4 - The Iron Tongue of Midnight (27 page)

Captain Forti sneered in disbelief, but led us all outside to examine the area. By the light of the footmen’s lanterns and the deputies’ torches, we found a vine roughly the thickness of my arm. Some of its branching tendrils had torn loose from the wall, and fresh leaves littered the ground at its base. Nearly bent double, nose to the dirt, the constable proved his worth as a hunter by discovering faint imprints of a woman’s shoe.

“By damn, the little woman did it. She climbed down the side of the villa.” Forti straightened with a gleam of admiration in his eyes.

In my heart, hope exploded like a festival skyrocket. Grisella still had a chance! I’d brought the law as duty demanded, but my daring sister had outfoxed us all. Despite everything she’d done, I couldn’t be sorry.

“But she can’t have got far,” Forti finished. On a shout, he urged his men to their horses, and furious activity ensued.

The constable gave me a push and chivvied me along. “You’re with me in the carriage. Now, where to? Toward the river? Doesn’t really know the country, does she? How fast can she run?”

Yes. No. I don’t know. With my mind reeling, I’m not sure whether the words passed my lips or not. Our party pulled away from the Villa Dolfini with a pounding of horseshoes and rattle of wheels on gravel. We turned left at the gate and sped along the road in the opposite direction from Molina Mori. After just a few minutes, I heard a shout and Ernesto whipped up the horses. I leaned out, gripping the window’s edge for all I was worth.

“There she is,” someone cried.

The rays of the carriage lamps lit on a limping figure making her determined way along the road: a woman with a dark cloak trailing behind her, brassy curls spilling from its hood. At the sound of our commotion, she stumbled into an uneven run, but with our greater speed, we soon overtook her.

The deputies jumped from their horses. Grisella whirled this way and that, still seeking escape from certain capture. For a heartbeat, her wild gaze fastened on me. With a terrible wrench of sorrow, I looked upon her dark eyes glittering with rage and her mouth contorted in a slash of misery and pain.

***

Venice, Feast of All Souls 1740

Dear Alessandro,

Grisella is gone. Her lovely face, her intriguing smile, and most elusive of all, the crystalline voice that could make an entire opera house shiver.

You know this, of course, because Gussie has written. He’s been stronger than I, the rock of our entire household. Though I returned to Venice several weeks ago, I’ve been too dispirited to compose a letter. This day set aside to pray for the souls of our beloved departed seems like a fitting time to take up my pen and relate a few things I think you would like to hear straight from me.

I stayed with our sister throughout her trial, until the very end, as close as I could get. Grisella was held in the guardhouse at Padua. Nearby, I found a tiny room usually rented out to university students, and I visited her whenever the authorities would permit. She suffered with her palsies during the trial, but once she knew her fate was certain, she turned as calm as the lagoon on a windless day. Her twitching and writhing disappeared entirely.

Grisella and I didn’t speak of recent events during the last days, but spent our time recounting memories of our childhood on the Campo dei Polli, dissecting them like the corpses of small animals on a naturalist’s slab. Grisella only became angry with me when I did not recall events in the same light that she did. Then she instructed me in the particulars, extracting the promise that I would never forget again.

Our sister’s end was mercifully quick. To insure that she would not die by slow suffocation, I had arranged for men who excel at the sport of leaping up to pull on the legs of jerking bodies to wait near at hand. Their services weren’t needed. When the trap gave way, her slender neck broke with a sharp crack.

I saw that she was buried in a churchyard outside Padua, for good this time. Given Grisella’s history, the priests at first denied her a sanctified resting place. It took my entire purse from Tamerlano to change their minds. No matter, I can soon earn the sum back when I’m ready to take up my work again.

When that will be I cannot say. Liya and Titolino are the bright spots in my life, but even they cannot lift this gloom that has settled upon me. Some days I wander the streets, numbly absorbing the sights and smell of the canals. Other days I sit with Annetta. She has forgiven me, I think, but this tragedy has set her back. For a while, Gussie had hoped to bring her to Padua to see Grisella one more time, but she wasn’t strong enough to make the journey. Now Annetta rocks endlessly as she stares at that last drawing Gussie made of Grisella. We took it away once, but Annetta’s unquenchable tears were even worse.

You say you often visit your mosque. When you are at your prayers, don’t forget Annetta. Don’t forget any of us. On top of our grief, we still live in fear of a steely-eyed Russian showing up at our door.

Perhaps after Christmas I will be ready to return to the stage. It is rumored that a production of Il Gran Tamerlano is to be mounted with all the pomp and splendor the opera deserves. But not in Venice. Maestro Weber found a generous patron at the court of Naples. A castrato fresh from my old conservatory will play the cruel tyrant. I have no regrets. As Gussie so candidly observed, I am completely unsuited for the role. I must find something that fits me better.

Wherever my travels take me, brother, I will never return to Terrafirma in autumn. Perhaps in the spring, when the trees are bursting with feathery green leaves and young buds. Or summer in its flower-strewn glory. Or even winter, with its Alpine blasts and bare tree branches. But never in autumn when the dying earth is shrouded in red and gold. That season now belongs exclusively to Grisella, and I would not for the world intrude on her solitude.

