The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  The son-or-nephew, much the same age as Conrad, shot him a glare.

  A Prince’s Man, like his father? Conrad wondered. Men to steer clear of, in any case. He could see that the Silvestri, father and son, would love to have him taken back to debtor’s prison.

  But they’re in no position to overtly argue with the King.

  “I consent.” Adalrico Silvestri spoke in a perfectly urbane tone that was more frightening than his son’s glares. “Your Majesty, your Treasury will pay the interests on Alfredo Scalese’s debts, enabling Signore Conrad Scalese here to stay out of jail to earn sufficient to pay off the principal.”

  The faint emphasis on ‘earn’ held more contempt than Conrad thought it possible to get into one word.

  “Precisely: I don’t want charity,” Conrad put in, perilously close to interrupting the King. “I’ll pay the debts off myself given time.”

  “Signore Scalese, if I had no… obligations… owed to your sire from the years before I took the throne, your time would still be spent in prison.” Ferdinand shrugged, managing (deftly as an actor) to leave an impression that Alfredo’s help had been incurred during youthful self-indulgence which the adult man would prefer to forget.

  Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily held out the quill to the old man, who scrawled “Adalrico Silvestri” in one long jagged line. Conrad signed his own name, and watched the king and the other man sign as witnesses—the latter being one “Niccolò Silvestri.”

  Ferdinand let them go through the politenesses attendant on farewells with perfect equanimity, and only after the two men had gone did he regard the anteroom’s tall doors with a faint frown.

  “Both of them in the Prince’s Men, I think,” he murmured. “My spies don’t like the look of the older Silvestri at all. I advise you to avoid the son, too, socially.”

  “If I don’t want to end up in a duel?” Conrad nodded. “Yes, sir. He looks the type to give out challenges, and if I did find myself in a duel with him, I doubt I’d get away alive. If not shot in the back, then met with by a gang of masnadiere on the way home…”

  Ferdinand gave a smile of appreciation. It faded to anger. “And now I believe I need to have a word or two with the Conte di Argente about using obvious plots by the King’s enemies to settle his personal grievances.”

  Conrad trespassed on his relationship with Ferdinand sufficiently to contradict him. “Sir, no!—Not if you ever want the man to work with me in the future!”

  By Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily’s expression, he was imagining il Superbo after a raking-down like that.

  “Very well.” The King gestured for Conrad to sit with him at the table. “Then, how is our Aztec Princess progressing?”

  Conrad took his notes and clean copy from their leather folder, together with more of Paolo’s correspondence. “I’m going to need to settle the roles quite soon. La Tachinardi writes that she’s not available to sing any role—still afraid of lightning, according to Paolo. We have one tenor, Bonfigli—Giovanni Davide is booked up two years ahead, and Berardo Winter hasn’t replied. Donna Belucci is turning out to be quite an asset—”

  Conrad showed the King his synopsis for “Xochitl the Aztec slave-girl,” now “Hippolyta the captured Amazon warrior”; at which Ferdinand looked thoughtful.

  “—And this can be as large or small a role as we require, sir,” Conrad added, “Depending on how she settles in with the rest of the cast. She need only come on to sing her arias at the beginning of Act II and Act III, to give the crew time to work the scene changes, and allow the cast who have sung in the strettas to rest for a few minutes.”

  Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily nodded as if he were an impresario like Domenico Barjaba. His expression altered. Conrad saw the man suppressed embarrassment.

  “In fact—as I was reminded on my return—I have another singer for you. She’s under contract to the San Carlo, so we must give her something… But it could be a small role. Brigida Lorenzani, a contralto.”

  Conrad searched his memory for Naples’ faces and reputations. Lorenzani, Lorenzani… Yes. Competent but not reputed to be inspired. Porca miseria! Just what we needed!

  “I’ll… think of something, sir.”

  “I’m sure you will. Show me the libretto so far,” the King added.

  The rest of the afternoon passed in discussion of how the libretto should be staged. Dismissing him, finally, Ferdinand picked up two or three of the files bound with red ribbon that Conrad recognised as diplomatic dispatches.

