Arlecchino jumps up, hopping from foot to foot in consternation. ‘Of murder?’ he says, and Sofia’s eyes widen at the sound of his voice.
‘Yes, of murder.’
‘Who did you kill?’ Even if the black mask and the woollen hat are hiding his features, the heavy, Bergamo accent is unmistakable. The hat is further back on his head than it was. And he is taller and thinner than Simone.
Sofia can hardly speak. In a voice that feels quite detached from the mouth that is uttering her words, she says, ‘I said it was a false accusation.’
Smacking himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand, Arlecchino then draws out his wooden bat and slaps it against the side of his leg with a ringing crack. ‘Of course, that’s what you said, isn’t it? A false accusation.’ He points the bat at her. ‘So who did you kill – falsely?’
Sofia walks towards him, as if sleepwalking. She stands and stares at him for what seems an age; then, hearing as though from a far distance that unmistakable hum of concern from an audience aware of a clearly unplanned silence, she swallows, shakes her head and finds her line. ‘It… it won’t be a false accusation in a moment, it’ll be a real one, and it’ll be you lying dead on the floor, you fool, not some lecherous nobleman in the depths of his castle.’
Arlecchino hangs his head like a scolded child and scuffs the trestle boards with the toe of his shoe.
‘That horrible man is dead, even though I didn’t kill him. But somebody did.’
‘Who though? Did you see anyone there?’
Fighting to make herself speak, she says, ‘Of course I didn’t see, you stupid, stupid man. I’d tell you who it was, wouldn’t I, if I’d seen him? And you could go and kill him for me.’
Turning to the audience, Arlecchino shrugs high in open-mouthed disbelief, one finger pressed against his chest, the other hand out sideways, palm up, fingers splayed. ‘Me?!’ he mouths, pulling a face, and the audience laughs.
Sofia grabs his arm, but, raising it quickly, he dislodges her grip and reaching for her hand, he links his fingers through hers. She gasps, draws a breath and manages to say, ‘Listen, someone out there has the truth festering within them – like a tumour – I’m sure of it. Find them for me, will you? Find out who did this? I don’t care how you do it – but find them.’
Arlecchino cups her face in his hands – very, very gently – and kisses her full on the mouth. Sofia’s heart stands still. The audience draws in a collective breath. Then he says, in a ringing voice, ‘I’ll do it. I’ll find him and kill him – just for you!’
The audience cheers.
With Colombina’s hand firmly in his, Arlecchino walks down to the front of the stage. Gazing out at the audience, he says, ‘Someone out there is wearing a piece of guilty knowledge tucked away inside his doublet. It’s curled like a snake against the skin of his chest. That little snake wriggles and writhes from time to time – most often when it hears mention of… certain events. Important events for the person inside whose doublet it is nestling. It must be wriggling now, don’t you think, signori and signore?’ Wooden batocchio tucked under his arm, Arlecchino raises his hands and wiggles his fingers. ‘Inside somebody’s shirt? When it’s just been listening to a tale of such misadventure as our lovely Colombina has been telling you? Now – the trouble with snakes is… if you’re not careful, they bite. It might not be just one person, either – that’s the thing about guilt. It’s infectious…’ Arlecchino snatches a look at Colombina; then, turning away, he puts a hand around the side of his mouth as though to keep his next loudly hissed utterance from her. ‘… like the pox.’ The audience laughs, but the laugh dies fast, as Arlecchino points out at them again, and says in a ringing voice, ‘One person did this terrible thing. One person – and he might be standing right next to you now, this very minute – one person picked up a dirty great candlestick and whacked a man on the back of the head with it – and killed him.’ He stands silent for a moment, staring out at the audience. ‘This city’s buzzing with the news, is it not? Somebody made that choice and now a man is dead. That somebody’s snake is probably particularly cold and slithery, and it most likely nips him quite often – just where it hurts most – when he’s least expecting it. But he won’t be alone: mark my words. There’ll be others too, with their own little vipers – perhaps someone who saw and hasn’t said. Someone who’s been told and is too scared to speak out. Someone who’s done the like before, themselves, and won’t risk exposure. They’ll all have their own wrigglers inside their shirts. You see if I’m not right.’
