The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  Her lips compressed for a moment. “His family were aristocrats, rich, they had influence… And that wouldn’t have mattered, but—I’d seen so many young women with good voices missing their chances, ending up as provincial singing teachers at the very best—”

  The depth of contempt in her tone sounded surprisingly masculine.

  “Roberto told me he could speak to impresarios he knew; that his family were on the opera boards of more than one town—”

  “A Neapolitan Count,” Conrad interrupted, biting down on scorn. “Even some impresarios wouldn’t want to offend him. So they might well allow his pet soprano a turn or two on the stage.”

  Something flashed in her glance. He felt it in his belly and his balls. That is the old Leonora!

  “And then, irony of ironies, now he has you, he won’t allow you to sing. The wife of the Conte di Argente shouldn’t be seen on the public stage—”

  “You know nothing!”

  “I know you appear to have fallen for a story rich young gentleman have told singers since the beginning of the opera! And you couldn’t succeed even with his influence—”

  She shot to her feet, faster than he could react. He had just time to remember that Leonora was not a woman to use that tone to. Her warm palm hit his face with a stunning slap.

  He probed with his tongue probed and tasted blood. The inside of his cheek was cut by one of his teeth.

  She gasped in a breath, looking up at him with defiance and fear both on her face—one emotion purely hers, Conrad thought, and the other common to all women who have opened the situation to violence with a man present.

  “He said he would marry me, Conrad!”

  It felt more of a blow than her hand.

  “And it wasn’t a lie, or a false promise. We were married before I left Venice!”

  Conrad found himself holding her upper arms with no memory of taking hold of her, the silk of her close-fitting sleeves crumpled under his fingers. “You know why I couldn’t offer you marriage! I had my father’s debts. How could I support a wife! Still less a family!”

  Something about the line of her lower eyelids, taut with keeping back tears, made him release her and step back.

  She sank down on the chair and sighed, perhaps with relief at the absence of violence. “Yes. Yes, you told me.”

  “And he was rich.”

  “He was rich,” Leonora echoed, without the antipathy.

  “And well-connected. And—”

  He suppressed the part of him that would have whined, I knew as many men in the opera world!—because the people that a beginning librettist knows are not the same as those known by a junior aristocrat. A piece of cynical advice thrown by his mother Agnese to his gawky younger sister fell from his mouth:

  “—And it’s as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man.”

  “It wasn’t like that!”

  He shrugged, in that moment pleased to see that his carelessness hurt her.

  “I should have written, at the very least. I know that.” Leonora shook her head. “I told myself it was Fate, that I was on the road, I ought not to turn back.”

  Her teeth closed very gently over her lower lip. He wanted to kiss her until she stopped doing that.

  “And so you married him because…”

  “…I could marry him.”

  Sudden hope is as painful as splinters of glass. “Is that all the reason! That you needed to marry, and he was able to? If I could have married, you’d have—”

  “You think I’d marry just to have a name, and enough money to get started in my career. You’re very ready to think of me as a whore. But what else could you think?”

  She stood up again in one sharp movement, all Leonora Capiraso, Contessa di Argente, and not the little Nora D’Arienzo who had been billed (at the bottom) on La Fenice’s posters.

  Etiquette demanded he should remain standing, since he shouldn’t sit when a woman was not also seated. Conrad nonetheless sat down hard, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and his forehead against his fists. “Oh, I’m no better than any other man. I’d rather think of you as a prostitute than think that you’re in love with another man!”

  Her voice softened. “You were a better man than many. I don’t suppose that’s changed over a few years.”

  Conrad lifted his head out of his hands, finding her dark lilac-shadowed eyes on him. Her face held a keen, affectionate expression.

  Conrad stood up. He couldn’t help but grab her hand, despite her immediate effort to withdraw it.

  “If you care, then leave him!—Oh, hell. I can’t even ask you to divorce him, I’m still poor—” The barely-furnished room seared into his vision, reminding him every moment, as if he could forget, how he was here in prison for owing money, however unjustly by the spirit of the law.

