The Devil in Music (77 page)

Julian
and de la Marque shipped their oars and let their boat drift on the
black, star-scattered mirror of the lake. Although it was two or
three in the morning, and there were no other boats in sight, they
kept their voices low and spoke in English for added safety.

De
la Marque regarded Julian appreciatively. "I think you must be
completely mad, man vieux. I've thought so from the beginning. Do
you realize it's only by the merest chance that you aren't cooling
your heels in the Santa Margherita prison?"

"If
I were, at least I would have the consolation of your company."

"I
know." De la Marque flashed his brilliant teeth in a smile.
"What do you think has kept me so remarkably well behaved?"

"I
haven't noticed you putting yourself under any great strain in that
regard."

"Oh,
come, I could have been much worse. I came very close to throttling
you when you told Grimani about my notebook."

Julian
smiled. "MacGregor thought you were meaning to make away with
me."

"Now
that is most unjust. I wouldn't have dreamed of it, except as a last
resort."

"That's
very good of you."

"Mon
vieux, whether you believe it or not, I came here as much to guard
you as to guard against you. I admire you enormously. I've been
fascinated by you from the first. If one of us were a woman, I would
be in love with you. I can't say more for you than that, can I?"

"It's
certainly one of the more singular tributes I've received."

"You
don't believe I'm in earnest." De la Marque leaned back on one
elbow, surveying Julian quizzically. "I wonder if you can have
any

idea
what the loss of that notebook meant to me? Have you ever been
inadvertently responsible for a disaster? I used to lie awake at
night second-guessing my every move cursing myself for a too-clever
idiot." He sat up suddenly and leaned toward Julian, elbows
propped on his knees. "The curse of revolutionary activity is
that one must write things down: names, places, sources of money and
arms. But if those writings fall into the hands of the police,
scores of people may fall a whole movement may collapse. It happened
to Maroncelli, and Andryane. The written word is damning."

"And
you thought written music might be less so."

De
la Marque sighed. "It seemed such a good idea at the time. Who
would make better spies than singers? They move about constantly
from city to city, they meet everyone: the nobility, army officers,
labourers. And when they perform each night, they can add any
variations they like to their songs. Voila: a spy who can pick up
information, then pass it on in public, before hundreds of people."

"While
you quietly take it down in your notebook and translate it at your
leisure."

"It
was an excellent cipher. I designed it myself. Nothing so banal as
a mere substitution of musical notes for letters of the alphabet the
resulting sequence of notes would be impossible to sing. No:
combinations of notes had certain meanings, depending on their
intervals, time values, and so on. It sounds complex, but it was
quite easy to use once you understood it. I suppose Aeneas didn't
tell you how it worked?"

"All
he told me was that it was built around the tritone: the interval of
three whole tones, known as diabolus in musica because it's awkward
to sing."

"Yes.
It was a pun on the society's name, of course. We called ourselves
Angeli, but the police nicknamed us Diavoli. So 'the devil in music'
seemed an appropriate key to the cipher."

"Marchese
Lodovico had guessed that tritoni lay at the heart of it," said
Julian. "He took to scribbling them everywhere. Marchesa
Malvezzi and I found two he'd written on some old sheets of music,
and I saw him jot down others when he came to the villa for my
lessons. Emesto noticed it, too, and jumped to the conclusion that he
was composing a piece of music."

De
la Marque nodded. "I'm not surprised he guessed the notebook
was in cipher. If nothing else, the recurrent tritoni were an oddity
that a connoisseur of music would have noticed. But why didn't he
turn it over to the police out of hand?"

"I
should guess, because he hadn't broken the cipher," said Julian,
"and he couldn't bring himself to relinquish the notebook until
he had. At all events, when I saw him jot down those tritoni, I knew
for certain that he'd brought the notebook to the lake and what was
more alarming, he'd begun to penetrate its secret. That's why I took
the risk of going to the castle on the night before the murder. I
hoped to get inside to search for the notebook, but Marchese Lodovico
caught me out."

"Now,
this is exactly the sort of thing I've been pining to know. I heard
very little about your mission after I left Milan. My colleagues
insisted I go: they were afraid Lodovico would guess the notebook was
in cipher, and I would be arrested and induced to talk. I suppose I
would have felt the same way in their place. So I went to Turin to
assist in the revolt there. Sadly, it was too disorganised and too
late hopeless from the beginning."

"It
must have been," said Julian politely, "if even you
couldn't save it."

"Now
you are jesting with me. But, really, if I could have induced my
colleagues to be a little more ruthless, we might have accomplished
something. The Piedmontese are too sentimentally attached to their
royal house they would put their trust in Carlo Alberto, though
anyone could see he hadn't the stomach to lead a revolution. But
that's neither here nor there. My flight from Lombardy robbed me of
the honour of making your acquaintance, which was rather unfair, when
it was I who proposed you as our agent to retrieve the notebook. Did
you know that?"

"No.
I had never heard of you before we met at La Scala."

"But
I had heard of you. As you later discovered, your patron the Comte
d'Aubret was a friend to the Angeli. When he purposed sending his
English protege to Italy, we the Angeli thought we could use you to
carry information from one city to another. D'Aubret disabused us of
that notion. He didn't want you drawn into our activities. He was
very protective of you."

"That
was good of him."

"Hardly
a passionate statement about the man for whom you risked your life."

"The
fact that I risked my life for him ought to be statement enough."

"To
be sure," said de la Marque, smiling. "Pardon me, mon
vieux I forgot you were English. But to return to the theft of my
notebook: you must realize it couldn't have come at a worse time.

