Secrecy

As we rode into the village where the potter was supposed to live, I saw a man slouched on a low wall, mending a wicker basket. I climbed down off my horse. His thick grey hair fell to his shoulders, and his hands were huge and slow, with fingernails that were circular, like coins. I asked where I could find Marvuglia.

‘Who’s looking?’ he said.

I told him my name.

He swore. ‘I thought you were coming next week.’

‘You’re Marvuglia?’

He heaved himself to his feet. His narrow eyes had raw, pink rims. ‘Now that you’re here,’ he said, his gaze shifting to Faustina, ‘I suppose you’d better come in.’

When we had tethered our horses, he led us through a gate and across a courtyard. In his kitchen he slopped some red wine into beakers he must have made himself. Displayed on a dresser were more examples of his work. An eel slithered across the green pond of a plate, dogs tussled on a bowl that was swollen as a pregnant woman’s belly. They were mistakes, he told me. He liked mistakes. In fact, he sometimes thought he preferred them to the pieces that were judged to be successful. I asked how he achieved such intensity of colour. One day he had been working with all the doors and windows open, he said, and a gust of wind had whirled into the room. Ash from the grate had landed on the blue glaze he was applying to a vase. Though he had assumed the vase would be ruined, he had fired it anyway, and it had come out oddly luminous. He had enormous faith in accidents. How could you learn anything if nothing ever went wrong?

‘But you’ll be wanting to see my proper work …’

We followed him through a low doorway and into a large, cool room. Hanging from the vaulted ceiling were several planks, each of which had a verse from the Old Testament carved into it. On a long trestle table in the middle of the room was an array of Marvuglia’s animals. I moved closer. They struck me as both primitive and pagan – partly, I thought, because they were life-size – life-like – and partly because the glazes flouted the laws of nature. The wolves were all blue, for instance – not an ordinary warm blue, like the sky, but a blue that was bruised and bleak, a chilblain blue, with hints of indigo, flint, and dirty ice. His goats were the blackish-red of old wounds or dried blood. His sheep were rust-orange, like metal left out in the rain. Every piece Marvuglia made had an injured or untended quality, a quality of having been mistreated or abandoned.

He asked Faustina what she thought.

‘They frighten me,’ she said.

He nodded, but said nothing.

‘They’re like the worst parts of ourselves, the most savage part – the part we’re ashamed of.’ She stopped in front of one of the cold blue wolves. ‘They’re like nightmares.’

Still he didn’t speak.

She wanted to know how he chose the colours.

‘I don’t choose,’ he said. ‘They just arrive.’

‘But they’re wrong.’

Marvuglia’s smile was instant, and oddly lascivious. ‘Not to me.’

Back in the kitchen, he poured more wine. When we were seated, he asked what I was working on. I told him I was interested in the plague.

‘I thought I saw a morbid streak in you.’ Knees wide apart, he reached down and tugged at his genitals. ‘How long have you two been together, anyway?’

‘We’re not together.’

‘Just as well.’

‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why “just as well”?’

‘You don’t belong together. It doesn’t look right.’

I felt a bright needle of anger go through me, but I fought the urge to challenge or contradict him. Instead, I glanced at Faustina, who was smiling.

Marvuglia noticed. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘If your colours are anything to go by,’ she said, ‘I’m not sure we should believe a word you say.’

He remained motionless for a few moments, then burst out laughing. ‘You’re quite something, you are. Madonna rotta in culo, if I were fifteen years younger …’

He went to fill her cup again, but she told him she’d had enough. Not long afterwards, we stood up to leave.

Outside, in the courtyard, a warm wind was blowing, and the leaves of a scruffy palm tree scraped and clattered. My horse skittered sideways, almost tripping over its own hooves.

Marvuglia scowled at the sky. ‘There’s bad weather on the way.’



Up ahead, the land blurred as the storm blew in from the north. I was thinking about Marvuglia, and wondering why Towne had wanted me to meet him, and what, if anything, we had in common. For all its unpredictability, his work was rooted in the earth, and in the things of the earth. It seemed to house resentment and the desire for vengeance; it failed to achieve transcendency. And I had found the man himself sarcastic and devious. Deliberately provocative. His claim that Faustina and I looked wrong together still rankled, and in the end I had to turn to her and ask what she had made of the remark.

‘He was jealous,’ she said simply.

‘You think so?’

‘Why? What do you think?’

I shrugged.

Though clouds were massing, we stopped beside a river. While the horses drank, I watched the water sliding past. Impassive, solid. A curious yellow-grey, like travertine. Faustina picked up a leaf and held it at arm’s length, then let it fall. Off it went, scrawling on the smooth, blank surface, as if it had been activated by the contact, and was delivering a message. The fast approaching storm, the whirling leaf – I had a sudden, acute sense of the shortness of time. I reached for Faustina’s hand. I thought I could feel the life rushing through her veins. Such optimism, such naivety. No inkling that it could end at any moment. I turned her hand over. Touched the tips of her fingers, one by one.

‘They’re beautiful, your fingers.’

‘Are they?’

She looked at her hands with such detachment that they might have been a pair of gloves. Not her gloves either. Someone else’s. Someone she didn’t even know. I felt all my words had come too late. Nothing I could say to her would make the slightest difference. Something inside me crumpled, and I stared off into the trees.

When I turned back, a tear had spilled in a straight line down her cheek. I touched the path it had left, the shine on her skin, then put the finger to my lips, and almost before I knew it my mouth was on her mouth, and I was kissing her.

‘The first time I saw you,’ I said.

‘What?’ she murmured. ‘The first time you saw me, what?’

Wind clutched at the trees behind us; the leaves rattled.

