‘You sent me a gift,’ I said.
‘I’ve never done anything like that before.’ She kept her face turned away from me, her eyes on the stalls. Spiky stacks of artichokes. A row of glossy aubergines.
‘You didn’t sign it.’
‘No.’
‘I liked the mystery of that.’
‘I didn’t need to sign it. I knew you’d know who it was from.’
‘How could you be certain?’
‘I just knew.’
I looked at her sidelong.
‘You say you like mystery.’ She had stopped at the edge of the square. The buzz and clatter of the market packing up — special offers, knock-down prices, dozens of last-minute deals being done. ‘I’ve got more mystery in me than —’ and she spun round, turning a full circle — ‘than all these people put together.’
‘We all have our secrets,’ I said gently, ‘don’t we?’
Her face tightened, and she lowered her voice until I could barely hear what she was saying. ‘Something happens, and in that moment you make a new person, another you, so there are two of you suddenly, and you believe in that new person with every fibre of your being, and you pretend that the other person, the person you left behind, you pretend she doesn’t exist, even though she might tug at your sleeve sometimes, and talk to you at night, and make surprise appearances in your dreams —’
I stepped in front of her. ‘You’re describing me. Here. Now. And for the last fifteen years.’
She didn’t understand. How could she?
‘Can you ride a horse?’ I said.
She looked at the ground and laughed. I asked if I had said something funny. She shook her head, and then apologized.
I was thinking of visiting a potter who lived in the country outside Florence, I told her. I wanted to see his work. If I borrowed two horses, she could come with me.
‘He makes animals.’ I tried to remember what Jack Towne had told me. ‘Wolves,’ I said uncertainly.
‘Wolves?’
‘Pigs too, I think.’
She was laughing again, more openly this time. She could probably be free on Friday, she said. I told her I would come for her. It would be early, just after dawn. Though it was reckless, even risky, I took her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. Then, before she could change her mind, I whirled off up the street.
‘Wait!’
I turned round.
She was standing where I had left her, but the low sun edged her face in gold, which made her difficult to see.
‘You don’t know where I live,’ she said. ‘How can you come for me if you don’t know where I live?’
In June, while exploring the wax workshops on Via de’ Servi, I had met a man who made votive images. During our conversation he had mentioned a type of gypsum that was quarried in the hills around Volterra. He claimed it produced a plaster that was more pliant and sensitive than any other. Thinking of the Grand Duke’s commission, I had put in an order for half a hundredweight.
The day after my coincidental encounter with Faustina, the sacks of gypsum were delivered to my workshop. I had been wondering how to get through the week. Now, all of a sudden, I had something to occupy me. I baked the gypsum for several hours, heating the rocks to a high temperature. Once I had purged them of all their moisture I let them cool, then I ground them into a fine powder. When the gypsum was ready, I sent for Fiore. I needed her for an experiment, I said. She arrived in the shoes I had bought her the year before, and a precarious fontange involving seagull feathers, a small rodent’s skull, and half a dozen bulrushes.
‘The height of fashion,’ I said, ‘as always.’
She grinned.
I rubbed hemp oil into her hands to prevent the wet plaster sticking to her skin, then I coated two short lengths of string in pig fat and attached them to her right hand so they started on either side of her wrist and met at the end of her longest finger. Once her hand was covered in plaster, I would take hold of the string, first one piece, then the other, and gently pull them sideways, cutting through the plaster as a cheese-wire cuts through cheese. Later, when the plaster had set, I would be able to lift the mould away in two neat halves.
I mixed tepid water into the kevelled gypsum. When it had achieved the correct consistency, I began to apply it to her hands.
‘It feels warm,’ she said.
‘It’s supposed to,’ I told her. ‘If it didn’t heat up, it wouldn’t harden.’
As I worked, the image of Faustina came to me, Faustina with the last rays of the setting sun behind her, Faustina edged in bright flame like a descending angel. I’ve found you, I thought. I’ve finally found you.
I glanced up to see Fiore staring at me.
‘Why are you smiling?’ she said.
Friday came. We left the city not long after dawn, and soon found ourselves on a sunken track that headed east. The grass-covered banks were planted with olive trees, their trunks stunted and flaky, silver-grey, while ahead of us sprawled a range of sun-bleached hills whose tops were concealed by cloud. It was the end of September, and the weather was humid; every once in a while, I had to take a deep breath so as to shift the air at the bottom of my lungs. We passed an abandoned farmhouse. A single peach tree stood on the land, a few reddish-orange globes clustered in its branches like a mocking variation on the Grand Duke’s coat of arms.
I had set out from my lodgings when it was still dark, afraid I would be unable to locate the apothecary, but when I led the two horses up the needle-narrow alley off Via Lontanmorti, I had the feeling I had been there before, and not just on the day of Fiore’s tour either. I was sure I had walked beneath its blackened arches, past its ulcerated walls, over its uneven, pitted paving stones. How could that be, though? I knocked on the apothecary door. A twitchy, dark-haired man let me in. Faustina was still upstairs, he said, but she would be down soon. When I told him his establishment was almost impossible to find, he nodded with a curious, modest complacency, as if I had paid him a compliment. There was no name, I said. There wasn’t even a sign.
‘If I might correct you.’ The man led me outside and indicated a number of stones set into the masonry some distance above the door. ‘That’s our sign. Over the years, it has become our name as well.’ He waited until I saw how the eight stones formed the rough shape of a question mark, then excused himself and withdrew into a dim back room, where he bent over a wooden box, sorting seeds with darting fingers.
As we rode eastwards, I turned to Faustina and asked who the man was.
‘My uncle,’ she said. ‘Giuseppe.’
‘I thought you must be related. You have the same quickness about you.’
She looked at me as if she thought I might be finding fault.
‘It’s a good quality,’ I said. ‘It makes you seem more alive than other people.’
‘You’ve got an odd way of talking.’
‘You mean my accent?’
‘No, the things you say.’ She hesitated. ‘Though your accent isn’t one I’ve heard before.’
I smiled. ‘That present you sent me …’
‘The oil or the fruit?’
‘The oil.’
‘Have you used it yet?’
I looked at her. ‘Not yet.’
‘It will keep your hands really supple — not just the skin, the joints as well —’
‘My hands?’
When I told Faustina what Beanpole had said, she covered her mouth.
Then, out of embarrassment, perhaps, she suggested I race her to a line of cypresses about a mile ahead. Without waiting for a response, she touched her heels to her horse’s flanks. I galloped after her, but she was already disappearing into the distance. By the time I caught up, she had dismounted, and her horse was drinking from a nearby stream.