She didn’t believe him. He would have perched on the end of her bed, and told her stories about what was happening in the village. He would have brought apricots and figs. He would have cared for her. She stared at the ground.
‘I did something no one else has ever done,’ Mimmo said in a low voice. ‘I flew.’ He looked off up the street, and his tongue moistened one corner of his mouth, something he used to do as a boy when he was unsure of himself. ‘Well, just for a moment, anyway.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I was there, remember?’
‘So,’ he said, and he was still looking past her, back into the village, ‘are you a witch yet?’
Their eyes met, and they began to laugh.
Not long afterwards, he told her he had to be going, and she understood that he was releasing her from an embarrassing situation, one she wouldn’t necessarily have known how to resolve. She also saw it as yet another example of his selflessness, his grace.
She watched as he laboured through the small piazza and up the slope to the castello. He wasn’t quick on his crutches, as she had claimed, or even particularly competent. His progress was awkward, and in the end she had to turn away.
For years she had asked herself why he had leapt off the roof. She knew the answer, of course. Because he had faith. Because he trusted her. Because he would have done anything for her. But even though she knew the answer, it seemed important to keep asking the question.
She fell silent.
‘He loved you,’ I said. ‘He probably still does.’
‘He lost his leg.’
‘You were just children —’
‘I ruined his life.’ She lowered her head. A tear spilled down her cheek. ‘I ruined it.’
‘It’s all right,’ I murmured.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘This is ridiculous. You’re the one who should be crying.’
I held her in my arms and stroked her hair. Her breathing deepened. She drifted off to sleep. Her book of spells and potions lay open on the floor. A draught from outside flipped a page, revealing a drawing of the crow’s feather. Above it, she had written a single word: featherspoon. I saw her crouching in the yellow grass, stirring the contents of the jar. Mimmo beside her, mesmerized. Her mother had given her up. So had her father. She had no idea of her true value. She even doubted her existence. Was it any wonder if she had looked for people who would believe in her? Was it any wonder if she had then felt compelled to test that belief, to push it as far as it would go?
She took a quick breath, as if she was about to dive beneath a wave, then turned over and laid her cheek against my chest.
The delicate, delicious weight of her.
‘Do you love me?’ she murmured.
She was talking in her sleep, or on the edge of sleep, but I answered anyway.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I love you.’
On returning to the House of Shells one evening, I found Signora de la Mar bent almost double outside my room. When she heard my footsteps, she straightened up. A letter had arrived for me, she said; she had been about to slip it beneath my door. I took it from her eagerly. I had been corresponding with van Leeuwenhoek about his microscopes, and also with a certain Mr Salmon, who had opened a wax museum in London, and I was expecting replies from both men, but when I had the letter in my hands I saw that it was discoloured — yellow in some places, brown in others — and that there were several diagonal slashes in the paper, all signs that it had been heated and then fumigated as a precaution against the spreading of disease. Looking more closely, I saw that it had been addressed to me care of the Grand Duke’s palace, and franked in both Naples and Palermo. My heart staggered; my face felt hot.
‘Is something wrong?’ the signora asked.
‘I think it’s from Sicily.’
I broke the seal. The letter was dated March the twenty-seventh, more than two months after the earthquake, and it was signed by my mother.
I began to read.
She assumed I had heard of the dreadful catastrophe that had devastated Sicily. By a miracle, she and her sister Flaminia had escaped with their lives, she said, but God in his wisdom had taken Jacopo, Ornella, and their three beautiful sons. Her own house — and much of Siracusa — had been severely damaged, and she could not have stayed there, even if she had wanted to. She had found refuge in Palermo, which had survived more or less intact. While there, word had reached her that I was living in Florence, and that I had done well for myself. She was writing to tell me that Sicily was ruined for her, and that she was on her way to join me. She trusted I could find it in my heart to welcome her. She hoped she wouldn’t be too much of a burden.
Though I had often imagined people surfacing from the past, they were shadowy presences — strangers who knew my story, and wished me harm. I had imagined Jacopo as well, of course, brimming with self-righteousness and anger. Not once, though, not in all these years, had I imagined my mother.
The letter rambled, and the handwriting was so shaky it might have been written during the earthquake itself. My mother had been thirty-three when she gave birth to me. She would now be seventy. How would she manage the journey from Palermo? What would I do with her when she arrived? I lifted the letter to my nose, as if for guidance. It smelled of ash and vinegar.
‘Well?’ The signora’s dark eyes showed above her orange shawl.
‘My mother’s coming,’ I said. ‘I’m going to need a place of my own.’
I called on Lorenzo Borucher. Once I had listened to him boasting about his latest exploits — he had done this person’s hair, that person’s hair; the names rarely meant anything to me — I told him I had decided to take his advice and look for a property to rent. My timing was impeccable, he said. He happened to know of a four-storey palazzo just off Via de’ Serragli, only a short walk from the Grand Duke’s palace.
‘It’s not what you’d call ostentatious,’ he went on. ‘In fact, it’s rather plain. You’ll probably like it.’ His cheeks dimpled. ‘But what about the signora?’
Like Pampolini, Borucher thought there was more to my relationship with Signora de la Mar than I was letting on, and I had done nothing to disabuse him. Since arriving in Florence, I had been mindful of what Gracián had written — namely, that one should always try and transform one’s defects into ornaments. Throughout my life I had been dogged by rumours, but only recently had I realized that the trick was not to deny them or rail against them but to add to them. The more talk that surrounded me, the less credence any of it would have. It might even help to conceal the truth.
‘What about her?’ I said.
‘Is it over?’
I smiled, but made no comment.
He was right when he said I would like the palazzo, though. Its rooms were modest and austere, just as he had suggested, and there was a paved courtyard in the middle that recalled the one in the house where I had grown up. Situated on a dead-end street — in Siracusa we would have called it a ‘ronco’ — it was quiet too. If I missed the House of Shells — I had become so accustomed to Cuif’s nocturnal somersaults that I found it difficult to sleep at first — I also relished my new privacy.
Not long after the move, Fiore took me to the firework factory again. The biggest festival of the year — San Giovanni — was looming, and the Guazzi twins were rushed off their feet. Doffo explained how they had combined spirit of nitre with oil extracted from caraway seeds to create what they called ‘liquid gunpowder’. The dragon they were in the process of building would swoop across the river, he told me, on an invisible, greased wire. Once it had dived beneath the surface, spitting flame — that was where the liquid gunpowder came in — it would soar into the air again, to a great height, and then explode. Ambitious, I said. The two brothers looked at each other and burst out laughing. That’s us, they said.