Secrecy

by Rupert Thomson

  That evening I built a fire with wood she had gathered from outside. We shared a bean stew, then sat on the bed and stared into the flames. Her skin had roughened; her cheeks were red, and the sides of her forefingers were dry and cracked.

  ‘Your poor hands,’ I said.

  ‘It’s been so cold.’ She seemed to hesitate. ‘Tell me really. Why did you come?’

  ‘They know you’re here.’

  ‘Here?’ She looked round the room, her glance bouncing off the walls like a trapped bird.

  ‘Not here. In the village.’

  ‘How did they find out?’

  I shrugged. ‘They’ve got spies. Informers.’

  I told her what Stufa had said in the Spanish Chapel, though I left out the part about the names.

  She asked what would happen when he arrived. She wasn’t to worry, I said. I would deal with him myself.

  ‘You? How?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet.’

  ‘What if he brings people with him?’

  ‘I’ve got the feeling that he’ll come alone.’ Once again, I sensed him behind me, following in my tracks. During the past few days, I had often felt his shadow fall across my path; even in broad daylight, it had seemed at times as if I had been travelling in the dark. ‘He thinks he can do everything himself.’

  ‘Maybe he’s right.’

  ‘This is the only chance we’ve got,’ I said. ‘To confront him here, on ground that’s unfamiliar to him –’

  ‘It’s such a risk, though.’

  ‘I know. I learned that from you.’

  I was trying to lighten her mood. She only shook her head.

  I had imagined we would talk for hours, but there was nothing left to say that wouldn’t undermine or frighten us. While I built up the fire for the night, she put away the food and lowered a bar across the door.

  Later, she examined the cut on my thigh. She thought it looked infected. Heating the blade of my knife until it glowed, she cauterized the wound. As she made up a poultice of geranium oil and lavender and tied it around my leg, I told her about the starving family.

  ‘They would probably have eaten you as well,’ she said.

  ‘The horse first, though.’

  She nodded. ‘Tastier.’

  For the first time that evening, she sounded like her old self.

  Still wearing our clothes, we climbed into bed. To be next to her again. To be breathing her in. I pressed my face into her soft, cropped hair. She must have felt me harden against her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  A twig snapped in the fireplace.

  That night I lay just beneath the surface of sleep, there but not there, like a fog-bound landscape. I would jerk awake, thinking I had heard the dull clink of a stirrup as Stufa climbed down off his horse, or the shuffle of his boots in the dirt as he circled the house, or the whisper of his cloak against the tiles as he crept over the roof. He was outside the door, or in the next room – or in the same room. The silence I could hear was the silence of him holding his breath.

  Then, in the small hours, the fear vanished. Desire took its place. I reached out to Faustina and eased the man’s breeches off her hips. We made love in the dark, without saying a word. I stayed inside her after it was over. I fell asleep inside her.

  At daybreak, I left the bed and lifted the bar on the door. The noise woke her. She muttered something about flowers, then sighed and turned to face the wall.

  I opened the door. It was a cold, still morning. A bird took off in a straight line from a scrub oak, a streak of black against the powdery ash-grey sky. Otherwise, nothing moved. Close to the front wall of the house was an almond tree, its white blossom tinged with pink. As I stood near the tree, the earth seemed to groan, like a boat that had run aground on rocks. Shivering, I set off to look for firewood.

  Out by the track was a hoarstone, half smothered by the undergrowth. Nearby lay a mill-wheel that had broken into three or four large segments. On the flat land west of the house I came across some bits of stone arranged in a rough circle. The remains of a well. There was no winch, though. No means of drawing water. I kneeled by the edge and peered over. Bricks had come loose from the walls and dropped away; weeds had flourished in the gaps. Far below, I could see a smooth blank disc that I took to be water, a disc in which I thought I saw my own reflection – small, truncated, featureless.

  Some time later, when I returned to the house with an armful of branches, I asked Faustina about the well.

  She put a hand over her mouth. ‘I should have warned you.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Nothing happened.’

  She began to cry.

  That afternoon, we rode down a leaf-covered track into a gully, then followed a watercourse that wound its way east through field maples, evergreen oaks and clumps of mouse-prickle. Once, I looked over my shoulder and saw the ghost house, a dim, solid shape high up in a mass of bare grey trees. We approached Torremagna from the north. A steep path took us past Vespi’s allotment and came out near the house where Faustina had grown up.

  Before we could knock on Mimmo’s door, he stepped out and pulled us both inside.

  ‘He’s here,’ he said. ‘He has taken a room above the tavern. He’s sleeping.’

  Sleeping?

  That was how confident Stufa was. He probably hadn’t even bothered to lock the door.

