Secrecy

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.

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.

‘What is it?’ Mimmo asked.

‘Nothing.’

I thought of what Stufa had said to Zumbo not long before his fatal plunge into the well. There are things you’ll never know. Zumbo hadn’t understood what Stufa had meant by that. I didn’t either. Perhaps it was the key to everything, or perhaps it was just pure bluster. It turned out that Stufa had been right, though, in ways he could never have imagined …

With a start, I remembered the baby Zumbo had made and then concealed inside the body of the girl. It wasn’t the Grand Duke’s future he had predicted. It was his own. Not a precaution, then, as he had intended, not a homage either, but a prophecy. A kind of self-portrait.

Secrecy had many faces. If it was imposed on you, against your will, it could be a scourge — the bane of your existence. On the other hand, you might well seek it out. Nurture it. Rely on it. You might find life impossible without it. But there was a third kind of secrecy, which you carried unknowingly, like a disease, or like the hour of your death. Things could be kept from you, maybe for ever.

The girl had pressed herself against Mimmo, though her eyes were fixed on me. I told her to come closer. She hesitated.

‘Suppose I show you my ring,’ I said.

Her gaze dropped to the opal. Charles had told me it was a symbol of passion and spontaneity, which had seemed so clever at the time — perfect, really — but as the years had passed those words had been replaced by others. Passion, yes. But thwarted. Incomplete.

Slowly, the girl detached herself, and came and stood in front of me.

‘It looks milky, doesn’t it,’ I said, ‘but if you tilt it you see all the colours of the rainbow.’

‘Are you a queen?’

‘I used to be.’

‘Not any more?’

‘No. I live in a convent now.’

She stared at me without saying anything. She was standing so close that I could hear her breath. In that moment I sensed something in her eyes. A watchfulness that came from somewhere beyond her. Real and yet intangible, like an echo or a draught. The presence of another.

‘It’s near Paris,’ I said. ‘Do you know where Paris is?’

‘France.’

‘Very good.’ I took off the opal and slid it on to the girl’s ring finger. It would be years before it fitted. ‘Your father’s going to look after this for you until you’re grown.’ Mimmo started to protest, but I talked over him. ‘Please. I want her to have it.’

Later, when she had left the room, I stood up. ‘There’s something else.’ I produced a purse. ‘I brought this for Faustina.’

He kept his hands on the back of the chair as someone else might keep his hands in his pockets. ‘She wouldn’t have accepted it.’

I put the purse on the table. ‘Use it for your daughter.’

He struggled over to the window, a curious five-legged creature with rounded shoulders and dusty hair. ‘You’re not going to take her away from me, then?’

‘No.’ I joined him at the window. It was late afternoon, and Luisa was on the terrace below, watering the geraniums. ‘But one day, perhaps, you’ll tell her who the ring was from.’

He nodded. ‘One day.’

I looked at the groove on my finger — a new absence, a lightness, an unexpected sense of release.

Luisa had moved on to the pots of basil and oregano. She held the bucket of water in both hands, careful not to spill a drop.

‘If Faustina knew about me,’ I said, ‘why didn’t she look for me?’

‘Perhaps she was proud.’ He glanced at me sidelong. ‘Or stubborn.’

Like her mother, I thought he meant.

When I left his house, I closed the green door gently behind me. The air still smelled of warm stone, but the sun had gone. In half an hour the village streets would be filled with people drawn outside by the coolness of the evening. Blue smoke lifting from the chimneys, the cries of children. Fireflies glinting like sparks in the darkness of the olive groves. I would already have started for the border by then. It was a long journey back.