Secrecy

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘Don’t.’ She went round the table and held his head against her chest. She smelled woodsmoke on him, and dried sweat, and fifteen or twenty glasses of young red wine. And distantly, ever so distantly, she thought she could smell horses.

  ‘You must forget,’ he said, his eyes closed in a kind of agony. ‘I’m drunk. I got carried away. I’ve been talking nonsense.’

  ‘You’re drunk all right.’

  He looked up at her and touched her cheek. ‘Sometimes, you know, you’re just like her. You’ve got the same spark –’

  Just then, a woman’s voice interrupted Faustina’s story. It was coming from the window. We crept across the room and peered out into the night. On the flat roof of the building opposite, a woman was pacing up and down, her face tilted skywards, her hands in front of her, clutching at the air. She was talking to herself in a language I took to be Hebrew. A man stepped out on to the roof, moving with such caution that it might have been a frozen pond. On his suit of dark clothes I could just make out the yellow badge all Jews were supposed to wear. The woman began to shout at him, then seemed to tear her hair out by the roots and fling it on the ground. For a moment, I couldn’t believe what I had seen. Then I understood. It must have been a wig. The man tried to reason with the woman, but she shook him off and pushed past him, back into the building. The man remained where he was, head bowed.

  We returned to the sofa. Some Jewish women were required to shave their heads when they married, Faustina told me, so they did not tempt other men. Those women tended to wear wigs. It was an extreme custom. You hardly ever saw it in Florence.

  ‘Why did you decide to tell me who you are?’ I said. ‘I mean, why tonight?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ She paused. ‘Maybe it’s to do with the lovely things you said earlier. It reminded me of what my father said to my mother – in that stable, in the rain …’

  My words echoing the words that had brought her into being, the words that had made it necessary to pretend she didn’t exist.

  My love like a poultice, drawing out that sweet, sweet poison.

  *

  ‘Actually, it’s a miracle I was born at all,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I can’t believe I’m here. Surely I must be imagining it all. Them. This. Even you.’

  When her father opened the second bottle, she went on, he jumped nine months to the next part of the story. Banished from Tuscany, he had crossed into the coastal state of Piombino, where he had found a job in a lead mine. It was hard work, and he would console himself with memories of the Grand Duke’s wife – and all the time, though he did not know it, she was pregnant with his child. Then, in the depths of winter, a letter arrived from her lady-in-waiting, telling him that she had given birth, and that he was to come for the baby. He arrived at the villa five days later, his mind whirling. The lady-in-waiting told him that the Grand Duke’s wife was indisposed, and could not see him. She asked what his intentions were. He said his sister would take the child. She seemed to approve of the idea. He set off for his sister’s house in the south-east of the duchy. A wet nurse – Vanna – travelled with him. When they stopped to feed the child – in lonely places, usually: mountain passes, forest glades – Vanna told him about the pregnancy, and how it had been concealed from all but the most trusted servants. Fortunately, the Grand Duke had been abroad for most of the year, in Germany, almost as if he were co-operating with the deception, but his prolonged absence had prevented his wife from claiming that the child was his, which would have saved everyone a great deal of trouble – though it was Vanna’s impression that she hadn’t wanted the baby to grow up as a member of the Grand Duke’s family. Anything but that.

  It took Remo and Vanna more than a week to reach Torremagna, and snow fell as they rode. He was afraid his daughter would catch cold. He was afraid she would die. He kept looking down into her face, which was no bigger than a saucer, her eyes a misty, marbled blue. She hardly made a sound, even when she was hungry. It was as if she understood her predicament, and knew better than to give herself away.

  The snow had eased by the time they arrived at Ginevra’s house. During the journey, Remo had grown to care for his daughter, and as he stood on the narrow, curving street something hot poured through him at the knowledge that he could not keep her, a kind of scalding of his heart. He whispered all sorts of things to her in their last moments together, as much to strengthen his resolve as anything else. It’s not because I don’t love you. You won’t remember any of this. I’m sorry, my little one. He knocked on the door, then looked down once again. Her mouth, which didn’t know how to smile. Her eyes, which still couldn’t shed a tear. A single snowflake landed on her forehead like a blessing. She blinked. She didn’t cry. He was glad she wasn’t any older.

