Secrecy (6 page)

The Grand Duke’s talk of an impossible love reminded me of Ornella Camilleri. For years after I was driven out of Siracusa I had clung to the hope that she might join me. Sometimes, in the small hours, I would wake believing she was beside me in the bed. If I turned over, there she would be. The twin hollows of her collarbone. The cool, glossy skin of her hip. And on her thighs a dusting of gold hair, which was only visible in sunlight. All of it imagined. Invented. For, whatever Jacopo might have thought, I had never slept with her. I had never even kissed her. Our love had been destroyed before it had the chance to come into being.

Late one night, when I was seventeen, I was pulled from my bed so roughly that the back of my head hit the floor. When I looked up, Jacopo was standing over me, his eyes like silver discs in the darkness, his breath sour with wine.

‘What are you playing at?’ he said.

I stared at him blankly.

‘You’ve been
seen
.’

‘Seen where?’ I said.

‘The Camilleri house.’

‘I’m working with Ornella’s father –’

‘Don’t say her name!’

‘But it’s true. He’s teaching me about anatomy –’

‘You’ve been seen with
her
. Talking.’

‘I’ve
spoken
to her.’ What could I say that would not provoke him? ‘We talk about books.’

Rather than ridiculing books, which was the response I’d been hoping for, Jacopo seemed to think I was parading my intelligence. ‘Books?’ He wrapped a hand round my throat and began to squeeze. ‘If I find out there’s something going on between you two –’ The silver drained from his eyes, and they became unnervingly opaque. ‘
Gesù bambino merdoso
, if I find out you’re up to something …’

He threw me aside and stumbled out of the room, but it was hours before I slept. From that moment on, I knew he would be watching me. I also knew that he already thought of me as guilty. I never imagined he would be so cunning, though. It just goes to show: the people you think you know, you hardly know at all.

I looked up and saw the Grand Duke sitting opposite me, resplendent in brocade and silk. Judging by what he had told me, it was clear that he, too, nursed a sense of injustice. We both understood what it was to feel aggrieved.

‘But I came here with some news.’ He pinched his lower lip. ‘Ah, yes. There’s to be a banquet in your honour.’

When the night arrived, I stood at the entrance to the
banqueting
hall with the Grand Duke at my side. In the weeks that had elapsed since his unexpected visit to my workshop I had gone over our conversation many times. I had been surprised by his intimate disclosures, flattered too, but they had troubled me, since they flouted every piece of counsel I had ever come across. While in Naples, I had read Torquato Accetto on the value of dissimulation. Provided you addressed your shortcomings in the presence of a priest, he said – provided, in other words, you were honest in your private life – you could dissemble to your heart’s content in public. After all, to protect yourself, it was often necessary to lie. Or if not lie, not tell the truth – or not the whole truth, anyway. Consider Justus Lipsius’s advice to foreigners travelling in Italy: have ‘an open face’, he said, ‘few words, and an inaccessible mind’. An inaccessible mind! Yet here was the Grand Duke revealing aspects of his marriage that should have remained buried deep inside him – and revealing them to me, a virtual stranger! It wasn’t that I doubted my ability to keep a secret. No, what I found worrying was the idea that the Grand Duke might, at some point in the future, come to regret having been so open. He might convince himself that I had teased the information out of him. He might imagine I had power over him, and begin to view me as a threat. There was only one sure way out of that predicament. He would have to destroy me. That was the deeply paradoxical nature of a
confidence
: it might draw you in close, but it also contained the seeds of banishment, exile, and even, possibly, annihilation.

But the Grand Duke was stepping forwards into the room. Despite the presence of several English dignitaries, the evening was to have a uniquely Sicilian flavour, he told me. It had been weeks in the planning, with every detail agonized over, right down to the violets which had been pinned to our breasts as we arrived, and which bore a close resemblance to those that grew in the lava-rich land around Catania. Even the waiters were Sicilian – or could pass as such. He waved an approving hand at a swarthy, stunted man who was dispensing drinks. ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s almost enough to make me feel homesick,’ I told him.

