Secrecy - By Rupert Thomson Page 0,32

it had achieved the correct consistency, I began to apply it to her hands.

‘It feels warm,’ she said.

‘It’s supposed to,’ I told her. ‘If it didn’t heat up, it wouldn’t harden.’

As I worked, the image of Faustina came to me, Faustina with the last rays of the setting sun behind her, Faustina edged in bright flame like a descending angel. I’ve found you, I thought. I’ve finally found you.

I glanced up to see Fiore staring at me.

‘Why are you smiling?’ she said.

Friday came. We left the city not long after dawn, and soon found ourselves on a sunken track that headed east. The grass-covered banks were planted with olive trees, their trunks stunted and flaky, silver-grey, while ahead of us sprawled a range of sun-bleached hills whose tops were concealed by cloud. It was the end of September, and the weather was humid; every once in a while, I had to take a deep breath so as to shift the air at the bottom of my lungs. We passed an abandoned farmhouse. A single peach tree stood on the land, a few reddish-orange globes clustered in its branches like a mocking variation on the Grand Duke’s coat of arms.

I had set out from my lodgings when it was still dark, afraid I would be unable to locate the apothecary, but when I led the two horses up the needle-narrow alley off Via Lontanmorti, I had the feeling I had been there before, and not just on the day of Fiore’s tour either. I was sure I had walked beneath its blackened arches, past its ulcerated walls, over its uneven, pitted paving stones. How could that be, though? I knocked on the apothecary door. A twitchy, dark-haired man let me in. Faustina was still upstairs, he said, but she would be down soon. When I told him his establishment was almost impossible to find, he nodded with a curious, modest complacency, as if I had paid him a compliment. There was no name, I said. There wasn’t even a sign.

‘If I might correct you.’ The man led me outside and indicated a number of stones set into the masonry some distance above the door. ‘That’s our sign. Over the years, it has become our name as well.’ He waited until I saw how the eight stones formed the rough shape of a question mark, then excused himself and withdrew into a dim back room, where he bent over a wooden box, sorting seeds with darting fingers.

As we rode eastwards, I turned to Faustina and asked who the man was.

‘My uncle,’ she said. ‘Giuseppe.’

‘I thought you must be related. You have the same quickness about you.’

She looked at me as if she thought I might be finding fault.

‘It’s a good quality,’ I said. ‘It makes you seem more alive than other people.’

‘You’ve got an odd way of talking.’

‘You mean my accent?’

‘No, the things you say.’ She hesitated. ‘Though your accent isn’t one I’ve heard before.’

I smiled. ‘That present you sent me …’

‘The oil or the fruit?’

‘The oil.’

‘Have you used it yet?’

I looked at her. ‘Not yet.’

‘It will keep your hands really supple – not just the skin, the joints as well –’

‘My hands?’

When I told Faustina what Beanpole had said, she covered her mouth.

Then, out of embarrassment, perhaps, she suggested I race her to a line of cypresses about a mile ahead. Without waiting for a response, she touched her heels to her horse’s flanks. I galloped after her, but she was already disappearing into the distance. By the time I caught up, she had dismounted, and her horse was drinking from a nearby stream.

‘You ride beautifully,’ I told her. ‘I didn’t stand a chance.’

‘I cheated – and anyway, I’ve got the faster animal.’

I had sensed this tendency in her before, when we first met on the street. She would invent half-truths that were detrimental to her. She ducked praise as others ducked blows.

I asked her how she’d learned.

‘A man called Sabatino Vespi taught me,’ she said. ‘My father worked with horses, though, so maybe it’s in the blood.’

She told me that when her father rode he seemed to float above the saddle, only connected to the horse by the most intangible of threads. His hands on the reins, his feet in the stirrups – but lightly, ever so lightly. They were like completely separate beings who just happened to be travelling in the same direction, at the same speed. It was a perfect understanding, harmony made visible.

She shook her head. ‘I’ll