She walked in front of me, her hair falling to the small of her back, as though years had passed. ‘We belong together,’ I whispered. ‘It looks right.’
Tears itched my cheeks.
It was morning. The snow at the edge of the road had a crust to it, a lustre, like the glaze on a cake. She turned to face me. Her eyes were so clear that they looked straight through me. Her lips were soft and dark as the skin on a ripe fig.
She stood below me. Say what you said before.
What did I say?
That thing about me spoiling women for you.
I smiled. It’s true.
Say it.
Before I met you, I used to look at other women. But you’re so beautiful, you ruined them for me. There’s no point looking any more. I’ll never see a woman who comes close.
Yes, she murmured. Yes, that’s it.
THREE
It was after two in the morning when Zumbo finally fell silent. He sat back in his chair and stared at me, his features haunted, drawn.
‘You never went back for her?’ I said.
He sighed, as if he had expected the question. ‘I had wrecked her life once. I didn’t want to wreck it again.’
Outside, the wind had dropped. In the distance, through the raw, dripping darkness, I could hear chanting. The office of the night.
‘I used to think she would come and find me,’ he said. ‘She never came.’
He paused.
‘I thought she must be happy.’
Leaning forwards, I threw another log on the fire. Sparks showered up into the chimney. If there was one thing I insisted on, it was an inexhaustible supply of wood; I might have been dispatched to a convent, but I didn’t see why I should suffer.
Within a few weeks of returning to Florence, Zumbo went on, he left again. He moved to Genoa, where he worked with a French anatomist. From time to time, news filtered through from Tuscany. He was told Bassetti had died, aged sixty-seven, and that none of the Grand Duke’s children had given him an heir. As for the woman he had made, he never heard what became of her. For all he knew, she was still lying in that locked chamber on the third floor of the palace.
He roused himself. ‘I brought you something.’
Undoing the straps on his portfolio, he took out a piece of parchment and handed it to me.
A young woman looked up at me. Long black hair, wide eyes. A tilt to her face that was self-possessed, wary, mischievous.
‘This is her?’
‘Yes.’ He had found it in Stufa’s saddlebag, he said.
I stared at the picture. Her colouring was darker than mine. Her hair too. That groom must have had some southern blood in him. Sardinian, most likely. But I could see myself in her as well — my wilful, headstrong younger self — and all I could think suddenly was, My daughter, my daughter. Though I had never known her, or held her, though I had never even heard her voice, this was my blood, my offspring — my one true child. Was that callous, given that I had three other children? Perhaps. But it was how I felt — on that night, and on many since.
When I looked up at last, Zumbo was asleep, his right arm dangling beside the chair, the veins swollen in his hand.
I went to bed, instructing a novice to show my visitor to the guest quarters, and to make sure he was comfortable. He left at dawn, before I woke, and I never saw him again. He died in Paris a month later, of an abscess on his liver.
As time went by, Zumbo’s appearance at the convent assumed the quality of a hallucination. I couldn’t forget what I had heard, but wasn’t sure how much to believe. What had he said? It sounded like a story, even to the story-teller. Since he knew I had lived what people like to call ‘a colourful life’, it was possible he had succumbed to the temptation to exaggerate, if only to hold my interest. His passion for my daughter, his vendetta with the monk. The work of art he had so lovingly constructed — my successor! It was also possible that he had been feverish, deluded. The dark smudges beneath his eyes, the headache that had felled him in Marseilles — and his sudden death, of course, only a short time after seeing me … As if that weren’t enough, I had to consider the way in which stories change shape when they are passed from one person to another. There had been a startling moment when my own words were returned to me, fourth-hand. Yes, I had stayed at Fontainebleau, but I never ate gold. I didn’t dance on rose petals. I didn’t lose my wedding ring either — not in the first week, anyway. And yet, for all that, I couldn’t stop thinking about what he had told me, and in the spring of 1703, more than a year after his visit, I travelled overland to Tuscany.
The journey took six weeks. On the twelfth of May I crossed into the duchy illegally, using a little-known hill-track near Cortona. Four days later, on a bright, hot afternoon, I approached Torremagna from the east. I left my retinue of servants and armed guards outside the tavern and set off through the village on foot. The smell of warm stone, nobody about.
Via Castello climbed past a church, then narrowed as it curved round to the right. I paused outside the house where Faustina had grown up. The brown front door and one small window told me nothing. A few paces further on was a green door, just as Zumbo had described. Mimmo’s house. I knocked, stood back. Perhaps I should have warned her that I was on my way. I hadn’t wanted word to get out, though. Imagine if the Grand Duke heard that I had returned! My throat was dry, my heartbeats shallow, feathery. Who would answer? Would it be her?
I was about to knock again when I heard a scraping sound behind me. A one-legged man came up the street, preceded by a wooden chair. Shifting his weight on to his good leg, he pushed the chair ahead of him, then rested his stump on the seat and swung his good leg forwards. It was impossibly laborious, even to watch.
He stopped in front of me. ‘You look lost. Can I help?’
His hair was grey, even though, by my calculations, he couldn’t have been much more than thirty.
‘Don’t you have any crutches?’ I said.
‘They broke. Well, one did.’
‘You’re Mimmo.’
He stared at me. In my fur-trimmed travelling clothes, I must have looked out of place, and I wondered if he suspected me of having been sent by the Florentine authorities to investigate Stufa’s disappearance. I was almost ten years late, but Zumbo had warned him somebody might come.
Turning his back, he opened the green door and manoeuvred himself down the steps. I asked if I could talk to him. He seemed to hesitate. Then the chair legs groaned on the floor tiles as he shifted sideways to let me pass.
I stepped down into the L-shaped room. There was a big fireplace set into the wall to my left, and a table and two chairs in the corner. To my right was the bed that had been Faustina’s hiding place. There were more stuffed birds than when Zumbo visited; the wooden boxes now covered almost every square foot of wall space. The window at the back of the room gave on to a terrace that was crowded with pots of geraniums and herbs. In the distance, the land rolled away, its folds and rumples punctuated by rows of cypresses that looked black in the sunlight.
‘I’m sorry if my Italian is hard to understand,’ I said. ‘I’m out of practice. It’s a long time since I was here.’
‘In the village?’
‘No. The duchy.’
I wasn’t as confident as I appeared to be. Beneath my sophisticated outfit, my heart was beating unevenly. Somewhere in this village — or even in this house — was the girl I had given birth to, then given up. I had travelled more than a thousand miles, and I had spent much of the journey trying to imagine our first meeting, but no matter how many times I looked at the portrait of her, I still couldn’t envisage it. Would she be curious? Angry? Too shocked to speak? Would she refuse to have anything to do with me? Every response I came up with seemed both possible and valid.