The Black Opera (65 page)

Conrad glanced back.

Leonora Capiraso stood several paces away from the bookcase, his Manton flintlock duelling pistol in her hands. The black muzzle pointed precisely at his heart.

“W
hy are you
protecting
him!” Conrad exclaimed. “Didn't you hear him confess?”

But I don't need to ask
.

He's her husband; she has a longer history with him than she does with me; of course she's loyal to him.

It still hurt.

As gently as he could, considering Leonora's temper, Conrad said, “Keep the pistol if it makes you feel safer. But we're going to King Ferdinand right now.”

Leonora said clearly, “No one is going to King Ferdinand.”

“What?” The bald exclamation made him sound like a village idiot. “Just because your
loving
husband has dragged you into this mess—”

Leonora took a precise step to the side. Conrad realised it allowed her to see both himself and Roberto without interruption. And it put her the other side of the long table in the centre of the room—in effect, safe behind a barricade.

He stared at her across polished mahogany and an expensive English lead crystal decanter and its attendant glasses. The pistol muzzle didn't waver from the trunk of his body. The weight of the flintlock pistol was supported by both her hands. The hammer was drawn back—and, as he observed that, she brought it back to full cock with a satisfying, terrifying
click
.

This isn't the first time she's handled a gun
.

Four yards away, behind an obstacle—
I can't simply grab her
.

He learned in the war, at this point there's nothing to do but wait. If—when—the trigger is pulled, there'll be the fraction of an instant between the flintlock mechanism striking the pan, and the flash travelling down the touch-hole and igniting the main charge. Men have thrown themselves aside from the lead bullet and lived, in that instant.

Some irrational, irreverent part of his mind supplied,
Tal momento! O istante!

In a voice more distant than the stars, she said, “Please don't move.”

Conrad could do nothing but gaze, stupefied, at her—at warm scented flesh into which he wished to sink, and obliterate all the world except the two of them. Except that…

“It's both of you? He forced you to
join
him?” Conrad added instantly: “Nora, we can give you sanctuary from the Prince's Men—”

Leonora snorted.

The sound of contempt went clear through him.

“Corrado, when did you ever know anyone
make
me do anything?”

Conrad stared into her determined, willing face. “You can't be a Prince's Man. Him, yes; but not
you
—!”

Roberto Capiraso leaned forward, his hands braced on his thighs for support, and grunted with bitter amusement. “Oh, she is.”

Conrad couldn't help staring at Leonora, in her high bodice and flowing tunic, with her fallen hair rippling down to her hips and below. Dishevelled, and with a pistol, she might have been the mad-woman in an opera.
Although on-stage it would more likely be a dagger.

“I told you my husband was a member of a criminal society,” Nora said lightly, as if she ignored the weapon she held. “I just didn't tell you which one.”

“Che cazzo!
And
what
was the point of—Oh. To divert suspicion from him if he made any mistakes.”

“Yes.” Leonora's gaze stayed fixed on Conrad. “Also… I did want you to leave Naples. I forgot how pig-headed you are when it comes to threats.”

Roberto Capiraso's baritone drowned her out. “You
warned
him? You treacherous bitch!”

Leonora moved from stillness to swiftness. The pistol came up so that she looked straight down the duelling sights at Conrad. Her fingers tensed, a fraction from fully pulling the trigger.

He flinched.

Her hands stayed steady. She turned her head, gazing at Roberto. “You have no reason to accuse me! I loved you before and after I died, Roberto, and now, just because I've kissed one man—because it was
necessary
—you accuse me!”

Contempt and self-contempt tore at Conrad's heart.

Necessary
.

Pain flooded in on him, drowning him. He dragged himself free of it sufficiently that he could think.
She must have a reason for that saying that
—

That she might be trying to drive him off for his own safety, he put out of his mind as a self-serving fantasy.

Roberto Capiraso spoke thickly, as if he had bitten his tongue. “It was
necessary
, was it?”

Conrad could have echoed him: the word stabbed deep. He moved forward a pace. He did not care that the pistol's muzzle shifted with him as he did. “Why? Why was it
necessary
for me to love you?”

Leonora didn't take her gaze from the Count. “Oh, I would have gone much further than love and one kiss. If I were a man, Roberto, and I slept with someone's
wife because it was necessary for the cause, you wouldn't think twice about it.”

“You're a woman: it's different!”

Her voice sang with scorn. “Do you say I can't have principles?”

Conrad flinched back from the zeal shining raw in her eyes.

She took another pace back, towards the door; the mahogany table still between her and both of them.

She doesn't want to be disarmed by me or her loving husband
, Conrad recognised.

But she still only has one shot
.

Wanting to spring forward, he forced his body to wait.

The slender woman, uncannily motionless, stared at the bruised face of Roberto Capiraso. “Let me tell you that you have nothing to forgive! I did what was right to keep this man's attention occupied—”

Every small brick of knowledge fell into place, building the edifice before he was consciously aware of it.
She's been decoying me, she doesn't love me
—He framed that with brutal honesty in his thoughts.
Then
—

“Only one thing makes me different from any other man in Naples,” he stated aloud. “The libretto—”

“Corrado!”

“—For the counter-opera—”

“Conrad!”
Her voice bounced back off the ornamented plaster ceiling. “I've been distracting you, yes! But—”

“But
—I can't trust anything you've ever said to me.”

