Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  “Signor Janvier?” Drusilla d’Isola stood behind them.

  Like all the women of the company, she had taken off the heavy stage make-up, but even under the delicate rice-powder and rouge with which she’d replaced it, she looked like a dead woman. The gorgeous knots and swags of blond lace and point d’esprit that framed her shoulders only served to accentuate her pallor; January sprang to his feet. “You should be lying down, Signorina,” he protested. “Please, sit—or, better still, allow my friend and myself to walk you back to your hotel. That was a heroic performance, but you must rest.”

  “It had to be done.” She shook her head at the offer of a gilt-trimmed chair, glanced over her shoulder at Belaggio, still surrounded by well-wishers and soaking up praise like a camel at a water-hole. “Once they begin to replace you— once people hear another’s name rather than yours . . .” She took a deep breath. “Thank you, so much, for sending for your sister to help me. She is a strong woman, your sister. A—a strega, such as we have in the villages. She was very good to me.” She crossed herself.

  Tired as she was, beaten and struggling to stay on her feet, she seemed very different from the fluttery, sweet child who clung so calculatingly to Belaggio’s arm; who followed Marsan with such adoring eyes. Maybe, thought January, because this was the first he’d seen Drusilla away from either of her lovers, operating on her own.

  “Silvio—Signor Cavallo—tells me that you are . . . are concerned in the matter of the strange events that have taken place here. Are concerned to find out who assaulted Lorenzo, and who may have tried to poison me.”

  “I was concerned about who assaulted Signor Belaggio,” said January. “I am a friend of Signor Davis’s, whom Belaggio has all but accused of the crime. And since I find it unlikely that two violent attackers are pursuing members of the same opera company, I think the same person is responsible for the injury to Madame Scie. Which means that others may be in danger as well.”

  D’Isola paled still more, if that was possible, and crossed herself again. “I know,” she whispered, and reached like a child to pluck at his sleeve. “That’s what I have to show you.”

  She went to the end of the musicians’ table and fetched a candlestick—“At first I thought it was just that bitch Montero, trying to force me aside. . . .”

  “I think it was,” said January. “The day before yesterday she hired me to take her through the Countess’s part. In case, she said, you and Signor Belaggio had a falling-out. It would be hard to prove. . .”

  D’Isola stopped in her tracks, lips hardening and eyes snapping fire. “Did she so?” She stamped her foot. “Cow! Slut!” Her hand clenched the gaudy brass as if she meant to brain her rival. “I would never have . . . oh! As if putting poison in my soup weren’t enough . . .”

  “You mean something else happened?” January saw again how she’d flinched as she opened the desk-drawer on-stage.

  “That scorpion! That . . . but of course, Signor Janvier. During the Letter Duet.”

  She led the way down the short corridor beside the rehearsal-room, to the little prop-room originally reserved for the variously colored glass filters that changed the color of the gas-jets, and now promiscuously crammed with rolled-up scrims, stacked chairs, and the hats, coats, and instrument-cases of the musicians. The Contessa Almaviva’s white-and-gilt writing-desk had been thrust into a corner: “Signor Caldwell insisted, Signore. He— and Lorenzo—ordered me to tell no one. He said it would not do for i padroni to know there had been more trouble.”

  The desk was old and French and rather delicate, cabriole-legged and tricked out in overemphatic gilding that looked gaudy by daylight, but by the glow of candles or gaslight on-stage merely seemed rich. The small scrap of paper on which she’d scribbled still lay atop it, with pen, standish, Cherubino’s military papers, and the pins and combs that had been in one of the ballet dancers’ hair.

  “Elizabetta—Signora Chiavari—says it’s Malòcchio— the Evil Eye—but I never have believed in the Evil Eye.” She gazed up at January in the candle’s single flare, grave as a child. “Neither does Concha, I know. That’s why . . . I can understand that she’d poison me, so she could be the Countess.” She pulled open the drawer. “But I don’t think she’d have done this.”

  Everything in the drawer—papers, quills, a stray hair-ribbon and the lambswool that had escaped from some long-ago dancer’s slipper-toe—was saturated with blood.

