by Mary Gentle
Decay had eaten into the petals. Other, older blossoms had been swept aside into the corridor. It argued someone who regularly visited, but had not been able in the past few weeks, or else the blossoms would be fresh.
Glancing at other shrines, their offerings were in a similar state. It was reassuring.
If the lazzaroni can’t get in here to pay their respects to the Sainted Dead—I doubt any others can get in past Mantenucci and Alvarez.
I don’t want to see any one of the company end up like Adriano Castiello-Salvati.
We have so short a time, now, that we need to keep safe. Surely we can?
Conrad stepped up his pace, preferring it where he emerged out into high-chambered spaces that had once been mines. Ancient Romans or Greeks had left the volcanic rock walls perfectly smooth behind them, and the air was scented by the pine planks Angelotti’s team used to construct the flooring.
Conrad walked in at the base of one great bottle-shaped chamber, realising that he must be coming in through an air or drainage channel.
Three dozen voices rose in the opening to Act II.
The chorus sang praises to the Sun, in a swifter pace, throbbing like the great steam engines Conrad had seen in England and France, wrapping him in nothing but the soul of music and voice. He paused in the shadows, watching Robert Capiraso conduct, and the various awkwardly-placed orchestra members produce an echoing celestial sound.
The celebratory passage ended—on stage, the singers would parade off to a martial hymn; but here Roberto Capiraso cut that short and dismissed them, all but the two main singers, who would remain behind to sing their latest conflict.
JohnJack and Velluti began the bass-castrato duet.
Their voices prowled around each other in the orchestral rehearsal, the way their bodies would as soon as they undertook the staging. The music was oddly lyrical, Conrad thought. Considering they’re swearing vendetta, and making arrangements for a duel to the death…
It held him unable to move. Fernando Cortez’s triumph ascended like bells, inhuman as the notes of a glass harmonica. Jaguar General Chimalli’s rhythmic bass insults undermined Velluti’s vocal acrobatics with the gravity that only a deep voice has. Spinelli dropped to a note that Conrad thought a Russian bass could be proud of—sprang up into the rhythm of their dual cabaletta—
The Conte di Argente rapped his knuckles on the candle-stand attached to his piano, and pointed into the gloom. “No! Again!”
The orchestra rearranged itself, taking their cue from Paolo playing first violin. Capiraso stood listening with closed eyes and a pained expression.
“Stop!” Capiraso slammed his hands down on the top of the piano. Paolo’s bow skidded, ended everything in a discord. “Signore GianGiacomo Spinelli, oblige me by not coming in late—”
Conrad stepped out of the shadows. “I heard no one out of time.”
“No?” Capiraso, even in the warm gold light, managed to give a chill look that was all il Superbo. “No.”
There was a distinctly implied No, I doubt you would.
“Signore Scalese, when you are in charge of rehearsals, you may—”
Temper getting the better of him, Conrad snapped, “In fact, I believe I am in charge! And Paolo is supposed to be conducting them—”
“That boy!”
“—That boy has done three years more in a Conservatoire than you have—”
It was a sheer and absolute relief, Conrad discovered, to allow himself to yell at Roberto Capiraso. The tenseness of past days exploded out of him. It might well have been the case for il Superbo, too. With his face distorted by light and shadows it was difficult to tell.
“—If you spent less time destroying the morale of the singers,” Conrad finished, loud enough to carry over the Count’s bitter protest, “and more time actually setting my libretto, we might have some chance of getting this opera finished before the first night!”
An anonymous voice from the direction of the rehearsal stage remarked, “A week and a half is long enough to put on an opera; people do it every day…”
“Yes. Thank you!” Conrad bit off his next remark. “If you’ve got nothing better to do but bitch—”
“No, nothing.” The voice turned out to be Sandrine, who beamed. Despite the heavy make-up, designed to be seen at a theatre’s highest gallery, she had a remarkably subtle expression of mischief that Conrad could plainly see.
