Though Vittoria della Rovere had never been popular, Florence plunged into an orgy of sorrow, remorse and penitence. The palace was draped in black silk, which snapped and rippled in the raw March breeze, and noble families hung tapestries from their windows, the rich fabrics dimmed by strips of funereal ribbon. The streets leading to San Lorenzo were choked with endless candle-lit processions, which brought that part of the city to a standstill. Church bells sounded at all hours of the day and night. The Grand Duke, who had rarely felt confident of his place in his mother’s affections, and who had been ambivalent, to say the least, about her constant interference in affairs of state, wept openly, refused to eat, and spent so long in prayer that both his knees swelled up and he could barely walk. Her passing also revived his anxieties about the succession. ‘No births,’ somebody heard him moan, ‘only death, death, death!’
It wasn’t until after the requiem Mass had taken place that I summoned the courage to approach him. Toldo was guarding the entrance to the Vasari Corridor on the afternoon in question, and, once I had persuaded him that I had urgent private business with the Grand Duke and swore that I would shoulder all responsibility, he grudgingly stood aside and let me through.
I climbed a flight of carpeted steps. It was quiet in the corridor, with round windows set low down in the walls. There were soldiers stationed at regular intervals, and though they remained motionless I sensed their eyes on me when I walked past. As the corridor moved north, it gradually sloped down until it approached ground level, and I had a view of the palace gardens, scraps of muted greenery caught in the metal grilles that were fitted over the windows. According to Toldo, the Grand Duke was on his own. Had he followed the corridor all the way to the Uffizi? Once, in a burst of enthusiasm, a month or two after I delivered my commission, he had taken me to the gallery to show me a sculpture he admired. A portrayal of two wrestlers in combat, neither of whom appeared to have gained the upper hand, the piece was a study in tension and balance. Incongruously, perhaps, it reminded me of the Grand Duke’s foreign policy, the way in which he contrived both to avoid commitment and to keep all his options open, and I wondered if that was why the sculpture appealed to him. After spending a few moments thinking about how to frame the observation, I put it to him, and he turned to me with a look that was warm, almost grateful, and said, ‘Ah, Zummo, I knew you’d understand.’ How long ago that seemed!
Soon I was beyond the gardens, and the corridor began to climb again. I was able to peer down into Via Guicciardini, the street I used to travel every day during my first two years in the city. Had the passers-by glanced up, all they would have seen was a shadowy figure; they would have assumed I was a member of the ruling family, maybe even the Grand Duke himself.
Without being aware of it, I had speeded up, and as a result I nearly missed him altogether. He was sitting with his back to me, in an alcove that overlooked the nave of Santa Felicità. His head was bowed, as if in prayer; the great globe of his belly rose and fell. It was here – precisely here – that Fiore claimed to have seen him once. He had often told me how much he valued time spent in the corridor – it was one of the few places where he could escape the pressures of his position – and I knew I shouldn’t be imposing on him, but recent events had left me with no choice. I had burned my boats. My boats were ashes. I decided not to wake him, though. I would simply wait.
By the time his eyes opened, at least a quarter of an hour had gone by, and I had almost forgotten why I had come. Watching a man sleep had begun to seem like an end in itself.
‘Zummo?’
‘Forgive me for intruding, Your Highness, especially at a time like this.’
He brought a fist up to his mouth to hide a yawn. ‘It’s a sad time. Very sad.’
I told him I had been praying for his mother’s soul.
‘But that’s not what brings you here,’ he said.
‘No.’ I took a breath. ‘I’ve never bothered you with anything personal before –’
I saw his gaze turn inwards. Had I lost him already? I should have prepared the ground with more subtlety, more care. After all, he had only been awake for a few seconds. But then I heard Cuif shriek in agony as I raised him up off the dungeon floor, and I pressed on regardless.
‘Bassetti has ordered the arrest and torture of a friend of mine,’ I said, ‘a man who is innocent of all charges.’