  “Wait a few weeks. Wait until I know how well the run of Il Terrore did, and see what impresario will take me onto his books.”

  He felt stunned by the familiar features, here in front of him.

  “Nora, I don’t care if he forbids you to sing! Come and sing the role of the Aztec Princess for me—”

  His mind scurried, already planning how her soprano would affect the mezzo role, and what on earth he might give Sandrine to make up for taking this from her—

  “—Please!—”

  Conrad broke off, aware that he was babbling and gripping her hand too hard. Her mouth made a tight line as she gazed at him. In contradiction her eyes seemed wonderfully warm.

  “I never thought I’d see you again.” Her expression altered to pure unhappiness. “I didn’t think how this would be, with things changed.”

  “Nora.” He smiled impulsively, at the incongruity of that name applied to this slender and beautiful woman in silk and lace. “Leonora…”

  “No—you don’t know—”

  “Yes, I know. You’re married! He’s your husband.” Conrad, in sudden panic, demanded, “You have children?”

  “No children.”

  “I apologise.” Formality was easier. Some atavistic part of himself murmured, No, not sorry, not sorry at all. Let there be still fewer things to hold them together!

  “No, you don’t.” Her voice, if soft, was no less intense.

  “How much honesty do you want from me? That I hope he drops down dead in the street today? How can I say that? I want you to be happy.” Conrad tried to control his breathing. “Does he make you happy? Does he?”

  Her voice was almost too soft to be heard. “You make me happy—” Conrad’s body jerked, as if he were all one musical string reverberating to being struck.

  “—He makes me happy.”

  She gave him a look that pierced him; that anatomised how his heart leaped and broke in a handful of seconds.

  He said, “And yet you chose.”

  Her expression was indecipherable and perturbing. She tried to pull her fingers out of his grip. For all her flustering, her cheeks remained pale, neither heated by exertion or blushing with shame.

  “‘Nora…” Conrad brought up his other hand, sliding his fingers into the wisps of dark curls behind her ear, where her hair was gathered up on her head.

  Her skin was heated where he let his fingertips slide into the depression of her jaw, seeking every sensation so that he would know her pulse beat as fast as his. Because she must feel something for me—

  He could feel nothing except delicate skin.

  She fought harder to free herself. Conrad gripped her around the wrist, taking the weight of her hand.

  Her hand felt heavy.

  Heavy like the weight that a human body has, when the life has gone out of it.

  Conrad frowned, between anger and panic.

  Something is wrong—is very wrong—

  “Let me go, Conrad!”

  He found himself wondering, ridiculously, Is she holding her breath?

  A struggling woman breathes harder, her breath comes in pants, and her chest rises and falls more quickly
. Conrad gripped Leonora’s wrist tightly, and stared at her blue bodice, cut in Empire-style under her breasts, so that her long coat and dress would fall undisturbed to her kidskin boots.

  No quiver of flesh disturbed those curves.

  No woman can hold her breath for minute after minute. No matter that it’s ludicrous: there’s no reason she should want to. It’s not possible—!

  “Conrad!”

  He met her dark gaze, letting her yank her wrist against the encircling grip of his fingers. Strong for a woman, yes—singers have to be fit—but he is a man, there is no way that she could escape from him. Except that she is nearly free.

  Hearsay and heresy congealed like ice in his stomach.

  “You were…ill.” Conrad winced, beginning the accusation.

  He expected her to be chill. A true dank-stone cold. For his hand not to warm hers: for her to feel as if she had walked out of an ice-store into the sun.

  Her skin flushed with a fevered heat that owed nothing to a quickened pulse.

  She looked to the side, suddenly, avoiding his eyes.

  Ah, no. I hoped I was wrong!

  Conrad managed not to swear, and to keep his voice steady.

