The Book of Human Skin (54 page)

Hermenegilda and Javiera were already laying Rafaela out with hands trembling with immeasurable tenderness. I embraced them both. Then I kissed my friend’s cold cheek, her closed eyes, her wet hair, her bruised nose and her blackened ears and fingertips.

Margarita and Rosita quietly let themselves into the room. They stroked Rafaela’s hair and then each took one of Rafaela’s still hands.

‘Have you heard? The
priora
is dangerously ill,’ murmured Margarita.

Too late, we stared at each other with a simultaneous realization. The
priora
’s health had gone into decline without any of us remarking on it, nor becoming suspicious as to why she had grown so pale, lacked an appetite and so frequently fainted.

Margarita, Rosita, Rafaela and myself: our friendship had sealed us in a bubble of hilarity. We had thought ourselves so witty, mocking the
vicaria
’s fanaticism. We had been too busy ridiculing Sor Loreta to see the danger of her heightened madness.

‘Was the drawing of the crucifixed tongue,’ pronounced Josefa, walking into the cell with a mass of roses and herbs. ‘That what done it. You laugh, Rafaela laugh, we all laugh. We sorry now.’

Minguillo Fasan

I know who you are! You are that Derisive Reader who’s kept sneeringly aloof from me.

What? What’s that? You told yourself that you continue to put up with this wickedness only in the sure hope of witnessing my come-uppance? But there’s no sign of that coming, is there? You say, and you may even
think
you’ve kept your distance, but I note that you’re still here with me at the thin end of the book, when everything has gone my way – except perhaps one. Or two.Think on that.

Well, the Derisive Reader may be happy now. There is trouble come to beset me.

Amalia did not quite die. I saw this as a delay, not a foreclosure on my plans, but a nagging grievance to me, just the same.

And then the Scottish merchant Hamish Gilfeather proved a disappointment.What a mealy pillar of rectitude! Call him fifty years old, call him a prude and a Puritan. He had a dead wife, as I had hoped to, and precisely no daughters. Being of a narrow and grudging nature, I doubt he would have put them at my disposal anyway.

The wife’s death was recent, and the man was still in a lather of sentimentality over it.The Pillar loomed up straight and cast a long thin shadow over my desk when I suggested some highly qualified Venetian whores for his cheering up.

He was precise and stiff-lipped at our one meeting, giving me searching looks that felt to rove my mind, in a highly uncomfortable fashion. He glanced at Amalia’s portrait over the mantelpiece and then at me, and audibly muttered something insulting about an old Chinese proverb he had picked up on his travels.

To my disappointment, he cared only for pursuing his own interests in Peru, on which he did not elaborate, though I tried in every way to extract some idea of them. He was not to be drawn, tempted or threatened into a partnership with me.

‘Now that my beloved Sarah is gone,’ he murmured – as if I might care – ‘I have few ties to my native shores.’

My dreams of a Britannic empire were fading away to nothing in the course of one conversation.The fellow had a hurry on him too, that made him peremptory, that made him unwilling even to take a drink with me, even though I had prepared a special cup of liquid amity for him.

‘I’ll be wishing you good morning, Conte Fasan,’ he said, rising abruptly at the sight of the rosy glass.

‘You shall take some “Tears of Santa Rosa” back to Scotland with you,’ I explained. ‘The first consignment will be at my expense.You shall see how the Scottish ladies will love it, and be back for more directly.’

‘I cannot stop you sending it, I suppose?’ he enquired.

‘No,’ I gloated.

‘And I suppose very few people decline your offers?’ your man asked me, with an unreadable look on his face. ‘I had heard it said of you, Conte Fasan, and I wanted to see for myself.’

Marcella Fasan

While Rafaela’s body was laid out in the
sala de profundis
, the
priora
hovered between life and death. Her coma was profound. She responded only to painful stimuli, fluttering her eyelids open for a second. Then she started anxiously, as if she feared attack, but soon lapsed back into unconsciousness.

