Secret of the Song

by Cathie Hartigan

  I swallowed and wished that passion had never been invented. Strewn across the coverlet of the bed lay a crimson night dress almost identical to the one I’d made before I became keeper of Donna Maria’s wardrobe. How I’d dreamed of the position, desiring the smooth hands of a seamstress, to sew silk instead of coarse linen. I was the fool in the room.

  It was much as he could do not to renew his ardour but once he had finished dressing, Don Fabrizio, after many kisses, left to rejoin the party. I wondered about his wife, Donna Maria Carafa. She would know, surely. Perhaps he would eat enough of cook’s garlic pastry pom-poms to quell the smell of sex.

  Donna Maria remained in her chamber, still ‘unwell’. She picked up the nightdress from the bed and held it to her like a baby. How I wish she held her real baby in the same manner. Donna Maria seemed to care so little for her children.

  ‘Here,’ she said, passing it to me. ‘Help me with this.’

  She stood with her arms up, almost like a child and I passed it over her head. It was then I noticed the tear.

  ‘Oh, my lady. Shall I fetch another? The seam is split here.’

  ‘Is it? No, don’t bother. I like this one. Besides,’ she said, putting her nose to the fabric and inhaling deeply, ‘it will be as if he is still here.’ She lay down and I straightened the sheets and coverlet. ‘Read to me, Silvia dear. Something soothing.’

  I did not want to fetch a book from the study downstairs in case I was seen and questioned by Don Giulio or Don Carlo. Instead, I chose from those we had in the chamber; my favourite. Everybody loved Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Even those who couldn’t read knew the story. It was so exciting! Orlando, the hero, goes mad when he discovers that his love, Angelica, has run off with a Saracen. The people are worried because Orlando destroys everything in sight. Eventually, an English knight comes to try and find a cure. He flies to the moon, which is where everything that is lost is kept (I love that part) and he comes back with Orlando’s wits in a bottle.

  I sat next to the bed, and by chance the book opened at that page. Was it fate? Or perhaps the English knight had come to help me. Either way, Donna Maria wasn’t listening as I read the passage where Orlando sniffs the bottle and recovers his sanity by falling out of love with Angelica. If only we could all do such a thing.

  ‘Shall I read more, my lady?’ Her face was turned away and I wondered if she were asleep, but with a big sigh she turned her head. Tears streaked this way and that across her cheeks. With my handkerchief I dabbed them dry.

  ‘You will help me, Silvia,’ she said, in a smaller voice than usual. ‘When … when it … when the worst comes. For I fear it will.’

  ‘If I can, my lady.’ I smoothed her forehead with my hand and sat with her in the quiet until I was sure she’d fallen into sleep. Then I went out onto the landing. There was still music being played downstairs but the raucous time had passed. From the window I saw Don Fabrizio leaving in a carriage with his wife. He held her hand to his lips at one point but as the carriage pulled away, he glanced back and up at the window. There was no doubt in my mind he would return.

  I stepped back almost into the pitcher full of water. It wobbled dangerously for a moment, but I steadied it and plunged my hand into the cool water. Scooping it up, I drank several mouthfuls, all the while wondering how on earth I could be of help to Donna Maria. And what would ‘the worst’ be when it came?

  Don Carlo did not like me, and ever since the singing session at Castle Gesualdo, I worried that he might take it into his mind that I should be tried as a witch. Then what could I do? I looked down at the water as a shaft of moonlight brightened the room, my face was in shadow and the interior of the pitcher oily dark. Why had Don Giulio sent up the pitcher? Danger came in many guises. A sharp blade, a blow … or a simple swallow of something unknown. I put my hand up to my throat, fearing there was something more deadly in the pitcher than water.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Mollie retreated into web-land. Short of wrenching the headphones from her ears, there was no communication. Even when I stood directly in front of her with my arms folded and sporting my best determined-and-fierce-mother expression, she merely closed her eyes and began to hum. I knew that if she knew how upset I was, she would be at least twice as upset, but still wouldn’t tell me. There are times when admirable qualities are really … really … actually, there are times when admirable qualities are a total pain in the arse.

