Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

She lowered her umbrella. ‘How long have we known each other, Remo?’

In his opinion, they hardly knew each other at all, but he wasn’t in a position to say so.

‘About two months.’

‘And what do you think of me?’ she said. ‘Do you find me boring? I’m always talking, after all — talking my head off.’ She walked in a tight circle just inside the stable door, water dripping from the tip of her umbrella. ‘You know, I’m not sure I’ve let you say anything, not in all the time we’ve spent together. Look at you now. You’re just standing there. You can’t get a word in edgeways.’

Remo smiled. ‘I don’t find you boring.’

‘No?’

‘Quite the opposite.’

‘What do you mean by that, Remo? Put it in words, so I can understand.’ She issued her commands with such a light touch that they felt like invitations, and she had moved closer, close enough for him to be able to see the drops of rain on her black dress, close enough to sense the warmth of the skin beneath.

‘You —’

She moved closer still. No woman, it seemed, had ever stood so close.

‘Your voice —’

‘What about my voice?’

There was such a sweetness to her breath that he thought she might have eaten an apricot or a peach while crossing the garden. Though neither apricots nor peaches were in season.

‘What about my voice?’ she said again.

‘The way you speak. I suppose it’s because you’re French.’

‘You think I sound funny.’

‘No, I like it.’

A horse stirred behind him. The whisk of a tail. Hooves shifting, clumsy, in the straw.

‘I’ve never seen anyone as beautiful as you,’ he said. ‘It’s impossible, at times, to believe it. I think I must be dreaming. Imagining things. But then I realize that I’m awake, and that you’re real.’

‘How do you know I’m real?’

She was so much cleverer than he was. She knew how to manipulate a conversation, how to give it a different shape, a new direction. Six words was all it took.

‘How do you know?’

Her pupils widened suddenly, and he felt he was falling towards her, into her.

Her breath against his face.

‘Touch me,’ she said.

He stepped back.

‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘I’m not good enough for you?’

That lightness again.

The rain hung behind her, as hard to see through as a piece of gauze. The world lay beyond — inaccessible, remote. Or maybe it was right there with them, where they stood.

He did as she had asked.

Early the next morning, he saddled two of the finest horses in the stable, and they rode west, towards Pisa. The lead-grey air, the dull copper of the sun. The mist so close to the ground that a farmhouse seemed to float on it like an ark. They had not discussed what they would do when they reached the coast. He assumed she had a plan. She didn’t seem like somebody who would ever be short of ideas, though all of them would involve a gamble. Perhaps she would charter a boat, and they would set sail for the south of France. That, he thought, was her immediate aim: to escape the prison of her marriage. He was happy, for the moment, to be with her, but he didn’t dare to think too far ahead.

Just as well.

The authorities caught up with them in the wooded hills not far from Lake Fucecchio.

‘All right,’ Malvezzi wheezed. ‘The fun’s over.’

The Grand Duke’s wife was escorted back to the villa. Remo, suddenly alone, expected to be punished. The galleys at the very least. Even, possibly, execution. Instead, they sent him into exile, with a warning that he should never set foot in Tuscany again. Perhaps they knew the Grand Duke’s wife was responsible, and that he was no more than a pawn in one of her many games.

‘What they didn’t know,’ Remo told Faustina, as she listened open-mouthed, ‘what no one knew, not even me, was that you were already alive inside her — a small seed growing …’

Faustina stared at him. ‘The Grand Duke’s wife was my mother?’

He looked right through her, back into the past. He seemed to be having trouble believing it himself. It sounded like a story, even to the story-teller.

‘My mother,’ she said again.

‘You were conceived on horseback!’ Remo laughed in delight, then shot her a wary glance. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you that.’ He hit the side of his head and groaned. ‘I shouldn’t have told you anything. I’m an idiot.’ He hit himself again.

‘Don’t.’ She went round the table and held his head against her chest. She smelled woodsmoke on him, and dried sweat, and fifteen or twenty glasses of young red wine. And distantly, ever so distantly, she thought she could smell horses.

‘You must forget,’ he said, his eyes closed in a kind of agony. ‘I’m drunk. I got carried away. I’ve been talking nonsense.’

‘You’re drunk all right.’

He looked up at her and touched her cheek. ‘Sometimes, you know, you’re just like her. You’ve got the same spark —’

Just then, a woman’s voice interrupted Faustina’s story. It was coming from the window. We crept across the room and peered out into the night. On the flat roof of the building opposite, a woman was pacing up and down, her face tilted skywards, her hands in front of her, clutching at the air. She was talking to herself in a language I took to be Hebrew. A man stepped out on to the roof, moving with such caution that it might have been a frozen pond. On his suit of dark clothes I could just make out the yellow badge all Jews were supposed to wear. The woman began to shout at him, then seemed to tear her hair out by the roots and fling it on the ground. For a moment, I couldn’t believe what I had seen. Then I understood. It must have been a wig. The man tried to reason with the woman, but she shook him off and pushed past him, back into the building. The man remained where he was, head bowed.

We returned to the sofa. Some Jewish women were required to shave their heads when they married, Faustina told me, so they did not tempt other men. Those women tended to wear wigs. It was an extreme custom. You hardly ever saw it in Florence.

‘Why did you decide to tell me who you are?’ I said. ‘I mean, why tonight?’

‘I’m not sure.’ She paused. ‘Maybe it’s to do with the lovely things you said earlier. It reminded me of what my father said to my mother — in that stable, in the rain …’

My words echoing the words that had brought her into being, the words that had made it necessary to pretend she didn’t exist.

My love like a poultice, drawing out that sweet, sweet poison.

*

‘Actually, it’s a miracle I was born at all,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I can’t believe I’m here. Surely I must be imagining it all. Them. This. Even you.’

When her father opened the second bottle, she went on, he jumped nine months to the next part of the story. Banished from Tuscany, he had crossed into the coastal state of Piombino, where he had found a job in a lead mine. It was hard work, and he would console himself with memories of the Grand Duke’s wife — and all the time, though he did not know it, she was pregnant with his child. Then, in the depths of winter, a letter arrived from her lady-in-waiting, telling him that she had given birth, and that he was to come for the baby. He arrived at the villa five days later, his mind whirling. The lady-in-waiting told him that the Grand Duke’s wife was indisposed, and could not see him. She asked what his intentions were. He said his sister would take the child. She seemed to approve of the idea. He set off for his sister’s house in the south-east of the duchy. A wet nurse — Vanna — travelled with him. When they stopped to feed the child — in lonely places, usually: mountain passes, forest glades — Vanna told him about the pregnancy, and how it had been concealed from all but the most trusted servants. Fortunately, the Grand Duke had been abroad for most of the year, in Germany, almost as if he were co-operating with the deception, but his prolonged absence had prevented his wife from claiming that the child was his, which would have saved everyone a great deal of trouble — though it was Vanna’s impression that she hadn’t wanted the baby to grow up as a member of the Grand Duke’s family. Anything but that.