Secrecy - By Rupert Thomson Page 0,80

there was no one pulling on the rope. She watched a woman run past with a bird-cage, its tiny wire door flapping, nothing inside. She remembered her sister, and hurried back into the house. It was then that the ceiling collapsed. They were trapped in what remained of the hallway, not far from the front door. Luckily, it rained. They took turns drinking the black water that dripped down the walls. Later, after they had been dug out, they heard the ground had opened like a mouth. Modica, Ragusa and Scichilo were swallowed. Nothing but stinking, brackish pools where they had been. The sea had risen up; shoals of fish were found miles inland. She had seen a dead donkey in an orange tree.

Her jaw shifted, as if her teeth hurt. ‘All our family documents were lost. The record of who we are, and what we own. All gone. And people too – so many people …’

‘Flaminia’s all right, though?’

‘She’s in Palermo.’

‘Father Paone?’

‘Gone.’

There was nothing left of the house that Jacopo had built, she went on. Not a single stone. She had told him not to live out there. She had said it was dangerous. He wouldn’t listen, though. He never listened.

‘It was so brutal – so thorough.’ A shiver shook her. ‘But that isn’t what stays with me. What stays with me is that bird-cage, with its wire door flapping …’ She looked at me; her pupils had shrunk, and white showed above and below her irises. ‘I can see it now.’

Two months after my mother’s arrival in Florence, Jack Towne invited me to his villa near the Fortezza da Basso. On a hot, late August night I was shown into a parlour and asked to wait. With its muted furnishings and its padded walls, the room had the deep, airless silence of a mausoleum. Though I barely knew the man, somehow this seemed in character.

A quarter of an hour passed, and still Towne did not appear. I opened the door to the adjoining room and stepped inside. The silence intensified. There were three sofas upholstered in dark velvet – chocolate, damson, aubergine – and fixed to the ceiling was a large round mirror. The tapestry at the far end of the room depicted a scene of such complex debauchery that I had to turn myself almost upside-down to make out what was going on. In the corner, on a pedestal, stood a life-size sculpture of a goat. The burnt vermilion glaze told me it was Marvuglia’s work.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting.’

I swung round.

Towne came forwards, smiling. ‘You went to see Marvuglia, didn’t you? He told me.’ One hand on my shoulder, he guided me back into the other room. ‘What did you think?’

I spoke about Marvuglia’s colours, and how they conveyed injury and torment.

‘And the man himself?’ Towne said.

‘I imagine he’s got enemies.’

Towne nodded.

Our conversation turned to the prints and drawings that were his stock-in-trade. I was curious to know what sort of work the Grand Duke had bought from him. Towne looked at me steadily. A two-headed calf, he said. A dwarf. Anything deformed or freakish. I remembered the armless German and fell silent, wondering what place I occupied in the Grand Duke’s collection, but when Towne produced a folio of drawings of people who had contracted syphilis I was suddenly glad that I had come. I had been planning a series of pieces based on pleasure and its consequences, and the drawings would be invaluable as reference. Towne was a hard bargainer. At last, though, we agreed on a price.

To celebrate our transaction – the first of many, he hoped – he insisted that I dine with him. In my opinion, we had less in common than he supposed, and I was eager to get away, but he wouldn’t listen to my excuses. He took me to the Eagle, an eating-house near Via Tornabuoni. To my dismay, the first person I saw when I walked in was Stufa. He was sitting at a table with Bassetti. Before I could suggest a change of venue, though, Towne had called out a greeting. It appeared he knew them both.

After the initial courtesies, during which Stufa acted as if I wasn’t there, Bassetti turned to me. ‘I hope your mother’s settling in.’

‘She is. Thank you.’ I hadn’t told the Grand Duke about my mother’s arrival, let alone Bassetti, but this was his way of reminding me that nothing escaped his attention.

‘She was lucky to survive,’ he said.

‘Yes, she was.’

‘And