“This is not the time! Go rest, all of you.” Conrad pulled a rolled sheaf of paper out of his pocket, and slapped it against the Conte di Argente’s chest. “The new Act Four, Scene Six. Perhaps we could have some good music for it?”
It was touch and go what Roberto’s temper would make him do. Thirty heartbeats ticked past.
The composer silently snatched at the papers, and stalked off through the chamber. Conrad watched him go.
“Corrado?”
His whole body suppressed a startle. Not because he was seeing the assassins of the Prince’s Men down every tunnel, this time—but because he would recognise the voice anywhere.
He blushed violently. “Nora!”
He turned around, realising she had been standing behind him all through his quarrel with her husband.
CHAPTER 31
That went out of his head—along with the rest of the world—as soon as he saw her face, pale as the white rock walls. He found his mouth dry and wordless.
Five weeks since this began. Less time than that since I’ve known she was here in Naples.
Whatever her name is—whatever she is—nothing in my feelings has changed!
He was not alone in most senses. The singers and instrument players collected in small groups, under the vast ceiling that the lamp-light barely showed; but they were far more interested in the break from work than in anything else.
Leonora’s dark shapely brows came down in a frown. Even that was a beautiful expression on her.
“I’ll be speaking to Roberto later. Conrad… Do you want this opera to be finished? I foresee one or other of you walking out if you don’t stop quarrelling!”
Conrad winced, a twelve-year-old schoolboy caught in a misdemeanour.
La Fenice in Venice is no different from any other opera house. Leonora will know, from there if nowhere else, about quarrels between prima donna and second soprano, between the composer and the orchestra, between anyone and anyone else, in fact. Even if she had never set foot backstage since Venice, she would recognise what damage a quarrel between the librettist and the composer could do.
“We do work together. He can be a good composer.” Conrad was suddenly speechless, as she moved further out into the light of the oil lamps, and he saw her fragile appearance. “Are you… I can’t even ask, are you well? What would that mean? Can you be ill?”
“I’m not ill. Just tired.” She smiled, more resigned than sad. “Corrado, we haven’t had time to speak… Because you’re a man, I suppose you must be wondering whether you had anything to do with this?”
Her unobtrusive gesture took in her fever-warm skin and stillness; her general differences as Returned Dead.
“Of course I wonder!” Conrad was startled to find his tone so rough. He looked down into her blue-violet eyes, wishing he had the right to brush the wisps of ash-brown hair back from her face. Desperate to show himself rational, adult, he said, “I can’t find any evidence as to why some people Return and most don’t. You…”
“Me?” Leonora gave him an amused look. “I’ve been thinking it over since we spoke—I knew you’d have more questions for me, Corradino! There truly was… nothing. Or, I suppose there was nothing but me—or else I wouldn’t remember it.”
She shook her head dismissively.
“But it was just… being. All I could think of was how much I wanted to be alive.”
“Is that it?” Conrad stared at her and stumbled over his words, barely keeping up with his own mind. “The Returned Dead come back because they want to?”
Does it have nothing to
do with the bereaved? So many of those who die are loved by the ones they leave grieving but still stay dead. If we’ve had the wrong idea all along…
“I don’t know, Conrad.” She tilted her head on one side, like Venice’s thieving brown fluff-ball sparrows.
“Then it wouldn’t depend on those who are left alive; how much they love you. Just on how much you love—” Conrad bit off the word he would have finished with.
Him. Him, not me. She won’t have come back for me.
But he said she remembered my name.
Conrad used the silence to gather up courage.
And when he found it, asked a different question entirely. “I must know. Am I in any way responsible for your death?”
Leonora shook her head. “I think this will be painful for you to hear, but I died in child-birth, with what would have been mine and Roberto’s first child. It seems I have too narrow hips to ever safely bear a child.”