‘I don’t know.’ I was shivering, but I wasn’t cold at all. ‘There aren’t any words for it.’

‘You weren’t short of words before.’

‘Did I talk too much?’ I pulled away, looked down into her face. ‘I meant everything I said. You’re lovely.’

‘Am I?’ Her voice was light, as before, but melancholy, fatalistic.

I kissed her again.

‘What did you think,’ she said, ‘when you first saw me?’

‘I felt I could look at you for ever, and that would be all I ever needed to see.’

‘That’s too much.’

‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘Would you rather I felt less?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

Lightning tongued the high ground to the north. Seconds later, thunder tumbled across the valley, loud and clumsy. Our horses shimmied, eyes flaring white.

As we scrambled up into our saddles, the wind hurled itself at us. We could hardly hear each other speak. Then the rain came, flung in huge, cold handfuls. We were soaked in no time, and the city was still miles off.

We rode side by side, crouching low over our horses’ warm wet necks.



Not long after seeing Faustina to her door, my body began to ache. Between one street and the next, my limbs weakened; it was all I could do to lead Faustina’s horse. When I reached my lodgings, the signora put me on a pallet on the ground floor and covered me with blankets. The sweat poured off me so fast that my skin seemed to have turned to water. She had to keep changing the bedding, complaining with her usual dry humour about my lack of consideration and my demanding ways. Fiore loomed over me, no space between the ceiling and her face. The room had folded like a paper lantern. I touched a cool place on the pallet, and my whole body shuddered. Moments later, I felt I had gone up in flames. There was no night and day, only hot and cold.

I saw the field of death we had ridden through on our way back. It was late, the night hour was tolling, and we’d had no choice but to make for the nearest gate. Outside Porta alla Croce was the place where they held public executions. And I was there again, huddled over my horse’s neck, eyes filled with rain. A dripping scaffold. One body hanging from a rope, another ripped right down the middle. A crow stood on a dead man’s skull. Mud everywhere. Puddles. Blood. Where was Faustina? I’d lost sight of her. I rode past four pallbearers, black cloaks to the ground, a coffin on their shoulders. A dwarf sat cross-legged on the mouldy lid. His head was shaved; his mouth had been sewn shut. A blind priest beat a drum.

I walked through our house and on into the courtyard. My mother had her back to me. She was talking to my father, who stood with his forehead against a pillar. He didn’t appear to be listening to her; his lips were moving, as if in prayer. My father, whose reputation as a craftsman was second to none. My father, the shipbuilder. My mother put a hand on his arm. He flinched and pulled away.

How could you? he said.

Sensing there was someone behind her, she glanced over her shoulder. When she saw me, her face became two faces – one for me, one against. The first, I understood. But why the second?

Not now, Gaetano, she said. And then, more forcefully, Not now.

My assassin showed, as I had known he would. He loitered on the threshold, one ankle crossed over the other, studying his nails. In his knee-high leather boots and his green velvet coat with its huge folded-back half-sleeves and silver piping, he was quite the dandy.

Who sent you? I said.

He did not reply. Instead, he took out a glass vial and removed the stopper. I asked him how much he had been paid. Twenty-five scudi? Fifty? Once again, he ignored me. Stooping over me, he cradled my head and held a spoon to my lips. His fingers smelled of sex, as if he had been pleasuring a woman. That was a bit much, I thought. Surely he could have waited until afterwards. All the same, I drank the poison down. And, almost straight away, a vicious cramp, as though I had swallowed a hand that was twisting my insides. Then a surprising revelation. There was no sudden, sickening drop into the dark. No panic or pain. No, the whole thing was far less brutal than I had imagined. I felt a kind of click. A soft jolt. Like being in a carriage when it runs over a rotten branch. There was the feeling that something had been severed. An uncoupling, then. But dreamy, stealthy. Deft. You fall away. You settle. Dust in sunlight, sediment in wine.

The assassin tucked his vial back into his pocket. Three paces took him to the window, where he stood with his back to me. There was bird-lime on his coat, just where the right arm joined the shoulder. I tried to remember what that signified. A windfall? His downfall? I couldn’t think. In any case, he hadn’t noticed. Odd that – me dead and knowing all about it, and him alive and none the wiser. His right shoulder lifted, his elbow eased sideways. Even from where I was lying, I could tell he was adjusting his testicles. The killing had excited him, perhaps. Then, as my thoughts were beginning to scatter and disintegrate, he spoke for the first time.

That’s it, sir. Just let go.

This was a man who knew his trade. They had sent a professional. Well, that was something – better, at any rate, than some cack-handed ruffian who has to hack at your throat a dozen times before he finds your windpipe …

The room went black.

Five days later, when the fever finally loosened its grip, the signora told me what an ordeal it had been.

‘You were shouting so loud,’ she said.

‘Did I say terrible things?’

‘You thought we were trying to kill you.’ She gave me a sharp look. Was she wondering if I had heard about her husband’s suspicious death?

I talked about the assassin. His small glass vial, his coat with its exaggerated sleeves. I wasn’t sure she believed me.

Fiore came and stood beside the bed. She had tucked her lips inside her mouth, and her eyes were so full of tears that they seemed to wobble. ‘I thought you were going to die.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ the signora said. ‘It wouldn’t have been very good for business.’

‘Mother,’ Fiore wailed. ‘Don’t.’



It took me almost three weeks to recover. As soon as I had my strength back, I called in at the apothecary. Giuseppe, who was grinding simples in a back room, told me that Faustina was out running an errand. I bought a bar of iris soap and some Venetian turpentine, then waited outside, on the street. I stared at the question mark above the door. The eight embedded stones were only marginally lighter than the surrounding masonry, and I wasn’t sure I would have noticed them if Giuseppe hadn’t showed them to me.

