‘A knife-sharpener,’ I said.
Faustina nodded. ‘He didn’t used to stop at our house. Ginevra didn’t trust him.’
One day she was south of the village, in the hollow where the mill house was, when she heard him coming. He lifted his flute to his lips as he approached and played a set of notes she didn’t recognize. She asked him why the tune had changed. He would show her why, he said, and seized her by the wrist. He would cut her throat if she didn’t let him show her. He was grinning. His teeth were brown, but his shoulder-length hair was oddly clean and shiny. He pinned her to the back of his cart, her head jammed against the grindstone, and stuck his thing in her. Before he could finish, though, he cried out and dropped to the ground. Vespi stood behind him, wielding an axe-handle.
‘I didn’t know he was capable of something like that,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘He was so upset. I think he suffered more than I did.’
Darker now, almost black, the sky appeared to have a surface to it, like water. It was deep too, and for a few giddy moments I felt I was falling upwards, and that the stars would bounce off me as I passed, no heavier than hail-stones, and that I could fall like that for ever.
‘He would have been a good father to you,’ I said.
‘You think so? I never thought of it like that.’ She leaned on one elbow and looked down at me with a sudden earnestness. ‘If I asked you to take me away from here, would you do it?’
‘From Florence?’
‘Yes.’
‘But my work is here,’ I said, ‘and I’m being paid so well.’
‘What if I said I was in danger?’
‘What kind of danger?’
She lay back. ‘It’s all right. It was just an idea.’
‘No, really. Tell me.’
‘I shouldn’t have brought it up. We hardly know each other —’
The flatness in her voice told me I had missed a chance to prove something to her, and just then, as I looked at her, I would have promised her anything — anything at all.
‘Where would we go?’
I was desperately trying to regain the ground I had occupied only seconds earlier. It was like the moment in her story where she ran up the track with a head full of frantic, fractured prayers. But there was no way back. There never is. I realized that what she had called ‘an idea’ meant something incalculable to her. It had cost her an effort to put the question, and she had done so against her better judgement. My lukewarm response had disappointed her all the more because she had, at some deep level, predicted it. It was too late now to talk of Genoa or Paris.
‘I love you,’ I said.
‘Do you?’ She looked startled, and no wonder: I had surprised myself. I suddenly felt younger than she was, even though I was almost twice her age.
‘It’s true,’ I said stubbornly. ‘One day you’ll realize.’
A clock tolled the hour. The air was motionless. The sky seemed lower than before, and heavier.
She rose to her feet and looked around. ‘I should be going.’
Walking home, I went over some of what she had told me in the weeks since I had met her. Mimmo’s friendship, Vespi’s courtship — both had foundered, come to nothing. These weren’t stories she had dredged up at random. No, they illustrated something fundamental, something she believed — or feared — might be true. How had she put it? Love lost out — as always … Had she turned to me, hoping that I would prove her wrong? Had I squandered the only opportunity I would ever be given?
Back in my lodgings, I was overtaken by a gloom such as I hadn’t known since the early days in Naples, when I received that letter from Ornella. After everything she had said, how could she possibly have fallen for Jacopo? And yet, at the same time, I knew how insistent and bloody-minded he could be. I sat down on my bed. A sinister new reading of the events had just occurred to me. Since I had worked closely with Ornella’s father, he would have been implicated in the charges brought against me. What if Jacopo had cast the Maltese surgeon in the role of my accomplice, and had then blackmailed him? Give me your daughter’s hand in marriage or I’ll ruin you. Was that how the wedding had come about? A sourness around my heart, I lay on my side and sank into a troubled sleep.
I was woken some time later by a constant banging. The wind had got up, and a loose shutter on the building opposite was being blown repeatedly against a wall. I could stay in my room no longer. Thinking I might pay another visit to the dingy tavern in San Frediano, I threw on my coat and hurried downstairs.
As I stepped out on to Via del Corno, a boy seemed to detach himself from the wall.
‘Signore?’
The boy’s face was pale and dogged, but he looked respectable enough, in a serge jacket and a pair of sturdy leather shoes.
‘Dr Pampolini sent me,’ he said. ‘He wants to see you.’
‘Now?’
‘Oh, yes. It’s urgent.’ His hands twitched. ‘It’s very urgent.’
I looked past him, towards the river. There was no one around, only the clammy, windswept canyon of the street, and the scuttle of leaves and vermin.
‘Why didn’t you try the door?’ I said.
‘I was about to.’ He sensed my disbelief. ‘I was. Honest.’
If somebody was dispatched to put an end to me, this, surely, was how it would feel — an innocent face, a few words intended to reassure, a short walk in the dark …
‘Don’t you recognize me, sir?’ The boy went and stood on the street corner, beneath a lit image of the Virgin. ‘I work with Dr Pampolini. My name’s Earhole.’ He shot me a rueful grin. ‘That’s what he calls me, anyway.’
I saw the livid, ragged fringe of skin where his right ear used to be. Earhole. I nodded slowly.
‘I remember.’
My sudden plunge into sleep had muddled me; I felt only loosely connected to my surroundings.
‘Please hurry,’ the boy said. ‘The doctor said it couldn’t wait.’
He led me north, through streets that were pinched between high walls. It was a short cut to the hospital, he told me.
I asked him how old he was.
‘My mother thinks I’m probably about twelve,’ he said.
Though he wasn’t tall, he walked with long strides, his upper body turning constantly to check that I was keeping up.
‘She’s not entirely sure,’ he said. ‘She drinks, you see.’
We passed a candle factory, the stench of boiling cow fat left over from the day. To the west, I glimpsed the Duomo, which hung above the rooftops like an upended cauldron. There was a distant, shimmery peal of bells, but the sound was blown to pieces by a gust of wind.
The boy leaned forwards from the waist, as if straining at a leash. ‘I hope Dr Pampolini isn’t angry. I said I’d —’
A shout stopped his sentence short, and dark shapes sprang from beneath an archway. My knife was out before I knew it. I lunged, and felt the blade sink in. There was a kind of yelp. My hand jarred; I must have hit a bone. The nearest shadow crumpled. The others fled.
I knelt on my assailant’s chest and held my knife to his throat. An awful reek lifted off him. Old sweat, raw garlic. Dried sperm. He looked to be a man of about thirty, with more hair on his cheeks than on his head.
‘Who are you?’ I bent down, into the smell, but kept my blade against his gullet. ‘Who sent you?’
His head moved from side to side, as if he were trying to lull himself to sleep. What he was doing didn’t seem to relate to my questions, but to some internal matter that he found far weightier and more pressing. The wind dropped. I thought I heard the blood leak out of him.
‘Did you hear me? Who sent you?’