Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

It took Remo and Vanna more than a week to reach Torremagna, and snow fell as they rode. He was afraid his daughter would catch cold. He was afraid she would die. He kept looking down into her face, which was no bigger than a saucer, her eyes a misty, marbled blue. She hardly made a sound, even when she was hungry. It was as if she understood her predicament, and knew better than to give herself away.

The snow had eased by the time they arrived at Ginevra’s house. During the journey, Remo had grown to care for his daughter, and as he stood on the narrow, curving street something hot poured through him at the knowledge that he could not keep her, a kind of scalding of his heart. He whispered all sorts of things to her in their last moments together, as much to strengthen his resolve as anything else. It’s not because I don’t love you. You won’t remember any of this. I’m sorry, my little one . He knocked on the door, then looked down once again. Her mouth, which didn’t know how to smile. Her eyes, which still couldn’t shed a tear. A single snowflake landed on her forehead like a blessing. She blinked. She didn’t cry. He was glad she wasn’t any older.

The door opened.

When Ginevra saw her brother standing on the doorstep she understood that he was about to ask an enormous favour, and she shook her head angrily, not because she was going to turn him down, but because it confirmed her low opinion of him. He was feckless, spoiled. Impossible. But it was impossible to say no to him. His charm got him into trouble, and then out of it again.

He handed the baby to his sister.

She became a mother.

‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked.

‘A girl.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘I don’t know.’ He glanced at Vanna, the wet nurse. ‘She hasn’t got one yet.’

‘You haven’t named her?’

He stared at the ground. He couldn’t believe how empty his arms felt. How light.

‘I’ll call her Faustina,’ Ginevra said.

‘Faustina?’ he said. ‘Why Faustina?’

‘It means “lucky”.’

Was this sarcasm, the scathing part of her character, or had a seam of compassion opened up in her? At some deep level, he couldn’t help but feel she might identify with the child she had inherited. After all, she too had been rejected once.

Remo was about to continue with his story when the front door opened and Ginevra walked in. He grinned. ‘I was just talking about you.’

‘A lot of rubbish, probably,’ she said, ‘judging by the amount of wine you’ve drunk.’

Remo turned to Faustina. ‘You see? I told you I was talking rubbish.’

The next day, as he prepared to leave, he told her that Ginevra had always been disapproving. It was her way.

‘I know,’ Faustina said. ‘But it doesn’t make her any easier to live with.’

Her candour startled him. ‘She was very kind, you know, to take you in …’

Just then, Faustina came close to siding with Ginevra against her father — she was suddenly aware of how weak and slippery he could be — but she saw him so seldom that she couldn’t bring herself to voice the barbed words that were lining up inside her. She couldn’t ruin the rare and precious moments they had together, nor could she risk saying something that might make him think twice about returning. She loved him so much that she could never be herself.

Not that it would have mattered greatly, as things turned out. Crossing the Maremma di Siena in an attempt to avoid detection, Remo contracted a fever and died later that year.

‘So,’ Faustina said, ‘now you know the whole story.’

I ran my hand over the sofa’s shabby velvet. ‘Do you believe what he told you?’

‘Why? Don’t you?’

‘I’m only asking.’

‘It’s all I know about myself. It’s all I’ve got.’ The flame in one of our lanterns fluttered and went out. In the dim light, Faustina looked at me across one shoulder, as apprehensive as one of the figures in the fresco. ‘You’re not going to take it away from me, are you?’

‘Of course not.’

She stood up and walked to the window. ‘There have been times when I’ve doubted it myself. The whole thing could be one of my father’s fantasies — the stable, the rain, the wet umbrella … The trouble is, I don’t have anything to replace it with.’ She was facing away from me, the fog drifting past her, into the room. ‘What makes it seem possible is the fact that Marguerite-Louise had lots of affairs. They still talk about it here. And there’s something in me that seems to belong elsewhere, to come from far away …’

‘Does your uncle know?’

She shook her head. ‘My father wouldn’t tell him. He thought it was safer. He didn’t even tell Ginevra.’

‘He was probably right,’ I said.

The second lantern flickered and then died.

When Faustina spoke again, she was just a voice in the darkness.

‘You asked me once what I was doing on the night of the banquet,’ she said. ‘I was there because I wanted to see the Grand Duke close up. I wanted to see the man my mother loathed, the man she left — the man who could have been my father, but never was.’

I joined her at the window.

While serving the pasta con le sarde , she went on, she had caught the Grand Duke staring at her, and when she met his gaze he seemed to jerk in his chair, as though somebody had pricked him with a pin. She thought he had recognized her — or if not her exactly, something in her — but had convinced himself that he must be mistaken or deluded, since he immediately shook his head, adjusted the position of his cutlery, and then turned to the jewel-encrusted woman on his left and started talking about the extraordinary freedoms enjoyed by the female sex in England.

‘You think you reminded him of Marguerite-Louise?’ I said.

‘I don’t know. That’s what it felt like. It was strange — like being two people at once.’

‘He talks about her all the time — to me, anyway. He claims he still loves her. You know what he told me? He can’t see any trace of her in his children. He thinks she did it deliberately. Because they were his.’ I paused. When I took a breath, I could feel the fog collecting in my lungs. ‘Did you know she tried to kill them, before they were born?’

She was looking at me now. I could see the chips of silver where her eyes were.

Pennyroyal had been involved, I said, and elaterium, and nights of drinking and dancing. Snake root. Artemesia. Long rides on the fastest horses. None of it worked. Later, Marguerite-Louise tormented the Grand Duke by telling him their marriage was a travesty, and that they had committed fornication, and that all their children were bastards –

‘And then she had a real bastard,’ Faustina murmured. ‘Me.’

I reached out in the darkness and found her hand. ‘You might be the only child she ever really wanted.’

I was woken in the night by the low, excited murmur of men’s voices. Lying with Faustina’s head against my shoulder, I listened to the riffle and snap of playing cards, and the delicate, bright chink of coins. Signora de la Mar had told me about the illegal gambling dens that operated in the ghetto after dark. It had been one of her husband’s many weaknesses.

At dawn I was woken again by the grating of iron bolts. The ghetto gates were being opened. I moved my arm from behind Faustina’s back. Her eyes opened, and she sat up.

‘There’s something I forgot to tell you,’ she said.

Every year, her uncle travelled north to visit his suppliers. He would cement old relationships, forge new ones. In the past, she had run the apothecary in his absence, but this time he wanted her to go with him. She needed to start learning the business, he had told her, or she wouldn’t be able to take over when he was gone. She would be away for a couple of months.