The Girl with the Painted Face

by Gabrielle Kimm

  A heavy, corpulent man, almost bald apart from a thick fringe around the back of his head at ear level, pushes back his chair with an audible scrape and stands. ‘Of course they want us to think she didn’t do it, but I don’t care a damn what they say. I’ve been told there’s an eyewitness and I’m having this girl. I’ve been waiting for a clear-cut case like this to make plain exactly how well we intend to deal with scum, and I’m not letting it slip away.’

  ‘But with respect, Signor da Budrio, you need to talk to these people – there are hundreds of them out there!’

  ‘So you say.’ Da Budrio raises an eyebrow. ‘And I expect they’d like to think themselves an effective insurrection. Well… we’ll see about that.’ And, lifting an elbow high and screwing up the side of his face as he scratches behind an ear, Signor da Budrio strides from the meeting room.

  He nears the bottom of the second staircase, and realizes that from outside in the piazza, a slow, rhythmic, throbbing chant is pushing its way through the heavy doors, each word ponderous and measured: ‘Let – her – out! Let – her – out! Let – her – out!’

  Da Budrio pauses, hand on the door handle; then, sucking in a deep breath, he opens the door.

  Beppe starts. As the door opens wide, a heavy, red-faced man with a fringe of white sheep’s wool hair around the back of his head stands square in the doorway. The chanting increases in volume as he appears. Beppe is not chanting himself; he cannot: his mouth seems set closed, but the words the crowd are howling reverberate in his head as a plea – a prayer. Let her out: please, please, let her out. He has pressed a fist against his lips and is chewing at the knuckle of his thumb. Lidia and Cosima are standing right behind him; he can feel their breath on the back of his neck.

  ‘Let – her – out! Let – her – out!’

  At the sight of the new arrival in the doorway, Agostino holds up both hands for quiet, and word of his request ripples through the crowd; they fall quiet section by section, from the front through to the back.

  ‘Are you responsible for this rabble?’ the man with the sheep’s-wool hair says to Agostino in a voice thick with dislike.

  ‘I would not address them as such, but I asked them to come here with me, yes.’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  Agostino’s voice deepens, thickens, becomes louder. ‘We are here because you are holding a young woman in that building there’ – he points – ‘on a spurious charge, for which there is no reliable evidence, while we here have proof positive that she could not have committed the crime of which she has been accused.’

  The heavy man raises an eyebrow. ‘You sound very certain, signore.’

  ‘That would be because I am. And these good people here are too.’

  The crowd shifts silently as the sea will move against a rock face: not breaking, just lifting and swelling massively.

  The heavy man eyes them all without a word.

  Agostino says, ‘Sofia Genotti is a member of my troupe of actors: the Coraggiosi. She is innocent of any crime, and —’

  ‘I have an eyewitness acc —’

  ‘If you have an eyewitness, then you also have a liar!’ Beppe blurts out, interrupting him, moving to stand shoulder to shoulder with Agostino. ‘Sofia was with me last night. I know she didn’t do anything to touch this man even, let alone hurt him. He was quite certainly alive when we last saw him.’

  The man in the doorway stares at him and the crowd seems to tauten. People move in a little closer to each other, pressing forwards, drawing in and focusing their attention on the man in the doorway.

  He, however, unabashed, draws himself up to his full height. ‘My name, should you not know it already, is Signor Antonio Giovanni Lorenzo Bellano da Budrio,’ he says loudly. ‘I am the governor of the city of Bologna, and I am ultimately responsible for the arrest and detention of anyone who breaks the law within the area of the city’s jurisdiction, though of course I rarely have direct contact with those detained. I do not take kindly to anyone attempting to interfere with due process.’ He pauses and gazes out imperiously across the still-growing crowd. ‘However many of them there might happen to be at any one time.’

  Beppe looks in desperation at Agostino, whose gaze remains fixed upon da Budrio. Cosima takes his hand. Beppe glances at her. ‘Ago will do what’s needed,’ she says quietly into his ear. ‘Trust him.’

