I moved closer.
Her dark-brown eyes, opaque and yet intelligent, had been made by a glass-blower in Murano. Her lips had been painted with two coats of Parisian lacquer, and around her throat she wore a string of imitation pearls. Though the idea for the necklace had originated in Fiore’s story about the murdered countess, it also had a practical function, which was to conceal the place where her head joined her body. Her hair was her own. One shade lighter than her eyes, with suggestions of bronze and copper, it tumbled in a loose, lustrous rope past the polished curve of her right shoulder, coiling over ribs that were more hinted at than visible, through the gate formed by her thumb and forefinger, and on to her upturned palm. What pleased me most, though, was her skin. It wasn’t white or rose or cream, nor was it gold or ochre, yet all those colours were involved. The tones altered in the most delicate and elusive of ways, from the cool ivory of her forehead and the milk-blue of her armpits to the hot coral of her nipples, as if blood were circling inside her, real blood, sometimes rising to the surface, sometimes holding back, staying deep. I had paid attention to the most obscure and seemingly insignificant details — the particular hue of an eyelid or a fingernail, the special pallor of the parts of her that rarely saw the light. I had worried she might be too much of an aphrodisiac, and I had been right to worry. The way she looked off to one side, inviting my gaze while averting her own. The way her lips parted a fraction to reveal her teeth. The way her left leg lifted to afford a glimpse of the supple inner thigh. Even in the stark spring light, her beauty was carnal. Had I gone too far?
Hardly having slept the night before, I lay on my divan and closed my eyes, only to be woken what seemed like moments later by a loud knocking. I hauled myself over to the door. It was the men from the local lumber yard, delivering the wood I had ordered. The girl would need some kind of plinth or platform if I was to show her to her best advantage.
As I paid for the timber, I was aware of her behind me, and my stomach tightened with apprehension, but I knew what I would do should I be challenged or attacked. I had allowed for that eventuality. I would open the lid of her belly. I would unveil the child. I would tell the Grand Duke that I had been influenced and moved by his constant agonizing over the succession. What I was giving him, I would say, was what he had been missing — at every level. Not just a woman, but a child. Sometimes you have to picture what you wish for. Will it into being. What I had made was a petition. It might be art, but it was also prayer.
*
I wrote to Bassetti the following day, requesting an audience with the Grand Duke, but it was almost a week before he sent for me. As I approached the apartment, the doors swung open, and Vittoria della Rovere emerged. It was the first time I had seen her close up. A great, bristling galleon of a woman with at least three chins, she had servants on either side of her to help her walk. According to Borucher, she seldom appeared at court; her legs simply couldn’t take the weight. She seemed to survey me as she drew level, her eyes cold, almost brazen, and then, without addressing me at all, she moved on.
Magliabechi was with the Grand Duke that morning, as was Stufa, and they had been joined by Paolo Segneri, a Jesuit scholar, and a number of Alcantarine monks from Montelupo. First to leave was the palace librarian, who muttered the words ‘nest of vipers’ as he passed, then bit voraciously into a hard-boiled egg he must have been holding, concealed, in one hand. He was soon followed by the others. Stufa paused in front of me, his big, spare frame and oddly hoisted shoulders blocking out the light. He said my name, then smiled. As before, his smile filled me with unease, perhaps because it seemed directed at some point in the future that only he could see, a time when my star had fallen. There was no amusement in it, and no benevolence. On the contrary. It revelled in the prospect of disaster.
‘How long have you been in Florence now?’ he said in his usual harsh whisper.
‘Two years.’
‘And when will you be moving on, do you think?’
I watched him carefully, but didn’t answer. After our last awkward encounter in the carriage, I had decided there was little to be gained from talking to him. I didn’t want to give him any more power and leverage than he already had. As Salvator Rosa had written beneath his atmospheric self-portrait: Either remain silent, or speak better than silence.
‘Rumour has it,’ Stufa said, ‘that you don’t stay anywhere for very long.’
‘There are all kinds of rumours about me,’ I said. ‘Only the other day, I heard that I was sleeping with my landlady.’
Stufa’s head tilted. ‘It’s not true?’
‘People like us tend to attract rumour,’ I said, ‘don’t you find?’
‘People like us?’ Stufa said.
I shrugged.
He left the chamber, the dry scrape of his voice still in the air, his black cloak billowing around his ankles.
At last, I was alone with the Grand Duke. He seemed distracted, though, if not irritable, and even the news that I had completed the commission wasn’t enough to alter his mood. He was about to depart for Rome, he told me. I should arrange delivery to coincide with his return.
Faustina was away for longer than expected, but in the middle of March I received a small packet filled with pomegranate seeds, her way of signalling that she was back. We arranged to meet on a Sunday outside the Porta al Prato. That morning there was a light breeze, white clouds tumbling over Empoli, and I wasn’t the only person who had thought of going for a walk in the Cascine, the lush, densely forested area to the west of the city. It wasn’t a feast day, but the air had a tingle to it — the beginning of spring, warm weather round the corner — and all sorts of hawkers and peddlers lined the streets. One had a stack of little cages and a banner that said GOOD LUCK FOR SALE. Not wanting to be late, I didn’t stop to investigate.
The crowds carried me along, people shouting, shoving, and my heart began to rock and tilt, as if only loosely moored inside my body. It had been almost three months since I had seen Faustina, and though I had often looked at the picture I had drawn, I no longer trusted it. It was just a fragment. It gave me nothing. It was like being shown a drop of water and asked to imagine a breaking wave. She was back. Such apprehension swept over me that I nearly turned around and fled.
I had passed through the western gate and was making for a path that led off into the trees when I felt somebody take my arm, and I knew, without looking, that it was her.
‘Keep walking,’ I told her, ‘then we won’t stand out.’
She had been gone for so long that I thought she might have forgotten the tight grip the city had on all our lives.
‘Have things been bad?’ she said.
I nodded. ‘It’s got worse.’
The world darkened as a cloud hid the sun.
‘A while ago,’ Faustina said, ‘you asked me about the sign outside the apothecary. Do you remember?’
‘You told me, didn’t you?’
‘Not everything.’
We were talking as if she had never been away. I glanced at her. Her forehead’s curve, her downcast eyes. The lustre of her skin. It was just as I had suspected: in person, she outshone any memory I might have of her.
The stones in the wall above the door were actually a kind of map, she said. They described a passage that conspirators used to use. If you passed the apothecary, heading north, you came to a dead-end alley on your left. Halfway down the alley was the entrance to the passage. Walk in and you would reach a gap that echoed the gap in the arrangement of the stones. It was a deep ditch or drain, and since it was pitch dark in the passage, you wouldn’t see it until it was too late. It proved fatal to all but the initiated. Once you had jumped over it, you followed the path suggested by the main body of the question mark, turning right, then left, then left again, and emerging at the rear of the apothecary. The key to the back door was attached to a piece of wire that hung against the wall.