Secrecy - By Rupert Thomson Page 0,58
‘the last time I ever saw him.’
It was around the time of her thirteenth birthday, and Remo stayed for three whole days. One afternoon, he went out hunting with another man from the village. When he returned, his lack of awkwardness with her and his exaggerated attempts to appear alert told her that he had been drinking. That evening, he settled at the kitchen table with a bottle of wine. Leaning against the wall with her hands trapped behind her, she watched him so closely that she could see the pulse beating in his neck. He had entered Tuscany illegally, he said, through the hills near Chiusi. He had risked everything to see her. If the authorities found out he had crossed the border, he would be thrown into prison, or even hanged. In the past, she had always let him speak, but this time she interrupted. She didn’t understand, she said. Why wasn’t he allowed to cross the border?
He drained his glass and poured another, then he said something that sent a thrill right through her.
‘You don’t know it, but you’re asking how you came to be born.’
When he was in his early twenties, he said, he had worked as a groom on one of the ducal estates. This was during the time of the Grand Duke’s famously tempestuous marriage.
‘It was a magnificent villa,’ he went on, ‘with its own private theatre, formal gardens, and a river nearby, but it was in the middle of nowhere – at least, that was how it seemed to the Grand Duke’s wife. She had become increasingly hysterical in Florence, and the Grand Duke thought that if he sent her to the country she might calm down, but she felt lonely and frightened. She was at the height of her beauty, and she was being buried. What if her light went out, the light that made her who she was? It was around that time that she started wearing black; she was in mourning for her life. She would come down to the stables every day – riding was her only consolation – and we would talk. She told me not to call her “Your Highness”. She wanted me to treat her like anybody else.’
Faustina asked what they had talked about.
Remo laughed. ‘Well, actually, she did all the talking. I just listened.’
She told him about visiting the court at Fontainebleau, and how she had fallen in love with her cousin, Charles. She showed him the ring Charles had given her. It was an opal, she said, a stone that stood for passion and spontaneity. I lost my wedding ring in the first week of my marriage. I still have this one, though. What does that tell you? How she had loved Fontainebleau! There was boating at midnight on candle-lit canals, dancing on carpets of rose petals. There were banquets that lasted from dusk till dawn. They drank snow-cooled wine, and dined on peacocks’ tongues and teal soup with hippocras and pies that sang because they were filled with nightingales. Beef was served in a gold leaf sauce. You ate gold? Yes. To make us strong. She talked about those days as old people talk about their youth – and she was only twenty-one! But it was a time when she had been happy – deliriously happy – and she seemed to know that it would never come again.
One wet afternoon, while he was polishing saddles in the tack room, the curtain of rain in the doorway parted to reveal the Grand Duke’s wife, a lilac umbrella open above her head, her eyes glowing underneath.
‘I’ve given Malvezzi the slip,’ she said.
Malvezzi, her chamberlain, had been instructed to follow her everywhere and report on her behaviour. Ever since his arrival at the villa, she had delighted in torturing the poor man by going on walks that lasted hours, knowing full well that he was overweight, and had no chance of keeping up.
She lowered her umbrella. ‘How long have we known each other, Remo?’
In his opinion, they hardly knew each other at all, but he wasn’t in a position to say so.
‘About two months.’
‘And what do you think of me?’ she said. ‘Do you find me boring? I’m always talking, after all – talking my head off.’ She walked in a tight circle just inside the stable door, water dripping from the tip of her umbrella. ‘You know, I’m not sure I’ve let you say anything, not in all the time we’ve spent together. Look at