Two miles on, I reached a gully. Trees choked with ivy, a floor of leaf-mould. I swung down out of the saddle. My horse’s eyes were rolling like balls in a bucket. I ran my hand over her sweaty neck until she calmed down, then I tethered her and undid my breeches. The wound wasn’t deep, scarcely more than a scratch, but the stranger had marked me, and I was left with no choice but to believe in him when I would rather have pretended he was yet another demon served up by my fevered imagination. He had pierced my skin, and I was worried that some of his terrifying desperation might have entered me.
When I glanced up, the trees appeared to have edged closer, and though I was certain the starving family were too weak to have followed me into the woods, I mounted and rode on, eager to be done with the region once and for all.
*
Towards sunset on the fifth day, Torremagna appeared ahead of me, its mud-coloured houses huddled on a rocky outcrop. A bell-tower modelled on the one in Siena rose clear of the tiled rooftops and seemed to support the heavy sky. It was warmer, but not by much. I was travelling the white road Remo had travelled more than twenty years before, his baby daughter strapped against his chest. To my left, the land sloped down, then lifted into a long blunt ridge. To my right, the blue-grey cone of Monte Amiata showed above a skirt of mist.
The first person I came across as I rode into the village was somebody I recognized. He was hoisting himself along on three legs, two of which were artificial, made of wood. Only when I had passed him did he look up at me. The portrait Faustina had painted had been accurate enough. Mimmo Righetti was still in his early twenties, but he had lost all the shine and suppleness of youth. I was struck by his gaze, though, which was steady and slightly humorous, as if he thought I might be about to make a fool of myself. My eyes shifted to his crutches. The bottom of each crutch had been carved to resemble a wild boar’s trotter. Higher up, they were patterned with vine leaves and clusters of olives.
‘Beautiful craftsmanship,’ I said.
He thanked me quietly. His gaze didn’t waver.
‘Your father’s work, I take it.’
‘What do you know about my father?’
‘Only what Faustina told me.’
Looking at the ground, he nodded.
‘Is she here?’ I asked.
When he didn’t answer, a pit opened inside me, and I felt I might be sick. What if Stufa had deceived me, and Faustina was somewhere else entirely, in a place known only to him and his informers, and my long ride south had removed me from the scene, leaving him free to deal with her without any danger of me interfering?
‘Is she here in the village?’ I said again. ‘It’s important.’
Mimmo told me to follow him.
On reaching his house, I looped my horse’s reins through one of the iron bars on the window, then I stepped down, through a green door, into an L-shaped room. Though the air hoarded the sweet smell of sawdust, I could see no sign of the cabinet-maker’s tools. Mimmo’s father must have retired. Or died. Fixed to the walls were a number of wooden boxes, each of which contained a stuffed bird.
Mimmo saw where I was looking. ‘It’s a hobby.’
‘Only birds?’
‘Didn’t she tell you?’
‘Yes. She told me.’ I faced him across the room. ‘Where is she?’
‘Not far away.’ He removed the cork from a bottle and poured me a glass of wine, then poured one for himself. His hand was as steady as his gaze.
I told him what had happened since Faustina left the city. He listened carefully, and when I had finished he said that no one resembling Stufa had appeared, and that Faustina was safe. The only place to hide her, he added, was in his house.
‘But he’ll search your house,’ I said. ‘He’ll search every house in the village.’
‘He can search all he likes. He won’t find her.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
In the last decade of his life, Mimmo said, his father had become convinced that furniture should combine the functional with the clandestine, and he had begun to incorporate sliding panels and hidden compartments into almost everything he made.
Mimmo pointed to the bed at the far end of the room. ‘One of the better examples.’
I moved towards the bed. Its headboard offered a sea view, with a port on the horizon. A female figurehead leaned out from the foot of the bed, and its sides had been carved in such a way as to suggest a waterline. The frame above the drawers rippled like unfurling waves, like the beginning of a wake, while the drawers themselves, which were below the surface, were decorated with fish, shells, rocks and coral. I had no idea what I was looking for.
Mimmo told me to open a drawer.
‘Think about the depth of it,’ he said, ‘from front to back.’
Suddenly I saw what he meant. Given the width of the bed, the drawers on either side weren’t as deep as they should have been. Beneath the mattress, and running down the middle of the bed, would be a space about the size of a person.
‘You have to lie on your back,’ Mimmo said. ‘If you’re an adult, that is. It’s easier if you’re a child. I used to hide in there a lot. I used to call it “The Hold” —’
There was something of the schoolmaster about him, something self-regarding and pedantic, and I turned from the bed and put my glass down so abruptly that it nearly shattered. For all his absence of bitterness and resentment, for all his understated charm, I knew he must view me as a rival, and, odd though it might sound, and despite his obvious disability, I felt he had me at a disadvantage. He was distracting me, delaying me.
‘I’m wasting time,’ I said.
‘Then go.’
‘You haven’t told me where she is.’
He was by the window at the back of the room, staring out into the night. ‘Can’t you guess?’
I went over and stood next to him. Though it was my first time in the village, I thought it must feel like any other night at the end of winter — the faint, insistent barking of a dog, the air fragrant, almost nostalgic, with woodsmoke — but somewhere out there in the dark was a figure on horseback, a huge, hunched figure with a gash for a mouth, the black flames of his cloak flickering behind him, and I felt the urgency of the situation, and the hopelessness, and a panic twisted through me, fast and incomplete, like a lizard that has lost its tail.
I nearly missed the turning that led out along the ridge. A white track, hemmed in by vines and olive trees. Stars crowding the heavens. And such a stillness that I didn’t feel I was outside at all, but in a space that was enormous yet enclosed — a ballroom, perhaps, or a cathedral. The chink of my horse’s bridle, the scuff and shuffle of her hooves. That dog still barking in the distance. Not much else. A turmoil inside me, though: my heart was making more noise than the rest of the world put together. I came over a rise in the land. A pair of cypresses stood out against the sky. Then the sharp, clean line of a roof. That was where Sabatino Vespi lived.
The track dipped down and veered to the right. A gap opened in a tangled hedgerow. The ghost house appeared below, crouching on cleared ground, the pale, hooded shapes of the crete seeming to glow in the darkness beyond it, across the valley. No lights showed in the windows, and all the shutters were closed. If Faustina was there, she was doing her utmost to conceal the fact.