Secrecy (18 page)

‘What do you mean by that, Remo? Put it in words, so I can understand.’ She issued her commands with such a light touch that they felt like invitations, and she had moved closer, close enough for him to be able to see the drops of rain on her black dress, close enough to sense the warmth of the skin beneath.

‘You –’

She moved closer still. No woman, it seemed, had ever stood so close.

‘Your voice –’

‘What about my voice?’

There was such a sweetness to her breath that he thought she might have eaten an apricot or a peach while crossing the garden. Though neither apricots nor peaches were in season.

‘What about my voice?’ she said again.

‘The way you speak. I suppose it’s because you’re French.’

‘You think I sound funny.’

‘No, I like it.’

A horse stirred behind him. The whisk of a tail. Hooves shifting, clumsy, in the straw.

‘I’ve never seen anyone as beautiful as you,’ he said. ‘It’s impossible, at times, to believe it. I think I must be dreaming. Imagining things. But then I realize that I’m awake, and that you’re real.’

‘How do you know I’m real?’

She was so much cleverer than he was. She knew how to manipulate a conversation, how to give it a different shape, a new direction. Six words was all it took.

‘How do you know?’

Her pupils widened suddenly, and he felt he was falling towards her, into her.

Her breath against his face.

‘Touch me,’ she said.

He stepped back.

‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘I’m not good enough for you?’

That lightness again.

The rain hung behind her, as hard to see through as a piece of gauze. The world lay beyond – inaccessible, remote. Or maybe it was right there with them, where they stood.

He did as she had asked.

Early the next morning, he saddled two of the finest horses in the stable, and they rode west, towards Pisa. The lead-grey air, the dull copper of the sun. The mist so close to the ground that a farmhouse seemed to float on it like an ark. They had not discussed what they would do when they reached the coast. He assumed she had a plan. She didn’t seem like somebody who would ever be short of ideas, though all of them would involve a gamble. Perhaps she would charter a boat, and they would set sail for the south of France. That, he thought, was her immediate aim: to escape the prison of her marriage. He was happy, for the moment, to be with her, but he didn’t dare to think too far ahead.

Just as well.

The authorities caught up with them in the wooded hills not far from Lake Fucecchio.

‘All right,’ Malvezzi wheezed. ‘The fun’s over.’

The Grand Duke’s wife was escorted back to the villa. Remo, suddenly alone, expected to be punished. The galleys at the very least. Even, possibly, execution. Instead, they sent him into exile, with a warning that he should never set foot in Tuscany again. Perhaps they knew the Grand Duke’s wife was responsible, and that he was no more than a pawn in one of her many games.

‘What they didn’t know,’ Remo told Faustina, as she listened open-mouthed, ‘what
no one
knew, not even me, was that you were already alive inside her – a small seed growing …’

Faustina stared at him. ‘The Grand Duke’s wife was my mother?’

He looked right through her, back into the past. He seemed to be having trouble believing it himself. It sounded like a story, even to the story-teller.

‘My mother,’ she said again.

‘You were conceived on horseback!’ Remo laughed in delight, then shot her a wary glance. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you that.’ He hit the side of his head and groaned. ‘I shouldn’t have told you anything. I’m an idiot.’ He hit himself again.

‘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 facing 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.’