The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  The ghost tapped his forefinger on his lower lip; a pose so artificial that Conrad would have punched him if it were only possible.

  “I suppose you might poison that old man, and burn his correspondence if you can get at it. Deny everything…” Alfredo shrugged, his amusement as transparent as his body. “Really, Conrad. You can’t be serious. You should do whatever you want to do. Something will always turn up.”

  “You feckless son of a bitch!”

  Unmoved, the ghost-image of a man shrugged. “Being feckless is good—it’s duty and honour that have you in danger of the debtor’s prison, isn’t it?”

  Despite his father being immaterial, Conrad picked up his silver-plated ink-well, that was weighted with solid lead, and hurled it through the ghost.

  Tullio flinched at how close the smash came to the glass chimney of one lamp. Regarding the spray of ink up the scarred wallpaper, he muttered, “Padrone—I know this has been building for nine years, but tell him without breaking our lodgings up—we had enough of that recently.”

  “Yes, Corradino.” Alfredo beamed. “You shouldn’t be so irresponsible.”

  “Irresponsible.” Conrad reached blindly for whatever he could find, with eyes for nothing but his father’s immaterial fatuous smile. “So I should be responsible and default on your debt, should I? Refuse to pay? It’s the law! I’m your son! Tell me how I can ‘fecklessly’ evade your creditors and still keep the name and reputation I’ve been making for myself!”

  The spectre lounged to his feet, smoothing down his cuffs. “I’ll come back when you’ve stopped throwing tantrums.”

  Conrad turned around and leaned his arms on the window-frame, and his forehead against the cold glass. Rage against injustice, and shame for speaking that way to his father, left him motionless and speechless.

  He saw in the window’s reflective dark surface how Alfredo Scalese shook his head in apparent sadness, and disappeared.

  “Cazzo!”

  Conrad left the window, and dropped onto the sofa beside Tullio. Urgency pressed in on him.

  “Is this too—too little—for the Prince’s Men?” he wondered aloud. “But I don’t know who else would be my enemy.”

  Tullio snorted. “I know of at least one man who’s a financier and has no cause to like you, padrone.”

  “Argente?”

  “Keep you out of the way of his wife, maybe?”

  Conrad thought it through briefly. “He wouldn’t do it. If nothing else, he won’t offend the King. He’s a Neapolitan Count; Ferdinand could strip him of his estates.”

  A quirk of Tullio’s mouth signalled assent. “That only leaves the Prince.”

  “And we don’t have much time. I’ll be watched. I need you to go to the King. But change your clothes first—”

  Tullio put up one broad-fingered hand, his smile sympathetic. “I got it, padrone. Want me to wear a false nose, too?”

  “I don’t know about a false nose, but I could certainly give you a black eye,” Conrad grumbled amiably, watching Rossi reach for his army greatcoat, and turn the collar up against wind and spies. “No—wait.”

  Tullio cocked his head, the picture of a man waiting for instruction.

  “That won’t work,” Conrad said decisively. “They will have checked these lodgings after what went on with the Holy Office. We have no guarantee they’re not still watching. If they take note of servants, your face will be known.”

  The ex-sergeant shook his head. “It’s all right, padrone. I understand. These ‘Prince’s Men’—they were just a bogeyman until now. But now you met one of them, and he’s smart and dangerous.”

  Conrad shifted on the sofa.

  Tullio thrust his fists into the greatcoat’s pockets. “I’m not going to be scared off by a gang of amateurs either, padrone. We saw worse in the war. If they was a real secret society, there’d be bodies along the foreshore from the harbour to Castell dell’Ovo, and we’d be worrying about assassination attempts on his Majesty. Right?”

  “One body was enough.” Restless, Conrad stood again, and paced the small amount of space in front of the hearth.

  “I know who’s not so known,” Tullio inelegantly said. “And how they could be even less so.”

  “Who—oh. Yes. Yes…”

  It didn’t take Tullio long to fetch her out of the lower floor of the lodging-house, where she had been gossiping—although they were interrupted by half a dozen conversations on the way up the stairs with other tenants, culminating in the landlady. Tullio finally had to shut the door with his foot.

