Night was falling. The green shade in the garden deepened.
‘Don’t forget me,’ she murmured. ‘People are always forgetting me.’
I gripped her hand more tightly.
‘Promise me,’ she said.
‘I promise.’
She took her hand away. My words had done little to comfort her; it was like blowing on a fire that had already gone out.
‘I seem to have spent most of my life in hiding,’ she said. ‘It makes me wonder if I’ll ever be able to stand out in the open — in the light.’ Tears welled into her eyes. ‘I thought that might happen with you.’
What if I had told her to come with me, and we had left the city, and made a new life in another place? I didn’t, though. We didn’t.
‘Is there somewhere you can go — temporarily, at least? Until things die down?’
‘Sometimes I feel like a ghost —’ She shook her head, as if angry at herself. ‘But I already told you that.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s all right to repeat yourself.’
‘No. It’s not all right.’
She turned away. I hurried after her. She moved ahead of me through the fig arbour, the hem of her dress trapping leaves and twigs, and then releasing them. Everything was speeding up. Receding. Time was a kite loose in a gale.
When she was out of the garden, she stopped suddenly and faced me. She was calm again. Beyond her, the street angled away, dark and deserted. In the distance, I could just make out the fire-blackened pot of the Duomo, upended against the blue night sky.
‘It’s not you,’ she said. ‘It’s not your fault.’
I took her in my arms, and words came in a rush. I wasn’t sure what I was saying. I crushed her against me, my mouth in her hair.
She freed herself, stepped back. Her chin lifted. ‘You’ll be all right.’ She reached up and touched my cheek. ‘You’ll be fine. You’ll make wonderful things.’
Wonderful things. Yes, well. There followed a number of weeks when all I did was work. I saw no one except Lapa, who brought news of my mother, and the occasional meal. I would fall asleep at my table and wake two hours later with a dead arm and a stiff neck. I would yawn and stretch. Go back to what I had been doing. I had sent Faustina away, and I didn’t know where she was, or if I would ever see her again. I didn’t cry, but there was an ache in my throat, and my vision kept misting over.
November became December. Bassetti’s insinuations had stayed with me. How could they not? I kept hearing my mother’s voice, drowsy, lowered to a murmur. I behaved badly. I was weak. At the time, I had assumed she was referring to the fact that she had not protected me, but what if she was talking about something else entirely? I chose not to pursue that line of thought. I preferred to believe that Bassetti was trying to undermine me. If that was the case, he was succeeding: I felt unsteady, fragile, under siege. Predictably, perhaps, my work had darkened. Inspired by the drawings I had bought from Mr Towne, I had embarked on a detailed and definitive study of the ravages of syphilis.
Just before Christmas, Redi visited. He would have come sooner, he said, but he had been called to Pisa, where the Grand Duchess had once again been taken ill. The syphilitic woman I had just completed seemed to fascinate him, and he examined her for long minutes with the magnifying glass he always carried on his person. He was particularly taken with the tiny, solitary maggot crawling over her left retina, and I was pleased he had noticed, since it had been intended as a modest homage to him and his entomological research. After Redi had left, though, my exhilaration faded. Never before had it struck me so forcibly that I only created perfect forms in order that I might damage them. I would hack and scrape and gouge at the unblemished surfaces, and sometimes, as if imitating those who were employed by the Office of Public Decency, I would heat my instruments over a flame, then watch as their glowing tips sank into waxy flesh. I was like a perverse barber-surgeon, operating on the bodies of the healthy to make them sick. Was it true what Jacopo and others had said of me, that I was a pariah, and that my activities were morbid, contaminating and repulsive?
January came.
Only a few days after Epiphany, Earhole delivered his first report. He had learned next to nothing, he said, largely because Stufa had spent much of the past two months in Pisa, with the Grand Duchess.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘She’s been ill.’
On the rare days when Stufa was in Florence, he moved between Santa Maria Novella and the Grand Duke’s palace. He went to Mass, he called in at libraries and bookshops. He visited the needy. It was almost as if he knew he was being watched, Earhole said, and was deliberately leading a model existence.
‘Nothing unusual, then?’ I said.
‘He’s good with a sword. Did you know that?’
I shook my head.
‘He practises every morning, in a cloister at the back of the monastery.’
Although I praised Earhole for his persistence, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed at how little he had given me. In trying to build a case against Stufa, perhaps I was attempting the impossible.
I didn’t hear from Faustina until the third week of January, and then only in the most elliptical of ways. One morning, as I left for work, I found Fiore standing on the street outside my house. Her hair was plaited with animal bones, and she had a knapsack over her shoulder. I could still see the place where Stufa’s ring had marked her face, and though it was little more than a small triangular indentation in the skin, I was reminded of my vow to the signora.
‘Walk with me,’ she said.
I looked at the sky. Clouds hung over the city, and it was oddly humid, not cold at all. ‘Where would you like to go?’
She linked her arm through mine. ‘The gardens.’
I took her to the Grand Duke’s menagerie, where she was delighted by the parrot, recently imported from Brazil. By the time we reached the Viottolone, the day had brightened; the sun struck through the double rows of cypress and laurel trees, and the sloping avenue was patterned with alternating stripes of black and white. There was a fountain at the bottom of the hill, I told her. The granite base had been quarried on Elba, then shipped up the Arno; it weighed so much that it had taken twenty-five pairs of oxen to haul it the last few miles to the palace. As we circled the fountain, she collected some of the delicate, pointed acorns that lay scattered on the ground and slipped them into her knapsack. I asked her what else she had in there. She put a hand over her mouth. She had completely forgotten, she said. It was a package, from a boy. That was the reason she had come.
‘A boy?’ I said. ‘Did he give you a name?’
‘No name.’
‘How old was he?’
She shrugged. She wasn’t good with that kind of question.
‘It wasn’t Earhole?’
‘No. This boy was nice.’
I smiled.
We sat on a bench, a grove of ilex at our back. The package Fiore handed over weighed almost nothing. This frightened me. She watched as I cautiously undid the paper. Inside was something soft, dark and glossy, which I took at first to be the wing of a bird. Then I realized it was human hair. I leaned down and smelled the hair. Faustina. This boy was nice. I imagined Faustina had delivered the package to the House of Shells herself, and that Fiore had been fooled by the disguise. I felt around in the wrapping, but couldn’t find a note.
‘When did the boy deliver this?’ I asked.
‘A week or two ago,’ Fiore said. ‘He told me there was no great rush.’
Sitting back, I let my breath out slowly. I seemed to see the world through glass — not the costly crystal of the palace windows, but glass that was poorly made, full of swirls, air-bubbles and distortions. The hills to the south showed above the city walls, their slopes forested, blue-grey, the sky an opaque lard-white. She had chosen not to write a note, which was entirely in character, but she would also have been aware that the package might fall into the wrong hands. A week or two ago. Given Fiore’s wayward sense of time, that could easily mean three or four. Faustina would be gone by now — and, obviously, she had tried to alter her appearance. Where was she? Was she safe?