The Black Opera (26 page)

Buried under the mask of a respectable woman.

Vaguely conscious of King Ferdinand at his elbow, Conrad said, “I'm sorry, sir.”

“Conrad—”

He made a stunned attempt at social necessities. “I didn't know you'd found us a soprano!”

Five years ago, six this spring. She was a whirlwind, a hurricane, a woman who could not be withstood when she made her entrance into any impresario's drawing-room, demanding that they hire her out to La Fenice, La Scala, or the Teatro San Carlo. Not as
prima donna
, admittedly. When he met her singing in La Fenice, she had a tiny role as Inez, the maid to the Queen of Spain. She made up for this lack of lines by her voice. As a superb dramatic coloratura soprano, she could rivet the whole house's attention with forty seconds of un-earthly sound, announcing her lady's death, or introducing the villain to the heroine, or rebuking a wicked poisoner… Not only impresarios and aristocrats and bourgeois society began to speak of her, but audiences did.

I fell hard in love; was amazed beyond words when she returned it
—

One year and one season in Venice later, after fourteen months, just before Lent, during an opera he cannot now listen to if any house revives it—

“—You disappeared!” Conrad barely noticed how hoarse his voice sounded. “I went everywhere. Genoa, Milan, Padua—Paris and Dresden and Vienna. No one had heard anything of you—Where have you been!”

Ridiculously, all he can think is that age has not touched her in the years since he's seen her.

As his eyes adjusted to the sunlight, though, he saw violet smudges dark under
her eyes, and at her temples—saw that she leans back on the couch with the acceptance of an invalid. If she's held on to her youth, she has not managed to disguise the fact that illness has touched her.

It doesn't matter
.

Seeing her beauty, unchanged except by the lines of sickness and a certain tiredness, he wondered if perhaps Italy, France, and the German kingdoms were not enough—if he should have pursued a forlorn hope to St Petersburg; if she picked up this weary coldness there.

A rush of protectiveness overwhelmed him: he found himself desiring to wrap her up in his greatcoat and demand a carriage, so that he might take her somewhere without her foot ever touching the ground, and there look after her until she is well again.

“Nora…” Conrad repeated tenderly.

A hand closed over his shoulder, powerful fingers digging painfully into his deltoid muscle.

Conrad was too surprised to resist as the hand dragged him to one side.

He choked on inarticulate rage as he discovered it was Roberto who had physically removed him. Wrenching himself free, he stepped forward between the Count and Leonora, shooting a fiercely protective glance.

Leonora sat up on the couch. Gold caught the light on her finger as she moved her hand. He had not seen it before: he saw it now.

A ring.

“You will have to forgive me—”

Nothing could be colder or less in need of pardon than the Conte di Argente's tone as he brushed past Conrad to the couch, and sat down on the edge, taking the woman's hands between his own, not looking at anything but her face.

“—My wife no longer sings.”

“I
perceive, also,” Roberto Conte di Argente stated without the possibility of contradiction, “that my wife is unwell.”

“Of course,” the King murmured, ringing a small bell beside him. As an aide appeared, he ordered, “See the lady to her coach, and accompany her home—Count, I will require you for further business.”

The next few minutes passed in a confusion which Conrad did not attempt to follow. Leonora's white face turned away from him, and her husband's hands put her furred cloak around her shoulders, his square body shutting out the view of her.

I thought I'd forgotten—got over it—accepted that I would never find her
—

“…Gentlemen?”

Conrad became aware someone was speaking to him.

The King, he realised belatedly. He met amiable blue eyes turned cold.

“I know both of you are aware of how crucial this opera is,” Ferdinand said. “Either you put any personal difficulties you have aside, or else I will have to ask one of you to step down. Now.”

His tone was stern rather than furious, but Conrad had by now enough knowledge of Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily to hear the unspoken
Damn them for this!
There isn't
time
.

The Count di Argente looked grim. “Our business takes precedence over anything else. Obviously.”

I have a hundred—a
thousand
—questions to ask—!

Before his mouth could get him into difficulties, Conrad said, “This won't affect the opera,” and shut it.

He made his bow and let the servants show him out.

He said no more to Tullio than, “I've
found
her!”

Tullio elicited the relevant facts with half a dozen incisive questions, and finished with one of his own. “You haven't seen her now for five—nearly six—years—You sure it's her?”

“She hasn't changed.”

Isaura had sat silently listening, evidently picking up the context of her brother's feral excitement. At Conrad's last assertion, she snorted. “If it's been five years,
any
woman has changed! This Leonora of yours will be nearly thirty…”

Conrad felt brief amusement at Isaura's tone, which clearly held thirty to be the next best thing to a hag. “She doesn't look a day older than when I met her…”

His memories of Venice ought to be rubbed featureless, given how often he'd examined them, but they remained clear. Nora's face is one of the most definite. Below him, her hair spread out all over the pillow. On-stage, lit only by the candles on the musicians' stands, singing her two lines in the moonlit Lion's Court of Alhambra in Act Two.