  “You were ill… Some time between when I last saw you in Venice, and now. You—what—had scarlet fever? Cholera? Or consumption? Or… What was it?”

  He slid his thumb under the end of her cuff, although it was cut to lie snugly against her skin. A sea-green bead cut its thread and bounced away on the cell’s bare floorboards. Conrad let the pad of his thumb rest against the underside of her wrist. It brought him the feel of the two tendons just up from the heel of her hand. And a sensation of flesh cooled by shadow.

  Push against her skin as he might, he felt no heartbeat.

  Leonora slowly turned her head to look up at him, eyes full of dread.

  Conrad put his other hand unforgivably against the breast of her dress. Unforgivable, because she is a married woman, and not married to him. His fingers at her throat, skin to skin, that he feels through his blood, bones and tendons—

  Under the weight of his palm, her sternum does not rise.

  Her ribs do not expand and contract.

  Conrad lifted his knuckles to her cheek, and felt that, close as his skin might come to her nostrils, no in-breath or out-breath of air touched him. Nothing at all, no matter how long he left his hand there.

  He spoke barely above a harsh whisper. “You were ill; doctors were called; il Conte di Argente offered his money—and none of it was any use, was it?”

  “No, none.”

  “You still died.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Conrad didn’t want to say it aloud. His mouth felt arid.

  “You’re one of the Returned Dead.”

  “Yes.”

  Leonora stood perfectly still as she answered.

  If she had done that before, he thought, he would have spotted it at once. No living, breathing body can stand as still as that.

  As still as the dead.

  “How long—how—?”

  “Some time after I married…” She sighed—or mimicked one. Conrad remembered seeing others of her kind who kept doing the things they did when they were alive. Perhaps for the sake of the emotions they need to express.

  Certainly not for the breath they don’t need.

  “…I heard afterwards that Roberto was distraught. All I knew was that I… woke. I woke, I wasn’t breathing. I knew what had happened—I knew a Returned woman in Castelfranco Veneto when I was small. There are… changes.”

  “You’re a miracle.” Conrad snarled the word, not sure if that was because he despised the Church’s description of the absolutely inexplicable, or because he didn’t need to hear anything about how desperately loving and grieving Roberto Capiraso might have been.

  No one can ever say what brings one person back, and not another—but who knows what Leonora might owe to her desperate grieving husband?

  “I no longer sing.” She sounded bereft. “Since I died.”

  Like all of her kind, she was slim. He took her hand again—heavier than the hand of the living, though not by much—and clasped it. Her grip felt warm. If the death-weight of her flesh bothered her, he thought between shock and joy, she never showed it.

  “Leonora…”

  He found himself too sick at heart to consider whether it might be Signore Aldini’s galvanic energy in her veins, or whether this was another form of life, that only counterfeits having gone through death. Speculation is useless. The truth of it is, everything about her has changed, and—nothing is different. She feels as warm in my arms as she ever did.

  Thought vanished in the strangeness of touching Leonora, not unresponsive as a corpse would be, but feeling no pulse under her fever-hot heated skin.

  As in a dream, he lifted his hand to her throat, fingers pressing down to find the carotid artery, as he has done on battlefields with fallen men.

  No heart-beat. Her rib-cage only lifted with air as she breathed in preparatory to speaking.

  “Corradino.” Her voice was breathier than he recalled. “You don’t flinch away?”

  “Why should I? I always loved your warmth in my bed.” He realised what he had said to a married woman just as she wrinkled up her nose, and smothered a giggle.

  “Don’t say that in front of Roberto.” She sounded unaccountably cheerful.

  Conrad let his other hand be about delicately smoothing her hair back behind her ears. The ash-brown curls were wonderfully soft and sleek.

  “I can’t help being glad you don’t run away from me.” She placed her fingers lightly against his cheek. “Some people think I ought to be a thing of horror—rotten flesh, raw-head and bloody-bones, children’s nightmares. I can see in their eyes that some think I am. That this—”

  Leonora shrugged, inviting his inspection.