  ELEVEN

  Naturally, no one had the slightest idea who had last been near the writing-desk before it was taken on-stage. Even the new stage-hands, Paddy and Liam—each of whom insisted the other had carried the desk—were prepared to swear that the blood hadn’t been in the drawer at that time, until they realized Caldwell wasn’t accusing either of them of putting it there. “I thought I’d smelt somethin’ amiss, y’see,” confessed Liam at last. “But there was sich a helter-skelter an’ all this plunder to be got onto the stage . . .” He took the long-nine cigar from his mouth and gestured around him at the Gothic archways, carven-legged tables, and bundles of banners bearing the arms of Spain and the emblems of the Duke of Arcos that jumbled the backstage together with Roman columns and classical statues brought up for the melodrama Brutus the following night.

  “I understand,” said Caldwell. It was nearly midnight, the tired cold stinks of greasepaint and gas-lamps mingling sourly with the smell of the man’s cigar. The remains of the food had been taken away by the Marsan and Trulove servants; the voices of those few who remained in the theater—January, Hannibal, Caldwell, Tiberio and his two helpers, Belaggio—echoed eerily in the cavernous night of the ceiling. Wrapped in Comte Almaviva’s purple velvet cloak, La d’Isola sat on a well-head belonging to the town of Portici, Cavallo and Ponte hovering behind her like a pair of watchful brothers. “Perhaps,” said Caldwell helpfully, “if we reconstructed where the desk was, we might be able to determine who came near it. . . .”

  As if, thought January, looking around him at the maze of flats, ropes, shadows, and segments of papier-mâché boiserie, anyone couldn’t have slipped through unseen to dump . . . to dump what? The blood had been fresh. Chicken, cat, rat . . . ?

  He took up again the brass candelabrum that d’Isola had earlier carried—it would reappear Friday night in the Duke of Arcos’s palace hall and probably adorn Caesar’s palace in between—re-lit three of its guttered tapers from the nearest gas-jet, and carried it down the steps and so out to the alley. Cloud had moved in to blot the stars, warming the air but filling it with the thick promise of rain. In the passway between the stable-yard wall and the theater, he found a cheap metal rattrap of the cage type, still containing three rats—the prop-vault stank of them—and a little dish of ground-nuts. All three rats had had their throats cut. A second dish, of half-spilled sugar-water that reeked of laudanum, explained why the rodents hadn’t put up much of a fight.

  A few minutes’ more search in the garbage of the passway yielded the tightly-corked gourd that had held the blood.

  January couldn’t be positive—cage and gourd were set to the left of the door, farther from the alley end of the passway—but he didn’t think he’d seen them at seven, when he’d come this way to force the lock.

  But his mind had been full of fear for d’Isola then, and the passway already dark.

  In any case, thought January, cage, gourd, laudanum, were cheap. They could have been purchased easily and anonymously in the marketplace. He’d already guessed that the perpetrator was connected with the theater. Anyone could have slipped into the prop-vault, or up to the repair-shops in the attic, or to any of a dozen other nooks and corners in that crowded building, to kill and drain the rats during the dinner-hour between rehearsal and the performance. Hell, thought January, you could have butchered a cow in the cluttered back corners of the prop-vault, hidden the remains for a week, and no one would be the wiser. The confusion resulting from d’Isola’s poisoning would have made that doubly simple.

  Voices in the
alley. The bang of the stage door. Cavallo’s: “Drusilla, cara mia, truly the place for you is at the hotel, in bed. After all you’ve been through . . .”

  “Oh, Silvio, what evil is going on here! Signor Janvier told me he believes this same person who attacked Lorenzo was also the one who tried to kill poor Signora Scie. And he will try again, maybe to kill you, or me, or . . .”

  “What befell Belaggio in the alley has nothing to do with you, little bird. How could it? It was that sow Montero . . . ”

  “But why would she have put the blood in the drawer if she intended to sing the Countess herself? Or if she put the blood, why would she have poisoned me? Silvio, no, it is a plot, an evil plot! You know this Incantobelli. Could he be so wicked? So mad?”