Priora Mónica’s servants kept Margarita by their mistress’s side, succumbing to violent hysterics if she showed signs of wishing to attend to her duties in the pharmacy. As long as Margarita was there, the Vixen stayed away and had no possibility of finishing her task. Sor Loreta was to be seen haunting the lane outside the
priora
’s quarters, her face skeletal with tension, her dry hands rubbing against one another.

She was waiting like a hyena for the death, counting on the likelihood that the Holy Fathers would then appoint her
priora
, whereupon she would cover up her crimes with all the devilish skills of her madness.

When not in the public safety of the church or refectory, the nuns stayed in their cells, afraid to be caught out on the streets. In hurried colloquies by the fountain, Rafaela’s
criada
and
samba
kept Josefa informed of what was going on. And she informed me, relaying information also to the
sambas
of Margarita and Rosita.

A secret meeting was arranged, with Javiera despatched to detain the
vicaria
with an invented tale of an Indian man seen in a far corner of the convent grounds.

First Margarita, then Rosita slipped into my cell. The servants followed, one by one. Time was too short for us to lament our losses, or to indulge in recriminations about our failure to recognize the danger of the
vicaria
. Nuns, servants and slaves talked starkly, as equals. Whispered bursts of information were exchanged like musket fire.

Sending a
criada
or a
samba
to the Bishop was quickly dismissed as an unworkable plan, as was the idea of whispering the truth to a priest at the confessional. Sor Loreta had won the clergy’s confidence. No one would believe the lurid tales of a coloured servant, or an anonymous denunciation at the confessional, especially of such an unwelcome tale, for it was one that would cast the Bishop and his priests in a ridiculous light for their long-standing ignorance and grave misjudgment in their choice of
vicaria
.

‘It will be for you to denounce the Vixen, Marcella. You know the whole story. The
vicaria
tried to do the same thing to you. You are high-born. You’ll be believed,’ Rosita explained. ‘But not till the
priora
is safe and can corroborate your evidence. The Vixen’s position is too strong. We must make our own unassailable before denouncing her.’

Margarita reported, ‘In the meantime, I am trying to discover which herbs were used to poison Madre Mónica.’

‘But if Madre Mónica does not . . .’

Josefa interrupted Hermenegilda, ‘And what you all do for to protect
my
mistress?’

My
samba
looked at me, her eyeballs veined with fear, ‘You is surely next victim, madam, you know that, does not you?’

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

Hamish Gilfeather was an angel in a dour guise.This man, on the pretext of a meeting with Minguillo, had brought hope and joy to all of us – to Gianni, to Anna, to me.

‘After my dear wife died in my arms, I came straight here to see what can be done for Marcella,’ he explained. ‘My Sarah urged me on. Why, she never tired of hearing about the girl. She said, “Hamish, when I am gone, you must be a hero for someone else.” That’s what she said.’ Mr Gilfeather’s face grew dim.

I did not have to warn him about Minguillo. Marcella had explained everything, even the death of Piero Zen, who had been his friend. Hamish Gilfeather had parleyed with Minguillo only for the purposes of seeing the enemy at first hand, and gleaning useful information. As for the latest news, of Amalia’s journey to the fringes of death, Hamish Gilfeather had already drawn his own conclusions.

‘I saw the lady’s portrait in that grim great house,’ he murmured, wiping away a tear. ‘Poor wee pretty pretty girlie. I can see why
he
wanted her . . . the Chinese have a proverb for it. “Ugly Frog longs to eat flesh of Heavenly Goose,” they say. But what made
her
entertain him as a husband? Did her mother knowingly send her to a fiend’s bed? D’ye ever see the monstrous tic of his leg, beating like a timpano on the floor? And the flocculent skin and the mad eyes on him! ’Twere it my daughter had been sacrificed like that, I would have slit the man from heid to pluck.’

For me, Amalia was still a painful subject, so I changed it. I enquired, ‘And what are your plans, Signor Gilfeather?’

The merchant was now going west to Spain. There he would meet with a trusted courier who made regular journeys to Peru, and who would make sure ‘any letters ye care to furnish’ reached Fernando, for their final journey inside those miraculous boots to Marcella.