Sofia cannot take her eyes from him. She stares and stares at him as he strides right to the front of the stage, pulls out his wooden bat, crouches down on his heels and points it at a man near the front of the crowd. ‘What about you, signore? Got a wriggler? Or you, signora, tucked down inside that very lovely bodice…’ Putting a hand down to the trestle floor, he leans out, craning his neck towards an amply bosomed woman to his left. ‘A chilly little wriggler right down in there?’ He snorts, then licks his lips, sketching the outline of the woman’s generous proportions with his hands. ‘Ha! Can’t imagine that one will want to come out very often.’ A snickering laugh trickles around the audience. ‘Laugh if you will,’ Arlecchino says now, straightening, scowling and pointing the bat again, ‘But if you’re one of those people – the people who know, and won’t say; the people who suspect but daren’t admit – then expect your writhing little worm of guilt to grow and swell and become more and more of a nuisance to you. Because the only thing that gets rid of a guilt-wriggler is an admission. You think about it.’
There is a clatter of footsteps on the stage behind them. Sofia turns, knowing full well that it will be Flaminio Scala, striding out as planned in his ridiculous long-nosed mask. Arlecchino grabs her hand. ‘Quick!’ he says. ‘We have to go! We don’t want to be caught here by that pompous old windbag – we’ll never get away!’ Turning back to the audience, he says, ‘Don’t forget what I said – it’ll only get bigger and colder and wrigglier and end up by strangling you!’ Then, with Sofia’s fingers laced through his, he runs across the stage and pushes his way through the gap in the backcloth.
Beppe cannot speak. Pushing his mask up and off his face so that it falls to the floor with a clatter, he puts his arms around Sofia and, without a word, he kisses her. His mouth is on hers, and her hands are in his hair, and her body is pressing against his, soft and pliant and eager. Stepping backwards, he feels the heavy folds of the backdrop shift behind him – another step in that direction and they will be on the stage. The ladder leading down from the trestles is a pace to the right.
‘Go back down the steps.’
As Sofia reaches back with her foot to find the first rung of the ladder, Beppe lets go of her, vaults down off the trestles and then lifts his arms to her; she turns to him and he picks her off the ladder, starting to kiss her again even before her feet have reached the ground. They lean together against the ladder, arms around each other, so entirely engrossed in their embrace that they hear nothing of the stream of hissed comments that are now coming from Simone da Bologna.
‘Quick! Stop it – let go of each other! You’re on stage again in a minute! Sofia! Signor Bianchi, you’ll have to wait until we —’
Neither Sofia nor Beppe are listening, though Beppe feels his shoulder being roughly shaken, and vaguely hears, as though from a distance, Simone da Bologna hiss-calling, ‘Prudenza! Quick, come here.’
Beppe, his mouth on Sofia’s, one hand at her back, the other in her hair, feels as though he could never have enough of her. He cannot hold her close enough. She is wriggling in against him, making soft little sounds of pleasure – not words, just inarticulate half-sighs – as she kisses him. Then other, bigger, male hands take hold of his upper arms and pull him back, away from Sofia. He jerks away, trying to free himself from whoever is holding him, but a laughing voice says, ‘Don’t worry – just get the jacket off him, will you? I’ll take over – but I need my costume. A
nd hurry! My cue is in a moment or two!’
The same hands reach around him from behind and Beppe feels unknown fingers beginning to unfasten the diamond-patterned jacket.
‘Prudenza, get the dress off Sofia.’
