“I think he means to attend, Signore.” Filippo smiled. “He is always—how shall I say—tortuoso in his written communications. Always use ten words when one would suffice, he would say…”
Vasquez twitched his shoulders in a dismissive shrug and threw the Conte di Ladispoli’s letter down onto a large pile of similar sheets. It took the two men the best part of the following hour to sort out the various replies, and by the end, a pile of letters of regret lay to one side of them, they had compiled a list of attendees, and the Spaniard had begun to draw up a plan of the parade ground. It was to be quite an occasion, it seemed to Filippo. A flamboyant exposition of Spanish power—ostensibly for the sake of entertainment, perhaps, but it would nevertheless be meant to be seen as a warning against any future insurrection, he felt sure.
Vasquez then leaned across the table and picked up a finger-thick stack of paper. “Filippo,” he said, “I need this put into Italian.”
Filippo flipped through the document: close-written in a spiky hand. His heart sank. This was not a task he would enjoy. Spanish had been as familiar to him as Italian since babyhood—his Castilian mother never having managed to master Italian—and Filippo and his superior always spoke together in Spanish, but Filippo found the painstaking business of translating anything this lengthy extremely tedious. He thumbed the sheets and glanced up at his companion.
“By when, Signore?”
Opening a large, calf-bound ledger, the Spaniard ran a slim forefinger down first one page, then the following. He frowned, and the soft tuft of beard just beneath his lower lip lifted as he pouted in concentration. Then, finding what he sought, he tapped the place twice. “You have ten days. You can have the Long Chamber today, if you like. Nobody is using it.”
“Thank you, Signore—I will do that. May I go and make a start on it right away?”
“Yes. I shall not need you for anything else today.”
Filippo left the room without a word.
He worked hard for several hours. He had had hopes that the document might have contained something titillating: perhaps a whisper of the intransigent Don Pedro de Alfàn’s plans for the reestablishment of the tyranny of the Inquisition—news with which Napoli had been buzzing for weeks. The papers, however, revealed nothing at all startling, and Filippo was soon bored.
He began to think back to the other evening at Francesca’s. Running his tongue over his lips, he pictured the door to her bedchamber. Ajar. He imagined pulling the door open as he did each week, and he smiled at the thought of the candlelight that always spilled out into the corridor, the warm smell of burning rosewood—she always had the fire lit—and the headiness of the cut flowers she liked so much. Breathing a little faster, Filippo ran the flat of his hand down over his breeches, rubbed his palm over his cock, and shut his eyes. Saw Francesca sitting on the edge of her bed. Saw himself crouching before her, his fingers gripping her knees. He swallowed, wiped his face, and returned to his translation. Into his mind came another, less welcome picture: a fleeting glimpse of the sweet curve of Maria’s lip. Filippo frowned and began once again to write—with every semblance of enthusiasm.
***
“I worry about you, Maria,” Emilia said.
Maria ignored her scowling sister. She closed her book, replaced the quill in its small iron pot, and rubbed at the ink stains on her thumb and first two fingers. Picking up the three small sheets of thick paper she had by now covered with scribbled notes, she read quickly through what she had written. A little crooked line puckered the skin between her brows, but as she finished reading, her expression cleared, and she tucked the three leaves inside the green leather-bound Book of the City of Ladies with an air of some satisfaction.
Emilia’s arms were tightly folded, and her bottom lip pushed forward sulkily as she stood and watched. “What if it were to become generally known how many hours in a week you devote to your books?” she said. “And that book in particular. I do not believe I know any other woman who does what you do.”
“It is no secret, cara—” Maria began, but Emilia interrupted.
“Well, it ought to be, Maria. It does not seem—I do not know what the word should be…”
“Well, perhaps if you read a little more widely yourself, you would be able to find the words you seek with more ease,” Maria said sharply. “Come, let us go and take the air—and no more criticism of how I choose to spend my time. As we go, I will tell you something of de Pizan…perhaps her story will convince you that it is quite proper for women to choose to improve their minds.”
