Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

‘I call him Earhole,’ he said, ‘for obvious reasons — though he is also, coincidentally, a wonderful source of information and gossip.’

We talked for another hour, and by the time I left the hospital I felt I had found a barber-surgeon I could rely on. Not only that, but I had met someone who shared many of my arcane enthusiasms.

By the end of July the conversion of the stable block was complete. In Naples, silence had been in short supply — the city seemed to reverberate, like a jar filled with bees — but once I arrived at the gate on Via Romana, and had been cleared by the guards, one of whom, Toldo, was a native of Messina, I found myself on a grass track that had a stone wall on one side and a row of myrtle trees on the other, and all I could hear was the occasional grunt or screech from the menagerie, and the faint click and trickle of a fountain, which reminded me of Fiore’s murdered countess and her ghostly, bouncing pearls. After a few steps, the track forked left into a paved courtyard with out buildings on three sides. I had more space than ever before. The old tack room, which looked north and backed on to a bank of earth, was cool even in hot weather, almost like being underground, and was ideal as a place in which to carry out dissections, while the south-facing stalls had been transformed into an airy studio where I could melt and model wax.

I worked hard for the rest of the summer. Keen to prevent my techniques from becoming common knowledge, I turned down various offers from would-be assistants or apprentices. I didn’t need help, and I resented all forms of interruption. There was something private, almost sacred, about wax: it demanded vigilance, devotion, subterfuge. Secrecy could be imposed from without, like a punishment or an affliction, but it could also be cultivated, or even willed. It could offer comfort. Provide a refuge. According to Herodotus, the Persians used to cover their dead in wax before they placed them in the ground. Wax was, in itself, a form of protection, a kind of veil.

Autumn came. Leaves scuttled across the stable yard, and a keen, metallic smell drifted down from the Casentino. The first snows had fallen in the mountains. One morning I was brushing fast, thin strips of molten wax into the inside of a mould when the Grand Duke appeared in the open doorway. He was alone. In his bottle-green silk and gold brocade, he reminded me of one of the beetles I had studied on a visit to Redi’s laboratory. I hesitated.

‘Please don’t stop,’ he said.

After watching for a moment, he remarked on the quickness of my hands.

‘You have to be quick, Your Highness,’ I said, ‘or the wax dries on the brush.’

While I covered the mould with a piece of muslin to protect the cooling wax, the Grand Duke surveyed the large round window I had installed in the southern wall to let in light.

‘It all looks so different,’ he murmured.

I asked if he approved.

He nodded. ‘I prefer it.’

I led him across the courtyard to my office, where we would be more comfortable.

‘I don’t usually set foot outdoors at this time of year.’ He gave the clouds a rapid, fearful glance, as if they might be capable of violence, and pressed a handkerchief over his mouth and nose.

Once in the office, I threw a log on the embers that were glowing in the grate.

The Grand Duke coughed. ‘It was my wife who used to keep her horses here.’

I watched him carefully. All I knew was that he had been married to Louis XIV’s cousin, Marguerite-Louise of Orléans, and that the marriage had failed, but I remembered what he had said about horses, and how he no longer found it pleasing to keep them. I had thought it an odd remark, even at the time.

‘They were French, of course,’ he went on, ‘like everything she surrounded herself with.’ He sniffed at the air. ‘I’m not sure I can’t still smell them. Can you smell them, Zummo?’

I inhaled. Woodsmoke. Plaster.

‘Possibly,’ I said.

‘Our marriage was torture, from beginning to end.’

The words had burst out of him, as if they couldn’t be contained any longer, but I had no idea why he had chosen me as an audience. I rather wished he hadn’t. The wrong kind of knowledge could be dangerous. People were always being persecuted for what they knew.

He sank down on to a chair. ‘You wouldn’t believe some of the things she said to me.’

Beyond him, between two outbuildings, the gardens sloped uphill, the foliage on the trees a muted gold. ‘Didn’t she appreciate these beautiful surroundings?’

He trained his heavy-lidded eyes on me for so long that I felt I must have spoken out of turn. ‘You don’t know? I thought everybody knew.’

After her father’s death, Marguerite-Louise had lived in Paris, which she thought of as the cradle of civilization, the centre of the world. Her marriage had taken her away from all that. When she arrived in Tuscany, she was only fifteen, but she already had strong opinions. She saw herself as having been banished to some dismal backwater, as she never tired of telling him.

‘I got a letter from her once. Do you know what it said? I remember the exact words. I swear by all that I most hate, that is yourself, that I enter into a pact with the devil to drive you mad. Her handwriting was huge, and it slanted across the page like rain. Torrential rain. The word “hate” took up the whole of one line.’ He gulped, then shook his head. His eyes had filled with water.

It sounded to me, I said, pouring two glasses of red wine, as if his wife had taken leave of her senses.

The Grand Duke blinked back his tears. ‘There were those who thought she drifted in and out of sanity. My mother, for one. My physician, Redi, too. And some of the reports that reach me from the convent in Montmartre which is now her home seem to confirm that view. She has become a compulsive gambler, appearing in Versailles in rouge and a blond wig. She’s quite capable of losing an entire fortune in a single night. No wonder she’s always asking me for money. Did you know she tried to steal my family jewels?’

I shook my head.

‘Not so long ago, she chased the Reverend Mother through the cloisters with a pistol in one hand and a hatchet in the other. When some attempt was made to restrain her, she threatened to burn the convent to the ground.’ He laughed, but more in horror than amusement.

I suggested, gently, that he might be better off without her.

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ he said. ‘But there’s something I haven’t told you. I fell in love with her the moment I saw her, and I have loved her ever since — despite everything.’

The Grand Duke’s talk of an impossible love reminded me of Ornella Camilleri. For years after I was driven out of Siracusa I had clung to the hope that she might join me. Sometimes, in the small hours, I would wake believing she was beside me in the bed. If I turned over, there she would be. The twin hollows of her collarbone. The cool, glossy skin of her hip. And on her thighs a dusting of gold hair, which was only visible in sunlight. All of it imagined. Invented. For, whatever Jacopo might have thought, I had never slept with her. I had never even kissed her. Our love had been destroyed before it had the chance to come into being.

Late one night, when I was seventeen, I was pulled from my bed so roughly that the back of my head hit the floor. When I looked up, Jacopo was standing over me, his eyes like silver discs in the darkness, his breath sour with wine.

‘What are you playing at?’ he said.

I stared at him blankly.

‘You’ve been seen .’

‘Seen where?’ I said.

‘The Camilleri house.’

‘I’m working with Ornella’s father —’

‘Don’t say her name!’