The stage curtain lifted to reveal a French salon full of partygoers in high spirits. The women wore hooped gowns and the men sported top hats and high collars. All of their faces were painted so thick with makeup they looked artificial, made of wax. But the passion in their voices felt utterly real. At the party, a beautiful woman glided through the gathering, and a couple of men approached her.
Madame Pomeroy leaned toward Hannah. “The beautiful one is Violetta,” she whispered. “She’s been very ill, but that gentleman you see, Alfredo, visited her during the worst of it. He loves her.”
“You understand what they’re singing?” Hannah asked.
“I speak Italian, yes.” She pointed at the stage. “You see, Violetta is refusing Alfredo’s advances.”
“Who is that other man?”
“That’s the baron. He says he loves Violetta as well, but she does not love him.”
Soon after, Violetta left the party and withdrew to a quiet room where she sat and looked at her reflection in the mirror. Alfredo entered and sang to her, his voice so sincere and full of longing. Before the curtain came down on the first act, Violetta gave Alfredo a flower, and Hannah could guess what that meant.
The second act opened with Alfredo and Violetta together, in love. They had settled in a quiet house in the country, and it seemed to Hannah a perfect ending. But then Alfredo’s father visited Violetta in secret.
Madame Pomeroy whispered, “He’s telling her that her relationship with Alfredo is ruining the family’s reputation. He’s begging her to leave Alfredo, because Alfredo will never leave her.”
“Does she?” Hannah asked, breathless.
“She does.”
With each note sung Hannah felt the distance collapse between her lofty box and the stage. Alfredo entered and Violetta sang, weeping, of her love for him. She fled from the house, and left a farewell note behind.
“Does it say why she left him?” Hannah asked.
“No. She keeps the reason to herself.”
Hannah felt compassion and admiration for Violetta, her strength in bearing her pain in silence. Upon reading the farewell note, Alfredo became angry and rushed after her.
“He believes she has gone to the baron,” Madame Pomeroy said.
Then the curtain came down and the lights came up. Hannah became aware that she was leaning forward in her seat, twisting her hands in her lap. She sat back and looked around in confusion.
“Intermission,” Madame Pomeroy said.
Hannah blinked and dabbed at her eyes.
“Care for some fresh air?” Frederick asked.
The three of them rose from their seats and left the box, Yakov trailing behind. They filed down to the foyer and then out into the night that had fallen over the square. Charcoal clouds smudged the stars out. Throughout the crowd, men struck matches and touched the licks of flame to cigars and cigarettes. People conversed and laughed.
Madame Pomeroy turned to Hannah. “What do you think of La Traviata?”
“I think it’s very romantic, but it’s also very sad.”
“The two feelings are frequent conspirators.” She turned to Frederick. “And what do you think?”
He stared at his shoes, which Hannah noticed were not as new as his suit, and he shrugged.
“Please,” Madame Pomeroy said. “I want to hear your honest impression.”
“Well,” Frederick said. “The story doesn’t make much sense.”
“Hmph,” said Yakov with a grin.
Hannah drew herself up. “What do you mean, it doesn’t make sense?”
Madame Pomeroy held up her hand. “Please, Hannah. Frederick, what do you find confusing?”
“Well, it seems like everyone’s just running around tripping over each other, making mistakes, and then somehow making them even bigger.”
Madame Pomeroy nodded. “Go on.”
“And why doesn’t Violetta just come out and tell Alfredo what’s going on? Seems like if she would just be honest with him, there wouldn’t be a problem.”
“We shall see,” Madame Pomeroy said, “what it will cost her to keep her pain a secret.”
At that moment a boy flew past them, darting through the opera patrons. Yakov leaped to Madame Pomeroy’s side, and reached into his coat. Frederick stood up on his toes, straining to see where the boy had gone.
“I know him,” he said. “He’s my friend.”
Three more figures, one older, two younger, plowed through another group nearby. They nearly knocked over a middle-aged woman, and took off in the direction the boy had run.