“I doubt very much that Filippo cares for your studies…” Emilia muttered.
Maria flushed. “I think that what passes between a wife and her husband should remain their business alone, do you not agree, Emilia?” And, tucking another curl back under her cap with fingers that shook, she stood and strode past Emilia to the door.
The two sisters walked in silence through the narrow streets.
Maria sensed rather than saw the sideways glances that Emilia threw toward her every few moments, but she made no attempt to talk to her. The stuff of their stiffened skirts whispered as they walked, as though in muffled conversation together, but other than this, the two women made no sound at all; each seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.
But now it was no longer her book that occupied Maria’s mind: she thought instead of her husband.
She was sure that Filippo believed she did not love him.
The Sisters who had raised her so carefully after the death of both her parents had done their work well, she thought. As well as instructing her in the faith, they had taught her to read, to write both in Latin and Italian, to be intelligently curious about the world around her—and to regard the “will of the flesh’ with dark dread, in case it should lure her into irreparable sin. Even now, more than ten years a respectable wife, Sister Annunziata’s dire indictments still whined inside her head if ever she sensed Filippo’s gaze begin to wander to her mouth or her breasts. Great iron gates would clang down around her, and she would feel her face close in upon itself, shutting her away from him behind a carefully practiced mask of untroubled elegance.
Wincing, Maria saw herself each time as Filippo must see her: repulsing his advances, turning from his kisses, cold and apparently unaware of his need for her. He still wanted her. Although she was unsure why, after so long with no encouragement, she knew that her husband did still look at her with longing.
And though she never responded, it was not because she did not wish to.
He had leaned past her at dinner only yesterday, reaching for a wine bottle. They had been sitting together, with Emilia facing them across the table, and Filippo had inadvertently pressed against her side as he had stretched across her. She had sensed his warm bulk and smelled his comfortable male smell of woodsmoke and sweat. Glancing at his hand gripping the neck of the bottle, Maria had held her breath. How easy it should have been, she thought angrily, to have smiled at him then, to have perhaps reached across under the table, out of sight of her sister, and stroked his thigh for a moment, just to show him that he was loved. That he was desired.
But she had not been able to move.
***
It is not long after midday prayers, and the sun is fierce. Sister Antonia has closed the shutters in the big room which Maria and Emilia have shared for nearly a year, but little white slivers of light are pushing their way through the gaps between the slats, dappling the walls and sliding over Maria’s bed.
The room smells—as it always does—of beeswax and dust, and there’s a faint, faint whiff of mold from the stone walls, which to Maria has always seemed somehow more of a taste than a smell.
“I think you two children should stay in for a while now—it is too hot to go out this afternoon,” Sister Antonia says, and it’s true—the sun has been baking down all morning. Although it is windy,
there is no respite from the heat: the wind is hot, like air pushing out of an unwisely opened oven. Sister’s big dough-colored forehead glitters with glass beadlets of sweat, and the dark hairs on her upper lip are shining. Her face seems too fat for her coif. It bulges, and the stiff, stained linen edges dig in all around her face. Maria imagines that when Sister Antonia undresses at night, her coif must leave a deep groove all around her face as though she were wearing a mask.
“Have a little rest now,” the big nun says, as she leaves the room. “You can come down later and help prepare the evening meal.”
She bustles out of the room like a pillow in a habit.
Maria lies still for some moments with her knees crooked up and watches the light playing across her dress, little pools of creamy whiteness that shift and move across the blue linen as the branches of the tree outside rustle uncomfortably in the hot wind; then she shuts her eyes and listens.
Emilia’s breathing has slowed: she must already be asleep. Her sister always sleeps easily, Maria thinks with a pang of envy. She herself knows all too well the unnerving mixture of stifling boredom and unpredictable fears that can fill a wakeful night.
