his gaze he seemed to jerk in his chair, as though somebody had pricked him with a pin. She thought he had recognized her – or if not her exactly, something in her – but had convinced himself that he must be mistaken or deluded, since he immediately shook his head, adjusted the position of his cutlery, and then turned to the jewel-encrusted woman on his left and started talking about the extraordinary freedoms enjoyed by the female sex in England.
‘You think you reminded him of Marguerite-Louise?’ I said.
‘I don’t know. That’s what it felt like. It was strange – like being two people at once.’
‘He talks about her all the time – to me, anyway. He claims he still loves her. You know what he told me? He can’t see any trace of her in his children. He thinks she did it deliberately. Because they were his.’ I paused. When I took a breath, I could feel the fog collecting in my lungs. ‘Did you know she tried to kill them, before they were born?’
She was looking at me now. I could see the chips of silver where her eyes were.
Pennyroyal had been involved, I said, and elaterium, and nights of drinking and dancing. Snake root. Artemesia. Long rides on the fastest horses. None of it worked. Later, Marguerite-Louise tormented the Grand Duke by telling him their marriage was a travesty, and that they had committed fornication, and that all their children were bastards –
‘And then she had a real bastard,’ Faustina murmured. ‘Me.’
I reached out in the darkness and found her hand. ‘You might be the only child she ever really wanted.’
I was woken in the night by the low, excited murmur of men’s voices. Lying with Faustina’s head against my shoulder, I listened to the riffle and snap of playing cards, and the delicate, bright chink of coins. Signora de la Mar had told me about the illegal gambling dens that operated in the ghetto after dark. It had been one of her husband’s many weaknesses.
At dawn I was woken again by the grating of iron bolts. The ghetto gates were being opened. I moved my arm from behind Faustina’s back. Her eyes opened, and she sat up.
‘There’s something I forgot to tell you,’ she said.
Every year, her uncle travelled north to visit his suppliers. He would cement old relationships, forge new ones. In the past, she had run the apothecary in his absence, but this time he wanted her to go with him. She needed to start learning the business, he had told her, or she wouldn’t be able to take over when he was gone. She would be away for a couple of months.
‘When are you leaving?’
‘Before the end of the year.’
I walked to the window. The fog had lifted, and the sky was a mottled silver-grey, like the skin of a fish. Perhaps my sense that things were temporary had not been so wide of the mark.
‘Think how much work you’ll be able to do,’ she said lightly.
I had sensed the secrets in her long before we ever spoke; in fact, I often thought it was the parts of ourselves we kept from others that had brought us together. As I stood looking out over the jumbled, clandestine rooftops of the ghetto, it occurred to me that she might have revealed her origins to me precisely because she was about to go away. She wanted to show me that I had earned her trust. She might also think the knowledge would bind me to her still more closely.
‘Is it really true,’ I asked, ‘what you told me last night?’
‘I think so.’ She shifted on the sofa. ‘Why else would my father have made me promise to forget everything he’d said?’
I turned and looked at her, and suddenly I was frightened.
Though it had only been light for half an hour, the narrow streets were already choked with Jews leaving the ghetto to sell their merchandise – Dutch linen, kerchiefs, and batiste – and we were carried along on the jostling stream of people, through the gate and out into the Mercato Vecchio. As we came to the junction of Ferravecchi and Pellicceria, a black carriage swayed round the corner. On the door I glimpsed Bassetti’s coat of arms. I told Faustina she should leave.
‘Just go,’ I said. ‘Quickly.’
By the time the carriage drew level, she had blended with the crowd, and I had done my best to tidy my hair and straighten my clothes. Bassetti’s