Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

Mimmo told me to open a drawer.

‘Think about the depth of it,’ he said, ‘from front to back.’

Suddenly I saw what he meant. Given the width of the bed, the drawers on either side weren’t as deep as they should have been. Beneath the mattress, and running down the middle of the bed, would be a space about the size of a person.

‘You have to lie on your back,’ Mimmo said. ‘If you’re an adult, that is. It’s easier if you’re a child. I used to hide in there a lot. I used to call it “The Hold” —’

There was something of the schoolmaster about him, something self-regarding and pedantic, and I turned from the bed and put my glass down so abruptly that it nearly shattered. For all his absence of bitterness and resentment, for all his understated charm, I knew he must view me as a rival, and, odd though it might sound, and despite his obvious disability, I felt he had me at a disadvantage. He was distracting me, delaying me.

‘I’m wasting time,’ I said.

‘Then go.’

‘You haven’t told me where she is.’

He was by the window at the back of the room, staring out into the night. ‘Can’t you guess?’

I went over and stood next to him. Though it was my first time in the village, I thought it must feel like any other night at the end of winter — the faint, insistent barking of a dog, the air fragrant, almost nostalgic, with woodsmoke — but somewhere out there in the dark was a figure on horseback, a huge, hunched figure with a gash for a mouth, the black flames of his cloak flickering behind him, and I felt the urgency of the situation, and the hopelessness, and a panic twisted through me, fast and incomplete, like a lizard that has lost its tail.

I nearly missed the turning that led out along the ridge. A white track, hemmed in by vines and olive trees. Stars crowding the heavens. And such a stillness that I didn’t feel I was outside at all, but in a space that was enormous yet enclosed — a ballroom, perhaps, or a cathedral. The chink of my horse’s bridle, the scuff and shuffle of her hooves. That dog still barking in the distance. Not much else. A turmoil inside me, though: my heart was making more noise than the rest of the world put together. I came over a rise in the land. A pair of cypresses stood out against the sky. Then the sharp, clean line of a roof. That was where Sabatino Vespi lived.

The track dipped down and veered to the right. A gap opened in a tangled hedgerow. The ghost house appeared below, crouching on cleared ground, the pale, hooded shapes of the crete seeming to glow in the darkness beyond it, across the valley. No lights showed in the windows, and all the shutters were closed. If Faustina was there, she was doing her utmost to conceal the fact.

I left my horse in the barn, then stood at the front door and listened. I didn’t want to startle her by knocking. Instead, I called her name. Then she would know who it was. A brief shriek of chair legs on a tiled floor. The door creaked open.

She was wearing clothes I had never seen before — a man’s clothes — and a strange, dark hat that had no brim. With a shock, I remembered that her hair was in my pocket. But this was the face I had travelled for a week to see.

‘Faustina …’

She brushed at her forehead, as if she had walked into a cobweb, and then looked past me, into the night.

‘How did you get here?’

‘I rode. I borrowed a horse.’

‘But why?’

‘I was worried.’

‘But the Grand Duke — your work …’

‘I’m in Volterra. That’s what I told people. I’m looking at the quarries.’

I put my arms round her. She smelled like somebody else. Just the knowledge that I was holding her, though. A sense of slippage. A letting-go. As if every muscle in my body had been tense for days.

‘I tried to forget you,’ she murmured.

‘Did it work?’

‘It was beginning to. But now you’ve ruined it.’ She pushed back from me, one hand on my chest. ‘How did you find me?’

‘You told me about this place …’

From behind me came a sound that was like air being blown out of someone’s mouth, and I glanced over my shoulder, imagining the woman with her cabbage-leaf skull-cap and her cracked plate of a face, imagining the monk with his shadow thrown down, long and confident, in front of him, as if he was riding out of the east at sunrise, imagining all manner of visitations, none of them benevolent, but it was only the wind worrying the trees at the edge of the property.

She had been living in the kitchen, which was the warmest room. There was a stone sink and a fireplace and a sagging truckle bed. She fetched water from Vespi’s well. He kept her stocked up with vegetables, and eggs, and fruit he had preserved the previous autumn. When she tried to protest, he said he had more than enough. He was an old man, with few needs.

That evening I built a fire with wood she had gathered from outside. We shared a bean stew, then sat on the bed and stared into the flames. Her skin had roughened; her cheeks were red, and the sides of her forefingers were dry and cracked.

‘Your poor hands,’ I said.

‘It’s been so cold.’ She seemed to hesitate. ‘Tell me really. Why did you come?’

‘They know you’re here.’

‘Here?’ She looked round the room, her glance bouncing off the walls like a trapped bird.

‘Not here. In the village.’

‘How did they find out?’

I shrugged. ‘They’ve got spies. Informers.’

I told her what Stufa had said in the Spanish Chapel, though I left out the part about the names.

She asked what would happen when he arrived. She wasn’t to worry, I said. I would deal with him myself.

‘You? How?’

‘I’m not sure yet.’

‘What if he brings people with him?’

‘I’ve got the feeling that he’ll come alone.’ Once again, I sensed him behind me, following in my tracks. During the past few days, I had often felt his shadow fall across my path; even in broad daylight, it had seemed at times as if I had been travelling in the dark. ‘He thinks he can do everything himself.’

‘Maybe he’s right.’

‘This is the only chance we’ve got,’ I said. ‘To confront him here, on ground that’s unfamiliar to him —’

‘It’s such a risk, though.’

‘I know. I learned that from you.’

I was trying to lighten her mood. She only shook her head.

I had imagined we would talk for hours, but there was nothing left to say that wouldn’t undermine or frighten us. While I built up the fire for the night, she put away the food and lowered a bar across the door.

Later, she examined the cut on my thigh. She thought it looked infected. Heating the blade of my knife until it glowed, she cauterized the wound. As she made up a poultice of geranium oil and lavender and tied it around my leg, I told her about the starving family.

‘They would probably have eaten you as well,’ she said.

‘The horse first, though.’

She nodded. ‘Tastier.’

For the first time that evening, she sounded like her old self.

Still wearing our clothes, we climbed into bed. To be next to her again. To be breathing her in. I pressed my face into her soft, cropped hair. She must have felt me harden against her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I can’t.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

A twig snapped in the fireplace.

That night I lay just beneath the surface of sleep, there but not there, like a fog-bound landscape. I would jerk awake, thinking I had heard the dull clink of a stirrup as Stufa climbed down off his horse, or the shuffle of his boots in the dirt as he circled the house, or the whisper of his cloak against the tiles as he crept over the roof. He was outside the door, or in the next room — or in the same room. The silence I could hear was the silence of him holding his breath.