The Girl With the Painted Face (51 page)

Beppe frowns. ‘I suppose so. But… Angelo was the one who went out of his way to get Sofia released. Why would he have done that if he was guilty of the murder? Wouldn’t it have been safer for him to leave her locked up for it if he’d done it?’

‘You heard what he said, when we talked about that before,’ Vico says, shaking his head. ‘He said he knew she wasn’t guilty. Said that he didn’t like to think of someone innocent being punished.’ He pauses. ‘That fits, doesn’t it? Guilt getting the better of him?’

Beppe sucks in a shocked breath. ‘Oh my God,’ he says in a slow whisper.

‘What?’ Sofia is staring up at him, wide-eyed. ‘What is it?’

Beppe shakes his head. ‘No, it can’t be – not after all this time.’

‘Beppe?’

‘I think you may be right,’ Beppe says, pushing the fingers of one hand up into his hair, making it stand on end. ‘I think guilt
may
have got the better of him.’

‘What do you mean? What are you saying?’

Beppe draws in a long, shivering breath. ‘I don’t want to go into details now… but I do think you may be right.’

Everyone is staring at him. Sofia takes one of his hands in both her own.

Gripping her fingers, running his tongue along his lip, Beppe says, slowly, ‘Do you know – I think Fosca might get it out of him.’

Vico whistles.

Lidia draws in a breath.

Not understanding, Sofia looks from Beppe to Vico. ‘Who’s Fosca?’ she says.

After a pause, Beppe says, ‘Someone extraordinary, who has a way of goading the guilty into revealing their inner thoughts.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Beppe explains and Sofia listens, frowning with concentration. ‘So you intend to surprise him with it?’ she says. ‘Angelo? Actually in a performance? Unrehearsed?’

‘Best way, I’d say.’

‘When?’ Lidia says, sounding concerned. ‘Beppe, we can’t afford to jeopardize any —’

Vico interrupts her. ‘Agostino’s fixed up a show at a big house near Borgo San Lorenzo next week. Some rich merchant with more money than he knows what to do with. God knows who. I think Fosca might be able to make an appearance there.’

‘Which
scenario
?’ Beppe asks.

‘Ago’s basing it on Flaminio Scala’s
The Just Punishment
– which seems highly appropriate, don’t you think?’

Sofia hears Beppe snort a soft laugh in his nose.

‘But,’ Vico continues, ‘he’s writing a few new elements even as we speak, so the final plot will be something new – different from the original. Just right for introducing our friend Fosca to the proceedings at the last minute, I would say.’

‘I agree,’ Beppe says. ‘Just right.’

‘Don’t say anything to Ago or Cosima, or the others – any of you. I’ll let him know what he needs to know – but at the last minute.’ Vico sounds almost angry, Sofia thinks. Reaching out, she slips her fingers into Beppe’s palm and he squeezes her hand.

‘Not a word.’ Beppe puts an arm around Sofia’s shoulders. ‘Let’s get back.’ With his mouth close to Sofia’s ear, he says, ‘Nicco offered to sleep in the yellow wagon with Giovanni Battista and Federico tonight. Said we could have his cart.’

Sofia turns her face quickly towards Beppe’s and kisses his mouth.

‘This, my friends, is the beginning of the conquest of our new territories!’ Agostino explains over welcome bowls of bread, ricotta and honey the next morning. ‘In the face of rank injustice, bigoted authoritarianism and unreasoned accusation, we have bade farewell to the familiar landscape of Emilia-Romagna, we have crossed the mountains in our bid to flee from those who no longer care for our expertise, and we stand now, trembling in anticipation, up to our ankles in the shallows of the unknown, like Amerigo Vespucci on the shores of the New World.’

Several people, their hands too busy with their breakfast to applaud and their mouths too full to cheer, tink their spoons against the sides of their bowls in appreciation of Agostino’s enthusiasm. Untidily swallowing a mouthful of his ricotta, Vico whistles.

Niccolò catches Sofia’s eye and winks.

‘We begin to rehearse
The Just Punishment
in earnest this morning,’ Agostino continues, in a rather more prosaic voice. ‘Now that Beppe and Sofia are back with us —’

More tinking of spoons.

‘— we must put all our efforts into perfecting
The Just Punishment
. We’ve performed it before and we did it well, and we’ll do it justice now. I’ve written a couple of new speeches – Federico: one for you, and Cosima and Angelo: a dialogue for the pair of you – but otherwise, it’s pretty much as it was.’ Agostino turns to Sofia and draws in a long breath. ‘It feels quite momentous, beginning work on a Flaminio Scala play, when you’ve performed on stage in his presence. Actually on stage with him.’

‘Beppe did too,’ Sofia says. ‘When he substituted for Simone.’

