The Devil in Music (64 page)

His
right foot slipped. An anguished cry rose up from below. He threw
all his weight to his left foot, flattened his body as hard as he
could against the wall, and righted himself. The onlookers groaned
with relief. Beads of sweat broke out on his brow, and his heart
beat hard and fast. He took half a dozen deep, measured breaths and
edged forward again.

Rinaldo's
balcony was before him at last. Three feet away two feet near enough
now to get his leg over the balustrade. Beatrice caught his hand and
helped him in. "Giuliano!" she breathed.

He
saw that she had in full measure an Italian woman's hero-worship of
physical courage. Seeing her eyes shining on him with a naivete as
rare in her as it was adorable, Julian could only wish he had thought
to climb up the side of a building before.

MacGregor
was not going to let him off so easily. "Well?" he called
from below, his voice snappish with pent-up worry. "What do you
think you've accomplished by these antics?"

Something
of the greatest importance, if Julian did not miss his guess. But he
was not prepared to shout it from the balcony. They would all know
soon enough.

For
the next three-quarters of an hour, Julian was very busy. He had
something to inspect and someone to interrogate. He had no sooner
finished these tasks than the dinner bell rang. It was late for

dinner,
by the villa's standards nearly half-past five. The marchesa had
decreed that, after all the strains of the day, no one should bother
to dress.

The
villa party began assembling in the drawing room all except
Francesca, who was not expected down to dinner. Grimani stood
looking out of one of the front windows, his back very straight and
his hands clasped behind him. Julian suspected he was watching for
Zanetti to return from Solaggio with the warrant for Valeriano's
arrest. Fletcher and St. Carr hung about by another window, talking
with forced unconcern about cricket. Carlo leaned his arm on the
mantelpiece, brooding. MacGregor paced back and forth before the
fireplace. Beatrice and de la Marque talked in low voices in a
corner. From the music room, Donati could be heard playing a
Scarlatti sonata.

Julian
went over to the ornate Malvezzi family tree, with its golden apples
bearing the names of past and present family members. He sought out
Lodovico: born 1765, married in 1790 to Isotta Marini. One child,
Rinaldo, born 1795. Married again in 1817, to Beatrice de Goncourt,
no issue

"Signor
Commissario!" Zanetti hastened in and presented Grimani with an
official-looking paper. Grimani glanced over it and said, "All
right. Bring in Valeriano."

Zanetti
skittered out. He returned a minute later with Valeriano and the
four gendarmes who had been guarding him. Valeriano looked pale and
listless. When Grimani told him he was under arrest and would be
confined in the village gaol, preparatory to his removal to the Santa
Margherita prison in Milan, he hardly seemed to be listening.

Julian
stepped forward suddenly. "Signor Commissario, I should like to
ask a favour on behalf of the prisoner."

"I
don't need you to ask any favours on my behalf, Signor Kestrel,"
said Valeriano, with strained courtesy.

Julian
paid him no heed. "I should like to ask that before he's
committed to gaol, he be allowed to sing for us once more."

"That's
ridiculous," said Grimani.

"It's
not ridiculous." Donati appeared in the doorway to the music
room, leaning on Sebastiano's arm. "It would be a great
kindness to a singer perhaps the greatest kindness you could bestow."

"I
want no such kindness," said Valeriano. "I don't wish to
sing."

"Consider,"
said Julian, "this may be your last opportunity, not

only
to sing for an audience, but to sing at all." He turned to
Grimani. "I don't suppose singing is allowed in the Santa
Margherita?"

"Of
course not," said Grimani. "The prisoners would be singing
all the time, and using their songs to send messages to each other."

Valeriano
looked taken aback. He had prepared himself for disgrace,
imprisonment, and death, Julian thought, but not for having the great
gift and consolation of his life torn away. At last he said in a low
voice, "If you please, Signor Commissario, I should like to sing
one last time."

Grimani
rolled his eyes in exasperation. "Very well. One song."

Julian
gave Donati his arm into the music room. "Maestro," he
whispered as he seated him at the piano, "play Che faro."

Donati
did not ask questions. He played the introduction to the famous ca
strato air: Orpheus's lament over the corpse of his beloved Euridice.
The company filed soberly into the music room, Valeriano still
flanked by his guards. He began:

"What
shall I do without Euridice? Where shall I go without my love?"

The
melody unfurled, exquisitely tender and anguished, entreating earth
and Heaven to answer the unanswerable.

The
door leading to the Hall of Marbles opened. Francesca stood there,
staring across at Valeriano as he sang. She wore an ill fitting
black dress that Julian recognized as one of Beatrice's. Her face
was white and gaunt. Her eyes expressed her feelings more eloquently
than speech. How dare you say those words? How dare you sing of
love?

"Euridice!
Oh, God! Speak to me! I am still your faithful lover ..."

Still
Francesca stared. Valeriano's voice began to falter.

"What
shall I do without Euridice? Where shall I go "

He
covered his face with his hands and wept.

Julian
went to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. "The masquerade is
over, Signor Valeriano. You know you didn't kill Marchese Lodovico
or Marchese Rinaldo."

"I
did kill them. This is just a moment of weakness it means nothing "

"I
don't say I suspect it," said Julian patiently. "I know
it. And I shall tell you how.

