The Black Opera (50 page)

The oil-lamps cast a softening light over the old brown bones; over skulls, and the rounded ends of femurs. It was easy to imagine the ghosts of ancient monks down here. Or Dominicans. Or more mortal intruders, sent by the Prince's Men to do more than cause minor accidents.

Stacks of bones lined the long corridors. Interspersed among them were tiny chapels or icons, some with withered flowers still drying around them. Conrad knelt and picked up a camellia, scarlet petals brown-edged.

Decay had eaten into the petals. Other, older blossoms had been swept aside into the corridor. It argued someone who regularly visited, but had not been able in the past few weeks, or else the blossoms would be fresh.

Glancing at other shrines, their offerings were in a similar state. It was reassuring.

If the
lazzaroni
can't get in here to pay their respects to the Sainted Dead—I doubt any others can get in past Mantenucci and Alvarez.

I don't want to see any one of the company end up like Adriano Castiello-Salvati.

We have so short a time, now, that we need to keep safe. Surely we can?

Conrad stepped up his pace, preferring it where he emerged out into high-chambered spaces that had once been mines. Ancient Romans or Greeks had left the volcanic rock walls perfectly smooth behind them, and the air was scented by the pine planks Angelotti's team used to construct the flooring.

Conrad walked in at the base of one great bottle-shaped chamber, realising that he must be coming in through an air or drainage channel.

Three dozen voices rose in the opening to Act II.

The chorus sang praises to the Sun, in a swifter pace, throbbing like the great steam engines Conrad had seen in England and France, wrapping him in nothing but the soul of music and voice. He paused in the shadows, watching Robert Capiraso conduct, and the various awkwardly-placed orchestra members produce an echoing celestial sound.

The celebratory passage ended—on stage, the singers would parade off to a martial hymn; but here Roberto Capiraso cut that short and dismissed them, all but the two main singers, who would remain behind to sing their latest conflict.

JohnJack and Velluti began the bass-castrato duet.

Their voices prowled around each other in the orchestral rehearsal, the way their bodies would as soon as they undertook the staging. The music was oddly lyrical, Conrad thought.
Considering they're swearing vendetta, and making arrangements for a duel to the death…

It held him unable to move. Fernando Cortez's triumph ascended like bells, inhuman as the notes of a glass harmonica. Jaguar General Chimalli's rhythmic bass insults undermined Velluti's vocal acrobatics with the gravity that only a deep voice has. Spinelli dropped to a note that Conrad thought a Russian bass could be proud of—sprang up into the rhythm of their dual cabaletta—

The Conte di Argente rapped his knuckles on the candle-stand attached to his piano, and pointed into the gloom. “No! Again!”

The orchestra rearranged itself, taking their cue from Paolo playing first violin. Capiraso stood listening with closed eyes and a pained expression.

“Stop!” Capiraso slammed his hands down on the top of the piano. Paolo's bow skidded, ended everything in a discord. “Signore GianGiacomo Spinelli, oblige me by not coming in late—”

Conrad stepped out of the shadows. “I heard no one out of time.”

“No?” Capiraso, even in the warm gold light, managed to give a chill look that
was all
il Superbo
. “No.”

There was a distinctly implied
No, I doubt
you
would
.

“Signore Scalese, when you are in charge of rehearsals, you may—”

Temper getting the better of him, Conrad snapped, “In fact, I believe I
am
in charge! And
Paolo
is supposed to be conducting them—”

“That boy!”

“—
That boy
has done three years more in a Conservatoire than
you
have—”

It was a sheer and absolute relief, Conrad discovered, to allow himself to yell at Roberto Capiraso. The tenseness of past days exploded out of him. It might well have been the case for il Superbo, too. With his face distorted by light and shadows it was difficult to tell.

“—If you spent less time destroying the morale of the singers,” Conrad finished, loud enough to carry over the Count's bitter protest, “and more time actually
setting my libretto
, we might have some chance of getting this opera finished before the first night!”

An anonymous voice from the direction of the rehearsal stage remarked, “A week and a half is long enough to put on an opera; people do it every day…”

“Yes. Thank you!” Conrad bit off his next remark. “If you've got nothing better to do but bitch—”

“No, nothing.” The voice turned out to be Sandrine, who beamed. Despite the heavy make-up, designed to be seen at a theatre's highest gallery, she had a remarkably subtle expression of mischief that Conrad could plainly see.

“This is
not
the time! Go rest, all of you.” Conrad pulled a rolled sheaf of paper out of his pocket, and slapped it against the Conte di Argente's chest. “The new Act Four, Scene Six. Perhaps we could have some
good
music for it?”

It was touch and go what Roberto's temper would make him do. Thirty heartbeats ticked past.

The composer silently snatched at the papers, and stalked off through the chamber. Conrad watched him go.

“Corrado?”

His whole body suppressed a startle. Not because he was seeing the assassins of the Prince's Men down every tunnel, this time—but because he would recognise the voice anywhere.

He blushed violently. “Nora!”

He turned around, realising she had been standing behind him all through his quarrel with her husband.

T
hat went out of his head—along with the rest of the world—as soon as he saw her face, pale as the white rock walls. He found his mouth dry and wordless.

Five weeks since this began. Less time than that since I've known she was here in Naples
.

Whatever her name is—whatever
she
is—nothing in my feelings has changed!

