by Mary Gentle
He cut himself off before he could complete it, aloud:
—Never considered offering me a place, with her, in the Prince’s Men.
Conrad was used to assuming that when he gave his word, he would keep it. That this was a part of his character. Now…
He released the balcony rail and shoved his hands through his hair, aching for some physical outlet for his pain and confusion.
Would I have abandoned his Majesty the King of the Two Sicilies if she offered me a place with her?
I should at least be able to answer that question one way or the other!
Roberto, sounding as if he had overcome his moment of breakdown, said, “You—even I—were not her first concern.”
Conrad stepped back out of the early sun, into the cool of the room. He heard himself sound strained.
“You and I are the only two men here who could know that truth. Because only you and I have heard her seize the attention of fifteen hundred people with a single passionate note.”
Roberto Capiraso gave a rueful nod.
The King handed off another list of instructions to a page, and walked over.
“Inform me. Aside from the book and music, what do you know of the black opera? About the function of this Il Reconquista?”
Roberto frowned. “I know only as much as was necessary for the structure of the opera. You could tell as much from studying the score, sire. The main climaxes are the stretta at the end of Act Two, and the soprano’s rondo finale at the end of Act Four. I assume the latter is what brings about the ‘sacrifice,’ as Nora calls it.”
“And how long have you known that the ‘sacrifice’ would be a Plinean eruption of Vesuvius?”
Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily couched the question almost primly in scientific terms. Conrad saw it hit home.
“The finale ultimo is Leonora, alone,” the Count said. “Because no other singer could do what she does. I assume that’s that part intended to ‘wake the God of this world.’ I don’t believe Leonora told any but her closest inner circle what that will involve. I… Truthfully, I never asked. I neither know nor care about il Principe’s theology!”
Conrad saw Ferdinand give the composer his bland, weighing glance, that concealed everything the intelligent monarch might be thinking.
Roberto Capiraso added, “I knew of the Prince’s Men only through my brother Ugo. Ugo was sufficiently older than I that he seemed more of an uncle or father to me, rather than a brother and equal. He died overseas, some years ago. Until recently, I thought he did no more than fund the Prince’s Men.”
“I was told Leonora Capiraso came back by way of a Sung Mass,” Ferdinand said. “Which you organised.”
“Which I asked the Prince’s Men to organise,” Roberto corrected, his tone still automatically respectful. “As far as I could tell, sir, it was an ordinary liturgical Mass, done by a common parish priest. Il Principe added their own elements into the ceremony, but to tell the truth, I was in no state to pay attention to them.”
The Count was lost to memory, his stare unfocussed.
“Leonora died. There was nothing the Church, or the Prince’s Men, or any man, could have asked in return for bringing her back that I would not have given.”
“But presumably your wife believes in the Prince of this World?”
“She may.” Roberto Capiraso’s tone took on sardonic amusement. “Sire, the antique Aegyptians worshipped cats and crocodiles. The black man of Africa has a thousand gods. The heretic Protestants have One, and say we have Three. Perhaps a Mass sung to any of them would produce a miracle?”
The King’s diplomatic expression momentarily failed. He winced.
In lieu of challenging the theology, he ushered the Count back towards his desk. Conrad followed, taking his chair.
“She came back,” Conrad said, aloud, and looked at Roberto. “And decided on doing this. Why this? Just because it involves singing?”
“She had been intrigued by il Principe before she died. She grew more so, afterwards. Il Reconquista is written for a voice not hampered by mortal restrictions. Breath control, sustained notes, pitch, reach, messa di voce… The difficulty is in restraining her to something the human ear can believe! Leonora will sing Queen Isabella because only one of the Returned Dead can handle its technical demands.”
Roberto hesitated, and added, less certainly, “It may be that only someone who has passed beyond death, and returned, can sustain an emotional intensity that surpasses the living.”
“Che cazzo!” Ferdinand seemed to bite back frustration and amazement. “Then it appears our only hope is the impossible—to find someone who can out-sing Leonora Capiraso! We had better hope we can find the Prince’s opera singers, to arrest them.”