‘I trust we’re not going to lose you just yet.’ He had stopped in front of a fresco of an erupting Etna, which had been specially commissioned for the occasion. ‘You may find a master who is greater than me, but no one will ever value you as highly as I do.’

I said I couldn’t imagine a greater master.

Positioned throughout the room were various specimens of cactus, and a number of the English guests, predictably, perhaps, suffered minor injuries later on, when a good deal of wine had been consumed. Oh, how the English love to drink! Not for nothing were they known locally as ‘sponges’.

An envoy from Hampton Court, as yet still sober,
complimented
the Grand Duke on his flair for the exotic. The Grand Duke smiled. He was well-disposed towards the English. They had given him a warm welcome when, in an attempt to escape the violence and rancour of his marriage, he visited their country in the 1670s.

A man with a neat black beard was standing nearby. I asked if he was also a diplomat.

He shook his head. ‘Like you,’ he said, ‘my interests lie
elsewhere
.’

His name was Jack Towne, he told me, and he traded in rare drawings. He was fortunate enough to count the Grand Duke among his many clients. In most civilized countries, it seemed, there were people who shared his predilections … He left the sentence hanging, not quite complete. It was his habit to imply or suggest, I realized, but never to explain; he would be the last man in the room to incriminate himself.

‘I’m beginning to see how you might fit into a city such as this one,’ I said.

‘You’re a Jesuit, I take it.’

‘I was educated by the Jesuits. How did you guess?’

He shrugged. ‘It must be the way you express yourself.’

‘Interesting that you should notice,’ I said lightly, ‘when it’s you who have been doing all the talking.’

‘And there’s the proof.’ Towne smiled. His teeth, which were crowded and crooked, seemed at odds with his carefully trimmed beard.

Just then, we were called to the table, and he could say no more, though he slipped me his card before we parted.

Among the many ‘Sicilians’ who waited on us that night was a girl whose hair gleamed like the obsidian I had collected once on the island of Palmarola. Her skin had an olive-gold patina that would darken quickly in the sun. With that colouring, you would have expected her to have brown eyes, but they were a clear, translucent blend of green and blue, like seawater at midday when the light is at its strongest. Her forearms, bare to the elbow, were slender; I could have circled her wrist with my thumb and forefinger. My breath caught in my throat.
Wasn’t she the girl I’d seen in the apothecary window?

I looked round, but she had disappeared – to the kitchens, most likely – and for one reckless moment I thought of
following
her. At the same time, I knew that since the entire evening was being staged in my honour people would be watching me. I sat back in a kind of daze.

Sitting opposite me was the Grand Duke’s younger son, Gian Gastone, his eyes watery and pink, his jaw-line lost in folds of fat. It was astonishing to think that he was only twenty. I watched him reach for his wine. He was so drunk that his hand described a semi-circle in the air and came back empty. He stared at it with bleary suspicion, as though it had played a trick on him. Before I could look away, he noticed me, and lurched forwards, over the table.

‘Are you a spy?’

Then, all of a sudden, the girl was standing next to me, leaning down. I turned my head sideways, my nose close to her hair, and tried to breathe her in. I thought I smelled cinnamon – or was it nutmeg? Once again, I remembered the afternoon of Fiore’s tour. Was this really the same girl? My hand was resting on the tablecloth, and as she reached past me to remove a plate the underside of her forearm brushed against the back of my hand, and I felt a shock go through me, all the way to a small, surprising place in my left heel, but she moved on without acknowledging that anything had happened, without even seeming to have noticed.

During an interval between courses, I walked over to Bassetti. He was talking to the Grand Duke’s librarian, Magliabechi, a man famed for his learning, his lack of interest in hygiene, and his love of hard-boiled eggs.

Bassetti turned to include me. ‘I trust you’ve settled in?’ In repeating the words I had used at our first meeting, he was mocking me gently.

I smiled. ‘Everyone’s been very kind.’

Magliabechi gave me a caustic look. ‘Remember what it says in the
Politica
. “Do they seem friendly and trustworthy? Watch out!”’

I was about to reply when Gian Gastone, who was sitting nearby, snatched his wig off his head and used it as the
receptacle
for a sudden, forceful jet of vomit.

