Hidden Voices (8 page)

“You promised not to tell,” wails Margaretta.

“Where did you get the honey?” I ask Catina.

“From Cook for when I have a coughing fit.”

She turns to Father. “The stories were indeed very scary, Signore.” She puffs up proudly. “My best tales yet, I do assure you.”

“Well, there will be no such tales tonight,” he cautions her with gentle brusqueness. “You need your rest as much or more than anyone, and I need helpers who are wide awake.

“Indeed,” he says again, while looking deep into her oval eyes, transparent as glass, as if to find an answer for them both. “We must protect each other, you and I.”

I
T HAS BEEN DAYS
since Luisa was sent to the infirmary, and her absence from my life causes that same bereft feeling as when something valuable has been lost and no one will help you look for it. There is but little news about those taken sick, and certain of the younger girls, afflicted before Luisa, have not yet returned.

The older girls among the
privilegiate del coro,
except for Luisa and Maria, have remained well and are relieved to have a chance at solo parts that would in normal times not have come to them. They must, of course, know how poorly they perform if one allows comparisons. I think the audiences, too, must be quite disappointed, although when I have put forth such sentiments, Rosalba and Anna Maria have roundly disagreed with me.

“Your judgment has been colored by your great affection for Luisa,” said Rosalba when I complained after the last concert about the unevenness of vocal tone.

“Truly,” added Silvia, “it is a relief to be spared Luisa’s ragged diction and deliberate phrasing.”

“As if you’d know the remedy for either one,” I countered, and with great restraint did not repeat what is very well known — that Silvia has at least one ear made of tin.

One night when sleep will not come and I am desperate for news of Luisa, I slip quietly from our chamber and creep up a flight of stairs and into the corridor leading to the hospital door, passing no one on the way. It is very late, but there will surely be a night nurse in attendance, perhaps one who is more forthcoming with information than those I have encountered during the day.

Candles burn within sconces on either side of the double doors, casting their light all the way to the stairs. Afraid to learn what is inside, I stand in front of the doors for a very long time, even reluctant to touch the knob or knock. When I do knock softly, there is no response, so I rap a little harder. At no response again, I rap harder still. The door suddenly springs open, and I lurch with ready knuckles into the same surly nurse who sent me away during the day. The stench of puke, fevered bodies, and strange medicinals makes me stagger.

“Not you again,” she says, holding me from her. “Such a big oaf of a girl,” she declares. “What business can you possibly have here in the dead of night?” She slaps a hand against my head. “Not sick yourself, are you?”

“I’ve come to find out about Luisa Benedetto. How is she faring? When will she be released? Will she be well in time for Carnival?”

“You shouldn’t be in here at all,” she says, grabbing my arm and shoving me back through the door until I lose my balance and must hang upon her like a giant leech.

“For heaven’s sake! Get off me, girl,” she says, shaking me from her.

“But I must be told something,” I wail. “I am sick with worry.”

“As you should be,” she says, softening enough to let me regain my balance at least. “Her fever is still climbing. This peculiar malady makes the older girls much sicker than the young ones.”

“What of Maria?”

“The young lady who was to be married?”

“Yes, that’s the one.”

She pauses such a long time, it’s almost as if she wants to tell me something with the words that are unspoken. Finally, she looks directly in my eyes and says, “I have no news for you on that one. Please leave now. You shouldn’t ask about these things.”

My heart thumps into my stomach. But it’s clear she will not divulge a bit of information about Maria, even as I feel certain I sense the truth.

“You don’t understand. I must at least be told about Luisa. Luisa is my dearest friend. If you would let me, I could care for her. I’d help you with the others, too. I have proven myself very useful in the nursery.”

“The best that you can do for her is stay away. Go toot upon your horn or whatever it is you are good at. You are not needed here.”

In a sudden frenzy, she pushes me with all the strength in her bulbous shoulders and two rough hands and slams the door behind me.

I’m much too wide awake and worried to return to sleep, but there is nowhere else to go but to my bed, the blankets now as cold as wash upon a line in winter. The other girls sleep deeply, so tired out from last night’s rehearsal that they have not heard me leave or return. Luisa’s chamber pot is empty, her bed undisturbed. Just before dawn, I climb beneath her flannel coverlet, which contains her skin’s sweet peppery scent. I tuck it securely around me, pull it up over my face, breathe deeply, and am able at last to doze.

E
VERYTHING IS SNAPPING INTO VIEW
after what seemed like days of fuzzy dreams and floating voices. How long have my eyes been wide open this way? There are many more beds than when I arrived, and nurses are squeezing between them to tend to moaning and feverish patients.

“You’re awake at last, I see,” says a large nurse, whom I’ve heard called Sofia, on her way to another patient with a compress of some kind. When she uncovers the girl’s chest, it is bright pink. I look down at my own to see the same color spreading over my trunk and onto my arms like a cascade of tiny strawberries. Another nurse puts a hand to my forehead and smiles, exposing a number of missing and broken teeth.