  Agostino draws in a long breath. ‘Signore,’ he says and his voice carries more clearly across the piazza than did da Budrio’s. ‘You seem not to understand. I fully accept that you are responsible for what happens to those who break the law. But Sofia Genotti is not one of them. She need not concern you. She is innocent.’

  Beppe nudges Cosima. ‘Don’t let him mention Correggio’s attack on Sofia, for God’s sake. That’ll give them a motive,’ he says, feeling the sting of tears in the corners of his eyes.

  Cosima gives him a tight little smile and shakes her head. ‘He won’t. He knows that.’

  The crowd begins chanting again. Low and menacing, the three long syllables roll around and around the piazza and Agostino’s voice rings out above the growl of it. ‘I appreciate the importance and dignity of your position, honoured signore,’ he says. ‘As do my friends here.’ He gestures grandly at the crowd and a spatter of applause ripples through it. ‘But please believe me when I say that we do not intend to leave until we have justice. Sofia is innocent and we need to have her back with us again.’

  Beppe sucks in a shocked breath: Angelo has stepped forward, his exquisite chin raised in arrogant disdain. Before Agostino can speak, he says loudly, ‘Signor da Budrio, I am Angelo Francesco Giuliano Cesare da Bagnacavallo – son of Signor Giuliano da Bagnacavallo of the Castello dei Fiore. Second cousin to the Duke of Ferrara.’

  Da Budrio’s face certainly twitches at the mention of Angelo’s prestigious parentage, but he makes no other response. Angelo continues, and there is now an exaggeratedly aristocratic drawl to his voice, ‘Perhaps we might be allowed to discuss a situation which my father would undoubtedly wish to have resolved without… how shall I put it?… undue unpleasantness.’

  Beppe’s visceral dislike of Angelo fights now with a surge of hope.

  Several other faces appear in the darkness behind da Budrio – faces creased with anxiety and anger – and someone puts a hand on da Budrio’s shoulder. He turns away to face into the interior of the building. The door remains open and the chanting continues.

  Curled in a ball on the uncomfortable mattress, with a thin blanket tucked around her, Sofia’s nose is prickling now with the acrid and shameful smell of urine; her skirts are chill and damp around the back of the hem, where she failed to hold them properly clear, and her face is sticky with half-dried tears. Her thoughts have tumbled and jostled for so long she can now no longer make sense of anything – her skull just seems to be filled with an unidentifiable buzzing.

  She is locked up. A prisoner. They never locked Mamma up all those years ago – though she is certain they intended to – poor Mamma never even reached a trial. Sofia and her parents had thought themselves safe in the salt marshes of Comacchio: far from Ferrara, far from their accusers, in that beautiful wild expanse of nothingness so many, many miles from anywhere; they had thought no one would ever bother to search that far for them.

  The sky is enormous. A clear grey-blue, it soars over the landscape like the inside of a vast silver dome and, given that much of the area over which it arches is water, that dome seems to plunge downwards too, falling away in a vertiginous swoop beneath their feet. It is like being held somehow in the centre of a measureless glass bubble. She imagines some Olympian god, holding up a transparent sphere and peering curiously into it, failing to see her and her family; to a god they would be no more than minute specks: tiny flaws in the transparent perfection of his globe. She looks about her: here and there, thin dark smudges of low-lying land break up the otherwise unremitting silver, and dotted along these sparse lines is the occasional squat building, reflect
ed exquisitely in the unmoving water. The odd clump of marshy grass lies like an inkblot on the great grey sheets, but other than these unimportant interruptions, there is little to see but air and water.

  ‘Look! Mamma, Papa, look!’ Sofia points out across the water. ‘What are they?’