The Grand Duke brushed at the front of his tunic, then stood up and walked off down the corridor, towards the Ponte Vecchio. Uncertain of the protocol, I remained where I was.
‘My friend’s life has been ruined. He might even die.’ I paused. ‘The interrogation was unjustified and brutal.’
Some distance away, the Grand Duke turned to face me. In his sombre mourning clothes, he seemed to fill the narrow space. ‘I wonder if you realize what you’re saying.’
‘I’m simply describing what I saw, Your Highness. Such violence – and all for nothing.’
‘These are serious allegations.’
Allegations. His choice of words told me everything I needed to know. He had decided not to back me in the matter. What on earth had made me think he would? I was overwhelmed by dizziness. The grey air prickled.
‘Bassetti occupies a position of trust,’ he said, ‘and he has occupied that position for many years.’
‘I know. Of course. Your private secretary. Your uncle’s too. And more than that, by all accounts.’
‘More than that?’
‘He guards your values. He enforces morality. He encapsulates the very spirit of your reign.’ I was babbling. Worse still, my Sicilian accent had returned. I sounded abrasive. Foreign. I doubted he could understand a single word.
‘And yet,’ the Grand Duke said, ‘you appear to be finding fault with him –’
‘Not finding fault, Your Highness. Not with him. No, no. I just think he might have been poorly advised – on this occasion.’
Better. But not good enough.
The Grand Duke adjusted the extravagant curls and scrolls of his black wig and then strolled back along the corridor towards me. As I flattened myself against the wall to let him pass, I was enveloped in the English fragrance he used – a heady concoction of primrose, eglantine, and marigold. He stood in the alcove, close to the iron grille, and gazed down into the nave of Santa Felicità. I heard him sigh.
‘Perhaps you’re not aware of this, Zummo – in fact, I’m sure you’re not – but I have already showed my support for you by choosing to ignore certain information that has come to light –’
Madonna porca. I bit my bottom lip so hard I tasted blood.
‘Information which, if true,’ he said, still peering down, ‘would make your position here untenable.’
I didn’t speak. I couldn’t.
‘I have vouched for you personally because you’re important to me. I have given you the benefit of the doubt. All this behind your back, without you knowing, because I didn’t want to distract you from your work. But if you lodge a complaint against the very people who are making accusations …’ He faced me, his eyes solemn beneath their heavy lids.
‘And my friend?’
He pushed out his lips, then shook his head.
Staring at the ground, I nodded to myself. There would be no apology, no justice. No attempt at reparation. Cuif would join the hordes of cripples and beggars who slumped against the walls of the city’s many charitable institutions with crude paintings of John the Baptist round their necks.
‘Those who are for us,’ the Grand Duke said, ‘and those who are against us cannot be measured on the same set of scales. Enemies have more urgency, more focus. They will always tip the balance.’
I was pretty certain that Cuif’s arrest and torture had been intended as a warning to me, and a lesson. What had not occurred to me – not, that is, until that moment – was the idea that he might have been a decoy, and that Faustina might be the real target. In a hurry to leave suddenly, I thanked the Grand Duke for his patience and his advice, and apologized once again for having interrupted him.
‘Do your work,’ he said. ‘That, after all, is why you’re here.’
The sky had darkened, and thunder began to roll and tumble in the hills behind San Miniato. In the street below, I heard a child cry out in terror. I backed away down the corridor. The Grand Duke was eyeing me with regret, it seemed, or even, possibly, nostalgia. Just then, he leapt towards me, doubling in size, and becoming brighter, almost silver, and I thought for one demented, panic-stricken moment that he was attacking me. Then I realized he hadn’t moved.
It was just sheet lightning flashing through the window to his right.
It was just the beginning of the storm.
In the fading light I saw Siena up ahead, and I remembered how it coiled on its hill like the shell of a snail, with hardly a straight street to be found, and how the subtle but recurring bends and curves gave the city an atmosphere of mystery, a discreet sense of the infinite.
The day after my encounter with the Grand Duke, I had called on Magliabechi. When I knocked, a small panel slid open at head-height, and I heard the librarian’s irritable voice: ‘If it’s not important, you can go away.’
