Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

Magliabechi was with the Grand Duke that morning, as was Stufa, and they had been joined by Paolo Segneri, a Jesuit scholar, and a number of Alcantarine monks from Montelupo. First to leave was the palace librarian, who muttered the words ‘nest of vipers’ as he passed, then bit voraciously into a hard-boiled egg he must have been holding, concealed, in one hand. He was soon followed by the others. Stufa paused in front of me, his big, spare frame and oddly hoisted shoulders blocking out the light. He said my name, then smiled. As before, his smile filled me with unease, perhaps because it seemed directed at some point in the future that only he could see, a time when my star had fallen. There was no amusement in it, and no benevolence. On the contrary. It revelled in the prospect of disaster.

‘How long have you been in Florence now?’ he said in his usual harsh whisper.

‘Two years.’

‘And when will you be moving on, do you think?’

I watched him carefully, but didn’t answer. After our last awkward encounter in the carriage, I had decided there was little to be gained from talking to him. I didn’t want to give him any more power and leverage than he already had. As Salvator Rosa had written beneath his atmospheric self-portrait: Either remain silent, or speak better than silence.

‘Rumour has it,’ Stufa said, ‘that you don’t stay anywhere for very long.’

‘There are all kinds of rumours about me,’ I said. ‘Only the other day, I heard that I was sleeping with my landlady.’

Stufa’s head tilted. ‘It’s not true?’

‘People like us tend to attract rumour,’ I said, ‘don’t you find?’

‘People like us?’ Stufa said.

I shrugged.

He left the chamber, the dry scrape of his voice still in the air, his black cloak billowing around his ankles.

At last, I was alone with the Grand Duke. He seemed distracted, though, if not irritable, and even the news that I had completed the commission wasn’t enough to alter his mood. He was about to depart for Rome, he told me. I should arrange delivery to coincide with his return.

Faustina was away for longer than expected, but in the middle of March I received a small packet filled with pomegranate seeds, her way of signalling that she was back. We arranged to meet on a Sunday outside the Porta al Prato. That morning there was a light breeze, white clouds tumbling over Empoli, and I wasn’t the only person who had thought of going for a walk in the Cascine, the lush, densely forested area to the west of the city. It wasn’t a feast day, but the air had a tingle to it — the beginning of spring, warm weather round the corner — and all sorts of hawkers and peddlers lined the streets. One had a stack of little cages and a banner that said GOOD LUCK FOR SALE. Not wanting to be late, I didn’t stop to investigate.

The crowds carried me along, people shouting, shoving, and my heart began to rock and tilt, as if only loosely moored inside my body. It had been almost three months since I had seen Faustina, and though I had often looked at the picture I had drawn, I no longer trusted it. It was just a fragment. It gave me nothing. It was like being shown a drop of water and asked to imagine a breaking wave. She was back. Such apprehension swept over me that I nearly turned around and fled.

I had passed through the western gate and was making for a path that led off into the trees when I felt somebody take my arm, and I knew, without looking, that it was her.

‘Keep walking,’ I told her, ‘then we won’t stand out.’

She had been gone for so long that I thought she might have forgotten the tight grip the city had on all our lives.

‘Have things been bad?’ she said.

I nodded. ‘It’s got worse.’

The world darkened as a cloud hid the sun.

‘A while ago,’ Faustina said, ‘you asked me about the sign outside the apothecary. Do you remember?’

‘You told me, didn’t you?’

‘Not everything.’

We were talking as if she had never been away. I glanced at her. Her forehead’s curve, her downcast eyes. The lustre of her skin. It was just as I had suspected: in person, she outshone any memory I might have of her.

The stones in the wall above the door were actually a kind of map, she said. They described a passage that conspirators used to use. If you passed the apothecary, heading north, you came to a dead-end alley on your left. Halfway down the alley was the entrance to the passage. Walk in and you would reach a gap that echoed the gap in the arrangement of the stones. It was a deep ditch or drain, and since it was pitch dark in the passage, you wouldn’t see it until it was too late. It proved fatal to all but the initiated. Once you had jumped over it, you followed the path suggested by the main body of the question mark, turning right, then left, then left again, and emerging at the rear of the apothecary. The key to the back door was attached to a piece of wire that hung against the wall.

‘I’m telling you this in case you need it one day,’ she said.

‘Your uncle won’t mind me knowing?’

‘I don’t think so. But remember, you’re the only person who does.’

We walked in silence, arm in arm. It seemed enough just to be touching.

‘There’s a tradition associated with this time of year,’ Faustina said at last. ‘It’s something lovers do.’

‘What’s that?’

‘They get lost — deliberately.’

We left the path and struck off at an angle, into the trees. The ground sloped upwards, became uneven. A slender shaft of sunlight leaned down through the mass of foliage, as if to remind me of our second fleeting encounter, Faustina reaching past me for a plate. There were fallen branches, ferns with serrated leaves. Soft beds of moss. Faustina removed her arm from mine, and we held hands instead.

After a quarter of an hour, the woods thinned out, and we came to a wide, canal-like stream called the Mugnone. In the distance, beyond the fields, I could just make out a range of scrubby, grey-green hills. It was out there somewhere that Faustina had been conceived — on horseback …

Far from the eyes of strangers, lost at last, we kissed. The smell of her hair, the feel of her shoulder blades beneath my fingers.

‘You’re still here,’ she murmured. ‘I was afraid you’d leave. I was afraid I’d come back to find you gone.’

We kissed for so long that my mouth tasted of hers.

‘You’re thinner,’ I said.

‘Too thin?’

‘No.’

We sank to the ground, and made love fast, clutching at each other, as if to make quite sure that we were really there. When we came, we came at the same time. My shuddering seemed part of hers. The edges of our bodies overlapped; I had no sense of where I ended and she began.

Later, I asked about her travels. She had been to many places — Trieste, Ferrara, Milan — but it was Venice that excited her most. She had been ferried about in a golden gondola. She had eaten duck ragout, a delicacy made from small black waterfowl known as ‘devils of the sea’. She had been to a bull hunt, a gambling hall. She had seen a horse dressed as a child. A fortune-teller had whispered to her down a long wooden pipe. He told her that she was loved, and when he saw her smile he rang a little silver bell to signify that he had guessed the truth.

‘One night,’ she said, ‘I went to a masked ball disguised as you.’

The look on my face made her laugh.

She rented dark, sober clothes, and had a mask made up. Brown eyes, a pointy chin. A slightly worried expression. She hid her hair under a wig of dark-brown curls. It was normal at carnival. The poor masquerading as the rich, the young pretending to be old … Everything was mixed up, the wrong way round. But also true, somehow.