  The door opened.

  When Ginevra saw her brother standing on the doorstep she understood that he was about to ask an enormous favour, and she shook her head angrily, not because she was going to turn him down, but because it confirmed her low opinion of him. He was feckless, spoiled. Impossible. But it was impossible to say no to him. His charm got him into trouble, and then out of it again.

  He handed the baby to his sister.

  She became a mother.

  ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked.

  ‘A girl.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He glanced at Vanna, the wet nurse. ‘She hasn’t got one yet.’

  ‘You haven’t named her?’

  He stared at the ground. He couldn’t believe how empty his arms felt. How light.

  ‘I’ll call her Faustina,’ Ginevra said.

  ‘Faustina?’ he said. ‘Why Faustina?’

  ‘It means “lucky”.’

  Was this sarcasm, the scathing part of her character, or had a seam of compassion opened up in her? At some deep level, he couldn’t help but feel she might identify with the child she had inherited. After all, she too had been rejected once.

  Remo was about to continue with his story when the front door opened and Ginevra walked in. He grinned. ‘I was just talking about you.’

  ‘A lot of rubbish, probably,’ she said, ‘judging by the amount of wine you’ve drunk.’

  Remo turned to Faustina. ‘You see? I told you I was talking rubbish.’

  The next day, as he prepared to leave, he told her that Ginevra had always been disapproving. It was her way.

  ‘I know,’ Faustina said. ‘But it doesn’t make her any easier to live with.’

  Her candour startled him. ‘She was very kind, you know, to take you in …’

  Just then, Faustina came close to siding with Ginevra against her father – she was suddenly aware of how weak and slippery he could be – but she saw him so seldom that she couldn’t bring herself to voice the barbed words that were lining up inside her. She couldn’t ruin the rare and precious moments they had together, nor could she risk saying something that might make him think twice about returning. She loved him so much that she could never be herself.

  Not that it would have mattered greatly, as things turned out. Crossing the Maremma di Siena in an attempt to avoid detection, Remo contracted a fever and died later that year.

  ‘So,’ Faustina said, ‘now you know the whole story.’

  I ran my hand over the sofa’s shabby velvet. ‘Do you believe what he told you?’

  ‘Why? Don’t you?’

  ‘I’m only asking.’

  ‘It’s all I know about myself. It’s all I’ve got.’ The flame in one of our lanterns fluttered and went out. In the dim light, Faustina looked at me across one shoulder, as apprehensive as one of the figures in the fresco. ‘You’re not going to take it away from me, are you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  She stood up and walked to the window. ‘There have been times when I’ve doubted it myself. The whole thing could be one of my father’s fantasies – the stable, the rain, the wet umbrella … The trouble is, I don’t have anything to replace it with.’ She was faci
ng away from me, the fog drifting past her, into the room. ‘What makes it seem possible is the fact that Marguerite-Louise had lots of affairs. They still talk about it here. And there’s something in me that seems to belong elsewhere, to come from far away …’

  ‘Does your uncle know?’

  She shook her head. ‘My father wouldn’t tell him. He thought it was safer. He didn’t even tell Ginevra.’

  ‘He was probably right,’ I said.

  The second lantern flickered and then died.

  When Faustina spoke again, she was just a voice in the darkness.

  ‘You asked me once what I was doing on the night of the banquet,’ she said. ‘I was there because I wanted to see the Grand Duke close up. I wanted to see the man my mother loathed, the man she left – the man who could have been my father, but never was.’

  I joined her at the window.

