Rondo Allegro

by Sherwood Smith

  Villeneuve lifted the back of his hand to Ponte San Bernardo and its duke, a quick, violent gesture that made her jump. “I have spent most of this night questioning this company of yours. It seems you have forgotten to mention your marriage to an English sea captain.”

  Anna sat upright. “How did you—” She let out her breath in a sharp sigh. “It is true. But I never think of him. I have not seen him for more than five years.”

  “How do you communicate with him?”

  “I don’t. Oh, I wrote before I left Naples, but I never received an answer.”

  “Naples?” Villeneuve repeated. “Five or six years ago . . . that would be when Nelson was marauding all over southern Italy. You are married to one of Nelson’s captains?”

  “It was an arranged marriage,” she protested. “We saw one another exactly twice, and never again.”

  “Twice, and never again,” he repeated, “and yet you stayed faithful, honoring your vows? I must request you do me the honor of not assuming I am stupid.”

  “Honoring my vows,” Anna repeated, flushing in anger. “You can only have got that from Jean-Baptiste Marsac, who made me a dishonorable offer. In refusing, I said those very words. It must be spite. I cannot imagine why he would even tell you!”

  Villeneuve let out his breath in a sharp, hissing sigh. “Your maid refused to speak to us, and we have her locked up elsewhere for further questioning, if need demands. Three others of your company all attested to the fact that you are married to an English sea captain. They also said,” and he touched his fingers on each point. “You came to the company in Paris, where you consorted with soldiers. Then you traveled with the company to the north coast, the west coast. The south coast. And all over Spain, the kingdom of our allies. For an innocent singer, you seem to have happened most extraordinarily upon all the sites about which Nelson and his friends in London would desire most to gain firsthand reports.”

  “But I never—”

  Another finger. “I am not finished! In each of these places, you and this maid of yours sought newspapers. It was not in French that you spoke to one another. Sometimes English, sometimes Italian. The maid was seen on the north coast questioning mariners, and again on France’s coast. They said you walked out to inspect the garrisons of every Spanish city you visited.”

  “I did not.” Anna spread her hands in appeal. “I visited cathedrals, and castles, and marketplaces. Why would I go to a garrison?”

  “To inspect the strength of our allies,” he retorted. “And yesterday you and your maid, upon arrival, walked directly to the wharf to spy on our fleet. Do not deny it—you were seen by my own men!”

  “I walked down to breathe the fresh air,” Anna began.

  Villeneuve raised his hand to stop her. With his other, he pinched his fingers between his brows. “In a very few hours, I must inspect the fleet. That cannot wait. We will question you later, as vigorously as is necessary. I am very sorry to have to say it. Making war upon women turns my stomach; it is perhaps as well that Minister Fouché is not here, for he would, from all accounts, enjoy nothing better. But I will do my best,” he promised heavily as he rose to his feet. “Because it is my duty, and the devil knows we are hard put enough as it is. As you no doubt saw on your tour along the wharf. Bon soir, Madame Sea-Captain.”

  The last word was spoken with heavy irony, and the door shut behind him, leaving her in the darkness. Anna stared in the direction of his empty chair, for a time too sick and too numb to react.

  Exhaustion caused her to doze fitfully until the crick in the angle of her neck, and her dry mouth, woke her. Pale light, the color of dirty milk, emanated from two tiny windows set up high on either side of the cell’s door. Through them light filtered, enough to reveal dirty stone. In the corner was a bucket, not even decently covered. Against the far wall, unseen until now, was a narrow cot covered with what looked like rotten sailcloth. Anna shuddered, her gaze wandering past to the three-legged stool at the cot’s foot, on which sat a cannikin. She got up and looked into it. She smelled water.

  She tasted it cautiously. It was stale, but no more than one got in most inns, and tasted slightly metallic from sitting in the can, but she knew good well water when she met with it.

  Anna drank half, forcing herself to ration it. Who knew when she might get any more.

  She returned to the bench, her arms wrapped around herself tightly. Tears burned, but she would not let them fall. She had done nothing wrong. She had to find a way to convince the admiral, and letting herself weep and wail would not help her to think.

