City of Masks (25 page)

‘Who calls this Senate?’ asked Rodolfo formally and the clerk read out the names of the twelve citizens, who stood and doffed their hats one by one.

‘What is the cause?’

The first citizen, one Giovanni Ricci, stood back up, coughed, shuffled his feet, and gave a rehearsed speech. ‘With all due respect to the memory of the late Duchessa, Goddess rest her, and to her daughter recently elected in her stead, we wish to raise the issue of the young woman’s birth. We all heard the evidence of Signora Landini, the midwife, that she delivered the Duchessa of a daughter. But is it not the case that the Duchessa of Bellezza must be legitimate?’

Ricci sat down, relieved that his task was over. There was murmuring in the hall. Bellezzans did not want to be deprived of their new Duchessa so soon but they wanted the matter cleared up. Arianna noticed that Rinaldo di Chimici had slipped into a front row seat.

Rodolfo stood to address the Senate; he had a sheaf of papers in his hand.

‘Senators and citizens of Bellezza,’ he began. ‘Signor Ricci is correct. I have consulted the constitution and there is a clause, number 67c, to be precise, that requires the Duchessa to be of legitimate birth, as well as of unblemished record and in good standing with her fellow-Bellezzans.’

There was much loud murmuring from the public.

‘However,’ Rodolfo continued, ‘you will remember that it is also part of Talian law that any ensuing marriage legitimizes the offspring of the two parties. And I have here a document that records the marriage of the late Duchessa, Goddess rest her indeed, to the father of the new Duchessa, Arianna Gasparini.’

The murmurs rose to a roar and di Chimici could be seen passing a message to his spokesman. Ricci rose to his feet, turning his hat nervously in his hands.

‘Senator,’ he began. ‘I am naturally pleased to hear it. But might we know who the father is?’

‘Certainly,’ said Rodolfo. ‘You and the eleven other citizens who called this Senate may peruse the marriage lines, which I shall first pass round to my fellow-Senators. There you will read of the marriage between her Grace, the Duchessa Silvia Isabella Bellini, and myself, Senator Rodolfo Claudio Rossi, which took place on the day of this year’s Marriage with the Sea.’

At this point the Council Hall erupted, but as far as Arianna was concerned there were only two people in it – herself and the man who had just calmly announced to the world that he was her father. Now he was looking straight at her and she felt her colour rising. Leonora took her hand.

‘Why didn’t he tell me he was my father?’ Arianna hissed at her aunt.

‘She didn’t tell him until the night of your election,’ Leonora said. ‘Goodness knows how she persuaded him to marry her in secret when he did, though he would always have done anything for her. I’m sure your mother had her reasons for the timing. But she told him the truth about you only the day before yesterday. I don’t think he’s taken it in yet.’

The Senators had finished with the marriage certificate and Rodolfo now handed it to Signor Ricci. He and his companions made a great show of studying it carefully, but Arianna was sure they wouldn’t know if it were genuine or not. Indeed she doubted if all twelve could read.

Rodolfo gave them a few minutes then said, ‘I also call on Brother Lodovico, who officiated at the ceremony, in the Duchessa’s private chapel, to corroborate the evidence of the document.’

A small brown-robed figure mounted the dais and Arianna remembered that she had seen him the night she had hidden in the Loggia degli Arieti. He was the monk she had seen on one of the wooden walkways high in the roof of the cathedral. He must have performed the marriage between her parents just before the feast, only a short time after Silvia’s other marriage, the one with the sea. But Arianna suddenly remembered that her mother had probably not taken part in that first ceremony. She had probably used a double.

The room was unbearably hot now; the dramatic revelations of the last hour had made the volatile Bellezzans sweat profusely. Arianna felt herself growing dizzy in the heat and the smell. And then she found she could think nothing more.

‘I can’t bear it, David,’ said Lucien’s mother. ‘I think I shall go mad.’

‘I know, I know,’ was all her husband said, holding her tightly and burying his face in her hair.

‘I can’t bear to think of him lying there getting thinner and thinner and wasting away. It was bad enough hearing the cancer had come back,’ said Vicky, ‘but I never thought it would be like this, without any time to say goodbye.’ She thought she had cried all the tears she had in her but still more seemed to come when Lucien’s father said, ‘At least we had that holiday with him in Venice.’

