When he was in his early twenties, he said, he had worked as a groom on one of the ducal estates. This was during the time of the Grand Duke’s famously tempestuous marriage.
‘It was a magnificent villa,’ he went on, ‘with its own private theatre, formal gardens, and a river nearby, but it was in the middle of nowhere — at least, that was how it seemed to the Grand Duke’s wife. She had become increasingly hysterical in Florence, and the Grand Duke thought that if he sent her to the country she might calm down, but she felt lonely and frightened. She was at the height of her beauty, and she was being buried. What if her light went out, the light that made her who she was? It was around that time that she started wearing black; she was in mourning for her life. She would come down to the stables every day — riding was her only consolation — and we would talk. She told me not to call her “Your Highness”. She wanted me to treat her like anybody else.’
Faustina asked what they had talked about.
Remo laughed. ‘Well, actually, she did all the talking. I just listened.’
She told him about visiting the court at Fontainebleau, and how she had fallen in love with her cousin, Charles. She showed him the ring Charles had given her. It was an opal, she said, a stone that stood for passion and spontaneity. I lost my wedding ring in the first week of my marriage. I still have this one, though. What does that tell you? How she had loved Fontainebleau! There was boating at midnight on candle-lit canals, dancing on carpets of rose petals. There were banquets that lasted from dusk till dawn. They drank snow-cooled wine, and dined on peacocks’ tongues and teal soup with hippocras and pies that sang because they were filled with nightingales. Beef was served in a gold leaf sauce. You ate gold? Yes. To make us strong. She talked about those days as old people talk about their youth — and she was only twenty-one! But it was a time when she had been happy — deliriously happy — and she seemed to know that it would never come again.
One wet afternoon, while he was polishing saddles in the tack room, the curtain of rain in the doorway parted to reveal the Grand Duke’s wife, a lilac umbrella open above her head, her eyes glowing underneath.
‘I’ve given Malvezzi the slip,’ she said.
Malvezzi, her chamberlain, had been instructed to follow her everywhere and report on her behaviour. Ever since his arrival at the villa, she had delighted in torturing the poor man by going on walks that lasted hours, knowing full well that he was overweight, and had no chance of keeping up.
She lowered her umbrella. ‘How long have we known each other, Remo?’
In his opinion, they hardly knew each other at all, but he wasn’t in a position to say so.
‘About two months.’
‘And what do you think of me?’ she said. ‘Do you find me boring? I’m always talking, after all — talking my head off.’ She walked in a tight circle just inside the stable door, water dripping from the tip of her umbrella. ‘You know, I’m not sure I’ve let you say anything, not in all the time we’ve spent together. Look at you now. You’re just standing there. You can’t get a word in edgeways.’
Remo smiled. ‘I don’t find you boring.’
‘No?’
‘Quite the opposite.’
‘What do you mean by that, Remo? Put it in words, so I can understand.’ She issued her commands with such a light touch that they felt like invitations, and she had moved closer, close enough for him to be able to see the drops of rain on her black dress, close enough to sense the warmth of the skin beneath.
‘You —’
She moved closer still. No woman, it seemed, had ever stood so close.
‘Your voice —’
‘What about my voice?’
There was such a sweetness to her breath that he thought she might have eaten an apricot or a peach while crossing the garden. Though neither apricots nor peaches were in season.
‘What about my voice?’ she said again.
‘The way you speak. I suppose it’s because you’re French.’
‘You think I sound funny.’
‘No, I like it.’
A horse stirred behind him. The whisk of a tail. Hooves shifting, clumsy, in the straw.
‘I’ve never seen anyone as beautiful as you,’ he said. ‘It’s impossible, at times, to believe it. I think I must be dreaming. Imagining things. But then I realize that I’m awake, and that you’re real.’
‘How do you know I’m real?’
She was so much cleverer than he was. She knew how to manipulate a conversation, how to give it a different shape, a new direction. Six words was all it took.
‘How do you know?’
Her pupils widened suddenly, and he felt he was falling towards her, into her.
Her breath against his face.
‘Touch me,’ she said.
He stepped back.
‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘I’m not good enough for you?’
That lightness again.
The rain hung behind her, as hard to see through as a piece of gauze. The world lay beyond — inaccessible, remote. Or maybe it was right there with them, where they stood.
He did as she had asked.
Early the next morning, he saddled two of the finest horses in the stable, and they rode west, towards Pisa. The lead-grey air, the dull copper of the sun. The mist so close to the ground that a farmhouse seemed to float on it like an ark. They had not discussed what they would do when they reached the coast. He assumed she had a plan. She didn’t seem like somebody who would ever be short of ideas, though all of them would involve a gamble. Perhaps she would charter a boat, and they would set sail for the south of France. That, he thought, was her immediate aim: to escape the prison of her marriage. He was happy, for the moment, to be with her, but he didn’t dare to think too far ahead.
Just as well.
The authorities caught up with them in the wooded hills not far from Lake Fucecchio.
‘All right,’ Malvezzi wheezed. ‘The fun’s over.’
The Grand Duke’s wife was escorted back to the villa. Remo, suddenly alone, expected to be punished. The galleys at the very least. Even, possibly, execution. Instead, they sent him into exile, with a warning that he should never set foot in Tuscany again. Perhaps they knew the Grand Duke’s wife was responsible, and that he was no more than a pawn in one of her many games.
‘What they didn’t know,’ Remo told Faustina, as she listened open-mouthed, ‘what no one knew, not even me, was that you were already alive inside her — a small seed growing …’
Faustina stared at him. ‘The Grand Duke’s wife was my mother?’
He looked right through her, back into the past. He seemed to be having trouble believing it himself. It sounded like a story, even to the story-teller.
‘My mother,’ she said again.
‘You were conceived on horseback!’ Remo laughed in delight, then shot her a wary glance. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you that.’ He hit the side of his head and groaned. ‘I shouldn’t have told you anything. I’m an idiot.’ He hit himself again.
‘Don’t.’ She went round the table and held his head against her chest. She smelled woodsmoke on him, and dried sweat, and fifteen or twenty glasses of young red wine. And distantly, ever so distantly, she thought she could smell horses.
‘You must forget,’ he said, his eyes closed in a kind of agony. ‘I’m drunk. I got carried away. I’ve been talking nonsense.’
‘You’re drunk all right.’
He looked up at her and touched her cheek. ‘Sometimes, you know, you’re just like her. You’ve got the same spark —’
Just then, a woman’s voice interrupted Faustina’s story. It was coming from the window. We crept across the room and peered out into the night. On the flat roof of the building opposite, a woman was pacing up and down, her face tilted skywards, her hands in front of her, clutching at the air. She was talking to herself in a language I took to be Hebrew. A man stepped out on to the roof, moving with such caution that it might have been a frozen pond. On his suit of dark clothes I could just make out the yellow badge all Jews were supposed to wear. The woman began to shout at him, then seemed to tear her hair out by the roots and fling it on the ground. For a moment, I couldn’t believe what I had seen. Then I understood. It must have been a wig. The man tried to reason with the woman, but she shook him off and pushed past him, back into the building. The man remained where he was, head bowed.