Beppe hears a squeak from Sofia, and feels her grip on the back of his neck tightening as she is pulled backwards away from him. For a moment their bodies are held apart from each other, though they struggle to maintain their kiss and their mouths are still touching. Beppe feels the jacket being pulled off him, first one sleeve jerked down over an arm, then the second, and, glancing behind Sofia, he sees a dark-haired, plump woman, frantically unpinning and unlacing Colombina’s dress and easing open the back of the bodice. She crouches behind Sofia for a moment and Beppe hears her amused voice, saying, ‘Quick, cara, step out of the skirts, will you?’
Sofia obliges, her arms now back around Beppe. She is dressed now only in shift and underskirt, he in nothing but the diamond-patterned leggings. He can feel her hands on the skin of his chest and back.
Simone’s voice says, ‘I’m not even going to try getting the leggings off him – I’ll have to use my old ones. But where’s my mask?’
‘He dropped it up there, look.’
Another, unfamiliar voice. ‘Here are the leggings, Simone.’
After a moment’s frantic rustle of clothing, there is a muttered oath, then footsteps on the ladder, followed by a brief burst of applause and a couple of whistles from the crowd.
The play unfolds behind and above Beppe and Sofia, and they take in not one word of it: it is no more than a jumble of noise, interspersed with laughter and clapping. Seated as they are at the foot of the ladder, entwined in each other’s arms, there are moments of interruption when unknown pairs of legs step over and around them, muttering apologies – once or twice Beppe thinks he hears a smothered snort of amusement – but not for a second does it occur to either of them to pause, to stop what they are doing, to search for a more suitable place to resume their rediscovery of each other.
‘Oh my word, but I am truly a fool,’ he says indistinctly, in between kisses. ‘And you will never forgive me, will you?’ He wonders if Sofia will remember the lines.
‘No, now that you mention it, I’m not sure that I shall.’
She mutters the response, her words almost indistinguishable as her mouth is on his, and he cannot help smiling.
‘Just one more chance?’ he says, pulling back for a second and holding her gaze. ‘One more very small… extremely insignificant… little chance?’
She stares at him, her expression taut and serious, and Beppe holds his breath. Then her face dissolves into a wide smile and her eyes are sparkling with tears. ‘Very well. Just one.’ A pause. ‘One last.’
They carry on kissing as the final prolonged burst of applause from the crowd fills the air. They fail to stop even as the actors burst through the hanging and jostle down the ladder, stumbling over them, apologizing; one or two of them laugh and clap at the sight of the two oblivious lovers, while another offers a decidedly lewd suggestion as to what they should best do next and where.
38
‘What did you say he called me?’
‘An underage bardassa with the morals of a tomcat, I think it was,’ Marco says, shaking his head, fiddling a shred of dry skin on his lip between his teeth. The tavern table in front of him is stained with ale and pitted with worm holes, and the tallow candle stub, stuck straight onto the wood, is giving out little more than a fitful, flickering, sheep-smelling glow.
Fabio da Correggio raises an eyebrow. Blowing out his cheeks and letting the air puff out of his mouth, he says, ‘How bloody rude.’ Then, grinning, he adds, ‘Though I suppose he wasn’t that far wrong, really, was he? Bastard.’ The grin fades. ‘God, though, I’d never have wanted that sort of an end for him. He was our cousin. Terrible. And they haven’t caught whoever did it?’
Marco’s heart flips over as he looks at his cousin: slight, smooth-cheeked, as fine-featured as many of the women of his acquaintance, as gaudily dressed as any of the performers at that last play. He decides to tell him the truth. ‘No. They haven’t. And you and I are getting off up to Verona fast, before they have time to think of accusing me.’
Fabio grins at him. ‘You didn’t do it, did you?’
