Scrambling back from her, the boy glances from one shocked face to another and spits one last time into the dust at their feet. He begins to run. ‘That’s what they’re saying in the city,’ he says thickly over his shoulder. ‘Bloody murderers!’
Within seconds he has disappeared and the Coraggiosi stand staring at the place where he has vanished.
‘So,’ Vico says, touching his eye with the tip of one finger and grimacing. ‘That’s what Bologna thinks of us now. A bunch of assassins.’
Sofia puts her hands over her face.
Beppe glares at Vico and mouths, ‘Shut up,’ as he puts his arms around Sofia. Raising his hands in apology, Vico turns away, bending and picking up the canvas bag the child had let fall. Opening it, he peers inside. Frowns. His frown deepens as he reaches inside and pulls out a small brown corked bottle.
‘What the hell’s this?’ he says, pulling the cork with a little high-pitched ‘pop’ and sniffing curiously. ‘Smells awful.’
Nobody responds. Then Angelo, turning and seeing what Vico is holding, strides over, elbowing past Beppe and Sofia and snatching up both bag and bottle. ‘Keep your bloody hands off!’ he says in an odd, distorted voice. Clutching bottle and bag close to his chest, he edges between the wagons, and climbs up into the smallest cart without another word.
‘Well… what the…?’ Vico says, shaking his head.
‘Let me see that eye.’ Lidia is looking determinedly at him, chin lifted, frowning in consternation.
‘No, leave it. It’s just a black eye. It’ll mend itself.’
‘The skin’s split. I’ll wash it for you.’
‘It’s fine. I don’t need you to bother with it, and —’
‘I don’t care what you think you don’t need.’
As Vico and Lidia begin to bicker, Beppe turns to Sofia, who has seated herself on the bottom step of the smallest wagon. She has her face in her hands and the ends of her fingers are hidden in her hair. He sits next to her, edging her along the seat with his hip. Putting his arms around her, he holds her close.
‘What will the troupe do now, if we’re not allowed to perform in Bologna?’ she says, leaning against him, her face still covered. Her voice is distorted by her fingers.
Trying to ignore the cold lump of anxiety which lodged itself in his chest as da Budrio made his announcement, Beppe says, ‘Don’t worry – we’ll just find new territory, that’s all.’
‘God, everyone is going to hate me for making this happen. If Niccolò had never introduced me to you all, then —’
‘Then I would never have met you. And I wouldn’t…’ He tails off, rocked by the enormity of the notion of chance, and says no more, contenting himself with tightening his hold on her.
Agostino strides around the end of the wagon, his expression still set and serious. ‘We have to go. Beppe, help me harness Topo. She’s in a state and you’re the only one she won’t bite when she’s like this. I want to be out of here within the hour.’
Beppe nods. He squeezes Sofia’s shoulders and stands, following Agostino around to the front of the wagon.
‘I can’t deny it, Beppe,’ he mutters almost soundlessly as Beppe begins fastening the mare’s buckles and patting her neck as he bends to pass the girth-strap under her belly. ‘This is a dreadful blow. I’m not sure the troupe will survive it.’
His voice equally quiet, Beppe says, ‘Oh God, don’t say that, Ago! You can’t mean it! What’s to stop us starting again further south – like you suggested?’
The mare tosses her head and snorts angrily. Beppe shushes at her, scratching between her eyes, and holding fast to her bridle.
Agostino’s voice is now little more than a whisper. ‘You know as well as I do that it takes years to build up the sort of following we have along the route: people are waiting for us at each city now, crowds form in expectation of our arrival, word spreads ahead of us. That doesn’t just happen, does it?’
‘No, it doesn’t, you’re right, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to make it happen a second time. We’re good, Ago. Thanks to you, we’re really good. We’ll succeed again.’
