I came back from Mass one day to find that a consignment of wax had been delivered to my room. I cut the cord that held the wrapping in place, and there it was, a brownish-yellow block, about the size of a child’s torso. Running my hand over the surface, which was pockmarked and granular, like certain cheeses, I leaned down and breathed it in. Such a delicious, complex smell.
I lit a small fire in the grate, then shaved a wedge off the block and began to heat it in a copper-bottomed pan.
‘Are you cooking?’
I had been so absorbed that I hadn’t heard Fiore enter. She was over by the door, chewing on her lower lip.
‘In a way.’ I tilted the pan, and we both watched the wax spill across the copper, faster than water. ‘Some sculptors make things out of wood or marble, but this is what I use.’
‘It smells like church.’
I took the pan off the fire and stood it on a metal trivet. ‘You know why?’
She shook her head.
‘This is what candles are made of,’ I said. ‘The more expensive candles, anyway. But you can make other things as well. Arms and legs. Heads. You can make whole people. Wax is the closest thing we have to skin and bone. Sometimes you can hardly tell the difference.’
‘When you talk about wax,’ Fiore said, ‘your voice changes completely.’
‘You don’t miss much, do you?’
She grinned.
Her mother had been with us the last time we were together, and I hadn’t had a chance to ask her the question that had been on my mind for several days. I had been unable to forget the girl I had seen in the apothecary window, and how she had stepped back into the shop’s interior with just the suggestion of a smile. I didn’t think that I’d imagined it. I had tried drawing her from memory – without success. I had also spent an entire afternoon doing my best to retrace Fiore’s route. Since she had been in charge, though, I hadn’t paid much attention to the sequence of the streets, let alone their names – I hadn’t known it was going to be so important – and while I had the feeling, more than once, that I was close – the iron studs on a front door, the fall of bleak light into a courtyard – I had failed to find the place.
‘On our tour of the city,’ I said, ‘we stopped outside an apothecary …’
Fiore’s eyes seemed to lose their focus.
‘It was in a narrow street,’ I said. ‘Quite dark.’
‘Most of the streets are like that.’
‘But I stopped, remember? I looked through the window.’
‘You looked through lots of windows.’
I tried to be patient. ‘This one was made of glass. Small glass panes.’
Fiore shrugged.
‘The shop was closed up for the night,’ I said, ‘so all I did was stand outside, and when I walked on there were dandelions floating in the air – thousands of dandelions –’
‘Dandelions?’ She wound a tangled strand of hair around her forefinger.
I was making her feel awkward, stupid – the way other people made her feel – but I had to keep probing.
‘You got left behind,’ I said. ‘You had to run to catch up. Don’t you remember?’
‘Sort of.’
It was no good. And if Fiore couldn’t help me, no one could. I would have to forget about the girl. I let out a sigh, then looked towards the window. Having to forget: I was used to that.
As Fiore turned to leave, the loose sole of her shoe caught on the uneven floorboards, and she almost fell.
‘I’m so clumsy,’ she wailed.
‘It’s not you,’ I said. ‘It’s those terrible shoes. How long have you had them?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You know what? Tomorrow, I’m going to buy you a new pair.’
I saw excitement in her face, and disbelief, but most of all I saw a kind of longing, and I realized, in that moment, just how little she got by on, how little she was given.
I had taken the Grand Duke up on his offer of the disused stables as a place to work, but there were walls to knock down and windows to install, and while the outbuildings were being converted I put in an appearance at court. Since everyone had their own carefully calibrated and highly symbolic position in the room, I had no way of approaching him, not unless he summoned me himself, and he was preoccupied that day, showing off a relic he had recently acquired, so I hung about on the fringes of the crowd, finding the whole experience stilted and strangely enervating. Then Bassetti came over.
‘How did you like the truffle?’
He seemed once again to writhe or coil beneath his clothes, a sudden, subtle oscillation that was over almost before it had begun. The first time I witnessed the phenomenon, in the parlour at the House of Shells, I had assumed it was a symptom of my own nervousness or disorientation, a temporary warping of my vision. Now, though, I wasn’t so sure.
I told him I had enjoyed the truffle very much. A taste like no other, I said. Impossible to describe. His plump lips parted; his tongue lolled and glistened between his teeth. He wanted to know if it had been my first. Indeed it had, I said. Throughout this apparently innocuous exchange, I watched for a flicker of amusement, or even of malice, but I saw nothing.