  But her mind revolved in circles, impelled by questions she could not answer. Gradually she became aware of occasional puffs of air through the tiny grated windows, and she closed her eyes, trying to imagine the endless sky as seen the day before, the seabirds diving and cawing, the restless green waters.

  Now the dancers will be warming their limbs, she thought, and she got to her feet. First stealthily, jerkily, she began the well-known patterns, and soon found a small measure of comfort in the movements. She did not have to think. She stretched and arched and danced, aware of the kinks and tweaks smoothing away.

  At the end she stood in the middle of the room, her throat aching. Now she would have been warming her voice with scales. She found middle C, and discovered it was comforting to sing her scales softly, almost under her breath. When she had finished, her throat was ready, and her blood pulsed through her veins. Sorrow flooded her heart, overflowing into song.

  Berenise’s “Da Torbida Procella” poured forth as she sang down mighty Pharaoh.

  She sang aria after aria, songs of sacrifice, loss, and passion.

  She had finished Gluck’s “Je t’implore” from Iphigenie en Tauride and was beginning Purcell’s anguished “When I am Laid in Earth” from Dido and Aenas when once again she heard the rhythmic tramp of feet.

  She flung herself back on the bench, her breath held in terror. Again, the patrol halted directly outside her door. It was unlocked, and to her amazement, the soldiers were not in the blue of France, but white and gold, the livery of one of the dons.

  “Senora,” spoke a tall officer with a ferocious mustachio. “By the orders of Admiral Federico Carlos Gravina y Nápoli, you are to be conducted to the Castillo de Santa Catalina.”

  And so it was the fortress after all.

  Blinking back tears, Anna pulled on her mantilla and stepped out, and stared not over the ocean, as she had imagined, but down into a plaza alive with seamen and officers and guards. Most of them were motionless, faces upturned as they gazed at her. She looked away, glad of the relative shrouding of the mantilla as she followed two tall guards, one bony, one stout, their necks brown from the sun below the polished edges of their helmets.

  When they reached the end of the gallery and turned through a gate, she glanced up in trepidation at the fortress with its jutting points overlooking the bay. The massive honey-colored stone building shouldered above her menacingly.

  The patrol escorted her up a narrow switchback that gradually widened, until they passed through iron-reinforced gates, under ugly cannon jutting between the castellations.

  They crossed a vast parade ground as the smell of stables wafted on the cool breeze, and into the stone building. Anna clasped her hands tightly, terrified. But the patrol did not march her down into a noisome dungeon. Once again they climbed tiled stairs.

  Up and up, until at last they stopped outside a thick double door beautifully carved with biblical scenes. The guards in white and gold at either side stood stiffly, as one of her guards opened the door.

  The mustached officer lifted his gloved hand to indicate she must go inside. Anna’s knees trembled as she stepped tentatively in a beautiful room with whitewashed walls, a brilliant rug covering the floor, and fine carved chairs and benches arranged around a table with curved legs ending in lion’s feet. An enormous epergne of silver sat upon it, framed by solid silver candelabra. An intricately wrought crucifix hung on one wall,
and on the others gold-framed paintings of men in stiff, jewel-encrusted armor and sashes, either mounted on rearing horses, or standing in what appeared to be marble rooms, surrounded by the accoutrements of war.

  At the other end of the room a second, even finer table had been set, behind which sat a swarthy, handsome man wearing a tightly fitted black coat with crimson lapels embroidered in gold, and a crimson sash. His epaulettes looked to be made of real gold. Over the front of his splendid coat extended a green and white silk sash, and on his breast a great medal whose diamonds reflected light from the open east windows. The reflections caught the streaming sunlight and threw rainbow splashes against the white walls.

  The young officer clicked his heels and announced in a hieratic voice, “His Excellency, Don Federico Carlos Gravina y Nápoli, Admiral of the Spanish Fleet. Senora Duncannon.”

  “Thank you, Captain. You may withdraw,” the admiral said in the lisping Spanish of the don.