Beppe laughs. ‘Ha! If you remember, as soon as I heard Scala’s footsteps coming up on to the stage, I called him a pompous windbag and said we ought to get away as fast as possible, and we scarpered, didn’t we?’

Agostino still looks awed. ‘But, nonetheless, you shared a stage. If only for a fraction of a second.’

‘If you like.’

Shaking his head as though in wonder, Agostino tuts his tongue against his teeth, his eyes momentarily unfocused. Then, puffing out a breath and standing up, he points his spoon at the troupe and says, ‘Right! That’s enough of that! On your feet, all of you! We have a great deal to do!’

‘And the four of us have still more, which will have to wait until after the rehearsal,’ Beppe mutters to Sofia, Vico and Lidia. ‘Fosca needs to be properly woken up and told what he has to achieve.’ Turning to Sofia, he adds, ‘He’s apt to misbehave, if you don’t treat him with enough respect.’

‘Isn’t his misbehaviour just what we’re after?’ Vico says quietly. ‘Let’s take ourselves off after the rehearsal. We need to plan this carefully.’

‘We do indeed. I have it pretty clear in my mind what we need to do.’

‘Where shall we go?’ Sofia asks, turning from Beppe to Vico and back.

‘Good question. It’s too cold now to sit out.’

‘I could ask Nicco for the little cart.’

Beppe nods. ‘Perfect. Tell him…’ He considers.

‘Tell him the truth?’ Sofia suggests.

Beppe, Vico and Lidia all stare at her for a second, then Beppe says, ‘Yes. Tell him the truth.’

A mile or so away down the road, Beppe steers Nicco’s cart off the track and onto a flat piece of waste ground. ‘Here will do as well as anywhere,’ he says, pulling Violetta to a stop under a tree, knotting the reins and draping the resultant loop over a peg on the side of the cart. Picking a net full of hay from under the seat, he hangs it on a low branch and Violetta begins at once to tear the contents from it, shaking her head when wisps catch on the mesh as she pulls.

Sofia jumps down from where she has been sitting beside him up front, while Vico and Lidia climb out of the covered space at the back.

‘So, Niccolò wasn’t surprised when you told him what we think?’ Vico asks.

Beppe shakes his head. ‘No. He just nodded – sort of screwing up his mouth as though sad that he’d had the same thoughts himself.’

‘And he thinks it’s a good idea to introduce Fosca into the proceedings?’

‘His exact words? He said it was
a stroke of genius
…’

‘Good, so let’s —’ Vico begins to speak, but Beppe interrupts.

‘I think you’ll want to know what else he said.’ He pauses.

Vico and Lidia are frowning curiously, but Sofia, having been told this already, holds her breath, feeling her heartbeat high in her chest.

‘I told him what you’d said about the contents of that little brown bottle, and the way Angelo had snatched it from you that time – and he looked badly shocked. He says he thinks…’

‘What?’

‘… that it’s something called laudanum.’

Vico whistles, but Lidia says, ‘What’s laudanum?’

‘Opium,’ Beppe says, and Lidia gasps. Beppe nods. ‘Yes, exactly. But – so Nicco told me – it’s opium in a new form, which some man in Switzerland invented a few years ago, to use to treat pain more efficiently. Made from opium, crushed pearls, musk, amber and saffron, he said, and a number of other things I can’t remember, dissolved in alcohol. Nicco says that he’s heard it works really well, though he’s only ever come across it once before… but because it’s so strong, he says, people have started taking it for the wrong reasons. I think this must be what Sebastiano da Correggio has been selling.’

‘Crushed pearls…’ Sofia says quietly to herself.

He says, ‘It was the smell that proved it to Nicco, I think. When I told him what you’d said the contents of that bottle smelled like, Vico, his mouth opened and he said that, given how Angelo had reacted, he was fairly certain that’s what it was in there. Nicco says once someone has started using it, this laudanum, they’ll do… almost anything… to keep up the supply.’

‘Almost anything?’ Lidia says softly.

‘Exactly.’

‘So – should Fosca know about it? About the laudanum?’ Vico says.

Beppe nods. ‘Oh yes, definitely. And, now you come to mention him, I think now is probably as good a time as any for Sofia to meet our friend Signor Fosca, now we’re away from the others.’

Vico and Lidia murmur their agreement.

Looking around, wondering where this new person is supposed to be coming from, Sofia sees Beppe reaching back up into the cart. He grabs his leather bag. Turning his back on the others, he opens the drawstrings and pulls from it firstly a black object that appears to be a hat, then something else she cannot properly see. She sees him duck his head; then, straightening, he pulls on the hat: another black woollen hat, but taller and stiffer than Arlecchino’s – quite a different shape.

He turns to look at them then and Sofia gasps aloud, putting her hands over her mouth.