  “—is all illusion, and that underneath everything is grave-cold and mossgreen. But it’s no illusion. This is how I came back.”

  Conrad took both her hot hands in his own. “I suppose everybody asks—but I can’t help asking, too. Came back from what?”

  The hope of getting an eyewitness answer robbed him of any more speech.

  Her expression changed from affection to apology. “The Mind of God; isn’t that what the Church teaches us? But I—don’t truly remember anything—I wasn’t there—I have no answers. You are not the first to ask.”

  She massaged her right hand with her left, and Conrad realised she had withdrawn from his grasp. Her face was sad and knowing. There was no accusation in her expression, but guilt tore through Conrad.

  She’s used to everybody rejecting her; no wonder she doesn’t go out in public!

  He took her by the shoulders. “It doesn’t make any difference to me!”

  The maid’s cry and a clatter of footsteps on the wooden stairs only gave enough warning for him to let her go, and step back.

  Leonora snatched up her hat and gloves, clutching them to her, plumes trailing.

  The door slammed open and Roberto Capiraso strode through it, moving far too fast for the size of the small cell.

  “Madam wife.” His voice grated.

  Conrad spoke at the same time as Leonora:

  “Argente—”

  “Roberto—”

  “I recognised your carriage outside. This is not where I expected to find you!” The Conte di Argente over-rode all other voices, including the guard’s outside the cell. “Come out, madam wife!”

  Conrad, in shock, thought, Strange how often real life mirrors the stage. Roberto Capiraso’s face flushed red, the man blustering like a stage baritone protesting against his wife’s betrayal of his honour.

  Nora’s voice cut in, not at all loud. Icy and intense. “Don’t make a fool of both of us! I have every right to visit the librettist of your opera. My experience in the world of opera itself is a help—”

  Roberto Capiraso’s hand closed over her wrist. It had none of the gentleness of Conr
ad’s remorseless investigation. It cut her voice off as cleanly as if he had grabbed her throat.

  Her shock at the red indentations of his fingers made Conrad think she was not used to being manhandled like this. That sent a spark of joy through his belly—At least she isn’t beaten by him!—which flashed into anger.

  “You have no right to hurt her, Argente!”

  “Oh, I apologise, is that your privilege?”

  Roberto Capiraso took advantage Conrad’s stunned silence to reach down with his free hand, and snatch the pages off the table.

  “I’ll set these.” He nodded curtly to Conrad. “Unfortunately, my wife and I are too busy to pay social calls at the moment.”

  Before Conrad could step forward, the Count caught hold of the open door, pushed his wife unceremoniously through it, and, as he followed, pulled it sharply closed behind him.

  “Cazzo! Wait! Nora!”

  The click as the lock’s wards engaged sounded an instant before Conrad’s fists crashed down and hit the wood.

  Three hours later Paolo arrived with the news that the royal yacht Roberto Guiscardo was sighted, and expected to dock back in Naples within the hour.

  CHAPTER 21

  The King placed the long, lawyer-written document on the table, gazing up mildly at the others present in one of his private chambers.

  “This is agreed, then, gentlemen?”

  Conrad blinked. A night of glacially-slow hours had passed, when he rivalled the changing guards for sleeplessness. Now, after the sudden rush of officialdom that had Conrad released into the custody of his Majesty at the Palazzo Reale, he found himself hungry—it was well past lunch time—but the more alert because of it.

  Conrad heard the timbre of iron as the King added, very patiently, “If anyone has difficulties, please speak now—once signed, this is settled.”

  “I’m content,” Conrad put in, slightly too quickly.

  The silver-haired Adalrico Silvestri, Conte di Galdi, held his gloves and cane neatly in one hand. His other hand rested on the arm of a younger man, whom Conrad recognised as one of Naples’ young-men-about-town who favour the opera, and guessed him to be Galdi’s son or nephew.