  While serving the pasta con le sarde, she went on, she had caught the Grand Duke staring at her, and when she met his gaze he seemed to jerk in his chair, as though somebody had pricked him with a pin. She thought he had recognized her – or if not her exactly, something in her – but had convinced himself that he must be mistaken or deluded, since he immediately shook his head, adjusted the position of his cutlery, and then turned to the jewel-encrusted woman on his left and started talking about the extraordinary freedoms enjoyed by the female sex in England.

  ‘You think you reminded him of Marguerite-Louise?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. That’s what it felt like. It was strange – like being two people at once.’

  ‘He talks about her all the time – to me, anyway. He claims he still loves her. You know what he told me? He can’t see any trace of her in his children. He thinks she did it deliberately. Because they were his.’ I paused. When I took a breath, I could feel the fog collecting in my lungs. ‘Did you know she tried to kill them, before they were born?’

  She was looking at me now. I could see the chips of silver where her eyes were.

  Pennyroyal had been involved, I said, and elaterium, and nights of drinking and dancing. Snake root. Artemesia. Long rides on the fastest horses. None of it worked. Later, Marguerite-Louise tormented the Grand Duke by telling him their marriage was a travesty, and that they had committed fornication, and that all their children were bastards –

  ‘And then she had a real bastard,’ Faustina murmured. ‘Me.’

  I reached out in the darkness and found her hand. ‘You might be the only child she ever really wanted.’

  I was woken in the night by the low, excited murmur of men’s voices. Lying with Faustina’s head against my shoulder, I listened to the riffle and snap of playing cards, and the delicate, bright chink of coins. Signora de la Mar had told me about the illegal gambling dens that operated in the ghetto after dark. It had been one of her husband’s many weaknesses.

  At dawn I was woken again by the grating of iron bolts. The ghetto gates were being opened. I moved my arm from behind Faustina’s back. Her eyes opened, and she sat up.

  ‘There’s something I forgot to tell you,’ she said.

  Every year, her uncle travelled north to visit his suppliers. He would cement old relationships, forge new ones. In the past, she had run the apothecary in his absence, but this time he wanted her to go with him. She needed to start learning the business, he had told her, or she wouldn’t be able to take over when he was gone. She would be away for a couple of months.

  ‘When are you leaving?’

  ‘Before the end of the year.’

  I walked to the window. The fog had lifted, and the sky was a mottled silver-grey, like the skin of a fish. Perhaps my sense that things were temporary had not been so wide of the mark.

  ‘Think how much work you’ll be able to do,’ she said lightly.

  I had sensed the secrets in her long before we ever spoke; in fact, I often thought it was the parts of ourselves we kept from others that had brought us together. As I stood looking out over the jumbled, clandestine rooftops of the ghetto, it occurred to me that she might have revealed her origins to me precisely because she was about to go away. She wanted to show me that I had earned her trust. She might also think the knowledge would bind me to her still more closely.

  ‘Is it really true,’ I asked, ‘what you told me last night?’

  ‘I think so.’ She shifted on the sofa. ‘Why else would my father have made me promise to forget everything he’d said?’

  I turned and looked at her, and suddenly I was frightened.

  Though it had only been light for half an hour, the narrow streets were already choked with Jews leaving the ghetto to sell their merchandise – Dutch linen, kerchiefs, and batiste – and we were carried along on the jostling stream of people, through the gate and out into the Mercato Vecchio. As we came to the junction of Ferravecchi and Pellicceria, a black carriage swayed round the corner. On the door I glimpsed Bassetti’s coat of arms. I told Faustina she should leave.

  ‘Just go,’ I said. ‘Quickly.’

  By the time the carriage drew level, she had blended with the crowd, and I had done my best to tidy my hair and straighten my clothes. Bassetti’s face appeared, almost as if he had known I would be there. He was on his way to the palace, he said. Would I care for a lift? I thanked him and climbed in.

  Once I was seated, he gave me a subtle, searching look. ‘You’re up early.’ His voice was all syrup and fur, as usual.

  ‘I was out walking, Don Bassetti,’ I said. ‘I like to watch the city wake.’

