Secret of the Song

by Cathie Hartigan

  ‘Oh, really?’ He sounded ever so slightly disappointed. ‘More than you?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  When I’d eased the bow through the loop and tweaked each side to make them even, I did look up, straight into his eyes. Perhaps it was the halogen spot-lighting that made them so bright.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, smiling.

  Another elastane moment.

  ‘Are we ready?’ said Robert from far away.

  Sigh. Shame about the concert really.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Jon again. And he leaned forward and kissed me. Only quickly, but not on the cheek. The name of my lipstick was Pink Fizz. I wondered if Jon felt a fizz like I did. Perhaps, but either way, it didn’t suit him, so I brushed it from his lips with my finger. He kissed that too.

  ‘Full house,’ announced Lorraine. ‘Are you all ready?’

  And on we went. I had no idea that recording for the telly needed quite so much wattage. I offered up a little prayer to the god of performing musicians as we walked out into the light.

  ‘There’s an awful lot of kids in the audience,’ said Jon, when we came off for the interval.

  ‘That’s because I’m singing,’ said Mollie, all confidence returned. ‘They’ve all come to see me.’

  Had I created a monster? Possibly, but it didn’t stop me giving her a huge hug and attempting a slobbery kiss, although she fought me off before I could succeed. We arranged a block of staging for her to stand on so that she didn’t look too small but I was beginning to think that might have been a mistake. What she lacked in height, she made up for in a host of other ways.

  ‘I suppose it’s a good thing we cut the programme. Anyway,’ said Jon. ‘Well done us. I think we did Mr Gibbons and Wilbye proud.’

  ‘And the rest,’ Robert said.

  ‘You were marvellous, darling,’ said Sophie.

  Both Robert and Mollie thought she meant them and I laughed. Pre-concert nerves were done with and the first half had been a success. Everything felt easier.

  ‘Do you think,’ Jon said, running his hands through his hair so it stood up, ‘that all those kids will start fidgeting soon? I wonder if we should have had the English lot in the second half and the Italians in the first.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but it’s too late now.’

  Before we began again, Lorraine spoke about how mysterious it was that the Gesualdo manuscript had turned up in the museum archives. Don Carlo Gesualdo lived for most of his life in or near Naples. It wasn’t unusual for musicians to travel widely at that time; the Cathedral churches and Royal Courts of the Renaissance often vied for the most talented musicians of the day; but even so, Exeter was certainly off the beaten track. It was her personal opinion, looking at the other manuscripts in the box, that it belonged in the Cathedral library. She made no mention of the frontispiece.

  My eyes adjusted to the light during Lorraine’s talk, which meant the audience was no longer a bright blur. At the back, near the door, I caught sight of Duncan. So he had made it after all.

  Finally, Lorraine asked members of the audience not to leave their seats at the end as there was to be an additional item on the programme.

  Jon, who’d been peering intently at the music, looked up, startled.

  What? He mouthed silently at me from behind the fan of his folder. What’s she talking about? I gave the tiniest shrug, but couldn’t help smiling. His eyes narrowed. What? What?

  There was no time to reply because Lorraine turned to us. Now for Gesualdo’s madrigal. A few more minutes and it would be over. There are some madrigals that almost sing themselves, but with Ite Sospiri Ardenti we veered through a strange harmonic assault course. But we had mastered it, although it had taken us a while.

  Jon would give us our cue, but I couldn’t help glancing at Mollie. Would she be up to it? I needn’t have worried. Her dear face showed no sign of fear as she looked with rapt attention at Jon. How I loved her. How I loved him too.

  Then, as we all took a breath, under the hot lights and in front of so many, something new happened. Listening to, or performing any piece of music is a journey into an ephemeral world, and no two journeys can ever be exactly the same. The complexity of the Gesualdo and all the trouble that permeated my life since its discovery had made it difficult for me to sing. It had become a cerebral experience – do this here, breath there, watch out for that note, listen to Sophie at that point – but where was the heart?