Ever your loving,
Tito

Author’s Note

As a young reader, I cut my teeth on English country house mysteries. From
The Moonstone
of Wilkie Collins to the later versions penned by Agatha Christie and her fellow Golden Age authors, the archetypes of the genre enchanted me. An isolated manor, a body in the library, and a cast of suspicious characters could provide hours of entertainment. The taste never really left me. I think I was curled up on my sofa watching a rented copy of Robert Altman’s
Gosford Park
when it occurred to me that Tito could have his own country house adventure, with a Venetian twist.

Venetian Villas

At its height, the Venetian Empire took in a vast arc of mainland territory that swept from the Po River in the south to the mountains that form a natural barrier between Italy and Slovenia in the northeast. Its people would not have been Venetian if they hadn’t transferred their comfortable way of living to this fertile land, which they called Terrafirma. Villas designed by the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio and his disciples sprang up all over Terrafirma. Serving as both peaceful retreats and working farms, the villas featured classical motifs adapted to residential and agricultural use. Many of the most beautiful still exist and are dotted along the Brenta, a river which was made into a canal between the Venetian lagoon and the city of Padua in the sixteenth century.

While the Villa Dolfini is a fictional structure, it owes parts of its layout to the Villa Rotunda at Vicenza and to the Villa Cornaro. This last is lovingly described by Sally Gable in
Palladian Days
, her account of restoring this sixteenth century home. For an American take on the theme, think of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Our third president was a keen student of architecture whose own house was built according to Palladio’s pleasing, symmetrical designs.

The Opera and Its Backer

Of course, I had to populate my villa and find a reason for Tito and Gussie to visit. An ambitious patroness gathering an opera company fit the bill. In mid-eighteenth-century Venice, the noble class was confined to a few hundred ancient and distinguished families from the so-called Golden Book. Music provided one of the few entrées into their rarified society. Octavia’s character contains undertones of Georgina Weldon, an eccentric, Victorian-era Englishwoman famous for taking up Charles Gounod when the composer of
Faust
was down on his luck. Her biography is entertainingly chronicled in
The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon
by Brian Thompson.

Tamerlano, the Italian name for Timur the Lame who sought to establish a fourteenth-century Mongol empire, had become a popular literary character by Tito’s time. The English playwright Christopher Marlowe used the tyrant as a subject, and a play by Nicolas Pradon served as a basis for several opera libretti. Many composers put Timur’s story to music, the most famous being George Frederick Handel. In the eighteenth century, the borrowing of storyline and characters was not regarded with the same disfavor as it is today. A lovely DVD of the Halle Festival’s production of Handel’s
Tamerlano
directly inspired the descriptions of the musical passages in
The Iron Tongue of Midnight
.

Tourette Syndrome

Since the publication of
Interrupted Aria
, the first novel in the Baroque Mystery series, readers often inquire about Grisella’s condition. Today she would be diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome, a neurological disorder characterized by motor and vocal tics that first manifest during childhood. The most dramatic feature of the disease is the compulsion to voice disturbing words and phrases, not only swear words, but also racial epithets and other socially inappropriate material. A broad range of impulse control difficulties may also be present. The course of the disease waxes and wanes over time, with adults often learning to control their symptoms to a great degree.

The current treatment involves medication and psychotherapy. Grisella’s elixir was compounded of substances available at the time, primarily opiates dissolved in alcohol, to which Grisella became addicted. In its analgesic value, it would have been similar to the more familiar laudanum, an opiate tincture sometimes sweetened with sugar.

Further Reading

I’d also like to direct the interested reader to several excellent histories of Constantinople. I enjoyed getting up to speed on Alessandro’s world, sometimes having to force myself to put the books aside and get back to writing. His Constantinople was a complex society, all the more so for a new convert to Islam. These volumes helped me envision what Alessandro experienced:
Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire
by Caroline Finkel and
Constantinople, City of the World’s Desire
by Philip Mansel.

Readers’ Guides

For the use of teachers, librarians, and book clubs, a Readers’ Guide is available for each of the novels in the Baroque Mystery series. These may be obtained by contacting the author through her website at www.beverlegravesmyers.com.

Acknowledgments

My heartfelt thanks to Joanne Dobson, Kit Ehrman, and my husband, Lawrence, for reading
The Iron Tongue of Midnight
in manuscript and offering wise suggestions. And to everyone who provided technical details about early opera, painting, architecture, or other specific matters: Flavio Ferri Benedetti, Kit Ehrman, Benjamin Hufbauer, Ann Lee, Megan McKinney, Janine Volkmar, Mark Windisch, and Luci Hansson Zahray. As always, the efforts of the staff at the Louisville Free Public Library were invaluable in gathering the materials necessary for the extensive research that made this book possible. Thanks are also due to my agent, Ashley Grayson, for his encouragement and support, and to my editor at Poisoned Pen Press, Barbara Peters, for her patience and attention to detail.

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