  When the door had shut, a pair of narrow dark eyes searched Anna’s face, then the admiral spoke in Neapolitan. “I understand that we are countrymen?”

  Anna was so startled to hear Neapolitan she gazed witlessly for a heartbeat or two. Belatedly she remembered her curtsey, and performed it with grace. When she rose, she thought she detected a slight easing, almost a smile in the hard face before her.

  “Your Excellency,” Anna said. “I am not a spy. I do not know how this comes about.”

  “It appears to originate in the surprising fact that a young Neapolitan lady, living in France, appears to have somehow annexed an English sea captain as a husband. Before we proceed to recent events, you might tell me how this came about?”

  Anna bit her lip, and decided that half-truths were worse than useless. And she would scorn to lie. “Well, the origins begin in political affairs in Naples. Your Excellency is surely familiar with those?”

  “I left Naples as a lad of twelve, but consider me tolerably well informed.”

  “I did not quite understand it at the time, but rebels having taken Naples and proclaimed a republic, my father’s man knew many of the ringleaders . . .”

  Out it all came, including Anna’s own lack of awareness of what her father had traded in order to gain Anna a place, exactly as Parrette had later related.

  She finished, “. . . and so my father was not a spy. But Beppe had heard this information through his friends among the lazarones, and my father only sought to see me established, since there was no one else. My mother being dead.”

  Admiral Gravina said suavely, “I am sorry to hear that. God rest her soul.”

  Uncertainly, Anna went on. “There is little more to tell. I was married to Captain Duncannon, who I subsequently saw exactly once, after a fete, and then never again. The English fleet sailed away, and when Sir William and Lady Hamilton departed Naples, I was left to my own devices. Maestro Paisiello—”

  “A great man, a very great man,” the admiral interrupted, the first real expression she had seen from him. “I myself have traveled great distances to hear his work.”

  “Yes, he is! He gave me an introduction to a lady in Paris, a great patron of female musicians and singers. When Madame de Pipelet remarried and quit Paris, I was hired into Company Dupree, and I have been with them ever since. That is the truth.”

  “And yet you do not explain your maid questioning mariners on the north coast, and so forth? Or did your company all tell lies?”

  “There were no lies. But misunderstandings, yes.” And Anna told the admiral about Michel Duflot, ending with, “So you see, with revolutionary feelings being so against the English, we thought it best never to mention Michel. But we always hoped to find word of his ship, at least.”

  The admiral moved a diamond-handled gold letter opener from left to right upon his desk, placing it as if getting the correct angle was of monumental importance, then he looked up. “My men have been calling you the angel of sorrow.”

  “I don’t understand, Your Excellency,” Anna said.

  “Your singing,” he replied, lifting a hand toward the window. “Perhaps it was not intentional? They could hear you through the grating in what was actually a winter pen for donkeys. We had to clear those cells out for the French, as we are very pressed for space. My prison,” he added with a faint tone of irony, “being crowded with unruly and outright criminals who call themselves French sailors. But you must have observed these troubles between what are supposed to be allies.”

  “I truly didn’t,” Anna said unhappily. “I mean, I might have if someone pointed it out, but I was not looking at sailors and the like. I wanted to see the sea and the sky, my first glimpse of the great Atlantic. It has been so very hot, much hotter than it ever is in Paris. I don’t know how to convince you or Admiral Villeneuve that I am not a spy.”

  “Then you probably do not know that until fairly recently, I was in fact an ally of the English,” the admiral went on.

  Not certain how to respond, Anna made a little gesture, half of appeal, then dropped a quick curtsey again—long-inculcated habit from her days in the royal palace, when curtseying and dropping one’s gaze was often the safest answer.

  He observed her bewilderment, the unhappy quirk to her brows, and went on, watching carefully, “I spent time in England studying their methods of maritime warfare, and I was honored to serve alongside Admiral Lord Samuel Hood at the siege of Toulon.”

  From all the reaction Anna made to ‘the siege of Toulon’ he might as well have been discussing events at the Antipodes. He made his decision; she was only aware of his continued irony as he said, “But our Prince of the Peace decided that Spain must throw in with the French republic, specifically with the new Emperor of the French, and so . . .” He lifted the letter opener. Light gleamed along the golden blade. “I am placed under the command of Admiral Villeneuve by royal decree.”

