The Girl With the Painted Face (41 page)

There is a long pause.

Federico says, ‘None of us does, Beppe. None of us does.’

The little town of Lugo is just waking up. Shutters bang open; sleepy-eyed workers stumble out into the early-morning chill, pulling coats and doublets tight about them and running hands through tangled hair. Two little boys scurry out through a cracked wooden door, squealing with laughter; the smaller of the two is carrying a carved wooden pig which he brandishes above his head. Making thick snorting noises through his nose, he runs after his companion, who squeals in mock terror, then laughs aloud.

Sofia stares about her, one hand on Ippo’s head, scratching the fur behind one of his ears. She is very hungry. She was too tense and miserable to eat much of the meal last night, and now, after that long night’s riding and walking, her belly is griping and uncomfortable and she feels a little light-headed. Reaching for the small bag fastened to her belt, she chinks the coins within through the thin leather. There must be a dozen or so
scudi
in there, perhaps more: money earned over the weeks she has been with the troupe and carefully hoarded. Thanking providence that she at least has the wherewithal to feed herself for a while this time, she wanders along several streets until she sees a row of covered shops.

She buys bread, two slices of sausage and a small bunch of grapes. A corked bottle of ale is the only drink she can find. Sitting down on a bench at the corner of a small piazza, she gives one of the sausage slices to the dog, then wraps a torn piece of bread around the other and eats it. The ale proves to be sweet and nutty and she drinks it gratefully, but then, draining the last mouthful from the bottle, she feels tears prick sharp in her eyes and nose. She is homeless again – and this time it’s immeasurably worse. Before, although she was frightened and cold, and had no idea what she was going to do, she had had no real sense of loss. Her rooms at Signora Romano’s had been cheerless enough and her friends there had not been close ones. Apart from a few once-treasured possessions, she has never really missed what she left behind.

But now…

While searching for food, she has managed to avoid thinking about Beppe, but now, sitting here on the edge of the ever more bustling piazza, try as she might, he elbows his way back into her mind and she sees again his tilted smile; she pictures him with head thrown back, eyes dancing as he looks up at a whirling blur of juggled objects. Beppe on stage: masked, black hat on the back of his head, brandishing his whip-loud
batocchio
, cracking it against a thigh as Arlecchino tumbles across the stage, chattering inanely to Agostino or Vico or Federico. Beppe walking on his hands across the little green clearing where he first began to teach her to act. And then come the images she cannot bear to allow herself to picture, pouring in like swirling water through a breached dam: herself lying in Beppe’s arms, warm in the wagon beneath crumpled blankets, happily chilly together in the hay barn in Montalbano; Beppe’s hands on her skin, running over her arms, her breasts, her back, her buttocks – oh God, she cannot bear to think of it! She bends forward and puts the heels of her hands over her eyes; pressing hard, bright patterns erupt and swirl.

Something cold and wet touches the back of her hand and she looks up. Ippo is at her feet, nosing her fingers, whining softly. He scrapes at her skirts with one paw. Leaning further forward, her face now glazed with tears, she fondles his ears and pats his side, murmuring unthinking endearments.

Beppe shakes his head. ‘No, I’m going after her. I have to.’

His face creasing with concern, Agostino stares at him. ‘But… but you have no idea where she might have gone, Beppe. North, south, city or village or open land – how on earth will you begin to look?’

‘She won’t have gone south – I know it. She’s never been down on this side of the mountains before… I think she’ll be heading back to places she knows.’

‘But, Beppe,’ Lidia breaks in, ‘she’s been banished. Da Budrio made it quite clear that she won’t be tolerated back in Bologna. She knows she can’t go back.’

Beppe shrugs. ‘There’re plenty of places other than Bologna.’

‘Exactly! How do you think you’re going to manage to search the
whole
of Emilia-Romagna – or further afield? On your own?’

‘My dog is with her. He’ll find me – or I’ll find them both.’ Feeling his face stiffening into a scowl, Beppe turns and strides away to the wagons, where, grabbing at a leather sack, he rummages through his belongings, roughly stuffing into the bag a spare pair of breeches, hose and a shirt, the half-dozen leather juggling balls and a purse in which is a chinking handful of coins.