The day darkened. Rain drifted through the narrow gap between the overhanging eaves.

‘There you are …’

I looked round. Faustina was standing a few feet away. The dress she was wearing was a subtle blend of ochre and green, with just a hint of silver. It reminded me of an olive leaf. Not the part you generally see. The underside.

‘That’s a wonderful colour,’ I said.

She thanked me.

I pointed at the sign. ‘Why the question mark? Is it because people can never find it, and are always asking where it is?’

She smiled. ‘Very good. But no, I don’t think that’s the reason.’

There were various stories, she said. Some claimed the sign referred to the question most often asked by customers – Can you cure me? – but her uncle thought otherwise. Historically, apothecaries had been places where difficult and dangerous questions were raised, he had told her, and it was his belief that the sign dated from the early sixteenth century, when several influential people from the city had used the apothecary as the headquarters for an attempted coup. Even Machiavelli had been involved, apparently. She seemed about to go on, then checked herself and changed the subject.

‘You disappeared,’ she said. ‘I was worried about you.’

‘I came down with a fever. I’ve never been so ill.’ I paused. ‘I almost died.’

She smiled again, then looked past me. A door slammed further up the street. The clatter of pigeon wings.

‘What about you?’ I said. ‘Any ill effects?’

‘None at all – not unless you count some dreams about strange-coloured animals.’

‘They stuck in my mind as well.’

I asked if she would come for a walk with me. She said she couldn’t – she had to help her uncle – but she could meet me the following Friday, if I wanted, beneath the column in the Mercato Vecchio.



One evening shortly afterwards, I went downstairs with presents for the signora and Fiore. I wanted to thank them for nursing me through my fever. I gave the signora the soap I had bought in the apothecary, and I had made a wax baby for Fiore, which she wrapped in a leaf from the yard. The signora insisted that I stay for supper.

We had finished eating and I was telling them about Pampolini’s love for the one-eyed woman who ran his local tavern when we were interrupted by a loud knocking. The breath stalled in my lungs. Though I had been free of Jacopo for almost two decades, I was always half expecting him to explode into my life. I sat motionless while Fiore answered the door. When she returned, she said the Grand Duke wanted to see me, and that a carriage had been sent. I let my breath out in a rush and stood up from the table.

‘Will you be long?’ she asked.

I said I didn’t know.

Outside the front entrance was a curious box-like vehicle with barred windows. The driver, a man with a pinched, pockmarked face and chickens’ feet for hands, seemed lifted straight from one of my recent hallucinations. I asked if he was waiting for me. He grunted. I opened the door and climbed into the dark interior. At first I assumed I was alone, but then a rustle came from the far corner, and a hand reached up and tapped on the roof. A strip of white appeared, then a hollow cheek, a lipless mouth.

Stufa.

I murmured good evening. He didn’t return the greeting, or even acknowledge me. The carriage jerked forwards.

As we crossed the Piazza del Gran Duca, a wash of weak moonlight splashed through the bars, and I noted the crude iron rings in the sides of the carriage and the dark stains on the floor.

‘We use it for transporting those accused of lewdness and debauchery,’ Stufa said.

I said nothing.

His mouth grew wider, thinner. ‘Not applicable tonight, of course.’

Cuif had told me that people called Stufa ‘Flesh’, but when I looked at him I saw a man driven by abstinence and self-denial. Was the nickname a sardonic response to his physical appearance? Or did it reflect the jealousy and resentment his air of privilege aroused? Was it, in that case, a genuine attempt to smear his reputation? I remembered Torquato Accetto’s advice, namely that one should conceal oneself beneath a veil made up of ‘honest shadows and violent defences’. That was another possibility. What if Stufa’s nickname described his concealed self?

The carriage lurched over the Ponte Vecchio and into Via Guicciardini.

‘I hear you’re making something special for the Grand Duke,’ Stufa said.

I kept my face expressionless. What could he be referring to? Though the casting of Fiore’s hands had proved successful – the plaster from Volterra had captured every bitten nail, every little scar – I hadn’t started work on the commission itself as yet. It was only a week or two since I had talked to Pampolini. It might be months before he could fulfil my request. And anyway, there was still the problem of how I was going to incorporate an element of ambiguity.

‘Everything I make is for the Grand Duke,’ I said, ‘or for his son, Ferdinando.’

Stufa glanced at me, and then away again.

‘Those boxes of yours,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen them. They remind me of nativities.’

I had never thought of my plague pieces as nativities. It was a troubling interpretation, subversive even; in Stufa’s eyes, I had replaced the divine with the human, birth with death. Turning to the window, I was relieved to see that we were approaching the palace.

‘I find them gratuitous. Histrionic.’ Stufa paused. ‘It’s not art at all, really, is it? It’s showmanship.’

I opened the carriage door and stepped out.

‘Thank you for the lift,’ I said.



On entering the Grand Duke’s apartment, his major-domo, Vespasiano Schwarz, told me His Highness was bathing, and that I should go straight in. In the bathroom doorway I hesitated. The Grand Duke’s voice emerged supernaturally from the swirling clouds of steam.

‘Zummo? Is that you?’ Once he had apologized for the lateness of the hour, he asked me how the commission was going.

‘Rather slowly, I’m afraid,’ I said.

The Grand Duke nodded, as if this was the answer he had expected. ‘I have been thinking about my wife. And love – I have been thinking about that too.’ Through the steam I saw his eyebrows lift; though the words were his own, they seemed to have caught him unawares.

