Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

But Stufa was talking again. ‘You haven’t forgiven me, and you’re not going to. It’s not in your nature. I know what you’re like, you people from the south.’

‘In my opinion,’ I said, ‘it’s usually a mistake to generalize.’

A smile registered on Bassetti’s lips.

‘It means you have an overly simplistic view of the world,’ I went on. ‘It can affect your judgement. Lead to mistakes.’

Stufa adjusted the position of his fork. ‘But you’re not denying it.’

‘I’ve said what I wanted to say.’ I stepped back from the table. ‘Enjoy your meal.’

When we were seated, Towne gave me a look of mingled admiration and surprise. ‘There aren’t many who would speak to Stufa like that.’

‘I’m sorry. Was I rude?’

‘You don’t need to apologize to me.’

‘Aren’t you a friend of his?’

Towne’s laugh was no louder than a sniff. ‘Friend? I doubt the word’s in his vocabulary.’ He reached for the wine. ‘What was that all about, anyway?’

We drank heavily that night, and were the last to leave the place. By the time I turned off Via de’ Serragli into the side street where I lived it was after midnight and a steady rain was coming down. I was so tired that I decided not to look in on my mother. Instead, I climbed the stairs, thinking I would fall straight into bed. As I reached the first-floor landing, though, I sensed that something wasn’t right. In my drawing room the candles had burned down, but not so low that I couldn’t see the chair that was lying on its side. I stepped warily through the half-open door. The locked drawers in my writing desk had been forced, and my notebooks lay scattered across the floor. At first glance, it didn’t seem as though anything had been taken. My most precious possession — a terracotta statue of Artemis from the Hellenistic period — still stood by the fireplace, and there was money on the mantlepiece. I realized it was my personal papers that had interested the intruder. In one of my notebooks there was a ragged edge where a page had been torn out. I looked at the preceding page, and the page before that. It was my portrait of Faustina that was missing.

Sober suddenly, I crossed the room and stared at the palazzo opposite, its shutters fastened, rain tipping off its eaves. What would somebody want with a drawing of Faustina? Of everything I owned, why that? As I stood at the window, it dawned on me that my mother might be responsible. Gripped by anxiety, perhaps, or terror, she might have been looking for something that belonged to her, something she had lost in the earthquake. She might have rifled through my possessions, not knowing whose they were, or where she was … I hurried back downstairs. In her room, there were lighted candles on every surface. Though it was stifling, she was lying in bed with the covers pulled up so high that only her face was visible. Eight fingers showed beneath her chin, as if she were clinging to a precipice.

‘Jacopo?’ she said.

‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘Gaetano.’

Her eyes darted about, and the tip of her tongue kept flickering over her top lip.

‘Are you all right?’ I said. ‘Where’s Lapa?’

She looked at me, her gaze unfocused, vague. ‘I thought it was them again.’

I lowered myself slowly on to the bed. ‘Has someone been here?’

‘There were three of them — or maybe four. I can’t remember. I didn’t see.’

‘Who were they?’

She looked beyond me. ‘They knocked loudly — so loudly. Lapa answered the door. Then they were in, like a whirlwind.’ She tightened her grip on the covers. ‘They were monks.’

‘What kind of monks?’

She shook her head.

‘Please try and think,’ I said. ‘What were they wearing?’

‘Black. And white.’

‘You’re sure?’ The flames of the candles swerved as a draught went through the room. ‘Have you seen any of them before?’

‘I don’t think so. But they were past me before I knew it — and there were so many.’

‘They didn’t harm you?’

‘No. They told me to stay in here, and I did, but I could hear them upstairs, laughing —’

‘I’m here now.’

‘They were laughing.’ My mother closed her eyes.

Back upstairs, I righted the furniture and put my papers in order. As I crossed the room I caught sight of my face in the mirror, and was surprised how calm I looked. In the past, if something like this had happened, I would have started packing immediately. I would have been gone before dawn. North to Bologna or Genoa. Or on to a different country altogether. France, perhaps, or even England. But there was a new stubbornness in me: I was no longer willing to do anything to avoid a confrontation. What’s more, people I cared about were implicated, and I didn’t feel I could abandon them.

Black, she had said. And white.

Dominicans.

I lay awake in bed, one question leading to another. Was Stufa behind the break-in? If so, was he acting on his own? Was he getting back at me, in other words, or was it something more orchestrated, more sinister? But why had the monks taken a drawing of Faustina? Could it have been a whim? No, it was more far more likely to be part of a campaign to gather evidence. They were attempting to identify an area in which I might be vulnerable. I didn’t like where this was leading. Did they know about Faustina? If so, how much did they know? And so on, and so on — for hours … Faces loomed and gaped. Plans formed, then fell apart.

The next morning my mother woke up complaining that she couldn’t breathe. I sat by her bed and held her hand.

‘It’s the dust,’ she gasped. ‘It’s all the dust.’

I looked at Lapa, who rolled her shoulders fatalistically and turned away.

My mother gripped my hand so hard that her nails left a series of tiny crescent moons imprinted on my palm.

‘Don’t go,’ she said.

I had only slept in snatches, and my head ached from all the wine I had drunk with the Englishman. I was still struggling to make sense of the break-in and the missing page, but my questions had become mundane, prosaic. Who had the drawing? What did they want with it?

My mother’s grip loosened, then tightened again. ‘Thank you.’

‘What for?’

‘For letting me live here. For taking care of me.’

‘You’re my mother —’

She looked at me, and something shifted deep down, at the bottom of her eyes, and I remembered all the insults Jacopo had flung at me.

‘You are my mother, aren’t you?’ I said.

Her gaze tilted, then flattened, like the slats on shutters. She seemed relieved, even grateful, and I had no idea why that might be so.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

Towards the end of the afternoon, Francesco Redi appeared with his physician’s green leather case, his long, almost womanly face more solemn than usual. He had just been subjected to another of Vittoria’s infamous tongue-lashings. She didn’t believe he had studied medicine. He knew nothing. Nothing . He wasn’t even fit to tend an animal. He opened the saphenous vein just above my mother’s ankle and bled her, then he administered a sedative. Of course, he ought to be used to the Grand Duchess by now, he went on. He’d been treating her for long enough.

Later, as I showed him out, I asked if he thought she might be dying.

‘There have been moments,’ he said, ‘when I almost wished that were the case.’ He crossed himself, then stepped into the street.

I returned to my mother’s bedside.

‘I behaved badly,’ she murmured.

‘Don’t worry about that now.’

‘I was weak …’

I sat with her until she fell into a shallow sleep. Her eyes flickered beneath their lids; a pulse beat feebly in her neck. She had not defended me. She hadn’t even realized I needed defending. I no longer blamed her for that. No one had stood much of a chance against Jacopo. I would rather have chosen my life than had it shaped by somebody who wished me harm, though who was to say it would have been better?