  My mobile rang as I was putting my shoes on.

  ‘The shoot’s off,’ said Jon.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ted’s just rung me. He can’t come.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ I said, crossly. ‘That’s rather short notice.’

  ‘He’s got to go and shoot butterflies hatching.’

  ‘It’s the wrong time of year for that.’ Are any men truthful?

  ‘It might have been sea horses.’

  ‘Really.’ Yeah, yeah …

  ‘Are you all right, Lisa?’

  He sounded concerned and I nearly asked him. Why hadn’t he told me about Daniela? I almost asked him. Almost. And I might have if Mum hadn’t chosen that very moment to mouth something incomprehensible at me.

  ‘… thought we might have a rehearsal instead,’ he was saying. ‘I’ve rung Robert. He says they’re okay with that.’

  ‘They?’ I said, shrugging at Mum.

  ‘Who is it?’ she whispered, loudly.

  ‘Jon,’ I mouthed back.

  ‘Yes, Sophie’s at Robert’s,’ he said.

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘Yes. So is it all right with you? You sound pissed off.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I said, meaning yes, I am. ‘I’m perfectly all right. See you later.’ I didn’t wait for him to say goodbye.

  ‘Why don’t you ask him to lunch?’ said Mum. ‘I’m sure Mollie would like that.’

  ‘Mollie saw enough of him while we were away.’

  ‘If you say so.’ She sniffed and went into her bedroom. Now Mum had the hump. What was I saying? It wasn’t her bedroom; it was mine! God. We were all pissed off now, not just me.

  I got my music together, waved at Mollie and called out goodbye to Mum. Neither responded.

  After Naples, October in Exeter felt chilly. The wind had a sharp edge to it. I didn’t feel like a rehearsal, but there again staying in the flat wasn’t much of an option. I took a deep breath. The world seemed to have shifted after being away only a few days. Sophie would tell me what had happened. At least, she might have something sensible to say.

  I had to fight my way into the drama studio. Somehow I got tangled up in the long black curtain that hung just the other side of the door, and for a moment I thought I might end up in Narnia or another perhaps more spooky world that required cloaks rather than fur coats. Once I’d wrestled my way through, I found myself alone in a large space lit by one small bulb.

  ‘Hello?’ Silence. My voice sounded flat. I walked into the puddle of light and peered into the gloom, turning slowly round a full three hundred and sixty degrees. There was no one. My shadow stretched out on the floor. It wasn’t every day I stood alone in the middle of a large empty space like that. Black curtains draped across every wall, and even the ceiling was painted black, so it seemed as if there were no edges to the world. It was like being outside on a dark night. The air pressed down on my head like a weight.

  I sang a few notes to test the acoustics. Not good, but maybe it wouldn’t be too bad when we were all together.

  A bang, a whoosh of air, and one of the curtains drew back to reveal Sophie in a bright turquoise kaftan. A butterfly in a dark forest. Robert stood behind her in the gloom.

  ‘Ah, Lisa. Hello. How lovely. Gosh, a bit dim in here.’ She let the curtain drop and all was drab again. ‘Let me find the lights.’ The curtains bulged and billowed as she fought her way through, then suddenly I was engulfed in light. Not quite Wembley stadium, but I’d been looking up when they first came on and was completely blinded.

>   ‘That’s better,’ Robert said, nodding hello to me. ‘We’ll be able to see the music now.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, and rubbed my eyes in exactly the way you’re not supposed to. One day, I’d probably be counting the crow’s feet and buying special cream for the eye area, but there was something very satisfying about giving them a good rub, especially when trying to restore any sort of vision.

  ‘How was Italy?’ Sophie said, when she reappeared from behind a curtain on the other side of the studio, dragging a chair with her good arm. ‘Don’t tell me … wonderful. I bet it was. Did you meet any nice Italians? How’s your mother? Better? Robert, I left a bottle of water in the car. Would you mind fetching it? There’s a love.’

  ‘She’s fine,’ I said, ‘and yes, it was wonderful. But, Sophie, I want to know what happened. How did you do this?’ I knocked gently on her cast. ‘Mollie said something about a fire as well as a fall. But she wasn’t clear. And “there’s a love”? Robert? Has the world turned upside down since I’ve been away?’