Roberto cut in icily. “Nor, apparently, can I. This is no matter of playing out a scene of jealous husband and pure wife in the debtors' prison! Leonora, we agreed you would not be further involved in this—”

“It was necessary. I told you it would be.”

“Was it? I think you always
intended
to find it necessary—”

“Roberto—”

“What have I heard since we came here? Nothing but
Conrad, Corrado, Corradino!
Tell me how you broke your word, Leonora. Tell me how you planned every step of this to bring him back to you—”

The pain in his voice provoked contradictory emotions in Conrad. Both sympathy, and a blazing hope that he was right.
Right that it's me she's been looking for, as I looked for her!

Leonora had the stillness of the Dead as she stood with Conrad's pistol raised. All her attention on her husband, she exclaimed fiercely, “I was as shocked as you were when Bourbon-Sicily presented him as the librettist! The idea that he would be writing the book for us—”

“—Is just
too
coincidental!” Roberto Capiraso's hands shook as he pulled off
his untied neck-cloth. He wiped his face with it, and pushed it into a pocket. Scorn made his voice razor-sharp. “You mean to tell me, with all your connections among
il Principe
, that you had no idea where Signore Scalese might be?”

Conrad snorted. “Unless she has some way of divining where lightning will strike, it
must
have been a shock seeing me in Ferdinand's opera!”

Two heads turned as one. Both glared at him as if he interrupted some private thing, not his business.

But it is my business!
No matter how close they seem to be.

Roberto Capiraso absently tested his swollen red and blue jaw under his clipped beard. “Leonora, believe me, I know your rank among
il Principe
is far higher than mine. I refuse to believe you didn't gain access to, say, the police lists of ‘undesirables' in the Two Sicilies—”

“Yes!” Her eyes seemed to take in all the light from the great sash windows of the mansion. They flashed. “Yes! Very well! I hoped I might see Conrad
privately
—”

Conrad's heart lurched.

“—While we were here; it would not have interfered with the mission. I had no idea
he
would be chosen as the King's librettist—I so swear!”

Conrad went to speak and found his mouth too dry.
I have no idea what I can say to her.

His body tensed as the pistol's muzzle shivered.

Roberto Capiraso wiped his mouth with his hand, this time. A thread of carmine—from where a tooth had cut the inside of his cheek?—ran down his chin, visible through his beard. He spat blood in Leonora's direction. “You claim that? Am I stupid?
Cornuto?
Even I can see that you'd spread your legs for him in front of me if he asked you to!”

“Never doubt what I feel for you—” she began.

“I
killed
you.” The Count sounded almost reflective. “I've been aware that you would, eventually, exact payment for that.”

“Oh, stop playing the martyr!” Leonora's voice shifted down the social classes. Her chin came up, and she glared at the dark man. “I've told you before, you were not responsible for my death!”

“You died in attempting to give birth to my child.”

Her voice snapped like a coachman's whip. “I was hardly
forced
to conceive it!”

Conrad saw her expression change.

He only then realised that he must have given an indication of the rip of her words.

“It couldn't be helped.” Her gaze sought his for one moment, before it went back to Roberto. “Not by you or any other man. My body wasn't meant for childbirth.”

Conrad's responsibility to the King of the Two Sicilies felt a very distant memory. Even the opera was no more than a fever-dream of work and
messa di voce
: those bel canto voices that swell up and sink down under perfect control.

Battered by feelings that were just the opposite, Conrad stated, “I'm finished here.”

“Corrado—”

“No more!”

It made his skin shiver to ignore a weapon, but he gave Nora his shoulder and turned to look directly at Roberto Conte di Argente.

“Tell me one thing. Before I leave this house and go to King Ferdinand and we have
no
private business.” Conrad drew breath, and managed to get words out steadily. “Before the child. Before Leonora died. In Venice—She was my wife in all but the church ceremony. How did you get her to love you and leave me?”

Roberto's head snapped around, his expression open and shocked.

“What do you mean,
leave
you? Scalese, a few assignations don't make a wife! She was never
with
you!”

“N
ora and I lived together as man and wife,” Conrad repeated, with as much dignity as he could manage. “Under the same roof in Venice, for over a year.”

“You did not.” The dishevelled figure of Roberto Conte di Argente stared back, apparently honest in his confusion. “She would have told me if she had ever been mistress to another man. I was her first lover.”

“Her
first?”
Conrad choked on words that would be half-venom, half-glee.

No—since I must disillusion him, let me at least not make Nora sound worse than she is.

“It was three years after the Armistice,” Conrad stated calmly. “We met. We were together fourteen months. Then along you came… and offered her marriage, I understand. It seems that's all it took to entice her away.”

“No.” Roberto Conte di Argente shook his head with perfect sincerity. “No. Three years after the war ended, she and
I
were in Venice for that year. I met her there.”

The silence in the richly decorated room stretched out to breaking point.

Have I mistaken the year?

“The first season at La Fenice, when I met her, she sang in
I Borgia,”
Conrad managed. “Through December and January. Then in
Riccardo Cuor di Leone
.”

Roberto Capiraso inclined his head as if he were not battered and bruised. “Also small roles in Paer's
Sofonisba
, and Donizetti's
Pietro il Grande
.”