  “I may be along again later in the week to watch the rehearsals, Corrado, if you think it won’t prove disruptive?”

  “If they can’t put up with you, sir, I have no idea how they’ll cope with the pit hurling old fruit when they sing a sour note…”

  He left Ferdinand chuckling.

  Tullio fell in beside him on his walk back from the Palace. The streets of Naples were one of the most secure places to talk of secrets, so long as one appears to be involved in no more than gossip—every other man and woman being engaged in their own business, at the volume of a shout.

  “I went out looking for all the local gossip about why the Donna and the Signore are together.” Tullio Rossi shoved his hands in his greatcoat pockets, sending Conrad a cautious look. “And if he beats her, that sort of thing. The servants say there are rumours of a child, years ago, but there’s no sign of any in the house, so that may be people making up juicy stories.”

  The feeling that urged itself on Conrad was, he realised, guilt.

  Tullio added, “There are the usual rumours she is beaten, but her maids have never seen bruises. Some of them say it must be she who can blackmail him—why else would he keep a wife who can’t give him a son? Just the usual scandal, padrone. Nothing you could say was true.”

  Nora’s married to him, why am I asking around to find dirt?

  “I told her why I couldn’t marry her,” Conrad muttered. “Back in Venice. I didn’t know she wanted respectability so much.”

  Tullio shrugged, turning into the steep road that led to the lodgings. “But he keeps her from singing, that’s what they say. They’ve been married for five or six years. There was a time when she was very ill—servants can’t keep it straight how long ago—and then she recovered, but gave up her professional singing career. She continued to sing in a few drawing-room operas, but then gave that up too.”

  The evening air had a chill touch to it. “That was the illness she died from, then?”

  And that was when she became Returned Dead.

  “They all say she’s got a ‘fragile constitution.’ They don’t all know she was dead.” Tullio smiled crookedly. “You should hear the rumours, padrone. One lot say she suffers from consumption, and if she sings a single note, she’ll drop dead in a shower of blood.”

  There are times when it would be satisfying to still have a hundred saints’ names to swear by. Conrad muttered, “Merda! Catso!”

  “Yeah. And there’s a whole other set of rumours, not so spectacular but more disgraceful, that she’s suffering from a ‘licentious’ disease. Opinions differ about whether she contracted it during her singing career, when it’s assumed she was a slut—or caught it from Il Superbo. Who, naturally, as a gentleman, patronises whores. Either way it stops her singing.”

  Conrad rubbed his forehead hard, as if that could get rid of the beginnings of another bout of hemicrania. “I should never have asked you to find out.”

  “All I’ve got’s rumours. Sorry, padrone.”

  Tullio waited until they were nearly at their door before he spoke again:

  “What makes someone Returned Dead? Who does it happen to? Why doesn’t it happen to everybody?”

  “I don’t know.”

  But I do know Tullio has his own dead, in the cold ground.

  “They say it most often happens to those who leave someone bereaved who can’t bear their death; who’d truly give their own life to have that person returned. But that can’t be the whole of it, or else we’d have citi
es full of Returned Dead! It’s an insult to people whose dead stay dead—as if they didn’t love them sufficiently well. I suspect the explanation is very different.”

  Tullio Rossi nodded, his gaze on the road ahead. He walked for a while saying nothing, people stepping aside from his route automatically.

  “Watch their house.” In the open street, Conrad won’t mention the name of the Argente mansion. “Is the… Donna… allowed out alone?”

  “With a maid and footmen, most times.” Tullio shrugged. “He’s careful of her—like she was made of glass, the attic-maids say.”

  “I suppose I don’t blame him.” Conrad called to mind every scrap of rumour and knowledge a jackdaw-librettist’s mind had collected on the subject. “It’s possible for the Dead to, well, not die, but to be destroyed… and the Dead don’t return twice.”

  Despite the crowded sunny street, Tullio Rossi shivered.

