Secrecy (12 page)

‘You disappeared,’ she said. ‘I was worried about you.’

‘I came down with a fever. I’ve never been so ill.’ I paused. ‘I almost
died
.’

She smiled again, then looked past me. A door slammed further up the street. The clatter of pigeon wings.

‘What about you?’ I said. ‘Any ill effects?’

‘None at all – not unless you count some dreams about strange-coloured animals.’

‘They stuck in my mind as well.’

I asked if she would come for a walk with me. She said she couldn’t – she had to help her uncle – but she could meet me the following Friday, if I wanted, beneath the column in the Mercato Vecchio.

One evening shortly afterwards, I went downstairs with presents for the signora and Fiore. I wanted to thank them for nursing me through my fever. I gave the signora the soap I had bought in the apothecary, and I had made a wax baby for Fiore, which she wrapped in a leaf from the yard. The signora insisted that I stay for supper.

We had finished eating and I was telling them about Pampolini’s love for the one-eyed woman who ran his local tavern when we were interrupted by a loud knocking. The breath stalled in my lungs. Though I had been free of Jacopo for almost two decades, I was always half expecting him to explode into my life. I sat motionless while Fiore answered the door. When she returned, she said the Grand Duke wanted to see me, and that a carriage had been sent. I let my breath out in a rush and stood up from the table.

‘Will you be long?’ she asked.

I said I didn’t know.

Outside the front entrance was a curious box-like vehicle with barred windows. The driver, a man with a pinched,
pockmarked
face and chickens’ feet for hands, seemed lifted straight from one of my recent hallucinations. I asked if he was waiting for me. He grunted. I opened the door and climbed into the dark interior. At first I assumed I was alone, but then a rustle came from the far corner, and a hand reached up and tapped on the roof. A strip of white appeared, then a hollow cheek, a lipless mouth.

Stufa.

I murmured good evening. He didn’t return the greeting, or even acknowledge me. The carriage jerked forwards.

As we crossed the Piazza del Gran Duca, a wash of weak moonlight splashed through the bars, and I noted the crude iron rings in the sides of the carriage and the dark stains on the floor.

‘We use it for transporting those accused of lewdness and debauchery,’ Stufa said.

I said nothing.

His mouth grew wider, thinner. ‘Not applicable tonight, of course.’

Cuif had told me that people called Stufa ‘Flesh’, but when I looked at him I saw a man driven by abstinence and self-denial. Was the nickname a sardonic response to his physical
appearance
? Or did it reflect the jealousy and resentment his air of privilege aroused? Was it, in that case, a genuine attempt to smear his reputation? I remembered Torquato Accetto’s advice, namely that one should conceal oneself beneath a veil made up of ‘honest shadows and violent defences’. That was another possibility. What if Stufa’s nickname described his
concealed
self?

The carriage lurched over the Ponte Vecchio and into Via Guicciardini.

‘I hear you’re making something special for the Grand Duke,’ Stufa said.

I kept my face expressionless. What could he be referring to? Though the casting of Fiore’s hands had proved successful – the plaster from Volterra had captured every bitten nail, every little scar – I hadn’t started work on the commission itself as yet. It was only a week or two since I had talked to Pampolini. It might be months before he could fulfil my request. And anyway, there was still the problem of how I was going to
incorporate
an element of ambiguity.

‘Everything I make is for the Grand Duke,’ I said, ‘or for his son, Ferdinando.’

Stufa glanced at me, and then away again.

‘Those boxes of yours,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen them. They remind me of nativities.’

I had never thought of my plague pieces as nativities. It was a troubling interpretation, subversive even; in Stufa’s eyes, I had replaced the divine with the human, birth with death. Turning to the window, I was relieved to see that we were approaching the palace.

‘I find them gratuitous. Histrionic.’ Stufa paused. ‘It’s not art at all, really, is it? It’s showmanship.’

I opened the carriage door and stepped out.

‘Thank you for the lift,’ I said.

On entering the Grand Duke’s apartment, his major-domo, Vespasiano Schwarz, told me His Highness was bathing, and that I should go straight in. In the bathroom doorway I hesitated. The Grand Duke’s voice emerged supernaturally from the swirling clouds of steam.