Roberto Capiraso inclined his head gracefully. For all his dishevelled clothing and bruises, Conrad thought, he still held the poise drilled into Neapolitan nobility.
“You must consider my advice tainted, of course, but, yes—the Prince’s opera cannot be countered. No human voice can out-sing Leonora. To counter the Prince’s Men, you must find them, and stop them.”
The almost imperceptible hesitation let Conrad know that the Count could not bring himself to say stop her.
Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily’s chin lifted. He had the expression of a man who accepts a challenge without hesitation.
He signalled to the army officers and police at the far end of the chamber, and handed one man the Conte di Argente’s list of names.
“Arrest these for questioning. Include the servants, and anyone else in the houses; every man, woman, and child. Argente, what’s this, here, at the end?”
“Our rehearsal rooms in Naples.” Roberto took the paper back, struggling in the cuffs to write an address more clearly. “It’s a common house in the Via Anticaglia, that has access through the cellar to an isolated part of underground Naples. One of il Principe, an antiquarian, suspects it to be part of that theatre which Nero anciently had built in Napoli for his ‘performances.’”
“Nero!” Conrad couldn’t help snarling the obvious question. “And you didn’t tell us this before?”
“It was abandoned at least ten days ago, after the final dress rehearsal. There may be some evidence left.” Roberto’s neck showed pink. “I’m afraid that rehearsal space was my fault—I suggested that, if we were overheard, you’d assume it came from any other of your mine-chambers.”
Conrad muttered. “We probably did! Minchia! What a mess!”
“A mess we will mend by finding the black opera.” King Ferdinand gave out comprehensive orders. A quarter-hour of furious activity succeeded. Aides, officers, and courtiers rushed into and out of the room—plainly now a warroom—and the pace of the ongoing search for the black opera stepped up to something frantic.
Ferdinand stood, arms folded, as his men extended the trestle tables to have maps of all Naples set out, and the countryside around the city. Police officers pinned scraps of paper to each district, noting when each had been thoroughly sifted; suspicious doors hammered on, and buildings entered.
The search grew in intensity.
“Sir!” Enrico Mantenucci shouldered in through the crowd of officers, jacket barely buttoned, holding up a bundle of papers. “Here’s the first list of arrests. We got pitifully few of ’em—either they were planning to go today, or they’ve been warned.”
Nora will have warned them, Conrad thought miserably. Because I couldn’t stop her from leaving the Argente mansion.
He caught sight of Roberto’s expression, where the Count sat. His chair now had a pair of Alvarez’s troopers behind it, too brutish-looking for their blue and burgundy uniforms.
He’s thinking the same of himself, Conrad realised.
“And Corazza?” the King demanded.
“The Archbishop’s Palace is deserted.” Mantenucci shrugged, dumping the papers on the King’s desk. “But it’s plain that they stripped the place bare last night, or early today. Even with inside information, my men failed to f
ind any trace of preparations for the opera in any of the other mansions named.”
Ferdinand sat down in his gilded chair. “Undoubtedly it will be clear who else is a member of the Prince’s Men in Naples, this afternoon, when certain boxes at the San Carlo remain deserted—but that’s too late to be useful.”
The police Commendatore greeted that with a wry smile.
“Enrico, I want the Guiscardo to go out on a patrol—”
Conrad found himself confronted by the King.
“—Corrado, can you think of anywhere else they might sing? On board a ship as they were at Tambora, or a palazzo, or—what?”
“Some place that could be fortified, so they couldn’t be interrupted?” Conrad picked a name from the air. “Castel dell’Ovo?”
Ferdinand greeted the suggestion with a snort. “Don’t think I haven’t had the garrison there checked!”
Conrad watched as information came in to the men at the trestle tables. Name by name, opera houses were crossed off the map.
“We’ve had the teatros under guard for weeks,” Colonel Fabrizio Alvarez muttered, joining the group of aides around the King’s desk, and bringing his own map.
The smaller theatres were slashed out with the stroke of a pen. Halls, palazzos, churches, Bohemian lodgings…
Word came back from Pozzuoli, Ischia, Sorrento, the Amalfi coast—the search had evidently begun early in the day, Conrad saw. He guessed the army had fast relays of horses set up; perhaps heliographs, too.