The
government in Milan was moving aggressively against political
dissenters. The first arrests had come a month or two before, and we
knew there would be others. We Angeli had contrived to keep our
movement very secret, but if my notebook were deciphered, it would be
all up with us.

"We
canvassed possibilities. We knew it would be useless for me to
confront Marchese Lodovico directly: he would either deny the theft
or carry it off with a high hand. The police would side with him not
that we cared to have anything to do with the police in any case. To
break into Casa Malvezzi would be worse than useless the marchese had
hordes of strapping footmen at his beck and call.

"It
was at this juncture that I chanced to hear you had come to Milan for
Carnival. I had a friend at the Santa Margherita, who kept me
apprised of the latest foreign arrivals. I saw at once that you
would make a perfect agent. You were English and had no connection
with Italian politics, so you were the last person Lodovico would
suspect of being a Carbonaro. You were a gentleman and had an entree
to exclusive circles. And by all accounts, you were a music lover.
I didn't know then that you could sing like an angel, but I was more
than willing to believe you were sent from Heaven. The question was,
had you the ingenuity to ingratiate yourself with Lodovico, and the
boldness to find my notebook and steal it back?

"I
persuaded Aeneas to sound you about it. He was reluctant at first.
He said: Why should you, a young English traveller, wish to throw in
your lot with us? I reminded him that my notebook heavily
incriminated the Comte d'Aubret in our activities, and if it were
deciphered, the Viceroy would think it his duty to inform the French
authorities. D'Aubret had many enemies in France. His intellects
were too sharp and too ungoverned. All those whose vanities he'd
wounded, whose pretensions he'd torn down, would seize on the chance
to have him imprisoned or exiled as a revolutionary. He was your
benefactor. It was even rumoured he was your father. If affection
for him didn't move you to help us, surely self-interest would."

Julian
did not reply. He thoughts were far away, in Milan on the night of
December the twenty-sixth, 1821 the first night of Carnival. The
streets were thronged with laughing, singing, jostling people.
Enticements were everywhere: the smell of freshly baked panettone,
the sound of popping corks, the flash of black eyes above a fan or
through the slits of a mask. Then all at once there came the hand on
his shoulder, the black-cloaked man at his side, the whisper in his
ear: "Signer Kestrel, I must talk to you."

He
remembered the hushed conversation on the little canal bridge near
Porta Romana the sable water shot with reflections of candlelight
from nearby windows, the confused fragments of songs borne on the
air. And of course there was Aeneas's voice, ludicrously
businesslike behind his beaked black Carnival mask. The whole thing
seemed a scene from an opera. But the danger to d'Aubret had been
all too real.

A
turmoil of feelings had rushed on him. Fear for d'Aubret remorse at
having left him at the mercy of his enemies strangest of all,
exhilaration at being able to repay a little of the debt of gratitude
that weighed on his heart.

"I
heard an account of your meeting with Aeneas long afterward," de
la Marque was saying. "I gather he was more than a little
astonished to discover he had caught a nightingale."

Julian
shrugged. "He told me that music was the best avenue by which
to approach Marchese Lodovico. So I asked him if the mar-chese
interested himself in aspiring singers. Aeneas said he did."

"Butyou
must understand, Signor Kestrel," Aeneas had gone on, "in
Italy every other man you meet thinks he can sing, and most of them
are right. The marchese would be interested only in a voice that was
extraordinary. " Julian had observed mildly that he had been
told his voice had great potential, though he had chosen not to
pursue a career on the stage. "Very well, let's hear it,"
Aeneas had said. So Julian had applied for a Carbonaro mission by
singing a serenade to a masked man, two ducks, and half a dozen
appreciative pairs of lovers leaning out of windows along the canal.

"Now
you must tell me everything," said de la Marque. "How you
induced Marchese Lodovico to carry you off to the lake, and how you
found my notebook at last."

"I
didn't induce him. He thought of the idea himself. I was a bit
nonplussed. When I sang under his window, I hoped merely to awaken
his interest. I had no notion he would take me up in that fashion."

"But
you must have had some idea of keeping your identity a secret else
why approach him so stealthily?"

"I
wasn't trying to be stealthy. I sang under his window for the
romance of the thing because I'd heard he was impulsive and
imaginative, and I thought a serenade would appeal to him more than a
letter of introduction. I also knew that men of his rank set no
store by anyone who seems to court their favour. Which is why, when
he

first
proposed to launch me on the operatic stage, I was very hard to
convince."

"But
this is delightful!" De la Marque leaned back, his head resting
on the seat at the end of the boat. "Go on!"

"I
told him I was very poor, but my father was a gentleman and wouldn't
have wished me to go on the stage. I said I was thinking of giving
music lessons. Marchese Lodovico was beside himself. "Give
music lessons! With a voice like yours? Surely if you must earn
your bread by your talent in music, it would be far better to win
fame and fortune on the stage than to toil in some conservatory."
I said, at least I needn't drag my name through the theatres or see
it on playbills. That may have been what gave him the idea of
weaving a mystery around my identity. At all events, I allowed him
to talk me round."

"Machiavellian,
mon vieux!"

It
was, rather, Julian thought. But it was not the whole story. He
remembered Lodovico pacing up and down his room at Casa Malvezzi. A
single lamp burned amid the crimson curtains and wall hangings, so
that the whole room swam in a red glow. "You really think I
could be successful?" "I know it! Put yourself in my
hands, Signer Kestrel. I will make you the greatest tenor in Italy!"
Julian half believed him. He had a dazzling vision of himself on the
stage at La Scala, the Theatre Italien in Paris, the King's Theatre
in London no, not London. That was not how he had meant to go home.
Yet his heart hammered, his head spun, and he asked himself which of
them was really the one being seduced.