‘Zummo? Is that you?’ Once he had apologized for the
lateness
of the hour, he asked me how the commission was going.

‘Rather slowly, I’m afraid,’ I said.

The Grand Duke nodded, as if this was the answer he had expected. ‘I have been thinking about my wife. And love – I have been thinking about that too.’ Through the steam I saw his eyebrows lift; though the words were his own, they seemed to have caught him unawares.

He began to talk about the day he first set eyes on Marguerite-Louise. It had been his intention to meet her when she landed at Livorno. He had wanted to show his support for her, he said, as she entered unknown territory. Not just Tuscany, he meant, but wedlock. He had been recovering from measles, though, and his mother thought it wiser if he waited at the Villa Ambrogiana, near Empoli. Things went wrong from the outset. He sprained an ankle as he left the palace. One of his dogs was sick in his carriage. Then it began to rain. Not knowing what to do with himself when he arrived at the villa, he ate lunch twice. Instant stomach pains. He took to his bed, where his dreams were mundane, exquisite tortures of his own devising, a catalogue of missed appointments and lost possessions. He woke in a cold sweat, convinced his bride-to-be was pacing up and down in an adjoining room. Not so. She had been delayed on the coast. Some irregularity in the health papers of certain of her entourage. He threw on the fashionable clothes he had ordered from Paris in the hope that he might impress her. A wide-brimmed beaver hat with flowing plumes and ribbons. High-heeled dancing shoes.

‘Such a fool! But I was only nineteen …’

Marguerite-Louise was even younger – fifteen and a half – and what he didn’t know was that she was already in love with someone else – her cousin, Charles. When Charles heard that she was to be married, he travelled to Marseilles, but he didn’t have the power to challenge, let alone overturn, the king’s
decision
. They must have cursed their fate. They must have kissed. They must have wept. And then she sailed out of his life, on a boat carpeted in velvet, a boat that had its own private garden of violets. How those sweet-smelling flowers must have turned her stomach! And the Tyrrhenian sea, which stayed calm until the last day of the voyage, as if to speed her passage to the dreaded Livorno, must also, paradoxically, have sickened her.

‘And I was waiting in my dancing shoes,’ the Grand Duke said, ‘knowing nothing of all this. Later, she told me, of course – in no uncertain terms.’

I murmured something about cruelty.

‘Zummo, you have no idea,’ he said. ‘She took one look at me and turned away. I don’t know what she said to the people with her – my French was never very good, not a patch on my English – but I saw her whole face shrivel, as if she had just swallowed a mouthful of vinegar. I was so apprehensive, so hurt, that I couldn’t kiss her. I didn’t even take her hand. Everyone was disappointed, though they tried their best not to show it. Imagine: two noble families, a prince and a princess, a fairy-tale wedding – all a sham …

‘We rode to Florence in the same carriage. She sat on one side, staring out of her window. I sat on the other, staring out of mine. Only once did she pay any attention to me. Looking me up and down, she asked me where on earth I’d got my clothes. I muttered the name of a haberdashery in Paris. I thought so, she said, and turned her back on me again. The strange thing was, I’d already fallen in love with her by then, and that made what was happening all the more excruciating.’

Servants filed past me with jugs of hot water and tipped them into the bath. The steam thickened.

‘The festivities began a few days later,’ the Grand Duke went on. ‘There had been nothing like it in Florence for at least a century. On our wedding day she travelled to Santa Croce in a coach drawn by eight white mules. White mules! Heaven knows where we found them. Her embroidered silver gown was overlaid with diamonds and strings of pearls, and a gold cloth was suspended above her head to shield her from the sun. In the church twelve choirs sang for us, but she couldn’t even raise a smile. I don’t think she smiled once all day. Then it got worse.’

‘Worse?’

He nodded gloomily. ‘I was so undermined by her hostile attitude but at the same time so in awe of her that I often couldn’t bring myself to sleep with her. Beauty can be terrifying, don’t you think?’

‘Sometimes it leaves you powerless.’

‘Exactly. And even if I
did
manage to sleep with her, I would return to my bed as soon as it was over. I was so upset by the whole thing. Sick with nerves. Redi advised me to limit the number of my visits to her bedchamber, but there was such pressure on me to produce an heir.’ He let out a short, bitter laugh. ‘I spent so little time with her that people began to suspect I was homosexual. Me!’ The steam thinned, and I noted the look of horror on his face, his eyes bulging, his mouth agape. ‘Me,’ he said again, ‘when it is I who have decreed that sodomites should be decapitated.’