  “Holy Baby Jesus!” Isaura remarked—or rather Paolo, Conrad registered, in smart man-about-town clothes.

  Tullio sounded oddly apologetic. “Padrone needs your help.”

  Paolo smirked. “Nothing new there. Is there, big brother?”

  Their confidence buoyed him up, somehow, even if he thought it unjustified. Conrad went briskly through the visit by Adalrico Silvestri, with only a pause for Isaura’s opinions of their father’s behaviour—not significantly different from Conrad’s.

  “I need you to take a letter to King Ferdinand—to the palace, and put it directly into his own hand.”

  Gianpaolo’s eyes widened, the man-about-town subsumed instantly into the shy beanpole girl. “They might have seen me come in here. They’ll know who I am—they might take your letter!”

  Conrad stopped her rush of words with a raised hand. “Look—we’ll disguise you! In a dress!”

  There was a pause.

  The young woman in man’s clothing alternately glared at him, and at Tullio Rossi. The ex-sergeant put his hand casually over his mouth, stifling entirely unmanly giggles. Conrad avoided Tullio’s gaze, and the ex-sergeant as assiduously looked away from him.

  Very dryly, Isaura remarked, “Thank you, brother…”

  Caught between laughing and feeling uncomfortable, Conrad said, “Isaura—You don’t have to do this, because I never want to put you into danger. If you do do it, Tullio will ask a couple of his mates from upstairs to go disguised as your servants—a respectable woman wouldn’t be out without a pair of footman, especially in the early evening. No one will look at you and see Gianpaolo Pironti.”

  “If the Prince’s Men murder me, I’ll haunt you too,” Isaura muttered. “Judging by the evidence, our family’s good at making a spectral annoyance of itself—so you better hope I come back safe.”

  “I do.” Conrad hugged her as if she were a young woman and his sister, not the man she was dressed as. He couldn’t help the weakness of appreciating the comfort he got when she hugged him in return.

  “Damn petticoats!—Yes, I understand why I have to!” Isaura snorted. “Let’s get this done, then.”

  It was not Conrad’s habit to pace the floor, but he made a circuit of checking the view through both windows and the stairwell outside the lodgings. The stairs were dark. The new gas lighting in their one main thoroughfare was not much better.

  “I shouldn’t have sent her.”

  He attempted to sit and listen to the voices of Naples below the front room balcony, and lose himself in the search for incidents among the Aztec and European characters which would spur the emotional drama that is opera.

  Ten minutes later, he was on his feet again.

  There were only seven paces between the bedroom door and the living room door; he counted them repeatedly. The noise from the street outside did not die down, but he could hear nothing that sounded like violence.

  “She’s a woman. She’s my sister.”

  “She’s Gianpaolo Pironti,” Tullio said, from where he sat with his feet resting on the brick hearth surround. He leaned forward and carefully placed another lump of coal in the grate, against the chill off the sea. “And she’s spent three years at that Conservatoire in Catania. After that, she either knows what to do with a pistol, or she’s expert in getting out of trouble before it starts.”

  Conrad halted. “She has a pistol?”

  “I might have… lo
aned her my old infantry pistol. Just the right size for carrying in a fur muff, I thought.”

  Before Conrad could challenge that, the outer door banged open.

  Isaura walked in with more of a stride than a young woman should.

  Tullio went out to talk with his mates on the landing, and Conrad followed Isaura—who went straight into his bedroom and began unlacing her skirts and bodice without ceremony, looking with longing at her shirt and trousers laid out on his bed.

  “Damn, I hate courtiers!” She kicked off her shoes. “They gave me the run-around for hours on end.”

  Conrad stepped back out of the room and pulled the door mostly closed in front of him, while she dressed; content to hold his conversation through the gap. “You did get the message to him? When will Ferdinand see me? Tonight?—It’s late—”

  The door opened. Isaura had her loose shirt pulled on and tucked in, and was unselfconsciously buttoning the fall-front flap of her breeches. Her cropped hair flopped out of the hair-pins that had kept it disguised under a bonnet. She ran her fingers through it, sending a clatter of pins across the floor.

