Secrecy Read Free

thousands of bits of string that were being knotted randomly, and at great speed. In the small hours I left the bed and parted the strips of oiled cloth that hung against the window. A view of towers and domes, and beyond them, darker than the sky, the ridge where I had stood a few hours earlier.
    As I leaned on the sill, a dream came back to me. I had been climbing a steep staircase in the dark. When I reached the landing, I stumbled towards a door that opened as I approached. Inside the room was a man sitting on the floor with his back against the wall. I knew him to be the Grand Duke, though he lacked the ripe lips and protruding eyes the Medici family were famous for. In fact, with his ruddy cheeks and his fair hair, he resembled my brother Jacopo – Jacopo the source of all my hardship and misfortune. The Grand Duke acknowledged me, but appeared preoccupied. He was gazing at his right hand, which had closed into a fist. I thought he might have caught a fly in it, and listened for a faint, furious buzzing. I heard nothing.
    Later, he led me out into the garden. Though it was evening, the sky glowed with a pale intensity. We walked side by side, at ease in one another’s company. I didn’t feel obliged to speak, and nor, it seemed, did he. It was as if we had known each other all our lives.
    We came to the end of a path, and it was then that he spoke for the first time. He had been told, he said quietly, that I had betrayed him. Was that true? I stepped over to a stone balustrade , hoping to appear untroubled, innocent. On the other side, the land dropped hundreds of feet, the view pure vertigo. In a panic, I asked him what he was holding. His teeth showed in an unnerving smile. I felt I had fallen into a carefully laid trap, and yet he didn’t answer my question, nor did he open that conundrum of a fist.
    I turned from the window. As I got back into bed, a man began to talk somewhere close by, his voice lowered to a growl, and though I couldn’t make out any of the words, I thought I heard defiance and regret. In the morning, when I mentioned the episode to the signora, she told me it sounded like her husband , though he had died a long time ago, the year the ostrich escaped from the Grand Duke’s menagerie and ran over the Ponte Vecchio, a crowd of people following behind and copying its jerky movements. She was smiling at the memory and shaking her head, and it was too late by then to offer my condolences. Actually, she went on, it might have been Ambrose Cuif, the Frenchman, whom I had heard. He lived above me, on the top floor, and suffered from insomnia – though, come to think of it, his voice was light and high-pitched, almost like a girl’s. Perhaps, in the end, I had been dreaming.
    ‘Perhaps,’ I said.

     
    During that first week I was woken one morning by a tapping on my door. When I asked who it was, there was no reply. I opened the door. Looked out. The stairwell was empty; voices floated up from the tavern far below. On the floor only inches from my toes was something long and papery, fragile as a strip of worn grey silk. Bending down, I saw it was a skin shed by a snake. Somehow I knew the signora’s daughter, Fiore, was responsible, and when I saw her next, in the parlour by the front entrance, I thanked her for the gift. She blushed and ran from the room, knocking a small table with her hip on the way out. A vase rocked on its base, but didn’t topple.
    The signora glanced up from her accounts. ‘She seems to have taken a shine to you.’
    That afternoon, I asked Fiore if she would consider showing me the city. She bit her bottom lip, then turned and moved towards to the window. Outside, a drizzle fell, as fine as pins. There might be a couple of places, she said at last, which she could take me to.
    By the following day, the weather had cleared, and we set out beneath a hot blue sky. Fiore led the way. Her lumbering walk, her oddly decorated hair. But she had a queenly air about her – she