Secrecy by Rupert Thomson Read Free Book Online Page B

me as guilty. I never imagined he would be so cunning, though. It just goes to show: the people you think you know, you hardly know at all.
    I looked up and saw the Grand Duke sitting opposite me, resplendent in brocade and silk. Judging by what he had told me, it was clear that he, too, nursed a sense of injustice. We both understood what it was to feel aggrieved.
    ‘But I came here with some news.’ He pinched his lower lip. ‘Ah, yes. There’s to be a banquet in your honour.’

     
    When the night arrived, I stood at the entrance to the banqueting hall with the Grand Duke at my side. In the weeks that had elapsed since his unexpected visit to my workshop I had gone over our conversation many times. I had been surprised by his intimate disclosures, flattered too, but they had troubled me, since they flouted every piece of counsel I had ever come across. While in Naples, I had read Torquato Accetto on the value of dissimulation. Provided you addressed your shortcomings in the presence of a priest, he said – provided, in other words, you were honest in your private life – you could dissemble to your heart’s content in public. After all, to protect yourself, it was often necessary to lie. Or if not lie, not tell the truth – or not the whole truth, anyway. Consider Justus Lipsius’s advice to foreigners travelling in Italy: have ‘an open face’, he said, ‘few words, and an inaccessible mind’. An inaccessible mind! Yet here was the Grand Duke revealing aspects of his marriage that should have remained buried deep inside him – and revealing them to me, a virtual stranger! It wasn’t that I doubted my ability to keep a secret. No, what I found worrying was the idea that the Grand Duke might, at some point in the future, come to regret having been so open. He might convince himself that I had teased the information out of him. He might imagine I had power over him, and begin to view me as a threat. There was only one sure way out of that predicament. He would have to destroy me. That was the deeply paradoxical nature of a confidence : it might draw you in close, but it also contained the seeds of banishment, exile, and even, possibly, annihilation.
    But the Grand Duke was stepping forwards into the room. Despite the presence of several English dignitaries, the evening was to have a uniquely Sicilian flavour, he told me. It had been weeks in the planning, with every detail agonized over, right down to the violets which had been pinned to our breasts as we arrived, and which bore a close resemblance to those that grew in the lava-rich land around Catania. Even the waiters were Sicilian – or could pass as such. He waved an approving hand at a swarthy, stunted man who was dispensing drinks. ‘What do you think?’
    ‘It’s almost enough to make me feel homesick,’ I told him.
    ‘I trust we’re not going to lose you just yet.’ He had stopped in front of a fresco of an erupting Etna, which had been specially commissioned for the occasion. ‘You may find a master who is greater than me, but no one will ever value you as highly as I do.’
    I said I couldn’t imagine a greater master.
    Positioned throughout the room were various specimens of cactus, and a number of the English guests, predictably, perhaps, suffered minor injuries later on, when a good deal of wine had been consumed. Oh, how the English love to drink! Not for nothing were they known locally as ‘sponges’.
    An envoy from Hampton Court, as yet still sober, complimented the Grand Duke on his flair for the exotic. The Grand Duke smiled. He was well-disposed towards the English. They had given him a warm welcome when, in an attempt to escape the violence and rancour of his marriage, he visited their country in the 1670s.
    A man with a neat black beard was standing nearby. I asked if he was also a diplomat.
    He shook his head. ‘Like you,’ he said, ‘my interests lie elsewhere .’
    His name was Jack Towne, he told me, and he traded in