what country I was in. England, perhaps. There were wild animals nearby, but I didn’t feel in any danger. The air was warm, the ground soft and yet resilient. To be alive was such a blessing, such a –
‘Zummo?’
Dazed, I sprang out of the chair. The Grand Duke was standing by the door. He wore a cream-coloured wig and scarlet clothes, the fabric glittering with gem-stones and trimmed with little clouds of fur. He must have come straight from an important engagement. I apologized for having dozed off.
‘You work harder than any of us,’ he said. ‘You put us to shame.’
‘I doubt that very much, Your Highness.’
He was weary too, he told me. He had spent most of the afternoon with an Austrian diplomat, one of Leopold I’s advisers, who was intent on involving him in a political manoeuvre that didn’t interest him in the slightest.
‘But let us put all that aside.’ Sinking down on to a chair, the Grand Duke eyed me from beneath his heavy lids.
I took hold of the muslin and pulled it in such a way that the girl was gradually revealed. The Grand Duke’s plump lips parted, and he gripped the arms of his chair as if frightened he might be swept away. His knuckles had whitened over the lions’ paws. Not wanting to break the spell, I stood quite still.
Finally, the Grand Duke rose to his feet. He advanced on the reclining figure cautiously, on tiptoe. She appeared to have made a child of him. He stopped beside her, one hand wrapped around his mouth and chin.
‘But this is perfect,’ he murmured.
Only then, as the air rushed out of me, did I realize I had been holding my breath. I hadn’t betrayed him or embarrassed him. I wouldn’t be required to defend myself.
‘This is better than I could ever have expected.’ He turned away, and the look he gave me when he reached the far side of the room could almost have been mistaken for pity. ‘You’re a master.’
‘For weeks, Your Highness,’ I said, ‘I worked on nothing but the colour of her skin.’
‘I can imagine.’
I had used a wide range of pigments, I told him, some organic, some man-made. I had used lead-white for her face. Gold-leaf too. And champagne chalk from Northern France. I had used smalt and malachite for her armpits, dragon’s blood and fustic for her thighs.
‘But the texture was no less important,’ I went on.
I had experimented with Turkish wax, which had a vivid orange-red colour to it, and wax from Madagascar, which was sandy brown and alluringly aromatic. I had imported wax from Senegal, but it smelled so pungent that I found myself recoiling. I had even worked with wax extracted from cabbages and plums. I had adulterated my waxes with fine resins, animal fats, kaolin, ochre, marble dust, and tallow. After hundreds of hours of trial and error, I had produced a wax the like of which had never been seen before, a wax both tactile and resilient, a wax as fleshy as flesh itself.
The Grand Duke was nodding. ‘She looks so real. If she were to sit up, or turn over, or even speak, somehow I wouldn’t be surprised.’ He laughed in disbelief at what he was saying, then seemed to shiver. Was he after all aware of a transgression of some kind? ‘Remind me how long this has taken.’
‘More than a year.’
‘It was worth the wait.’
I thanked him.
‘One thing.’ With a thoughtful expression, he moved back towards the girl. He seemed bolder suddenly, and more complacent, as if in the brief moments he had spent on the far side of the room he had become accustomed to her existence. As if, by removing himself, he had taken ownership. The speed of the transition startled me, but perhaps it illustrated his sense of prerogative. As the Grand Duke, he was used to receiving extraordinary gifts. I watched as he traced the dip in the muscle of her upper arm, the slow curve of her jaw. ‘Could you give her some hair?’
‘She already has hair,’ I said. Then, feeling foolish, I added, ‘On her head.’
‘But not,’ he said, ‘elsewhere …’
I found myself staring, but he was gazing up at the domed ceiling.
‘I used to play in here when I was young,’ he said. ‘I would hide from Bandinelli.’
‘He was your tutor, wasn’t he?’
‘My mother likes to say he was the one who made me what I am.’ The Grand Duke smiled bleakly, then looked beyond me, at