“He might be in trouble,” Frederick said.
Yakov scowled and withdrew his hand from his coat. Madame Pomeroy crimped her brow in worry and patted his arm. “My golem,” she said.
Frederick pointed. “They went down that alley.”
An usher rang a hand bell up on the Opera House steps, calling them back from intermission. They moved with the rest of the opera patrons back into the theater, but Frederick kept glancing at the alleyway.
Hannah touched his arm. “I hope your friend is okay.”
“Me too,” he said.
CHAPTER 10
Escape
GIUSEPPE SPUN AROUND AND SLAMMED THE DOOR SHUT BEHIND him, but had no way of locking it. And here inside the Opera House it was too dark to run. He stumbled forward, kicked an empty pail, and knocked his head on a beam. He put his hands out to feel his way and found a scaffold overhead.
He heard the door open behind him and saw three silhouettes leak in like oil slicks from the alley. The door shut.
“I can’t see,” one of them whispered.
“Shut your mouth, Paolo.” That was Ezio.
“Both of you be quiet, or you’ll be running from me.” Stephano’s voice touched Giuseppe in the darkness like cold fingers through cobwebs.
“Spread out,” the padrone said.
Giuseppe dared a silent step forward, and then another. He heard movement behind him and from both sides. Someone kicked the same pail and cursed. They were drawing closer. Giuseppe reached over his head, grabbed a beam, and swung onto it like a monkey. He kept his breathing as low and even as he could, drops of sweat hanging from his eyebrows.
Someone whispered, nearly right below him. “I thought I heard something.”
“I’m coming,” Stephano said.
Giuseppe’s arms and legs quivered. If they reached up, they could touch him. He had to get higher. Very slowly, he slid forward and found a pillar. He held on to it and got his feet under him, and then he stood and found another beam above. He heaved himself up.
“I hear him,” Ezio whispered.
Giuseppe heard the scratch of a match. He held still and studied the structure he had scrambled up. It climbed into darkness beyond the reach of the match light, but only a few feet distant a hanging catwalk led deeper into the theater.
“He’s up there!”
Giuseppe looked down and saw Paolo pointing at him.
“Get up there!” Stephano shouted.
All three of them reached up and pulled their way toward him.
Giuseppe launched forward, scrambling between beam and post until he reached the narrow catwalk. It swayed under his weight as he ran, and a moment later he felt it lurch. One or all of them were on the gangplank with him. He saw light up ahead.
He sped along the walkway, his fiddle bouncing on his back. The catwalk ended abruptly at a corner and bent him over the handrail. Giuseppe looked to his left and saw a labyrinthine assembly of planks, staircases, ropes, and pulleys. Curtains and great sheets of painted wood and framed fabric hung high in the air on a system of tracks. Charging footsteps echoed behind him.
He dove for the nearest stairs, and the wood creaked and groaned under him. At the top he spilled onto another catwalk and looked down, the floor some thirty feet below. There were people down there, backstage, some milling in costumes, others rushing around. A few of them were pointing at Giuseppe, whispering. Stephano hit the b
ottom of the stairs with a snarl of fury, sweat smearing the dirt on his face. He had his hands on the rails to pull himself faster.
Giuseppe fled along the walkway, up another staircase, along another catwalk, zigzagging through the air. He slowed when he heard no sound of pursuit and eventually ended up perched above the stage. Opera singing rose up around him. A man’s voice like the sweet, rich smoke from a pipe, a woman’s voice light and clear as sunlight on the ocean. They were singing in Italian, familiar music that reminded Giuseppe of home. He froze for a bare instant and listened.
“Alfredo,” she sang. “Little can you fathom the love within my heart for you.”
Men worked the ropes and levers from the platform beneath Giuseppe’s. He could not see the audience, but he could feel them out there beyond the curtains, all dressed up in their finery, smiling over the performance and basking in the ease of their lives. Not a one of them would help him.
Stephano appeared alone at the edge of the catwalk. Gaslight lit him from below, like hellfire beneath a demon.