He began to talk about the day he first set eyes on Marguerite-Louise. It had been his intention to meet her when she landed at Livorno. He had wanted to show his support for her, he said, as she entered unknown territory. Not just Tuscany, he meant, but wedlock. He had been recovering from measles, though, and his mother thought it wiser if he waited at the Villa Ambrogiana, near Empoli. Things went wrong from the outset. He sprained an ankle as he left the palace. One of his dogs was sick in his carriage. Then it began to rain. Not knowing what to do with himself when he arrived at the villa, he ate lunch twice. Instant stomach pains. He took to his bed, where his dreams were mundane, exquisite tortures of his own devising, a catalogue of missed appointments and lost possessions. He woke in a cold sweat, convinced his bride-to-be was pacing up and down in an adjoining room. Not so. She had been delayed on the coast. Some irregularity in the health papers of certain of her entourage. He threw on the fashionable clothes he had ordered from Paris in the hope that he might impress her. A wide-brimmed beaver hat with flowing plumes and ribbons. High-heeled dancing shoes.

‘Such a fool! But I was only nineteen …’

Marguerite-Louise was even younger – fifteen and a half – and what he didn’t know was that she was already in love with someone else – her cousin, Charles. When Charles heard that she was to be married, he travelled to Marseilles, but he didn’t have the power to challenge, let alone overturn, the king’s decision. They must have cursed their fate. They must have kissed. They must have wept. And then she sailed out of his life, on a boat carpeted in velvet, a boat that had its own private garden of violets. How those sweet-smelling flowers must have turned her stomach! And the Tyrrhenian sea, which stayed calm until the last day of the voyage, as if to speed her passage to the dreaded Livorno, must also, paradoxically, have sickened her.

‘And I was waiting in my dancing shoes,’ the Grand Duke said, ‘knowing nothing of all this. Later, she told me, of course – in no uncertain terms.’

I murmured something about cruelty.

‘Zummo, you have no idea,’ he said. ‘She took one look at me and turned away. I don’t know what she said to the people with her – my French was never very good, not a patch on my English – but I saw her whole face shrivel, as if she had just swallowed a mouthful of vinegar. I was so apprehensive, so hurt, that I couldn’t kiss her. I didn’t even take her hand. Everyone was disappointed, though they tried their best not to show it. Imagine: two noble families, a prince and a princess, a fairy-tale wedding – all a sham …

‘We rode to Florence in the same carriage. She sat on one side, staring out of her window. I sat on the other, staring out of mine. Only once did she pay any attention to me. Looking me up and down, she asked me where on earth I’d got my clothes. I muttered the name of a haberdashery in Paris. I thought so, she said, and turned her back on me again. The strange thing was, I’d already fallen in love with her by then, and that made what was happening all the more excruciating.’

Servants filed past me with jugs of hot water and tipped them into the bath. The steam thickened.

‘The festivities began a few days later,’ the Grand Duke went on. ‘There had been nothing like it in Florence for at least a century. On our wedding day she travelled to Santa Croce in a coach drawn by eight white mules. White mules! Heaven knows where we found them. Her embroidered silver gown was overlaid with diamonds and strings of pearls, and a gold cloth was suspended above her head to shield her from the sun. In the church twelve choirs sang for us, but she couldn’t even raise a smile. I don’t think she smiled once all day. Then it got worse.’

‘Worse?’

He nodded gloomily. ‘I was so undermined by her hostile attitude but at the same time so in awe of her that I often couldn’t bring myself to sleep with her. Beauty can be terrifying, don’t you think?’

‘Sometimes it leaves you powerless.’

‘Exactly. And even if I did manage to sleep with her, I would return to my bed as soon as it was over. I was so upset by the whole thing. Sick with nerves. Redi advised me to limit the number of my visits to her bedchamber, but there was such pressure on me to produce an heir.’ He let out a short, bitter laugh. ‘I spent so little time with her that people began to suspect I was homosexual. Me!’ The steam thinned, and I noted the look of horror on his face, his eyes bulging, his mouth agape. ‘Me,’ he said again, ‘when it is I who have decreed that sodomites should be decapitated.’

Ah, I said to myself, but that was later.

‘The more reticent I was,’ he went on, ‘the more antagonistic she became. She would insult me, right in front of her servants. They thought it was amusing. They were all French, of course. They used to help her move from one bedchamber to another, so I wouldn’t be able to find her. Sometimes I would walk the corridors for hours – in my nightshirt! It’s a wonder I didn’t catch my death.’ He sighed, then reached for a glass and drank. ‘You know what her servants did? They set traps so she would know when I was coming. Bells on door handles, chamber pots in the middle of corridors. That sort of thing. For a while she had a dog. Some fancy French breed. Infuriating creature. It would start yapping whenever it heard my footsteps or my voice. Once, her servants rigged up a trip-wire outside her bedchamber and I fell and almost broke my collarbone …’

‘Forgive me, Your Highness,’ I said, ‘but it’s a miracle she got pregnant at all.’

‘There were nights when she relented. I never understood what prompted her sudden changes of heart, and I could never ask. If I raised the subject, she would tell me not to be so vulgar, so distasteful – what was I, a peasant? – and that would lead to an impassioned diatribe about Florence, what a backwater it was, and how her life had become a purgatory, if not a hell, and she would finish off with a sarcastic, disparaging reference to Dante, just to show how well-educated and civilized she was.’

‘And you still loved her …’

He lay back in his bath and stared at the ceiling for so long that I didn’t think he was going to answer. ‘You should have seen her, Zummo,’ he said at last. ‘She was exquisite, even when she was angry. Especially when she was angry. Dark eyes, auburn hair. Wonderfully delicate features. And she could be so charming, if it suited her. But always, in the end, this look of mingled boredom and disgust would appear on her face, and then the fighting would begin again, and she would start to scream at me: our marriage was a travesty, she was no better than a concubine, and all our children were bastards. Her screaming could be heard throughout the palace, and I would have to send her to Lappeggi or Poggio a Caiano, along with her entire, enormous retinue of servants.’ He peered at me across his chest. ‘I became the symbol of everything she hated.’