Cosima’s face appears at the door. She is holding out a sacking-wrapped parcel. ‘Here, my lovely. That should keep you going for a while. Cheese, bread, some slices of that lamb from the other night, and a few plums.’ In her other hand is a bottle of ale. ‘And this might help, too.’

The concern in her face moves him. Without a word, he takes the food and ale from her and puts it into the bag, then he puts his arms around her and they stand close for a long moment. She says, with her head on his shoulder, ‘Find her, Beppe, and bring her back. It doesn’t feel right here without her any more.’

‘No. It doesn’t.’ He swallows uncomfortably, then stands back from Cosima. ‘I’ll find her. I have to.’

A few streets down from the little piazza where Sofia bought her bread and sausage is a long narrow street which leads right down to the edge of the town. It has no opening at the far end: a featureless, windowless, stucco-fronted house blocks right across the thoroughfare, along the length of which runs a trickle of dank water which disappears into a tiny ditch at the far end. Washing is strung on dozens of lines across the street, flapping in the slight breeze like festival flags. Several shops open out onto what is, in fact, little more than a wide alleyway; at one window Sofia sees meat: fresh and smoked. Some half-dozen bloodstained rabbits hang heads down, their ears drooping, their front paws daintily together. A large pig’s head on a slate slab glares, mouth agape, a furious grimace still etched across its lardy face as though daring anyone to recoil in disgust, and, Sofia sees now as she peers further in, a cluster of grease-whitened sausages dangles from a row of hooks on the back wall, like a bunch of long-since-severed arms.

Not finding the contents of the shop at all appealing, Sofia wanders on, Ippo at her heels.

A door opens just ahead, and a large woman wrapped in a voluminous white linen apron steps out backwards into the street, leaning away from the weight of several large baskets. Thick white cheese rinds show through the gaps in the weave.

The woman nods cheerily to Sofia as she passes. ‘Mind now,’ she mutters. ‘Shouldn’t want to trip over you.’

Smiling, Sofia steps back out of the woman’s way.

‘I’ve some lovely sheep’s cheese new in this morning,
cara
,’ the woman says over her shoulder as she walks on. ‘Fresh in from Faenza. Pop in and have a look. Can’t do better than a nice piece of cheese, I always say.’

Faenza. Why does that name sound familiar? Sofia knows that she has never been there – why should it chime in her mind so significantly? And then a memory:
A pretty little place called Faenza. It overlooks an ancient landscape, thick with old oaks and sweet chestnuts, with beech trees and conifers
. Niccolò. Niccolò Zanetti. He lives in Faenza. He said he was going back there when he left them a few weeks ago.

She will go to Faenza and try to find Niccolò.

31

Even though it is chilly this morning, the sun is bright on the dew-glittering field in front of him; turning to look back over his shoulder, Niccolò Zanetti puts a hand up to shade his eyes. Far ahead, a long line of now-leafless oak woodland stretches up and over the hills. A scatter of rooks swirls up and around, cawing harshly before they sink back down into the treeline.

A small, dark shape comes out of the trees and moves across the edge of the field.

Niccolò whistles and the shape stops dead for a second, then begins to run. A moment later is it is at his side: a skinny, rough-coated creature with a long thin tail, which, until a month or so ago, was owned by an elderly and increasingly frail old man in the town – an old man who had often had recourse to Niccolò’s ministrations over the years.

‘Take Bacca when I go, Niccolò, won’t you?’
 

‘The dog?’
 

A nod. ‘He likes you. And you’ll be good to him, I know that.’
 

‘I’d be honoured, Eduardo, you know that.’
 

‘You’ll be able to take him along when you go back out on the road – he’ll enjoy travelling.’
 

Niccolò reaches out a hand and the dog noses his palm, flecks of drool spattering out as it pants and shakes its head. Yes, he thinks: Eduardo was right. Next spring, when he ventures back out, he’ll be pleased to have company. Next year might well be his last on the road, though; it’s a life for a younger man, really. The poor sleep, the lack of comfort, the heckling crowds and the constant threat of being run out of town by officious authority figures: Niccolò has loved it in the past and has relished the fun of the shows he puts on, but he is not sure he has the heart for it any longer.

