The Devil in Music (74 page)

"I'm
sorry," Fletcher said helplessly.

"Take
him away," ordered Grimani, bored.

"Let
me go with him," begged Lucia.

"Out
of the question," said Grimani.

The
soldiers moved to take Fletcher away. Lucia called out to him, "I'm
so sorry!"

"There's
nothing to be sorry about," he reassured her. "I'll be all
right,"

"I
knew you would understand! I felt it." She pressed her hands
to her heart. "I'll stand by you, whatever happens. I'll never
desert you, as long as you're in any danger."

Fletcher
smiled. "Then I've nothing more in the world to wish for."

The
soldiers marched him out.

MacGregor
took Julian's arm. "Come. Let's get you upstairs and into a
hot bath. You must be chilled to the bone."

Julian
let himself be led away. As soon as he and MacGregor were out of
earshot, he asked, "What has Fletcher done to get himself
arrested?"

"He's
confessed to being Orfeo."

Julian
stopped in his tracks. "What?"

"Caught
you by surprise, has it?" MacGregor chuckled. "Well,
after all, you can't know everything."

"I'm
absolutely floored. What in the name of all that's marvelous
possessed him to do that?"

"Lucia
gave him away. I'm not sure why, but it seemed to have something to
do with rescuing you."

"Good
God. What an infernal tangle."

"Can
you do anything to help him?" MacGregor asked.

"Yes.
I have one card left in my hand. And I can see I shall have to play
it."

Dipper
joined Julian in his room a quarter of an hour later, as clean and
neat as if he had never set foot outside the villa that night. He
began laying out Julian's evening clothes, blissfully unheeding of
Julian's suggestion that he take the rest of the night off. "Have
you at least taken some refreshment?" Julian asked. "I
don't want you dropping from fatigue and cluttering up the carpet."
"I had some wine and a biscuit, sir." "Very
fortifying, if you happened to be a mouse." "Sir."
Dipper put down his clothes brush and looked at Julian in pained
remonstrance. "I can't have you looking anything less than
togged out to the nines. Puts me in a bad light, don't it, sir, on
account of everybody knows it's me as rigs you out."

"Yes,
I quite see. I shouldn't like to hazard your reputation." He
compromised by making Dipper share the cold meats, cheeses, and other
delicacies that shortly arrived on a tray. After they had eaten,
Julian finished dressing and regarded himself in the mirror. It
seemed extraordinary that he should look just as he did on any other
night his white cravat tied with exquisite simplicity, his black coat
and trousers moulded to his body without a crease, his white cashmere
waistcoat shimmering with a trace of white satin embroidery, his
black shoes mirror-bright. White kid gloves hid the scratches on his
hands. He glanced toward the clothes he had been wearing before, now
piled in a corner like a snake's sloughed skin. He hoped the boots
could be saved. He would not find another pair like them before he
returned to England.

He
was procrastinating, he knew. He must go downstairs. He owed a
great many explanations, and the time had come to pay the debt.

He
had no sooner emerged from his room than Beatrice looked out of her
room across the way. "I've been listening for you," she
whispered. "Come in for a moment!"

He
complied. She closed the door behind them, leaned back against it,
and looked at him with rueful, laughing eyes. "I had to speak
to you alone. I've been hovering in wait for you like a peasant girl
for her sweetheart."

"It
suits you," he said, smiling.

"I'm
behaving horribly, I know. I have every reason to be angry with you.
Last night you spurned me you even seemed to suspect me of the
murders. Pride ought to keep me from approaching you first;
resentment ought to harden my heart against you. But when you fell
into danger I forgot my anger, and now that you've returned I've lost
my pride. I'm not afraid to make the first advance. Forgive me,
Giuliano, for everything."

She
held out her hand. He took it, bent over it, and kissed it. When he
straightened, she was looking at him with dazzled eyes. "Come
to me tonight, Giuliano," she breathed. "Tell your doctor
friend something, anything, but come to me."

He
drew her into his arms. She abandoned herself to him. He felt that
she kissed him with her very soul on her lips.

When
at last they moved a little apart, he asked, "What of Orfeo?
Have you forgotten your anger against him, too?"

Her
face set. "We know now who he is. I can leave him in Grimani's
hands. I believe Grimani has no more love for him than I have."
Her features softened once more. "So you see, I'm free of him.
We need never think of him again."

He
clasped her once more to his heart and kissed her, letting the moment
engulf him blot out all that had passed and all that was to come.

At
length she drew away. "We must go downstairs. Everyone is
waiting for us."

"Beatrice
"

"I
know, love. I wish them all at the devil, too. But we can't
disappoint them." She laughed softly. "And it would never
do, would it, if they came looking for us here?"

The
drawing room at midnight was as bright as day. Beatrice must have
sent for every candle in the house. They stood on tables, in

candle-stands,
along the mantelpiece, and in the windows. It was like being in a
votive chapel on the feast-day of a patron saint.

Carlo
had been taken to the barracks in Solaggio, and Fletcher was still
confined in the billiard room. The rest of the villa party were all
there: Beatrice, Francesca, Valeriano, de la Marque, St. Carr,
MacGregor, Grimani, Donati, and Sebastiano. Ernesto, Dipper, and
Nina had been invited to join their masters on this festive night,
though they kept respectfully in the background, Ernesto standing,
Dipper and Nina sitting on the carpet hand-in-hand. Lucia was there,
too, seated on an ottoman at the centre of the room, where Grimani
could keep her under his eye. Zanetti sat with his portable desk on
his lap, taking notes.

