Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

‘Can you do anything for him?’ I said.

‘Not much. Even if he lives, I doubt he’ll walk again.’

‘I don’t want to live,’ Cuif murmured.

I leaned down close. ‘Don’t say that. You’ll be fine. You’re in good hands.’

Pampolini asked Earhole to fetch the dwale. It was a tincture made from henbane, mandragora, hemlock, mulberry juice and pape, he told me. It would put Cuif to sleep. After that, he would see what he could do. He filled a spoon with the brown liquid, lifted Cuif’s head and tipped the contents into his mouth.

I glanced at Earhole. ‘How’s the ankle?’

‘Much better, thanks.’

‘This man was one of the great entertainers of his age,’ I said. ‘His somersaults were legendary. I was lucky enough to watch him once, rehearsing in his room. But now they have destroyed him …’

‘They?’ Earhole said. ‘Who?’

Pampolini frowned. ‘Never you mind.’

I left Cuif with Pampolini, asking that the Frenchman be given the best available care and promising to cover all expenses. On my way home, I called in at the House of Shells to let the signora know what had happened. She began to cry again, her face buried in one of her elaborately embroidered shawls.

By the time I opened my front door, I was close to tears myself. A lighted candle wavered in a red glass lantern, and dark pink roses floated in a bowl that stood on a low table by the wall, but the air still smelled of my mother’s poultices and potions. My house had become a shrine to her distress.

‘Who’s that?’ she called out.

I put my head round the door. ‘It’s me.’

She was sitting up in bed, shuffling a pack of miniature cards.

‘Where’s Jacopo?’ she said.

‘He died, mother. In the earthquake.’

Her face emptied; the cards fell still between her fingers. The simplest exchanges were fraught with confusion and misunderstanding.

Then a brightness flooded back into her face, and she looked younger, almost girlish. ‘How’s your work going?’

‘I didn’t work today,’ I said.

She reached for her tumbler of acquerello . When she had taken a sip, she put the tumbler back on the bedside table and looked at me again, a smile precariously balanced on her lips, her eyes an eerie, bewildered pale-brown.

‘And what about your work, Gaetano? How’s it going?’

She could ask the same question three or four times in a single conversation, but since she seemed unaware of the fact that she was repeating herself it made no sense to point it out, and I tended to treat each new repetition as an original remark. I told her my work was going well. She needed to be reassured that things were stable.

That week I had trouble sleeping. One night, I was woken in the small hours by a terrible screaming. What a wind, I thought. I couldn’t remember hearing anything like it, not even on Ponza in 1688, when I was trapped on the island by a storm. It occurred to me to go outside and inspect the damage — I imagined trees uprooted, shattered roof-tiles, boats ripped from their moorings — but just as I was about to leave my bed a silence fell, and I heard the murmur of voices in the distance. These would be people like me, I thought, people who had been woken by the gale.

The next morning, as I walked down the track to my workshop, I came across Navacchio, supervising the trimming of a hedge. When I talked about the wind, he looked nonplussed.

‘You couldn’t have slept through it,’ I said. ‘No one could.’

Navacchio pinched a large, flat earlobe between finger and thumb.

I looked past him, into the gardens. There were no fallen branches, no flattened shrubs. There was no debris of any kind.

‘Did you hear the news?’ Navacchio said.

‘What news?’

‘The Grand Duke’s mother’s dead.’

Though Vittoria della Rovere had never been popular, Florence plunged into an orgy of sorrow, remorse and penitence. The palace was draped in black silk, which snapped and rippled in the raw March breeze, and noble families hung tapestries from their windows, the rich fabrics dimmed by strips of funereal ribbon. The streets leading to San Lorenzo were choked with endless candle-lit processions, which brought that part of the city to a standstill. Church bells sounded at all hours of the day and night. The Grand Duke, who had rarely felt confident of his place in his mother’s affections, and who had been ambivalent, to say the least, about her constant interference in affairs of state, wept openly, refused to eat, and spent so long in prayer that both his knees swelled up and he could barely walk. Her passing also revived his anxieties about the succession. ‘No births,’ somebody heard him moan, ‘only death, death, death!’

It wasn’t until after the requiem Mass had taken place that I summoned the courage to approach him. Toldo was guarding the entrance to the Vasari Corridor on the afternoon in question, and, once I had persuaded him that I had urgent private business with the Grand Duke and swore that I would shoulder all responsibility, he grudgingly stood aside and let me through.

I climbed a flight of carpeted steps. It was quiet in the corridor, with round windows set low down in the walls. There were soldiers stationed at regular intervals, and though they remained motionless I sensed their eyes on me when I walked past. As the corridor moved north, it gradually sloped down until it approached ground level, and I had a view of the palace gardens, scraps of muted greenery caught in the metal grilles that were fitted over the windows. According to Toldo, the Grand Duke was on his own. Had he followed the corridor all the way to the Uffizi? Once, in a burst of enthusiasm, a month or two after I delivered my commission, he had taken me to the gallery to show me a sculpture he admired. A portrayal of two wrestlers in combat, neither of whom appeared to have gained the upper hand, the piece was a study in tension and balance. Incongruously, perhaps, it reminded me of the Grand Duke’s foreign policy, the way in which he contrived both to avoid commitment and to keep all his options open, and I wondered if that was why the sculpture appealed to him. After spending a few moments thinking about how to frame the observation, I put it to him, and he turned to me with a look that was warm, almost grateful, and said, ‘Ah, Zummo, I knew you’d understand.’ How long ago that seemed!

Soon I was beyond the gardens, and the corridor began to climb again. I was able to peer down into Via Guicciardini, the street I used to travel every day during my first two years in the city. Had the passers-by glanced up, all they would have seen was a shadowy figure; they would have assumed I was a member of the ruling family, maybe even the Grand Duke himself.

Without being aware of it, I had speeded up, and as a result I nearly missed him altogether. He was sitting with his back to me, in an alcove that overlooked the nave of Santa Felicità. His head was bowed, as if in prayer; the great globe of his belly rose and fell. It was here — precisely here — that Fiore claimed to have seen him once. He had often told me how much he valued time spent in the corridor — it was one of the few places where he could escape the pressures of his position — and I knew I shouldn’t be imposing on him, but recent events had left me with no choice. I had burned my boats. My boats were ashes. I decided not to wake him, though. I would simply wait.

By the time his eyes opened, at least a quarter of an hour had gone by, and I had almost forgotten why I had come. Watching a man sleep had begun to seem like an end in itself.

‘Zummo?’

‘Forgive me for intruding, Your Highness, especially at a time like this.’

He brought a fist up to his mouth to hide a yawn. ‘It’s a sad time. Very sad.’