Troops in the streets, men in watch-towers, paid informers skulking at the back of the market district—
“Nothing!” a disgruntled Enrico Mantenucci summed up.
“Gentlemen,” Ferdinand said briskly, “they can hardly have vanished off the face of the Earth!”
“Perhaps they’re not here, sire.”
“Maybe they’re in the other Sicily—”
“—Or at sea—”
“They’re close to that.” Ferdinand flung out an arm, pointing towards the window and Mount Vesuvius beyond. “Gentlemen, I thought you commanded enough men to assure me that nothing—no one—could be hidden here!”
A frantic debate broke out.
Somewhere they can’t be seen, Conrad thought.
“Would they have the nerve to stay underground?” he found himself saying aloud.
Enrico Mantenucci gave a snort at the idea. “It would be like them! But no, my men have searched underground Naples backwards and forwards.”
The Colonel of the King’s Rifles reached to rummage among the maps on the King’s desk, flattening down the various sheaves of paper. Fabrizio Alvarez, seen close to, was a thin, dark man, an inch or two taller than Conrad himself, with a drooping moustache that disguised a sensitive mouth for a soldier.
Leaning over the desk, Alvarez ran a finger over a map; west, along the coast road from Naples to the Phlegraean Peninsula. “Think I’ve got something, sire.”
The faint spoor of a memory appeared in Conrad’s mind.
“You have underground Naples guarded, sir.” Alvarez acknowledged Mantenucci. “But I can think of one place, underground and above ground. None of the bell-tower spies could see inside. The Grotto of Posillipo.”
Conrad’s skin involuntarily shivered between his shoulder-blades.
I’m remembering stone-cold chill, he realised.
He had been four or five. It was before Isaura was born, and Conrad was glad of that later. Alfredo urgently had to leave Naples and the docks were watched…
Rock increasingly rose up either side of the coast road, like walls. “Mined by the ancient Romans,” Alfredo told a fascinated small boy. “They didn’t care to have their direct route from Naples to Pozzuoli interrupted by hills, and when they didn’t care for something, they altered it.”
The deep cutting became a tall tunnel, high as a cathedral before the roof-arches curved together. But so narrow! A slot, barely room for two carts to pass each other, with the weight of the hills pressing down. The constriction felt so overpowering that the child Conrad embarrassed himself, crying with fear.
Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily frowned down at the map. “Surely someone would have seen something.”
“We checked the road this side. We can’t be everywhere, sire.” Enrico Mantenucci gave a tired shrug. It was obvious the small, brisk man had been not so much off-duty, as on unofficial duty and without sleep.
“Pusilleco—” Enrico used the Neapolitan name for Posillipo. “—It’s not on the road to anywhere important. If they wanted to go to Pozzuoli, say, they’d take a boat from the harbour here. If they wanted to travel north up-country, they’d have taken the direct route out of Naples. Besides, we’d have seen them go in.”
“Not if they planned ahead,” Conrad suggested. “It’s—possible—to spend the night there. A number of people, carriages, baggage-carts, could all move into place there and not be seen.”
Roberto, in the corner of his vision, didn’t react suspiciously; he seemed sunk in misery.
Ferdinand’s expression sharpened. “Fabrizio, send a squad of your cavalry along to scout; that’ll be quickest… There’s nowhere else that we aren’t searching, is there, gentlemen?”
The King brushed off the confirmations from Mantenucci’s officers as if they were expected. Alvarez sent one off of his aides-de-camp, presumably to brief a cavalry squad. Ferdinand sat on the corner of his desk, much more the desperate man than the king.
“If they are hiding there, they surely can’t be planning to sing there?”
“I’ve been hearing singing underground for weeks now!” Conrad rebelliously muttered.
Enrico Mantenucci snorted. “Well, they might sing. It’s as high as a Gothic church inside. They might not be close to Vesuvius—but they’re on the Burning Fields.”
“I can hardly believe the black opera will work any miracle in a tunnel!” Ferdinand sounded affronted.
