The second lantern flickered and then died.
When Faustina spoke again, she was just a voice in the darkness.
‘You asked me once what I was doing on the night of the banquet,’ she said. ‘I was there because I wanted to see the Grand Duke close up. I wanted to see the man my mother loathed, the man she left — the man who could have been my father, but never was.’
I joined her at the window.
While serving the pasta con le sarde, she went on, she had caught the Grand Duke staring at her, and when she met his gaze he seemed to jerk in his chair, as though somebody had pricked him with a pin. She thought he had recognized her — or if not her exactly, something in her — but had convinced himself that he must be mistaken or deluded, since he immediately shook his head, adjusted the position of his cutlery, and then turned to the jewel-encrusted woman on his left and started talking about the extraordinary freedoms enjoyed by the female sex in England.
‘You think you reminded him of Marguerite-Louise?’ I said.
‘I don’t know. That’s what it felt like. It was strange — like being two people at once.’
‘He talks about her all the time — to me, anyway. He claims he still loves her. You know what he told me? He can’t see any trace of her in his children. He thinks she did it deliberately. Because they were his.’ I paused. When I took a breath, I could feel the fog collecting in my lungs. ‘Did you know she tried to kill them, before they were born?’
She was looking at me now. I could see the chips of silver where her eyes were.
Pennyroyal had been involved, I said, and elaterium, and nights of drinking and dancing. Snake root. Artemesia. Long rides on the fastest horses. None of it worked. Later, Marguerite-Louise tormented the Grand Duke by telling him their marriage was a travesty, and that they had committed fornication, and that all their children were bastards –
‘And then she had a real bastard,’ Faustina murmured. ‘Me.’
I reached out in the darkness and found her hand. ‘You might be the only child she ever really wanted.’
I was woken in the night by the low, excited murmur of men’s voices. Lying with Faustina’s head against my shoulder, I listened to the riffle and snap of playing cards, and the delicate, bright chink of coins. Signora de la Mar had told me about the illegal gambling dens that operated in the ghetto after dark. It had been one of her husband’s many weaknesses.
At dawn I was woken again by the grating of iron bolts. The ghetto gates were being opened. I moved my arm from behind Faustina’s back. Her eyes opened, and she sat up.
‘There’s something I forgot to tell you,’ she said.
Every year, her uncle travelled north to visit his suppliers. He would cement old relationships, forge new ones. In the past, she had run the apothecary in his absence, but this time he wanted her to go with him. She needed to start learning the business, he had told her, or she wouldn’t be able to take over when he was gone. She would be away for a couple of months.
‘When are you leaving?’
‘Before the end of the year.’
I walked to the window. The fog had lifted, and the sky was a mottled silver-grey, like the skin of a fish. Perhaps my sense that things were temporary had not been so wide of the mark.
‘Think how much work you’ll be able to do,’ she said lightly.
I had sensed the secrets in her long before we ever spoke; in fact, I often thought it was the parts of ourselves we kept from others that had brought us together. As I stood looking out over the jumbled, clandestine rooftops of the ghetto, it occurred to me that she might have revealed her origins to me precisely because she was about to go away. She wanted to show me that I had earned her trust. She might also think the knowledge would bind me to her still more closely.
‘Is it really true,’ I asked, ‘what you told me last night?’
‘I think so.’ She shifted on the sofa. ‘Why else would my father have made me promise to forget everything he’d said?’
I turned and looked at her, and suddenly I was frightened.
Though it had only been light for half an hour, the narrow streets were already choked with Jews leaving the ghetto to sell their merchandise — Dutch linen, kerchiefs, and batiste — and we were carried along on the jostling stream of people, through the gate and out into the Mercato Vecchio. As we came to the junction of Ferravecchi and Pellicceria, a black carriage swayed round the corner. On the door I glimpsed Bassetti’s coat of arms. I told Faustina she should leave.
‘Just go,’ I said. ‘Quickly.’
By the time the carriage drew level, she had blended with the crowd, and I had done my best to tidy my hair and straighten my clothes. Bassetti’s face appeared, almost as if he had known I would be there. He was on his way to the palace, he said. Would I care for a lift? I thanked him and climbed in.
Once I was seated, he gave me a subtle, searching look. ‘You’re up early.’ His voice was all syrup and fur, as usual.
‘I was out walking, Don Bassetti,’ I said. ‘I like to watch the city wake.’
‘Florence inspires you?’
‘Yes.’
He was mortified, he said, on account of his continuing failure to visit my workshop. He felt he owed me an apology. He was doing me a great honour even to think of visiting, I told him. It would be a miracle if he could find the time, preoccupied as I knew him to be with such weighty matters. But Bassetti would not be mollified, or even sidetracked. He began to discuss the delights and dangers of works made out of wax. He was curious to learn my views on what he called ‘the disorderly imagination’. He had heard of wax figures being used in love spells, for example. Death threats too. An effigy had even featured in a plot to kill a king. One’s approach to wax was like one’s approach to life itself, I said. It depended entirely on your moral sense. Wax could lead you into temptation. Wax could deliver you from evil. Bassetti sank into a pensive silence, his forefinger laid on his moustache, his thumb beneath his chin.
He seemed to be worrying at the subject without quite knowing why. It was as if he sensed the existence of the secret commission, but couldn’t give it a name or a shape. In spite of that, I found him good company, genial but perceptive, and it was on that morning, as we jolted over the Ponte Santa Trinità, that I decided to take his amiability at face value. His conversation with Stufa after the banquet was the kind of conversation he would have had about any new arrival in the city. It was necessary vigilance. Standard procedure. I shouldn’t overestimate my own importance. And as for those disturbing, snake-like oscillations, I hadn’t noticed them of late.
All the same, I was relieved he hadn’t seen me with Faustina. In recent months, the Office for Public Decency had become less tolerant, and the penalties for even the most innocuous transgressions were unremittingly harsh. Men found to have entered houses that were inhabited by unmarried women had been thrown into prison, and one youth had been sent to the galleys in Livorno, simply because he had stopped on the street and talked to a girl in an upstairs window. If you were in a tavern and you mentioned any kind of illicit behaviour, people would hold their hands out, loosely clenched, and make sinister rowing motions, and there was a renewed appetite for public floggings and other such brutalities. Even though I met Faustina secretly, in out-of-the-way places, I was under no illusion about the risks we were running. The fewer people who knew about us, the better.
What’s more, her latest revelations had triggered a whole new set of anxieties. How would the Grand Duke and his advisers react if they learned of her true identity? Given the intense speculation surrounding the succession and the fatalistic air that hung over the palace, it seemed likely they would view her as a threat. The last thing the Grand Duke would want in these troubled times was for his wife’s infidelity to manifest itself. At the very least, Faustina would be living proof of his dishonour, a reminder of his weakness — a source of shame. All things considered, maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea if she disappeared for a while.