I asked him how he dealt with that.

‘I prayed,’ he said. ‘She hated that too. She mocked my piety. She would drop to her knees and put her hands together and lift her eyes heavenward and start talking a lot of mumbo-jumbo – or perhaps it was French that she was talking …’

He laughed quietly, and I laughed with him, but then a silence fell between us. Some minutes passed. Eventually, I heard a snort, and then a rumble. He had fallen asleep, his half-open mouth perilously close to the surface of the water. I went and alerted Schwarz.

Later, outside the Grand Duke’s apartment, I stood by a window that gave on to the courtyard at the back of the palace. The eastern sky was the colour of charcoal, daybreak still at least an hour away. I decided to call in at the stables. If I caught my work at odd moments – off guard, as it were – I could sometimes come up with unexpected solutions.

I set out across the gardens. Trees stirred drowsily; the air smelled of wet wood and something sweet but sharp, like wild strawberries. As I rounded a high, shaved hedge, I came across a man on a bench, his clothing dishevelled, his head flung back. Gian Gastone. Tears trickled sideways into his hair. I turned away, thinking to retrace my steps. Just then, his head lifted.

‘Spying on me again,’ he said.

He wiped his eyes, then foraged in the dark air beneath the bench and brought out a flagon of red wine. He raised it to his lips and drank.

‘You’re wasting your time. I don’t have any secrets.’ He set the wine back on the grass, then drew his sleeve smoothly across his dripping nose, reminding me of someone playing a violin. ‘You people. You never give up, do you?’

He yawned, then closed his eyes.

Before I moved away, I heard him murmur something about marriage, and a hideous German woman, and what a joke the whole thing was.



It was early morning by the time I reached my lodgings on Via del Corno. My eyes felt gritty, almost grazed, and the veins ached in my legs. I wanted nothing more than to sleep until nightfall, but I was brought up short by the sight of a bundle of rags dumped against the door of my room. As I approached, a hand emerged and scratched an ear. It was Fiore.

I asked her what she was doing there.

She sat up. ‘You never finished the story about your friend.’

I unlocked my door. Once inside, I sat her at my desk and gave her a piece of seed-cake and some acquerello. She laid her wax baby beside her and began to eat.

‘You remember I told you Pampolini’s in love with a woman who’s only got one eye?’ I said.

Mouth full of cake, Fiore nodded.

‘Know how I know?’

‘How?’

‘He’s bought himself a wig.’

Imported from Copenhagen at great expense, it was a subtle greenish-blond, and Pampolini put it on whenever he went to the one-eyed woman’s tavern. He was obviously trying to impress her.

Fiore had finished eating. ‘What took you so long, anyway?’

‘The Grand Duke wanted to talk to me.’

‘Doesn’t he have anyone else to talk to?’

‘Good question.’ I paused. ‘I think he likes the way I listen.’

She turned to the wall.

Though I was used to seeing her face empty of all expression, I still hadn’t worked out what lay behind it. Sometimes I thought she might be distancing herself from knowledge she found unpalatable or threatening. Other times it felt more serious, like an involuntary suspension of her faculties, a kind of switching-off.

‘What did he talk about?’ she asked eventually.

‘His wife, mostly.’

‘Does he love her?’

‘Yes, he loves her, but she’s gone.’

She looked at me again. ‘Did she die?’

‘No. She went back to France. That’s where she’s from.’

‘I think I heard that story,’ she said. ‘I suppose he’s sad.’

‘Yes, he’s sad. But she wasn’t very kind to him.’

Fiore sipped her acquerello.

‘She didn’t love him as much as he loved her,’ I went on. ‘People don’t always love each other the same amount, even when they’re married.’ In that moment, I saw Faustina as I had seen her last, her dress the colour of an olive leaf, and I felt the blood go rushing from my heart. I turned to Fiore. ‘Are you going to get married one day?’

Her face tilted up to mine, and she gave me a strange, stubborn look. ‘I’m going to marry you.’

‘I’m a bit old for you,’ I said gently, ‘aren’t I?’

‘That’s all right. I’ll be older soon.’

When I laughed, it startled her at first, but then she realized she must have said something clever, and she began to laugh as well.



On Friday I got to the Mercato Vecchio early. It was busy, as always, not just with stall-holders and their clientele, but with all manner of con-men, quacks and entertainers. I watched a cripple’s pet monkey juggling walnuts. Nearby was a dentist in a bloody apron, who delighted his audience by repeatedly pulling good teeth instead of rotten ones.

I had been waiting for a quarter of an hour when Faustina appeared. Stepping back into the shadow of a loggia, I sketched her as she wandered among the stalls, tasting olives and salted almonds. She had such a casual, spontaneous air about her that you never would have suspected she was meeting someone.

At last, I could resist no longer. I went up and touched her on the shoulder. She turned slowly.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said.

‘You weren’t late. You’ve been here all the time.’

‘How could you tell?’

‘I could feel it.’

‘I couldn’t believe I was the one you were waiting for. I felt really lucky.’

‘If you pay me too many compliments at the beginning,’ she said, ‘you might find yourself with nothing left to say.’

‘The beginning of what?’

Her face appeared to rock a little, like a boat disturbed by a wave that had come from nowhere.

‘And anyway,’ I said, ‘I disagree.’

‘Do you?’