  With a rush of realisation that swept through my whole body, I knew the key to releasing the curse from the madrigal. Of course! The answer had been in the last line all along, but I hadn’t truly understood its meaning. All madrigals are awash with torment and unrequited love, and Gesualdo himself certainly was, in both life and music. Ite, ardenti sospiri was no different.

  Ite, ardenti sospiri,

  Nati del duol che mi consuma e strugge,

  Seguite, chi mi fugge

  E prend'in gioco i miei gravi martiri,

  Combattete quel core

  Finché rompa il suo ghiacchio il vostr'ardore.

  Go, burning sighs,

  born of the pain that consumes me,

  follow the one who flees me,

  and laughs at my heavy torments.

  Fight that heart until your warmth breaks its ice.

  I had never enjoyed singing this madrigal, let alone loved it, but as I sang my first phrase, all effort and previous misgivings dropped away. How sensual was the Italian language, how intense the pain of his torment, how delicately Sophie and Mollie sang their filigree semi-quavers, almost mocking the muscular harmonies of the men beneath. And my part, like the last gold thread, that completes a tapestry, and with its light brings warmth to an otherwise cold and austere picture.

  It was as if, somehow, each note in its correct place was at last putting the world to rights.

  The audience clapped very nicely and afterwards we finished with the Arcadelt Il bianco e dolce cigno. It was one of my favourites and much more agreeable to everyone, judging by the applause.

  Then it was my turn to speak. I’d made a few notes and had slipped them into my folder. I’d agonised about whether to begin with Ladies and Gentleman, but it sounded so formal and then there were all the children. Should I address them too? I thought I should, so I stood up and said.

  ‘Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, born in 1560 probably, and died in 1613.’ It wasn’t the most arresting of beginnings, but nobody yawned. ‘Not an A-list composer,’ I went on, ‘and probably not the first Italian nobleman to murder his wife and her lover. Evidently, murder was considered a fitting punishment for infidelity in those days. So, although lots of people assume he became mad as a result of his crime, it seems that he was probably mad all along. It’s also not the case, although you’d be forgiven for thinking it, that madness inspired his music; other composers were writing the same sort of thing. It wasn’t until the twentieth century, however, that the affirmation from Stravinsky really elevated Gesualdo’s music to that of genius rather than lunatic.’

  Under the lights I could feel my face getting hot. I took a sip of water.

  ‘Since then,’ I went on, ‘both his life story and his music have been the source of inspiration for all manner of creative endeavours. I’ve discovered operas, novels, a ballet by Stravinsky, dance/dramas, documentaries and at least one movie. It was as if Stravinsky pressed Go!’

  There was a ripple of appreciation for my small joke.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘it seems to me that bringing such a story from the past to the present, via any medium, is like shining a light into darkness. What is fearful and troubling can be transformed.’ I took a deep breath. That might be meaningless for the audience, but it meant a great deal to me. ‘Now,’ I began walking towards the keyboard, ‘as far as I know, nobody has based a musical for children on his story. That is, until now.’

  That was the cue for all the children in the school choir to stand up and come to the front. I couldn’t bring myself to loo
k at Jon.

  Would he mind or would he be pleased? A glance said he looked stunned. But whether it was in a good way, I couldn’t tell. Doubt, another hideous demon, jeered at me from the wings, but on stage, the choir neatened themselves into their usual rows. If I had misgivings, I certainly wasn’t going to let them know, so I gave them my widest smile.

  It was a shame we couldn’t perform the whole thing, but the seats were hard and even the most padded of bottoms would resent them eventually. I’d chosen two choruses and the last love duet, which featured the chorus as well. Mollie I had no doubts about, but anxiety welled up in me when I caught sight of poor Jonah, who looked as if the Whale of Doom was swimming inexorably towards him.

  I played the introduction. Jonah was about as far from the handsome and dashing hero, Fabrizio, as anyone could be, although in another ten years I could see he’d have a certain undernourished poet appeal. When I got to the chord where he was supposed to come in, I fixed him with my eye and nodded with all the determined encouragement I could muster.

  Nothing happened. Well … something did. A cross between a croak and a cough.

