The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  Conrad stopped himself from laughing at his own thoughts, since that wasn’t less likely to make him seem a lunatic.

  “All right, but what does that mean? What are the phenomena Men call God?” Conrad nested his fist in his palm, tapping the one against the other. “How does miraculous lightning differ from normal lightning? Or are they both God’s, and God just performs one at random, and aims one for a miracle?”

  Isaura’s eyes were even wider, if possible. “Mother blames you for me not being devout, you know. At least, she said that whenever she was furious with me. That’s why I was in the convent school for three months. Do you really think it wasn’t a miracle?”

  “I think it was a bolt of lightning.” Conrad took her hand, and was relieved that she allowed it. “Look at how often God strikes down his own places of worship. Even St Mark’s in Venice, with their bells consecrated to ward off the artillery of heaven and the ‘powers of the air’—until the Church authorities finally decided that Mr Franklin’s ‘iron points’ weren’t irreligious, and fitted them. And after that, coincidentally enough, lightning’s been harmlessly conducted to the earth.”

  Conrad stopped, and glared at her. He demanded, “What are you laughing at?”

  “You still lecture.” Her smile grew, and she looked teary-eyed. “Just like you did when you were thirteen, and I was tiny—it’s the first thing I remember about my big brother.”

  Tullio, who appeared to have given up cleaning away the tea things entirely, remarked, “Weren’t you sweet, padrone…”

  “Out on the street, Rossi. Without a penny. I’ll even take your shoes.”

  Isaura looked uncertain at that, but grinned a moment or two after Tullio did.

  “In any case, the Teatro Nuovo didn’t have a lightning-conductor,” Conrad finished. “Though I suspect that has very little to do with the ‘heresy’ of Franklin’s iron points. It’s more likely to be the opera board too stingy to pay out.”

  His sister smiled. It was not difficult to remember the doe-eyed three year old wandering fascinated after her big brother—showing a flawless ability to pass any adult blame on to him, too.

  “Three months in a convent school?” he added.

  “They didn’t expel me!” Paolo protested immediately. “They asked Mother to withdraw me.”

  By the care with which she inflected “asked,” Conrad suspected “begged” would be the better word.

  He felt a constriction in his throat. I’ve missed so much of her life. Which appears to have been remarkable, so far.

  “Do you have lodgings?” he wondered aloud.

  She shook her head.

  “You’ll stay here,” he said, at the same moment that Tullio went over to set up the Chinese screen in front of the other, elderly couch; and make a day-bed for his master.

  “If I may…?” Her eyes were momentarily bright as she nodded.

  Conrad put his arm around her shoulder, where she sat beside him, and gave her a careful hug. “I know lodging with an atheist might be a social handicap, but at least you needn’t worry about being caught in your shirt of a morning…”

  “I don’t think I’m an atheist.” Isaura surveyed him. “If you listen to rumour, the Conservatoire is a hotbed of revolutionary science and heresy—which isn’t quite true, we mostly talk about, well, music. Possibly I’m a freethinker.”

  Conrad restrained himself from slapping his own forehead. “What do you think an atheist is!”

  “Judging by my big brother—a heretic who’d like to burn down every church in Italy?”

  Conrad ignored Tullio’s mutter of, “Not every church…”

  “Just most of them?” She grinned. “Are you sure you’re not more of an anti-theist than an atheist?”

  “When I throw Rossi out, you can carry his bags…”

  Conrad caught the slide of her gaze as she eyed Tullio Rossi.

  Tullio had his arms folded, and was shaking his head.

  “Heretics,” he muttered. “First one, and now another one, worse than the other one! We’re all going to burn…”

  “You first,” Conrad invited, and watched Tullio’s morose expression be succeeded by a broad smile.

  After a moment, Isaura’s oddly worried look lightened, and she smiled at Tullio.

  Conrad let himself ruffle her hair, surprised to find himself disturbed at how short she had cut it. Conventions have power.

  “I suppose,” he said thoughtfully, “I should have realised. If you’re happy to disguise yourself as a man and work in man’s clothes, you’re not going to be too worried about other social conventions.”

