by Mary Gentle
The gleam turned into a grin. “If I am discovered, it won’t be by the Conte di Argente.”
Unless his wife tells him. Conrad shook himself free of the thought. In a different tone, he said, “We truly need you here. I know you’d rather be with Tullio when he leaves for the north with our friend from Stromboli.”
Her blonde-brown eyebrows rose. “And I know you’d rather leave Naples with our composer’s wife… But we both have our jobs here, no?”
Conrad glanced around, checking they had not been overheard. “So we’ll both be here on Tuesday afternoon.”
“We will.”
Conrad rested for the hour or so before he would be needed, watching the rehearsals from the back of the box.
He found it analgesic, he realised, that Roberto Capiraso remained stubbornly blind to Paolo’s gender. He treated her as an upstart boy from the Conservatoire. Whether it was watching Isaura bite her tongue, or exchanging a comment with her afterward (“Damnation, if he keeps looking at me like that, Corradino, I swear I’ll just stand up and strip off my shirt!”), it kept Conrad able to be in the same theatre with his composer.
I can do it, he realised.
We’re all together under pressure here, we know we need each other to succeed, and we grow a certain esprit de corps between us, no matter what our personal opinions are.
Blindsided, he realised he was thinking of Nora again. Of other things that could never be.
The mourning I feel for the loss of that voice to death…
What would L’Altezza azteca be like if Nora could have sung Princess Tayanna?
The guards changed shift, and Mantenucci’s temper seemed unpredictable (if “Let me do my damn job and protect you!” was any indication). Conrad settled for returning to underground Naples with the singers for the last hour of rehearsal time.
The odour of the evening meal cooking sifted through the aqueducts and passages. That section of the tunnels that had been taken over by the work-crew drowned out other sound with incessant hammering.
The answer came to him out of nowhere—or out of whatever place the seeds of story come: perhaps the same mind that dreams at night. Conrad stopped dead.
Spinelli trod on his heels and swore.
Conrad ignored the dramatic complaining from the other singers. “Come with me.”
He led the primo uomo and prima donna—knowing the rest would follow—into his own stone chamber, and drew two thick velvet curtains across the entrance, muffling the noise to where it was bearable.
He gave Velluti his own seat—a gilded, velvet-padded monstrosity brought down from the Palazzo Reale by some over-enthusiastic servant. It was deceptively comfortable. Sandrine and Estella sat down on the satin couch, JohnJack between them, each with an arm linked through one of his. Brigida Lorenzani glanced about and chose a stout dark wooden chair, throne-like, and suitable for her weight. She looked in her silks like a pagan queen; Lorenzo, on a padded stool at her elbow, like an intelligent vizier.
“Very well.” Conrad looked around at them all. “I’ve been approaching this wrongly.”
CHAPTER 37
That brought about complete cessation of their conversations.
Conrad met their eyes, each person in turn. “It’s all very well for il Conte to specify the counter-opera by classification—seria, semi-seria, comedy—but that isn’t the heart of it.”
JohnJack smiled and leaned back between his two ladies. Conrad didn’t give him a chance to interrupt with any I told you so.
“You know your roles. You know them as characters, as people.” Conrad paused, watching their faces for recognition. “What I need to know, to write the verses for the finale, is what you will or won’t do, as that role.”
A moment of silence. The basso broke it.
“Oh, si…” JohnJack’s expression turned introspective. “I will insist on paying court to the Princess—and repenting my crimes, when faced by the memory of the old King. But Tayanna needs a steady male influence while she rules, and who better than I, one of her own people, who loves her?”
Sandrine gave a curt nod, with an edge of regality to it. “I won’t give up my throne. But I want my lover.” Her large, elegant hand waved in Velluti’s direction.
“And Cortez—” Giambattista corrected himself. “—I will not give up the Princess. Pagan though she may be. Or bow my head to il Re Carlo, when Spain is so very far away.”