  Sophie laughed as we went back behind the curtains to fetch another couple of chairs. ‘Oh, you,’ she said, giving me a friendly biff on the arm. ‘It’s just a figure of speech. And as for what happened …’

  The door banged again but it wasn’t Robert. I could hear Daniela laughing – high and singsong, a naughty giggle – and felt a cross between anger and distress, then the beginnings of a slow churning sensation in my stomach.

  ‘Oh, look, Jon,’ Daniela said. ‘We’re all alone.’

  I rammed the legs of my chair against the curtains, pushing through them like a bull with its head down but with somewhat less grace. Unfortunately my effort didn’t find a gap in the fabric, and I ended up carrying the curtain with me and making my entrance from beneath it as if I was wearing a long black train. It did terrible things to my hair.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, swivelling my eyes from one surprised face to the other and then putting my chair down rather too particularly and taking a while to get comfortable.

  ‘Oh, hello, you two,’ Sophie said. I felt a stab. You two? Were they a two? Robert came back and handed Sophie her water.

  ‘Is that it?’ said Jon. ‘No wine?’

  It was a joke and I felt a riposte begin to form that on another day might have resulted in a little banter, but I squashed it at once. ‘Someone could go out for coffee later.’

  ‘Good idea, Lisa,’ he said.

  His use of my name made me glance in his direction long enough to see concern on his face, but I quickly turned back to my music. ‘Let’s do some singing first. How about Languisco e moro?’

  It had been agreed that we would sing two madrigals by Gesualdo, one already in the public domain and the newly-discovered Ite sospiri ardenti.

  There was a flapping of pages before we all stood up.

  We stood in a circle and cast the spell; notes seemed almost solid. I looked at the music on the page. Sophie began, her opening phrase falling step by step as she sang ‘Languisco e moro’, then Daniela and Jon joined her in a similar descending cascade, ‘I languish and die’. Robert and I would begin later. How reassuring, how reliable he was, steady … you needed a steady bass in this sort of thing. It could so easily go off the rails. Come apart. Soon, we’d be in. In fact, we already were, although we hadn’t sung a note. We’d acclimatised to the pulse of the music, consciously at first, following the slight raise of Jon’s hand. It had slipped into our subconscious once Sophie had started singing. Now it resided deep in our bodies, firm and reliable as our bones. Four bars, five … I heard Robert’s quiet intake of breath at the same moment as mine and we were there.

  My entry was on the same note as one being held by Daniela, so I had to sing as quietly as possible to begin with, gradually getting louder as she faded, otherwise there’d be a sudden jolt in the sound. I remembered Jon saying it was like passing on a baton and the overlap should be almost imperceptible.

  It was as if we opened a portal into the distant past. All the emotional torment of the mad Gesualdo poured out into the drama studio and his strange, unworldly harmonies rocked the reality of that Sunday morning. Everything felt different. ‘Ma tu, fera cagion de la mia sorte’, the words filled my mouth with the taste of lemons before they poured out into the fray. Our voices swirled around the room, but you, savage cause of my death, for pity’s sake, comfort so painful a death with a single tear. We all pleaded with equal sorrow, with equal pain, with equal intensity. Single threads wove together in an ever more complex twine, twisting and turning until the agonies were over, the knot was tied and the resolution made. ‘Now that you be merciful, sweet it is to die.’

  Phew.

  ‘That wasn’t bad, was it?’ Jon said, and I couldn’t help smiling to myself at the outrageous understatement. ‘Shall we go straight into the other one?’

  We all focussed once again.

  Well… you win some, you lose some, I suppose. If we were a relay team then we’d have been disqualified for false starts, changing lanes and not just dropping the baton, but lobbing it into the crowd. It can happen, but not usually with an ensemble as experienced as we were. It’s the sign of an amateur group if they lose confidence when one part goes astray. Usually the others will cover the error and the perpetrator joins back in, hopefully without any of the audience noticing, but halfway through singing Ite sospiri ardenti, we fell completely apart.

