The Black Opera (19 page)

“Say I have—” He jabbed a finger at her. The aggressiveness of the gesture clearly startled her.

Conrad immediately sat down on the couch beside her, giving up the
advantage of height, and trying to make himself seem more approachable.

The girl's been here five minutes and I'm already subjecting her to the ‘asking a question in the Royal Society' Conrad Scalese. How about Conrad-the-brother? I doubt she's been spending her time lately reading the history of the heretical American Mr Franklin.

“Say it was a miracle,” Conrad went on, more conciliatory. “What does that mean?”

Isaura watched him carefully, as if he might be an escaped patient from a lunatic asylum. “People usually say that means God did it.”

“God did it.” Dear God
.

Conrad stopped himself from laughing at his own thoughts, since that wasn't less likely to make him seem a lunatic.

“All right, but what does that mean? What are the phenomena Men call God?” Conrad nested his fist in his palm, tapping the one against the other. “How does miraculous lightning differ from normal lightning? Or are they both God's, and God just performs one at random, and aims one for a miracle?”

Isaura's eyes were even wider, if possible. “Mother blames you for me not being devout, you know. At least, she said that whenever she was furious with me. That's why I was in the convent school for three months. Do you really think it wasn't a miracle?”

“I think it was a bolt of lightning.” Conrad took her hand, and was relieved that she allowed it. “Look at how often God strikes down his own places of worship. Even St Mark's in Venice, with their bells consecrated to ward off the artillery of heaven and the ‘powers of the air'—until the Church authorities finally decided that Mr Franklin's ‘iron points' weren't irreligious, and fitted them. And after that, coincidentally enough, lightning's been harmlessly conducted to the earth.”

Conrad stopped, and glared at her. He demanded, “What are you laughing at?”

“You still lecture.” Her smile grew, and she looked teary-eyed. “Just like you did when you were thirteen, and I was tiny—it's the first thing I remember about my big brother.”

Tullio, who appeared to have given up cleaning away the tea things entirely, remarked, “Weren't you sweet, padrone…”

“Out on the street, Rossi. Without a penny. I'll even take your shoes.”

Isaura looked uncertain at that, but grinned a moment or two after Tullio did.

“In any case, the Teatro Nuovo didn't have a lightning-conductor,” Conrad finished. “Though I suspect that has very little to do with the ‘heresy' of Franklin's iron points. It's more likely to be the opera board too stingy to pay out.”

His sister smiled. It was not difficult to remember the doe-eyed three year old wandering fascinated after her big brother—showing a flawless ability to pass any adult blame on to him, too.

“Three months in a convent school?” he added.

“They didn't expel me!” Paolo protested immediately. “They
asked
Mother to withdraw me.”

By the care with which she inflected “asked,” Conrad suspected “begged” would be the better word.

He felt a constriction in his throat.
I've missed so much of her life. Which appears to have been remarkable, so far.

“Do you have lodgings?” he wondered aloud.

She shook her head.

“You'll stay here,” he said, at the same moment that Tullio went over to set up the Chinese screen in front of the other, elderly couch; and make a day-bed for his master.

“If I may…?” Her eyes were momentarily bright as she nodded.

Conrad put his arm around her shoulder, where she sat beside him, and gave her a careful hug. “I know lodging with an atheist might be a social handicap, but at least you needn't worry about being caught in your shirt of a morning…”

“I don't think
I'm
an atheist.” Isaura surveyed him. “If you listen to rumour, the Conservatoire is a hotbed of revolutionary science and heresy—which isn't quite true, we mostly talk about, well, music. Possibly I'm a freethinker.”

Conrad restrained himself from slapping his own forehead. “What do you think an atheist
is!”

“Judging by my big brother—a heretic who'd like to burn down every church in Italy?”

Conrad ignored Tullio's mutter of, “Not
every
church…”

“Just most of them?” She grinned. “Are you sure you're not more of an anti-theist than an atheist?”

“When I throw Rossi out,
you
can carry his bags…”

Conrad caught the slide of her gaze as she eyed Tullio Rossi.

Tullio had his arms folded, and was shaking his head.

“Heretics,” he muttered. “First one, and now another one, worse than the other one! We're all going to burn…”

“You first,” Conrad invited, and watched Tullio's morose expression be succeeded by a broad smile.

After a moment, Isaura's oddly worried look lightened, and she smiled at Tullio.

Conrad let himself ruffle her hair, surprised to find himself disturbed at how short she had cut it.
Conventions have power
.

“I suppose,” he said thoughtfully, “I should have realised. If you're happy to disguise yourself as a man and work in man's clothes, you're not going to be too worried about other social conventions.”

She shook her hair back into place with a boy's gesture. “Still thinking, remember? Means I look at things one by one.”

Tullio, having finished with the day-bed, paused with the clean linen he was taking through to the bedroom. “I've seen miracles, though. Seen it on campaign. Men in the surgeon's tent lived who shouldn't have, because a priest came round, or a hedge-witch.”

