face appeared, almost as if he had known I would be there. He was on his way to the palace, he said. Would I care for a lift? I thanked him and climbed in.
Once I was seated, he gave me a subtle, searching look. ‘You’re up early.’ His voice was all syrup and fur, as usual.
‘I was out walking, Don Bassetti,’ I said. ‘I like to watch the city wake.’
‘Florence inspires you?’
‘Yes.’
He was mortified, he said, on account of his continuing failure to visit my workshop. He felt he owed me an apology. He was doing me a great honour even to think of visiting, I told him. It would be a miracle if he could find the time, preoccupied as I knew him to be with such weighty matters. But Bassetti would not be mollified, or even sidetracked. He began to discuss the delights and dangers of works made out of wax. He was curious to learn my views on what he called ‘the disorderly imagination’. He had heard of wax figures being used in love spells, for example. Death threats too. An effigy had even featured in a plot to kill a king. One’s approach to wax was like one’s approach to life itself, I said. It depended entirely on your moral sense. Wax could lead you into temptation. Wax could deliver you from evil. Bassetti sank into a pensive silence, his forefinger laid on his moustache, his thumb beneath his chin.
He seemed to be worrying at the subject without quite knowing why. It was as if he sensed the existence of the secret commission, but couldn’t give it a name or a shape. In spite of that, I found him good company, genial but perceptive, and it was on that morning, as we jolted over the Ponte Santa Trinità, that I decided to take his amiability at face value. His conversation with Stufa after the banquet was the kind of conversation he would have had about any new arrival in the city. It was necessary vigilance. Standard procedure. I shouldn’t overestimate my own importance. And as for those disturbing, snake-like oscillations, I hadn’t noticed them of late.
All the same, I was relieved he hadn’t seen me with Faustina. In recent months, the Office for Public Decency had become less tolerant, and the penalties for even the most innocuous transgressions were unremittingly harsh. Men found to have entered houses that were inhabited by unmarried women had been thrown into prison, and one youth had been sent to the galleys in Livorno, simply because he had stopped on the street and talked to a girl in an upstairs window. If you were in a tavern and you mentioned any kind of illicit behaviour, people would hold their hands out, loosely clenched, and make sinister rowing motions, and there was a renewed appetite for public floggings and other such brutalities. Even though I met Faustina secretly, in out-of-the-way places, I was under no illusion about the risks we were running. The fewer people who knew about us, the better.
What’s more, her latest revelations had triggered a whole new set of anxieties. How would the Grand Duke and his advisers react if they learned of her true identity? Given the intense speculation surrounding the succession and the fatalistic air that hung over the palace, it seemed likely they would view her as a threat. The last thing the Grand Duke would want in these troubled times was for his wife’s infidelity to manifest itself. At the very least, Faustina would be living proof of his dishonour, a reminder of his weakness – a source of shame. All things considered, maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea if she disappeared for a while.
When Faustina and her uncle left the city, towards the end of December, I occupied myself with the Grand Duke’s commission to the exclusion of all else, setting myself the target of finishing by the time they returned. The winter was cold and wet that year – the amphitheatre in the palace gardens flooded, and the Arno almost burst its banks – and I put in long days in my workshop.
I was embarking on the most difficult part of the process. After countless experiments, I decided to combine yellow beeswax with a more resilient wax imported from Brazil. Carnauba, as it was known, was hard and brittle, and it melted at a much higher temperature than other waxes. This was crucial. If the melting point of the first layer that