Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

You think that’s where she is?

I never told her that I loved her. I wanted her to guess. Mimmo’s voice choked. Don’t hurt her. Please.

Stufa strode towards the door. Get out of my way.

He fell for it, I said.

Faustina nodded.

I rode on, towards Arezzo.

Would Mimmo really have used Stufa’s appearance to let Faustina know how he felt about her? It would certainly have had the desired effect on Stufa. How would Faustina have reacted, though? Did I want Mimmo to take care of her, look after her? Had I had that in mind the whole time, without ever quite admitting it to myself? After all, she could hardly return to Florence, not while Bassetti was alive. Or was I secretly — selfishly — hoping that some long-buried anger and resentment would surface, and that their friendship would founder?

She kept appearing as I travelled north. Her face would have a startled look. Too little sleep. Too much left unsaid. She would walk into my arms, or she would fling herself at me and almost knock me off my feet — and her only a slip of a thing! I would hold her so tightly that it felt as if our two bodies might be merging into one. Perhaps what I wanted was to crush the breath out of her. Then she wouldn’t have a life without me. Then I wouldn’t be missing anything. But in the end I always let go of her and fitted my boot into the bright hoop of the stirrup, for it was always, in the end, a leave-taking, a goodbye. Only when I had vaulted into the saddle did I look at her below me, her dress creased by the force of that last embrace.

You’ll forget me, I said. I know you will.

She ran a hand across her cropped dark hair. You’re stealing all my lines. Why can’t you think of anything original?

I wanted to smile, but couldn’t. My mouth wouldn’t make the right shape.

You’ve found someone else, she said.

Don’t be ridiculous.

She turned away, her shoulders shaking.

There’s no one else, I said. How could there be?

When I reached out and touched her cheek, I found that it was wet.

I’ll never leave you, I said.

I nodded off, and when I woke, or seemed to wake, I was back in the ghost house, standing at an upstairs window. Snow on the ground, a waning moon. Trees all askew, like the rigging on a wreck.

Then I was outside. The air so cold and clean it made my lungs feel new. I could see the lines on my hand. Heart line deep. Life line ending in a row of Xs, as if my last days were a wound that needed stitches. I walked to the well and peered over. Stufa was at the bottom, looking up at me. He stretched out his arms, like a child wanting to be picked up and held.

I woke. I slept.

My hands froze around the reins.

She walked in front of me, her hair falling to the small of her back, as though years had passed. ‘We belong together,’ I whispered. ‘It looks right.’

Tears itched my cheeks.

It was morning. The snow at the edge of the road had a crust to it, a lustre, like the glaze on a cake. She turned to face me. Her eyes were so clear that they looked straight through me. Her lips were soft and dark as the skin on a ripe fig.

She stood below me. Say what you said before.

What did I say?

That thing about me spoiling women for you.

I smiled. It’s true.

Say it.

Before I met you, I used to look at other women. But you’re so beautiful, you ruined them for me. There’s no point looking any more. I’ll never see a woman who comes close.

Yes, she murmured. Yes, that’s it.

It was after two in the morning when Zumbo finally fell silent. He sat back in his chair and stared at me, his features haunted, drawn.

‘You never went back for her?’ I said.

He sighed, as if he had expected the question. ‘I had wrecked her life once. I didn’t want to wreck it again.’

Outside, the wind had dropped. In the distance, through the raw, dripping darkness, I could hear chanting. The office of the night.

‘I used to think she would come and find me,’ he said. ‘She never came.’

He paused.

‘I thought she must be happy.’

Leaning forwards, I threw another log on the fire. Sparks showered up into the chimney. If there was one thing I insisted on, it was an inexhaustible supply of wood; I might have been dispatched to a convent, but I didn’t see why I should suffer.

Within a few weeks of returning to Florence, Zumbo went on, he left again. He moved to Genoa, where he worked with a French anatomist. From time to time, news filtered through from Tuscany. He was told Bassetti had died, aged sixty-seven, and that none of the Grand Duke’s children had given him an heir. As for the woman he had made, he never heard what became of her. For all he knew, she was still lying in that locked chamber on the third floor of the palace.

He roused himself. ‘I brought you something.’

Undoing the straps on his portfolio, he took out a piece of parchment and handed it to me.

A young woman looked up at me. Long black hair, wide eyes. A tilt to her face that was self-possessed, wary, mischievous.

‘This is her?’

‘Yes.’ He had found it in Stufa’s saddlebag, he said.

I stared at the picture. Her colouring was darker than mine. Her hair too. That groom must have had some southern blood in him. Sardinian, most likely. But I could see myself in her as well — my wilful, headstrong younger self — and all I could think suddenly was, My daughter, my daughter. Though I had never known her, or held her, though I had never even heard her voice, this was my blood, my offspring — my one true child. Was that callous, given that I had three other children? Perhaps. But it was how I felt — on that night, and on many since.

When I looked up at last, Zumbo was asleep, his right arm dangling beside the chair, the veins swollen in his hand.

I went to bed, instructing a novice to show my visitor to the guest quarters, and to make sure he was comfortable. He left at dawn, before I woke, and I never saw him again. He died in Paris a month later, of an abscess on his liver.

As time went by, Zumbo’s appearance at the convent assumed the quality of a hallucination. I couldn’t forget what I had heard, but wasn’t sure how much to believe. What had he said? It sounded like a story, even to the story-teller. Since he knew I had lived what people like to call ‘a colourful life’, it was possible he had succumbed to the temptation to exaggerate, if only to hold my interest. His passion for my daughter, his vendetta with the monk. The work of art he had so lovingly constructed — my successor! It was also possible that he had been feverish, deluded. The dark smudges beneath his eyes, the headache that had felled him in Marseilles — and his sudden death, of course, only a short time after seeing me … As if that weren’t enough, I had to consider the way in which stories change shape when they are passed from one person to another. There had been a startling moment when my own words were returned to me, fourth-hand. Yes, I had stayed at Fontainebleau, but I never ate gold. I didn’t dance on rose petals. I didn’t lose my wedding ring either — not in the first week, anyway. And yet, for all that, I couldn’t stop thinking about what he had told me, and in the spring of 1703, more than a year after his visit, I travelled overland to Tuscany.

The journey took six weeks. On the twelfth of May I crossed into the duchy illegally, using a little-known hill-track near Cortona. Four days later, on a bright, hot afternoon, I approached Torremagna from the east. I left my retinue of servants and armed guards outside the tavern and set off through the village on foot. The smell of warm stone, nobody about.