Thinking of her pregnant, thinking of her in the Conte di Argente’s bed—
“Yes, it’s painful to hear.” Conrad held her gaze for long enough that she understood how many ways he meant it. “Nora, I thought of you often—” Every day! “—over the years. I want to think that might have had some influence on your Return, even if only the smallest.”
“Who knows?…” Leonora reached up with her fingers and gently brushed his cheek. “Don’t let Roberto’s temper drive you away, Corradino. Your friendship is valued here, I promise you.”
Her touch scalded him.
“I had achieved some… balance of mind,” he whispered, “while I was away from Naples, and then working down here. Now that’s scorched up in flames! How I was, before I left—sending Tullio to ask questions of your servants, wondering if I could find a way to see you when your husband was out… It makes me sound like some shabby conventional adulterer!”
Leonora made to speak but he pressed on, in an intense whisper.
“This isn’t a case of a woman I once had, and I wonder if I can have her again, in the teeth of the marriage laws!” Conrad watched her features, responsive to his crudity, and all he saw was her wonder. “Every time I think of you, I think, ‘this is Nora, Leonora D’Arienzo, who is the other half of my soul. If we never saw a priest in Venezia, that doesn’t make us any less married. I know she’s faithful to me.’”
“Corrado—”
“And at the same time I know you left Venice with Roberto Capiraso, and married him to become Contessa di Argente; I know you lay with him—And now you tell me that you died in birthing his child—”
She gazed up at him in the golden lamplight. It was impossible to believe he no longer had the right to take her hand, or hold her body close up against him, or kiss her. He clasped his hands behind his back to force himself to remember.
“Nora, I know I asked before—men always ask—but—does he make you happy?”
“Not so many men ask in that tone.” Her lips curved, as if she were remembering small things: the everyday currency between a husband and wife. “And, yes. I won’t lie to you. He does.”
Happier than with me?
As if she could read his mind—or, as her husband has told him, because his emotions are so clearly decipherable from his expression—Nora said quietly, “I didn’t choose him over you just because he made me happy. You made me happy.”
“I know: you told me: you married him because he could marry you.”
A plausible account of events tumbled into his mind like dominoes falling. That she married the Conte di Argente, that she died in child-bed; that suppose—only suppose—she married him because she learned she was pregnant…
Because little Nora from the orphanage in Castelfranco Veneto knows what orphanages are like, knows the half-slavery of children fostered out, and would never subject any child she might have to that.
And in that case, if she were pregnant in Venezia, it might have been his, or mine—
Either of us might be responsible for Leonora’s death.
“Was it my child?”
“No.”
Clearly, she had expected this question.
“We’d been gone from Venice two years before I fell for a baby. Corrado, I want to talk to you—we will talk, when the opera’s safely launched—because there’s so much for us to say.” She paused. “It’s just over a week; try to bear with him until then?”
It was not the question he wanted to have asked of him. But since it was Nora, he said, “Yes, I swear.”
She stepped back, inclining her head in a polite nod.
The Conte di Argente was visible across the chamber, Conrad realised; talking with the second violin. As Conrad watched, Roberto shot a glance at Leonora.
Leonora walked away, gracious, exchanging words with all of the cast during this resting period.
Not mine, never mine, she went through death and came back and she still chose il Superbo over anyone else.
He saw Nora approach her husband. This time he tried to watch and see, rather than be overcome by jealousy. Leonora smiled up into her husband’s face. Roberto touched her hand gently, for such a squarely-built man, and then swirled an errant lock of her hair around his finger.
She swatted mock-angrily at his hand and swept off, talking to the seated members of the cast, until Sandrine held up a mirror so that the pale woman could take out the pins and rearrange her hair.
Conrad waited until the composer was standing alone, between conversations; strain momentarily creasing his face.
“Signore.” It was difficult to expose his sincerity to the other man’s possible acid. He nonetheless finished. “I have only just heard. I would like to offer you condolences on the passing of your child.”
