Secrecy (30 page)

I nearly missed the turning that led out along the ridge. A white track, hemmed in by vines and olive trees. Stars crowding the heavens. And such a stillness that I didn’t feel I was outside at all, but in a space that was enormous yet enclosed – a ballroom, perhaps, or a cathedral. The chink of my horse’s bridle, the scuff and shuffle of her hooves. That dog still barking in the distance. Not much else. A turmoil inside me, though: my heart was making more noise than the rest of the world put together. I came over a rise in the land. A pair of cypresses stood out against the sky. Then the sharp, clean line of a roof. That was where Sabatino Vespi lived.

The track dipped down and veered to the right. A gap opened in a tangled hedgerow. The ghost house appeared below, crouching on cleared ground, the pale, hooded shapes of the
crete
seeming to glow in the darkness beyond it, across the valley. No lights showed in the windows, and all the shutters were closed. If Faustina was there, she was doing her utmost to conceal the fact.

I left my horse in the barn, then stood at the front door and listened. I didn’t want to startle her by knocking. Instead, I called her name. Then she would know who it was. A brief shriek of chair legs on a tiled floor. The door creaked open.

She was wearing clothes I had never seen before – a man’s clothes – and a strange, dark hat that had no brim. With a shock, I remembered that her hair was in my pocket. But this was the face I had travelled for a week to see.

‘Faustina …’

She brushed at her forehead, as if she had walked into a cobweb, and then looked past me, into the night.

‘How did you get here?’

‘I rode. I borrowed a horse.’

‘But why?’

‘I was worried.’

‘But the Grand Duke – your work …’

‘I’m in Volterra. That’s what I told people. I’m looking at the quarries.’

I put my arms round her. She smelled like somebody else. Just the knowledge that I was holding her, though. A sense of slippage. A letting-go. As if every muscle in my body had been tense for days.

‘I tried to forget you,’ she murmured.

‘Did it work?’

‘It was beginning to. But now you’ve ruined it.’ She pushed back from me, one hand on my chest. ‘How did you find me?’

‘You told me about this place …’

From behind me came a sound that was like air being blown out of someone’s mouth, and I glanced over my shoulder, imagining the woman with her cabbage-leaf skull-cap and her cracked plate of a face, imagining the monk with his shadow thrown down, long and confident, in front of him, as if he was riding out of the east at sunrise, imagining all manner of
visitations
, none of them benevolent, but it was only the wind worrying the trees at the edge of the property.

She had been living in the kitchen, which was the warmest room. There was a stone sink and a fireplace and a sagging truckle bed. She fetched water from Vespi’s well. He kept her stocked up with vegetables, and eggs, and fruit he had preserved the previous autumn. When she tried to protest, he said he had more than enough. He was an old man, with few needs.

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. When 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.