never be able to ride like that.’
Towards midday we stopped at an inn on the edge of a village. A white ox lay in the muddy yard. An old woman was standing nearby, arms folded, legs apart. When she saw us, she turned and went inside. We followed her. The floor was dirty, and the air smelled of cold grease. I ordered wine. She didn’t have any wine, she said with a sour face. All she had was acquerello, a drink made from water and the dregs of crushed grapes. She seemed to resent our presence, even though she must have depended on people like us to earn a living.
We took a table by the door.
‘I think you know what I’m going to ask,’ I said.
Faustina looked at me and waited.
‘You work in an apothecary, but you were in the palace on the night of the banquet …’
‘That’s your question?’
I nodded.
‘There’s a reason,’ she said, ‘but I can’t tell you – at least, not yet.’ She sipped her acquerello. ‘It was nothing to do with you.’
The old woman brought us a thin rice broth, a plate of white beans and some cold cabbage. I asked for bread. She didn’t have any. As we ate, Faustina spoke about her childhood, which she had spent in Torremagna, a hill-top village south-east of Siena. She had lived with her father’s sister, Ginevra Ferralis, in a house whose back wall formed part of the old fortifications. She had grown up thinking of Ginevra as her mother. Ginevra had sharp elbows and long, slightly bandy legs, and there was a violet smear on her left cheek, as if she had been out gathering wild berries and had reached up absentmindedly to wipe her face. She had never married, though she had been engaged to the son of a local judge, who had left her for a richer woman only a few weeks before the wedding. She learned the bitter coin-taste of abandonment, and no man was allowed into the house again, except for Sabatino Vespi, who courted her for a decade and didn’t get over the threshold more than a handful of times.
Vespi was much older than Ginevra, Faustina said, and though he lived on a ridge outside Torremagna, he spent most afternoons on a plot of land at the foot of the village walls, directly below Ginevra’s house. It was there, on a west-facing slope, that he grew the fruit and vegetables that he sold in the nearby market town. Faustina would often go with him. They would leave so early that stars would still be scattered across the sky, and she would sit on the tailboard, facing backwards, her bare feet dangling above the white dust road. Wrapped in a rug that smelled of earth, she would watch as the dark shapes of scrub oaks, pines and cypresses jolted by.
One Tuesday morning, when she was nine or ten, he broke a long silence with a question that caught her off guard, though she knew, with the uncanny, unearned certainty of a child, that this was a subject he had been turning over in his mind for years. ‘Do you think your mother would ever marry me?’
‘Do you want to marry her?’
‘Oh, yes.’
Intrigued by the force he had put into the words, she scrambled over the heaps of onions and garlic, and climbed up on to the bench-seat.
‘So you love her?’
Vespi looked towards the moon, which had faded as the darkness faded, and was now no more than a chalk scratch on the slowly heating pale blue of the sky.
‘I loved her long before she got engaged,’ he said. ‘I loved her before she knew what love was. I loved her first.’
She had never heard him talk about his feelings before – it hadn’t occurred to her that he might have any – and she stared at his battered, unshaven features with a kind of awe.
‘Does she know that?’
‘No.’
‘You never told her?’
‘I should have. I was too shy, though.’ He looked at her. ‘You think it’s too late?’
If she tried to imagine Ginevra’s heart, she saw wood-shavings, and bacon-rind, and thin, curling off-cuts of boot-leather. It was like peering into the corner of a shed, or into a room that was hardly ever used. She hoped her heart never looked like that.
Vespi saw that she had no reply for him. ‘You do, don’t you? You think it’s too late for poor old Vespi.’
Once, when Vespi appeared at the house with a basket of his