‘No I bloody didn’t!’ His voice comes out higher-pitched than he meant. There have been so many moments, since he sat in that room at Franceschina with Sebastiano’s body, staring at the seeping stain on the pillow around his cousin’s head, when he has anxiously wondered if he might have done. Done it and somehow forgotten. Though he knows he could never have lifted the candlestick and… and brought it down onto the back of Sebastiano’s head like that, every time he has heard people speculating about the possible identity of the killer over the past few days he has felt heat rising in his face, and has dreaded an unstoppable rush of colour proclaiming a guilt he knows he does not possess. Or hopes he does not possess. Because how many times had he in fact wished his cousin dead? On how many occasions, facing yet more of Sebastiano’s snide comments and menace-heavy threats, did he wish he could just draw his dagger and put an end to it? Is that enough to make him guilty? It feels strangely as though it might be. God, he wishes now that he had never borrowed money from Sebastiano in the first place – in fact he is astonished that, given his own debts and insecurities, Sebastiano ever agreed to lend him a single scudo.
Perhaps blood ties do matter after all.
‘What shall we be doing in Verona?’ Fabio says into his thoughts, and Marco looks up at his other, younger cousin, whose mouth has now curled into a cat-like smirk of anticipatory excitement. He swallows uncomfortably. Sebastiano might repeatedly have risked too much for his laudanum and his desire for a beautiful woman, but he, Marco, knows that he is perhaps just as reckless in the pursuit of his own addiction. He is all too aware that Fabio is nothing but trouble; he knows that Fabio cares nothing for anyone but himself; he is quite certain that as soon as the first hint of possible excitement somewhere else reaches Fabio’s ears, the boy will be off, abandoning Marco without a qualm. But still he craves his young cousin’s company – he longs for it – and he knows he will lap up every second of it he is offered, like a starving cat. He relishes the prospect of this trip to Verona with him, however terrible the reason for its undertaking: Fabio will be his alone for at least the next few days. Unless they meet someone who takes Fabio’s fancy in a tavern or on a street corner, of course.
‘In Verona?’ he says. ‘Oh, we’ll find somewhere to live first – then I want to look up a moneylender friend of mine. What we do might depend on how generous he’s feeling at the moment.’
Fabio laughs and Marco watches his small white teeth gleam in the candlelight.
39
The ugly donkey’s taut hoof-beats ring out into the silence of the still evening and the iron-wrapped wheels of the little cart crunch over the loose stones of the track. A chilly mist has already risen as the October evening has begun to draw in, wreathing itself around trees and bushes, and hanging like a thick cobweb low over the ground. Spiralling wisps of the mist curl away from the cart as the donkey trots on down the ditch-bound track as though through watered milk.
Niccolò has his thickest woollen coat over his shoulders, while Sofia has bundled herself in two blankets: one around her shoulders, the other tucked over her knees. Ippo is sprawled across her lap. She is warmly wrapped but, even so, her fingers and toes are stiff with cold and she has been wriggling them repeatedly to try to prevent them from numbing.
Only Beppe seems unaffected by the sharp nip in the air. Dressed only in breeches and shirt and his old leather doublet – the one Sofia likes best – he has an arm around her shoulders and she can feel the heat from his body where he is pressed against her.
‘There they are, look – over there,’ he says, pointing. ‘Can you see the smoke?’
‘Where? Oh yes, I see. Is that really them? Can you be sure?’
‘How long, Niccolò?’
Niccolò pats her knee. ‘A few minutes perhaps. No more. Just as well – I think poor Violetta has had quite enough of being on the road.’
‘Oh, do let’s hurry – I so want to see them all.’
‘Shall we send Ippo on ahead when we get a bit nearer?’ Beppe suggests.
The dog’s ears prick at the sound of his name and he lifts his head.
Ruffling his ears, Sofia smiles. ‘Oh yes – like a harbinger.’
Beppe raises an eyebrow and grins. ‘A very scruffy and mud-covered harbinger.’
As the cart rounds a bend, the wagons are clearly visible, standing in a huddle near a stumpy group of trees, some paces back from the track. Sofia holds her breath at the sight of Agostino bending over the brazier, which is sending a column of grey smoke up into the still evening air. Cosima is holding his arm, pointing back towards the wagon, gesturing with her free hand, and Agostino is shaking his head. Cosima gives him a swift kiss and walks back to the cart.
The Girl with the Painted Face Page 38