War and its disastrous, pointless fighting have been and gone since then; something jerks in his chest at that memory. It should leave deeper scars. But his nightmares about that time in his life never undo him as completely as his dreams that he is left by her—again and again. Or else he finds her. And then wakes up, alone.

Separating out the year and more that they lived together—in the apartment room near the Accademia's colony of feral cats—from the dreams, is less than easy.

Conrad didn't sleep during the night.

The reality of Leonora's existence stunned him into a permanent wakefulness. That, he realised, and a growing dread of going back to the secret museum in the morning, and attempting to pick up work where he and—her
husband?
—had stopped.

Two carnivals passed in Venice while he was in that city. The first saw him have to put a mask on, to have the nerve to approach the young singer—the
commedia
Plague Doctor's grotesque bird beak, since that was the only mask left that he could afford.

She laughed at me—without any unkindness. And it was that which made me see her as human and approachable.

A year later, they made an arrangement to meet in front of St Mark's Basilica on the hour—a strong wind from the south-east had whipped up the water on the Lido, the sea backed up, and the paving stones of the Square were flooded in part. Conrad picked his way through the waters, buffeted by Carnival crowds around the Campanile, arrived precisely as the bells rang—and she was not there.

He never saw her in Venice again.

Nor in any other town he searched.

From that Tuesday in that February until today—yesterday
—

No matter how he turned on the day-bed, or mashed his pillows, he was still left staring into the darkness, open-eyed.

All that surprised him about
that
was that he did not particularly feel it the following morning.

He made his way through the maze of Palace rooms early enough that the footmen and guards were still yawning. He put his key into the door of the secret museum, opened it, and stepped through.

The lemon-coloured light from the eastern windows outlined the solid shape of the Conte di Argente, standing gazing across the Bay. One possessive hand rested on the upright piano. Conrad hesitated, and the bearded man turned to face him.

The numerous man-beasts, fornications, and phalluses blurred in Conrad's sight.

He couldn't help but tell over the other man's name and titles, like rosary beads. Roberto Capiraso. Conte di Argente.
And—Leonora, Contessa di Argente?

Conrad saw the Count inhale, his fists clenching, nails evidently digging into his palms. He turned.

“Scalese—just what is your interest in my wife?”

The possessive tone raked claws of irritation up Conrad's back. Anger freed his tongue when, Conrad realised, it probably shouldn't have done. “She must have
told
you what I—You owe
me
an explanation!”

“I owe you nothing, you little upstart!”

“I think you do.” Conrad took several paces forward, between cupboards and desk, until he reached the piano and the window, letting his inch or two of greater height intimidate the heavier man in that crowded space.

Il Conte did not look intimidated.

Roberto Capiraso shot a look from pitch-dark eyes. “Yes, you met her in Venice. She remembers you. Whatever fantasy you may have woven around a woman you clearly never knew at all—is irrelevant. Leonora D'Arienzo became betrothed to me in Venice, married me, and has been my wife since that day to this!”

The avalanche of his words threatened to leave Conrad speechless. Half-blind with anger, he forced out, “She was my wife in all but name for over one whole year—”

“And she is my wife by the blessed sacrament of marriage!”

It cut off his breath—cut off, Conrad discovered, anything more he could say.

“We have work, here,” Roberto Capiraso emphasised. “This is the last discussion I will entertain on my personal life, is that clear, Scalese? You will show my wife the respect owed to the Contessa di Argente by one who is—” The man's gaze swept up and took in Conrad in one glance. “—clearly her social inferior, and inferior in all the ways that matter.”

It silenced Conrad for sufficient time that Roberto Capiraso sat down at one of the green-topped desks, unlocked the drawers, and eventually brought out both a steel-nib pen and sheets of paper ruled with staves.

Leaving me standing here as if I were some farm-hand confronted with his Master
.

Conrad ignored the locked cupboards and his own manuscript. He opened the shutters to the balcony, looking out over the bright sea, and breathed in the live air.

Was he in Venice, back then? I never saw him! I never heard his name, or anything like it!

There were rumours said she'd gone away with a well-dressed young man. But whatever happened, there would have been a rumour something like that; it's what people like to think.

I don't know, now, which of the moments I saw her in Venice was the last. Because I had not ever expected her to walk away from me.

But then she was not in his bed when he woke, not in their lodgings, and her name—in the smallest possible type and at the very bottom—had been removed from the bill at La Fenice.

Il Conte di Argente would have been, what, in his late twenties then?
A rich young nobleman doing the Grand Tour after the Emperor's wars ended? And I had taken on my father's debts. We wouldn't have moved in the same circles, that's for sure.

He could have been any one of the hundreds of young men who frequented the backstage at the opera. No names. No idea when their boat had left, or which road they might have taken away from the city of canals.

I had only the acid knowledge that Nora was gone. Alone, or with another man, or… How could I imagine? When I had no idea there was anyone other than the two of us in the world.

With his back to the other man, Conrad thought himself isolated—until he caught sight of the composer's reflection in the window-glass.