Agostino wipes his eyes with the back of his wrist and Beppe, touched by the older man’s sudden air of vulnerability, reaches out and takes his hand. Agostino tries to smile, but all he can manage is a tight twitch of his cheek muscles. Cosima, appearing now, sees the look pass between the two men and checks. Standing squarely in front of Agostino she puts a hand on either side of his face and stares into his eyes. ‘Now, you listen to me, Agostino Martinelli,’ she says softly. ‘You and I started this troupe – God knows how long ago – and we’ve made it into something wonderful, and neither you nor I nor any other member is about to give up on it now, just because some pompous old oaf of a man has given us a bloody great boot up the backside.’ She puts her arms around him and hugs him. ‘And don’t you dare let that little girl see how worried you are. She already feels totally responsible for what’s happened, and you are not to make it worse.’
Agostino shakes his head.
‘Beppe,’ Cosima says over Agostino’s shoulder. ‘You go back and help Sofia get cleaned up and changed as we get the wagons going. Ago, take the yellow wagon, Federico can take the blue and Lidia and I will manage this one – Vico can walk alongside Topo until we are out of the city, in case she starts getting silly.’ She kisses Agostino tenderly. ‘No more of this fretting. I want to hear you loud and blustering and stuffing far too many words into every sentence, exhorting us all to better things – just as you normally do. The troupe is not called I Coraggiosi for nothing, is it? We need you to be brave – come on, carissimo.’
As he turns to go back to Sofia, Beppe sees Cosima and Agostino embracing again. Tipping his head back and staring up into the sky for a moment, he runs back round to where Sofia is still huddled on the wagon step. ‘Listen, lovely girl, we need to get you tidied up and fit to be seen again,’ he says, taking her hands and pulling her to her feet. He holds her face tenderly and kisses her mouth, and feels her arms sliding around his waist.
‘Oh, Beppe,’ she says into the stuff of his doublet, clinging tightly. ‘I don’t care how uncomfortable it is, but stay next to me. And wherever we sleep tonight, be with me. Please?’
‘I’m not sleeping anywhere other than where you are, little seamstress. Not ever.’
The three wagons rumble away from Bologna a little while later, the iron-clad wheels and the horses’ hooves loud on the cobbles as they go. A scattering of people along the route wave to them and shout their goodbyes, and the Coraggiosi wave back. One small figure, though, makes no gesture of farewell. One small boy in an oversized doublet, from his vantage point on top of a wall near the southern gate to the city, merely stares after them, tearing moodily at a hunk of bread he stole from a nearby market stall some moments ago. ‘Bloody murderers,’ he mutters to himself, spraying breadcrumbs over his tattered breeches.
27
That evening, in an upstairs chamber at the Castello della Franceschina, a number of people have gathered to stand vigil over the body of Sebastiano da Correggio. His bloodied head has been washed, and his clothes have been changed. The badly stained shirt has already been burned. Now, lying on his bed in the grandest of the bedchambers at the castello, dressed in his most expensive embroidered doublet and breeches, da Correggio looks peaceful: his hands are folded on his chest; his eyes (which were wide and staring when they picked him up from the floor of the study) have been closed; candles burn at the head and foot of the bed and a dozen silent figures are keeping watch. Da Correggio’s cousin, roused from his bed less than an hour after he returned home from watching the play, stands in the shadows near the head of the bed. Marco’s eyes are stiff and heavy with lack of sleep and he has been trying for the best part of an hour to avoid looking at where a seeping stain has darkened the linen on which his cousin’s head is resting. Glancing across the room, he catches the eye of his elderly uncle, who is seated in a carved wooden chair near one
of the tightly shuttered windows. His uncle stares at him without comment for several long seconds; then, shaking his head a fraction, he drops his gaze to his clasped hands. His lips begin to move in silent prayer.