  “She must go out alone at some time,” Conrad added, frustrated. “The market? To meet female friends? Find out! Because I intend to speak to her again. I have to.”

  The next day was work, and Conrad put everything else out of his mind. He made his way down the dusty palace corridors out of the public eye, not to the secret museum—where he might be forced into the company of the Conte di Argente—but to the same hushed small library.

  “Son.”

  The spectre of Alfredo Scalese, otherwise Alfred Amsel, had the blue translucence of wood-smoke. The ghost’s eyes were more opaque than the rest of him, which at least meant one didn’t have to see the inside of his brain-case.

  Conrad stopped in the empty library’s entrance. Abruptly he turned and pulled the tall doors closed behind him. “What do you want, Father?”

  “I stayed for you.”

  Since Alfredo had been white-haired when he died, and pale with illness, he looked little different as a ghost. Conrad felt his heart wrench.

  “Strange.” Conrad deliberately walked through one of the ghost’s arms as he claimed a table and set his own notebooks and folders out. “You were unreliable, Father—unreliable to the highest degree. You gambled, you spent every scudo you promised to the family, you couldn’t keep any post longer than six months; I’d seen Europe, Turkey, Russia, and North Africa by the time I was ten years old. And yet… and yet. Part of me regards you as a child regards his loved father.”

  He spoke with his gaze on his papers, not looking up until he finished setting them in order.

  The spectre met his gaze. Its eyes were rimmed with light, as if it could still weep. But Alfredo Scalese coughed and dusted his nose, as certain not to show emotion as in life. “I’ve been watching people reading. There are books here—you’ll have to come, I can’t exactly lift them, can I? You complained the ancient savage ceremonies of tearing a heart out on top of a pyramid were too bloody to put on stage, which is where you need your climax…”

  Conrad was mildly amused, despite himself. “I don’t remember objecting, so much as being realistic about the Church censor.”

  “But there’s a tribe who sacrifice their virgin daughters to the mouth of a volcano! In Naples, what better spectacle to watch? They can shiver happily over their own mountain of fire, and get the thrill of seeing it erupt on stage instead of in real life!”

  “That’s—thoughtful.” Conrad pulled out a best-quality cotton handkerchief, given to him by Isaura, and sneezed, dusting his nose hard, much as Alfredo had done.

  Thoughtful, even if it does remind me far too much of the Prince’s Men and their damned volcanoes. But Father doesn’t need to know about that.

  “I suspect every opera house in Naples wants to do volcanoes. It’s inevitable.” Conrad added, “And I have Angelotti on my back enough as it is—I only asked him if we could collapse the entire Serpent Queen’s Palace in an on-stage earthquake.”

  Alfredo smiled wickedly. “Some men have no sense of humour.”

  Conrad straightened his shoulders, and followed the ghost down into the stacks. Alfredo darted sideways, and re-appeared through the shelves—which made Conrad’s stomach turn over, no matter how many times he’d seen it before.

  “There’s a biography of Signore Cortez two shelves over,” the ghost remarked, “but this is my find, down here—the autobiography of a woman who travelled through South America with one of the touring opera companies they have down there! You can get every detail of the country correct to the utmost degree—shall you take notes?”

  Conrad pulled out the indicated volume, that was less dusty than most on the shelves, being newer, and took it back to his table.

  The afternoon wore away to evening, servants came into the library with lamps, the windows turned first indigo and then black. Conrad found his hand cramping from so much note-taking and sketching. Before he realised it, he was deep in conversation over the opera with his Father.

  With an after-imprint of my father, he corrected himself. He leaned back in his chair, gazing down the library aisle to where the smoke-blue figure bent over, searching the spines for another title.

  Is a spectre less of a person than one of the Returned Dead? Or are they no more than he is?

  In all the years Father’s come to me, after he died, have I ever known him learn anything? He’ll remember that we spent half a night structuring the entrances and exits for Act I and II of The Aztec Princess. But can he change his character? Is he capable of being anything except irresponsible and feckless, as the real man was?

