My heart surged. Good. Good.
‘Once you’ve told me what I need to know,’ he went on, ‘I’m going to reach into your mouth and tear it out.’
He drew his sword. A harsh grinding, like some terrible, discordant music. The last of the sun collected on a blade that must have been four feet long, the metal glowing a livid pink, the colour of intestines.
‘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 ther
e, 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.
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.
THREE
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.
Via Castello climbed past a church, then narrowed as it curved round to the right. I paused outside the house where Faustina had grown up. The brown front door and one small windo
w told me nothing. A few paces further on was a green door, just as Zumbo had described. Mimmo’s house. I knocked, stood back. Perhaps I should have warned her that I was on my way. I hadn’t wanted word to get out, though. Imagine if the Grand Duke heard that I had returned! My throat was dry, my heartbeats shallow, feathery. Who would answer? Would it be her?
I was about to knock again when I heard a scraping sound behind me. A one-legged man came up the street, preceded by a wooden chair. Shifting his weight on to his good leg, he pushed the chair ahead of him, then rested his stump on the seat and swung his good leg forwards. It was impossibly laborious, even to watch.
He stopped in front of me. ‘You look lost. Can I help?’
His hair was grey, even though, by my calculations, he couldn’t have been much more than thirty.
‘Don’t you have any crutches?’ I said.
‘They broke. Well, one did.’
‘You’re Mimmo.’
He stared at me. In my fur-trimmed travelling clothes, I must have looked out of place, and I wondered if he suspected me of having been sent by the Florentine authorities to investigate Stufa’s disappearance. I was almost ten years late, but Zumbo had warned him somebody might come.
Turning his back, he opened the green door and manoeuvred himself down the steps. I asked if I could talk to him. He seemed to hesitate. Then the chair legs groaned on the floor tiles as he shifted sideways to let me pass.
I stepped down into the L-shaped room. There was a big fireplace set into the wall to my left, and a table and two chairs in the corner. To my right was the bed that had been Faustina’s hiding place. There were more stuffed birds than when Zumbo visited; the wooden boxes now covered almost every square foot of wall space. The window at the back of the room gave on to a terrace that was crowded with pots of geraniums and herbs. In the distance, the land rolled away, its folds and rumples punctuated by rows of cypresses that looked black in the sunlight.
‘I’m sorry if my Italian is hard to understand,’ I said. ‘I’m out of practice. It’s a long time since I was here.’
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