  I was listening to Daniela in order to pick up a note for my next entry only to find she wasn’t singing it. There was a hole where a sound should have been. That didn’t matter terribly as I did know my part, but when it came to it, instead of hearing something recognisable from the others, it was if they were singing some other madrigal, one I’d never seen or heard before. Gesualdo’s harmonies were challenging but it was the oddest thing, like walking in the front door and discovering your house had been redecorated, and instead of your own furniture there was nothing but junk. I felt irritated, then completely overcome with doubt. I missed my entry.

  We all began talking.

  ‘You should have sung a G sharp in bar twenty-eight …’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault …’

  ‘They’re quavers, not crotchets …’

  ‘You completely cocked that bit up …’

  ‘Bollocks …’

  I looked round at everyone’s faces, hardly recognising my friends, their expressions were so bad-tempered and accusatory. How did that happen? Daniela spoke rapid Italian to the air above our heads. Apparently, knitting an imaginary cat’s cradle was her out of sorts response.

  ‘All of you,’ she said, thrusting her chin at each of us in turn. ‘You are all very bad with the accent. Italian is the language of lovers, is it not?’

  ‘Isn’t that French?’ murmured Sophie.

  Daniela smacked the challenge away. ‘You must listen to me. The way you say sospiri, it is terrible. The sos is like in sock,’ she waved her hands at Robert’s ankle. ‘Not soap.’

  There was something hilarious about the way she began vigorously rubbing her face but I couldn’t access sufficient light-heartedness to go there.

  A chill wrapped itself round my neck, and I remembered the very first time we opened the museum’s copy at Sophie’s house. It was a warning, this draught, I was sure of it, like a spectre from the past lurking just behind my ear. The notes of the madrigal seemed to shift before my eyes.

  ‘Nooooo,’ they whispered. ‘Nooooo.’

  Choir practice at Mollie’s school the next day couldn’t have been a more different experience. Yes, there were tears, but they were Emily’s, a child of the highest snivelly order. I was all sympathy, every time. There were no cross words though. I’d moved Jonah, whose pathological wriggling had irritated those all around him, to the end of the back row next to the sizeable Connor. Jonah and Connor were now friends, and any whale jokes I may have thought of never reached their ears.

  The sound made by the choir had improved so much I began to think I might be distantly re
lated to Gareth Malone after all. Miss Price said that they’d taken my pronunciation advice so much to heart that they corrected each other when speaking. ‘It’s MOVE-munt, not move-MEANT, bum-face …’

  It wasn’t like Noteworthy; the simplicity of the relationship – you choir, me conductor – enabled a lot of songs to be sung and improved upon. Halfway through the wretchedly premature Away in a Manger, it occurred to me that they should enter the local music festival. It would be good experience for them and lovely for the school if they won.

  ‘Do you fancy that?’ I asked Mollie, when I picked her up later.

  ‘Could do,’ she said, airily.

  She meant yes, but I haven’t forgiven you for the incident with the Coco Pops yet. I didn’t point out that I might be the one doing the forgiving.

  ‘Can I have a muffin?’

  We were passing a Costa and I had a weakness-of-will attack.

  Mollie did the obvious and correct thing by ordering the double chocolate muffin while I made a mistake and chose the raspberry and white chocolate. If only raspberries came without pips. I was mulling over the thought that they should come supplied with floss when Daniela walked through the door. It was quite a big cafe and she didn’t see us, I suppose because we were mostly concealed both by a pillar, and the large sofa we were sitting on.

  ‘Eat up,’ I said to Mollie.

  ‘Why?’ She looked up, saw Daniela standing at the counter, and immediately her expression changed. Guarded would be a word for it. Shifty might be another. She grabbed one of the large cushions and put it on her lap, so that the only bit of her visible was from the knees down.

  ‘You’ve got some explaining to do, Mollie,’ I said in my best and fiercest cushion-penetrating whisper.

  The cushion trembled but stayed put. I decided that I would be perfectly nice and friendly to Daniela, steering the conversation round to what the bloody hell was she doing in my flat, in a reasonable, measured way.