  She shook her hair back into place with a boy’s gesture. “Still thinking, remember? Means I look at things one by one.”

  Tullio, having finished with the day-bed, paused with the clean linen he was taking through to the bedroom. “I’ve seen miracles, though. Seen it on campaign. Men in the surgeon’s tent lived who shouldn’t have, because a priest came round, or a hedge-witch.”

  Paolo-Isaura visibly hovered between treating Tullio Rossi as a servant or her brother’s friend, and enthusiastically settled on the latter. “Someone they believed could help them.—And how do you know these wounded ‘shouldn’t have’ lived? A different doctor might have given a different opinion—”

  “—Because I know what happens to a man when his guts are laying outside his belly and covered in mud—”

  Perhaps by association, Conrad noticed that his wounds had opened again, where the steel had chafed his wrists. Enough to make blood stain his shirt. Since Tullio looked fully engaged with Isaura’s argument, he left both of them alone and eased off his coat, and set himself to washing the wounds and gathering bandages. His attention didn’t return until, he realised, voices had risen to a steely loud pitch. He looked up from trying to fasten a bandage around his wrist, to see Isaura leaning on her hands on the table, glaring across at a Tullio Rossi who had one boot up on the neighbouring chair, a bundle of sheets balanced on his knee.

  “—And I’ve seen a man with his eye knocked into his skull recover and see again—!”

  “—You can try to put me off with gruesome examples as much as you like, Signore Rossi, but these things have to be examined—”

  Conrad slammed his hand flat on the table. It made his sore wrist ache, but produced a loud enough sound that both shut up and turned their heads to stare at him.

  “Yes. Consider the Returned Dead. Spectres. Ghosts, and other hauntings. Not miracles, but so far inexplicable,” Conrad said to Isaura. He added, “Tullio, you also know damn well that men died who shouldn’t have. Whatever a miracle is, not everybody gets one.”

  Both of them subsided—Tullio with a look as though he had just recalled he was arguing, unrestrainedly, with his master’s sister.

  Conrad studied Isaura, and saw no similar realisation that she had been arguing with a servant as if he were a gentleman.

  Because Tullio’s closer to being my brother than my servant? Or she could be a social heretic as well as a religious one, and still be sticking to the principles of the Enlightenment.

  As if I didn’t have enough trouble!

  He smiled, nonetheless.

  Tullio Rossi dumped the linens and came round the table and took Conrad’s right wrist, tutting at the clumsy attempt at a bandage, and picking up a new strip of old sheet to try again.

  It took Conrad a moment to realise that his left hand was gripped as well, and that Paolo was cleaning the minor wound with a damp cloth and frowning concentration.

  “You can’t expect to hide a whole opera production…” she observed absently.

  “Misdirection is the intended route, rather than trying to conceal us. I’m also given to understand we have our own watchers, spies, secret police, and so on.” Fear made a reappearance in the pit of his stomach. “I really ought to send you home.”

  Paolo ignored the addition as if he hadn’t voiced it. She tied the bandage off neatly.

  “I’m in!�
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  Gianpaolo-Isaura proved her worth as a secretary within two hours of the following morning: she streamlined the copying of Ferdinand’s letters and handled the start of auditions from outside the city with enviable speed and skill. And all the contract negotiations. Conrad, who had thought he might have to spend a few days instructing her, realised by lunch-time that she was not only handling correspondence and interviews, but keeping the accounts as well.

  “Thanks,” Tullio observed, as the three of them ate pasta bought further down the street. “It usually takes me weeks to convince the padrone that he’s superfluous; you’ve done it in a morning.”

  Conrad, impelled to a fraternal defence, warned, “Tullio—”

  And realised that Gianpaolo’s response had been to stick out her tongue at the ex-soldier.

  She followed that with a cheerful résumé of those gestures she had learned in Napoli’s streets, demonstrating both her attention to detail and phenomenal memory.

