groped my way forwards, hands outstretched. The atmosphere was damp, and oddly thick. Whenever I paused, I was deafened by my own breathing. I turned left, then left again. At last, I emerged into the yard Faustina had described. I tipped my head back and gulped fresh air from the sky, then began to explore the back wall of the building. When I had found the piece of wire, I followed it downwards until my hand closed around a key.

I had heard it said that if you want to know what paradise smells like, you only have to visit an apothecary. Alone, at night, this seemed more true than ever. As I crept through the back room, all kinds of scents and perfumes made themselves known to me. Rose petals one moment, mustard seeds the next. Then ginger. Molasses. Sage. I found the stairs, began to climb. In the silence, my heart sounded noisy, clumsy, like someone running down a street in heavy boots.

I stepped out on to the third floor and was about to reach for Faustina’s door handle when the door opened, and her face appeared. She jumped when she saw me. I slipped past her, into the room. She closed the door, then moved towards me.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m sorry. I wanted to come earlier –’

‘Not so loud. My uncle’s only one floor down.’

I told her about the theft of the drawing.

The small space between her eyebrows darkened, as if it had been shaded in. ‘You think it means they’re interested in me?’

‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ I said.

‘I hope they don’t know. About who my mother is, I mean.’

‘How could they?’

She shrugged.

I asked if she had noticed anything unusual recently.

‘Like what?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. Has anyone been watching you?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘We’ll have to be careful from now on,’ I said. ‘Even more careful.’

We made love silently, furtively, as though we, too, were thieves, and pleasure was something it took two people to steal.

Every now and then, we stopped to listen, thinking we had heard her uncle’s bedroom door or voices in the yard below.

When she came, I put my hand over her mouth.



Halfway across the Ponte Rubaconte, a cold wind gusted, and I was glad of the English coat the Grand Duke had given me earlier that year. I wore it buttoned to the neck and kept my head lowered. My third winter in Florence.

The day before, I had called on Pampolini and asked if I could have a word with Earhole. Pampolini said he hadn’t seen the boy all week. His mother had lost her job at the slaughterhouse, and she was drinking heavily. They lived on Via delle Poverine, near the Campo della Morte. He gave me directions and told me to watch out I wasn’t robbed.

Ever since the break-in, I had been trying to come up with strategies. I didn’t think I had much chance of talking Stufa round. He had told me I was a dead man, and I doubted he had it in him to relent; the best I could expect was to delay or deflect his animosity. That said, it didn’t seem a bad idea to acquire some ammunition of my own. As yet I had nothing except a few rumours spread by an out-of-work French jester. I was going to need more than that. In the meantime, I had to hope that Stufa’s life was going well. You should always wish success on your enemies. If they’re happy and fulfilled – if they feel blessed – they’ll be far less likely to turn on you.

Bassetti presented a different problem. On the face of it, he had always been agreeable. If I had twinges of uneasiness, it was because I suspected he had registered the fact that the Grand Duke and I had grown closer. Whenever he saw us together, he would assume an indulgent look, as if we were wayward but harmless children, but I knew he would not take kindly to being upstaged or excluded, and once or twice, while the Grand Duke and I were discussing some aspect of the secret commission, Bassetti had entered the room unexpectedly, and we had broken off in the middle of a sentence, an abrupt, artificial silence that a man of Bassetti’s social sophistication could hardly have failed to notice. He must have realized that something was being kept from him, and I was always bracing myself for a confrontation. It never came. Was I imagining tension where none existed? Was it possible that Bassetti actually approved of my role as the Grand Duke’s confidant? It was one of my strengths that I saw things other people didn’t see. Was I now seeing things that weren’t there at all? I had written Bassetti a note, asking for an appointment. I wanted to convince him of the fundamental innocence of my relationship with the Grand Duke. I had to be certain he was on my side.

Via delle Poverine was aptly named. There were no paving stones, only potholes. Palaces had given way to shacks and sheds, their walls patched with rotten wood, loose stones and handfuls of river clay. Looming above the rooftops, sheer and forbidding, was the tower of San Niccolò. Nearby, huddled on a mud embankment, were half a dozen grubby children. As I drew level, the sun broke through a veil of cloud and turned the puddles silver. The leader of the group was a boy of about thirteen. His hair hugged his skull like fur.