“Your fever’s down, praise God,
bambina,
” she says, the words whistling softly over me. “You have much
buona fortuna.
”

“What day is it?” I ask. My words sputter out the rough track of my throat, which is still unbelievably sore.

“Why, it’s Friday at last. The end of another terrible week!” She clasps one hand with another. “Of course you wouldn’t know about it. You’ve slept it away.”

“The concert,” I say, but can’t finish the thought.

“No need to be thinking of that. While you’ve been here, more than one concert has gone on as planned with the girls who are well. Except for you and one other, it’s only the youngest ones who’ve taken sick.”

“Has my mother been told? Does she know where I am?”

She looks at me strangely, winks at another nurse, then touches my forehead again.

“The delirium should be long past. What’s this talk of a mother?”

“My mother. Sabina Dolores Cincotta,” I tell her as loudly and deliberately as my voice will allow. “She must be told I am sick.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying. This is an orphanage. All the patients are orphans.”

How can I convince her? I am so weak that I burst into tears.

“Signora Mandano knows my beautiful mother. She must find her and tell her,” I repeat. “My mother needs to know I have been ill.”

“There, there, Signorina. Don’t excite yourself. Didn’t we all have a mother once?”

“My father is a duke. His name is in the Golden Book.”

“But of course. Every duke worth his salt leaves a bastard or two at our door.”

“You must send a message. She lives near the Rialto Bridge on Calle del Carbon. It isn’t very far.”

“Yes, my darling,” she says, pulling the blanket up to my chin. From the brusque way she does it, I can tell she has no plans at all to do as I ask and thinks that the fever has taken hold again. Though I’m too exhausted to even lift my head, when another nurse passes between the beds by the window, I call out to her.

“Please, Signora. Will someone please make sure my mother is told I have this
malattia
?”

Her smile is as vacant as that of Sofia. “Of course,
bambina. Immediatamente.
”

If only I could scream or lift my body somehow from this narrow bed. If I could just jump up and run or fly. If I could even sing, it might make them listen and be convinced that I’m not afflicted in the head.

Instead I sink back onto my cot and slip into sleep once again, waking only when I’m propped on a nurse’s arm and a spoon is thrust between my teeth or when there is some commotion in the room. Once, late at night, I wakened for a time to stare blind-eyed at the greenish shadows and shapes, which, as I watched, became a child being wrapped in linen, head to toe, and taken from the room on a litter. The silent, solemn movements made me certain that she would not be returning to this life, and I lay awake for a long time afterward, terribly saddened yet very aware of my own body’s juices and rhythms building again, struggling to assert themselves.

Days, I believe, pass in sleeping and waking. Finally it seems I am waking for much longer periods, eager to drink the potions and other beverages offered to me, even taking small bites of the millet porridge I would ordinarily shun. There are fewer beds in the room, and some are empty. No patient is groaning or seems to be in a crisis. My skin itches, and long strips of it are peeling from my hands and feet.

“Don’t worry,” says Sofia. “That is the last stage of this strange canker rash. It means you are surely on the mend.”

I would like to tell her that it feels as if I am breaking into little pieces instead, but I know she will not understand.

The door opens suddenly, and a nurse I don’t remember seeing before fills the opening. She cradles a small figure whose hair drapes from her limp head like a damp yellow kerchief. The child’s eyes are closed, but she wheezes and gasps in her fevered sleep. As she passes my bed, I look at the troubled features and am startled to find that I know this patient, that it is Catina, the confident little girl who did her best many days ago to
console me in the infirmary. How wrong she had been then about this throat disorder. How very sad that such a frail child is now its victim, for many stronger than she have succumbed to its fearful hold. That I have escaped death is perhaps a miracle. When I am no longer so terribly weak, I must study why I have been spared and what it can mean.

I
HAVE BEEN VERY GOOD,
showing up for almost every rehearsal and trying hard not to anger Maestro Gasparini or Father Vivaldi by not being prepared. It has been most difficult without Luisa and Maria. I myself have had to sing the contralto solo on more than one occasion, and now that Father is planning a grand biblical performance of his first oratorio,
Moyses Deus Pharaonis,
I simply don’t know how he will fill all the difficult roles.

Today we were told that Maria has left us, and not for a husband. She has, in truth, left this world entirely in the throes of the terrible illness that has claimed some of the younger girls. I did not know her well, so it is not a great personal loss, but there is always deep sadness on hearing that someone has died whose life had not really begun.

Apparently Luisa is improving, praise God, but they say it will be a long recuperation. There is even talk of sending her to the country in the spring to the same Tuscan farm where other students have gone to recuperate after illnesses not nearly as severe.