Conrad stayed on his feet, orchestrating the gathering. In fact he had no need to do much except nudge and listen, as they argued in their stage roles. He did not interrupt until after a half-hour of back-and-forth, when he pounced on Estella.
“Repeat that,” he demanded.
Estella lifted a dazed expression from where she had been haranguing Velluti. “I said, ‘I know you no longer love me, you love Tayanna.’”
“And you’ll be prepared to leave a man whose affections have gone elsewhere?” Conrad spun around and pinned Brigida Lorenzani. “Suppose your daughter wants to return to the Amazon lands—?”
“Dear daughter, I welcome you, but not your son.”
Estella Belucci’s eyes narrowed. Conrad recognised her expression as the one that made managements tremble.
“You’re my Queen and my mother,” Estella said. “And if you wish to make an exception to that law, it’s in your power. Because, otherwise, I will certainly take my son and become a wanderer—leaving the Amazon lands forever, and abdicating my place as your successor.”
Conrad caught a broad grin on Brigida’s round face.
Demurely, she said, “Then an exception will be made. Something as insignificant as a boy-child should not interrupt the succession.”
Conrad bent to scribble triumphantly on his copy of the score. “And that resolves Hippolyta, her son, and the Amazon Queen! This is exactly what I hoped for…”
“Semi-seria, then?” JohnJack questioned.
Conrad straightened up from the pages on his desk. “It’s the best I can do, I think. Not everybody can have a happy ending.”
The coloratura bass snorted. “I’ve had the short end of the stick before in Signore Rossini’s semi-seria comedies! Can I take it that Jaguar General Chimalli will be meeting a bad end when he raises the rebellion?”
“If you’re volunteering.”
“Deh! I get to threaten Signore Cortez, I hope, before I perish? And fight him?”
Giambattista Velluti’s eyelids lowered. “The body to be dragged off by the heels, I would suppose, before the Princess and I have a happy duet?”
The bass grumbled, but waved an accepting hand.
Lorenzo Bonfigli coughed. “And what’s il Re doing, while you’re singing, Cortez?”
Sandrine beamed, before Conrad could make any suggestions.
“Being bribed,” she said happily. “We Aztecs have gold enough to fill a ship or two for King Carlo. We can arrange a tribute every five years—”
“Two.” Lorenzo flirted his eyebrows at the mezzo.
“—Three years,” Sandrine corrected herself gravely. “Which will keep Spain content. I assume that Signore Cortez will in any case want to continue with his heroic deeds, and explore all of South America for Spain, in between returning home to his new wife?”
Velluti gave a thoughtful nod. “I’d hardly retire from conquest.”
Il Re Carlo addressed his new Viceroy. Sandrine caught Conrad’s eye, murmuring too quietly to disturb them. “And I’d hardly retire from ruling my Aztecs…”
“Too unfeminine a line to include,” Conrad muttered. He grinned as Sandrine made a face also unsuitable for a Princess.
Another half-hour passed, the characters of L’Altezza azteca wrangling for position. Conrad wrote as fast as he could to keep up—from time to time there was something worth jotting down as a verbatim line.
When it devolved into mere repetition, he stopped them.
“Enough. This is exactly what I need. And now dinner—before we discover if it’s the Aztecs or
the Amazons who practise cannibalism!”
The principal singers left—JohnJack and Estella both embracing him—and Conrad collapsed in his chair, the suddenly-empty chamber a balm to his thoughts. He ran over the notes that he made, conscious that his own stomach grumbled.
This is it.
The realisation made his spirit soar. Or whatever part of the human mind that the common reference of “spirit” means. This is it, I can mine all the material I need from this—
Saturday night, now.
Sunday.
Monday.
A few hours of Tuesday morning, should we be utterly desperate. And then we’re out of time.
Conrad got to his feet, not sure if he was seeking a meal, or il Superbo, or both.
The cuts give us eight minutes for the rondo finale, he mused. Twelve, if we end with a stretta. Most of the music exists in the score—I think—it just needs to be adapted. If Roberto can do it right.