  “The padrone isn’t useless,” she retorted, twirling pasta on her fork. “That’s why he shouldn’t be wasting time handling the contract-work when he should be writing a libretto!”

  “You know,” Conrad said, pressingly aware of his lack of even a subplot, “you’re right.”

  Isaura and Tullio mugged surprise at him with a remarkably similar humour.

  “Of course you’d both join together to bait me,” Conrad observed, amused. “I realise I have lackeys, now. It’s traditional to harass the master.”

  Isaura-Paolo poked his shoulder with a stiff forefinger. “Then I suggest the master gets to work…”

  Conrad duly sat and meditated an hour or so, knowing better than to prod his brain for an idea, but letting his thoughts wander where they might—hoping for something to emerge from the fog, as it always inexplicably did. Isaura went down to meet a ship from Marseilles, supposedly carrying the Corsican castrato Armando Annicchiarico. And a messenger arrived not long before the siesta, carrying an envelope closed with the royal seal.

  Conrad tipped him, broke the wax, and pulled out a sheaf of papers.

  “Not more reading,” Tullio muttered, from where he sprawled in front of windows in which the glass had been replaced.

  “Salvatore Cammarano’s notes for the first counter-opera. His libretto got burned, apparently…” Conrad was unaware of anything for the next half-hour. When a ceramic edge nudged his hand, he took a mug of wine from Tullio. It didn’t improve what he read. “It’s as bad as the King said it was. We do have to start from the ground up. I don’t know what Cammarano was thinking…”

  “Maybe,” Tullio sounded cynical, “that these Prince’s Men would break his knee-caps, if he turned in something decent?”

  “Or that his final drafts are much better than his first?” Conrad pushed his chair back and stood up. “If anyone calls for me, take a message, will you? I’m going down to the Palace library.”

  “Do this, do that, take a message.” Tullio’s grumbling held a badly-disguised tone of amusement. “It may not be really hot yet, but you know what? I’m taking a nap, padrone. Wake me up when the next catastrophe happens.”

  “If there was any justice, Rossi, you’d be struck by lightning!”

  “Nah. I leave that to my betters and social superiors. Particularly those who ended the Battle of Maida with a splinter from an artillery carriage in their bums…”

  “And isn’t it a pity we’re not writing a one-act Neapolitan comedy.” Conrad couldn’t suppress a smile. “Heroic as that might be, I don’t think it’s going to carry me through four acts and a whole evening!”

  He grabbed up his hat, cane, and gloves, and summoned a carriage, since even in early spring, now, it had turned too warm to walk comfortably down to the Palazzo Reale and Ferdinand’s libraries—an enviable collection, and unusually scientific for a European monarch.

  As he was jolted over the cobbles, Conrad worried like a mastiff at the idea of a suitable subject for his libretto.

  Classical tragedy? The life-story of some historical figure? Rossini and Colbran between them grabbed all the major historical heroines…

  The coachman reined in slightly, muttering. Four men in double-breasted greatcoats, only two of them wearing their tall hats, and the burliest with a carriage-whip clasped behind him, stood in debate in the middle of the street. There were any number of children over six and under twelve scattering around unsupervised. Four, playing tag, darted across in front of the horse. Conrad caught sight of a groom in a muffler, standing by his master’s carriage, who was evidently taking the time to show off the fine points of the dun mare to more of the brats.

  The coach swung back to pass three women in shawls and bonnets, with a child in plain blue shift and a white coif.

  Here there were no pavements, and groups of people chatting occupied all the road. Approaching the palace, which did have pavements, the couples and groups more reluctantly left the centre of the road clear. The carriage slowed, nevertheless, for a rifleman in a cockaded hat walking with his arm around the waist of a woman—her red dress and bonnet and white shawl of sufficient quality to make her sweetheart or wife rather than whore.

  And slowed again, for a trooper wheeling a barrow piled high with ammunition boxes.

  Conrad sat back in his seat with a groan. This is my audience.