He was not alone in most senses. The singers and instrument players collected in small groups, under the vast ceiling that the lamp-light barely showed; but they were far more interested in the break from work than in anything else.

Leonora's dark shapely brows came down in a frown. Even that was a beautiful expression on her.

“I'll be speaking to Roberto later. Conrad… Do you want this opera to be finished? I foresee one or other of you walking out if you don't stop quarrelling!”

Conrad winced, a twelve-year-old schoolboy caught in a misdemeanour.

La Fenice in Venice is no different from any other opera house. Leonora will know, from there if nowhere else, about quarrels between
prima donna
and second soprano, between the composer and the orchestra, between anyone and anyone else, in fact. Even if she had never set foot backstage since Venice, she would recognise what damage a quarrel between the librettist and the composer could do.

“We do work together. He can be a good composer.” Conrad was suddenly speechless, as she moved further out into the light of the oil lamps, and he saw her fragile appearance. “Are you… I can't even ask, are you well? What would that mean? Can you
be
ill?”

“I'm not ill. Just tired.” She smiled, more resigned than sad. “Corrado, we haven't had time to speak… Because you're a man, I suppose you must be wondering whether you had anything to do with this?”

Her unobtrusive gesture took in her fever-warm skin and stillness; her general differences as Returned Dead.

“Of course I wonder!” Conrad was startled to find his tone so rough. He looked down into her blue-violet eyes, wishing he had the right to brush the wisps of ash-brown hair back from her face. Desperate to show himself rational, adult, he said, “I can't find any evidence as to why some people Return and most don't. You…”

“Me?” Leonora gave him an amused look. “I've been thinking it over since we spoke—I knew
you'd
have more questions for me, Corradino! There truly was… nothing. Or, I suppose there was nothing but me—or else I wouldn't remember it.”

She shook her head dismissively.

“But it was just…
being
. All I could think of was how much I wanted to be alive.”

“Is
that
it?” Conrad stared at her and stumbled over his words, barely keeping up with his own mind. “The Returned Dead come back because
they
want to?”

Does it have nothing to do with the bereaved?
So many of those who die are loved by the ones they leave grieving but still stay dead. If we've had the wrong idea all along…

“I don't know, Conrad.” She tilted her head on one side, like Venice's thieving brown fluff-ball sparrows.

“Then it wouldn't depend on those who are left alive; how much they love you. Just on how much
you
love—” Conrad bit off the word he would have finished with.

Him
. Him, not me. She won't have come back for me.

But he said she remembered my name
.

Conrad used the silence to gather up courage.

And when he found it, asked a different question entirely. “I must know. Am I in any way responsible for your death?”

Leonora shook her head. “I think this will be painful for you to hear, but I died in child-birth, with what would have been mine and Roberto's first child. It seems I have too narrow hips to ever safely bear a child.”

Thinking of her pregnant, thinking of her in the Conte di Argente's bed
—

“Yes, it's painful to hear.” Conrad held her gaze for long enough that she understood how many ways he meant it. “Nora, I thought of you often—”
Every day!
“—over the years. I want to think that might have had some influence on your Return, even if only the smallest.”

“Who knows?…” Leonora reached up with her fingers and gently brushed his cheek. “Don't let Roberto's temper drive you away, Corradino. Your friendship is valued here, I promise you.”

Her touch scalded him.

“I had achieved some… balance of mind,” he whispered, “while I was away from Naples, and then working down here. Now that's scorched up in flames! How I was, before I left—sending Tullio to ask questions of your servants, wondering if I could find a way to see you when your husband was out… It makes me sound like some shabby conventional adulterer!”

Leonora made to speak but he pressed on, in an intense whisper.

“This isn't a case of a woman I once had, and I wonder if I can have her again, in the teeth of the marriage laws!” Conrad watched her features, responsive to his crudity, and all he saw was her wonder. “Every time I think of you, I think, ‘this is Nora, Leonora D'Arienzo, who is the other half of my soul. If we never saw a priest in Venezia, that doesn't make us any less married. I know she's faithful to me.'”

“Corrado—”

“And at the same time I know you left Venice with Roberto Capiraso, and married him to become Contessa di Argente; I know you lay with him—And now you tell me that you died in birthing his child—”

She gazed up at him in the golden lamplight. It was impossible to believe he no longer had the right to take her hand, or hold her body close up against him, or kiss her. He clasped his hands behind his back to force himself to remember.

“Nora, I know I asked before—men always ask—but—
does
he make you happy?”

“Not so many men ask in that tone.” Her lips curved, as if she were remembering small things: the everyday currency between a husband and wife. “And, yes. I won't lie to you. He does.”

Happier than with me?

As if she could read his mind—or, as her husband has told him, because his emotions are so clearly decipherable from his expression—Nora said quietly, “I didn't choose him over you just because he made me happy.
You
made me happy.”

“I know: you told me: you married him because he
could
marry you.”

A plausible account of events tumbled into his mind like dominoes falling. That she married the Conte di Argente, that she died in child-bed; that suppose—
only suppose
—she married him
because
she learned she was pregnant…

Because little Nora from the orphanage in Castelfranco Veneto knows what orphanages are like, knows the half-slavery of children fostered out, and would never subject any child she might have to that.

And in that case, if she were pregnant in Venezia, it might have been his, or mine
—

Either of us might be responsible for Leonora's death
.

“Was it my child?”