I set off round the house. Snow lay on the almond blossom, white heaped on white. The sticks marking the well were still in place, though far less obvious. Only the top two inches showed. When I reached the back of the house, the sky brightened a fraction. The sun like a small, worn coin, so dull I could look straight at it. The shadows bleak and blue. From the corner of my eye I saw a rabbit hopping through coarse grass near the barn. Then it stopped abruptly. Had it heard something? I glanced towards the track. When I looked for the rabbit again, it had gone.
Back on the first floor, I stared at the landscape until my eyes ached. Writing appeared on the blank page of the snow. Apologies, hypotheses. My own obituary. Cracks showed, pink at first, then deepening to red. A dog’s head lay on the ground, as if decapitated.
Once, the white surface burst apart, and Cuif sat upright, grinning. Watch this! Off he went, making a series of fluid hoop-shapes in the air. He left no prints — no marks at all.
The day passed in fits and starts. Time behaved like the rabbit. Leaping forwards, standing still.
I went downstairs and stoked the fire. I tried to eat. I listened.
He didn’t come.
I found it difficult to imagine what might be keeping him. Perhaps, as in a legend, he had fallen into a sleep that would last for centuries. Perhaps I would die waiting. Become another ghost.
This house, this snow.
This loneliness.
Towards the end of the afternoon there was a flaring on the horizon, a band of apocalyptic colour, which made the bare trees at the limit of the property look brittle, scorched. The sun wasn’t small and pale any more. As it dropped, it swelled and sagged, and the orange ripened to a bloody, bloated crimson.
It was then that I heard him.
‘My soul does not magnify the Lord,’ he sang, ‘and my spirit hath renounced God my saviour —’
I sank below the level of the windowsill, my sword flat on the floor beside me. I recognized the Magnificat, but it was a version all his own. He had bastardized it. Turned it upside-down.
‘Because he hath regarded the sins of his handmaiden —’
I thought I knew what he was doing: he was twisting the Virgin Mary’s words and putting them in the mouth of the Grand Duke’s wife.
‘For behold,’ he sang, ‘from henceforth, all generations shall call me cursed —’
As I peered over the rough stone sill, he came through the gap in the hedge and down the slope, a swirl of mist or smoke drifting off him, as if he were a gun that had just been fired. He was mounted on a piebald stallion with a great blunt head, its black lips frothing where they chafed against the bit. Attached to the saddle were the tools of a torturer’s trade — a pair of metal pincers, a brazier, an array of gouges, pliers and branding irons, and a wooden structure with straps and buckles which I took to be a rack. The whole assembly creaked and clanked as if to accompany his sacrilegious chanting. I stood to one side of the window, out of sight, but I needn’t have bothered. He didn’t even glance in my direction as he rode by. He knew I was there, and he obviously thought Faustina was with me. Round the house he went, his eyes half closed, his words flung in exultation at the sky.
‘And verily he shall smite me down, and I shall feast on dirt —’
He wasn’t making the slightest attempt at camouflage or stealth. His triumph was a foregone conclusion, and it was easy, looking at him, to believe in his invincibility. But all at once my apprehension was overtaken by a purely practical concern. If he kept circling the house, he might stumble into the trap I had laid. His horse would suffer injury, but he would probably be thrown clear, and my only weapon — my one advantage — would be lost. I had no choice but to confront him. I needed him on foot.
The next time he came round the corner of the house I was waiting for him, the concealed well in front of me, the peach trees at my back. When he saw me, he brought his stallion up short.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The Sicilian.’
I kept my mouth tight shut. My teeth clicked and rattled behind my lips.
‘But where’s the whore?’ He cast a theatrical look around him, as if she too might suddenly appear.
‘Who are you to call her a whore?’ My voice sounded weak; I wished I hadn’t spoken.
‘He’s got a tongue in his head — but not, I fear, for much longer.’ Stufa climbed down off his animal.
My heart surged. Good. Good.
‘Once you’ve told me what I need to know,’ he went on, ‘I’m going to reach into your mouth and tear it out.’
He drew his sword. A harsh grinding, like some terrible, discordant music. The last of the sun collected on a blade that must have been four feet long, the metal glowing a livid pink, the colour of intestines.
‘I’ll roast it over a fire, then I’ll devour it. I’m rather fond of tongue.’ He struck out sideways at the almond tree; snow wolfed the severed branch. ‘Who knows, perhaps I’ll acquire your pretty way with words.’
I moved to my left. I had to keep an eye on the three sticks; at the same time, I couldn’t afford to arouse his suspicion. He stood with his feet wide apart, sword pointing at the ground. His breath turned to smoke as it poured from his mouth. His black cloak was a hole cut in the world.
‘Judging by your defence of the whore, I’d say you’re in love with her. Are you in love?’
The well stood between us, though Stufa was stepping sideways, towards the house, as if he sensed the existence of a trap and was circumventing it.
‘I hope you’ve sampled her already. Because you’re not going to get another chance.’
Cuif appeared on the land to my right, Cuif as he had been when I first met him — sardonic, mischievous, preoccupied — and in that moment all my fear and indecisiveness fell away.
‘You don’t half talk a lot,’ I said. ‘Maybe people are right when they say you’ve lost your mind.’
He began to advance on me, both hands on his sword. He was keeping close to the front wall of the house, hoping to minimize the number of surprises that could occur. For all he knew, I could have accomplices. The trap I had set was my only hope, and it now seemed desperate, ludicrous, impossibly naïve.
‘Did you tell anyone you were coming?’ I asked him.
‘Why would I do that?’
‘Surely you cleared it with Bassetti?’
Stufa laughed.
I knew then that he had acted on his own.
But he had managed to bypass the well, and as I backed away he came after me, his shoulders hunched, cold light silvering his blade.
Behind the house, he tripped on something buried in the snow and almost fell. Swearing, he freed his right foot from the remnants of a ladder. Was that the ladder Faustina had climbed with Mimmo on the day he broke his leg? It seemed like an omen. Of what, though, I could not have said.
I spoke again. ‘That girl you killed — who was she?’
He turned his head to one side and spat into the snow. ‘There are things you’ll never know.’
Once at the front of the house again, he stopped to scan the ground. Perhaps he thought my retreat had been strategic, planned. Perhaps he suspected an ambush. To my right, where the copse was, the ivy-choked trunks and branches black against the rust of the sunset, the Guazzi twins were bent over, lighting a touchpaper. A snake with glowing red scales glided across the snow towards me. I watched it plunge into a drift and then emerge again, sparks crackling from its mouth.
‘Liquid gunpowder,’ I said.