my hand over the surface, which was pockmarked and granular, like certain cheeses, I leaned down and breathed it in. Such a delicious, complex smell.
I lit a small fire in the grate, then shaved a wedge off the block and began to heat it in a copper-bottomed pan.
‘Are you cooking?’
I had been so absorbed that I hadn’t heard Fiore enter. She was over by the door, chewing on her lower lip.
‘In a way.’ I tilted the pan, and we both watched the wax spill across the copper, faster than water. ‘Some sculptors make things out of wood or marble, but this is what I use.’
‘It smells like church.’
I took the pan off the fire and stood it on a metal trivet. ‘You know why?’
She shook her head.
‘This is what candles are made of,’ I said. ‘The more expensive candles, anyway. But you can make other things as well. Arms and legs. Heads. You can make whole people. Wax is the closest thing we have to skin and bone. Sometimes you can hardly tell the difference.’
‘When you talk about wax,’ Fiore said, ‘your voice changes completely.’
‘You don’t miss much, do you?’
She grinned.
Her mother had been with us the last time we were together, and I hadn’t had a chance to ask her the question that had been on my mind for several days. I had been unable to forget the girl I had seen in the apothecary window, and how she had stepped back into the shop’s interior with just the suggestion of a smile. I didn’t think that I’d imagined it. I had tried drawing her from memory – without success. I had also spent an entire afternoon doing my best to retrace Fiore’s route. Since she had been in charge, though, I hadn’t paid much attention to the sequence of the streets, let alone their names – I hadn’t known it was going to be so important – and while I had the feeling, more than once, that I was close – the iron studs on a front door, the fall of bleak light into a courtyard – I had failed to find the place.
‘On our tour of the city,’ I said, ‘we stopped outside an apothecary …’
Fiore’s eyes seemed to lose their focus.
‘It was in a narrow street,’ I said. ‘Quite dark.’
‘Most of the streets are like that.’
‘But I stopped, remember? I looked through the window.’
‘You looked through lots of windows.’
I tried to be patient. ‘This one was made of glass. Small glass panes.’
Fiore shrugged.
‘The shop was closed up for the night,’ I said, ‘so all I did was stand outside, and when I walked on there were dandelions floating in the air – thousands of dandelions –’
‘Dandelions?’ She wound a tangled strand of hair around her forefinger.
I was making her feel awkward, stupid – the way other people made her feel – but I had to keep probing.
‘You got left behind,’ I said. ‘You had to run to catch up. Don’t you remember?’
‘Sort of.’
It was no good. And if Fiore couldn’t help me, no one could. I would have to forget about the girl. I let out a sigh, then looked towards the window. Having to forget: I was used to that.
As Fiore turned to leave, the loose sole of her shoe caught on the uneven floorboards, and she almost fell.
‘I’m so clumsy,’ she wailed.
‘It’s not you,’ I said. ‘It’s those terrible shoes. How long have you had them?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You know what? Tomorrow, I’m going to buy you a new pair.’
I saw excitement in her face, and disbelief, but most of all I saw a kind of longing, and I realized, in that moment, just how little she got by on, how little she was given.
I had taken the Grand Duke up on his offer of the disused stables as a place to work, but there were walls to knock down and windows to install, and while the outbuildings were being converted I put in an appearance at court. Since everyone had their own carefully calibrated and highly symbolic position in the room, I had no way of approaching him, not unless he summoned me himself, and he was preoccupied that day, showing off a relic he had recently acquired, so I hung about on the fringes of the crowd, finding the whole experience stilted and strangely enervating. Then Bassetti came over.
‘How did you like the truffle?’
He seemed once again to writhe or coil beneath his clothes, a sudden, subtle oscillation that was over almost before