"There
were several things about your confession that I doubted, but my
first piece of concrete evidence came when I climbed up to Marchese
Rinaldo's balcony, as you said you had done. There's a cornice
moulding above the ledge between the two balconies. I tried to grasp
it, but it was six or eight inches out of my reach. Marchesa
Francesca couldn't have reached it, either. But you have the
advantage of us in height, Signer Valeriano. You could have grasped
that moulding and you would have. Anyone venturing along that narrow
ledge would have taken advantage of whatever support came to hand.

"Afterward
I went upstairs to the garrets and leaned out of the windows to look
at that cornice moulding. There's a deep groove along it that last
night's rain didn't penetrate. It has quite an elaborate collection
of leaves and spiders' webs and they haven't been disturbed at all.
You were never on that ledge, Signer Valeriano. Your confession was
an ingenious tissue of lies.

"Or
rather, I shouldn't say of lies, but of truth and lies ingeniously
mixed. I believe Lodovico really was your father, and you lured him
to the belvedere rendezvous using the glove he had given your mother.
But you didn't intend to kill him. You meant to use his treatment
of your mother to blackmail him into letting Marchesa Francesca see
her children. Your note told him to meet you in the belvedere 'after
eleven," but as you told us earlier today, you didn't arrive
until mid-night. And by the time you arrived, he was already dead.

"That's
how you knew so much about the condition of his body. You even knew
about the loaded gun he had with him: you found it while you were
searching his pockets for your note and your mother's glove. But I
disconcerted you when I asked you about the wad that had been used to
load the gun that shot him. That was something you couldn't have
known."

"But
but Rinaldo's murder?" broke in Carlo. "How could he have
learned so much about that so quickly? He wasn't even in the house
when it was discovered."

"No,"
said Julian, "but he was in Solaggio. Commissario Grimani sent
Bruno to Solaggio this morning to deliver messages to Coman-dante Von
Krauss and others. He warned Bruno not to speak to anyone along the
way, but I'd had a little experience of Bruno, and I didn't think he
was capable of obeying that order. He had just seen

Marchese
Rinaldo's body and had a good look around his room. He wouldn't be
able to resist giving the villagers a first-hand account of the
murder. I cornered him a little while ago and prevailed on him to
admit it. He gathered a group about him in the piazza and told them
every detail he could remember: the bloodstained razor lying on the
bed, the unfastened chain around Marchese Rinaldo's neck, and the
rest of it. And he remembers distinctly that Signor Valeriano was
there."

Grimani's
eyes sparked angrily.

"Of
course Bruno didn't know about Marchesa Francesca's climbing down
from her balcony," Julian went on. "But that story must
have spread very quickly: the soldiers who found her in the chapel
knew it, and they weren't instructed to keep it to themselves."

"How
did Signor Valeriano know about the drop of candle wax on the sheet?"
Grimani objected. "That wasn't something Bruno or the soldiers
would have seen."

"I
wondered about that, too," said Julian. "Then I remembered
that you and I discussed it in the presence of the gendarmes you sent
to fetch Valeriano from the Nightingale. I'll wager they talked
about it as they were bringing him here. At all events, from one
source or another, he gained all the information he needed to confess
convincingly to Marchese Rinaldo's murder. He had a great deal to
memorize in a very short time. But he was accustomed to learning
major opera roles in a matter of days. This can't have been very
different."

Julian
turned to Valeriano. "To be sure, you had compelling reasons to
want Marchese Rinaldo dead. But when you had an opportunity to kill
him in the duel, you risked letting him kill you instead. Your
explanation for that was clever but implausible. You fired into the
air for the simple reason that you weren't willing to kill your
brother.

"I
don't know why you felt the need to convince Marchesa Francesca you
had never loved her, but I should guess you wanted to mask the fact
that it was for her sake you were doing all this. You knew she was
in danger of being arrested for both murders, and the only way you
could think of to save her was to condemn yourself. Perhaps you also
hoped, by repulsing her, to discourage her from making any effort to
prove your innocence, and so put herself at risk again. She said
your pretence of love for her was the performance of your life. But
in reality you gave the performance of your life earlier today, when
you persuaded her you felt nothing for her, at the very moment when
you were giving up your life in her service."

"Is
that true?" Francesca asked Valeriano breathlessly.

"I'm
sorry," he whispered. "I tried to save you. I couldn't
carry it through "

He
got no further. Francesca launched herself at him, beating him with
her fists, kicking him, tearing at his clothes. "How could you?
How could you tear my heart out, and think it was for my good?"

"I
was trying to protect you!" he pleaded. "I was out of my
mind with fear for you! And I thought that, once you were free of
me, you could marry again and have more children "

"Oh!"
She flung him from her in disgust. "How can you be so stupid
and selfish?"

"Selfish?"
he echoed in astonishment.

"Yes!"
She looked around at the others. "I expect you think he's
brave. He isn't brave! He throws away his life because he thinks it
of so little value! Dare to live, Pietro! Dare to believe that you
deserve to live! That and nothing else will make you truly a man!"

"You
despise me," he said bleakly.

Her
face crumpled. "No, I love you. Else why would I care so
much?"

They
fell, exhausted, into each other's arms.

Grimani
asked abruptly, "Why were you still in Solaggio this morning,
Signer Valeriano, when you said yesterday that you meant to return to
Venice?"

Valeriano
turned toward him, flushed and happy, his arm still about Francesca's
shoulders. "That was my intention. But it was hard enough to
give Francesca up to leave her so completely was beyond me. Besides,
I was worried about her. I hardly knew what I feared, but when I
thought of Rinaldo's cruelty and her despair, I couldn't desert her.
So I put up at the Nightingale, thinking I would wait a few days to
be sure she was safe then I would go."