Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

‘I’ll roast it over a fire, then I’ll devour it. I’m rather fond of tongue.’ He struck out sideways at the almond tree; snow wolfed the severed branch. ‘Who knows, perhaps I’ll acquire your pretty way with words.’

I moved to my left. I had to keep an eye on the three sticks; at the same time, I couldn’t afford to arouse his suspicion. He stood with his feet wide apart, sword pointing at the ground. His breath turned to smoke as it poured from his mouth. His black cloak was a hole cut in the world.

‘Judging by your defence of the whore, I’d say you’re in love with her. Are you in love?’

The well stood between us, though Stufa was stepping sideways, towards the house, as if he sensed the existence of a trap and was circumventing it.

‘I hope you’ve sampled her already. Because you’re not going to get another chance.’

Cuif appeared on the land to my right, Cuif as he had been when I first met him — sardonic, mischievous, preoccupied — and in that moment all my fear and indecisiveness fell away.

‘You don’t half talk a lot,’ I said. ‘Maybe people are right when they say you’ve lost your mind.’

He began to advance on me, both hands on his sword. He was keeping close to the front wall of the house, hoping to minimize the number of surprises that could occur. For all he knew, I could have accomplices. The trap I had set was my only hope, and it now seemed desperate, ludicrous, impossibly naïve.

‘Did you tell anyone you were coming?’ I asked him.

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Surely you cleared it with Bassetti?’

Stufa laughed.

I knew then that he had acted on his own.

But he had managed to bypass the well, and as I backed away he came after me, his shoulders hunched, cold light silvering his blade.

Behind the house, he tripped on something buried in the snow and almost fell. Swearing, he freed his right foot from the remnants of a ladder. Was that the ladder Faustina had climbed with Mimmo on the day he broke his leg? It seemed like an omen. Of what, though, I could not have said.

I spoke again. ‘That girl you killed — who was she?’

He turned his head to one side and spat into the snow. ‘There are things you’ll never know.’

Once at the front of the house again, he stopped to scan the ground. Perhaps he thought my retreat had been strategic, planned. Perhaps he suspected an ambush. To my right, where the copse was, the ivy-choked trunks and branches black against the rust of the sunset, the Guazzi twins were bent over, lighting a touchpaper. A snake with glowing red scales glided across the snow towards me. I watched it plunge into a drift and then emerge again, sparks crackling from its mouth.

‘Liquid gunpowder,’ I said.

Stufa looked at me. ‘Who are you talking to? There’s no one here.’

I walked backwards slowly, keeping the hidden well between us. Once again, I felt Cuif’s spirit near me, impish, combative. ‘Actually, it’s not the murder that interests me, not any more.’

‘No?’

‘Murder’s nothing special. I’ve killed people myself.’ Well, one anyway. I crossed myself. ‘No, what interests me,’ I said, ‘is what went on between you and the Grand Duke’s mother …’

Stufa’s gaunt face tightened. ‘What?’

‘What interests me,’ I said, ‘is what you two got up to when you were alone together —’

With a roar, Stufa hurled himself towards me. Then he was gone. His oddly abbreviated shout hung on in the air.

A black hole in the snow. The brown glow of the sun behind the trees.

And nothing else.

I don’t know how long I stood there for.

By the time I approached the well, it was dark. As I was looking down into the shaft, a movement behind me nearly stopped my heart. Stufa’s horse was peering over my shoulder.

I kneeled down, hands gripping the edge, and thought I saw a faint gleam far below. Was that his sword? His teeth? The emerald? I had watched him drop through the surface of the world as surely as if a trapdoor had opened under him. No one could survive such a fall. And yet …

Given his almost supernatural hostility, I felt I had to make quite certain. I remembered the shattered mill-wheel by the track. Digging into the snow, I dragged the pieces across the ground, then tipped them, one by one, into the well. The first piece fell without a sound. The second rebounded off the walls on its way down. I heard the third piece land — the dull, distant crack of stone on stone.

I fetched my food from the kitchen, then went to the barn and mounted up. I rode out to the track, leading Stufa’s piebald stallion on a long rein.

As I passed through the gap in the hedgerow, I looked over my shoulder. I could just make out a black line in the snow. The lip of the well. He was buried deep, deeper than any grave.

I was trembling all over, but not with cold. Not to go back to Mimmo’s house, where she was waiting. Not to tell her that I had saved her, that she was safe. Not to hold her again, or even see her. To do that would be to implicate her, though. I had to disappear from her life as abruptly as Stufa had disappeared from mine. I had to leave her with the beginning of a story, but no middle, and no end. He left in the afternoon, she would say. It was snowing. He did not return.

I rode back through the village. On the main street, at the top of the slope, two boys were building a snowman.

‘He could use a nose,’ I said, ‘don’t you think?’

I threw them a carrot from my bag.

In the future, if someone came to Torremagna, asking questions, the boys would remember me. Their version of events would be sketchy, incomplete — filled with enough unlikeliness to be believable. Yes, we saw him. He gave us a nose — for our snowman. They would grin at each other. He was riding one horse, leading another. Black and white, I think. No, no rider. With those words, the trail would go cold.

If someone came.

Because if Stufa had been telling the truth — if he had really acted on his own — no one in Florence would have the slightest idea where he had gone.

I headed east along a white dirt road. Over a range of wooded hills and down into the nearby market town. Then north, up a wide, bleak plain. The Val di Chiana. I had lived my life on the run — it was a habit, a necessity — but no journey had ever been more difficult. I tried not to think about Faustina — I tried not to think at all — but she appeared anyway. She stood at the edge of the village in the dress that reminded me of olive leaves, the skin smudged beneath her eyes, her forefinger touching her lower lip.

Where is he? she said.

I don’t know.

But that’s his horse …

He must have had some kind of accident.

I began to laugh. I shook with laughter.

Some kind of accident, I said again, when I had myself under control.

She told me that when Stufa knocked on Mimmo’s door the whole place seemed to shake. She was already concealed inside the bed by then. Even so, she hardly dared to breathe. Mimmo let Stufa in. She imagined Stufa filled the room. As a horse would have done. Or a giant.

You’ve hidden the whore, haven’t you? Stufa said.

Mimmo said he didn’t know any whores.

Stufa hit him. Your childhood friend, he said with a sneer. Your sweetheart . You’re trying to help her.

Help her? Mimmo’s voice lifted in indignation. Why would I help her? She nearly killed me. Look at my leg!

He related the events of fifteen years before. Stufa became impatient.

Why are you telling me all this?

She used to take me there, Mimmo said. It was her favourite place. He paused, and the silence seemed to gather itself. It’s a place she’s always returning to — in her mind, at least. A place of penance and contrition.