Secrecy - By Rupert Thomson Page 0,59

you now. You’re just standing there. You can’t get a word in edgeways.’

Remo smiled. ‘I don’t find you boring.’

‘No?’

‘Quite the opposite.’

‘What do you mean by that, Remo? Put it in words, so I can understand.’ She issued her commands with such a light touch that they felt like invitations, and she had moved closer, close enough for him to be able to see the drops of rain on her black dress, close enough to sense the warmth of the skin beneath.

‘You –’

She moved closer still. No woman, it seemed, had ever stood so close.

‘Your voice –’

‘What about my voice?’

There was such a sweetness to her breath that he thought she might have eaten an apricot or a peach while crossing the garden. Though neither apricots nor peaches were in season.

‘What about my voice?’ she said again.

‘The way you speak. I suppose it’s because you’re French.’

‘You think I sound funny.’

‘No, I like it.’

A horse stirred behind him. The whisk of a tail. Hooves shifting, clumsy, in the straw.

‘I’ve never seen anyone as beautiful as you,’ he said. ‘It’s impossible, at times, to believe it. I think I must be dreaming. Imagining things. But then I realize that I’m awake, and that you’re real.’

‘How do you know I’m real?’

She was so much cleverer than he was. She knew how to manipulate a conversation, how to give it a different shape, a new direction. Six words was all it took.

‘How do you know?’

Her pupils widened suddenly, and he felt he was falling towards her, into her.

Her breath against his face.

‘Touch me,’ she said.

He stepped back.

‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘I’m not good enough for you?’

That lightness again.

The rain hung behind her, as hard to see through as a piece of gauze. The world lay beyond – inaccessible, remote. Or maybe it was right there with them, where they stood.

He did as she had asked.

Early the next morning, he saddled two of the finest horses in the stable, and they rode west, towards Pisa. The lead-grey air, the dull copper of the sun. The mist so close to the ground that a farmhouse seemed to float on it like an ark. They had not discussed what they would do when they reached the coast. He assumed she had a plan. She didn’t seem like somebody who would ever be short of ideas, though all of them would involve a gamble. Perhaps she would charter a boat, and they would set sail for the south of France. That, he thought, was her immediate aim: to escape the prison of her marriage. He was happy, for the moment, to be with her, but he didn’t dare to think too far ahead.

Just as well.

The authorities caught up with them in the wooded hills not far from Lake Fucecchio.

‘All right,’ Malvezzi wheezed. ‘The fun’s over.’

The Grand Duke’s wife was escorted back to the villa. Remo, suddenly alone, expected to be punished. The galleys at the very least. Even, possibly, execution. Instead, they sent him into exile, with a warning that he should never set foot in Tuscany again. Perhaps they knew the Grand Duke’s wife was responsible, and that he was no more than a pawn in one of her many games.

‘What they didn’t know,’ Remo told Faustina, as she listened open-mouthed, ‘what no one knew, not even me, was that you were already alive inside her – a small seed growing …’

Faustina stared at him. ‘The Grand Duke’s wife was my mother?’

He looked right through her, back into the past. He seemed to be having trouble believing it himself. It sounded like a story, even to the story-teller.

‘My mother,’ she said again.

‘You were conceived on horseback!’ Remo laughed in delight, then shot her a wary glance. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you that.’ He hit the side of his head and groaned. ‘I shouldn’t have told you anything. I’m an idiot.’ He hit himself again.

‘Don’t.’ She went round the table and held his head against her chest. She smelled woodsmoke on him, and dried sweat, and fifteen or twenty glasses of young red wine. And distantly, ever so distantly, she thought she could smell horses.

‘You must forget,’ he said, his eyes closed in a kind of agony. ‘I’m drunk. I got carried away. I’ve been talking nonsense.’

‘You’re drunk all right.’

He looked up at her and touched her cheek. ‘Sometimes, you know, you’re just like her. You’ve got the same spark –’

Just then, a woman’s voice interrupted Faustina’s story. It was coming from the window. We crept across