The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  “’S good doctor.” His voice was not strong. “Just a poor excuse for a man. Alvarez’s lot?”

  Conrad realised that Tullio had noted the troopers of the King’s Rifles guarding the passage outside.

  “Don’t think you have an advantage,” Conrad said carefully. He knew having guards would make Tullio see himself as weak. “The rest of the cast and crew have the same arrangement now.”

  He set the kettle on the brazier.

  “You’re right, I’ve got no facility with invalids or sick-beds. But I can at least make tea…” Absently, while he poured, Conrad added, “The best thing I can say about the San Carlo dress rehearsal today is that Sandrine didn’t break her ankle, she severely sprained it.”

  “That good?” Tullio’s scratchy voice was amused. “The English say it’s an omen. Bad dress rehearsals, good performance. Now would be a really good time to become superstitious.”

  “I’ll get you a black cat.”

  Conrad brought the tea across. Tullio sat up in the bed.

  “Listen,” Conrad said. “We have less than a week. The Sun-Moon-Earth line up happens on the fourteenth, and we open then, ready or not. As for you… You’re staying in that bed until I say you can get up!”

  Tullio chuckled and groaned all together. “Gimme a day or two. It’s all bruises, padrone. I ache from head to foot; I can take that out on any of the Prince’s Pricks that show. Only this time they’re not getting behind me with a cosh.”

  “Maybe.” He was determined to watch Tullio’s head-wound himself. “I’ll find us something to eat.”

  Conrad went out to arrange food. On coming back in, he surprised Isaura helping the ex-sergeant into his shirt and breeches.

  “Oh… Conrad.” Paolo stepped back, cheeks pink. She looked less like a boy when she blushed, unless it was one of the Renaissance’s androgynous cherubs.

  Tullio finished easing his shirt down over his bandaged ribs, and shot a challenging look at Conrad. “Paolo, you want to run along for a bit? I want to talk to your brother.”

  Gianpaolo looked the most stubborn that Conrad had ever seen her.

  She scowled, suddenly, as if something was decided in her mind, and whirled on her heel and stalked out.

  “So.” Tullio folded his arms—although the fact that he was sitting propped up in a bed, and that he winced at the action, lost it some of its belligerence.

  Conrad became aware he was still standing just inside the room. He closed the curtain fully, and sat down on the end of Tullio’s bed.

  Tullio said flatly, “Does the Master want to stop Isaura from nursing his servant?”

  “You mean, am I going to pull the head of the family act, and object to some servant courting my sister? Protect my only sister’s virtue?”

  “She’d bust the bollocks of any man she didn’t want near her virtue,” Tullio muttered, “and we both know it. All the same, I can’t see any of your family happy about Paolo spending long hours in the sickroom with an unmarried man.”

  Conrad leaned his spine up against the bed-post. He surveyed the ruffled, bandaged form of Tullio Rossi.

  “Let’s think about that, shall we, Tullio? Let’s consider my late father Alfredo, who was—I admit—completely feckless. My mother Agnese, content to depend entirely on my Uncle Baltazar’s charity while whining that I don’t send her more money. And Isaura herself, who’s far more comfortable dressed as a man than as a woman, and likely to stay that way. Not to mention her brother, the librettist, with his staunch atheist beliefs… Should I ask if you want your virtue protected?”

  Tullio laughed and groaned together, one arm going to support his ribs. “Padrone, you know what I mean!”

  “I know what I mean, yes. I mean that I know you. If it looks like she’s going to be hurt, you’ll let her down gently and back away, no matter how much you might care for her.”

  It was not often he got to see total shock on Tullio’s pugilist-face; he couldn’t help enjoying it.

  “Make sure you don’t back off just because you think she might suffer socially,” Conrad added. “She’ll suffer in any case, given what she’s like, and she doesn’t care. Just… Remember she doesn’t take well to being protected.”

  “She doesn’t.” Tullio shook his head. “Dear God—if Paolo finds out we’ve been talking about this without asking her, we’ll both need protection!”

  The laughter was healing, Conrad found. Or that might have been the relief.