  Anna curtseyed again.

  “I am not without sympathy for the admiral. Both fleets are, let us say, in dire need of many specifics. Admittedly the harbor is rife with spies, many of them former friends of warrant officers, traders, and seamen. They talk in their cups. The English, though standing well to the south, seem to know everything there is to know about our movements. Consequently my esteemed colleague’s rage is, perhaps, if no more pardonable, at least understandable, when he is presented with an apparent spy.”

  Anna’s dismay and perplexity were so plain that the admiral set the letter opener down and reached for a tiny silver bell that tingled sweetly.

  The door opened at once, and the admiral rose, speaking in Spanish once again. “Madame, I beg of you, permit the captain to conduct you to quarters I have specified. Admiral Villeneuve has been informed of the change of venue; perhaps he will be relieved to regain badly needed space.” Admiral Gravina bowed slightly.

  Anna understood that the interview was over. Further protest was useless. She curtseyed again, and followed the young captain out.

  Instead of going downstairs to some dungeon, they proceeded along a tiled hallway to a wing on the far side of the command quarters. Here they came to a plain wooden door, which was opened by an armed guard stationed there.

  The captain bowed slightly, and Anna passed inside an airy room with two broad windows. The whitewashed walls were bare except for the expected crucifix, and opposite that, a picture of a woman in a stiff gown with a ruff and a pearl headdress on another. A rug of blues and golds lay on the floor, on which was set chairs and a table, with fine candlesticks on it.

  There was a door on the other side. As the entry door was shut and locked behind her, the inner door opened—and there was Parrette!

  “Oh, I am so glad to see you. The French admiral said they questioned you,” Anna burst out.

  “And so they did. But I refused to tell them anything. The very idea. Spies! Whom would we spy for? I demanded to know who accused us of such a thing, but they would not tell me. However, an orderly did say they would bring us something to eat,” she said, drawing An
na into a bedroom with two smaller rooms off it.

  At one side stood a monumental bed upon a platform, with a canopy over it fit for a queen. On the other side, a narrow alcove gave way to a garderobe, decently closed off. Anna recognized her trunk against the inner wall. “And hot water to bathe in is on the way,” Parrette finished with triumph, as if restored amenities also restored order to the world.

  Anna quickly related the gist of her interview with Admiral Gravina, then said thoughtfully, “There was no one writing our words down. I wonder if that was a good thing or not.”

  “I would not dare a guess,” Parrette answered. “But this much I’ve learned, mostly through overheard curses and slanders, the French are not very popular in Cadiz. Ah. That must be our tray.” The sound of the salon door unlocking caused her to cock her head. “Come. Eat and drink something. Then I will repack our trunks. Who knows what these men will be at next. Whatever it is, we ought to be ready.”

  o0o

  Anna slept through the rest of that day, clean, fed, and resting in a comfortable bed. The next day, she rose betimes. She had finished her dance stretches before the sun came up. Then she prowled the salon and discovered an ancient trunk in a corner, the carvings on it peopled with women in high coned hats and long trailing gowns, the men in short tunics, with hose on their legs and odd pointed shoes with the tips tied back to their ankles in what looked like chains.

  She opened the trunk, and caught her breath in pleasure: books! She had not been able to read since her long-ago days with Madame de Pipelet in Paris.

  Many of the books were in Spanish or Latin, with fragile leather covers. But she found a small stack of newer French novels, and even more amazing, three in English: a book of Pope’s poems, a novel by Samuel Richardson, and a book of travels by Daniel Defoe.

  The novel by Richardson, tied up with tape, was a seven volume production in octavo. Anna opened it first.

  Clarissa was slow going initially. Anna had not thought in English for so long that she struggled to recall the meanings of words. She set it aside frequently, resorting to either the poems or entries in the travel book, but she discovered that rereading sentences, or trying them out loud, sometimes shook loose the meanings that had been buried in memory.