  I segued into the introduction again. The choir shuffled and Mollie looked alarmed. Some people wouldn’t notice though, and if he came in the second time, all would be well.

  He didn’t, despite, or perhaps because of a dig in the side from Connor’s elbow.

  But someone did.

  As he walked across the stage, Jon sang Fabrizio’s opening line. Tears pricked at the corner of my eyes. He put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, and Jonah found his voice and they sang together. Fabrizio stands between Maria and the mad Prince and declares he will die rather than see Maria hurt. Mollie, as Maria – and to some extent, Maria Callas – swears she will die if Fabrizio is hurt. I couldn’t help but join in.

  The Prince, aka the entire choir, swears they will both die, but in his madness waves his halberd rather too wildly and topples to his death from the battlements of his castle. The music ends in a fantastic descending cry for the choir at the same time as the two lovers ascend to the highest notes in their range. The accompaniment featured very many semiquavers all played at top speed and volume. It really deserved a full orchestra but in spite of that, the applause was thunderous as the audience rose to their feet. Then I did shed a tear, and was thankful for the emergency tissue I had up my sleeve.

  After that everything got rather muddled. People milled. They always do after a concert, especially if parents and children are involved. I tried to see where Jon had got to but found Duncan standing in front of me instead.

  ‘Buona sera, lovely Lisa,’ he said, placing a large bouquet of pink roses in my arms and, with a gesture I associated with Italy rather than Scotland, he took hold of my hand and kissed it.

  They were the most splendid roses. Honestly, they were. In a gesture that really was only one of pleasure and gratitude, I brought my hand and his up to my cheek. I was thanking a friend, that’s all. Besides, behind him and obviously with him, stood a smiley woman of much more his age than mine. His wife, surely.

  But as I gushed my thanks – I saw Jon. Right there, with only a couple of people between us.

  He wasn’t looking in my direction but I could see he was frowning. Not crossly, more a quizzical sort of frown. One that asks a question. Where am I? Where are you?

  Then he turned and he did see me. He saw the flowers too, and Duncan. I knew he was shocked. I saw the muscle in his jaw twitch and the awful cold and hostile expression I’d seen in the hospital returned. The next thing, he’d turned away and I lost sight of him.

  Mum was at my elbow.

  ‘Well, my girl,’ she said. ‘What are you going to do now?’

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Gesualdo 1611

  I needed more than two hands to count the number of funerals I’d attended in my life. That’s of the people I liked, rather than all the others who were ferried through the chapel.

  Vitore, the cloth merchant, was found cold on the floor of his shop surrounded by roll upon roll of sumptuous fabrics. All his family were dead already, so San Domenico and surrounding churches were the beneficiaries of his riches. I placed one of my samples in his coffin, a small return.

  Several sisters at the convent died of fever. In the year following the murder of my lady the summer’s air was of poor quality. I took a walk to the sea most days in an attempt to breathe something less evil-smelling, but the sea stayed flat as if pressed down by the stench. Any waves made hard work of reaching the shore.

  Rosa from Palazzo San Severo died in childbirth and the baby died too.

  Some years weren’t so bad and I’d been lucky. In winter there was pain in the tips of my fingers and the joint of my right hand thumb, but it was nothing much. My eyes had remained sharp and when I looked in the mirror I saw no sign of the fog that eventually blinded Salvo’s mother. Perhaps if they were less sharp, I should not be able to see where little birds left their footprints round my eyes or where my hair was streaked grey. I sighed, and thought of the day at the market when I had first met Signora Carlino. It was a very long time ago. Twenty years now.

  Agnola’s letter should not have surprised me, but of course, it did. A great many people had died of fever in the city but somehow I didn’t expect my mother to contract it up in the hills and in the spring too. She’d died quickly, a blessing for her, but too far away for me to get there while she still lived. I was glad Agnola had stayed and not been such a wilful daughter as me.

  I looked down at my hands. In fact, my visits to Gesualdo were few enough for one. Four times I had made the journey, for my father’s death, my sister’s wedding and birth of her first baby, and now my mother. I could have gone more often, but even now, although the fear of Don Carlo had diminished considerably, when I looked up at the castle on the hill, I felt a pain in my heart that would never shift.