  Conrad stood up, and turned out the travelling chest that stood locked at the foot of the camp-bed. His hands sifted through spare shirts and found a flat wooden box with brass clasps.

  “I intended to do this before…” Conrad took out one of a pair of Manton flintlock duelling pistols, state of the art, with an octagonal barrel and the bore scratch-rifled. Deadly up to twenty yards. “You can take this.”

  For the first time in a long time—years, perhaps—the older man looked outright startled. “That cost a mint! I can’t take that! It’s one of a pair!”

  “And so are you.”

  Conrad watched emotions play by lamp-light across Tullio’s weathered face.

  “Yes, I saved your life in the war. I’ve lost count of the times you did the same for me. You’re far more of a brother than a servant. Take the fucking pistol and practise with it. Brother.”

  Tullio stretched out a hand and weighed the pistol that Conrad lay flat on it.

  “Seen these shoot,” he observed shortly. “Take off a fly’s bollocks. Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.” Conrad closed the lid on the remaining pistol. “Are you sure?”

  Tullio gave a slant, weary grin. “I would say this is just to get out of paying me… if you’d ever paid me! Sure I’m sure. Find me a powder flask and some moulds, will you?”

  The ancient mine-shafts resounded to the painful cracks of pistol shots all that afternoon. Conrad’s ears developed a high-pitched whine, and powder gritted between his teeth. The scent of hot metal permeated the carved chambers as Tullio poured melted lead into moulds to make his own ammunition. Conrad found himself grinning at unlikely moments.

  It says sad things about a man’s life when he finds the smell of gunpowder reassuring.

  The smile didn’t leave his face while he made out a new codicil to his Last Will and Testament in Tullio Rossi’s favour.

  If this goes wrong, I’ve nothing to leave him. If it goes right, but I don’t survive, he’ll have Ferdinand’s reward. And my debts will be paid off by the King. Paolo—Isaura—gets everything else. And won’t that make the Pironti family spit blood.

  The dark of the moon came remorselessly closer.

  The Teatro San Carlo had final stage-flats and props finished and added day and night, under heavy guard. The second dress rehearsal took place on the Wednesday, on the stage of the San Carlo.

  It turned into what a limping, grunting, newly up-and-about Tullio termed “a complete cat’s ear-hole.”

  “Four hours of singing.” Roberto looked grey around the mouth. “And the interval lengthened by thirty minutes for set-changes.”

  Conrad made a stalwart effort to be reassuring. “We only need to get used to this theatre. And we can make cuts.”

  JohnJack Spinelli, in the gorgeous feathers and gold armour of the Jaguar General Chimalli, gave Conrad a lethal stare. “Have I ever mentioned that you’re hopelessly optimistic?”

  “Usually you stick with ‘hopeless.’”

  “And we’re not yet complete…” Roberto Capiraso, ignoring the by-play, gave Giambattista Velluti a pacifying glance, and rummaged through the clutch of papers he held. “Conrad!—Act Four, our primo uomo is in prison, awaiting execution, and have you got any verses for his Hymn of Death yet?”

  “The Hymn of Death is going to be the death of me!” Conrad made an attempt to dispel the man’s tenseness. “How do you expect an atheist to write a hymn?”

  “Quickly!”

  Conrad caught the flash of dark humour. He
thought it disturbing to find that the man King Ferdinand foisted on him by royal fiat—the man who had stolen Leonora and married her—was also a man remarkably easy to work with.

  “I’ll do that next,” Conrad promised. “And we might pick up some time if the Act III stretta was faster than the aria. Places for sextet, please!”

  He clapped his hands for attention and turned to his sister.

  “Paolo, convince the orchestra this isn’t a dirge. Brisker, please! Pretend you have a cabriolet waiting outside and you’re paying the driver by the minute…”

  That cheered the musicians up enough to undertake yet another run through.

  The San Carlo’s auditorium, when empty, was overshadowed by its tremendous chandelier. There were no finely-dressed people to take attention from the Bourbon blue and gold of the boxes, all six tiers of them. Standing in the Pit, eyes closed, Conrad felt as if he stood in the focus of a chambered seashell or the ear’s canal.