Ah, I said to myself, but that was later.

‘The more reticent I was,’ he went on, ‘the more antagonistic she became. She would insult me, right in front of her servants. They thought it was amusing. They were all French, of course. They used to help her move from one bedchamber to another, so I wouldn’t be able to find her. Sometimes I would walk the corridors for hours – in my nightshirt! It’s a wonder I didn’t catch my death.’ He sighed, then reached for a glass and drank. ‘You know what her servants did? They set traps so she would know when I was coming. Bells on door handles, chamber pots in the middle of corridors. That sort of thing. For a while she had a dog. Some fancy French breed. Infuriating creature. It would start yapping whenever it heard my footsteps or my voice. Once, her servants rigged up a trip-wire outside her bedchamber and I fell and almost broke my collarbone …’

‘Forgive me, Your Highness,’ I said, ‘but it’s a miracle she got pregnant at all.’

‘There were nights when she relented. I never understood what prompted her sudden changes of heart, and I could never ask. If I raised the subject, she would tell me not to be so vulgar, so distasteful – what was I, a peasant? – and that would lead to an impassioned diatribe about Florence, what a backwater it was, and how her life had become a purgatory, if not a hell, and she would finish off with a sarcastic, disparaging reference to Dante, just to show how well-educated and civilized she was.’

‘And you still loved her …’

He lay back in his bath and stared at the ceiling for so long that I didn’t think he was going to answer. ‘You should have seen her, Zummo,’ he said at last. ‘She was exquisite, even when she was angry.
Especially
when she was angry. Dark eyes, auburn hair. Wonderfully delicate features. And she could be so charming, if it suited her. But always, in the end, this look of mingled boredom and disgust would appear on her face, and then the fighting would begin again, and she would start to scream at me: our marriage was a travesty, she was no better than a concubine, and all our children were bastards. Her screaming could be heard throughout the palace, and I would have to send her to Lappeggi or Poggio a Caiano, along with her entire, enormous retinue of servants.’ He peered at me across his chest. ‘I became the symbol of everything she hated.’

I asked him how he dealt with that.

‘I prayed,’ he said. ‘She hated that too. She mocked my piety. She would drop to her knees and put her hands together and lift her eyes heavenward and start talking a lot of mumbo-jumbo – or perhaps it was French that she was talking …’

He laughed quietly, and I laughed with him, but then a silence fell between us. Some minutes passed. Eventually, I heard a snort, and then a rumble. He had fallen asleep, his half-open mouth perilously close to the surface of the water. I went and alerted Schwarz.

Later, outside the Grand Duke’s apartment, I stood by a window that gave on to the courtyard at the back of the palace. The eastern sky was the colour of charcoal, daybreak still at least an hour away. I decided to call in at the stables. If I caught my work at odd moments – off guard, as it were – I could
sometimes
come up with unexpected solutions.

I set out across the gardens. Trees stirred drowsily; the air smelled of wet wood and something sweet but sharp, like wild strawberries. As I rounded a high, shaved hedge, I came across a man on a bench, his clothing dishevelled, his head flung back. Gian Gastone. Tears trickled sideways into his hair. I turned away, thinking to retrace my steps. Just then, his head lifted.

‘Spying on me again,’ he said.

He wiped his eyes, then foraged in the dark air beneath the bench and brought out a flagon of red wine. He raised it to his lips and drank.

‘You’re wasting your time. I don’t have any secrets.’ He set the wine back on the grass, then drew his sleeve smoothly across his dripping nose, reminding me of someone playing a violin. ‘You people. You never give up, do you?’

He yawned, then closed his eyes.

Before I moved away, I heard him murmur something about marriage, and a hideous German woman, and what a joke the whole thing was.

It was early morning by the time I reached my lodgings on Via del Corno. My eyes felt gritty, almost grazed, and the veins ached in my legs. I wanted nothing more than to sleep until nightfall, but I was brought up short by the sight of a bundle of rags dumped against the door of my room. As I approached, a hand emerged and scratched an ear. It was Fiore.