I spoke through the hatch. ‘It is important.’
The latch clicked, seemingly of its own accord, and the door swung inwards. Magliabechi was sprawled on his back in the middle of a large dusty room, not in a chair, but in the kind of wide, shallow cradle that one might use for sorting pears or peaches. He was surrounded by books, all stacked in vertiginous, fragile towers. As I approached, he reared into a sitting position. ‘Careful! Don’t hurt my spiders!’
In the grey light that fell in a column from the window above him, I saw that his cradle was linked to the piles of books by dozens of cobwebs.
‘Did you know that a spider can survive for months without food?’ Magliabechi peered at me as if I were a lesser species, chin jutting, bits of egg-white wedged in the gaps between his teeth.
‘No, I didn’t know that.’
I passed him the jar that contained the piece of the dead girl’s skin. He grasped it in both hands, his fingers hook-like, scaly.
‘Interesting specimen,’ he said. ‘My first thought? Domini canes. It’s a pun. Domini canes means Dominicans, obviously, but it also means “Hounds of the Lord”.’
‘That’s precisely the answer I was hoping for,’ I said.
He handed the jar back to me.
Talking of Dominicans, he said, had I by any chance heard about Stufa’s vigil? He had sat beside Vittoria’s body for more than a week, and had prayed without ceasing. He had hardly slept. His mind was beginning to unravel.
‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ I said. ‘She was like a mother to him, apparently.’
‘And more than that, some say.’ Magliabechi gave me a wily, tantalizing look, but wouldn’t elaborate.
Later that day, I walked over to Santa Maria Novella, intent on seeing the dogs for myself. Once in the Spanish Chapel, I approached the eastern wall. There they were, with their long, pointed muzzles and their teeth set in fierce, even rows. One of them had savaged a wolf and drawn blood, wolves symbolizing the unbelievers who threatened the fold. As I stood in front of the fresco, struck by the dogs’ uncanny resemblance to the crudely decorated piece of skin inside my bag, I heard footsteps and turned to see Stufa standing at my elbow.
‘The Exaltation of the Order of the Dominicans,’ he said. ‘Andrea di Bonaiuto at his most inspired.’
‘So it’s not true that all art leaves you cold.’
Stufa’s face looked even bonier than usual, and his eyes, though piercing, were lightless. His vigil had taken its toll, and he was still grieving, of course, but it also seemed likely that the death of his protector had left him feeling unanchored and exposed.
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ I said.
‘Is that why you came? To gloat?’
‘Actually, I wasn’t expecting to see you. Since you’re here, though, there’s something I want to put to you.’
‘Really?’ Stufa sounded sceptical, sarcastic. He clearly doubted I could say anything that would be of interest to him, and that prompted me to be more blunt than I had intended.
‘You’re a murderer,’ I said.
I had expected him to be startled, but he held my gaze. ‘What happened? Did that spineless Frenchman die?’
‘No, he didn’t. Not yet, anyway.’
‘In that case, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I’ve got evidence that connects you to the death of a girl.’
‘What girl would that be?’
‘She was found by the river. In Sardigna.’
‘As it happens,’ he said slowly, ‘there is a girl I’m interested in. It seems we’re destined to be together. Look inside her name. I’m there.’ He waited for me to understand. ‘You don’t see it? My name, her name – the one inside the other.’ His lips were thin and bloodless; his tongue showed between them, dark as a parrot’s. ‘I’ve already penetrated the girl you’re in love with. I’ve already had her.’
‘You’re just playing with words.’ But he had ruined Faustina’s name for me, and he knew it.
‘People like us should share things, don’t you think? That’s what you said, remember? People like us.’
I turned away, making for the cloister.
‘Are you going already? Don’t you want me to tell you where she is?’
I kept walking.
‘Put it like this. Tomorrow I leave for the south-east of the duchy. There’s a little village, on a hill …’
He was claiming to know where Faustina was, and I couldn’t afford not to believe him.
