A Portrait of Silas Fox - Part III
In Part II, Lord Ashby marries Lady Ashby, but all is not well at Oakmont Hall. Silas and Sebastian draw closer together, and Silas is devastated when Sebastian is banished from the court. Shortly thereafter, he learns that he has been sold to a marchioness in Florence.
I shall spare you the descriptions of Florence, for I know you lived there for many years. In fact, it’s there that I was first introduced to your work. When we arrived, I craned my head out of the carriage and saw the city, which appeared to me then much like your painting Amanacer Florentino: church bells and clatter of hooves, an orange dawn rising over cathedrals, the hills of Tuscany rising and falling on the horizon like distant waves. It was late spring, and the whole world around me seemed in bloom.
I fell in love with Italy throughout my time there. It was a slow and solemn love affair, and it was magnified by my concurrently growing hatred for the Marchioness. Love and hate eclipsed each other, perhaps even breeding one another: Italy was a gorgeous backdrop to my torture. Not at first, though–at first, the Marchioness was lovely and charming. When I met her, she was dressed in a lilac gown with her eyelids painted to match, her blonde hair piled high upon her head like a halo.
She had been widowed a number of years by then. Her husband had died in the Guerra di Valtellina, and she, twenty-four and childless, had inherited his estate, his fortune, and his title. She seemed to desire companionship above all else. The palazzo was routinely filled with visiting parties, royals and nobles and aristocrats and elites from other Italian states, sometimes coming from as far as Milan. It was as though the Marchioness could not face the silence of being alone in this world. As a result, she was very rarely unaccompanied by a friend, or at least one of her ladies-in-waiting, who all clamored to be in her favor. The rumor had it that she required they lie in the grand bed with her all night so that she was not alone even in sleep.
She did not have a jester, or a buffone as they called them here, so I initially thought, perhaps naively, that I would be filling that role. It was only when she picked me up unexpectedly, carried me as she climbed a step ladder, then placed me upon the mantle of the fireplace that I began to question this thinking.
The fireplace was tall and crafted of smooth marble. No ladder or notched wall existed near it, and I immediately realized I was trapped upon the mantle, twelve or so feet off the ground, as though I were a nutcracker.
“Per favore, Marchesa,” I said. “I cannot get down.”
She curled her upper lip, and at once appeared far crueler than her face of beauty had initially portended.
“Oh, but you are a great decoration.” She spoke English in a thick Italian accent that rose and fell with each sentence. “I think I will leave you there. Signore di Mantova is coming in three days. He will be very amused.”
“Per favore…”
Eventually, she accepted that I could not possibly sleep and eat there for three days. I knew there would be more mantle duties in my future, for before she agreed to bring me down, she made me swear I’d play along when the Lord of Mantua came. To be in her arms as she lowered me was simply horrifying. She was like a tiger, a beautiful, wounded creature that had revealed its long sharp teeth. I knew then that I was unsafe in her company. Lord Ashby had, in a distant and muted way, treated me as a being worthy of respect, or at least one of neutral regard. But the Marchioness valued me as an entertaining pet, an interactive decoration to place upon a shelf, unblinking and docile as a doll. A fool to laugh at.
When her companions visited, she would put on a show for them that always involved some variation of my torture. Once, she called the hunting dog in from the grounds and forced me to mount the dog and ride it around the dining room. They all cackled at this, spewing long drunken sentences in Italian, and from them I only picked up one phrase: come un cavallo. Like a horse.
Then she had the giardiniere blow his dog whistle, and the mastiff took off running. I had to grip tufts of hair in my fists and cling my thighs to the creature so as not to be launched from it. It sprinted down the hall, picking up speed faster than a chariot, and made a sharp turn at the outdoor exit that nearly sent me flying. The party clamored to the window to watch as the dog, with me precariously on its back, raced out to the lawn and ran in circles on the grass, ultimately rewarded with a large pheasant bone. I stepped off the dog when it began to slow, fell to my knees in the dirt, and promptly vomited.
When the maggiordomo fetched me to come back inside, he tried to lift me off the ground. I snarled at him in a voice that seemed not my own: “Do not lay a damn finger on me.” He dropped me in an instant and stepped back.
I rose and walked behind him carefully. When I returned to the dining room, money was being exchanged. It appeared that bets had been placed on how long I might stay mounted to the dog’s back, and where and when I might fall.
*****
There are worse things I could tell you, but to harken back upon such events feels too confounding. I often find myself questioning whether my memory of things is how they really happened, and whether I am a reliable source at all. Some of the things inflicted upon me seem so evil I think they cannot be true, but then again, I have seen the evils that lie in the hearts of men and women and humans alike, and what they will do if they think you are not one of them. Perhaps I deviate from these stories not because I am afraid they are untrue, but because they are true, and I do not want to only tell tales of suffering when there is so much beauty in this world, too.