‘In the light of today’s news,’ said Signor Ricci, carried away by being able to speak without notes in the great Council Hall, ‘I hope I may express, on behalf of my fellow-citizens, our sincere condolences to you, Senator, on the death of your wife, as we now know our beloved Duchessa to have been.’

‘Well said,’ echoed round the room, as Arianna came to with the acrid scent of Leonora’s smelling- salts under her nose. She thought she was still not quite conscious when she saw di Chimici spring to his feet and call out, ‘There is another cause!’

Rodolfo said calmly, ‘Ambassador, as an honoured guest of Bellezza, you are of course free to attend our public Senate and most welcome to do so. But I’m sure you realize that cause can only be given by one of our own citizens.’

‘Of course,’ said di Chimici, sitting down. ‘Forgive me. It is just that I heard these citizens discussing the case and I remembered that there were two causes.’ He glared at Ricci, who jumped back up.

‘Oh yes, Senator. I was forgetting in all the excitement over the marriage,’ said the foreman. ‘We are also disturbed by allegations of witchcraft among the new Duchessa’s intimate friends.’

‘Witchcraft?’ said Rodolfo. ‘Can you be more specific?’

‘Magic,’ said Ricci uncomfortably. ‘Consorting with spirits.’

Rodolfo merely raised one eyebrow.

‘She has a friend,’ Ricci ploughed on. ‘A special friend with whom she has spent a lot of time, a young man.’

‘You are referring to my apprentice, Luciano, perhaps?’ said Rodolfo.

‘Yes, indeed, Luciano is the name. We have evidence, incredible as it may seem, that he is not actually, er, how can I put this? Not exactly a mortal being of this world.’

‘What is this evidence?’ asked Rodolfo.

‘Well, with your permission, Senator, we shall bring him forward and demonstrate it.’

There was a new sensation in the hall as Enrico walked up to the front dragging Lucien with him.

‘Luciano!’ cried Arianna at the same time as Ricci said, ‘As you will see, the boy has no shadow.’

‘Are you ready?’ asked Mr Laski.

Lucien’s parents nodded. They were on either side of him, each holding a hand. ‘Goodbye, darling,’ said his mother.

The sun had disappeared behind a cloud for a moment but was coming out again to shine with all its brightness through the tall glass windows of the Council Hall. The windows were behind Lucien and faced west and he knew he would stand revealed as the Stravagante he truly was. Everything had gone horribly wrong. He looked at Arianna and wondered what it would mean for him and her.

At that moment, Rodolfo called, ‘Luciano, catch!’ and threw something towards him; automatically he put out his hands to catch whatever it was but they were still tied together and to Enrico. He muffed the catch and the object fell on the floor.

At that moment the sun came out fully and shone through the window and Lucien saw what he had never seen in Talia before – his shadow stretched out on the floor in front of him. He felt a new kind of solidity and before he had time to realize what it meant, he saw that Leonora had just beaten di Chimici to picking up the thing that Rodolfo had thrown, which she pocketed, and then he heard that the whole Council Hall was filled with laughter.

‘There seems to be no absence of shadow to observe,’ said Rodolfo, though he was keeping his voice steady only by a great effort of will. ‘If there are no further causes, I declare this People’s Senate closed.’

The doctor closed Lucien’s eyes.

Chapter 21

The Man in Black

Lucien was in a state of shock. Enrico had quickly untied him and then disappeared. Leonora took Lucien back to her house, with Arianna dancing anxiously round them. She took him into her elegant little sitting-room with its spindly chairs and rang the bell for wine. Before it was brought, Silvia had joined them and Rodolfo was shown in minutes afterwards.

He took Lucien’s pulse as the boy lay on a little red velvet sofa.

‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Are you all right?’

Lucien nodded. He was numb and Leonora had to force some wine between his lips. The red liquid was like a blood transfusion, giving him the strength to speak.

‘Di Chimici’s man, the one in the blue cloak, took me from the Piazza the night of the election,’ he said. ‘He tied me up and threatened me and locked me in a room. I was blindfolded at first, when he brought someone to see me, but I’m sure it was the Ambassador. They took all my things.’ His voice broke. ‘They took the book – I couldn’t stop them.’

He drank some more wine, to steady himself.

‘Perhaps they don’t know what it does?’ said Arianna.

Lucien shook his head. ‘They know all right. It’s only a matter of time till they work out how to use it.’ He turned to Rodolfo. ‘I’ve failed you, master.’