I stared out over the rooftops. The pale-gold October light streamed down on to my face. My skin seemed to be absorbing it, soaking it up. Light could feel liquid.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t disagree more.’ My face still felt illuminated, not just by the sky, but by a kind of candour, the fact that I was speaking the truth. ‘I’ll never run out of ways of telling you how beautiful you are.’

She linked her arm through mine, and we walked east, along the Corso. I remembered what Marvuglia had said as we sat in his kitchen. You don’t belong together. It doesn’t look right. What did he know?

‘By the way,’ I said. ‘I drew you.’

She asked if she could see. I took out my notebook and opened it. She stared at the image for a few long moments. ‘I look like that?’

‘To me you do.’

‘It’s lovely.’

In Piazza Santa Croce a crowd was gathering for a game of calcio. Music started up close by. There was a man hunched over a lute, his hand a blur. Another man blew on a set of pipes. A third hammered at a tall, barrel-shaped drum, his face transfixed, almost demonic. Faustina stood in front of me, and I watched over her shoulder, my face close to her hair. The three men were arranged in an arc around a dark-skinned woman who wore a leather waistcoat and an ankle-length bronze skirt. Her eyelids were painted with black dots, which made her eyes look caged. She sang in a guttural, agonized voice, her head angled sideways and downwards, her hands clapping in a rhythm I had never heard before. Leaning back against me, Faustina put her mouth next to my ear. They were Spanish, she said. They came through the city every year.

I followed her across the square and into Via dei Malcontenti. As we passed alongside the church, a few hundred people surged in our direction, all looking beyond us, and I had to keep hold of Faustina and edge sideways, leading with my shoulder, or we would both have been swept back into the square.

We turned left, then right, the streets narrowing. All that remained of the music was the pulsing of the drum. She led me through a door of warped wooden staves and into a wild garden. There was a cluster of palm trees and a tiled terrace. I followed her down some steps and through an arbour, its metal frame in the clutch of superannuated fig trees and twisting vines. We walked in a green gloom, rotten fruit exploding softly beneath our shoes.

‘Who else knows about this place?’ I said.

‘I’m not sure. Children, maybe.’

She had found a twist of ribbon once, she said. Another time, her foot had caught in a wooden hoop.

Beyond a tangle of undergrowth, at the far end of the garden, was a second, smaller terrace, overshadowed by pine trees and the remains of a pergola. Two pillars, a stone bench. A few broken pots. The faded pink tiles were decorated with pale-green concentric circles, like the ripples when a pebble is dropped into a pond.

‘When I was young, I was alone a lot,’ I told her. ‘I used to break into abandoned houses.’

I described how I would stride out on to the first-floor balconies and make speeches to the crowds that massed below. A sea of faces. Deafening applause.

Faustina was brushing the leaves and dirt off the stone bench. ‘So you always knew you were going to be famous?’

‘No, no. It was just a game. Anyway, I’m not famous.’

‘You will be,’ she said.

I glanced at her, sitting there. I could see her as a little girl – dark, wary, eel-quick. ‘Were you lonely as a child?’

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I had a friend called Mimmo. He thought I was a witch.’ She grinned. But then the grin faded so fast that her whole face seemed to shrink.

I joined her on the bench. ‘What is it?’

She shook her head.

‘Tell me.’

His name was Mimmo Righetti, she said, and he lived on the narrow, curving street where she grew up, in a house with a green door. His father worked with wood. His mother was dead. Why did Mimmo think she was a witch? Perhaps he had heard people in the village gossiping, or perhaps it was just a feeling that had come to him, as sudden and unprompted as a shiver. Your mother’s not your mother, he would chant in his fluty voice, and she would pretend that his face was a window and she was looking through it at the view, and Mimmo would shout, Look! You see? You’re definitely a witch! because all the little hairs had lifted on his arms. But he had identified the central mystery of her life: her mother wasn’t her mother. Later, when he was eight or nine, he added a second line: And your father’s never here. It was true: he wasn’t. Her father, Remo Ferralis, was someone she did not know, and hardly ever saw. That was something else she didn’t understand. When Mimmo called her a witch, it was as if he was addressing all the aspects of her life that she could not explain. Whether he intended it or not, he had given her a way of thinking about herself.

She did her best to live up to his expectations. She would gather plants and herbs and tie them in bunches and hang them from the beams to dry. She would spend hours distilling potions, which they would drink, and which would give them stomach ache or hiccups or diarrhoea. She would build fires, make offerings. Cast spells. She would try to transform herself. Your mother’s not your mother and your father’s never here, Mimmo would chant, and she would whirl round the flames, her black hair flying, and Mimmo would sit on his haunches, hugging his knees, and sometimes she really did feel as if her face had changed, as if she had turned into another person – or no, as if she had become someone, finally become someone – and it thrilled her, and scared the daylights out of her, and made her feel different, special, powerful.

One warm September afternoon, as they returned from an expedition to the woods, trees rising on one side of the white dust road, a steep drop on the other, she told Mimmo they were going to attempt something extraordinary.

‘Today,’ she said, ‘we’re going to fly – like birds.’

‘Like birds!’ He tipped his head back and stretched out his arms, and if she hadn’t grabbed him by the collar he would have missed his footing and plunged headlong into the gully, a fate that had befallen more than one drink-addled peasant on his way home from a dance.

‘Careful,’ she said. ‘You haven’t had the potion yet.’

He grinned. ‘Where are we going?’

‘The ghost house.’

‘I knew it!’