  “No.” Her expression was serious. “I couldn’t give him the message. The King’s not in the Palace.”

  Conrad stared, more disoriented than if she had been speaking Classical Greek. “Not in the…”

  “I finally got it out of one of his damn gentleman-in-waiting,” Isaura said. “He’s not even in Naples. King Ferdinand left the city this morning.”

  CHAPTER 17

  “‘Left the city.’” Conrad considered that for thirty heartbeats.

  Tullio’s “Vaffanculo!” was over-ridden by his own English-learned: “Fuck it up the arse backwards!”

  Tullio broke the following silence. “You game to try again, Signore Paolo?”

  “Of course.” Isaura lowered her chin, having successfully tied her linen cravat. “I planned to go back out—it was getting late for a lone woman, even with your friends accompanying her… Shall we?”

  Conrad stood up, not realising until then that he had sat down on the coach like a sack of meal. “You’ll be recognised!”

  “That’s a risk we have to take.” Isaura-Paolo got in just before Tullio. “We need to know, brother. Where the King’s gone—if he left—or if that’s just a cover-up story, and he’s sick or assassinated.”

  The enumerating of possibilities was numbing. Conrad reached for his great-coat and hauled it on, knowing the double-breasted coat and a low-crowned hat would leave him anonymous to all except very bad luck.

  Paolo objected, “They’ll see you.”

  He echoed her directly. “That’s a risk we have to take… We’ll split up; that’s less dangerous. Let’s meet on each hour at Antonio’s.”

  By mid-evening, Conrad’s threadbare patience was nearly worn through. He sat in the ancient tavern, lost to view among other patrons, and saw Tullio close the door as he came in. The broad man braced his shoulders when he glanced across at Isaura, who accompanied him.

  Not good news, then.

  With all of them seated over wine in the packed room, heads together like every other set of conspirators or criminals in Naples, Conrad began optimistically. “You found out where the carriages were being packed for?”

  Tullio shook his head. “Had a go at finding out what the gossip is. Think we’ve got the answer. It wasn’t easy…”

  Tullio held out his hand significantly, as any other disreputable man in a tavern would.

  Despite the seriousness of the situation, Conrad couldn’t help a grin. “How many ducats difficult was it?”

  “Oh, nine or ten, easy…” The ex-soldier regarded the handful of small change Conrad passed over with mild disgust, and began counting the calli and mezzicalli with his hands concealed beneath the table—the calli being the twelfth part of a Neapolitan penny, and the other worth one-half of that.

  “No carriages.” Isaura’s alto was quiet, but not close enough to a whisper to attract attention. “Our friend apparently didn’t leave by road.”

  “He didn’t?”

  Tullio, still counting, spoke with absent gravity. “Word among his servants—and the people who know, because they packed the baggage—is that he had his wife—”

  Conrad’s memory supplied the name: Queen Maria.

  “—And all their children—and his mother-in-law the Old Tart—”

  Ferdinand’s probity had been something of a shock to the rather lax court morals when he took the throne. Conrad dimly remembered hearing of it—he himself had been in Prussia at the time. Ferdinand’s mother-in-law had a fondness for handsome young guardsmen, which had not endeared her to the new regime, and had gained her any number of unsympathetic nicknames. Having met her briefly at a court-attended opera, Conrad had allowed himself to be charmed by her, and rather felt Tullio would react the same way if they ever met.

  “—All packed up and put on board ship with him,” Tullio ended.

  Dragging his mind back to the current issue, Conrad demanded, “So why would he take his whole family on—” The royal yacht—the Guiscardo—no—“his—boat? Surely this isn’t the time for a relaxing cruise…”

  “He’s not so much taking them on the ship, as by it.” Tullio leaned forward with a huge sigh. He appeared halfway drunk to a casual glance. “Seems he’s taking his family to the other Sicily, to Palermo. As far as I can find out, he’ll be back. But not until he’s got them all settled in for a long stay. All of his family, not just the heir and spare.”