Bassetti introduced me to the Grand Duke’s physician, Francesco Redi. The Grand Duke had described Redi as a tyrant, but I had never met anyone less tyrannical; he was a docile man, with the sensitive, elongated face of a horse. I told him I was looking for an anatomist; I would be needing body parts, but I was also keen to resume my study of the art of dissection. Redi apologized profusely. He would be unable to collaborate with me himself. He had turned sixty-five, and his energies were failing. Besides, he was preoccupied with his research, what he called ‘the unmasking of untruth’. He recommended a barber-surgeon by the name of Pampolini, who practised at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova.
Not long afterwards, Lorenzo Borucher walked up to me.
‘How are your lodgings? Bearable? Oh, good.’
A hairdresser by trade, Borucher spoke fast, almost breathlessly, hands twirling on the end of powerful wrists. It was he who had called on me in Naples, informing me of the Grand Duke’s passion for my plague pieces, he who had delivered the letter of invitation.
I mentioned that Bassetti had been to see me.
You wouldn’t think so to look at him, Borucher said, but Bassetti came from humble stock. His father had worked as a coachman. His influence was not to be underestimated, though. He organized the Grand Duke’s political and social life, and he was also active in matters of morality. As the driving force behind the Office of Public Decency, he had encouraged the Grand Duke in his persecution of licentious behaviour. He came down particularly hard on sodomy and prostitution.
As Borucher talked on, I began to consider the significance of Bassetti’s appearance at the House of Shells. Given his lofty position, it surprised me. Surely a written summons would have sufficed? But perhaps I had learned something about the way he operated. He put no trust in the judgement of others. He insisted on seeing things for himself. There was no matter so small that it didn’t warrant his interest or attention.
And there had been someone with him, I remembered – a man with a strange, gaunt face … I was about to ask Borucher if he knew who that might be when the Grand Duke’s elder son, Ferdinando, appeared in front of me. He had been spared the exaggerated features his family were known for, but the deep vertical line between his eyebrows suggested a vexed, impatient nature.
‘I should warn you,’ he said. ‘My taste in art is nothing like my father’s.’
‘People say you have a wonderful collection.’
‘I own a Raphael and a del Sarto. In general, though, I prefer the Venetians –’
‘That’s right. You do.’ The man who loitered at the Grand Prince’s elbow wore a lilac robe and pink leather slippers.
Ferdinando rolled his eyes. ‘I was talking about artists, Cecchino.’
Cecchino was a singer, he told me. From Venice, obviously.
The singer turned to face me. He had painted his lips a shade of mauve that made his teeth look yellow, and his eyebrows were two astonished arcs. ‘Actually, I’m familiar with your work.’
Ferdinando looked at him.
‘Yes,’ Cecchino said, ‘I distinctly remember a bare-breasted woman. She was dying, I think – or perhaps she was already dead.’ He waved a hand; it didn’t matter. ‘What intrigued me was how sensual she was. It almost made me want to leap on top of her and ravage her.’ He appeared to hesitate. ‘Or rather, it would have,’ he added slyly, ‘if I were that way inclined.’ Cecchino sidled closer, and I was enveloped in his perfume, which was dense and sickly, like a lily when its petals go brown at the edges. ‘You’ve been so patient with my clumsy compliments that I feel I should reward you. Would you like to hear me sing?’
‘It would be an honour,’ I murmured.
I had imagined an intimate recital for certain privileged guests in the gardens of some ducal villa – Pratolino, perhaps, or Lappeggi – but as Cecchino stood in front of me his mauve lips parted, and he released a high-pitched note of such concentrated power that it seemed to obliterate not only the room and everybody in it but the world outside as well. When the note ended, it left a void. Then the world returned, a little paler and more unsteady than before.
Cecchino turned to the Grand Prince. ‘There are tears in his eyes.’
‘You frightened him.’
‘Really? Don’t people sing in Sicily?’
‘Not like that,’ I said.
Ferdinando began to laugh, and once he had started he couldn’t stop. The Venetian was laughing too.
‘You’re very funny,’ Ferdinando said when he had himself under control again. ‘We must see more of you.’
The steps outside Santa Maria Nuova were packed with people seeking admission to the hospital. As I drew near, a man seized me by the arm. He had a deep gash on his cheek, and his eyes swam with some sort of rheum or glair. I couldn’t help him, I said. I wasn’t a physician. He began to rant about how clerics received preferential treatment, and how the poor were left to fend for themselves. Though his grip was fierce, I managed to shake him off, but not before he had bled all over my sleeve.
I found Pampolini in a small green room with a high ceiling and a single barred window. A stocky man, with a head that was wider at the jaw than at the temple, he was crouched over a wooden desk, making hurried notes. Pinned to the wall behind him were a number of anatomical drawings.