  Papa and Mamma turn to see what has startled her. At least thirty or forty extraordinary – and enormous – birds are standing in shallow water a few hundred yards from them. A soft pink, they have long, stilt-like legs, some straight, some bent at an acute angle halfway down. Gracefully curving necks lead to heavy heads, with enormous, angular, black-tipped beaks. A small blot of shadow lies on the surface of the water beneath each bird, shifting over the rippling surface as they move. Some of the birds have dropped their heads to the water and are dabbling in the shallows, while others appear to be keeping watch: necks stretched upwards, the heads swivel from side to side almost comically, Sofia thinks.

  Something startles them then, and as one they take off, honking, spreading wide wings and trailing the long crane-fly legs out behind them. They swirl up and around and down, landing again within seconds and resume the dabbling and watch-keeping.

  ‘What are they?’ Sofia says again, her voice not much more than a whisper.

  ‘I’ve no idea, cara,’ Papa says. ‘But they seem to live here, don’t they? Perhaps we’ll learn about them from someone when we settle down and find a house.’

  ‘We’re going to live here?’

  ‘Yes.’ Papa is looking at her carefully. ‘I’m fairly certain that we are. What do you think of that idea?’

  Sofia gazes about her for several seconds before answering. ‘I think,’ she says slowly, ‘I think I shall like it. It will be like living in the middle of the sky. And there’s nowhere for the bad people to hide here, is there? If they come after us, we’ll see them coming a long way away.’

  ‘But we didn’t. We didn’t see them coming – not then, and not now,’ she says aloud, and her words hang like dead things in the musty air of the cell. And at the thought of her mother’s terrible final moments, her father’s slow decline and death the following year, and fearful for what might lie ahead, she wraps her arms over her head, and curls up more tightly, clutching handfuls of her hair. A sob swells in her throat.

  She has been crying for so long that she has no tears left. Sightlessly staring at nothing with eyes that feel as though they are lidded with leather, Sofia lies on the hard straw mattress, listening to the mute nothingness of the inside of the cell, when a sound filters through: a low, throbbing, repetitious sound – like chanting. Sitting up and frowning, she strains her ears to try to hear more clearly.

  It’s a long, three-beat chant, whatever it is they are saying. Three thudding words, repeated over and over again. Sofia gets to her feet. Dragging the table over to the wall beneath the window, she scrambles up to stand on it: from here she can just see out. Much of the piazza outside is hidden by part of the building next door, but from what she can see in the little gap between the two walls, it’s clear that the square is teeming with people, and it must be they who are making the noise. Sofia screws up her face, trying to make out the words they are saying.

  ‘Let – her – out! Let – her – out!’

  She holds her breath. Shuts her eyes, listening even more intently.

  ‘Let – her – out! Let – her – out!’

  Da Budrio turns back to face Agostino and Angelo. ‘You wait here,’ he says. ‘I shall return.’

  And before either man can do more than open his mouth, the door closes once more. Beppe leans against the wall by the door, his forehead pressed painfully against the brick, trying to swallow down the rising wave of panic that is fast threatening to overwhelm him. Lidia and Cosima both step close and put arms around him.

  ‘He said he’d be back,’ Lidia says. ‘He’s not just walking away from us.’

  Cosima nods. ‘It looks as though they might be thinking seriously about what we’ve said… what Angelo said.’ She puts a hand around the side of Beppe’s head, drawing him in close; he leans against her for a moment; then, gripping her fingers, he stands straight again, turning back to look at the crowd.

  The people in the square start singing.

  One lone voice begins it – a clear, ringing tenor – then more and more join him, and the sound rapidly fills both the piazza and Beppe’s head. He has no idea what the song might be – though he thinks he has heard it before, perhaps in a tavern, perhaps in the street – but here, issuing from two, three, four hundred mouths, it has a haunting power and the hair on the back of his neck prickles.

  The Coraggiosi stand in a tight group by the door. Agostino and Cosima, Lidia and Vico, Federico, Giovanni Battista and Angelo – and Beppe, a little to one side now, right by the architrave of the door, leaning against it, waiting, waiting.

