She has lied to Il Sicofante twice today. It does not matter. Il Sicofante lies to everyone. Yesterday he told Mona Lucrezia that she has the loveliest chin in Italy when she doesn’t have one at all, and that the bulging veins on Mona Aurelia’s ankles are a sign of nobility. The apothecary would paint fucus on a wild boar and marry it to the King of Spain if he was paid enough. Lying is as much part of his household as the staircase and the sugar bin. Palmeria, the maidservant, lies about the flour – she says she gets it from the miller on the Via Appia but really it comes from the Monte del Grano and everyone knows the friars mix their flour with sand. Cimon too, for all his righteous talk, is a creature best suited to crevices. He slithers around the house at all hours, and Flavia, working hard in the cellar, must be still until he returns to bed.
* * *
For months she has been doing this. A cold sweat forms on her back as she strains stone against stone, peering through the candlelight at what she has made. During the day she drags her limbs around, so tired that her tasks swim before her eyes.
She has no choice. She arrived here with the biggest lie of all. After that, the little ones hardly matter.
Already today she has told Il Sicofante she ordered more cardamom seeds when she actually forgot to add them to the merchant’s list. Then she told him she was going to pluck the hairs from Mona Fulvia’s toes, but went instead to see the mute pedlar on the steps of the cathedral. Now she must pretend the birds are a present from Mona Fulvia because she took the money to pay for them from Cimon’s purse. Il Sicofante is bound to see them because he cannot let the moon lose its belly without sniffing round the painted box with its little winged boys.
The painted box is Flavia’s biggest lie. It sits in her room like a stolen chalice, full of ribbons and wrongness.
* * *
Cimon is not in the kitchen so she pulls one of the hooks out of the beam where the apothecary’s herbs hang to dry. With the birdcage in one hand, she rushes up to the top of the house.
The room where she sleeps is very small. Half the floor is taken up with dusty storage jars and sacks of grain, but there is a window looking out over the city, a lattice of crossed wood that makes diamond shapes of the corrugated rooftops. On her first night here she dragged her pallet underneath it just to breathe everything in. Now she eases the metal hook into a split in the panel above the window and hammers it in with the heel of one of her old clogs. She does not wear the clogs any more, just uses them for squashing scorpions or throwing at Cimon’s backside. She has leather shoes now, just like the ones Pia wore for feast days, except hers have mother-of-pearl buttons on the sides. They are better than Pia’s, though sometimes she still wishes she had her sister’s shoes.
She loops the birdcage onto the hook. It hangs lopsidedly and the bullfinches flutter back up to their perch. Their heads make little swivelling movements as she puts a few specks grain in the bottom of the cage. The birds ignore it, huddling close.
Flavia watches them for a moment then goes over to her dressing table.
Cimon laughs when she calls it that – three pieces of wood begged from a scaffolder and hammered together with nails and her ever-useful clogs – but it is covered with as many little pots and jars as Ghostanza Dolfin had. Il Sicofante lets her take what she wants from the storerooms, even musk oil, which she mixes into breath lozenges, and a tiny piece of ambergris, which is rarer still because it is spat out of a sea monster’s stomach and is good for making perfumes last.
This is the beauty of the lie she has told Il Sicofante. He needs her still, because she has not yet shown him Ghostanza’s secrets. The new shoes are from him, as is the cheerful cluster of peasant hair that now sits on her head. A little darker than Mona Bartola’s but curlier and softer than Flavia’s stiff plaits ever were. Il Sicofante showed her how to flatten her remaining tufts of hair with wax and seal the wig to her scalp. Then he gave her a silver-framed looking glass that shows her things she never realised she had: spots whose yellow centres erupt from her skin like earthworms in the rain; hairs that sprout where they should not be and sometimes when they cannot sprout become another worm hole that must be plucked and purged.
The glass shows nicer things too. A pair of delicate black lines where once her eyebrows knotted into a scowl, dark-lashed eyes shaded with a smudge of kohl along their lower lids.
Best of all it shows what is not there, because now the bird lives always behind a hardy cerussa of the apothecary’s making. She hates taking it off, even in the brief hours of sleep. She is so frightened of being without it she always keeps a little pot of powder in the pocket of her skirt.
In this Il Sicofante has been true to his word – giving Flavia a face that can bear heat and frost without crumbling into dust. Still, it is lumpy and discolours easily. When she puts it on, it does not glide across her face like Ghostanza’s cerussa. Both Flavia and the apothecary know it is very far from the Venetian recipe, and it is hard to say which of them wants that particular secret most.
* * *
As the birds hop around their new home, Flavia takes off her wig and combs out the tangles the wind has woven into it. Her own hair has grown back almost to her ears, straight and stiff as ever. She would like to shave it off but it has its uses. There are strands of grey, green and pink among the brown, offspring of her less successful experiments. She cannot try the same things on her face without rousing suspicion.
She picks up a pot of Il Sicofante’s new fucus. Blush of Eve, he calls it: a dark pink powder melded with fish glue and gum arabic that she paints on her lips and cheeks every morning. She takes a brush and swirls it lightly around the pot, then trails a line over her lower lip and presses it lightly against the upper one until the fucus makes a blushing reflection of itself.
‘Ghostanza,’ she whispers, watching the pinkness concertina.
She smiles at the looking glass. Her teeth are whiter now she uses the apothecary’s tooth powders. Some of them are beginning to hurt her, a dull ache that seizes her gums and makes her cry when she chews on Cimon’s hard bread, but everyone can see how well her mouth looks at the front. Before, it was just a thing for stuffing food into and complaining with. Now it can do all kinds of tricks. She can smile when she does not mean it, squeeze her lips together in vexation when she is not cross. Most importantly, her mouth can lie. It can say, ‘I have something for you,’ when she has not, and it can weave deceit as skilfully as a choir nun embroiders an altarpiece.
She used it for the lie she told when Maestro Vitale brought her to the apothecary. A lie like oricello, sinking deep and wide. The fruits of it are already in their summer shades because Il Sicofante is greedy for fame and he cannot stop boasting to the city matrons: Ghostanza’s secrets wrapped around the cheeks and brows of his noblewomen.
Because of this she scours the apothecary’s shelves for hope. Alum, musk, white lead, quicksilver, turpentine, vinegar, cloves. Ground metals and sulphides. Each promising cure and restoration, though their scents are acrid – little like beauty. She has watched the apothecary crush pearls and dried lilies into his cerussa, grind up red roses for his fucus. Gold and silver he uses as well, for smoothing wrinkles and keeping the skin in its glowing youth. But she must do more than copy Il Sicofante if she is to recreate Ghostanza’s recipes. Spices, herbs and oils: all of them known or possible ingredients, but they are dead in their separate jars and nothing she has done yet has brought them to life.