Outside, cicadas chirr rhythmically—on and on without pause, a ceaseless accompaniment to the afternoon; though sometimes they do suddenly stop—inexplicably all together—for seconds at a time, leaving a silence like a ripped hole in the noise they have been making. When they start again each time, Maria imagines the sound as grains of sand, trickling back into the hole.
A new noise.
Above the scratch-scratch of the cicadas comes a grunt. Scuffling and leaf-rustling.
Maria crosses to the window and puts her eye to one of the gaps in the slats.
The boy from the village is climbing the big tree again. He often spies on her in the gardens when she is outside and tries to see in through her window when she is indoors. She watches him now: long, thin brown legs sticking out of tattered breeches, grease-spiked black hair, and a prominent nose like a goose’s beak. His skin seems dusty. He both intrigues and repulses her: his eyes are bright and knowing, and his stare often sends a little warm worm of embarrassment down through her guts, but there is something of the mantis about him, she thinks now, as he moves from branch to branch with slow deliberation, bare toes seeking the next foothold, hands reaching and grasping, craning toward her window to try and see in through the shutters.
She knows it is probably sinful to think it, but she likes the idea that the boy wants to look at her.
There is a whip-crack of splintering wood.
“No!” Maria gasps and presses her face to the gap in the shutter, feeling her nose flatten against the resin-smelling wood, but the boy is falling away from where she can see. She hears another grunt, several more cracks, and a deadened thud. Then nothing.
Fumbling with the fastening of the shutters, Maria unlocks them and throws them wide. Hot sunlight pushes into the room, making her wince, and for a moment she is quite blinded. But then she sees a crumpled angular shape on the ground. Unmoving.
“What is it? Mia? Why have you opened the—?”
Maria ignores her sister and, panting, scrabbles her way out of the room.
***
The sisters say he has broken his neck. Maria and Emilia have not seen the boy—they have been forbidden to go to the sickroom, but they’ve heard the sisters whispering, have seen them shake their heads and cross themselves, have heard the endless chanted prayers in the chapel. Four days ago, Maria heard Sister Cecilia say he still cannot move at all. Sister said he might die.
Maria wants to see him. A lump of guilt like a cold plum has been lodged uncomfortably in her chest for days.
Emilia says, “But it’s his own fault, Mia; he was being nosy. It’s very sad, if he has hurt himself, but—”
“How can you say that?”
“Well, it’s true. It’s nothing to do with you.”
Maria stares at her sister for a moment, then turns on her heel and makes for the door.
“Where are you going?”
Maria ignores her.
The plum has shifted up into her throat. She has to see the boy.
She walks down two long corridors, out into the sandy square, dimpled all over with footprints, that lies within the cloisters, and in through the door on the far side. The sickroom is around the next corner.
The door is open.
Maria walks up to it, slowly, slowly, heartbeat thick and loud in her ears.
She hesitates. Holds her breath. Peers into the room.
Sister Angelica is standing in front of a table, her back to the door, ladling soup from a pewter jug into a small bowl. The boy is lying on a truckle bed in the corner of the room: an abandoned marionette, all strings severed. His face is now ashen and slack, and the goose-beak nose stands out, as though it has been stuck on as part of a disguise. His mouth is crooked, his lips loose and too wet. A thin line of dribble has slid from the corner of his mouth, down his jaw toward his ear like a snail’s trail. And his eyes are enormous: wide and dark with fear.
He sees her.
Stares at her.
No longer insolent and knowing, his gaze moves jerkily across her face, and up and down her body. Pleading. Maria feels sick. He reminds her of a rabbit she once saw in a trap: wire pulled tight around its throat, it lay still and trembling, passive and unresisting in the torpidity of all-encompassing terror.
Sister Angelica crouches down beside the boy and gently lifts a spoonful of soup to his mouth. His eyes move then from Maria to the elderly nun, and Maria sees them bulge slightly as he tries to take the soup from the bowl of the spoon. A few drops seem to trickle past his teeth, but most of it runs down his chin. He cannot move his head. He cannot even open his mouth.