  Just as the crowd’s song builds to a ringing crescendo, the door opens again and the sound quickly fades. The thin man from earlier looks at the troupe and says, ‘Signor da Budrio wonders if you would care to come in.’

  Agostino nods and takes a step towards the door. ‘Thank you.’

  The thin man shakes his head. ‘No – you misunderstand. The signore would like to see him.’ He nods towards Angelo. ‘Just him.’

  Agostino clutches at Angelo’s sleeve. ‘Please, Angelo, don’t agree to this. Take us all in with you.’

  Angelo stares for a moment at Agostino, his expression impossible to read. His gaze moves to the women, to the two older men, to Beppe. Beppe’s heart races. Then, after several long seconds, Angelo shakes his head. ‘It’ll be better if I go alone, I think,’ he says. And without a backward glance, he follows the thin man into the darkened entrance, and the door closes once more.

  25

  They have been living in the house on the edge of the salt marsh for just less than a fortnight. Long and low, red-roofed and brick-walled, it sits near the edge of a wide expanse of water; scrubby bushes cluster around two sides of the house and, away to the left of the building, a long strip of land curves away like a protecting arm around the edge of the marsh.

  The furthest of the three rooms holds two straw-filled mattresses, one wooden chest and a broken chair; in the middle room a table and several folding stools give the family somewhere to sit and eat, and the small fireplace over on the far wall provides the means to cook and keep warm. And in the outermost room, a long low table and a bench fill most of the space.

  Mamma has already begun collecting leaves and roots to dry and turn into her special tinctures and powders: bunches and piles lie neatly along the whole length of the table on shallow, sand-filled trays.

  The light in all the rooms is dim and indistinct: rather than glass in the windows, they are lined in a thick parchment, which gives an odd, filtered light: as though, Sofia thinks, the house were underwater.

  She stands by the low table in the outermost room and fingers the dozen or so bunches of drying leaves and flowers lying on the sand-trays. Picking one up, she holds it to her nose, then, grimacing, puts it back down quickly: woundwort. A bunch of starry-white bogbean flowers catches her eye and she reaches out to run a finger over their ragged, frilled edges; they are already beginning to turn brown. Several bunches of cudweed lie in piles at one end of the table, and Sofia straightens them to lie more neatly. What was it Mamma said about cudweed as they picked these leaves a few days ago? It’ll make you sweat, she said – good for fevers. It can turn a man… into a devoted lover, too, she added, smiling at Sofia.

  ‘Does Papa like it?’

  She saw a smile on Mamma’s face for the first time in days. ‘Oh, Papa doesn’t need it. He never has.’

  She fiddles the fading white flowers with the tip of her index finger for several more seconds, pleased with the silky fringed feeling of the petals against her skin, then turns back towards the middle room. Mamma asked her to keep an eye on the fire while she was out getting food from the market in the town, and Sofia is determined to s
how her how well she can manage the task. Squatting down in front of the little hearth, she jabs at the mound of glowing logs with a short iron poker. A burst of red sparks spits out at her and a log crumbles and falls; several nut-sized lumps bounce out, white hot, onto the stone surround and Sofia, standing quickly, kicks them back into the blaze with the toe of her shoe. She adds another couple of logs, then sits back on a low stool to wait and watch her charge, making sure it behaves and works hard until Mamma’s return. Or until Papa comes back from his search for work.

  Sofia and her mother cross one of the many bridges which up-and-over Comacchio’s myriad canals. This one is of stone: neatly built, shallow, merely for foot passengers. Some are bigger, strong enough for a laden cart; others are flimsy, ramshackle, poorly built affairs, which wobble each time someone crosses from one side of a waterway to the other. Sofia does not like these wobbling ones; there are several she fears will collapse beneath her each time she sets foot upon them. Sofia and Mamma make their way down one long waterside street, cross another bridge – a sturdy stone one – and turn down a narrow alley towards an open space in the centre of the town where Sofia knows the bustling market regularly takes place.