Contracting lines showed at the corners of Roberto Capiraso’s eyes. The Conte di Argente was taken aback, evidently. He weighed Conrad with a long look.
His narrow glance relaxed.
“Thank you,” Roberto said soberly.
A chord sounded from the piano. Conrad glanced across to see Paolo playing the first phrase of Cortez’s aria of love for the Princess Tayanna. Giambattista Velluti had taken Leonora’s hand. Now he sang to her with self-assured passion. There were comments from the other singers and musicians gathered around, but not distinguishable over Velluti’s warm contralto notes.
“Vulgar exhibitionist!” Roberto Capiraso sighed.
It was an almost cordial sigh. Il Superbo had evidently become used to the castrato’s foibles.
Surveying the crowd around the piano, under the oil lamps that barely touched the gloom high in the bottle-shaped roof, Conrad found himself saying, seriously, “The time’s coming when we have to tell them.”
The Conte di Argente swung on his heel, bringing him around to face them. Sandrine’s mezzo sounded as she joined her voice with Giambattista, both of them now serenading a laughing Nora.
“That it’s not organised criminals they have to fear.” Roberto raised a brow. “Do we need to tell them?”
“The essential people, yes—they’ve noticed the attacks that are feeling out our strength. We owe them.” Conrad met il Conte’s gaze. “If any of them are going to crack, and need to be replaced, the sooner we know about it the better.”
Roberto Capiraso nodded. “I… yes. I suppose you’re right.”
Conrad thought, momentarily, of Adalrico di Galdi, and the nameless priest in the Duomo. “I imagine that the Prince’s Men themselves may spread rumours about their presence in Naples—because they’ll know that, if we haven’t told the company, our people will see that as a betrayal.”
Roberto made a very unaristocratic grimace. “Yes. The cast have new material to adapt to, today and tomorrow; shall we say, tell them in three days’ time?”
“Monday,” Conrad compromised. “Make it tomorrow evening.”
“Very well.”
There was a pause.
“I suppose, under different circumstances—” Roberto Capiraso evidently braced himself. “—You are a
man for whom I might have developed a slight respect.”
There was no doubt, looking at him, that the man was genuine. The mixture of old pain, embarrassment, anger, and relief at having spoken his mind was too complex for any actor.
Under different circumstances, Conte di Argente, you and I would have been friends.
“‘A slight respect’?” Conrad echoed, giving the other man a chance to hear what he had said, and decide how he intended it to be taken.
Roberto Capiraso perceptibly winced.
Conrad offered his hand. He couldn’t help a smile. “I suppose that’s the best I’ll ever get out of Il Superbo.”
The Conte di Argente choked back a snort.
They shook hands, and went to break up the impromptu duet in favour of actual rehearsals.
Morning came and made it Monday, March 6th: eight days left of the deadline. Somewhere in the Empyrean, Conrad thought, Moon and Sun and Earth are drawing together according to the inexorable Laws of Motion. Moving towards a line that will pull with massive strength at the crust of the world.
He put together a picture of Naples above, but now only from men’s reports. Tremors of the earth had become a regular occurrence; they sounded as hollow dull thuds in the caverns. Campania had minor quakes so often, without visible result except an occasional rock-fall, that even in the mines people ignored them.
There was talk of extra vents opening on the mountain. Colonel Alvarez reportedly sent some of his men up by donkey, plodding the slow and tortuous rise from the base of the volcano, to the edges of the ash-field bordering the fathomless crater. The air was startlingly cool on the way up, but turned scorching hot near to crevasses that vented out smoke stinking of sulphur.
“Be reasonable, padrone,” Tullio said. “If Vesuvius went boom every time there were earthquakes and smoke-vents, people wouldn’t have got in the habit of ignoring it, would they?”
Conrad muttered about Pliny.
Much of the libretto of Act IV was composed and scored in record time. Rehearsal in the catacombs took place in three shifts, over eighteen hours a day. Hearing his words sung transformed them.