That afternoon I told my mother I was going to look at the gypsum quarries near Volterra, and that I might be gone for as long as a fortnight, then I borrowed a mare from Borucher, strapped a sword to the saddle and rode south to Siena, forty-seven miles down that lonely, stony switchback of a road, the sky low and dark, the weather unseasonably cold for March. In making for Torremagna, was I protecting Faustina or was I putting her at risk? I had no idea.
As I approached Siena’s northern gate, my path was blocked by two men on horseback, their breath steaming in the icy half-light. At first I assumed they were working for a local hostelry – they would offer me low prices, clean linen, fine wine; they would offer me the world if only I agreed to choose their establishment over all the others – but as they drew nearer I saw that they had a jittery, flamboyant look about them that had nothing to do with honest business. The man who rode in front was tall and angular. His grizzled, greying beard didn’t match his hair, which was chestnut-coloured and luxuriantly wavy. The other man had a lazy, laconic air, as if he was used to people finding what he said amusing. One of his eyes didn’t open properly.
When the bearded man noticed me looking at his incongruous hairpiece, he reached up and stroked it. ‘A whore I f*cked and killed in Poggibonsi. And here’s something else I got.’ He undid the buttons on his tunic. A strip of bloodstained fabric showed.
‘Is that silk?’ I asked.
He nodded, then glanced down. ‘It was white before I gutted her.’
‘Nothing like a bit of silk to keep you warm on a cold night,’ I said.
These were men for whom violence was as ordinary and natural as sleep.
He told me there was a fee for entering the city, which should be paid to him and his colleague directly. It wasn’t my intention to enter the city, I said. I wasn’t even passing through. I was bound for Torremagna, a village forty miles to the south-east.
‘There’s a fee for that as well,’ he said.
‘I thought you might say that.’ I reached into a pocket and took out Faustina’s hair, which I had tied with a piece of ribbon. ‘You’re not the only one who’s killed a whore.’
He came forwards on his horse and held out a hand.
‘No,’ I said. ‘This trophy’s mine. Kind of a coincidence, though, don’t you think?’
The two men stared at me, either curious or just plain foxed, and I realized I had to keep talking, otherwise the spell would break.
‘Are you on the road most days?’
They watched me with the appearance of shrewdness, as if they suspected there might be a right answer, but weren’t sure what it was.
‘There’s a man coming this way,’ I went on. ‘He’s a monk.’
The bearded man muttered something under his breath.
‘Have you seen anyone like that?’ I said.
He shook his head. A wind sprang up, and a few strands of his gruesome wig drifted across his face. He pushed them back behind his ear.
‘You couldn’t miss him. He’s a big man, dressed in black and white.’ I paused. ‘They call him “Flesh”.’
The man with the lazy eye wanted to know why. I mentioned a partiality for choirboys and suckling pig. In that order. The two men looked at each other, and I saw a thought pass between them, amorphous, yet coiled, feral.
‘And he’s a monk?’ the bearded man said.
‘A Dominican. Hence the black and white. You’re sure you haven’t seen him?’
They were sure.
‘He’ll be here soon,’ I said, ‘and he’ll have money on him.’ I paused again. ‘He wears an emerald. It was a gift from the Grand Duke’s mother. That’s got to be worth a bit.’
The bearded man picked at a tooth. ‘He’s hunting you, isn’t he?’
He wasn’t without a certain sly intelligence; I was almost proud of him.
‘If he asks about me,’ I said, ‘tell him I went to Torremagna.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘I want him to find me.’
I glanced over my shoulder. Night had come down while we had been talking, and the woods I had passed through earlier were already sunk deep in the murk. Ahead of me, the walls of Siena rose behind the two road agents, lights showing in windows that seemed randomly arranged. I remembered the striped churches, the curving streets, the penniless nobility.
