Rupert Thomson: Secrecy

I saw the road agents confronting Stufa, all three men on foot. The sun rinsed the countryside in stringent yellow light. Stufa produced a roncolino , a short, curved knife designed for cutting ripe grapes from the vine, and drove the rust-pocked blade into the bearded man’s abdomen, then jerked it upwards through the complex, tumbling parcel of guts. Nobody had even asked him for money. Nobody had had the chance. He was supernaturally fast and violent.

Right hand enamelled with the bearded man’s blood, shreds of red silk trailing from the blade, Stufa rounded on the man with the lazy eye. There was nothing laconic about him now. Stufa dropped his weapon in the grass and wrapped both hands around the man’s thin neck. That was the last place he ever stood. A brackish wind stole through a nearby stand of cane. The dry stalks clicked and rattled.

Later, I saw Stufa sitting with Faustina in a brown room filled with firelight and shadows. He was an old friend of mine, he said — we had known each other for years, since we were theology students — and because I was too busy to make the journey from Florence — You know how it is with artists! — he had been sent on ahead to watch over her. Judging by the indulgent, almost sleepy way she looked at him — exactly the way my mother used to look at Jacopo — she believed every word. She didn’t know his name was hidden inside hers. She didn’t know his name at all. I reached for the door handle that led to the room, intent on warning her, and woke up grasping at the nothingness in front of me.

I slept again, and woke to find Stufa’s knife lying near me, but the crust of dried blood on the blade was the night sky and the silk tatters clinging to the hilt were dawn’s red streaks showing in the east. I had visited the hospital before I left. Cuif would live, Pampolini said, though it seemed unlikely he would regain the full use of his arms. There had been too much internal damage. To my astonishment, Pampolini had saved Cuif’s leg. Not that the knee would ever function properly again. When I looked in on Cuif, he gave me a sickly smile. Tell that German to watch out. He’s got some competition now. I sat up, rubbed my face. The land unfolded to the south, its corrugations the colour of mould on cheese, no trees for miles. My dreams had felt so earthed in what was real that it was hard to believe in the world that lay before me, so unthreatening, so empty of people, and so quiet.

Perhaps that was why the events of that morning caught me unprepared. I had been riding for an hour or two when I passed a stone dwelling that crouched in the shadow of a crumbling tufa cliff. The ground all round looked worn and patchy. A man waved from the doorway. I waved back. A woman appeared. Then some children. In no time the whole family were swarming across the threadbare land towards me. At first I took this to be some kind of welcome — a traveller was a rare sight, maybe — but when I saw how starved they were, their eye-sockets hollow, almost bevelled, their skin moistureless and slack, I realized it was Borucher’s mare they were after. A horse was food — no, more than that: a feast — and they would kill me for it. I jabbed at her flanks with my heels. She reared, and then sprang forwards. The woman spun sideways with a shriek, her arms outstretched. I smelled her famine breath. The man lunged at me, and caught my thigh with the tip of a sickle. Then I was beyond them, wind roaring in my ears.

Two miles on, I reached a gully. Trees choked with ivy, a floor of leaf-mould. I swung down out of the saddle. My horse’s eyes were rolling like balls in a bucket. I ran my hand over her sweaty neck until she calmed down, then I tethered her and undid my breeches. The wound wasn’t deep, scarcely more than a scratch, but the stranger had marked me, and I was left with no choice but to believe in him when I would rather have pretended he was yet another demon served up by my fevered imagination. He had pierced my skin, and I was worried that some of his terrifying desperation might have entered me.

When I glanced up, the trees appeared to have edged closer, and though I was certain the starving family were too weak to have followed me into the woods, I mounted and rode on, eager to be done with the region once and for all.

*

Towards sunset on the fifth day, Torremagna appeared ahead of me, its mud-coloured houses huddled on a rocky outcrop. A bell-tower modelled on the one in Siena rose clear of the tiled rooftops and seemed to support the heavy sky. It was warmer, but not by much. I was travelling the white road Remo had travelled more than twenty years before, his baby daughter strapped against his chest. To my left, the land sloped down, then lifted into a long blunt ridge. To my right, the blue-grey cone of Monte Amiata showed above a skirt of mist.

The first person I came across as I rode into the village was somebody I recognized. He was hoisting himself along on three legs, two of which were artificial, made of wood. Only when I had passed him did he look up at me. The portrait Faustina had painted had been accurate enough. Mimmo Righetti was still in his early twenties, but he had lost all the shine and suppleness of youth. I was struck by his gaze, though, which was steady and slightly humorous, as if he thought I might be about to make a fool of myself. My eyes shifted to his crutches. The bottom of each crutch had been carved to resemble a wild boar’s trotter. Higher up, they were patterned with vine leaves and clusters of olives.

‘Beautiful craftsmanship,’ I said.

He thanked me quietly. His gaze didn’t waver.

‘Your father’s work, I take it.’

‘What do you know about my father?’

‘Only what Faustina told me.’

Looking at the ground, he nodded.

‘Is she here?’ I asked.

When he didn’t answer, a pit opened inside me, and I felt I might be sick. What if Stufa had deceived me, and Faustina was somewhere else entirely, in a place known only to him and his informers, and my long ride south had removed me from the scene, leaving him free to deal with her without any danger of me interfering?

‘Is she here in the village?’ I said again. ‘It’s important.’

Mimmo told me to follow him.

On reaching his house, I looped my horse’s reins through one of the iron bars on the window, then I stepped down, through a green door, into an L-shaped room. Though the air hoarded the sweet smell of sawdust, I could see no sign of the cabinet-maker’s tools. Mimmo’s father must have retired. Or died. Fixed to the walls were a number of wooden boxes, each of which contained a stuffed bird.

Mimmo saw where I was looking. ‘It’s a hobby.’

‘Only birds?’

‘Didn’t she tell you?’

‘Yes. She told me.’ I faced him across the room. ‘Where is she?’

‘Not far away.’ He removed the cork from a bottle and poured me a glass of wine, then poured one for himself. His hand was as steady as his gaze.

I told him what had happened since Faustina left the city. He listened carefully, and when I had finished he said that no one resembling Stufa had appeared, and that Faustina was safe. The only place to hide her, he added, was in his house.

‘But he’ll search your house,’ I said. ‘He’ll search every house in the village.’

‘He can search all he likes. He won’t find her.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

In the last decade of his life, Mimmo said, his father had become convinced that furniture should combine the functional with the clandestine, and he had begun to incorporate sliding panels and hidden compartments into almost everything he made.

Mimmo pointed to the bed at the far end of the room. ‘One of the better examples.’

I moved towards the bed. Its headboard offered a sea view, with a port on the horizon. A female figurehead leaned out from the foot of the bed, and its sides had been carved in such a way as to suggest a waterline. The frame above the drawers rippled like unfurling waves, like the beginning of a wake, while the drawers themselves, which were below the surface, were decorated with fish, shells, rocks and coral. I had no idea what I was looking for.