‘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.