When he sensed my presence, he stopped writing and looked up. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘What?’ I glanced at my sleeve. ‘No, no. One of the people outside mistook me for a surgeon. He wouldn’t let go of me.’
‘You’ve got the hands of a surgeon – or a cook.’
He was referring to my scars and burns, the legacy of twenty years of working with wax.
‘Francesco Redi sent me,’ I said.
Pampolini nodded. ‘A good man, especially if you’re interested in worms.’
‘Which I am.’
I introduced myself. I had recently been taken on by the Grand Duke, I said. Pampolini asked me what I did. As I described my little theatres filled with the graphic, tortured bodies of the dead and dying I saw his eyes brighten.
‘Some people think my work’s a little –’ I hesitated – ‘extreme …’
He let out a sudden, full-throated laugh. ‘In that, sir, we’re alike. And yes – though you’ve been too delicate to raise the subject – you’ve come to the right place. I know what you’re after, you see. Cadavers!’ He had climbed to his feet and was rubbing his hands. This, clearly, was a man who loved his job. ‘We have a plentiful supply here at Santa Maria Nuova, and I’d be happy to help you out.’
Just then, a boy put his head round the door. He said there were three people waiting to be bled. Before he withdrew, I noticed that one of his ears was missing. That was Nuto, Pampolini said. Nuto’s mother was employed by a slaughter-house for pigs near Via Frusa. She was a frightful drunk. He had been teaching Nuto the rudiments of his trade. Some grammar too.
‘I call him Earhole,’ he said, ‘for obvious reasons – though he is also, coincidentally, a wonderful source of information and gossip.’
We talked for another hour, and by the time I left the hospital I felt I had found a barber-surgeon I could rely on. Not only that, but I had met someone who shared many of my arcane enthusiasms.
By the end of July the conversion of the stable block was complete. In Naples, silence had been in short supply – the city seemed to reverberate, like a jar filled with bees – but once I arrived at the gate on Via Romana, and had been cleared by the guards, one of whom, Toldo, was a native of Messina, I found myself on a grass track that had a stone wall on one side and a row of myrtle trees on the other, and all I could hear was the occasional grunt or screech from the menagerie, and the faint click and trickle of a fountain, which reminded me of Fiore’s murdered countess and her ghostly, bouncing pearls. After a few steps, the track forked left into a paved courtyard with out buildings on three sides. I had more space than ever before. The old tack room, which looked north and backed on to a bank of earth, was cool even in hot weather, almost like being underground, and was ideal as a place in which to carry out dissections, while the south-facing stalls had been transformed into an airy studio where I could melt and model wax.
I worked hard for the rest of the summer. Keen to prevent my techniques from becoming common knowledge, I turned down various offers from would-be assistants or apprentices. I didn’t need help, and I resented all forms of interruption. There was something private, almost sacred, about wax: it demanded vigilance, devotion, subterfuge. Secrecy could be imposed from without, like a punishment or an affliction, but it could also be cultivated, or even willed. It could offer comfort. Provide a refuge. According to Herodotus, the Persians used to cover their dead in wax before they placed them in the ground. Wax was, in itself, a form of protection, a kind of veil.
Autumn came. Leaves scuttled across the stable yard, and a keen, metallic smell drifted down from the Casentino. The first snows had fallen in the mountains. One morning I was brushing fast, thin strips of molten wax into the inside of a mould when the Grand Duke appeared in the open doorway. He was alone. In his bottle-green silk and gold brocade, he reminded me of one of the beetles I had studied on a visit to Redi’s laboratory. I hesitated.
‘Please don’t stop,’ he said.
After watching for a moment, he remarked on the quickness of my hands.
‘You have to be quick, Your Highness,’ I said, ‘or the wax dries on the brush.’
While I covered the mould with a piece of muslin to protect the cooling wax, the Grand Duke surveyed the large round window I had installed in the southern wall to let in light.
‘It all looks so different,’ he murmured.
I asked if he approved.
He nodded. ‘I prefer it.’
I led him across the courtyard to my office, where we would be more comfortable.
‘I don’t usually set foot outdoors at this time of year.’ He gave the clouds a rapid, fearful glance, as if they might be capable of violence, and pressed a handkerchief over his mouth and nose.
Once in the office, I threw a log on the embers that were glowing in the grate.
The Grand Duke coughed. ‘It was my wife who used to keep her horses here.’
I watched him carefully. All I knew was that he had been married to Louis XIV’s cousin, Marguerite-Louise of Orléans, and that the marriage had failed, but I remembered what he had said about horses, and how he no longer found it pleasing to keep them. I had thought it an odd remark, even at the time.