Work at such intensity brought him to the state that, when he should have lain down to snatch sleep for a few hours, he could only sit and watch his fingers shaking.
The right middle finger had an ink-stained callus.
He licked his left index finger and rubbed at the ink, failing to remove most of it.
I am afraid to sleep. Afraid that if I relax this ardent state of mind, I won’t be able to retrieve it when I need it—in four hours time.
Thinking of similar occasions in the past, sleeping four-hour watches in the war, didn’t help. I should take a job as a ditch-digger, Conrad berated himself fiercely. Since it was always easier to go out and dig trenches than think. And at the moment, I would much sooner be shifting mud…
He pushed aside the inner curtain and sprawled down on his camp bed, staring up at the chiselled roof.
It was an odd thought that brought him sufficient peace to sleep.
I’ve seen enough of Roberto; il Superbo is—to give him credit—doing everything he can to assist the conclusion of L’Altezza.
I’ve seen nothing of Nora.
I suppose, at the moment, that’s her way of helping.
Sunday passed too quickly. Conrad swore openly at the stupidity of those singers and musicians who went to Mass, and weren’t there when he needed them for rehearsal. Some of Alvarez’s soldiers muttered and made the sign to avert the evil eye.
“It won’t work,” Paolo stated, noting it happen backstage in the San Carlo. “You’ve got as evil an eye as any I’ve ever seen, cousin!”
Conrad fixed her with it. “Forty-eight hours, cousin. Then we’re done.”
Isaura grinned at him. “I’ll be conducting, and you’ll be curled up in the back of one of the boxes, sleeping like a baby…”
Conrad nearly let out precisely what he thought of impudent sisters, superstitious cast members, and the entire organisation of the Prince’s Men in general and in particular. Fortunately, perhaps, Giambattista called him over, complaining that one of Conrad’s favourite new lines was impossible for anyone human to pronounce, and so he let out some of his temper on Velluti’s impervious hide.
Sunday and Sunday night saw the most part of the new verses written.
The early part of Monday morning was lost to il Superbo protesting that he wouldn’t violate his music in accordance with this new libretto, and another hour when—instead of giving the Conte di Argente a blunt response—Conrad fell asleep at the table listening to him.
The rest of Monday made Conrad think of Sunday as a slack and indolent twenty-four hours. Between the recitateurs taking the singers through the new verses, and perfecting the new stage blocking with Isaura, and delegating someone to inform Michele Angelotti that his volcano was reduced to mere exotic scenery—Princess Tayanna would take refuge from danger (and sing) some way up the step-pyramid… Conrad was not surprised to find himself eating standing up in one of the underground mines, hounding Roberto Capiraso into making his music as breathtaking as possible.
He fell asleep again for an hour in the afternoon. The singers, chorus, musicians, and stagehands all had their scheduled breaks, so that they should not arrive at tomorrow stumbling with exhaustion and sung-out, but Conrad oversaw all of them, sequentially.
When the curtain goes up tomorrow, I’m done; I don’t have to sing, play, or conduct.
One of Alvarez’s men took him down into underground Naples at some later time; it was not clear under whose orders. Conrad didn’t care. He fell fully-dressed onto his camp-bed and slept—too tired to dream—and woke with his pocket watch telling him it was eleven.
“Eleven o’clock Monday night, sir,” the next one of Alvarez’s men said as he arrived.
Conrad’s stomach warmed up from icy, which it had become when he feared that he would find it eleven on the morning of the fourteenth.
Still Monday. Still a few more hours we can use.
He got himself an escort back up to the San Carlo.
Abandoning the musicians and chorus to Paolo, Conrad stayed with the principal singers, easing them through rehearsal after rehearsal of the new last twelve minutes, until the words began to come by instinct rather than a panicked search through memory.
Sandrine, Giambattista Velluti, JohnJack, Lorenzo Bonfigli, the Amazons (albeit with Hippolyta’s son fast asleep in the care of his father, a tenor from the chorus)… all passed in order. Again, they took rest where they could—though there was not much of that, the finale scene requiring all of them on stage.