While I was subjected to these horrors, I began to understand Italian. Little by little, as I was made an ornament to sit through dinner, I listened and heard words repeated, conjugated, and sung that slowly made sense to me. I stole a book from the library and spent a massive amount of time in the servants’ quarters studying the movement of the language, the way the Italian expression ebbed and flowed. I felt my mind expanding. It seemed that learning this other language held the key to unlock a new way to understand the world around me.
One cool autumn morning, a signore named Iacopo Foscarini from Venice came to visit. He had a thick dark mustache, perfectly quaffed and curved, and he wore robes of fine silk embroidered in silver threads. He presented the Marchioness with a basket of irises and violets and grapefruit, and bowed to kiss her hand delicately. With him he brought a troupe of musicians: a lutist, a harpsichordist, and a theorbo player, all things I had heard or read of but never seen. The musicians paid no notice of me. I eavesdropped as they rehearsed in the gallery, and hearing their music moved me to tears.
It was Signore Foscarini who caught me reading–or, rather, attempting to read–La Galatea. It was dusk, and I was standing by a low window, my head craned over the pages of the book to read by the last glimmers of dying light. I was so focused on my translations that I did not notice him until I glanced up and he stood before me.
“Vostra Maestra,” I said quickly, bowing while slamming the book shut and trying to hide it behind me. This was an impossible feat; the book was the size of my torso.
To my surprise, he dismissed my bow with a casual wave and spoke. “Tu puoi leggere?” he asked me.
“Si, signore.”
“In Italiano?”
“No, signore. L’inglese è la mia madrelingua.”
“I see,” he said in careful English. “You are an English dwarf?”
“Yes, signore.”
“So you have read La regina delle fate?” he asked. “I do not know the name in English.”
I thought for a moment, then said, “The Faerie Queen. Yes, signore I have read it.”
He let out a sharp exhale. I thought at first it was the sound of anger, but when I looked up at his face, I saw that he was in awe.
“Tell me, what is your favorite book?”
“My favorite book is Don Quixote.”
“I have read this book as well, but only in Spanish. My father was a Spaniard. Spanish is, as you say, my mother tongue.” I must have appeared confused, because he laughed. “My mother was una Contessa di Venezia. My riches are from her.”
I admired how casually he spoke of his wealth. That is something I don’t understand about the nobles I have become acquainted with over the years: many of them behave as if their money and trades are secret, valuable information, or they try to posture as if they’ve earned it rather than inherited it. Foscarini did neither.
“I do not know Spanish,” I told him then. “But I am educated in English and arithmetic. My father was a merchant.”
“How did you end up here?” he asked.
“I was previously in Baron Ashby’s court.”
I had shirked the question, but he did not push. He instead looked me up and down, from my hair to the soles of my shoes. For the first time since my arrival in Italy, I was being truly seen, noticed for my intellect and my character, and I basked in the moment.
“Come curioso,” he said quietly, more to himself than to me.
*****
Signore Foscarini and I became fast friends. We would meet in the library daily for mutual language lessons and discussions. He would arrive with a quill and parchment, scribbling down the things I told him verbatim in hasty shorthand. Though he was a guest, he made himself at home in the palazzo. The north guest chambers became his own, and the staff became friendly with him. He took his coffee each morning in the parlor with the Marchioness, and their laughter could be heard from beyond the closed frosted doors.
Foscarini taught me a generous amount of Latin, the foundation for the romance languages, and this in turn allowed me to understand much of the Italian I heard in everyday conversations. He was an educated man himself, and we often engaged in philosophical debates about the human experience and absolute truth. He was particularly interested in thinking about the natural world, and how humans had come to exist in it.
Winter came to Florence, and it was mild and damp, nothing like the snowfall I had once experienced in England. In the mornings, the grounds of the palazzo would be shrouded in a veil of thick mist. The Marchioness began to treat me less cruelly–I believe she saw that Foscarini had taken a liking to me–though I was still treated as an object. With fewer visitors in the rainy season, I was routinely made to wear miniscule velvet clothing she chose for me, sit upon her shelf, and give her compliments as she applied rouge to her round cheeks.