‘Nice coat.’

He bounced a pebble on his palm. In place of eyebrows he had two slightly swollen ridges of bone.

I said I was looking for Nuto.

‘Nuto?’

‘He’s about your age. He’s only got one ear.’

The boy tilted his head, playing deaf. ‘What’s that?’

His cronies sniggered.

They knew who I meant, but weren’t about to help.

I moved on. A pebble skipped over my boot.

‘I thought you were looking for Nuto,’ the boy called out.

A second pebble struck the back of my leg. I swivelled round. The children were already on their feet.

‘Any more of that,’ I said, ‘and someone else is going to lose an ear.’

The boy’s arm flashed in the dim air. A stone whirred past my head. I started towards the embankment. By the time I reached the place where the children had been standing, they were fifty yards away, on the far side of a gully filled with slimy, stagnant water. His face expressionless, the boy looked straight at me and drew his forefinger across his throat.



Earhole lived in the last shack in the row, part of it propped on wooden piles and leaning precariously over the Arno. When he answered the door, he didn’t seem surprised to see me. Had he, too, learned to mask his feelings?

There was only one room. A small child sat on the mud floor, gnawing on a twig. Probably its teeth were coming through.

‘My niece,’ he said. ‘I’m minding her.’

He handed me some wine in a clay cup. Through the cracks in the walls I could see the river sliding past, the colour of phlegm.

I told him I wanted him to follow someone. His brief would be to gather information. I drank from my cup and made a face.

‘This stuff is foul.’

He grinned. ‘It’s what my mother drinks.’

He was trustworthy, I said. He had good powers of observation, and he knew the streets. He would be perfect for the job.

He accepted the praise with a certain complacency, as if his qualities and talents were beyond dispute. ‘Who am I to follow?’

‘Stufa.’

He turned away, the ragged outline of his ear reddening. He clearly knew the name.

‘If it’s too much of a challenge,’ I said, ‘or you’re afraid to take it on, I’ll understand.’

‘I’m not afraid. I’m just not sure it’s politic.’

I smiled at his vocabulary. ‘Maybe not. But I don’t have any choice.’

‘What kind of information are you after?’

‘Something I can use against him.’

‘That won’t be easy. I imagine he’s pretty careful.’

‘He is, and he isn’t.’

Stufa was Vittoria’s protégé, I said – in her eyes he could do no wrong – and this, paradoxically, was where his weakness lay. Since he believed himself to be invulnerable, he took more risks than one might expect.

‘How do you know all this?’

‘I’ve been watching him. Besides, it’s how the powerful behave.’

Earhole looked through the gap in the wall that served as a window. Though he wasn’t entirely reassured by my answer, I thought he could see that it made sense. It’s the people who don’t have any power who have to watch their step.

The door banged open. A woman stumbled in and dropped heavily on to a stool. She laid her head on her arms, her white scalp showing through her hair. She smelled of urine and cheap wine.

‘My mother,’ Earhole said.

He gestured to me. I followed him outside. We stood near the mud embankment, and I mentioned the children I had seen earlier.

‘It’s not a very good area,’ he said.

I smiled again.

I told him what I knew about Stufa, then handed him some change as a retainer. He asked if I had cleared it with Pampolini. I said I had. I watched as he concealed the coins, one by one, about his person. He should come to my workshop, I told him, as soon as he had something to report.

He nodded. ‘All right.’

Before I left, I asked why he put the money in so many different pockets.

‘So it doesn’t jingle,’ he said. ‘So she can’t hear it.’



The day of my appointment with Bassetti arrived, and as I climbed the slope that led up to the palace its heavily barred windows and crude blocks of toasted stone seemed to bear down on me. As in a dream, I had the feeling that events were moving too fast, even though I was the one who had initiated them. I felt jumbled, scattered. Unprepared.

Located on the first floor, with windows that overlooked the gardens, Bassetti’s office was predictably lavish, one entire wall depicting the alignment of the stars at the moment when he first found favour with the Grand Duke’s family. Bassetti himself was seated, pen in hand, behind a desk inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl. As amiable as ever, he told me that my request for an audience had surprised him. We knew each other too well, didn’t we, to have to resort to such formality?

