The Black Opera
Page 69
“But.” Conrad found he couldn’t manage another word.
“When Adalrico and his son put their plot into action, I half hoped it would push you back to a distance… but then you came out of prison, and work pushed us back together.” His mouth quirked in his clipped beard, in an expression of sardonic humour. “There have been great partnerships in the mondo teatrale before: Persiani and Donizetti, Romani and Bellini…”
Conrad noted the stain of pink high on the man’s cheekbones. He thought, amazed, Roberto is ashamed.
Faced with that, he could do nothing but be honest.
“You still love Leonora,” he said.
Roberto’s smile twisted into pain. “Yes, I love her. You love her, too. Despite everything. And since I’m now the one who can’t support her…”
Conrad felt every muscle tense. He held himself back. “You don’t get to call her a whore, Roberto!”
“I’m sorry, Corrado, I’m sure I’ve heard you say the very same thing—”
“Che cazzo!” One of the balcony shutters was drifting closed; Conrad slammed it back against the wall hard enough to flake off the plaster.
“Ask her!” the dark man demanded. “You have a stipend as director of the scientific institute. I have nothing! She said it herself, a minute ago—Ask her which one of us she’s going to choose!”
A high-pitched scream of anger split the air. Leonora sprang to her feet, the chaise-longue screeching back over the tiles.
“Neither! I choose neither of you fucking idiots!”
Conrad opened his mouth to shout.
The drawing-room door banged open.
Luigi Esposito strode through.
“Oh thank God! The ’thirty-eight!”
The Returned Dead police chief was holding a wine glass, Conrad saw. He swept over to the side-cabinet, and seized a bottle.
“Anatoile Vercel, bless him,” Luigi breathed, lifting the bottle, and filling his glass at eye-level with the yellow wine. He didn’t look at any of the three people in the room. “Ah, there’s nothing like wine made from savagnin grapes and aged in oak casks…”
Conrad managed to recover his voice. “Luigi—”
“I had to find a bottle of the ’thirty-eight. Maria will kill me, otherwise.” Luigi favoured them—all three of them—with a dazzling smile. “When she and my second wife got together about me, they sent me out to buy wine and spent the entire night with this, trying to drink the other one under the table… And every hour until dawn, I came home, and I found Adelaide and Maria stone-cold sober.”
Roberto eyed Luigi Esposito with what Conrad thought, at first, was distaste—and then realised was an odd fascination.
“You have two wives?” Roberto said.
“I have three, now.”
The police chief took a sip of the wine, and closed his eyes, either in appreciation for the Vercel wine, or lost in memory.
“All the children play together,” he added, proving it to be the latter.
“Three wives?” Conrad blurted. “And they all know…?”
“None of the children call me ‘Uncle.’—Stefania is from Palermo, so I suppose we shall live in the house here, now, since our sovereign monarch wants me to be his liaison between the Naples and Palermo police forces. And in Naples, let’s be honest, there’s a lot of rebuilding to do.”
Luigi opened his eyes, his innocent gaze gleaming.
“You’ll excuse me; Maria and Stefania and Adelaide will kill me if they don’t get their share!”
He tucked his empty glass into the hand that held the first bottle of the Vercel, returned to the cabinet, acquired two more wine-glasses, and picked up two bottles by their necks.
“…What this wine needs is a fine quality cheese… By the way, you have guests.”
Not having a hand free, the police liaison between Palermo and Returned Dead Naples backed his way out through the doors.
There was a silence.
A long silence.
“So.” Conrad hoped his voice didn’t betray him. “So… What should we put on at the San Carlo next season?”
Roberto hurriedly said, “I’d thought about a comedy?”
Nora lifted her head to look at both of them. “I can have the rebuilding completed by November?”
CODA:
Luigi Esposito left the drawing-room of the apartments in the Palazzo dei Normanni, letting the doors fall shut behind him.
A man, and a woman in man’s clothing, hastily stumbled back from where they clustered outside.
“I couldn’t hear anything!”
“What did they say—?”
“SST!”
Luigi beckoned them down the corridor towards the palace apartment’s large central hall, and a rising babble of sound, where his Majesty King Ferdinand and a growing number of society’s great and good collected, taking drinks from the servants, and waiting to greet their hosts.
Luigi made introductions between his three wives and Tullio Rossi—they amiably gossiped with him—and to Paolo Scalese, whose evening dress fooled two out of the three women.
The string quartet in the corner came to a subtle, quiet halt.
Flunkies flung back the double doors.
“Your Majesty!” the apartment’s major-domo announced. “Lords, Counts, ladies, gentlemen! I present to you—the new Governor of Naples!”
King Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies clapped his hands. “Bravo!”
Every man and woman present joined in the applause, polite at first, and then, as their hosts appeared, sincere.
“Bravo!”
“Brava!”
“Bravissima!”
All three of them came in together, the penniless Count leaning on his stout padded crutches; Conrad and Leonora close enough to either side to support him if he slipped.
Roberto smiled as if a touch stunned—and Conrad as if he heard glorious applause for the production of some Neapolitan opera.
Leonora moved to the centre, her left arm tightly through Conrad’s, and her right arm linked as firmly with Roberto Conte di Argente. She might have been only beautiful, in a plain high-waisted white dress, with antique bronze earrings and hair ornaments, but neither the silk nor the metal shone as brightly as her smile.
Luigi discretely passed wine-glasses to Tullio and Paolo-Isaura.
He filled them, and his own, with the Vercel jaune.
Wordlessly, they raised glasses to each other:
Ting! Ting! Ting!
RUDE ITALIAN FOR BEGINNERS:
(Please note that rough modern equivalents have been used for early-nineteenth-century swearwords; it would take more of a linguist than I am to accurately portray Neapolitan, Sicilian, and other pre-Unification Italian of the period.)
cazzo—as a noun: penis, cock. As a colloquial interjection, used more as the UK currently uses “fuck!”; the all-purpose transgressive exclamation.
che cazzo—lit. “what penis”; colloquially “what the fuck!”
che stronzo—lit. “that asshole”/“what an asshole.”
Ciel; “O ciel!”—lit. “heavens!” or “sky!” an archaic appeal to the deity.
cornuto—“horned,” i.e. cuckolded; a husband sexually betrayed by his wife.
Dio!—“God!” (As appeal, imprecation, or whatever else this all-purpose oath can cover.)
fessa—lit. “cleft,” colloquially “cunt.”
figlio di puttana—“son of a whore,” used similarly to “sonofabitch!”
merda—shit; crap.
merda per merda—“shit, shit, shit!”
minchia—southern Italian version of cazzo: penis.
porca miseria—lit. “pig poverty” or “miserable pig”; colloquial equiv. “goddammit!”
porca vacca—lit. “pig-cow.”
porco giuda—lit. “Judas pig” (No, I don’t know why adding “pig” to almost anything can turn it into a swear-word; pigs are truly inoffensive animals…)
testa di cazzo—dickhead.
N.B.: Scheiße or Scheisse is, of course, not Italian but German; it translates as “shit,” with much the same vulgar connotations as the English word.
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Nyx had already been to hell. One prayer more or less wouldn’t make any difference…
On a ravaged, contaminated world, a centuries-old holy war rages, fought by a bloody mix of mercenaries, magicians, and conscripted soldiers. Though the origins of the war are shady and complex, there’s one thing everybody agrees on—
There’s not a chance in hell of ending it.
Nyx is a former government assassin who makes a living cutting off heads for cash. But when a dubious deal between her government and an alien gene pirate goes bad, Nyx’s ugly past makes her the top pick for a covert recovery. The head they want her to bring home could end the war—but at what price?
The world is about to find out.
“Kameron Hurley’s a brave, unflinching, truly original writer with a unique vision—her fiction burns right through your brain and your heart.”
—Jeff VanderMeer, author of Finch
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1864. London is a city in transition. The Constantine Affliction—a strange malady that kills some of its victims and physically transforms others into the opposite sex—has spread scandal and upheaval throughout society. Scientific marvels and disasters, such as clockwork courtesans, the alchemical fires of Whitechapel, electric carriages, and acidic monsters lurking in the Thames, have forever altered the face of the city.
Pembroke “Pimm” Halliday is an aristocrat with an interest in criminology, who uses his keen powers of observation to assist the police or private individuals—at least when he’s sober enough to do so. Ellie Skyler, who hides her gender behind the byline “E. Skye,” is an intrepid journalist driven by both passion and necessity to uncover the truth, no matter where it hides.
When Pimm and Skye stumble onto a dark plot that links the city’s most notorious criminal overlord with the Queen’s new consort, famed scientist Sir Bertram Oswald, they soon find the forces of both high and low society arrayed against them. Can they save the city from the arcane machinations of one of history’s most infamous monsters—and uncover the shocking origin of …
THE CONSTANTINE AFFLICTION
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mary Gentle published her first novel at the age of eighteen, and has a master’s degree in Seventeenth Century Studies and another in War Studies. The author of several novels, she lives in Stevenage, England, with her partner Dean Wayland.