‘Never a good idea,’ Bassetti murmured, ‘to try and keep up with the English.’

He covered his nose, and the two men moved away.

Towards the end of the banquet, the Grand Duke made a speech in which he described the profound effect my
teatrini
– my little theatres – had had on him. I was not only a visionary, he told the gathering. I was a moralist. I captured the spirit of the times.

Later still, when even the English were beginning to stagger, their eyes astonished and blank with wine, I excused myself, but instead of following the corridor that led to the front entrance, I set off in the direction of the kitchens, determined to track down the waitress I had seen earlier. Perhaps the English weren’t the only ones to have overdone it, though, for I somehow ended up in a part of the palace I didn’t recognize, and as I came stumbling down a wide flight of stairs, trying to make my way back to the banquet, I heard voices.

I crept towards the balustrade and peered over. Some thirty feet below was a large bare hallway, illuminated by a single iron chandelier. Two men stood facing each other. I was so high above them that I could only see their shoulders and the crowns of their heads, but I knew one of them was Bassetti. Nobody else spoke in such voluptuous tones. The second man was taller than Bassetti, with broad shoulders; his bald patch was ringed with black hair. Judging by the way they addressed each other, I would have said Bassetti was the more powerful, and yet the bald man didn’t sound particularly subservient.

‘– the documents tomorrow,’ he was saying in a voice that was quiet but slightly hoarse, almost as if he had been shouting.

‘Anything else?’ Bassetti said.

‘What about the Sicilian?’

The Sicilian?
Had I heard him correctly?

Bassetti turned and walked over to the wall. ‘What about him?’

‘You mentioned him the other day.’

‘Did I? In what connection?’

‘You’re getting forgetful in your old age.’

‘And you, Stufa, are getting insolent.’

The bald man laughed. ‘You want me to look into it?’

‘Not yet. We’ve got plenty of other things to deal with.’ Bassetti said good night, then disappeared into an adjoining room.

Acting on an impulse I didn’t entirely understand, I unpinned my violet and dropped it over the balustrade. As I stepped back into the shadows, heart hammering, I heard the man let out a grunt of surprise. Perhaps the violet had spiralled past his face. I could imagine him staring at the flower, then glancing over his shoulder. I couldn’t imagine his expression, though. I didn’t even know what he looked like. At some point he would probably discover that violets had been worn by people who attended the banquet, but it seemed unlikely he would be able to trace that particular violet back to me. I climbed the stairs again, on tiptoe.

His name was Stufa.

Since flowers didn’t fall all by themselves, from nowhere, he would realize that somebody had been watching him. Would he assume the violet was a love-token – that he had a secret admirer, in other words – or would he see it in a more sinister light? Though I didn’t know the man, and had nothing against him, I found myself hoping that the falling flower had sent a shudder through him. Of uncertainty, at the very least. Or, better still, of fear.

The howling of the wind hid the sound of the Frenchman’s somersaults. The strips of oiled cloth that hung against the window reached into the room; I felt damp air move over my face. Turning on to my side, I pulled the covers up around my ears. They had a name for these bitter, nagging gusts that blew out of the north, but I had forgotten what it was. Once again, I heard the bald man’s grating whisper.
What about the Sicilian?
That had to be me, didn’t it? Who else could he be talking about?
You want me to look into it?
Then Bassetti’s voice.
Not yet.
By which he meant that there would come a time – and, unfortunately, there was plenty to unearth.

I remembered a bright spring morning in 1675. Sunlight angled down into the courtyard in the middle of our house. I was having breakfast with my mother and her sister, Flaminia, when Jacopo appeared unexpectedly. I had thought he was billeted with a battalion of Spanish troops in Messina; in fact, we’d all thought so. Jacopo wasn’t alone. Lurking behind him, close as a shadow, was Padre Paone from Sant’ Andrea, the church opposite our house. Padre Paone had baptized me, and had given me my first communion. I had known him since I was a child.

I got up to offer him a seat.

‘Given the circumstances,’ he said, ‘I think I’d better remain standing.’ He would not meet my gaze.