I asked the bearded man how much he wanted. He mentioned an amount. I told him it was more than I could afford. He should remember that I was no different to him – a man trying to make his way in the darkness, a man with hair in his pocket and blood on his hands. I took out a drawstring purse where I kept such money as I was prepared to lose and tossed it to him, then watched as he loosened the string and poked at the coins that lay inside.
‘The monk will make up the difference,’ I said.
Tugging on the reins, I pressed my heels into my horse’s flanks, then rode past the two men. I was careful not to look back, not to hurry. I didn’t want to trigger a pursuit. I didn’t even want the idea to enter their heads.
Once I had gained the high ground to the south-east of Siena, I began to look for a place to sleep. By then, I was in the crete, as they were known, a series of chevron-shaped ridges and ravines that were often bare, revealing an unearthly, greyish clay-like soil. There was almost no vegetation. Sometimes a row of cypresses, sometimes an olive tree so gnarled that it looked biblical. The wind roamed the landscape unimpeded.
I came across an abandoned cart and tethered my horse to its one remaining wheel, then I walked a few yards off the track and lay down on a patch of couch grass, my sword beside me. He was good with a sword, Earhole had said. I wasn’t, though. I didn’t know why I had brought it. Pointless, really. The raw air skimmed across my upturned face.
I saw the road agents confronting Stufa, all three men on foot. The sun rinsed the countryside in stringent yellow light. Stufa produced a roncolino, a short, curved knife designed for cutting ripe grapes from the vine, and drove the rust-pocked blade into the bearded man’s abdomen, then jerked it upwards through the complex, tumbling parcel of guts. Nobody had even asked him for money. Nobody had had the chance. He was supernaturally fast and violent.
Right hand enamelled with the bearded man’s blood, shreds of red silk trailing from the blade, Stufa rounded on the man with the lazy eye. There was nothing laconic about him now. Stufa dropped his weapon in the grass and wrapped both hands around the man’s thin neck. That was the last place he ever stood. A brackish wind stole through a nearby stand of cane. The dry stalks clicked and rattled.
Later, I saw Stufa sitting with Faustina in a brown room filled with firelight and shadows. He was an old friend of mine, he said – we had known each other for years, since we were theology students – and because I was too busy to make the journey from Florence – You know how it is with artists! – he had been sent on ahead to watch over her. Judging by the indulgent, almost sleepy way she looked at him – exactly the way my mother used to look at Jacopo – she believed every word. She didn’t know his name was hidden inside hers. She didn’t know his name at all. I reached for the door handle that led to the room, intent on warning her, and woke up grasping at the nothingness in front of me.
I slept again, and woke to find Stufa’s knife lying near me, but the crust of dried blood on the blade was the night sky and the silk tatters clinging to the hilt were dawn’s red streaks showing in the east. I had visited the hospital before I left. Cuif would live, Pampolini said, though it seemed unlikely he would regain the full use of his arms. There had been too much internal damage. To my astonishment, Pampolini had saved Cuif’s leg. Not that the knee would ever function properly again. When I looked in on Cuif, he gave me a sickly smile. Tell that German to watch out. He’s got some competition now. I sat up, rubbed my face. The land unfolded to the south, its corrugations the colour of mould on cheese, no trees for miles. My dreams had felt so earthed in what was real that it was hard to believe in the world that lay before me, so unthreatening, so empty of people, and so quiet.
Perhaps that was why the events of that morning caught me unprepared. I had been riding for an hour or two when I passed a stone dwelling that crouched in the shadow of a crumbling tufa cliff. The ground all round looked worn and patchy. A man waved from the doorway. I waved back. A woman appeared. Then some children. In no time the whole family were swarming across the threadbare land towards me. At first I took this to be some kind of welcome – a traveller was a rare sight, maybe – but when I saw how starved they were, their eye-sockets hollow, almost bevelled, their skin moistureless and slack, I realized it was Borucher’s mare they were after. A horse was food – no, more than that: a feast – and they would kill me for it. I jabbed at her flanks with my heels. She reared, and then sprang forwards. The woman spun sideways with a shriek, her arms outstretched. I smelled her famine breath. The man lunged at me, and caught my thigh with the tip of a sickle. Then I was beyond them, wind roaring in my ears.
