Secrecy (32 page)
He must have had some kind of accident.
I began to laugh. I shook with laughter.
Some kind of accident, I said again, when I had myself under control.
She told me that when Stufa knocked on Mimmo’s door the whole place seemed to shake. She was already concealed inside the bed by then. Even so, she hardly dared to breathe. Mimmo let Stufa in. She imagined Stufa filled the room. As a horse would have done. Or a giant.
You’ve hidden the whore, haven’t you? Stufa said.
Mimmo said he didn’t know any whores.
Stufa hit him. Your childhood friend, he said with a sneer. Your
sweetheart
. You’re trying to help her.
Help
her? Mimmo’s voice lifted in indignation. Why would I help her? She nearly killed me. Look at my leg!
He related the events of fifteen years before. Stufa became impatient.
Why are you telling me all this?
She used to take me there, Mimmo said. It was her favourite place. He paused, and the silence seemed to gather itself. It’s a place she’s always returning to – in her mind, at least. A place of penance and contrition.
You think that’s where she is?
I never told her that I loved her. I wanted her to guess. Mimmo’s voice choked. Don’t hurt her. Please.
Stufa strode towards the door. Get out of my way.
He fell for it, I said.
Faustina nodded.
I rode on, towards Arezzo.
Would Mimmo really have used Stufa’s appearance to let Faustina know how he felt about her? It would certainly have had the desired effect on Stufa. How would Faustina have reacted, though? Did I
want
Mimmo to take care of her, look after her? Had I had that in mind the whole time, without ever quite admitting it to myself? After all, she could hardly return to Florence, not while Bassetti was alive. Or was I secretly – selfishly – hoping that some long-buried anger and resentment would surface, and that their friendship would founder?
She kept appearing as I travelled north. Her face would have a startled look. Too little sleep. Too much left unsaid. She would walk into my arms, or she would fling herself at me and almost knock me off my feet – and her only a slip of a thing! I would hold her so tightly that it felt as if our two bodies might be merging into one. Perhaps what I wanted was to crush the breath out of her. Then she wouldn’t have a life without me. Then I wouldn’t be missing anything. But in the end I always let go of her and fitted my boot into the bright hoop of the stirrup, for it was always, in the end, a leave-taking, a goodbye. Only when I had vaulted into the saddle did I look at her below me, her dress creased by the force of that last embrace.
You’ll forget me, I said. I know you will.
She ran a hand across her cropped dark hair. You’re
stealing
all my lines. Why can’t you think of anything original?
I wanted to smile, but couldn’t. My mouth wouldn’t make the right shape.
You’ve found someone else, she said.
Don’t be ridiculous.
She turned away, her shoulders shaking.
There’s no one else, I said. How could there be?
When I reached out and touched her cheek, I found that it was wet.
I’ll never leave you, I said.
I nodded off, and when I woke, or seemed to wake, I was back in the ghost house, standing at an upstairs window. Snow on the ground, a waning moon. Trees all askew, like the rigging on a wreck.
Then I was outside. The air so cold and clean it made my lungs feel new. I could see the lines on my hand. Heart line deep. Life line ending in a row of Xs, as if my last days were a wound that needed stitches. I walked to the well and peered over. Stufa was at the bottom, looking up at me. He stretched out his arms, like a child wanting to be picked up and held.
I woke. I slept.
My hands froze around the reins.
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.
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.
Mimmo was frowning. ‘You know my name,’ he said slowly, ‘but I’ve no idea who you are.’
‘Zumbo sent me. From Paris.’
‘Zumbo?’ He turned away, head lowered.
‘Zummo. You remember him?’
‘Of course.’ His knuckles whitened on the arms of the chair as he adjusted the position of his stump. ‘You’ve come all the way from Paris?’
‘Yes.’
‘What does he want?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I haven’t made myself clear. My name is Marguerite-Louise of Orléans, and I’ve come to see my daughter.’
His whole body twitched, and the chair that was supporting him tipped over and crashed to the floor. He had to seize the corner of the table to keep himself from falling.
A voice called down from upstairs. ‘Are you all right, father?’
Mimmo called out that he was fine.
I righted the chair, and as I looked at him close up and saw the tears in his eyes I thought I understood.
‘She doesn’t live here any more, does she?’ I said. ‘She left you.’
He faced into the fireplace. ‘She’s dead.’
‘Dead?’
‘Yes.’
I swallowed. ‘When?’
‘She died nine years ago. In childbirth.’
I sank down on to a chair. All this way, all this time, and she was gone – and the fact that I had missed her by so many years only made it worse.
‘And the child?’
‘That was her just now.’
‘She had a child …’ I glanced up at Mimmo, but he was standing with his back to the light, and his face was hard to see. ‘Who by?’
She was Zummo’s daughter, he said. It seemed that Faustina had become pregnant the night she spent with Zummo in the ghost house.
‘She’s my daughter now, though,’ he added. ‘I’ve cared for her since she was born.’
I heard the warning in his voice. I heard the apprehension too.
He hauled himself over to a door at the back of the room. ‘Luisa?’ He looked at me across one shoulder. ‘She was
christened
Marguerite-Louise, but that’s a bit of a mouthful, isn’t it.’
I stared at him. ‘She’s named after me?’
‘It was Faustina’s idea.’
A girl appeared. She had shoulder-length brown hair and cautious eyes, and her shift dress had been washed so many times that it was impossible to tell what colour it had been when it was new. Clearly, she hadn’t expected to find a stranger in the room. Nervous suddenly, and wrong-footed, she rubbed quickly at the side of her head, the flat of her hand skimming her hair. At first I didn’t understand why the gesture seemed so familiar. Then I realized it was something Zumbo had done when he came to see me, and I let out a soft laugh of wonder and
recognition
.