My life, during this period, seemed to go on forever: quiet moments spent pouring over books with Foscarini, hours performing my dwarfness for the Marchioness who was becoming increasingly vivacious, misty mornings spent watching the canary cage which was visible from out my window. For the first time in my life, I began to collect items of my own: several sets of clothes, which had been sewn and tailored to my fit by the palazzo sarta, a set of leather bound Italian history books, and a beeswax candle carved into the shape of a mushroom. The latter was gifted to me by the maggiordomo, who had revealed himself to be a benevolent man with a passion for carving and whittling. His quarters, the largest of all of ours, were adorned with whittled flutes and tiny wooden swords, and the windowsill was lined with candles and soaps meant to be the shapes of trees but, from a distance, were undeniably phallic.
One day, as I explained to Foscarini iambic pentameter and the rhyme scheme of the Faerie Queen, he leaned over and lightly tapped my skull with the end of the quill.
“What I do not understand is how you are able to contain all this knowledge in there,” he said. “The leading scientists say that the smaller the brain, the less capacity for intelligence. Take a hare, for example, and compare it to a horse. Then compare a horse to a man. It is a…what is the word?”
“Correlation,” I said.
“Evidence, I think is the word I mean. It is the same with women, and children. Their heads are smaller than a man’s.”
“Correlation merely means that two things are true at once,” I said. “It does not mean that one is evidence for the other. Only that they have a relationship.”
He sat back in his chair. “See? You are quite a curiosity.”
I shrugged and shifted the conversation elsewhere, back to Latin words or to some topic I cannot recall now. He lit a pipe, and offered it to me. I obliged and tasted tobacco for the first time. It filled and burned my lungs, and while I coughed and sputtered out smoke like a dragon, he laughed. He was my friend, and I cared for him deeply. But it was he who taught me that being seen is not the same as being understood.
*****
The precariousness of Foscarini’s situation only became clear to me when he first casually questioned me about the Marchioness. During our studies one evening, he asked me whether I thought she preferred jasmine or olive blossoms. I told him that she was the extravagant type, so whichever was in more abundance was the one she would prefer. The next day, a florist wagon appeared at the gates of the palazzo. The parlor room and the grand hallway were quickly lined in vases of olive flowers that filled all rooms with a honey-sweet scent and made my nose itch.
The Marchioness began calling upon me less, and so did Foscarini. I heard them taking coffee or wine together often, and on several occasions my friend did not meet me in the library and instead found his nighttime company elsewhere. It was apparent to the entire staff that he was courting her. He had been staying in the palazzo for months, after all.
One day, he arrived to the library with a loopy grin on his face. He marched to the armchair where I sat, picked me up, and swung me about as though we were dancing. I closed my eyes and bit my cheek, waiting for it to be over.
He placed me back in the chair with vigor. My head spun.
“It has happened,” he said. “I have asked La Marchesa for her hand in marriage, and she has agreed.”
“Congratulazioni, signore.”
“We shall feast! We shall drink the finest wines, for I am to have the finest bride!” I smiled and nodded, but he must have seen my hesitancy, because he then said, “What is it? You are not happy about this?”
“No, no,” I said quickly. “I am simply surprised.”
“You do not approve?” He frowned.
“No, signore,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “It is only that I have not ever seen the benevolent character of La Marchesa, and I am having trouble imagining one so kind as you being with her.”
He said nothing for a moment, then at last spoke.
“You do not like her because she does not see your intelligence.”
I winced, my whole body tensing. I could not help it. It was a visceral reaction when I considered the horrors the woman had subjected me to.
“Perhaps, signore,” I managed. “One could say that.”
He took his half-moon glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Silas, my small friend, I am going to share something with you, and you must swear to me that the words I speak will not leave this room.”
“All right.”
“As you can imagine, the union between my father and mother was controversial. My father had my mother’s wealth when they married, yet he was not treated well by the Italians in business. She was respected as una Contessa, but they did not respect him. I inherited his estate when he died, and it was far less than my mother started with. This marriage between the Marchioness and I…”
“I understand.”
“I do not want you to think of me as a materialist,” he said. “It is simply that to live the life I live now, I must make a necessary arrangement. It is why I came here in the first place–to court La Marchesa. And I believe I truly have fallen in love. She is compelling, when you allow her to be.”
“I do not think of you that way,” I said.
“Please.” He clasped my hands in his. “She may not see you the way I do, but I promise you that she will. I will make it so.”
“Thank you,” I said, unconvinced. And then, because he seemed surprisingly desperate for my approval: “It will be un matrimonio bellissimo.”