Giuseppe ran. The walkway ended at a brick wall, but a ladder climbed from there. It was the only way left for him. He rushed toward it and jumped as high as he could, landing on the fourth rung and scrambling. A hand snatched at the cuff of his pants, and he kicked it off.
At the top of the ladder Giuseppe hit a trapdoor. He felt around, found a latch, and threw the hatch open, emerging into a room of heavy chains and massive gears ten feet across. He kicked the trapdoor shut and ran down a passageway toward another ladder.
He entered into a larger space overwhelmed by an ivory moon, the backside of the Opera House clock. A circle of flaming gas torches burned around its circumference, and the heat washed over Giuseppe’s face. He huffed in the heavy air and hurried to the second ladder. He scampered up, through another trapdoor, and climbed out onto the roof. He looked around, spotted a chimney, and hid behind it.
A moment later the trapdoor burst open, and he heard Stephano labor up into the night. The padrone’s boots thumped and his breathing was heavy and ragged.
“You think you can hide up here?” he wheezed. “Huh, boy?”
Giuseppe was trapped. The square lay several stories below. Nearby, the dome of the Archer Museum loomed in the night, while across the roof the cathedral’s spires stabbed at settling drifts of fog.
Stephano paced the roof, getting closer. “You could have had it good,” he said. “If you would have brought me that violin, we could have worked something out, you and me. Your talent and that instrument, we could have gone places.” He pulled the big knife from its sheath on his belt.
The alley between the Opera House and the museum opened, a black chasm with a span of five feet, maybe eight. Could he jump it?
“Where are you, Giuseppe?” Stephano’s voice came from a few feet away, on the other side of the chimney.
Giuseppe bolted up and sprinted for the edge of the building. He heard Stephano’s heavy boots behind him. His legs burned, and the wind blurred his vision with tears. He reached the ledge and launched into the air.
He sailed across the gap and landed in a hard roll onto the roof of the Archer Museum. He shook his head and looked back. Stephano gripped the ledge and stared across the divide. The padrone looked down as if studying the distance, weighing the risks. His body sagged, and Giuseppe could tell he was exhausted. Stephano slammed his fist into the stone and pointed at him.
“You listen to me!” he said. “There’s nowhere in this city you can go where I won’t find you.”
Giuseppe struggled to his feet. He walked right up to the ledge and stood directly opposite Stephano. He had escaped.
“I’ll find you and I’ll kill you.”
Giuseppe tipped his cap to his former padrone. He turned his back on him and walked away, while Stephano screamed threats into the night, his voice breaking over the rooftops.
Giuseppe slipped his old fiddle from his back. He checked inside, relieved that the beat-up case had protected it. He slung it over his shoulder and crossed the roof, an ache collapsing his whole chest. His stomach cramped up. Stephano was right. There was nowhere to hide. He could not trust any of the other boys, not even Ferro or Alfeo. Pietro had shown him that. How long could he move about before one of them spotted him? How long before one of them tried to take him down to please Stephano?
Giuseppe reached the museum’s great dome and walked along its base. The charge running through him dissipated, and he deflated like a sail. A quarter of the way around the dome, he found a row of skylights that glowed with the pale yellow of a dying firefly. He crouched and crept up to one and peered down into the museum through sooty glass.
It appeared to be some kind of storage room. Crates like those he had seen unloaded at the docks lined the walls, stacked half a dozen high. Worktables ran up the middle, loaded with lit oil lamps and big magnifying glasses. Here and there were stone objects, carvings and statues, skulls and bones from beasts Giuseppe had never imagined.
A bronze object glinted and Giuseppe recognized the strange head from the docks. Then a man appeared, the man with the dusty hair. He bent over the head and opened a panel in the brass forehead, revealing an intricate nest of gears. The man picked up some instruments and began to probe around inside.