‘They were French, of course,’ he went on, ‘like everything she surrounded herself with.’ He sniffed at the air. ‘I’m not sure I can’t still smell them. Can you smell them, Zummo?’
I inhaled. Woodsmoke. Plaster.
‘Possibly,’ I said.
‘Our marriage was torture, from beginning to end.’
The words had burst out of him, as if they couldn’t be contained any longer, but I had no idea why he had chosen me as an audience. I rather wished he hadn’t. The wrong kind of knowledge could be dangerous. People were always being persecuted for what they knew.
He sank down on to a chair. ‘You wouldn’t believe some of the things she said to me.’
Beyond him, between two outbuildings, the gardens sloped uphill, the foliage on the trees a muted gold. ‘Didn’t she appreciate these beautiful surroundings?’
He trained his heavy-lidded eyes on me for so long that I felt I must have spoken out of turn. ‘You don’t know? I thought everybody knew.’
After her father’s death, Marguerite-Louise had lived in Paris, which she thought of as the cradle of civilization, the centre of the world. Her marriage had taken her away from all that. When she arrived in Tuscany, she was only fifteen, but she already had strong opinions. She saw herself as having been banished to some dismal backwater, as she never tired of telling him.
‘I got a letter from her once. Do you know what it said? I remember the exact words. I swear by all that I most hate, that is yourself, that I enter into a pact with the devil to drive you mad. Her handwriting was huge, and it slanted across the page like rain. Torrential rain. The word “hate” took up the whole of one line.’ He gulped, then shook his head. His eyes had filled with water.
It sounded to me, I said, pouring two glasses of red wine, as if his wife had taken leave of her senses.
The Grand Duke blinked back his tears. ‘There were those who thought she drifted in and out of sanity. My mother, for one. My physician, Redi, too. And some of the reports that reach me from the convent in Montmartre which is now her home seem to confirm that view. She has become a compulsive gambler, appearing in Versailles in rouge and a blond wig. She’s quite capable of losing an entire fortune in a single night. No wonder she’s always asking me for money. Did you know she tried to steal my family jewels?’
I shook my head.
‘Not so long ago, she chased the Reverend Mother through the cloisters with a pistol in one hand and a hatchet in the other. When some attempt was made to restrain her, she threatened to burn the convent to the ground.’ He laughed, but more in horror than amusement.
I suggested, gently, that he might be better off without her.
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ he said. ‘But there’s something I haven’t told you. I fell in love with her the moment I saw her, and I have loved her ever since – despite everything.’
The Grand Duke’s talk of an impossible love reminded me of Ornella Camilleri. For years after I was driven out of Siracusa I had clung to the hope that she might join me. Sometimes, in the small hours, I would wake believing she was beside me in the bed. If I turned over, there she would be. The twin hollows of her collarbone. The cool, glossy skin of her hip. And on her thighs a dusting of gold hair, which was only visible in sunlight. All of it imagined. Invented. For, whatever Jacopo might have thought, I had never slept with her. I had never even kissed her. Our love had been destroyed before it had the chance to come into being.
Late one night, when I was seventeen, I was pulled from my bed so roughly that the back of my head hit the floor. When I looked up, Jacopo was standing over me, his eyes like silver discs in the darkness, his breath sour with wine.
‘What are you playing at?’ he said.
I stared at him blankly.
‘You’ve been seen.’
‘Seen where?’ I said.
‘The Camilleri house.’
‘I’m working with Ornella’s father –’
‘Don’t say her name!’
‘But it’s true. He’s teaching me about anatomy –’
‘You’ve been seen with her. Talking.’
‘I’ve spoken to her.’ What could I say that would not provoke him? ‘We talk about books.’
Rather than ridiculing books, which was the response I’d been hoping for, Jacopo seemed to think I was parading my intelligence. ‘Books?’ He wrapped a hand round my throat and began to squeeze. ‘If I find out there’s something going on between you two –’ The silver drained from his eyes, and they became unnervingly opaque. ‘Gesù bambino merdoso, if I find out you’re up to something …’
He threw me aside and stumbled out of the room, but it was hours before I slept. From that moment on, I knew he would be watching me. I also knew that he already thought of me as guilty. I never imagined he would be so cunning, though. It just goes to show: the people you think you know, you hardly know at all.
I looked up and saw the Grand Duke sitting opposite me, resplendent in brocade and silk. Judging by what he had told me, it was clear that he, too, nursed a sense of injustice. We both understood what it was to feel aggrieved.
‘But I came here with some news.’ He pinched his lower lip. ‘Ah, yes. There’s to be a banquet in your honour.’