I brushed into the moulds was too low, its integrity might be impaired or even destroyed by the next layer that was applied. To the blend of beeswax and carnauba I added lead-white, which I hoped would guarantee the pearly quality I had admired in the paintings of Correggio. Translucency was desirable in itself, but it would also allow subsequent and more heavily pig mented layers to show through from underneath. I would be able to conjure a shadow in some places, a blush in others.
So strange, Faustina being gone. Like a throwback to the days when I had no idea who she was or where she lived, when I had no hope of ever seeing her again. I would stare at the drawing I had made of her. Though it was a good likeness, it didn’t bring her any closer. If anything, in fact, a gap began to open up between the image, which was static, and the complex, fluid person I was only just beginning to know. She became distant, improbable, and there were moments when I suspected that our whole relationship was wishful thinking, and all the stories she had told me were invented – which, oddly enough, was how they had seemed at the time.
But there was an aspect to all this that was even stranger. Perversely, as Faustina became more insubstantial, and harder to believe in, the girl I was working on emerged, took shape. On the day when I gently prised the first completed mould apart and lifted out the unknown girl’s left arm, I realized there was an eerie correlation between my experience and that of the Grand Duke, a correlation that was bound, at some as yet uncharted level, to draw us closer: I missed Faustina, just as he missed Marguerite-Louise, and if Faustina’s story about her origins was true, then the object of my longing was the offspring of his.
Though I had preserved the carving of the dog’s head, both in the form of a mould, and as a specimen, in alcohol, I sometimes worried that it might not be enough to protect me. Or, to put it another way, I kept feeling there was a shortfall in the work itself, a connection I had failed to make.
Then, on a frosty January morning, the Grand Duke’s head gardener, Navacchio, appeared in the doorway to my workshop. He was a diligent, thoughtful man with thinning hair and abnormally large ears; whenever I saw those fleshy lobes, in fact, I was tempted to reach out and give one of them a playful tug. He was sorry to disturb me, he said, but he had been growing fruit out of season, in a glasshouse of his own design, and he would appreciate my opinion. He handed me a peach from the basket he was carrying.
I cut the peach in half, and as I stared at the dark-red stone at the heart of the fruit I felt something skip or catch inside me. I found myself thinking once again of Faustina’s scandalous conception. What had her father said? A small seed growing … I stood back, the halved peach lying on the table. Of course. Yes. That was it. I would place a baby in the belly of the girl. On the outside, she would be everything the Grand Duke was hoping she would be – an archetype, a beauty, a kind of Eve. Inside her, though, there would be a child that had grown to full term, and was ready to be born.
Navacchio was fiddling with the handle of his basket. ‘You’re not going to try it?’
I took a bite. The flesh was much crisper and more tart than I had expected.
‘Interesting,’ I said.
‘You don’t like it.’
‘I do. But it reminds me of an apple.’
If Navacchio was disappointed by my response, he gave no sign of it. He just nodded gravely, thanked me and turned away.
I should have been thanking him. For the next two weeks, I worked on the new idea, adapting a mould I had brought from Naples. Though the child would be hidden, and might never be seen, by anyone, it would have to be as beautiful as the girl who was going to carry it. I gave it flawless skin and sleek black hair. Its hands were tucked beneath its chin, its knees drawn up towards its chest. The umbilical cord, whose blood vessels were visible as strands of turquoise and orange, coiled under its left wrist, then over its