Julian
stood before the mantelpiece and embarked on the story of how he had
uncovered Carlo's guilt. "It was partly a process of
elimination. Signor Valeriano's confession was false. Marchesa
Francesca's very real agony on hearing it convinced me that she
believed it and thus couldn't possibly be the murderer herself.
Still, I sensed that Signor Valeriano's kinship with the Malvezzis
lay at the heart of these murders if only I could fathom how.

"The
more I thought about it, the more implausible it seemed that Marchese
Lodovico would have made a mock marriage in the first place. Assuming
he had done it, why had he kept it such a secret, and why he had ever
after eschewed love affairs with singers? Forgive me, Signor
Valeriano, but a nobleman's friends are unlikely to think less of him
for playing a trick of that sort on a woman of Giulietta Petroni's
birth. And so I began to wonder if by any chance the marriage could
have been real."

Valeriano
stared.

"I
asked myself who alive would have first-hand knowledge of the
marriage. Giulietta, her maid Elena, and Lodovico were all dead.
That left only the priest. I pictured a Neapolitan of at least
sixty, sufficiently educated to be, or pass for, a priest. He also
had to be unscrupulous enough to perform a mock marriage or disavow a
real one."

"And
you thought of Guido," said Beatrice.

"Yes,
Guido, who, I had discovered, knew Latin, and who had appeared in
Carlo's life very suddenly not long before Lodovico's murder. I
speculated that he had told Carlo about Lodovico's marriage to
Giulietta. But the information would have meant nothing to Carlo
unless the marriage was real. I learned from the family tree"
he went over to it "that Lodovico had married Rinaldo's mother,

Isotta,
in 1790. Giulietta hadn't died until 1793. I knew because Valeriano
mentioned that his mother died three years before the French invaded
Italy.

"I
asked myself whether Lodovico would have been rash enough to marry
Isotta, when he already had a legal wife. I remembered Ernesto's
telling me that the only person Lodovico ever feared was the old
marchese, his father. Since Lodovico was the eldest son, his father
might well have compelled him to marry. And Lodovico might have
committed bigamy sooner than tell his father the truth.

"If
Guido revealed to Carlo that Lodovico's marriage to Isotta was
invalid, that would give Carlo every reason to kill his brother.
After the murder, he could pretend to discover that Rinaldo was
illegitimate, and he himself was Lodovico's direct heir."

"Just
what I would expect of a liberal," said Grimani. "They
have no religion and no respect for authority. How can they know
right from wrong?"

"With
respect, Signor Commissario," said Julian, "I think Carlo's
much-vaunted liberal ideals are a consequence of his ruthlessness,
not a cause. He threw in his lot with the French because he saw it
as the best means of advancement. After the French were driven out,
he had nothing to gain by forswearing liberalism. He was so heavily
compromised in the Austrians' eyes that they would never have
restored him to government office. He might as well at least keep
the character of a man of principle. But it galled him unspeakably
that his brother was at the pinnacle of wealth and power, while his
own star had set, and he had nothing in the world but debts and
memories. He once spoke to me of the Wheel of Fortune. When Guido
came to him with the story of Lodovico's first marriage, it must have
seemed to him that Fate was letting him give the Wheel a turn,
bringing himself to the top again, and his brother to the bottom.

"But
there was one gaping flaw in this theory I'd devised: four and a half
years went by, and Carlo never revealed that Lodovico's marriage to
Isotta was invalid. He might have discovered too late that he
couldn't prove it, but I couldn't credit that. He wouldn't have
taken the risk of killing his brother unless he was confident of the
gain. So it must be that after Lodovico's death he learned something
that dished his scheme.

"I
went back to the family tree. It told me that Rinaldo had been born
in 1795, two years after Giulietta died. I remembered Valeriano's
saying that his mother believed Lodovico had set spies on her. That

might
not have been all her fancy: Lodovico might have been hoping to hear
of her death so that he could make his union with Isotta legal by the
simple expedient of marrying her again.

"He
would have wanted to keep that second marriage a secret, but still,
he would surely have left some evidence of it, in case Rinaldo's
legitimacy was ever called in question. The best repository would be
the family lawyer, Palmieri. What was more, if Palmieri knew of the
second marriage to Isotta, it could have been he who revealed it to
Carlo. Carlo was Lodovico's executor: what more natural than that
Palmieri should have discussed intimate family business with him
after Lodovico's death?

"Carlo
would have had no choice but to swallow his losses and keep the
secret of Lodovico's marriage to Giulietta. He only renewed his
project of inheriting the family estate when chance presented him
with a golden opportunity to kill Rinaldo. That explains the long
gap between the two crimes, which I had initially thought made Carlo
an unlikely suspect, at least if the motive were pecuniary.

"We
may not ever know precisely how Rinaldo's murder came about. But
this is what I should guess: Carlo was wakeful that night and came
out of his room. He happened to look out of a south-facing window
probably the one at the end of the hallway and saw Francesca climbing
down from the balcony. He guessed that Rinaldo must have locked her
in with him. Moreover, Rinaldo must be deeply asleep, else Francesca
wouldn't have been able to escape. So he coldbloodedly killed
Rinaldo and did all he could to pin the crime on Francesca, knowing
that if she were found guilty, her son, Niccolo the only person who
stood between him and the title would fall neatly into his hands."

"Thank
God you warned me not to bring my children here!" Francesca
exclaimed.

"I
could hardly credit that Carlo would be so rash as to strike at
Niccolo so soon after Rinaldo's murder," said Julian. "But
how could I take that chance? As it turned out, your sending me to
see the children gave me the perfect opportunity to speak with
Palmieri. Unfortunately, Carlo learned of my intent." Julian
saw no need to reveal how this had come about, for which Nina looked
at him gratefully. "Give Carlo his due: he excels at devising
schemes on short notice. By the time I returned with the information
I'd sought, he had laid a trap that nearly finished me."