Almost the whole of Beppe’s face has been covered by what looks like a decaying skull. Bone-white and cracked, the face has two expressionless black eyeholes and small elongated pits for nostrils. Only his mouth is showing and now he speaks, in a voice Sofia has never heard him use. The Bergamo lilt that she loves has gone; this accent is cold and hard, an aristocratic Venetian, and there is a rasp to it that seems to suck the very life out of the air around them. The hairs rise up on the back of her neck and along her forearms.

‘Signorina,’ the creature says. Sofia finds she cannot think of it as Beppe.

She does not answer.

‘I think we have come close to meeting, more than once.’

Sofia stares, still silent.

Fosca comes up to stand close behind her. She does not turn around. He leans out to one side of her and whispers into her ear. ‘On those days when you feared for your life, signorina, are you aware that I was just around the corner, waiting for you?’ He pauses, then, laying a hand on each of her shoulders, he says, ‘I so hoped you’d come.’

Not daring to move, Sofia remains facing forwards. She glances at Lidia and Vico; Vico raises an eyebrow, but other than this, neither of them moves or speaks.

‘I was badly disappointed,’ Fosca says. ‘We must make a more binding arrangement to meet next time. And that next time must be soon.’ He runs a finger down one of her cheeks.

Sofia’s heart is racing now. This is Beppe – her sweet, funny, familiar Beppe. But here, in this mask, using this voice, he is frightening her. She swallows uncomfortably.

Then Beppe strides around to stand in front of her. Puffing out a breath, he pushes the mask up onto the top of his head and the hat falls to the ground behind him. ‘There you are,’ he says in his normal voice, crouching to pick it up. ‘That’s Fosca.’

Sofia does not know what to say.

‘He’s not the most comfortable of companions, really, is he?’

‘What is…? When did…? Did you
invent
him?’ Sofia is struggling to find her words, so unnerved has she been by what has just occurred.

‘No. He’s part of the tradition. Doesn’t often make an appearance, though. He hasn’t turned up in a Coraggiosi play for years. The mask was made for me by a man in Napoli, years ago. I’ve only used it a couple of times.’

Still unsure how to react, Sofia finds herself staring up at the mask, now perched jauntily on the top of Beppe’s untidy head. He sees her gaze and, reaching up and pulling it off, hands it to her. She takes it gingerly, holding it at arm’s length, as though she expects it to speak to her again from within her grasp. It seems to have been formed, like the other masks, from thick leather, moulded and shaped to sit comfortably on an actor’s face. Two real teeth have been inserted into the leather to sit above the wearer’s upper lip.

‘Isn’t Ago going to be angry if we just throw this new material into a finished performance, in front of a paying patron?’ Lidia asks now, and Sofia looks up from her contemplation of the death mask.

Beppe hesitates. ‘Yes, I suppose he might be.’ Lidia opens her mouth to reply, but Beppe interrupts. ‘Would you rather we didn’t do it?’

Vico answers for her. ‘Of course we’re going to do it. If Angelo killed that man, we need to know, don’t we?’

‘But what if he didn’t?’ Sofia asks.

They all turn and stare at her. Beppe nods. ‘Mmm. There’s always the chance that we’re wrong.’ Frowning, he pauses for a moment, then says, ‘Fosca just needs to phrase things carefully, so it’s not a direct accusation.’

Lidia seems determined to consider every possible problem. ‘What about the others, though? Whether Angelo is guilty or not, how are we going to prevent the whole show breaking down?’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that – we’re all capable improvisers, aren’t we? Look at Sofia – the least experienced of all of us, and she managed to keep going on that stage when I turned up and left her almost speechless. Unexpected things have happened in performances before, haven’t they? Remember that pig in Ravenna?’

The stage is set. The banqueting room at the merchant’s large villa in Borgo San Lorenzo is wide and long, low-ceilinged, with deep, brightly painted parallel beams like the vividly coloured ribs of some giant creature. The walls are lined in bright tapestries, rushes cover the wooden floor, and dozens of dribbling candles are filling the room with a shifting yellow light. The three dozen or so members of the audience – seated nobles, and servants standing in groups at the sides of the room – are eagerly awaiting the start of the performance and an anticipatory hum of murmured conversation is filling the air. Sofia, who has peeped out at them from behind the backdrop, is anxious, reminded all too forcefully of the scene at Franceschina moments before the start of that ill-fated show. Their host here, though, is a very different prospect to Sebastiano da Correggio: heavy-bellied, grey-haired, red-faced and widely smiling, the wealthy merchant is sitting in the front seats with his equally plump wife and their several children, beaming out at his guests, gesticulating and pointing out features of the stage with a thick forefinger, clearly delighted at the prospect of the evening’s entertainment.