*****
Picture this: there is a dwarf fast asleep in his bed, dreaming listlessly of another world under a hunters’ moon. Earlier that night, the dwarf was dismissed after a usual evening spent sitting in a miniature chair by the pet dog in the corner of the dining room. When he got to the servants’ quarters, the maggiordomo and all of the cuocos and camerieres were drinking aged red wine, so old the cork had crumbled and lodged itself partly inside the bottle. Join us, they had said. So the dwarf drank wine for the first and only time in his life. It is likely not surprising to you that the drink worked twofold on his small body, and after one glass he was so besotted he had to dismiss himself to bed.
This dwarf is suddenly roused from his sleep by enormous hands. He opens his eyes, but in the dark he cannot discern who these men are. They grip him roughly and lift him from his bed, then carry him, as one would a sack of vegetables, out into the hall and up the servant staircase into the palazzo. During this time, his face is buried in a large armpit, and he sees nothing but black and smells alcohol-tinged perspiration.
The dwarf is thrown to the cool marble floor of the grand room. All around him, stretching upward, are bodies, the sound of lively orchestral music, laughter, grunts from men, drunken squeals from ladies. The party from earlier must still be happening, must have evolved into something more bacchanalian and disorderly. His arrival signifies something to all of them, and they all seem to shout instructions, though he does not know why.
At once he is grabbed by someone and hoisted upward. He is tossed lightly in the air, then caught as the person tests his strength with the newfound object. Then, to the sound of screaming and egging on–he knows what is coming, but he still closes his eyes and begs God to not allow it–he goes sailing through the air, landing uncertainly in the crooked arms of a crooked neighbor.
Laughter. Applause. Thunder outside, a summer rainstorm, or perhaps it is only in his mind. He has only a moment to collect himself before he is thrown again, this time with purposeful aim, his body the arrow an archer lets fly. Again. His head feels woozy and his mouth tastes of iron. Again. He lands on a pillow which has been dragged from the couch. It sags under his weight and he falls to the floor. He realizes the taste in his mouth is blood. Again. The air seems to be getting thinner as he soars; he is no longer an arrow but a leaf in the wind. Again. This time, the distance is too great. He lands in a heap against the wall below the window, the cacophony of laughter coming at him from all directions.
There are only two faces he can make out in the crowd that spins before him, before his eyes close and he succumbs to darkness. He sees the face of his mistress, the Marchioness, tilting her head back and laughing, eyes black as a crow. And then he sees her new husband, his once and only friend in this place, looking at him from his curled mustache and deep brown eyes, one part fascinated, two parts sorry.
*****
Twelve days after that night, when my bruises had healed and my body had at last begun to feel like my own again, I received news that I was being sent to an English Baron. Not sold this time, but rather traded: one of the paintings the Marchioness sought for her collection was apparently worth my very existence. It was a dark, rather somber oil sketch of a dining scene painted by a fellow by the name of Caravaggio who died about three decades prior. I admired the artist, though I did not care for the way his shadows were placed so liberally, making each scene look sinister.
I packed my things once again into my old leather sack, feeling strangely melancholic to be leaving. I was not ready to return to England. I had the sense there was so much happening in Italy outside the walls of the palazzo, a world of painters, architects, thinkers, and dreamers, and I could be a part of it, too, if only I escaped the confines of my servitude. But no, this was not my fate, and I begrudgingly accepted my leave as I shoved my clothing, a book of Italian history, and my beeswax candle into the bag.
On the day of my departure, I carried the leather sack to the entryway and awaited the carriage that would take me to Nightwick Keep. I knew nothing of Lord Barrow then, only that he was a Baron with some modest stake in land and political ties to London. It was late morning and the low-hanging mist was burning off, the scent of flowers and bread wafting through the streets, revealing a bright day in Florence I would be leaving behind.
The Marchioness did not come to see me off; this I had expected. But to my surprise, Foscarini came just as my carriage became visible at the end of the pathway. He lowered himself to one knee and held his hand out to shake mine. His touch was soft, his eyes sympathetic, and it was only then that I realized he was the one who had requested I be sent away.
“Goodbye,” he said. “Buona fortuna, my small friend.”
What I would give to be referred to with the removal of the prefix, to be simply a friend and worthy of that singular word. I suppose that was Foscarini’s grand miscalculation, the hamartia of his life. He always considered and categorized things by their outward traits: beauty, size, intellect, while the inward traits evaded him. I heard just two years later that he and the Marchioness had divorced; the scandal was enough to threaten their wealth completely. Where he should have seen cruelty, he saw beauty, just as when he should have seen a man–a friend–he saw smallness.
To be continued…
Kaylie Saidin grew up in California and now lives in North Carolina. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from UNC Wilmington, where she served as fiction coeditor of Ecotone Magazine. Her writing has appeared in Oxford American, Prairie Schooner, New Orleans Review, Los Angeles Review, Nashville Review, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere.
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