  ‘Don Carlo won’t leave the castle now,’ Agnola said, as we walked back from the church together. ‘They say he is under the spell of the witches, but from what I hear, he’d be mad with or without spells.’

  ‘Witches? Really?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s true. There’s talk of the Inquisition and a trial. Do you remember Auralia, old Francesca’s niece? She’s one of them.’

  I nodded, but my memory was of a child.

  ‘Well …’ Agnola chatted on. She told me how Don Carlo mistreated his poor wife, how Auralia had become his mistress, how he had to be whipped before going to stool …

  ‘Agnola!’ I said, holding my hands up to my ears. ‘Please don’t tell me such things.’

  ‘Oh, there’s much worse than that,’ she said, gaily. ‘Laura told me that Auralia made Don Carlo drink her monthly blood.’

  I stopped still and for a few paces Agnola didn’t notice, so busy was she with her dreadful tales.

  ‘Laura?’ I said, ‘not Laura Scala?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. She’s in charge of the laundry up there. She says the castle is full of the stuff of sorcery. Tokens and talismans, there are vials of different coloured potions. All the servants take their own bread to eat – they say the food made there is poisoned, not so that you’ll die straight away, but slowly and very painfully. All your teeth turn black and fall out first.’

  ‘Really,’ I said. She was probably right. I doubted Laura had enough imagination to make up such a story. I sighed. How sheltered I’d been from the world and its gossip.

  ‘Is it true,’ Agnola asked, in a whisper even though no one was nearby, ‘that Don Carlo threw the naked bodies down onto the church steps?’

  I gasped. ‘No! That’s not true at all. I was there, Agnola. It was very terrible, but the rites were observed.’

  ‘Ah well. That will be a disappointment to some. They say that she was so beautiful that even in death a priest could not resist her, and—’

  Agnola talked on, but all I could think of was the last time I saw Laura from the window at San Severo. Had she betra
yed us? Would Donna Maria be alive if she hadn’t? The pain in my heart swelled and I had to force it away. Nothing that happened back then mattered anymore. Besides, I couldn’t be more thankful for my life at the convent.

  We’d reached the corner where we would turn into the track leading home. The castle hill would be behind us.

  ‘You go on, Agnola,’ I said. ‘I’d like to walk a little further.’

  Up ahead, I could see the shrine where I’d waited for Francesca the morning I went with her to market. I had it in my mind to leave a little posy in memory of my mother under the roundel of the Virgin. May is an abundant month for flowers and I picked daisies, lavender, a little late broom, and risked the prickles for a stem of the wild rose that rambled over the shrine itself.

  The shrine was at the crossroads. To turn right and labour up the hill would eventually take the traveller to the castle. The track wound in amongst the olive trees where I first set eyes on Don Carlo from my hiding place. Ahead, the track led to Fontanarosa, and left and away down the hill and many hours away lay Napoli, Roma, Firenze and the rest of the world.

  The shrine provided me with an excuse to linger. Two women with empty baskets nodded before heading for Fontanarosa. A horseman in Gesualdo livery rode at speed up the hill towards the castle. I stood back as he passed but still felt the quake in the ground from the horse’s hooves. Once the noise of him passed, the bees’ humming and twittering of little birds was all I could hear.

  I sat down with my back against the warm stone of the shrine and pulled my knees up to my chest the way I used to as a girl. I was glad of my hat and pulled the brim down to keep the sun from my eyes.

  So, Don Carlo had succumbed to the charms of a witch after all. I took a deep breath, full of the wild rose’s sweet perfume. Perhaps it was that which made me smile.

  The sound of movement in the undergrowth made me look up. A snake? I remembered the terror I used to feel at the sight of one and hoped for a mouse or a deer, but when the snake’s eye glittered in the sunshine not an arm’s length from me, I thought how beautiful it was. Like me, it was keen to enjoy a sunny spot. I kept very still as it curled its way, head down, into a spiral.