Two miles on, I reached a gully. Trees choked with ivy, a floor of leaf-mould. I swung down out of the saddle. My horse’s eyes were rolling like balls in a bucket. I ran my hand over her sweaty neck until she calmed down, then I tethered her and undid my breeches. The wound wasn’t deep, scarcely more than a scratch, but the stranger had marked me, and I was left with no choice but to believe in him when I would rather have pretended he was yet another demon served up by my fevered imagination. He had pierced my skin, and I was worried that some of his terrifying desperation might have entered me.
When I glanced up, the trees appeared to have edged closer, and though I was certain the starving family were too weak to have followed me into the woods, I mounted and rode on, eager to be done with the region once and for all.
*
Towards sunset on the fifth day, Torremagna appeared ahead of me, its mud-coloured houses huddled on a rocky outcrop. A bell-tower modelled on the one in Siena rose clear of the tiled rooftops and seemed to support the heavy sky. It was warmer, but not by much. I was travelling the white road Remo had travelled more than twenty years before, his baby daughter strapped against his chest. To my left, the land sloped down, then lifted into a long blunt ridge. To my right, the blue-grey cone of Monte Amiata showed above a skirt of mist.
The first person I came across as I rode into the village was somebody I recognized. He was hoisting himself along on three legs, two of which were artificial, made of wood. Only when I had passed him did he look up at me. The portrait Faustina had painted had been accurate enough. Mimmo Righetti was still in his early twenties, but he had lost all the shine and suppleness of youth. I was struck by his gaze, though, which was steady and slightly humorous, as if he thought I might be about to make a fool of myself. My eyes shifted to his crutches. The bottom of each crutch had been carved to resemble a wild boar’s trotter. Higher up, they were patterned with vine leaves and clusters of olives.
‘Beautiful craftsmanship,’ I said.
He thanked me quietly. His gaze didn’t waver.
‘Your father’s work, I take it.’
‘What do you know about my father?’
‘Only what Faustina told me.’
Looking at the ground, he nodded.
‘Is she here?’ I asked.
When he didn’t answer, a pit opened inside me, and I felt I might be sick. What if Stufa had deceived me, and Faustina was somewhere else entirely, in a place known only to him and his informers, and my long ride south had removed me from the scene, leaving him free to deal with her without any danger of me interfering?
‘Is she here in the village?’ I said again. ‘It’s important.’
Mimmo told me to follow him.
On reaching his house, I looped my horse’s reins through one of the iron bars on the window, then I stepped down, through a green door, into an L-shaped room. Though the air hoarded the sweet smell of sawdust, I could see no sign of the cabinet-maker’s tools. Mimmo’s father must have retired. Or died. Fixed to the walls were a number of wooden boxes, each of which contained a stuffed bird.
Mimmo saw where I was looking. ‘It’s a hobby.’
‘Only birds?’
‘Didn’t she tell you?’
‘Yes. She told me.’ I faced him across the room. ‘Where is she?’
‘Not far away.’ He removed the cork from a bottle and poured me a glass of wine, then poured one for himself. His hand was as steady as his gaze.
I told him what had happened since Faustina left the city. He listened carefully, and when I had finished he said that no one resembling Stufa had appeared, and that Faustina was safe. The only place to hide her, he added, was in his house.
‘But he’ll search your house,’ I said. ‘He’ll search every house in the village.’
‘He can search all he likes. He won’t find her.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
In the last decade of his life, Mimmo said, his father had become convinced that furniture should combine the functional with the clandestine, and he had begun to incorporate sliding panels and hidden compartments into almost everything he made.
Mimmo pointed to the bed at the far end of the room. ‘One of the better examples.’
I moved towards the bed. Its headboard offered a sea view, with a port on the horizon. A female figurehead leaned out from the foot of the bed, and its sides had been carved in such a way as to suggest a waterline. The frame above the drawers rippled like unfurling waves, like the beginning of a wake, while the drawers themselves, which were below the surface, were decorated with fish, shells, rocks and coral. I had no idea what I was looking for.
