I stared at the wedge of sunlight near my feet until it began to resemble a crevasse into which I might disappear. If Jacopo were to do away with me, my guilt would become a fact, since there would be no one left to tell my side of the story. He would remove the need either to press charges or to provide evidence. He would be held up as the saviour of the family’s honour. A pillar of the community. I lifted my eyes from the ground, and all I could see for a few long moments was a pulsing triangle of violet and green. My only option was to flee.
I rolled over on to my back. I had eluded Jacopo, but now I had the likes of Bassetti to contend with — Bassetti, whose record of serving the ruling family for more than three decades testified to his statecraft, his guile and his resilience. Whenever I ran into Bassetti, he was pleasantness itself, and yet, even during our first meeting, I thought I had sensed something else in him — something slippery, reptilian. Then, on the night of the banquet, the façade had slipped. Gone was the avuncular Bassetti. And in his place? An impatient man. A fractious man. There was more than a hint of ruthlessness as well. We’ve got plenty of other things to deal with. I suspected that his career had been built on the misfortunes of others, misfortunes he himself engineered and would, at the same time, deny all knowledge of. I had to avoid drawing attention to myself — I should live quietly, work hard — but, like Ornella, I seemed to provoke people; I was often misinterpreted, misjudged. I would have to be ingenious, I realized, if I were to survive in this city, where scheming and machination were second nature. Though ingenuity might not be enough. I would have to be lucky too.
The wind rose again. Trees roared; roof-tiles rattled. Bracing myself against the cold, I got out of bed and had a last piss in my chamber pot.
Tramontana.
That was the name of the wind.
The following week, as I was leaving my lodgings, I heard somebody call my name. Cuif was peering out of his top-floor window, his face a distant, pale oval. He had been working on his comeback, he told me, then laughed the somewhat hysterical laugh of a person who doesn’t see anybody from one end of the day to the other. He had a new trick, he said. He wanted my opinion. I promised I would drop in later.
When I returned that evening, I found him perched on a high stool, scribbling in a ledger. It was damp in his room, and he had wrapped himself in a coat that appeared to be made from the crudely stitched skins of vermin.
‘I’ll be with you shortly,’ he said, his eyes fixed on the page, as if, like Galileo, he was engaged in work of great historical significance.
His voluntary imprisonment had mystified me at first. Now, though, I thought I was beginning to understand. In this tiny kingdom of his own devising, he could reconstruct himself. He was watching the world turn. Waiting for the ideal moment to make his entrance.
I wandered over to the shelf by the window. The Frenchman’s library dealt more or less exclusively with his craft. There was a copy of Rhetorical Exercises by the original harlequin, Tristano Martinelli. He also had A Choice Banquet of Tumbling and Tricks, The Anatomie of Legerdemain, and Wit and Mirth: an Antidote to Melancholy. I began to leaf through the Martinelli. In his short book, he claimed to be revealing the secrets of his profession. He followed his obsequious dedication to an imaginary patron with four pages of teasing chapter titles and a further seven of illustrations. He left the remaining fifty-seven pages blank. It was an exercise in mockery and obfuscation. On a more serious level, though, I thought he was saying, I’m not going to tell you — or even, It cannot be told.
‘Martinelli’s a big influence.’ Cuif was standing at my elbow, head inclined.
‘I didn’t hear you cross the room.’
Cuif smiled, then he opened a cupboard, took out two long-stemmed glasses with fluted sides and poked a forefinger into each of them in turn, removing the crisp bodies of dead insects.
‘Drink?’ he said.
We were halfway through a jug of rough red wine when I asked Cuif if he knew of somebody called Stufa.
He kept his eyes on his glass. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘No reason,’ I said. ‘I just heard the name somewhere.’
Cuif told me that Stufa acted as a spiritual adviser to the Grand Duke’s mother, Vittoria della Rovere. She was a daunting woman, he said. Always in black, of course. Eyes too close together. Ferocious temper.
I drew him back to the subject, asking how Stufa had acquired the position.
Vittoria had adopted Stufa when he was four, Cuif said. She had educated the boy herself, just as she had educated the Grand Duke, filling his head with stories of penance and martyrdom, and it was no great surprise when, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, he expressed the desire to enter the holy orders. She placed him in a Dominican monastery — in Bologna, Cuif thought, or Padua — where by a mixture of bribery and intercession he secured his master’s degree while still in his twenties. Every week he wrote to the Grand Duke’s mother — or his mother, as he now thought of her — and when he was in his thirties he returned to Florence so as to be of service to her. He joined the monastery of Santa Maria Novella as a librarian, but he also supplied Vittoria with religious texts, administered the holy sacraments and led her in prayer. It was said, in fact, that he was the only person who could handle her.
‘So he’s a Dominican,’ I said.
Cuif nodded.
Not a bald patch, then. A tonsure.
‘I sometimes think it might explain why he’s so prickly,’ Cuif said.
Ever since Savonarola had made an enemy of the Medici family, he went on, the Dominican order had been out of favour in Florence. When judges or inquisitors were needed, it was the Franciscans who were called on. To be a Dominican was to be in a minority of sorts, and vulnerable as well, to some extent, no matter how many influential friends one might have.
‘You know a lot,’ I said, ‘for somebody who never leaves his room.’
‘You think you’re my only visitor?
I smiled. ‘Before I go, would you show me your new trick?’
‘I already did.’
‘Did you? When?’
‘You missed it. You weren’t paying attention.’
‘Show me again.’
‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Not now I’ve been drinking.’ He eyed me over the rim of his glass. ‘You’ll just have to come back, won’t you?’
*
One morning I found Signora de la Mar at the foot of the stairs, holding a package that was addressed to me. Some idiot had left it outside the back door, she said, and she had almost tripped over it on her way out. As I turned the package in my hands, I thought of the pistachio-coloured ankle-boots I had bought Fiore a month or two before, and how her face had lit up when she put them on.
‘How is Fiore liking her new shoes?’ I asked.
The signora rolled her eyes. ‘She practically sleeps in them.’
I didn’t open the package until I reached the privacy of my workshop. Inside, in a simple wooden box, was a halved pomegranate, the red seeds facing upwards. A thin glass bottle lay next to it. There was no note, no card — nothing to indicate the sender’s identity. To a Jesuit, the pomegranate had a symbolic value, since the seeds were believed to represent the drops of blood Christ shed when he wore the crown of thorns, but in a secular context it alluded to the tension that existed between secrecy and disclosure, and I knew instinctively, as soon as I saw it, that the package had come from the girl in the apothecary. What was in the bottle, though? I removed the stopper. I thought I could smell roses, but there was also a pungent element, something almost fiery, like a type of pepper. On returning to my lodgings that evening, I asked the signora if she could tell me what it was. She put her nose to the bottle, then straightened up. She had no idea. She had never smelled anything like it.