Everything was bleak; the di Chimici would stravagate and the whole rotten business of plundering the twenty-first century would begin. There was nothing anyone could do to stop it. And beyond these grim thoughts lay a terror that Lucien could not even contemplate yet.

‘No,’ said Rodolfo, his face full of pain. ‘It is I who have failed you. I could not find you in time to send you back home and now it is too late.’

The room was very quiet.

‘Just what did happen at the People’s Senate?’ asked Silvia.

‘Di Chimici had trumped up a second cause,’ said Rodolfo. ‘To investigate Arianna for witchcraft, on the grounds that she had a familiar demon – our friend Luciano. Di Chimici’s mouthpiece claimed that the boy had no shadow.’

Silvia gasped. ‘So he is revealed as a Stravagante from the other world?’

The shutters were closed in Leonora’s sitting-room, to stop the sun from fading the upholstery. Rodolfo strode over to the window and flung them open.

‘That is no longer what he is,’ he said. ‘See, he is as solid as you or me.’

Lucien stood up and walked to the window; his black shadow streamed out on the tiled floor behind him. ‘I can’t go back, can I?’ he said.

Rodolfo put an arm round the boy’s shoulders. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You are a Bellezzan now, by night and by day. Your life in the other world is over. It is a bitter ending and I shall never forgive myself for it.’

Lucien blinked hard to keep back the tears. This was it then; he was dead.

A part of him was horrified at the realization. But slowly another part was telling him that he was at least still alive in Bellezza. He knew that the cancer would have killed him if he’d stayed in his world, and that he had been given a second chance that most people would kill for. He had to lock his feelings about his old life and his parents away until it was safe to take them out and look at them.

But there was a more immediate problem to deal with now – the fact that the di Chimici had an important key to the science of stravagation.

‘But the book, master,’ he said. ‘Can we steal it back?’

‘No need,’ said Rodolfo, with a rueful smile. ‘I think Leonora has it.’

Astonished, Lucien saw Leonora produce from her petticoat pocket what was indisputably his book, his talisman to the other world.

‘But how? Di Chimici’s spy took it out of my pocket the night they captured me,’ he said.

‘No,’ said Rodolfo. ‘They took the substitute book that I made for you shortly after the Feast of the Maddalena. It was then that I realized how much danger you were in. You remember that since then I have been asking you to come back to the laboratory before stravagating home. I would make the necessary substitution again before you left.’

‘But why?’ asked Lucien. ‘And how?’

‘I was sure they were going to try to capture you and take it from you,’ said Rodolfo. ‘It wasn’t hard. I got another book from Egidio and marked it and soaked it to make it look like yours. I wrote in it in your hand the notes you had put in it, even though I didn’t understand them all. It was an exact replica.’

‘It certainly fooled me,’ said Lucien bitterly.

‘I was wrong,’ said Rodolfo. ‘I should have told you what I’d done. But I didn’t want to frighten you. And Luciano,’ he added softly, ‘the outcome would have been the same. The di Chimici kept you prisoner for too long. It was only if I could have found you that I could have helped you home.’

Everyone was looking at Lucien and the sympathy in their eyes was more than he could bear. ‘You’re right,’ he said roughly. ‘Even if I hadn’t been kidnapped, I was going to die in my world anyway. But I can’t bear it that I didn’t say goodbye to my parents.’

‘I know,’ said Rodolfo, ‘I’m going to try to put that right. But there is just one thing I have to do first. Leonora, may I have a few words with Arianna in private?’

Arianna followed Rodolfo into the little garden as if she were sleepwalking. For some minutes now she had stopped understanding what was happening around her. Her mind was just too overloaded with momentous information to take in any more. She remembered that she was angry with Rodolfo, but even that seemed to be about something that had happened long ago and that she was looking at from far away. She wondered if she were going to faint again.

Rodolfo looked old and grey-faced, as if he were burdened with some terrible tragedy. She didn’t know what to say to him. But he saved her the trouble.

‘I know that you are hurt by what Silvia has done,’ he began. ‘And by what I did in the Senate just now. We both thought that your genuine surprise about your parentage would convince the people that we had been successful in concealing the facts from everyone, yourself included. Otherwise they might not have believed our story. I could not let them know that I had found out about your existence only a few days ago and about my part in it even later.’

He paused. Arianna struggled to understand.

‘You really never knew that the Duchessa had a child?’