  I moved to the window. ‘Is anybody with him?’

  ‘He’s alone.’

  ‘Well, that’s something.’

  I began to outline my plan, such as it was. I needed Mimmo to tell Stufa that the ghost house was Faustina’s favourite place. He should let the information slip, as if he didn’t see it as particularly significant.

  Mimmo glanced at Faustina, but she had her back to him, and was staring at the boxes of stuffed birds.

  ‘You’re sure he’ll come?’ he said.

  ‘I imagine he already knows you were friends when you were children. Or if he doesn’t, he’ll find out soon enough.’ I spoke to Faustina. ‘You should stay here. Mimmo’s going to hide you.’

  ‘And you?’ she said, her back still turned. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet.’ I saw Stufa lying on his back with his eyes closed. His hands, folded on his barrel of a chest, rose and fell with every breath. His emerald sent green spikes into the air.

  Mimmo and Faustina were watching me from different corners of the room. Just then, I thought I could see their future. I wasn’t part of it. I didn’t feel aggrieved, though, or envious; I was too exhausted to feel anything. I pinched the bridge of my nose between finger and thumb, wishing I had slept for longer.

  I asked Mimmo where the tavern was. The other end of the village, he said. I walked to the front door and opened it. The sky had darkened. A few white flakes drifted past my face. Something clicked into place, and I found that I was smiling.

  ‘Is that snow?’ Mimmo said.

  ‘If everything goes well,’ I said, ‘you’ll never know what happened. Maybe they’ll send people from Florence to investigate. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter. You won’t have anything to say. You’ll be outside the story. Free of it.’

  Stufa’s eyes slid open. He yawned, then swung his legs on to the floor, the nails on his big toes wide and flat, as though they had been beaten with a hammer. He sat on the edge of the bed with his hands braced on his knees, fingers pointing inwards, elbows out. His laughter was as quiet and dry as leaves being blown across a flagstone floor. He had just remembered where he was, and what he was about to do.

  I went outside and climbed on to my horse. From the doorway Mimmo told me to wait. Moments later, he handed me a bag containing some provisions. I thanked him.

  Faustina stood nearby, her mouth set but not quite steady. ‘If everything goes well. What does that mean?’

  ‘Look at the snow,’ I said. ‘It’s just like after you were born. Whe
n you first came here. It’s a good sign.’ I reached down and touched her face. ‘I love you,’ I said. Then I turned my horse around and rode away.

  As the street bent to the left, I glanced over my shoulder. She was still standing by the green front door.

  I called out to her to go inside.

  She didn’t move.

  The snow was light as dust, but, judging by the sky, which hung like a swollen sack over the village, it would soon get heavier. I passed the church and came down on to the main street. At the bottom of the slope, in the small, oddly shaped piazza, a group of children were dancing with their heads tipped back, trying to catch the snowflakes in their open mouths. I rode past them, then pressed my heels into my horse’s ribs. She broke into a trot.

  Up ahead of me the world had shrunk. To the north, the woods and ridges were shrouded, brooding – almost violet. I looked south, towards Monte Amiata. Its stark upper slopes, coated in white, glowed in the weakening light, and for a moment I was nineteen again, Etna to the left of me as I escaped. This sudden sense of displacement unnerved me. But even more unnerving was my apparent willingness to submit to it. Had I been asked which of the two predicaments seemed preferable, I would probably have said the one I was imagining, the one I had been remembering and regretting all my life, not the one in which I now happened to find myself.

  I took a mallet from the back room and carried it out to the flat land west of the house. Snow settled on my shoulders as I knocked the remaining chunks of stone into the well. I heard them bounce off the walls, but didn’t hear them land. I had no idea of the depth of the well. Still, I supposed it would be deep enough.

  Once I had obliterated the last traces of the well-housing, I foraged for sticks, but Faustina had been building fires for weeks, and dead wood was in short supply. I scoured the copse on the western edge of the property, then set off down the track we had used earlier that day.

  Some time later, I crept back towards the house with a bundle of twigs. I worked as fast as I could, arranging bits of wood in a criss-cross pattern over the well. If Stufa came before I finished, I wouldn’t stand a chance. Snow dropped into the round black hole and vanished. Watching the descending flakes, I began to feel weightless, dizzy, as though I were being sucked backwards, feet first, up into the sky.

  I covered the sticks with weeds, leaves and blades of grass. The simple grid or lattice I had built would support a fall of snow, but it would give the moment a man set foot on it. I stood back. The last smears of light behind the trees were brown as old bloodstains. I reached for three twigs I had set aside and drove them upright into the ground around the well, then I withdrew into the house and lowered the bar across the door.

  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 sto
ne 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.