Free Secrecy by Rupert Thomson

murmur. And then again: ‘At last!’
    ‘The
cruelty
of that.’ The Grand Duke shuddered.
    I didn’t think he expected me to comment. All he asked, it seemed, was that I listen.
    ‘When I woke,’ he went on, ‘I was drenched in sweat. I had to call for Redi –’
    The rooster crowed, making me jump; I had forgotten it was there. It looked at me with one eye, the iris a shiny, tawny colour, like polished teak.
    ‘When I wake, it’s always the same,’ the Grand Duke said. ‘I have the feeling she’s in the palace, and that she’s planning another attack on me.’ Like the cockerel, he looked at me sidelong. ‘She used to attack me, you see? Physically. Once, she kicked me – right here, on the shin. I’ve still got the scar. Another time, she threw a vase. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but I had to have guards stationed outside my bedchamber – to protect me from my wife!’ He let out an eerie, astonished laugh. ‘Even then, I couldn’t sleep. She was so clever; she could talk her way round any man. Can you imagine what it’s like to fear your own wife? Can you imagine what it’s like to love someone who wants you dead?’ He stood up and moved back to the window. Rain slithered diagonally across the glass. ‘Eventually, of course, I realize she’s no longer here, and that she left for Paris more than fifteen years ago – that she’s gone for ever, in fact – but there’s no relief in that. I just feel alone – more alone than you can possible envisage …’
    I joined him at the window. We both stared down into the bleak, wet square.
    ‘You know what pains me most of all, Zummo? I can’t see her in any of my children. Two sons and a daughter, and none of them has her beauty or her spirit. Ferdinando’s charming, I suppose – at least, he was charming as a boy – but now he seems determined to follow in the footsteps of that bestial, sacrilegious , fornicating brother of mine, Francesco Maria, who has transformed our noble family’s villa in Lappeggi into a den of debauchery and filth of every kind, God forgive him.’
    The Grand Duke had delivered the sentence without drawing breath; his face had flushed, and the corners of his mouth were white with spit. I thought it best to remain silent, especially as I had never met his brother.
    ‘Gian Gastone?’ The Grand Duke shook his head. ‘I see nothing of his mother in him, except for a certain wiliness, perhaps, and the occasional glimmer of intelligence. But he has become a shambling drunk, old before his time. Did you witness his behaviour at the banquet in November?’
    I nodded.
    ‘He’s an embarrassment. I’m thinking of sending him to Germany. Lord knows what they’ll make of him. And then there’s Anna Maria. I adore her, of course, but – well – she’s strange. That mannish laugh, that frizzy hair. Still, at least I’ve managed to find her a husband …’
    The cock crowed again.
    The Grand Duke sighed, then reached into the barrel and threw the tethered fowl another fistful of grain.
    ‘No, Marguerite-Louise left precious little of herself behind,’ he said, ‘and I find it selfish of her, if that doesn’t sound too irrational. I almost feel she might have
willed
her absence in her children. Is that possible, do you think?’
    I told him there were those who believed that babies in the womb were as malleable as wax, and could be shaped by the imagination of the mother.
    ‘Though I’m not sure I go along with that,’ I added.
    ‘Still, if anyone could do it, she could,’ the Grand Duke said. ‘She tried to kill them, you know – before they were born.’
    I stared at him.
    ‘I only found out later. She took all sorts of abortifacients – everything she could lay her hands on: pennyroyal, squirting cucumber, lozenges of myrrh. She rode her thoroughbreds flat out. She danced all night. She walked up every hill she could find. With hindsight, it was a miracle any of our children survived.
    ‘And when she left, she