‘I came here to reassure you, Don Bassetti,’ I began.

Smiling, Bassetti put down his pen.

I hurried on. ‘I’ve seen a lot of the Grand Duke this year –’

‘That’s only natural. You’re his favourite artist.’

‘He takes an interest in my work, and I find that gratifying, of course I do, but I wouldn’t want you to think –’ I broke off. This was coming out wrong, as I had feared it would.

‘I’m glad you’re here, actually.’ Bassetti leaned back in his chair. ‘I had a visitor the other day – from Sicily. Naturally enough, your name came up. He told me all kinds of stories …’

In that moment, for the first time ever, I thought I saw through Apollonio Bassetti. I was convinced that this ‘visitor’ of his was a fabrication. It allowed him to be in possession of certain inside information without appearing to have collected it himself. The effect was to render him neutral, blameless.

‘Apparently your mother had a child by your father’s employer, a man called –’ Bassetti consulted the documents in front of him – ‘Gargallo. Does that name mean anything to you?’

I felt my face flush.

‘Your father kept quiet about it, in return for which Gargallo gave you all a decent place to live. People say your father died of shame.’ He looked up from his papers. ‘I’m sorry. Didn’t you know?’ He sat back again. ‘It’s probably just idle chatter. People will say anything.’

I had to clear my throat. ‘Who told you this?’

‘There were other stories,’ he went on. ‘One of them was really quite damaging.’ The room seemed to darken, as often happens in the summer when a cloud blocks the sun; it was November, though, and the weather was overcast and grey. ‘It’s so lurid that I’m sure there can’t be any truth in it. All the same, “no smoke without roast meat”. Do you have that phrase in Sicily?’

‘We have lots of phrases.’

‘Since the Grand Duke’s reputation must be protected at all costs, I’m afraid I have no choice but to investigate the rumours. It would be negligent not to. Luckily, I have men like Stufa at my disposal –’

‘Stufa,’ I said. ‘Of course.’

‘He’s something of an expert in the field.’

‘I’m not sure how impartial he’s going to be.’

Bassetti’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Quite apart from his close connection with the Grand Duke’s family, Stufa’s a highly respected public servant. I’ve no reason to doubt him.’

The meeting had gone worse than I ever could have imagined. I stood up, thinking I should leave.

‘One more thing before you go,’ Bassetti said, all softness now. ‘There’s the small matter of the woman you’ve been seeing …’

My heart clenched like a fist.

‘I said “woman”,’ Bassetti went on, ‘but I suppose I should really have said “whore”.’

I reached up and touched my ear. It was important that I appeared calm. Pensive. Mildly intrigued.

‘The apothecary’s daughter.’ Bassetti’s voice was languid, almost bored. ‘I’ve seen her, actually. Quite good-looking, if you like that kind of thing.’

‘I’m not sure who you’ve been listening to,’ I said, ‘but they seem to have got their facts muddled up.’

‘Have they?’

‘Yes. You’ve been misinformed.’

‘So what did they get wrong? Not the fact that she’s a whore, surely?’

Bassetti waited to see if I would react, then he reached for the small bell on his desk. I remembered Faustina’s fortune-teller, and how he had used a bell to signal that he had guessed the truth about her – namely, that she was loved. Had Bassetti guessed the truth about me? The door opened behind me. ‘Show this gentleman out,’ Bassetti said, ‘would you?’

When I was halfway across the room, near the fresco that symbolized his rise to power, he spoke again. ‘As a foreigner, Zummo, you may not be aware of this, but there’s a law that applies to women like her. They’re required to wear a yellow band or ribbon, either in their hair, or round one of their sleeves.’ He lifted his eyes from the document he had been studying. He had a look I had seen on his face before, benign and drowsy, like someone who has eaten a heavy meal and is ready for a nap. ‘The penalties for not doing so,’ he said, ‘are quite severe.’



‘I came as soon as I could,’ Faustina said. ‘Have you been waiting long?’

‘About an hour,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry.’