Marco looks from his uncle to a row of Franceschina servants, standing stiffly and smothering yawns, then to a couple he recognizes from the performance last night – the paramour and her husband. The man is thin, sunken-cheeked, with sparse hair and a beaky nose. He is finely dressed and clearly wealthy, and his rather beautiful wife is – Marco flicks a glance downwards – expecting a child by the look of her. She is silent and upright, staring fixedly at Sebastiano’s face. By rights, Marco thinks now, she should be crying out – falling to her knees as she weeps and clutches at her hair; in circumstances like this, Marco feels sure that his cousin must be feeling the lack of an appropriate display of feminine grief to mark his passing and he wonders briefly why the usual group of hired women have not yet been brought in – it seems almost shameful that none is here to bewail his cousin’s passing. Sebastiano had no time to prepare himself for death, after all; he left the world unshriven, which, Marco thinks now with a pang of fear, bodes ill for a man such as his cousin as he faces Judgement laden down with so heavy a burden of wrongdoings.
As he does himself.
He shivers at the thought.
This woman is no paid mourner: she stands still and quiet. Her face is set, her mouth no more than a compressed line in her face. One hand caresses the slight swell of her belly.
It seems to Marco, watching her now, that she is concealing some unspoken truth behind that mask-like expression as she is concealing the child beneath her skirts. He cannot determine what it might be – unexpressed love, perhaps? If she were actually in love with his cousin, she could hardly declare it in front of her husband, though of course the counterfeit wailings of most mourners are rarely anything other than an expected exhibition and a woman hiding such a covert passion might well wish to take advantage of the custom to give herself the freedom to howl and tear her clothes in what would be in reality a genuine display of grief, performed under the nose of her unsuspecting husband.
Presumably the child she is carrying is Sebastiano’s.
Looking at her now, though, Marco thinks, he is not sure that it is love she is concealing. There are no tears glittering unshed; her jaw is set and her mouth firm. She looks more as though she is trying not to spit.
28
The road up and over the mountains between Bologna and Firenze is often steep and at times it twists and turns to such an extent that manoeuvring anything like a heavy wagon around the tight bends can be a genuinely hazardous experience. The Coraggiosi have spent much of the last few days struggling with their three unwieldy carts along narrow roads which have at times crumbled alarmingly when anyone has been unwary enough to stand too near the edge, sending rubble and dust tumbling downwards in scurrying puffs.
At times the drop is enough to turn the stomach.
The October weather has begun to disintegrate. The wind on the slopes has been colder than anyone expected and the wagons offer little in the way of genuine shelter when exposed like this. Even the yellow wagon, whose canvas cover is by far the newest and most robust of the three, seems to be made of little more than paper when hit broadside with biting gusts from the east, as it has been for the last couple of days. Everyone – well wrapped in their warmest clothes – is looking forward to reaching lower ground.
It is not only the weather which is deteriorating, though: Sofia has been uncomfortably aware for the last day or so of a worrying change in atmosphere among the troupe members. The high-spirited banter which normally buzzes between them all – the witty, affectionate bickering, the re-enacted extracts of recent performances, the loudly voiced and highly opinionated criticisms of rival actors in other troupes – has all but dried up. Agostino, whom Sofia has rarely known to be silent on any subject, has hardly spoken at all since the troupe left Bologna; he and Cosima have talked quietly between themselves but have shared little with the others, while old Giovanni Battista, feeling the autumnal chill, has largely remained within the smallest wagon, wrapped in a blanket and dozing on the little bed.
Angelo has ridden on his dark pony a few paces behind the wagons since Bologna, stony-faced, saying almost nothing, and merely shrugging dismissively at mealtimes and in the evenings, when anyone has tried to raise the subject of what was discussed between him and Signor da Budrio. When they stopped overnight in the little town of Borgo Tossignano, he disappeared completely, re-emerging only the following morning as the troupe readied themselves to resume their journey, looking drawn and pale and heavy-eyed. No one has yet asked him where he went.
