took me to an ornate but grimy building in the Jewish ghetto. It was here that a countess had been stabbed to death by one of her many lovers.
Dusk fell. As we walked back to the House of Shells, through the labyrinth of streets that encircled the ghetto, Fiore went into more detail about the murder. The lover’s knife had severed both the woman’s throat and the necklace she had been wearing, and on certain nights, if you listened carefully enough, you could hear the click-click-click of loose pearls bouncing down the stairs. Though Fiore was still talking, I had become distracted. Most of the shops near the Mercato Vecchio were hung with sheets of oiled paper or sealed with a single wooden shutter, but I had stopped, by chance, outside an establishment whose window was made of panes of glass. Judging by the many jars and bottles on display, it was an apothecary, though it didn’t appear to have a name, or even a sign. I moved nearer. As a boy, I had spent hours in apothecaries. Whenever my mother was taken ill, which happened much more often after my father’s death, one of my duties was to collect her medicines. While waiting, I would listen to the men who gathered in the shop – they talked about their families, their careers, and about religion and politics as well – and I soon realized that if you wanted to take the pulse of a city and learn the shape of its secrets, there was no better place to be. As I bent close to the glass to examine an array of herbs used against pregnancy – I recognized mugwort and juniper – a slender hand reached down and placed a new jar in the window. Looking up, my eyes met those of a young woman. Perhaps it was the pane of glass between us that gave me licence, or perhaps it was the unlikely marriage of her black hair and pale green eyes, but I remained quite still and stared at her until, at last, with the suggestion of a smile, she lowered her gaze and withdrew into the dark interior, and I was left to turn away and walk light-headed along the damp, shadowy gorge of an alley whose air in that moment, unaccountably, had filled with the seed-heads from dandelions, fragile, transparent, and whirling downwards in their thousands, like insubstantial, half-imagined snow. It wasn’t until I reached the corner that I remembered Fiore. I looked over my shoulder and saw her hurrying after me in her derelict, ill-fitting shoes.
Some days later, Signora de la Mar called through my door. ‘You have a visitor.’
I didn’t answer. I was working on a sketch of the girl I had seen, and didn’t want to be disturbed.
The door opened. ‘He’s from the palace.’
I looked round. The signora’s face was flushed, and not, I thought, because she had just climbed five flights of stairs.
She shrugged. ‘I can tell him you’re busy if you like.’
‘Perhaps I’d better see what it’s about.’
I followed her down to the parlour.
Standing with his back to the window was a man in opulent dark robes. He was heavily built, with a greying moustache. I put his age at about sixty.
‘The House of Shells,’ he said. ‘It’s some years since I was here.’ His voice was rich and succulent, a voice that was used to being listened to. ‘You know the story, I take it?’
I shook my head.
The signora’s husband came from Salamanca, he said, which was famous for pies filled with scallops. There was a house in the city that was tiled with scallop shells, apparently, and it had been the Spaniard’s dream to recreate the house in Florence. The winters were too wet, though, and the shells kept coming loose. Or else people would steal them. Little by little, he lost his strength, his sense of purpose.
‘And it was shellfish, oddly, that killed him in the end.’ He fingered his moustache. ‘You’re from Sicily, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘How long since you were there?’
‘Sixteen years.’
‘You don’t miss it?’
‘I miss it, yes.’ Why did his gentle probing unnerve me so? He was probably just being polite. ‘And you, sir? Where are you from?’
‘You don’t know who I am?’
‘You haven’t told me.’
Though my visitor remained quite motionless, he appeared, in that moment, to writhe or undulate, reminding me of something I had seen in the market in Palermo once – a snake rising, charmed, out of a basket. It only lasted a