“Death can be quite relaxing,” JohnJack Spinelli murmured, dozing off in a chair after the fifth time of being dragged away after Chimalli’s rebellion failed.
Conrad looked up automatically, and only slowly realised that he was looking for the figure missing from the San Carlo: the composer’s Returned Dead wife.
He would have punched JohnJack for a joke in bad taste, if the man hadn’t instantly slid into sleep, and Conrad doubted he’d even thought of Leonora when he spoke.
At three in the morning, Conrad called a halt to rehearsals.
“Was it Norma?” Sandrine wondered aloud, sounding thick with sleep. “Started life with singers dazed by rehearsals up to six hours before the curtain… Ah! Signore Rossini’s Cenerentola!”
“Both, I think!” Lorenzo Bonfigli laughed. “Maybe it’s as well we’re not doing this for the reviews in the Giornale.”
The Giornale should be the least of your worries, Conrad thought, but stopped himself from saying out loud. If they’ve got their confidence, no need to undermine it.
The Conte di Argente went as far as to offer Estella Belucci his arm, since the blonde woman swayed where she stood. “If all goes well, we can revive L’Altezza azteca in the future.”
“With a cast that need not be awake at three-thirty in the morning…” JohnJack stifled a massive yawn, which Conrad thought was ironic seeing the bass had had the most rest during the evening.
Of course, back in his underground dry cistern, Conrad found himself unable to fall asleep.
He was too tired to make sense of the fears and imaginings that turned his mind to an Arctic cold, knowing only that they concerned the Prince’s Men.
Ferdinand is right. There’s something we haven’t seen; some danger from the Prince’s Men that we don’t yet suspect—
Something is wrong.
Something more than the possibility that the black opera is better, more polished, more effective than L’Altezza azteca?
Conrad found his eyes closing despite himself.
I’m at the heart of a citadel. Even if it isn’t visible.
More than this underground sanctuary—there are two or three regiments on duty at any time; there are Enrico’s police. And secret police, agents, spies. We have every possible protection. The members of the opera are guarded beneath earth and stone, kept away from danger. Will be guarded, again, when we go up to the Teatro San Carlo in the morning…
Danger still manages to get through. Ask Tullio.
Something’s wrong.
A
nd I don’t know what it is.
Conrad sat down to eat with Luigi Esposito, finding that his early waking on Tuesday coincided with the end of the captain’s shift.
“Anxious for the performance?” Luigi mumbled over the rim of a cup of Turkish coffee.
Anxious, Conrad admitted to himself.
But not as much as when I’m beset with night-terrors.
“I’m concerned about Tullio,” Conrad admitted. “No report of the ship?”
“Did you ever know a count, lord, king, or emperor who could make an appointment on time?” Luigi waved a careless hand, slopping his thick black coffee. “We wait for them, that’s their view.”
“Well, there’s that.”
And won’t his Imperial Majesty be shocked when L’Altezza starts exactly on time? We can’t afford to miss high Earth-tide.
Conrad finished eating, and was escorted back up to the theatre by a squad of Luigi’s men. It was not quite six. The sun was not up, outside. A few gas-lamps glimmered in the dark, on these populous high-class streets. The rest of Naples was a heaped sleeping beast. On the flank of Vesuvius and the eastern hills, only the slightest difference between land and sky showed.
The backstage area of the San Carlo was currently more draughty than stifling. Conrad didn’t bother to take off his greatcoat as the escort ushered him in. He signalled his gratitude to the departing officers, and pushed one of the doors closed behind him; heavy, and felted on the side that faced the stage. The singers had formed loose groups, apparently idly talking or examining the stage flats that represented Princess Tayanna’s serpent-decorated boudoir.
In fact, Conrad abruptly realised, every eye was fixed on il Superbo.
Roberto, Conte di Argente, stood downstage; head thrown back, cropped beard jutting, his voice raised to Giambattista Velluti. “You insolent lackey!”