Maria tries to imagine the suffocating horror of being imprisoned like this, locked silent and frightened into a coffin of flesh. The beseeching expression in the boy’s eyes makes her feel light-headed. She can feel her stomach churning.
***
Glancing across at her sister, Maria said, “Emilia, do you remember the boy with the broken neck?”
Emilia frowned. “Which boy?”
“At the convent. The one who couldn’t move. The one who died.”
“Oh, yes,” Emilia said with surprise in her voice. “That poor creature. He fell out of a tree, didn’t he? I haven’t thought of him for years. What made you remember him?”
“I don’t know,” Maria lied. “What a terrible thing, though, do you not agree? To be trapped like that inside a body that cannot do what you ask of it.” Her voice shook a little, but her sister did not seem to notice Maria’s unease.
“What a strange thing for you to be thinking,” Emilia said.
There was a long pause. All Maria could hear were their footfalls on the cobbled path. Her sister’s face was, as usual, quite impassive and unreadable, and in an instant, Maria was rocked by a sudden need to ask Emilia about her intimacies with her late husband. She felt sick. Had Emilia endured the same suffocating, broken-necked paralysis in the bedchamber as she always did? Or had the sisters’ hellfire-scorched injunctions somehow passed her by? When Antonio had died—had there been, somewhere beneath the grief Maria knew her sister had genuinely suffered, a wash of relief? She knew, in a jumble of muddled guilt and self-loathing, that if Emilia had indeed been, for the years of her marriage, as miserably confused as she herself still was, she, Maria, would in some strange way feel less alone. Her instinctively compassionate nature hoped—quite genuinely—that her sister’s marriage had been a happy one, but another less forgiving voice at the back of her mind could not help yearning for a companion in her isolation.
Emilia interrupted her thoughts, saying, “Funny, you remembering that boy. You’ve made me think of any number of things from our time at San Sebastiano, Ma
ria. Do you remember Sister Cecilia and that lizard?”
In spite of her discomposure, the memory of the incompetent and corpulent Sister Cecilia’s inept attempts to capture the errant reptile in the convent chapel made Maria smile. The two sisters spent a few moments sharing memories of their years with the nuns, and then they both fell silent once more as they turned toward home.
Maria thought about the evening ahead and the brief sense of amusement she had felt at her childhood memories trickled away and vanished like water into sand. She had guessed what it was that Filippo did on those occasions when he returned late to the house. She sensed something dishonest in his eye, and there was often a certain familiar slipperiness about his lower lip, when he gave his regular excuses.
She did not blame Filippo, though, and in some confused way found herself even feeling grateful to whoever the woman might be, for thus tending to her husband, and so releasing her from the obligations she found so difficult to fulfill. But she also knew a painful, screaming jealousy when she allowed pictures to form in her mind of her husband’s hands on another body. Even though the touch of those hands on her own skin froze her into immobility. She could hardly bear to think of how Filippo would be spending his evening and yet, with a trickle of shame, Maria admitted to herself a certain relief that tonight, at least, he would not need to ask her the question she dreaded.
She felt hot tears sting the corners of her eyes and wiped them surreptitiously with the tips of her fingers, turning her head so Emilia would not see.
She hoped this unknown woman did not love her husband. And hoped rather more desperately that Filippo did not love the woman.
Book of Encounters
I surprised myself last night. I couldn’t sleep, and I found myself thinking about Filippo and the impossibility of his situation, and as I lay there thinking, I realized, much to my astonishment, that I actually envy his wife. How strange that must sound, for a courtesan to admit that she envies a frigid woman. But Filippo’s wife has something I have never had—a man who loves her. I’m sure from what Filippo says that that is the case, despite everything. I imagine what would happen if I withheld my favors from my patrons, the way Filippo’s wife does from him. Dear God, if I were ever even to suggest it, I should very soon be left with nothing and no one. And I doubt it would take long.
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