  How many people have gone mad, hoping their loved ones will lose their faults and cruelties in the spectral life they have? Could I ever have a proper father in Alfredo?

  Conrad found his fist pressing against his sternum, where an acid feeling burned. It tasted like regret.

  Rehearsals at the church hall can continue without me for one night. If Isaura-Paolo can play the piano, the singers can scramble through their parts for Act I.

  He allowed himself to be imposed on by his father, moving from one book to the next, reading passages to one another—Alfredo leaning over Conrad’s shoulder, arm sometimes intersecting his son’s as he pointed out pages in an open book.

  In the middle of an argument regarding the male castrato voice versus the female mezzo, Alfredo’s head came up like a hound scenting a fox.

  At the same moment, Conrad saw the windows were no longer black but grey.

  A repetitive sound echoed across the streets of the city.

  Cock-crow.

  Conrad said, “Father—”

  Alfredo Scalese gave a smile of regretful affection, and sifted away on the air, dispersing like smoke.

  Conrad sat down, a little suddenly, and gazed at his heaped piles of notes.

  He remained for some time sitting, staring at nothing in particular. And then shook himself, and stood up, sweeping up his documents and returning to the secret museum to lock them safely away.

  Roberto Capiraso’s dip-pen and inkwell were still on the table, but there was otherwise no sign of the Conte di Argente.

  The wind outside the palace felt refreshing and cold. The eastern sky turned a tropical-butterfly blue. Conrad pushed his sleep-deprived body into a walk through the harbour district, moving as briskly as he might while obstructed by crowds of the lazzaroni of Naples—“common working people” or “beggars,” according to who one speaks to. The fishing-boats were selling the last of their first catch for a few soldi, and heading out for a second attempt. Conrad bought breakfast from a food-seller, and let the keen air clear his head as he ate.

  He made sure his way back to the lodgings took him past St Abadios’ church hall. Loaned through the King’s influence for the singers’ rehearsals, it was out of the way of most passersby. Conrad automatically glanced down the twisted lane, between five- and six-storey buildings strung with washing, on the off-chance that some over-enthusiastic cast members would be still at the hall.

  Movement caught his eye.

  Far too much of it.

  So many people there—at this h
our of the morning?

  Shadow between the tall tenements chilled him. Or at least, he hoped it was the shadow. He pushed forward—the closer he came, the more solid the press of the crowd. Shoulders and elbows got him through to the front.

  “Shite…” He breathed out.

  Plaster flaked off the front walls of the building in a gust of heat. Two or three deceptive trails of smoke drifted out of the doors. The planks on one side were burned through completely.

  The alley to the south side of the building was blocked—all that side of the brickwork wall collapsed. Beyond, inside, the small hall stood open to the sky, roof burned away, walls blackened.

  Beads of fire sparked in the ruins.

  CHAPTER 22

  One of the chorus tenors, a short man whom Conrad had also seen in the Duomo choir, clutched at Conrad’s sleeve with both hands. “Supernatural fire!” The tenor unknotted his fingers with difficulty to point.

  A low haze of smoke or mist filled the remains of the hall. Conrad edged closer. At the level of the floor, he saw scattered fires, burning with a peculiar yellow-white glow. His head came up abruptly.

  The colour of the flames—that smell—

  Ignoring complaints, Conrad grabbed the tenor’s arm, dragged the small man back, and dropped him. His mind supplied him with memories of that same yellow-white quenchless fire, on the battlefields, and at the Royal Society of London. An experiment with a substance always kept under water for fear it should burst into flame on contact with the air—

  Conrad shoved bodily through the protesting crowd of lazzaroni. Police officers and foot-soldiers in the King’s uniform were struggling to set up a bucket-chain from the harbour.

  “Not water!” He looked around desperately for someone he might know—and saw no familiar face.

  He picked on a man with police lieutenant’s insignia, who had a well-shaven face and ironed uniform for a man out of bed just before dawn.

  “Signore! Listen! Water will only spread these flames!”