  “Signor Janvier asked that also.” Young Ponte’s slow, countryman’s voice. “Honor demands vengeance, yes, but not vengeance on harmless women. This Signor Davis . . .” Their voices faded as they moved toward the street and were lost in the general clamor of Carnival. A few moments later the door banged again. Caldwell’s velvety baritone echoed against the brick of the alley walls— “. . . need hardly tell you that none of this is to be spoken of to anyone. The last thing this theater needs is a rumor that a madman is out to do murder during a performance.” Keys jangled. A bolt scraped.

  “As for myself, I walk abroad o’nights,” quoted Hannibal in the gloating accents of Kean playing the Jew of Malta, “and kill sick people groaning under walls: / Sometimes I go about and poison wells. . . .”

  “People believe it, my friend,” admonished Caldwell grimly. “People believe it.” Footfalls squished, diminuendo. Then the clop of hooves and the American’s voice dimly telling the driver of a fiacre where to take him. I’m the last one here. January reflected uneasily on the empty darkness of Rue des Ursulines, and his landlady’s voice: He had a knife.

  More footfalls, then a cough.

  “O blood, Iago, blood.” Hannibal leaned a shoulder against the corner of the tiny passway in which January crouched. “Find anything of interest?”

  “How now? A rat,” returned January gravely. “Dead for a ducat, too.” Edging carefully between the stable wall and that of the theater—the space was barely as wide as his shoulders—he carried cage, rats, and blood-stinking gourd up to the door of the secret back-stair and set them in the little three-by-four space just inside, to keep them safe for the remainder of the night. “I take it it’s too late for Shaw to be here still.”

  “It’s too late for God to be here.” The fiddler coughed again, and fished a handkerchief from his pocket to hold to his lips—January saw a fleck of blood in the wavery gleam of his candles. “I’ll see you home.”

  January blew out the tapers and left the holder there, too, carefully closing the door. “You don’t have to.” By the rasp of his breathing Hannibal wasn’t well enough to see himself home.

  “I have money.” They felt their way down the passway and along the alley in the dark. “All we have to do is get you to your doorstep—I doubt the invisible Devil’s going to brave another meeting with Madame Bontemps. I wouldn’t.”

  But the driver of the fiacre they hailed from the theater’s front steps bluntly refused to drive January anywhere. “I could get in trouble, me,” said the man. Under the slouched brim of his hat his eyes glinted in the glare of the gaslights. “Me, I don’t care who I drive, but there’s a law in this town, eh? They don’t want me to drive no colored, I won’t drive no colored.”

  “I’m only seeing my friend home,” began January, one arm around Hannibal’s shoulders, and the driver shook his head.

  “Then I see your friend home, me.”

  “Idiotes!” High heels tapping sharply on the boards of the sidewalk, Consuela Montero strode over to them from the City Hotel across the street. Plumes and bows nodded in her black hair as she pulled the velvet ruffles of her cloak about her. “Imbeciles, with your silly pride . . . Get on the box.” She gestured January imperiously to the seat beside the driver, the traditional place for servants to ride.

  “Yes, m’am.” January bowed with every appearance of deep respect. “I was just wanting to get Michie Hannibal—”

  “Señor Hannibal is sober, at least enough to see to himself,” retorted Madame Montero as the driver flipped open the carriage door with his long whip. As January crossed behind the hack and around to the driver’s perch, Hannibal handed the soprano up the step: “Es verdad, the pride of men! What does your man think, that this driver has never seen one who had to be helped home by a footman? Rue des Ursulines. Then you will take my friend here back to Perdidio Street.”

  “Bounteous madam,” quoted Hannibal, removing his shabby hat, “whatever shall become of Michael Cassio / He’s never anything but your true servant.”

  As the fiacre passed before the lights of the City Hotel, January saw Montero glance sidelong at Hannibal, amused speculation in her dark eyes. “And is this the same Michael Cassio of the play, that has but a poor and unhappy brain for drinking?”

  “Drunk?” protested Hannibal floridly. “And speak parrot? And squabble? Swagger? Swear? And discourse fustian with one’s own shadow?”

  “Basta! I think maybe if, as I hear, there is evil about . . .” She switched to Italian, in case the driver spoke Spanish as well as French. “I, as well as some others I might name of this company, might find myself in need of a true servant or two.”