Paolo-Isaura visibly hovered between treating Tullio Rossi as a servant or her brother's friend, and enthusiastically settled on the latter. “Someone they
believed
could help them.—And how do you know these wounded ‘shouldn't have' lived? A different doctor might have given a different opinion—”

“—Because I know what happens to a man when his guts are laying outside his belly and covered in mud—”

Perhaps by association, Conrad noticed that his wounds had opened again, where the steel had chafed his wrists. Enough to make blood stain his shirt. Since Tullio looked fully engaged with Isaura's argument, he left both of them alone and eased off his coat, and set himself to washing the wounds and gathering bandages. His attention didn't return until, he realised, voices had risen to a steely loud pitch. He looked up from trying to fasten a bandage around his wrist, to see Isaura leaning on her hands on the table, glaring across at a Tullio Rossi who had one boot up on the neighbouring chair, a bundle of sheets balanced on his knee.

“—And I've seen a man with his eye knocked into his skull recover and see again—!”

“—You can try to put me off with gruesome examples as much as you like, Signore Rossi, but these things have to be
examined
—”

Conrad slammed his hand flat on the table. It made his sore wrist ache, but produced a loud enough sound that both shut up and turned their heads to stare at him.

“Yes. Consider the Returned Dead. Spectres. Ghosts, and other hauntings. Not miracles, but so far inexplicable,” Conrad said to Isaura. He added, “Tullio, you also know damn well that men died who shouldn't have. Whatever a miracle is, not everybody gets one.”

Both of them subsided—Tullio with a look as though he had just recalled he was arguing, unrestrainedly, with his master's sister.

Conrad studied Isaura, and saw no similar realisation that she had been arguing with a servant as if he were a gentleman.

Because Tullio's closer to being my brother than my servant? Or she could be a
social heretic as well as a religious one, and still be sticking to the principles of the Enlightenment
.

As if I didn't have enough trouble!

He smiled, nonetheless.

Tullio Rossi dumped the linens and came round the table and took Conrad's right wrist, tutting at the clumsy attempt at a bandage, and picking up a new strip of old sheet to try again.

It took Conrad a moment to realise that his left hand was gripped as well, and that Paolo was cleaning the minor wound with a damp cloth and frowning concentration.

“You can't expect to hide a whole opera production…” she observed absently.

“Misdirection is the intended route, rather than trying to conceal us. I'm also given to understand we have our own watchers, spies, secret police, and so on.” Fear made a reappearance in the pit of his stomach. “I really ought to send you home.”

Paolo ignored the addition as if he hadn't voiced it. She tied the bandage off neatly.

“I'm in!”

Gianpaolo-Isaura proved her worth as a secretary within two hours of the following morning: she streamlined the copying of Ferdinand's letters and handled the start of auditions from outside the city with enviable speed and skill. And all the contract negotiations. Conrad, who had thought he might have to spend a few days instructing her, realised by lunch-time that she was not only handling correspondence and interviews, but keeping the accounts as well.

“Thanks,” Tullio observed, as the three of them ate pasta bought further down the street. “It usually takes me weeks to convince the padrone that he's superfluous; you've done it in a morning.”

Conrad, impelled to a fraternal defence, warned, “Tullio—”

And realised that Gianpaolo's response had been to stick out her tongue at the ex-soldier.

She followed that with a cheerful résumé of those gestures she had learned in Napoli's streets, demonstrating both her attention to detail and phenomenal memory.

“The padrone isn't useless,” she retorted, twirling pasta on her fork. “That's why he shouldn't be wasting time handling the contract-work when he should be
writing a libretto!”

“You know,” Conrad said, pressingly aware of his lack of even a subplot, “you're right.”

Isaura and Tullio mugged surprise at him with a remarkably similar humour.

“Of course you'd both join together to bait me,” Conrad observed, amused. “I realise I have
lackeys
, now. It's traditional to harass the master.”

Isaura-Paolo poked his shoulder with a stiff forefinger. “Then I suggest the master gets to work…”

Conrad duly sat and meditated an hour or so, knowing better than to prod his brain for an idea, but letting his thoughts wander where they might—hoping for something to emerge from the fog, as it always inexplicably did. Isaura went down to meet a ship from Marseilles, supposedly carrying the Corsican castrato Armando Annicchiarico. And a messenger arrived not long before the siesta, carrying an envelope closed with the royal seal.

Conrad tipped him, broke the wax, and pulled out a sheaf of papers.

“Not more reading,” Tullio muttered, from where he sprawled in front of windows in which the glass had been replaced.

“Salvatore Cammarano's notes for the first counter-opera. His libretto got burned, apparently…” Conrad was unaware of anything for the next half-hour. When a ceramic edge nudged his hand, he took a mug of wine from Tullio. It didn't improve what he read. “It's as bad as the King said it was. We do have to start from the ground up. I don't know what Cammarano was thinking…”

“Maybe,” Tullio sounded cynical, “that these Prince's Men would break his knee-caps, if he turned in something decent?”

“Or that his final drafts are much better than his first?” Conrad pushed his chair back and stood up. “If anyone calls for me, take a message, will you? I'm going down to the Palace library.”

“Do this, do that, take a message.” Tullio's grumbling held a badly-disguised tone of amusement. “It may not be really hot yet, but you know what? I'm taking a nap, padrone. Wake me up when the next catastrophe happens.”