  Conrad met Tullio’s shrewd gaze.

  “He wants them away from Naples and Vesuvius—” Conrad hesitated, and then let out his own sigh. “—And I can’t fault him for that. If I could persuade you and Isaura to leave the city, I would. Things may get very dangerous here.”

  Isaura quietly snorted.

  Conrad looked at her.

  “As if it wasn’t hairy enough leaving town ahead of Papa’s creditors!” she proclaimed.

  Conrad smiled. “I thought you were too young to remember that. I do remember you prattling on, wide-eyed and innocent, distracting attention from whatever Papa was hiding.”

  “I can still be wide-eyed and innocent,” Isaura said, somewhat sourly. “Which is how we know our friend has gone to Sicily.”

  Conrad rallied his thoughts. How long to Sicily and back? How long will the King stay there? Will he need to call at other ports, if he hears anything about the Prince’s Men?

  “We should go back home.” Conrad stood.

  Once in their lodgings—in what he knew was a purely illusory safety—he briefly put his arm around Isaura’s shoulders, for all she was Paolo at the moment.

  Taking advantage of the opportunity to speak freely, she mirrored his own thoughts exactly.

  “Ferdinand may also be on the track of some move by the Prince’s Men. Clearly, that’s important, but it doesn’t help us. Without specific instruction, there’s no one who will authorise such a large withdrawal of money from the treasury. No one will take your word for it, brother, that the King would want them to pay off your debts.”

  Conrad grunted.

  “We must know somebody…” Tullio hauled his greatcoat off, movements more suited to the field than the drawing-room, and tossed it at Conrad.

  The weight was surprising. Conrad looked questioningly at him.

  “Got savings, padrone; they’re sewn in the hem. Dunno if they come anywhere near what you need… Doubt it; sorry.”

  Conrad found it on the tip of his tongue to speak a refusal—and didn’t.

  “I’d do the same for you,” Conrad said, with absolute honesty. “But if you’ve got enough money to outweigh Alfredo’s gambling habits—I’d like to know how the hell you’ve been making it!”

  Tullio grinned, and handed over the very sharp small knife with which Conrad trimmed his quills. “Tips, mostly, padrone. What I can screw out of the nobility. And no, I ain’t rich, but that Count di Galdi might take it as a down-payment?”

&
nbsp; Conrad slit the thread sewing up the coat-hem, while Isaura held her cupped hands beneath.

  “If he was just concerned about money, he might…” Conrad snatched one penny out of the air before it bounced off into the shadows. “…I think this is designed to put me in jail.”

  Isaura estimated the sum in her hands by eye as a hundred calli, counted it out, and proved to be almost correct. Tullio’s savings were mostly small coins, with a scudo that Conrad thought it better not to enquire into.

  Having stacked the coins into piles, they looked at each other, and Tullio set about threading a needle and sewing his savings back into secrecy.

  “Nine scudi total isn’t going to get us anywhere… The trouble is, people I know here are singers and crew.” Tullio shrugged. “Money comes into opera hands and goes out of opera hands just as fast. Look at Signore JohnJack.”

  “Well, we won’t let that stop us asking, will we?” Conrad eyed both of them with mock sternness.

  “No sir, padrone!” Isaura grinned, her confidence seeming to be restored.

  “No,” Tullio agreed. “You know, it’s not every man who has the chance of being arrested for the second time in a week…”

  “You needn’t make it sound like an achievement!”

  Isaura kicked off her boots and rubbed at her feet. “We’re too late to do more tonight. Corradino, skip work tomorrow morning—we’ll go out early, avoid di Galdi’s lawyers for a bit. Catch some people before they’re up and out.”

  Conrad slowly nodded, and then swore.

  When Tullio looked questioning, he added, “Something so simple, and it’s giving us so much trouble!”

  The ex-soldier continued on his way to the food cupboard, and hauled out another bottle of wine. He removed the cork and set it down on the table, with a sly smile. “Drink and you might sleep, padrone. Let’s drink to God sending us stupid enemies in future, shall we?”