Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

I unpacked the food Mimmo had given me. I had no appetite, but forced myself to eat. A small wedge of pecorino, some radishes. Half a carrot. Again and again, my eyes were drawn to the barred door. The night before, I’d had Faustina for company, and Stufa had not yet arrived. Now, though, he was a mile away, and there was nothing for it but to wait. I decided to sleep upstairs, otherwise I would get no rest at all.

On the first floor the rooms were laid out on either side of a wide corridor. Halfway along, a scythe leaned against the wall, like a thin man who had stopped to catch his breath. I chose a room above the kitchen, with a window that looked east, towards the village. I put a hand on the chimney-breast. It was warm from the fire I had built earlier. I went downstairs, dragged the bed up to the first floor and pushed it against the chimney, then I blew out my candle and pulled the blankets over me. As soon as I was lying still, the house came alive. All sorts of knocks and creaks and whispers. When would Stufa come? At midnight? Dawn? I kept thinking I heard someone moving around below. I must have left the bed a dozen times. The white land hovered in the darkness. The air had an edge to it, like glass. Once, I saw a light come and go in the thickets we had ridden through that afternoon. A poacher, perhaps. In this weather, though?

Morning came. The silence was so profound that I thought I had gone deaf. I stood at the window and looked out. Several inches of snow had fallen during the night, but there were no footprints. There had been no visitors. A sense of dread held me where I was; I couldn’t seem to move. At last, my bones chattering in the cold, I turned away. Wrapping the blankets round my shoulders, I crossed the corridor.

From a window at the front of the house I saw that the well was undisturbed. You wouldn’t have known it was there. I went downstairs. As I rebuilt the fire, I realized the deep snow wasn’t wholly in my favour. It would help Stufa too. He would be able to approach the house without me hearing. If I wasn’t to be caught off guard, I would have to keep watch from one of the windows that had a view of the track.

I lifted the bar on the door and stepped outside. The snow was smooth as milk, except for the little arrow-trails left by birds. Such stillness. Such a hush. It seemed possible that the world had been emptied while I was sleeping. All the souls had been gathered up, and I had been forgotten, overlooked.

Sometimes, when I thought about my mother’s unlikely reappearance in my life, I would see it as an opportunity, a gift, and I was tempted to turn to her and say, Tell me the truth about the past. But I had never quite managed it — and even if I had, I doubted she could have told me, not after what she had been through, not after all these years. The truth was a key on the floor of the ocean, its teeth mossy, blurred. Once, it might have opened something. Not any more. And perhaps, in the end, I didn’t want to hear it, anyway. The idea that Jacopo might have been right all along — or if not right exactly, not entirely wrong …

I set off round the house. Snow lay on the almond blossom, white heaped on white. The sticks marking the well were still in place, though far less obvious. Only the top two inches showed. When I reached the back of the house, the sky brightened a fraction. The sun like a small, worn coin, so dull I could look straight at it. The shadows bleak and blue. From the corner of my eye I saw a rabbit hopping through coarse grass near the barn. Then it stopped abruptly. Had it heard something? I glanced towards the track. When I looked for the rabbit again, it had gone.

Back on the first floor, I stared at the landscape until my eyes ached. Writing appeared on the blank page of the snow. Apologies, hypotheses. My own obituary. Cracks showed, pink at first, then deepening to red. A dog’s head lay on the ground, as if decapitated.

Once, the white surface burst apart, and Cuif sat upright, grinning. Watch this! Off he went, making a series of fluid hoop-shapes in the air. He left no prints — no marks at all.

The day passed in fits and starts. Time behaved like the rabbit. Leaping forwards, standing still.

I went downstairs and stoked the fire. I tried to eat. I listened.

He didn’t come.

I found it difficult to imagine what might be keeping him. Perhaps, as in a legend, he had fallen into a sleep that would last for centuries. Perhaps I would die waiting. Become another ghost.

This house, this snow.

This loneliness.

Towards the end of the afternoon there was a flaring on the horizon, a band of apocalyptic colour, which made the bare trees at the limit of the property look brittle, scorched. The sun wasn’t small and pale any more. As it dropped, it swelled and sagged, and the orange ripened to a bloody, bloated crimson.

It was then that I heard him.

‘My soul does not magnify the Lord,’ he sang, ‘and my spirit hath renounced God my saviour —’

I sank below the level of the windowsill, my sword flat on the floor beside me. I recognized the Magnificat, but it was a version all his own. He had bastardized it. Turned it upside-down.

‘Because he hath regarded the sins of his handmaiden —’

I thought I knew what he was doing: he was twisting the Virgin Mary’s words and putting them in the mouth of the Grand Duke’s wife.

‘For behold,’ he sang, ‘from henceforth, all generations shall call me cursed —’

As I peered over the rough stone sill, he came through the gap in the hedge and down the slope, a swirl of mist or smoke drifting off him, as if he were a gun that had just been fired. He was mounted on a piebald stallion with a great blunt head, its black lips frothing where they chafed against the bit. Attached to the saddle were the tools of a torturer’s trade — a pair of metal pincers, a brazier, an array of gouges, pliers and branding irons, and a wooden structure with straps and buckles which I took to be a rack. The whole assembly creaked and clanked as if to accompany his sacrilegious chanting. I stood to one side of the window, out of sight, but I needn’t have bothered. He didn’t even glance in my direction as he rode by. He knew I was there, and he obviously thought Faustina was with me. Round the house he went, his eyes half closed, his words flung in exultation at the sky.

‘And verily he shall smite me down, and I shall feast on dirt —’

He wasn’t making the slightest attempt at camouflage or stealth. His triumph was a foregone conclusion, and it was easy, looking at him, to believe in his invincibility. But all at once my apprehension was overtaken by a purely practical concern. If he kept circling the house, he might stumble into the trap I had laid. His horse would suffer injury, but he would probably be thrown clear, and my only weapon — my one advantage — would be lost. I had no choice but to confront him. I needed him on foot.

The next time he came round the corner of the house I was waiting for him, the concealed well in front of me, the peach trees at my back. When he saw me, he brought his stallion up short.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The Sicilian.’

I kept my mouth tight shut. My teeth clicked and rattled behind my lips.

‘But where’s the whore?’ He cast a theatrical look around him, as if she too might suddenly appear.

‘Who are you to call her a whore?’ My voice sounded weak; I wished I hadn’t spoken.

‘He’s got a tongue in his head — but not, I fear, for much longer.’ Stufa climbed down off his animal.

My heart surged. Good. Good .

‘Once you’ve told me what I need to know,’ he went on, ‘I’m going to reach into your mouth and tear it out.’

He drew his sword. A harsh grinding, like some terrible, discordant music. The last of the sun collected on a blade that must have been four feet long, the metal glowing a livid pink, the colour of intestines.