It was too far away to see exactly what he was doing, and Giuseppe did not want to risk being caught up there. He sloped away from the window and around to the far side of the dome, where he found a ladder bolted to the wall. It dropped to a lower roofline, and from there Giuseppe shimmied down the shingles, braced himself against a copper rain gutter, and leaped to a nearby building. He began his passage over the rooftops of the city, traversing an entirely man-made landscape of angles, slate cliffs, and brick precipices, the final boundary before the domain of clouds and birds and aeronauts.
The farther he traveled from the square, the closer the buildings clustered and the easier it was to move between them. After several blocks he used an outside staircase to descend to the street, touching down like a wobbly sailor too long at sea.
He hid in an alley to recover his bearings and to plan his next step and, in the quiet of that moment, thoughts lurking in the background approached. He thought of the green violin and clutched his forehead. He thought of the stolen money, of his brother and sister, and moaned. A tortured moment passed, but he put a stop to it. There would be time to deal with all of that after he had found a place to hide.
He thought about Frederick, but even if he could trust the apprentice he had no sense of the boy’s master. No, Frederick’s shop would not work. It had to be somewhere Stephano would never go, even if he thought Giuseppe might be in there. He closed his eyes. In his mind he ran through the city, down familiar streets, into abandoned warehouses and across courtyards. Nothing felt safe. He thought of each of the city’s districts. And then the park.
Giuseppe stepped away from the wall. Of course. McCauley Park. It was perfect. But the same things that would keep Stephano out had until now kept Giuseppe out as well. Not too far in, the park turned wild and unmanaged, bristling with fearful tales and frightening legends. But the stories about the rat cellar had been frightening, too.
Giuseppe kept off the main streets, dove from shadow to shadow, hiding even from casual pedestrians out on the street. He took no chances, and managed to reach McCauley Park without being spotted by anyone.
For a while he stood at the edge looking in, listening to the crickets chirp. Gravel paths drifted through the trees like vapor trails left by specters and ghouls. Giuseppe planted his feet on the nearest track and stepped into the woods.
He stumbled often, with the sky blacked out, and chose the trails that led him deeper into the park, until those paths finally dwindled and ended. He told himself that the forest was just a different kind of city, with lanes and byways, and its own citizens. He was a foreigner, but he could learn his way. The farther he went, the older the trees appeared, thicker and grizzled and hard as iron. He heard the
sound of water flowing nearby, and picked his way in that direction.
A few moments later he stepped into a muddy streambed. The canopy of leaves parted above it, laying a silver thread of moonlight on the creek. Giuseppe dropped to his knees and scooped up handfuls of cold water. The drink chilled him from the inside and soothed his aching muscles. A boulder jutted out over the riverbank behind him, creating an empty hollow. Giuseppe crawled into it, and curled up like a sleeping pup.
Safe in his cave, he released the thoughts he had kept at bay. I’ll never play the green violin again. His money was gone, and he had no way of getting home, no way to ever see his brother and sister again. He began to cry and closed his eyes. He hugged his old fiddle until the tears stopped, and he felt better having let them out. Exhausted and shaking, he fell asleep.
A squirrel woke him. He opened his eyes and saw the critter flashing its bushy tail and bawling him out from a nearby tree. He tried to unfold his body and winced, sharp cramps twisting the muscles in his legs. He had a few scrapes and bruises on his arms he had not noticed the night before. He hauled himself out of the cave and stood up, hands on his lower back, arching with his eyes closed.
He yawned and hobbled to the stream for a drink. His stomach grumbled to say that water was not enough. Giuseppe had not eaten anything the previous day, and only a little more than that the day before. The memories of his loss and escape felt distant, as if months or years had already passed. But the pain that hollowed out his gut felt all too recent, and had nothing to do with his hunger.
He climbed up on the boulder he had slept under and looked around. Trees in every direction, and underbrush and bramble hid any paths that might be winding between them. The steadfast squirrel followed him, bounding and hollering from tree to tree.
“All right, all right,” Giuseppe said. “I’m going.”
The Clockwork Three Page 12