Rodolfo shook his head. ‘If I had known, do you think I should have let her get away with this mad plan? That I should have let her rob me of my child? No, I should have taken you myself and hidden with you in some far-off land and never seen her again rather than agree to such an unnatural scheme.’

Arianna felt a rush of warmth towards him.

‘I have upbraided her for the lies and for the uncertainty in which she left me for days,’ he continued, shaking his head. ‘I should not wish to live through such days as those again. But in the end I must accept that she was acting in accordance with what she thought was right. But never think that you were not wanted, my daughter.’

He took both of her hands in his and kissed her gently on the forehead. ‘And now we must go back to my palazzo, without the time to talk about this as we should. As a result of my distraction and ill-judgement there are even greater wrongs that have to be addressed. But I trust there will be time enough in the future to talk together and for me to piece together the years of your life that I have lost.’

*

William Dethridge knew straightaway that something was different about Lucien.

‘Ah, well met, yonge mann!’ he cried as soon as they all got back to the laboratory, but then, with a piercing look, ‘Thou art translated and bicome as I am.’

After that he said nothing, but held the boy in his arms for a long time and then went to sit in a dark corner.

‘You know that Maestro Crinamorte opened a window on to your world?’ Rodolfo asked Lucien, using Dethridge’s new Talian name.

‘Yes,’ said Lucien, wondering whether he would now have a new name too. He felt as vulnerable as an unbaptized baby.

‘We have seen something in it which would upset you,’ said Rodolfo. ‘But I shall need to look again. Are you willing to look with me?’

Lucien nodded. He couldn’t trust himself to speak. Rodolfo drew back the silver curtain. It was weird for Lucien to see his own bedroom – it would have been weird at any time. But now that he knew he was never going back there, it was almost unbearable. As he watched, Lucien saw his mother appear in the glass. He was shocked; she looked so much older than he remembered her, yet surely not much time had passed in his world since he last saw her?

She was thin and haggard. Perhaps it was more noticeable because she was wearing a black dress Lucien had never seen before. In the mirror she knelt on his bed and reached up to the silver Venetian mask and unhooked it from the wall.

‘Can you understand what you are seeing?’ asked Rodolfo. ‘What does it mean?’

Lucien nodded. ‘She only wears black to funerals, though that’s a new dress. I can only guess about the mask. They gave it to me in Venice.’

Rodolfo looked at him seriously. ‘Then I must go straightaway.’

He had not stravagated in all the time Lucien had been visiting Talia. ‘It is early evening here,’ he said. ‘So it must be early morning in your world. Your mother is up earlier than usual, perhaps because she cannot sleep. Tell me your address so that I can find the house. You said it was near the school in Barnsbury. Maestro, come with us if you will.’

Lucien told him the address and the three Stravaganti went into an inner chamber, where Rodolfo slept. He took from a chain round his neck a silver ring, which he slipped on his finger. ‘This is my talisman, Lucien,’ he said, ‘Doctor Dethridge gave it to me. Will you both watch by me while I’m away?’

And, waiting for nothing more, he slipped into unconsciousness.

The duty priest at the cemetery blenched when he first saw the dates of the person he must officiate over that Thursday. He hated burying young people. It was not just the tragic unnaturalness of it and the distraught parents; any priest might have to cope with that from time to time in his ministry. It was all the other young people who came to the funerals. Some in black from head to foot, even if they’d not been close friends, others trying to wear something cheerful under the impression that it was what the deceased would have wanted.

The girls were always in floods of tears and the boys not much better. And he would have to preach a sermon that would leave them all with some hope to cling on to, even the atheists and agnostics who would be the majority.

The parents, for example, who had been to see him. They had said they were not churchgoers. ‘Even if I had been, I wouldn’t go now,’ the father had said rudely. ‘I know there’s no God after what’s happened to Lucien.’

‘Hush, David,’ the wife had said, but she too had asked if the ceremony could be ‘non-religious’.

‘Well, you don’t have to have prayers or hymns,’ the priest had said as gently as he could, making allowances for their grief. ‘You can have poems or other readings of your choice and the music you think appropriate for your son. But can I just suggest you read through the funeral service in the Book of Common Prayer? It does contain some very fine passages and some people find them comforting, even if they are not believers.’

In the end they had opted for the whole 1662 service, with two hymns, ‘Come Down Thou Love Divine’ and ‘Jerusalem’. The mother had chosen all the other music and asked for one of her son’s friends to read a poem and then, hesitantly, said that they would appreciate it if his sermon recognized they were not believers.