  These are the people who will come to every performance of a three-week run, and comment more knowledgeably than the Master of Music at a Conservatoire. Some come to be a composer’s claque and hiss his competition. Most of them come to the Teatro San Carlo with a better ear for voice and music than any house in Italy. And these are the people who have to be seized up into passion by King Ferdinand’s opera.

  I’m approaching it the wrong way. Any average work won’t do it.

  So that leaves me looking for a subject that they won’t expect, but will love. And Ferdinand wants it done in six weeks.

  Conrad opened his mouth and shut it again.

  I wonder if it really compromises my atheism to swear by hell-fire and bloody damnation!

  He left the carriage and found his way to the smallest of the King’s libraries, which was the one best stocked with good translations of the Classical Greek and Roman authors. He read omnivorously for hours, only occasionally interrupted as functionaries and courtiers wandered in and out. None of them paid overt attention to the books that piled up by his elbow.

  I’d bet money that the Prince’s Men have a paid spy in the Palace. Most likely more than one. But who’d suspect me, a lowly copyist attached to the King’s Master of Music?

  And Prince’s men or not, I prefer to be considered ‘lowly’ when it comes to royal courts.

  Any attention from a King, major or minor, plunges one into the jealousy and enmity that is court politics. Make a friend, make three enemies, as the proverb goes.

  Of the half dozen other men who occupied chairs in the library, all had the look of genuine scholars or Natural Philosophers—it spoke well for Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily that his court attracted them, Conrad thought, going back to the passage in Seneca that he had been puzzling over.

  A coil of cold wind snaked over the back of his neck. He felt all his hairs stand up.

  A sepulchral moan echoed through all the bookcases, and the heights of the vaulted roof.

  It swelled into a groan of spiritual anguish.

  One annoyed academic voice hissed, “Sssshh!”

  Conrad was broken rudely out of communion with blood-drenched love affairs (not to mention incest, patricide, vengeance, fraternal treachery, and other promising subjects). He looked wildly around.

  An old man in scholar’s voluminous robes sniffed, returning pointedly to his leather-bound tome.

  Searching for what had disturbed him, Conrad instantly saw the translucent shimmering form of a ghost.

  The spectre drifted through the main library table, ignoring how it cut its body off at the waist. The skirts of its formal velvet coat swirled through the page th
at Conrad had been reading. White eyes looked down.

  “Conrad. Son!”

  CHAPTER 11

  Conrad marked his place in his book with his finger and regarded his father’s ghost.

  “Father.”

  The apparition wore court dress, as always, as if prepared to give a recital at a moment’s notice to some German princeling or Neapolitan Count. The ghost of Alfredo Scalese was too familiar a sight to surprise Conrad very much. He calculated that it was a rare year that went past without one or two visits by the man.

  Several of the other users of the library gave pronounced harrumphs at the impolite manifestation, and went back to their books.

  “I comfort myself, sometimes,” Conrad murmured, hardly above a whisper.

  “With the thought that at least you’re only a spectre. If you were one of the corporeal Returned Dead, you’d be much more intrusive.”

  The ghost laughed. It had a chilling quality, although Alfredo’s round face held nothing but amusement.

  “I’ll never understand how a son of mine could be so fond of work.” Alfredo shook his head, his white hair twisting on an unseen wind. “The day’s done. If you were to walk down by the Mercato, I guarantee you’d meet a dozen pretty girls.”

  Bluntly, Conrad said, “Go away, Father.”

  “Oh, you snake’s tooth!” His smile was roguish, clearly still dwelling on hypothetical girls. Alfredo’s teeth had been a good colour and regular before he died; they were blinding white now. “I recognise that temper: that’s your mother in you. Used to give me hell sometimes… Why don’t you get out and enjoy yourself, son?”

  Conrad wondered how closely his father’s ghostly existence allowed Alfredo to examine the lives of others. Will he know if I lie?

  “It’s very simple.” Conrad lowered his gaze determinedly to his book. “If I don’t work, I don’t earn. If I don’t earn, I don’t eat.”

  “Oh, you could eat on what you earn in half of the year! Live well, too. If you didn’t insist on this ridiculous plan to give your money to other men, when my debts died when I did—”