had frozen, he told me. Higher up, beyond the Pescaia. He was hoping to sell his load to the ice house in San Frediano. Near the Duomo, I came across two police officers, recognizable by their swords and their grey jackets. They were rousing a man who was slumped against the gates of a palazzo. Sleeping on the street was illegal, they told him. He should go to the Albergo dei Poveri – the Paupers’ Hotel – where he would be given a bed. Not long afterwards, as I passed behind San Lorenzo, I saw a woman leaning against a wall, one hand propped on her hip, a jaunty yellow ribbon in her hair.
‘You look sweet,’ she said, her breath like smoke. ‘Not Jewish, are you?’
A whore could be flogged for sleeping with a Jew. This was one of the Grand Duke’s recent initiatives.
‘I’m Sicilian,’ I said.
‘Cristo santo, I’m not sure which is worse.’
I don’t know whether it was her smile, which was charmingly crooked, or the slight catch in her voice, a kind of huskiness, but I followed her across the street and up a creaky flight of stairs to a small back room with an unmade bed and a brazier of hot coals in the corner.
‘Nice and warm in here,’ she said.
She took off her clothes and lay on the bed, and I could see from the smooth, faintly concave stomach that she was young, no more than seventeen. I leaned down and kissed the mossy darkness of her armpits.
‘No one ever did that before,’ she said.
I drew back. With her arms flung behind her head and a sheet twisting down between her legs, she reminded me of Poussin’s ‘Sleeping Venus’ – she had the same boldness and sensuality – and I decided there and then to reacquaint myself with the Frenchman’s paintings before I started work on the commission.
The young woman asked me, lazily, what I was looking at.
‘You’re giving me ideas,’ I said.
She laughed.
I leaned down again and ran my tongue from her belly-button to her clitoris, taking my time to connect the two. Her skin tasted of rose-water, and also of saltpetre, and I was reminded, incongruously, of the Guazzi twins.
‘No one ever did that either,’ she murmured.
‘Maybe you should be paying me.’
‘Cheeky bastard.’
She twisted round and took me in her mouth. Unlike other women I had known, she didn’t hurry. It felt more like an exploration than a rhythm, her lips still, only her tongue moving. She understood how to make the pleasure last, and swallowed everything that came out of me.
‘Aren’t you going to penetrate me?’ she said. ‘I like to be penetrated.’
An hour later, as I walked back to my lodgings, a woman opened a first-floor window and leaned out. I jumped backwards, thinking she was about to empty a chamber pot. She laughed and offered to lower her price, seeing as how she had given me such a shock.
‘You’re too late,’ I said. ‘I’ve already been with someone.’
The woman looked back the way I had come. ‘I hope it wasn’t Cristofana. She’s got every disease under the sun.’
Her cackle followed me as I moved on.
Dawn was a slit of rose in a brown sky. The streets creaked in the cold. I was no closer to solving the conundrum I had set myself, but I felt I had learned something, both from the Englishman and from the whore, and as I climbed into bed I comforted myself by repeating the Grand Duke’s words: Take all the time you need.
At the end of a day’s work, I would often wander in the palace grounds. Sometimes I would pass the modest garden that backed on to the convent of San Giorgio, attracted by the perfume of its many exotic plants. Like the Vasari Corridor, it was reserved for the Grand Duke and his immediate family, and I wasn’t allowed inside. Other times, I would visit the menagerie, where monkeys swung fluidly through the upper reaches of their cages, frowning like old men, and vultures shifted and sulked, their plumage the stiff dull black of widows’ weeds. Crevalcuore, the man who tended the animals, made himself scarce whenever I appeared. Like me, he guarded his privacy fiercely. Or perhaps he was just shy.
One evening in March, I found myself on the Viottolone, a grand sloping avenue lined with laurel trees and cypresses. Halfway down the hill, I turned left, making for the circular maze near the eastern wall. I was thinking about the girl who