  “And was there,” asked Rose the following morning when January stopped by the backstage of the Théâtre d’Orleans with coffee and callas, “an invisible devil with a knife concealed somewhere in the Rue des Ursulines awaiting your arrival?”

  “There was someone.” January poured her out some coffee from the stoppered gourd and perched on the footslopes of Mount Vesuvius. This Vesuvius was smaller than the American version—an American would have said that was only to be expected—and instead of a long trackway where red and gold silk would be rippled in counterfeit for lava, it had a sort of metal-lined ditch. But like its American counterpart, it was studded with caldera, into which basins of wet clay or sand could be set, to control the flares of its eruption. Leather hosepipes trailed across the backstage floor and vanished among the flats, to be hooked to the gas-jets in the proscenium when it came time for poor mute Fenella to leap off the balcony into the blazing lava.

  January took a bite of the sticky, egg-sized rice-ball he held, getting powdered sugar all over his trousers, jacket-sleeves, and the front of his yellow calico shirt. Rose was having the same problem, with the result that Vesuvius looked as if it had experienced a light fall of unseasonable snow.

  “As I was getting off the box, I saw someone step out of a passway between two houses and stand for a moment on the banquette. He was too far off for me to be sure— but I think he was tall. The streetlamp over the intersection was out and I didn’t have more than a moment to look before Madame Montero ordered me to go inside and tell a fictitious maid that she wouldn’t be coming in after all. If I hadn’t ridden the fiacre as her servant,” he added quietly, “I would have walked past that passway, coming home on foot.”

  Rose patted the fine white dust from her hands as she slipped down from her own seat on the mountain’s flank. “Have you any idea why?” she asked, eschewing exclamations of horror or concern—she’d have been useless as the heroine of a melodrama, January reflected, amused. “Why you? Why not the other musicians?” Over her plain blue frock she wore a smock of worn pink calico, which, being Rose, she’d disdained to match with a pink tignon: the headscarves she wore were almost invariably white, suiting well her plain, neat dresses. The smock’s pockets bulged with pens, small notebooks, bits of chalk, and pestles, giving her the air of an apothecary.

  January followed her into the napkin-sized prop-room. Space had been cleared on a little table for half a dozen boxes labeled with the names of various importers in New Orleans who brought in chemicals from New York, London, and Hamburg for use in sugar refining, paint manufacture, and the apoth
ecary trade. Nitrate of Strontia, said the label on one large jar of needle-like white crystals. Another jar contained sulfur, and a small cask set carefully to one side was simply labeled Gunpowder. A wicker-wrapped carboy, by its smell, held alum.

  Various sieves, of fine hair or bolting-cloth, which January recognized as Rose’s own property rather than that of the theater, were stacked neatly on a rear corner of the table—a row of wide-mouthed porcelain jars offered powders, which she proceeded to measure and mix with a small bone knife on a sheet of white paper. More paper, rolled into cylinders and gummed, lay ready to hand.

  “I have to get as much of this done in advance as possible,” explained Rose. “One can’t mix the chlorate of potassa or the gunpowder in until the very last moment, of course, and even with the ballet, there isn’t long between acts. Did Madame Montero say how she happened to be in front of the City Hotel at midnight?”

  “I did not have the opportunity to ask. But she’s staying at the Hotel, and midnight is not so very late, so it could have been chance. I trust,” added January grimly, “that this room is kept firmly locked when you’re absent.” As a surgeon, he had been called once to the scene of a theater fire. Paper flowers, masses of curtains, jumbles of stored props and flats—too few doors and too many people all crammed together on benches and chairs . . .

  The minute he’d heard La Muette was going to be performed at the American Theater, he’d made sure he knew the quickest route from the orchestra pit to the nearest window.

  “Well, I don’t think there’s enough of anything here to blow up the theater,” said Rose reasonably as she gently spooned gunpowder into a marble mortar and began— carefully—to grind it. Above her head, rain drummed gently on the gray window-glass. “But yes, Mr. Davis has given me the key and has moved out all the other props into the main backstage. And the whole of the mountain’s going to be wet down with jugs of water just before the curtain goes up on Act Three. With luck it won’t dry out before the eruption. And you haven’t answered my first question.”