Every day for a week I took new letters to Hamish Gilfeather at his
inn by Rialto, for how could I put into one letter all I had to say to Marcella? Once I had tried to put it into a single kiss.

Hamish Gilfeather was often out. When I asked the innkeeper where he was, I was treated to a wink and a smile. ‘Very interested in Venetian
art
, our Scottish merchant,’ he hinted.

The next time I saw Hamish Gilfeather, I enquired after Cecilia Cornaro’s hand. I had not seen her since I carved her fingers apart.

‘It does famously! She would not tell ye, but she is grateful.’ He turned slightly pink about the jowls. ‘She has a good heart. D’ye know she actually came all the way to Edinburgh when my wife lay dying? It was too late for a portrait, which I so badly wanted. But when my darling Sarah passed, Cecilia let me talk and talk to her of my miseries. She said that she liked the Scottish accent.’

Hamish Gilfeather’s trunks were dispatched back to Scotland heavy with Murano glass tucked up in Burano lace. He told me with a long face that Minguillo would be sending a great box of ‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’ to follow, despite his protests. And I forthwith set him extremely straight as to the nature of that liquid.

‘I would have suspected as much if ye had not told me,’ he growled. ‘Have no fear: the pernicious stuff shall be destroyed.’

Venice seemed empty without Hamish Gilfeather. He had left me a note in his strictly grammatical Italian: ‘I have no small doubts that I’ll be seeing you in Arequipa one of these fine days, and every hope that it shall be with our dear Marcella on your arm.’

I doubled my working hours so that I barely dozed between jobs. If Marcella was to be on my arm, I wanted to be able to buy her a dress with sleeves of silk.

Marcella Fasan

I made my usual abridged and fanciful confession. The priest dismissed me with a light penance: clearly he had no idea of the drama being played out on our side of the grate. Then I slipped across the courtyard
to the
sala de profundis
, knowing myself under the observation of the Jackals.

I joined a group of frightened nuns singing
Salve Regina misericordiae
in quivering voices around Rafaela’s corpse.

My friend lay in the wooden catafalque with a large candle at each of its four corners. Rafaela looked unfamiliar in her full habit: in real life she had been so assiduously negligent in the wearing of it. Seeing her encased in black and white was almost the only way to persuade myself that she was truly dead. White roses had been placed at her temples by her loving servants, and their perfume mixed with the smoke of the candles.

Around her were the old portraits of dead nuns.

You may not paint a nun until she is dead
. A hundred years ago, back in Venice, Cecilia Cornaro had told me that. Rafaela and I had laughed about it. Suddenly it seemed the bitterest fact in the world.

I had brought with me paper and pastels. I did not think the Jackals would stop me – even they must have had their fill of our pain that day. Rafaela’s face I had sketched many times, but never like this, still, sad, almost ugly with surprise, as if the
vicaria
’s unforeseen lurch back to violence had truly astonished her. The hollow of one eye was blackened, with red and purple shadows. The side of her head that the
vicaria
had smashed against the bath was swollen: you could see the distortion even beneath her veil. Hermenegilda had scorned to cover the damage with flowers. I propped my crutch by the door and prepared my materials with a shaking hand. After I had recorded every detail of Rafaela’s injuries, Rosita and Margarita quietly signed and dated my picture as a true likeness. Then I began a picture of Rafaela as I had known her.

In knots of two and three, the nuns came cautiously to pray and weep by Rafaela’s corpse, and to watch me draw. Hermenegilda and Javiera made sure my vigil was never solitary. Everyone seemed to understand that there was a safety in numbers: I was often in a large company of mourners. Apart from her Jackals, the
vicaria
had no supporters inside Santa Catalina, but there were plenty who feared her enough to turn a blind eye to their doings.

In the middle of the night, when all the other nuns were locked out of the
de profundis
hall, the
vicaria
brought in a barber from the
tambo
and ordered him to cut out Rafaela’s heart, to be buried separately in a lead casket. Before dawn, every nun in Santa Catalina knew about this butchery.