‘Come on,’ he says and Bacca pricks his ears. ‘Let’s go back.’

Bending and picking up a short length of stick, he throws it ahead and the dog bounds after it, joyfully splay-legged and ungainly. It is no more than a short walk back to the little house where his daughter and her husband have lived for years now – modest, it is true, but still a warmer and far more welcoming home than the two-room hut he and Anna rented for so many years until Anna married at the tender age of sixteen. That, of course, was when he, Niccolò, took to the road.

He puts a hand to his eyes again, gazing over to where Anna and Franco’s little house stands set into the hillside. Smoke is rising from the rough chimney stack and a row of freshly washed shifts and shirts hangs on a long line between one of the outer walls and a tall pole some thirty yards away.

Niccolò checks.

Beside the pole is a figure he does not immediately recognize. He frowns, trying to focus in the sharp light. It appears to be a young woman and a dog – too slight and with too much wild-looking hair to be Anna. His daughter always keeps her hair neatly tucked away under a linen cap, these days.

Bacca slows and the hair on his neck rises, but, reaching down to the dog, Niccolò scratches between the creature’s half-pricked ears. ‘Who’s that, then?’ he says softly, staring across at the motionless figure. ‘Who’s come to see us up here at this time of year?’

Bacca glances up at him, then returns his gaze to the newcomers.

‘Stay close,’ Niccolò says and the dog keeps pace as he walks towards the house and the girl.

A resigned shake of the head. ‘No, signore, I’m sorry. I’ve not seen anyone of that description.’

Beppe does not bother even to try to smile now. He just turns away, muttering thanks, puffing a sigh and pushing his hands through his hair. He has asked perhaps a hundred different people, perhaps two hundred – in villages and towns, taverns, farms, along roads and at the doors of outlying houses – and at every place he has stopped he has received a negative answer to his questions. In every face at which he has gazed he has seen only blank ignorance – some have been kind, some dismissive, but however sympathetic they feel towards him, every face has been ignorant.

All except one. One person not far from Castel del Rio thinks he might have seen someone of Sofia’s description, in a cart in the small hours, a couple of days ago.

Heading north.

The immensity of his task is beginning to weigh upon him, and the certainty he felt on leaving the troupe that it would be only a matter of days before he tracked Sofia down is beginning to seem little more than ridiculous. But, he reasons with himself now, it cannot be impossible – she only had a matter of an hour or so on him. She cannot have been on the road any more than a couple of hours at most before her disappearance was discovered. If she’d been on foot, he would have caught up with her by now, he is sure of that. He ran almost without stopping for the first hour of his journey.

She must somehow have found a lift of some sort.

In a cart, it would seem.

Sitting down on a boulder at the side of the road which leads into the little town of Lugo, Beppe puts his head in his hands and closes his eyes. Where can she have gone? There has to be logic to this. He has only to think with Sofia’s mind, to try to work out where she would think to go. It must be possible.

He is missing his dog badly. Normally, Ippo would be here at his feet, aware of his master’s distress, pressing up against him and whining softly. Oh God, he hopes that the dog is with Sofia.

Where now? Where on earth should he look now? Italy is beginning to seem like a limitless, featureless desert, and the task ahead of him entirely impossible to achieve – but he cannot conceive of not continuing to search. Even the thought of not finding Sofia makes him feel physically sick. But what if he has missed her, and has left her somewhere behind him – or what if that one witness is wrong? What if she has done what he has been so sure she has not: what if she has gone south? Here he is, sitting outside Lugo, and she might, even as he thinks this, be walking across a piazza in Firenze, or even further south – heading for Roma? Feeling his breathing quickening and his thoughts beginning to fragment, he snatches at his leather bag and pulls it towards him; unfastening the strings, he pushes his hands down inside it. Right at the bottom is the little mesh pouch in which are his five leather juggling balls.