  The sextet ground through.

  “It wasn’t any worse with Annicchiarico,” Tullio’s voice muttered.

  Conrad opened his eyes to see the big man limping over to what was theoretically the best spot to hear the sound.

  “There’s nothing wrong with it, padrone. Conrad. The tune just doesn’t stay in the mind. Not even while they’re singing it.”

  Conrad was almost glad to find one of the King’s aides at his elbow, and to be summoned across to the Palace.

  Mist hid all of Naples, and the sea-fog brushed wet and welcome over Conrad’s skin as he crossed the piazza. He turned his face up, and exhaled in relief at being under an open sky.

  Something made a sound, as if thunder growled out to sea.

  Conrad slowed his steps as he walked along the front of the Palazzo Reale, glancing to the east. It was not thunder. The sea-fog did not break. There was no glow of lava. The grinding together of rocks was unmistakable, however.

  Vesuvius’s long, slow grumbling and minor tremors excited no notice among the palace soldiers or the people he passed.

  He was shown up to the fourth floor of the palace, to a suite that he guessed was one of Ferdinand’s private offices. The King sat at a vast green-topped desk, folders and files spread out open before him.

  “The Prince’s Men are giving us largesse…” Ferdinand waved Conrad to sit with a thoughtful hand.

  “I don’t understand, sir.”

  “You’d think, this close to the first night, that their people would have to be coming in to Campania with the black opera?” Ferdinand had lines on his plump face that were not there a week ago. “Enrico and his men are covering the borders—I doubt any of them have slept more than three or four hours a night.”

  Conrad had sufficient knowledge of the various states’ secret police and blacklists of undesirables from personal experience. No one loves an atheist. “Has anyone been caught?”

  Ferdinand gave a tight-lipped smile.

  “That would be the problem… Something on the order of fifteen hundred people have entered Campania in the last week alone, all of whom we have solid cause to suspect. The week before, it was just over a thousand. None of them are their inner circle—so far as we know. Each must be interrogated.” He sighed. “It seems the Prince’s Men have sent in sufficient of their minor agents that we have to run ourselves ragged following and questioning them.”

  Conrad blinked. “And meanwhile, the important men quietly take their places?”

  “I would imagine so. They come in—or emerge if they’re already here. Enrico and his people are swamped taking care of the people we know to suspect. The closer we get to the fourteenth, the more decoys are coming in.” Ferdinand turned over pages in a file. “So, yes, the more men who cross our borders openly with suspicious notes against them on their files, the more chance that those who cross borders secretly won’t be taken.”

  Conrad thought it went without saying that some of those might be double bluffs, and therefore no man could be ignored. “The ones you have. We don’t know where they’re heading for?”

  “I don’t ask Enrico and his men what methods they use.” Ferdinand scowled, rubbing at his forehead. “For which I suspect I shall answer, some day. But even so, they have no useful confessions. Those who are Prince’s Men are zealots, fanatics… Those who are innocent take up our time and are harmed despite themselves.”

  “They have that many people willing to be sacrificed—to be interrogated, to go to prison…” Conrad frowned and slipped, speaking without tact. “I suppose it’s obvious now why they killed Signore Castiello-Salvati. He would have been able to help you with this.”

  Ferdinand paused.

  After that moment, the King said, “Enrico is also watching over those residents that Adriano suspected of being Prince’s Men. A fair number of the nobility have vanished over the last week. We can’t just imprison their relatives or connections—how would we choose which? All have reasons for why they might be absent—business, time spent back at their estates, tours of foreign countries… I don’t know what excuses the common people make.”

  The slow grinding of abyssal rock vibrated through the floorboards and walls.

  Conrad stayed silent until it faded away. “They’re still rehearsing.”

  “High earth-tide is certainly coming.” Ferdinand pushed a paper chart of the Tyrrhenean Sea across the desk. It was heavily marked in pencil. “A merchant captain brought me this, from his soundings north of Sardinia. New volcanic reefs, dangerous to shipping. And over here, through the Straits of Medina, something that might be a whole new volcanic island.”