We were in the overgrown garden, beyond the fig arbour. Only a few yards away was the place where we had first made love.

She took a step towards me, and then stopped. ‘Is something wrong?’

The sun had dropped behind the trees. The bottom of the sky looked charred. I felt the air approach, then push past, as tangible as a current of cold water in the sea. A shiver went through me, lasting longer than a shiver should.

‘They think you’re a prostitute,’ I said.

The spaces between her features seemed to widen. ‘What? Who does?’

‘Bassetti.’

‘Why would he bother with someone like me?’

‘I know. I’ve been thinking the same thing.’ I pulled a leaf off a fig tree and slowly tore it in half. ‘You haven’t denied it.’

Her cheeks burned. ‘Do you believe him?’

‘No. Of course not.’

‘You don’t sound very sure.’

‘I don’t know what to believe, Faustina. I’m not sure of anything. I can’t sleep.’

She put a hand on my forearm. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You asked me once if I would take you away from here. When I told you I couldn’t, you said, What if I was in danger? Do you remember?’

She nodded.

‘Well, now you are,’ I said. ‘These people, they’re above the law. They are the law.’

Only a few days earlier, I had come across a crowd gathered in Piazza di Santa Trinità, an open space that was often cordoned off for games of football. They whistled and jeered as two cloaked officials appeared with a young woman. The sign that hung around her neck said ‘For Whoredom’. The officials tore the dress off her back and began to whip her. She turned to the people who surrounded her, her shoulders streaked with blood. Help me. I didn’t do anything. I’m innocent. The jeers and whistling grew louder. A fisherman told me that the woman was supposed to have slept with a Jew from Livorno. It would be the same, I thought, if Faustina was accused of being a whore, and was found to have broken the law by failing to wear a yellow ribbon. She, too, would be publicly stripped and flogged.

When I turned to look at her, she seemed smaller and more fragile than before. She had put on the cream silk gown I had given her; she was too beautiful, too visible.

‘You can’t stay here,’ I said. ‘I’m worried what they’ll do to you.’

‘Why is it,’ she said, ‘that things are always being taken from me?’

‘I wish I could protect you, but I’m not sure I can.’

‘We’ve only just begun to know each other. Now it’s over.’

‘Don’t say that. This isn’t the end.’

‘It feels like it.’

I took her hand. It was cold. She had gashed the skin at the base of her thumb.

‘How did that happen?’ I said.

Sleepily, she looked down at her hand, but didn’t answer. I asked again.

‘That?’ she said. ‘I don’t know. I was in the shop, I think.’

Night was falling. The green shade in the garden deepened.

‘Don’t forget me,’ she murmured. ‘People are always forgetting me.’

I gripped her hand more tightly.

‘Promise me,’ she said.

‘I promise.’

She took her hand away. My words had done little to comfort her; it was like blowing on a fire that had already gone out.

‘I seem to have spent most of my life in hiding,’ she said. ‘It makes me wonder if I’ll ever be able to stand out in the open – in the light.’ Tears welled into her eyes. ‘I thought that might happen with you.’

What if I had told her to come with me, and we had left the city, and made a new life in another place? I didn’t, though. We didn’t.

‘Is there somewhere you can go – temporarily, at least? Until things die down?’

‘Sometimes I feel like a ghost –’ She shook her head, as if angry at herself. ‘But I already told you that.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s all right to repeat yourself.’

‘No. It’s not all right.’

She turned away. I hurried after her. She moved ahead of me through the fig arbour, the hem of her dress trapping leaves and twigs, and then releasing them. Everything was speeding up. Receding. Time was a kite loose in a gale.

When she was out of the garden, she stopped suddenly and faced me. She was calm again. Beyond her, the street angled away, dark and deserted. In the distance, I could just make out the fire-blackened pot of the Duomo, upended against the blue night sky.

‘It’s not you,’ she said. ‘It’s not your fault.’

I took her in my arms, and words came in a rush. I wasn’t sure what I was saying. I crushed her against me, my mouth in her hair.

She freed herself, stepped back. Her chin lifted. ‘You’ll be all right.’ She reached up and touched my cheek. ‘You’ll be fine. You’ll make wonderful things.’