  ‘Florence inspires you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He was mortified, he said, on account of his continuing failure to visit my workshop. He felt he owed me an apology. He was doing me a great honour even to think of visiting, I told him. It would be a miracle if he could find the time, preoccupied as I knew him to be with such weighty matters. But Bassetti would not be mollified, or even sidetracked. He began to discuss the delights and dangers of works made out of wax. He was curious to learn my views on what he called ‘the disorderly imagination’. He had heard of wax figures being used in love spells, for example. Death threats too. An effigy had even featured in a plot to kill a king. One’s approach to wax was like one’s approach to life itself, I said. It depended entirely on your moral sense. Wax could lead you into temptation. Wax could deliver you from evil. Bassetti sank into a pensive silence, his forefinger laid on his moustache, his thumb beneath his chin.

  He seemed to be worrying at the subject without quite knowing why. It was as if he sensed the existence of the secret commission, but couldn’t give it a name or a shape. In spite of that, I found him good company, genial but perceptive, and it was on that morning, as we jolted over the Ponte Santa Trinità, that I decided to take his amiability at face value. His conversation with Stufa after the banquet was the kind of conversation he would have had about any new arrival in the city. It was necessary vigilance. Standard procedure. I shouldn’t overestimate my own importance. And as for those disturbing, snake-like oscillations, I hadn’t noticed them of late.

  All the same, I was relieved he hadn’t seen me with Faustina. In recent months, the Office for Public Decency had become less tolerant, and the penalties for even the most innocuous transgressions were unremittingly harsh. Men found to have entered houses that were inhabited by unmarried women had been thrown into prison, and one youth had been sent to the galleys in Livorno, simply because he had stopped on the street and talked to a girl in an upstairs window. If you were in a tavern and you mentioned any kind of illicit behaviour, people would hold their hands out, loosely clenched, and make sinister rowing motions, and there was a renewed appetite for public floggings and other such brutalities. Even though I met Faustina secretly, in out-of-the-way places, I was under no illusion about the risks we were running. The fewer people who knew about us, the better.

  What’s more, her latest revelations had triggered a whole new set of anxieties. How would the Grand Duke and his advisers react if they learned of
her true identity? Given the intense speculation surrounding the succession and the fatalistic air that hung over the palace, it seemed likely they would view her as a threat. The last thing the Grand Duke would want in these troubled times was for his wife’s infidelity to manifest itself. At the very least, Faustina would be living proof of his dishonour, a reminder of his weakness – a source of shame. All things considered, maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea if she disappeared for a while.

  When Faustina and her uncle left the city, towards the end of December, I occupied myself with the Grand Duke’s commission to the exclusion of all else, setting myself the target of finishing by the time they returned. The winter was cold and wet that year – the amphitheatre in the palace gardens flooded, and the Arno almost burst its banks – and I put in long days in my workshop.

  I was embarking on the most difficult part of the process. After countless experiments, I decided to combine yellow beeswax with a more resilient wax imported from Brazil. Carnauba, as it was known, was hard and brittle, and it melted at a much higher temperature than other waxes. This was crucial. If the melting point of the first layer that I brushed into the moulds was too low, its integrity might be impaired or even destroyed by the next layer that was applied. To the blend of beeswax and carnauba I added lead-white, which I hoped would guarantee the pearly quality I had admired in the paintings of Correggio. Translucency was desirable in itself, but it would also allow subsequent and more heavily pig mented layers to show through from underneath. I would be able to conjure a shadow in some places, a blush in others.

  So strange, Faustina being gone. Like a throwback to the days when I had no idea who she was or where she lived, when I had no hope of ever seeing her again. I would stare at the drawing I had made of her. Though it was a good likeness, it didn’t bring her any closer. If anything, in fact, a gap began to open up between the image, which was static, and the complex, fluid person I was only just beginning to know. She became distant, improbable, and there were moments when I suspected that our whole relationship was wishful thinking, and all the stories she had told me were invented – which, oddly enough, was how they had seemed at the time.