  “An island?”

  “Only a few inches above sea-level as yet. I had it claimed for the Kingdoms. It was either that or have the damn English get it. I’m calling it ‘Ferdinandea.’” Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily had a very crooked smile. “It will probably sink back down. They usually do.”

  The King’s smile faded as he put his finger on the tiny port inlet of Pozzuoli, a few miles west along the coast from Napoli itself. “The Campi Flegrei is full of sulphur steam, boiling mud pools, new small ash cones, craters.”

  “I don’t suppose we have to worry about sulphur pools if Vesuvius blows,” Conrad said bleakly.

  “My Natural Philosophers are interested in how much volcanic lava might lie beneath the Burning Fields. They apparently think it comparable to another volcano such as Vesuvius…”

  Conrad said weakly, “Cazzo.”

  Other pencil marks on the map annotated Ætna, Vulcano, Stromboli, the Aeolian Islands. It was not difficult to see what that portended.

  Ferdinand rolled up the map and looked at Conrad with brisk enquiry.

  Conrad detailed a report. He concluded, “I’m staging another full rehearsal tomorrow.”

  “Good. Your new adaptations work? Ah—” The King sat back. “I had Armando Annicchiarico followed, as I promised. He travelled home to his brother’s family in Corsica; that was all. You can be relieved about your judgement of character. He has no connection with the Prince’s Men.”

  A call for a servant had wine served to both of them. Only when it made Conrad’s head swim a little did he realise how many hours it had been since he ate.

  Too many rehearsals, too many cuts in the old score, too many re-writes of singers’ lines to match the new score—this is not the state we should be in a few days before opening!

  Halfway down the glass, Ferdinand said, “No matter where the black opera is, if we can’t identify their singers and musicians in the next few days, we have no way of stopping it going forward.”

  Conrad felt chills down the hot skin at the back of his neck. They were not caused by the open windows and the swirling sea-fog.

  Ferdinand finished: “I wish I thought Naples might be as lucky as Tambora.”

  “Lucky?” Conrad couldn’t help but be appalled.

  The King looked both sad and amused. “Remember—Tambora was not sufficient. Tens of thousands of deaths were not a large enough blood sacr
ifice to rouse their God as they desire. If it had been, we wouldn’t be here now.”

  Conrad bowed his head, and accepted another glass of wine.

  “And Signore Rossi?” Ferdinand turned brisk. “Is he recovered enough to escort the Emperor north from Stromboli?”

  “He says he is, sir.” But that’s Tullio. The idiot.

  Cautiously, Conrad added, “I’ve been wondering, sir. Would it be wise to have L’Altezza’s first night on the thirteenth, instead of the fourteenth? We could just manage it. Then the Emperor’s escape could be facilitated twenty-four hours before we have to handle the rest of this. He’d be gone before high earth-tide, when it comes down to the counter-opera against the black opera.”

  When we finally discover if what we’re doing is sufficient to stop them.

  “No,” Ferdinand said.

  The King stood and made his way from behind the desk. Conrad followed a bemused half pace behind.

  Glass doors stood thrown open, leading to a balcony that Conrad thought must overlook the old Angevin palace and the centre of Naples. The sea-mist hid everything but bare masts and round Norman towers. The city, with its narrow lanes and monumental tenement houses, might never have existed.

  Ferdinand stepped out onto the balcony, fine moisture clinging to the gold silk epaulets of his coat. He stared out at the Bay as if he could pierce the cloud that lay on it.

  Muted by the fog, his voice did not carry.

  “We can have one first night, Corrado. Naples is full of double and triple agents. The Palace leaks intelligence like a sieve. The only secret we still have is how L’Altezza plays in front of an audience. Frankly, that’s because, so far, even we don’t know that.”

  Conrad rested his hands on the stone of the balustrade, the cool dampness welcome. “But, sir, you want the Emperor to escape safely.”

  “In fact—” Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily gave an amiable and rather more weary smile than before. “In fact, Conrad, the sole and only reason I’m allowing his Majesty the Emperor to come here is, so that everybody who should be watching us is watching him.”