“The tunnel is a defensible site, sir,” Fabrizio Alvarez put in. “If they blocked off the road at both ends.”
Conrad leaned back in his chair while Ferdinand and Alvarez exchanged opinions on how susceptible a fortified Grotto di Posillipo might be to men with muskets and grenades.
“Bastards will have a few rifled weapons with them,” Mantenucci grunted. “Every gentleman hunts…”
Servants brought round olives and bread, and a fine wine.
Conrad felt the painful bruises on his ribs, now. He found he could feel little else.
He ate nothing. He sat watching the light on the glistening fruit, unable to make a connection between hunger and satisfying his appetite.
Shock had been hovering since he turned and saw Nora with his Manton duelling pistol.
It descended now.
Nora… where are you? What are you doing?
He mindlessly picked up a glass of wine, not tasting it as he drank it down in one go.
Sleep came on him so strongly and suddenly that he couldn’t speak, or stand up, or protest to himself that he was in the private apartments of a monarch.
Men’s voices slid away into a buzz.
Slumped in the chair, he sank into the inexorable gravity of sleep, desperate not to dream.
Nora… Have I really seen you for the last time?
Is my last memory to be your face staring at me over the sights of my own gun?
A hand closed over his shoulder, firmly shaking him.
He opened his eyes to a different light.
A quick glance at the clocks told Conrad it was now closer to nine in the morning than eight.
Only five-and-twenty minutes asleep? It feels like a year!
Enrico Mantenucci patted him again on the shoulder, with a wry smile. “Fabrizio’s patrol sent word back. No Prince’s Men at Pusilleco, but people had obviously been there. Judging by the remains of food, they stayed there overnight.”
The police Commendatore frowned.
“I don’t trust soldiers to have questioned witnesses properly, but accordi
ng to what their lieutenant says, there weren’t any baggage carts, just coaches. One woman thought she saw a cello case, of all things… So I suspect singers and musicians went that way, but as for stage scenery and props—could the black opera be a concert performance?”
“If they want to be as powerful as something staged at the San Carlo, with an audience of over three thousand? No.”
The sleep made Conrad freshly alert, but he felt the antipathy to direct light that was his early warning of hemicrania. He turned his back on the windows, to avoid triggering it, and gave Enrico a nod as the man was summoned back to Ferdinand’s side.
Beside him, Roberto Capiraso spoke in a hard voice. “Congratulations.”
Conrad poured out more wine for himself, and, after hesitation, for the other man. “In your place, I wouldn’t know what to want, either.”
“Throw her into jail, her and all her radicalist friends!”
Conrad realised that Roberto Capiraso had opened the score of Il Reconquista d’amore on the King’s desk, and was using his steel pen to make alterations.
He couldn’t help a prod. “Revising that finale ultimo?”
“Not at all.”
The Count sounded as much il Superbo as if he were in a drawing-room, not in handcuffs. You would have to know him well to sense his inner frantic turmoil. Conrad realised that he did.
“It occurred to me,” Roberto said, eyes still fixed on the paper. “I had the better part of two years to write this. I wrote several careful drawing-room pieces during that period, to see how various arias would sound in public… A few months ago, when I was told I would also be composing the counter-opera, I thought I hardly needed to sabotage anything. What kind of an opera can any man write in six or ten weeks?”
Conrad almost choked on outrage. “Donizetti! Pacini! Mercadante! Meyerbeer! Signore Rossini’s comedies! Even the new men, Signore Verdi and Herr Wagner!”
Roberto Capiraso sat back in his chair, ignoring the two troopers behind him. Clearly, he distracted himself from thinking of what was going on. But, clearly, he also meant what he said.
“I wasn’t then so familiar with the inner workings of opera. Here, creating L’Altezza azteca… It was exhilarating. That I might bring music forth at such speed, and of such quality. It had to be inferior to the black opera, but I could add that afterwards—subtle mistakes in structure and ornamentation at key points, and stretching voice control to destruction. The rest of L’Altezza is—is good. And then… I realised that, although I thought Il Reconquista finished—it could be so much better.”
