I left my horse in the barn, then stood at the front door and listened. I didn’t want to startle her by knocking. Instead, I called her name. Then she would know who it was. A brief shriek of chair legs on a tiled floor. The door creaked open.
She was wearing clothes I had never seen before — a man’s clothes — and a strange, dark hat that had no brim. With a shock, I remembered that her hair was in my pocket. But this was the face I had travelled for a week to see.
‘Faustina …’
She brushed at her forehead, as if she had walked into a cobweb, and then looked past me, into the night.
‘How did you get here?’
‘I rode. I borrowed a horse.’
‘But why?’
‘I was worried.’
‘But the Grand Duke — your work …’
‘I’m in Volterra. That’s what I told people. I’m looking at the quarries.’
I put my arms round her. She smelled like somebody else. Just the knowledge that I was holding her, though. A sense of slippage. A letting-go. As if every muscle in my body had been tense for days.
‘I tried to forget you,’ she murmured.
‘Did it work?’
‘It was beginning to. But now you’ve ruined it.’ She pushed back from me, one hand on my chest. ‘How did you find me?’
‘You told me about this place …’
From behind me came a sound that was like air being blown out of someone’s mouth, and I glanced over my shoulder, imagining the woman with her cabbage-leaf skull-cap and her cracked plate of a face, imagining the monk with his shadow thrown down, long and confident, in front of him, as if he was riding out of the east at sunrise, imagining all manner of visitations, none of them benevolent, but it was only the wind worrying the trees at the edge of the property.
She had been living in the kitchen, which was the warmest room. There was a stone sink and a fireplace and a sagging truckle bed. She fetched water from Vespi’s well. He kept her stocked up with vegetables, and eggs, and fruit he had preserved the previous autumn. When she tried to protest, he said he had more than enough. He was an old man, with few needs.
That evening I built a fire with wood she had gathered from outside. We shared a bean stew, then sat on the bed and stared into the flames. Her skin had roughened; her cheeks were red, and the sides of her forefingers were dry and cracked.
‘Your poor hands,’ I said.
‘It’s been so cold.’ She seemed to hesitate. ‘Tell me really. Why did you come?’
‘They know you’re here.’
‘Here?’ She looked round the room, her glance bouncing off the walls like a trapped bird.
‘Not here. In the village.’
‘How did they find out?’
I shrugged. ‘They’ve got spies. Informers.’
I told her what Stufa had said in the Spanish Chapel, though I left out the part about the names.
She asked what would happen when he arrived. She wasn’t to worry, I said. I would deal with him myself.
‘You? How?’
‘I’m not sure yet.’
‘What if he brings people with him?’
‘I’ve got the feeling that he’ll come alone.’ Once again, I sensed him behind me, following in my tracks. During the past few days, I had often felt his shadow fall across my path; even in broad daylight, it had seemed at times as if I had been travelling in the dark. ‘He thinks he can do everything himself.’
‘Maybe he’s right.’
‘This is the only chance we’ve got,’ I said. ‘To confront him here, on ground that’s unfamiliar to him —’
‘It’s such a risk, though.’
‘I know. I learned that from you.’
I was trying to lighten her mood. She only shook her head.
I had imagined we would talk for hours, but there was nothing left to say that wouldn’t undermine or frighten us. While I built up the fire for the night, she put away the food and lowered a bar across the door.
Later, she examined the cut on my thigh. She thought it looked infected. Heating the blade of my knife until it glowed, she cauterized the wound. As she made up a poultice of geranium oil and lavender and tied it around my leg, I told her about the starving family.
‘They would probably have eaten you as well,’ she said.
‘The horse first, though.’
She nodded. ‘Tastier.’
For the first time that evening, she sounded like her old self.
Still wearing our clothes, we climbed into bed. To be next to her again. To be breathing her in. I pressed my face into her soft, cropped hair. She must have felt me harden against her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I can’t.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
A twig snapped in the fireplace.
That night I lay just beneath the surface of sleep, there but not there, like a fog-bound landscape. I would jerk awake, thinking I had heard the dull clink of a stirrup as Stufa climbed down off his horse, or the shuffle of his boots in the dirt as he circled the house, or the whisper of his cloak against the tiles as he crept over the roof. He was outside the door, or in the next room — or in the same room. The silence I could hear was the silence of him holding his breath.
Then, in the small hours, the fear vanished. Desire took its place. I reached out to Faustina and eased the man’s breeches off her hips. We made love in the dark, without saying a word. I stayed inside her after it was over. I fell asleep inside her.
At daybreak, I left the bed and lifted the bar on the door. The noise woke her. She muttered something about flowers, then sighed and turned to face the wall.
I opened the door. It was a cold, still morning. A bird took off in a straight line from a scrub oak, a streak of black against the powdery ash-grey sky. Otherwise, nothing moved. Close to the front wall of the house was an almond tree, its white blossom tinged with pink. As I stood near the tree, the earth seemed to groan, like a boat that had run aground on rocks. Shivering, I set off to look for firewood.
Out by the track was a hoarstone, half smothered by the undergrowth. Nearby lay a mill-wheel that had broken into three or four large segments. On the flat land west of the house I came across some bits of stone arranged in a rough circle. The remains of a well. There was no winch, though. No means of drawing water. I kneeled by the edge and peered over. Bricks had come loose from the walls and dropped away; weeds had flourished in the gaps. Far below, I could see a smooth blank disc that I took to be water, a disc in which I thought I saw my own reflection — small, truncated, featureless.
Some time later, when I returned to the house with an armful of branches, I asked Faustina about the well.
She put a hand over her mouth. ‘I should have warned you.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Nothing happened.’
She began to cry.
That afternoon, we rode down a leaf-covered track into a gully, then followed a watercourse that wound its way east through field maples, evergreen oaks and clumps of mouse-prickle. Once, I looked over my shoulder and saw the ghost house, a dim, solid shape high up in a mass of bare grey trees. We approached Torremagna from the north. A steep path took us past Vespi’s allotment and came out near the house where Faustina had grown up.
Before we could knock on Mimmo’s door, he stepped out and pulled us both inside.
‘He’s here,’ he said. ‘He has taken a room above the tavern. He’s sleeping.’
Sleeping?
That was how confident Stufa was. He probably hadn’t even bothered to lock the door.
I moved to the window. ‘Is anybody with him?’
‘He’s alone.’
‘Well, that’s something.’
I began to outline my plan, such as it was. I needed Mimmo to tell Stufa that the ghost house was Faustina’s favourite place. He should let the information slip, as if he didn’t see it as particularly significant.