Sofia would have liked to share her worries with Beppe, but he has been on foot most of the way, walking with the horses – he has had much of his time and energy taken up with helping them negotiate the treacherous mountain roads. Sofia knows that he is only doing what has to be done, but the inevitable result of it all is that while he has kept his promise of never sleeping away from where she is, in daylight hours he has hardly spoken to her. Over the past couple of days he seems to have become increasingly tense and withdrawn, and Sofia is beginning to dread that some unspoken barrier has arisen between them. She dares not ask Lidia or Cosima what they think, so as the jolting, chilled and monotonous days have passed, she has swallowed down her fears and tried to immerse herself in the myriad little tasks that fall to her lot. But Beppe’s words keep coming back to her, words uttered as he stared up into the sky on the lane outside Montalbano: I could imagine Agostino not wanting the scandal of a murder to affect the troupe’s reputation. And that scandal was a murder supposedly committed not by a member of the troupe, but by his long-absent father, years before. Is this why they are all withdrawing from her? Is this why everything seems to be falling apart – because of the scandal of a murder?
Early in the morning of the fourth day of the Coraggiosi’s journey south, Lidia has been making herself useful, repainting small items of scenery, and Sofia has been glad to keep her company; she has been stitching and darning damaged costumes, thankful for the comforting warmth of the piles of fabric on her lap.
‘We’ll be down on the plains soon,’ Lidia says, frowning as she struggles to keep a small gilt-framed picture still on her cloth-covered lap, a paint-laden brush held out sideways as the cart jolts across yet another uneven piece of road.
Gasping and swearing softly – she has just jabbed herself with her needle – Sofia says, ‘Have you been down this far south before?’
Lidia shakes her head. ‘No. I’m not sure any of us have. We’ve always kept to our territory – along from… oh, I suppose Piacenza in the west, down across to Ravenna on the coast.’
Her face burning, Sofia stares down at the cloth in her hands: Beppe’s diamond-patterned jacket. Resisting the urge to pick it up and press it to her face – to breathe in the smell of him – she fiddles a little section of seam between finger and thumb as she says, ‘I feel so responsible for all this.’
‘You mustn’t. And I know Beppe’s said the same to you over and over again. You simply mustn’t. Because —’
‘But I do. If I had made more of a fuss about leaving the banqueting room – if I had refused to go with da Correggio – we’d be in Bologna today, wouldn’t we? Getting ready to set off for Ravenna.’
Lidia pauses. ‘Well, yes, I suppose we would. But you could just as easily say that if Ago hadn’t agreed to perform at bloody Franceschina, it would never have happened. Or if any of us had stopped you leaving the room with that man. Which we all should have done.’ She waves a hand in the air and paint spatters across the floor of the wagon. ‘Or if Beppe hadn’t gone down to the kitchen to see about Ippo when he did, then da Correggio would never have made his move and… oh, you could drive yourself mad thinking like this. You’ll have to stop it.’
Sofia nods.
‘We’ll over-winter somewhere – getting work where we ca
n, preparing new material, rehearsing, performing indoors if we can secure a commission or two – and then we can start touring again properly in the spring, trying to establish ourselves in Toscana. Cosima suggested that we could go and present ourselves at the Villa Cafaggiolo – that’s down on the other side of the mountains. With Angelo’s family connections we might get ourselves a performance there and that would be a good start.’
‘Angelo’s connections? What do you mean?’
‘Cafaggiolo’s the summer residence of the Medicis, and the Duke of Ferrara married one of the Medicis a few years back. Angelo’s father is a second cousin, if you remember.’
Sofia puffs a breath in surprise. ‘The Medicis? Surely not! Do you really think a family that prestigious would be interested in a little troupe like —?’
‘Like us? Oh, I do hope so. Ago’s hopeful, anyway, Cosima says.’
The scandal of a murder. Dreading the thought that the scandal might reach Cafaggiolo before the Coraggiosi and that everyone will blame her if it does, Sofia sighs and picks the jacket back up. Pushing her hand down inside one of the sleeves, she spreads her fingers out, holding the cloth tight across them so that she can begin to darn where the sleeve has worn thin over the elbow, a patch about the size of a large coin. She weaves the needle in and out of the remaining worn threads, back and forth, creating a fine mesh, then ducks into and out of this soft web, over and over, keeping the threads taut across her fingers. Slowly the patch starts to feel thicker and stronger.
The Girl with the Painted Face Page 29