Mimmo told me to open a drawer.
‘Think about the depth of it,’ he said, ‘from front to back.’
Suddenly I saw what he meant. Given the width of the bed, the drawers on either side weren’t as deep as they should have been. Beneath the mattress, and running down the middle of the bed, would be a space about the size of a person.
‘You have to lie on your back,’ Mimmo said. ‘If you’re an adult, that is. It’s easier if you’re a child. I used to hide in there a lot. I used to call it “The Hold” –’
There was something of the schoolmaster about him, something self-regarding and pedantic, and I turned from the bed and put my glass down so abruptly that it nearly shattered. For all his absence of bitterness and resentment, for all his understated charm, I knew he must view me as a rival, and, odd though it might sound, and despite his obvious disability, I felt he had me at a disadvantage. He was distracting me, delaying me.
‘I’m wasting time,’ I said.
‘Then go.’
‘You haven’t told me where she is.’
He was by the window at the back of the room, staring out into the night. ‘Can’t you guess?’
I went over and stood next to him. Though it was my first time in the village, I thought it must feel like any other night at the end of winter – the faint, insistent barking of a dog, the air fragrant, almost nostalgic, with woodsmoke – but somewhere out there in the dark was a figure on horseback, a huge, hunched figure with a gash for a mouth, the black flames of his cloak flickering behind him, and I felt the urgency of the situation, and the hopelessness, and a panic twisted through me, fast and incomplete, like a lizard that has lost its tail.
I nearly missed the turning that led out along the ridge. A white track, hemmed in by vines and olive trees. Stars crowding the heavens. And such a stillness that I didn’t feel I was outside at all, but in a space that was enormous yet enclosed – a ballroom, perhaps, or a cathedral. The chink of my horse’s bridle, the scuff and shuffle of her hooves. That dog still barking in the distance. Not much else. A turmoil inside me, though: my heart was making more noise than the rest of the world put together. I came over a rise in the land. A pair of cypresses stood out against the sky. Then the sharp, clean line of a roof. That was where Sabatino Vespi lived.
The track dipped down and veered to the right. A gap opened in a tangled hedgerow. The ghost house appeared below, crouching on cleared ground, the pale, hooded shapes of the crete seeming to glow in the darkness beyond it, across the valley. No lights showed in the windows, and all the shutters were closed. If Faustina was there, she was doing her utmost to conceal the fact.
I left my horse in the barn, then stood at the front door and listened. I didn’t want to startle her by knocking. Instead, I called her name. Then she would know who it was. A brief shriek of chair legs on a tiled floor. The door creaked open.
She was wearing clothes I had never seen before – a man’s clothes – and a strange, dark hat that had no brim. With a shock, I remembered that her hair was in my pocket. But this was the face I had travelled for a week to see.
‘Faustina …’
She brushed at her forehead, as if she had walked into a cobweb, and then looked past me, into the night.
‘How did you get here?’
‘I rode. I borrowed a horse.’
‘But why?’
‘I was worried.’
‘But the Grand Duke – your work …’
‘I’m in Volterra. That’s what I told people. I’m looking at the quarries.’
I put my arms round her. She smelled like somebody else. Just the knowledge that I was holding her, though. A sense of slippage. A letting-go. As if every muscle in my body had been tense for days.
‘I tried to forget you,’ she murmured.
‘Did it work?’
‘It was beginning to. But now you’ve ruined it.’ She pushed back from me, one hand on my chest. ‘How did you find me?’
‘You told me about this place …’
From behind me came a sound that was like air being blown out of someone’s mouth, and I glanced over my shoulder, imagining the woman with her cabbage-leaf skull-cap and her cracked plate of a face, imagining the monk with his shadow thrown down, long and confident, in front of him, as if he was riding out of the east at sunrise, imagining all manner of visitations, none of them benevolent, but it was only the wind worrying the trees at the edge of the property.