They skirted the village and turned on to a dirt track that led past a vineyard and an olive grove and out along a low ridge. Up ahead, she could see the two tall cypresses that marked the entrance to Sabatino Vespi’s property. It was Vespi who had given her the goatskin bag she was carrying. That morning she had packed it with everything they would need: a jar of water from the ancient spring below the village, some dead skin shaved from Mimmo’s heel, five spiders’ legs, the head of a rose that she had dried in the sun and ground to a fine powder, a chopped-up clove of garlic, part of a honeycomb, a grey hair found near the altar – she thought she had seen it fall from the priest’s head during a Mass to celebrate the Assumption of the Virgin – some sprigs of basil and oregano, a blue flower, a few of her own fingernail clippings, some sawdust from Mimmo’s father’s workshop, and, most important of all, a glinting black-green feather, which must have belonged to a raven or a crow.

After passing Vespi’s house, the track dipped down and curved to the right, and the roof of the ghost house appeared below, crouching on a promontory that overlooked the wooded valley to the north and the smooth clay hills beyond. It was said that the woman who owned the place had been born in the same year as Galileo, which would have put her age at roughly one hundred and ten, but nobody had set eyes on her for years, and the few who claimed to have caught a glimpse of her – a figure hesitating on the track at dusk, a face adrift in an upstairs window – often thought it was a ghost they had seen. She was so old, perhaps, that nobody could tell the difference.

That morning, the two friends hurried down the slope towards the house, an open barn on their right, the tall brick tower of the dovecote to their left. They circled the well and knelt in the yellow grass under the peach trees, which stood at the edge of the property. On waking, Faustina had imagined they would test her potion beyond the trees, where the ground dropped twenty feet to the field below, but when she saw the ladder leaning against the back wall of the house she changed her mind. The ladder seemed providential, too good to be true, though it also carried a warning: two rungs were missing near the top, as if to discourage people from climbing any higher.

She uncorked the jar of water and began to add ingredients. Last to go in was the flower, which she had found behind a market stall the previous Tuesday.

‘Blue to represent the sky,’ she said. ‘Our new element.’

They crept through the grass to the back of the house. Up against the wall, in shadow suddenly, she shivered.

‘What if the woman comes?’ Mimmo said.

‘She won’t,’ Faustina said. ‘She’s dead.’ Then wished she hadn’t said the word.

She followed Mimmo up the ladder, the jar in her left hand. Once on the curving tiles, they kept as low as they could. The slope of the roof would shield them from anyone who might be passing along the track.

She showed Mimmo the feather. His face lit up; he was alive to its significance. As she stirred the potion, using the feather as a spoon, they murmured the incantation he had invented, and always now insisted on: Your mother’s not your mother and your father’s never here. They repeated the words until their heads were empty – the magic needed a clear space, a kind of arena, where it could happen – then she handed the jar to Mimmo. He brought it up to his lips. Over the rim she could see his eyes, wide with excitement and anticipation.

‘Like birds,’ he whispered.

He took two or three gulps, his face twisting as he swallowed. It’s like medicine, she had told him once. The worse it tastes, the better it works. She swirled the contents of the jar and drank the rest.

It was a breathless early autumn day. The sun had lost none of its heat, and the mountains to the north-east were a dusty, faded purple. Her body twitched suddenly, as if she were on the brink of sleep.

‘I think it’s time,’ she said.

They rose to their feet.

Mimmo lifted his arms out sideways, as if to test his new powers. ‘I can’t feel anything.’

‘It’s subtle,’ she told him. ‘Light as air.’

She felt slightly sick; she tried not to think about the spiders’ legs and the priest’s greasy hair.

‘Shall I go first?’ she said.

‘No, me.’ He jumped up and down, making the loose tiles clack. ‘Me first.’

She put an upright finger to her lips.

He scrambled up to the apex of the roof. Still on all fours, he turned his back on the chimney and began to make his way down to the far end. From there, it was a sheer drop to the ground. He stood up. He was facing away from her, his arms held at right-angles to his body. He appeared to be looking out into the heat-haze that shimmered above the land.

Then he stepped off the roof.

For a moment he seemed to remain quite motionless. He hung in the air, the back of his head outlined against the flawless sky, and she thought he was about to veer sideways and soar up over the track and on towards the village.

Why hadn’t she stopped him?

Why hadn’t she gone first?

He had insisted, though, and there had been no mistaking his eagerness as he scurried over the tiles. He had believed in the potion to such an extent that she had begun to think it might actually work. Like Mimmo, she had wanted it to work. For those few seconds, his faith had converted her.

Then the air let go of him, and he vanished from sight, and there was a dull, ugly sound, like something collapsing. She rushed to the edge of the roof and peered over. Mimmo lay crumpled in the yellow grass. One of his legs had twisted back on itself; the skin had broken, and a piece of bone was showing.

She coughed twice and almost vomited, then she hurried back across the tiles. Down the ladder. Round the house. Out of the shadow, into the sun. Mimmo was still lying on the ground. His eyes were closed, and the fingers of his left hand were moving slowly, almost numbly, like insect feelers.

‘Did it work?’ His grey face made his lips look mauve. ‘Did I fly?’

‘I think so.’ She glanced over her shoulder. The roof was higher than she remembered. Above the tiled edge the blue sky seemed to lurch and tilt. ‘Yes. Just for a moment.’

His head moved sideways, and he was sick in the grass. Dark specks floated in the viscous fluid. Spiders’ legs. Rose dust. A rustle came from behind her. Looking round, she let out a cry. An old woman stood at her elbow. Her black clothes were so faded that they had gone brown, and her face was as cracked as a dropped plate. On her bald head she wore a hat made from a cabbage leaf. She began to speak, but Faustina couldn’t understand a word. The sounds were shapeless and morose. Like groans. She told Mimmo she would fetch help, then she turned and ran.

She made for Vespi’s house. He would know what to do. She talked to God the whole time she was running. Strange gabbled prayers. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Then: It’s not true. It can’t be. I must have imagined it. And then: You could have let him fly. Just once. Would that have been so difficult? And finally: He’s not going to die, is he? Please say he isn’t. She ran so fast she tasted blood.

Mimmo didn’t die, but he lost his leg. They cut it off, just above the knee.

A few days later, she called at the Righetti house. Mimmo’s father came to the door. Mimmo was still in hospital, he said, but they thought he would pull through.

She burst into tears. ‘It was all my fault.’

Mimmo’s father placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘He told me what happened. You were on the roof, and he was showing off. He went too near the edge.’

Mimmo had lied in order to protect her.

‘You’ve always been a good friend to him,’ Mimmo’s father said. ‘He looks up to you.’ He turned his eyes on her. Burst veins in the whites. Sagging lids. ‘He would never blame you.’

Her heart thumped. Did he know? Had he guessed? There was nothing worse than the feeling of being found out.

Before she left, he showed her the strap the barber-surgeon had wedged between Mimmo’s teeth before he operated. Mimmo had bitten clean through the leather.

Though Mimmo’s father told her that she was always welcome, she couldn’t bring herself to visit again. From that day on, she always turned right when she left her house, even if it meant going out of her way. If she saw Mimmo from a distance, stumping along on crutches his father must have made for him, she would duck down a side street, or else she would double back. And he, too, kept himself to himself. She could have said she was sorry, she supposed, but the longer her silence lasted the harder it became – and besides, he wasn’t the sort of person who would have expected an apology. Given that he had covered for her, it might even have offended him.

‘Actually, that’s nonsense,’ she said. ‘I was just a coward.’

Though there was still light in the sky, the shade in the garden had deepened. I stroked her arm, and all the tiny hairs stood up. She looked into my face.

‘I was a coward,’ she said again.

My hand moved to the smooth groove at the back of her neck. The colour of her eyes intensified, like embers when you blow on them, and my mouth found her mouth, my tongue was touching hers, and I thought I could taste salt, the almonds she had eaten earlier.

A sudden roar. The football match in Santa Croce.

We slid from the bench to the ground. She lay on her back, and I faced her, my cock against her hip. I reached under her skirts. Her breath caught on her teeth, and her eyelids lowered, her dark lashes resting lightly on the lavender skin beneath her eyes. I was seeing her in minute detail, as if through a magnifying glass. I ran my finger slowly from her perineum to her *oris. I was hardly touching her at all, but the liquid inside her rose to meet my fingertip, her cunt a cup full to the brim. I could delay no longer. Her cries, though uttered next to my ear, sounded as faint and distant as birds flying high up in the air, birds not visible to the naked eye. Afterwards, we lay side by side, and stared up into a sky that seemed limitless.

‘That wasn’t the first time, was it?’ I said.

‘Yes. Well, no –’

I looked at her.

‘I was attacked once,’ she said. ‘When I was fourteen.’

There was a shifty-looking man who came through Torremagna every few months with a mule-drawn cart and a grindstone. He would always blow the same three haunting notes on his flute to let people know that he had arrived.

‘A knife-sharpener,’ I said.

Faustina nodded. ‘He didn’t used to stop at our house. Ginevra didn’t trust him.’

One day she was south of the village, in the hollow where the mill house was, when she heard him coming. He lifted his flute to his lips as he approached and played a set of notes she didn’t recognize. She asked him why the tune had changed. He would show her why, he said, and seized her by the wrist. He would cut her throat if she didn’t let him show her. He was grinning. His teeth were brown, but his shoulder-length hair was oddly clean and shiny. He pinned her to the back of his cart, her head jammed against the grindstone, and stuck his thing in her. Before he could finish, though, he cried out and dropped to the ground. Vespi stood behind him, wielding an axe-handle.

‘I didn’t know he was capable of something like that,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’

‘He was so upset. I think he suffered more than I did.’

Darker now, almost black, the sky appeared to have a surface to it, like water. It was deep too, and for a few giddy moments I felt I was falling upwards, and that the stars would bounce off me as I passed, no heavier than hail-stones, and that I could fall like that for ever.

‘He would have been a good father to you,’ I said.

‘You think so? I never thought of it like that.’ She leaned on one elbow and looked down at me with a sudden earnestness. ‘If I asked you to take me away from here, would you do it?’

‘From Florence?’

‘Yes.’

‘But my work is here,’ I said, ‘and I’m being paid so well.’

‘What if I said I was in danger?’

‘What kind of danger?’

She lay back. ‘It’s all right. It was just an idea.’

‘No, really. Tell me.’

‘I shouldn’t have brought it up. We hardly know each other –’

The flatness in her voice told me I had missed a chance to prove something to her, and just then, as I looked at her, I would have promised her anything – anything at all.

‘Where would we go?’

I was desperately trying to regain the ground I had occupied only seconds earlier. It was like the moment in her story where she ran up the track with a head full of frantic, fractured prayers. But there was no way back. There never is. I realized that what she had called ‘an idea’ meant something incalculable to her. It had cost her an effort to put the question, and she had done so against her better judgement. My lukewarm response had disappointed her all the more because she had, at some deep level, predicted it. It was too late now to talk of Genoa or Paris.

‘I love you,’ I said.

‘Do you?’ She looked startled, and no wonder: I had surprised myself. I suddenly felt younger than she was, even though I was almost twice her age.

‘It’s true,’ I said stubbornly. ‘One day you’ll realize.’

A clock tolled the hour. The air was motionless. The sky seemed lower than before, and heavier.

She rose to her feet and looked around. ‘I should be going.’