The Exploits & Adventures of Miss Alethea Darcy (26 page)

Had he? Duellers were more likely to harm an opponent by not aiming at them than by taking careful aim; duelling pistols were temperamental weapons, and hardly accurate, even in the hands of a master shot. Yet he had had murder in his heart when he struck Warren across the face, and murder in his mind when he raised the pistol.

For what? For a painting! For a tawdry few square feet of canvas, a two-dimensional image of a pagan goddess, Titian's whore, people said. A thing of beauty, but to take a man's life in cold blood on account of a picture was irrational, pointless, chillingly futile.

Warren was sitting up now, supported by the surgeon. He was pale, and his eyes were closed.

“He'll live,” Harry said.

“Thank God,” said Titus. “I've killed enough men in my life, Christ knows why I should take it upon myself to hustle another out of this world.”

“He wronged you.”

“He annoyed me. Is that a reason to take a life? Let him have the picture, let the king hang it in some private chamber and lick his lips as he goes past his goddess. I want none of it. This whole affair has been a wild-goose chase of the most extreme kind. What a fool I have made of myself!”

 

Titus raised Lady Hermione's hand to his lips.

“I'm happy to see you, Titus,” she said. “Come and sit by the window, where there is more air, such a sultry day. My dear man, how tired you look. The hot weather doesn't suit many Englishmen, I know, although with your service in Spain, I would have thought—”

“It isn't the heat, ma'am,” said Titus. “I slept ill last night, that is all.”

He had, in truth, passed a wretched night. Waves of regret over losing his temper with Warren and wounding him mingled with nightmares of his fighting days, and through all his bad dreams, he was searching, desperately and in vain, for someone. At first, in his half-dazed state he had thought it was his Titian beauty, but in the early hours, sitting on the side of the bed, spangled with moonlight and with his tousled head in his hands, he realised that the elusive figure was Alethea.

How could he simply let her walk away and make no effort to ensure that she reached her destination safely? There was no reason to suppose she wouldn't, but then the image of Mr. Darcy rose in his mind again, severe and condemnatory. He had been so obsessed with his Venus that he had failed as a human being. Alethea was in trouble, or she would not be running across Europe in trousers. Had he made any real effort to find out what kind of trouble? No, he had assumed an unhappy marriage, an adulterous affair; he had made no attempt to get at the truth of her situation.

She would have resented his trying to ascertain what had happened to goad her into this wild scheme; she was, he suspected, a private person, disinclined to pour out her woes to others. Nonetheless, he could have tried, and he hadn't. He made up his mind. As soon as it was convenable, he would call upon Lady Hermione and learn whereabouts in the city her son resided. Then he would pay a visit, and if it embarrassed Alethea to encounter a witness of her unconventional disguise, that was unfortunate, but would not deter him.

He might well find they were all gone to Vienna; Camilla Wytton could have decided that her father was the best person to deal with Alethea's problems. Only he was of another generation, and Alethea's behaviour was so very shocking; might not an affectionate sister want to keep this information from their father?

“I want to call upon Alexander while I'm in Venice,” he said to Lady Hermione. She had ordered glasses of the light white Veneto wine that everyone drank in Venice, a chilled and refreshing beverage on such a day, and he was drinking his gratefully.

Lady Hermione put down her glass. “I am sorry to tell you that you have missed him. He is gone to Rome, with Camilla, for a visit of some weeks.”

He was relieved, if a little disappointed. “I should have made my visit sooner, when I arrived in Venice.”

“When was that?”

“Ten days ago.”

She shook her head. “Then you were too late in any case; he and Camilla left nearly a fortnight ago.”

Entering the theatre, Alethea crossed into another world. A world of music and gossip, glitter and sweat, harmony and backbiting. An artificial world, the stage a little world of its own within the larger world of the auditorium, and quite disconnected from the sun-soaked streets of the world outside the theatre.

It was a ridiculous, gruelling enterprise. She was not in vocal practice, not after her time on the road. The San Benedetto was a huge theatre, and not all her work with Silvestrini had prepared her for such demands on her voice. She had the voice, that was admitted grudgingly by even the least enthusiastic of her fellow thespians, but did she have the stamina?

For a castrato, they whispered, the voice was undeveloped. In her few snatched hours of rest, Alethea explained this to Figgins, who was severe and disapproving at men singing women's roles, women dressing up in men's breeches to entertain the crowd, and of the foreign idea of men being emasculated to preserve their boyish voices.

“It isn't done at all these days, the few remaining castrati are older men.”

“If men you can call them”—with a sniff.

“The quality of the castrato voice lies in the combination of a boy's high, pure voice with the physique, the lungs and chest, of a grown man.”

“How came these men to be eunuchs? Were they captured by pirates and cut?”

“It is an operation on a boy of nine or so; a simple incision is enough.”

More sniffs. “Then it's a pity it's going out of fashion, for it would be doing women a favour for many men to lose their balls.”

Alethea wasn't sure of the anatomical details of castrati. “I believe that although they are unable to get children, some of them—”

Figgins lifted her hands. “No, tell me nothing more about them. But if they can have the pleasure without the consequences, we'll need to lock this door; I know what kind of women those opera singers and dancers are.”

Which was more than Alethea did, for she was, and felt, a complete outsider. The only bond she shared with the other singers was music. Otherwise, she was an intruder, a foreigner, an inexperienced non-professional interloper, a sexual freak, a favourite of Massini's, and, however friendly she was, of quite another rank. Not all her goodwill or acting ability could wipe away the years of upbringing in an English country house, as the daughter of a rich man.

Her knowledge of the Venetian dialect of Italian increased greatly, although most of her new vocabulary was of a kind that could never be used in polite society. Half the singers and dancers and musicians regarded her with obvious distaste, if with a morbid curiosity as to what there was within her slightly baggy trousers, while the other half took a prurient interest in her genderless state, and considered her fair game.

She owed much to Massini's uncanny ability to appear whenever situations promised to get out of hand. And for his swift decisions when it came to her garbing herself in women's clothes in her role as the page. He provided a screen, and was invariably there to keep curious onlookers at bay.

Alethea had never worked so hard in her life, had never finished a day so utterly exhausted. Thank God for the theatricals she and her sisters had revelled in during those distant Pemberley days, when most holidays saw productions of scenes from Shakespeare or whole plays from contemporary authors when time allowed. She had always enjoyed being before an audience, and although too young to take on key roles, had learned much from watching and copying the one or two really talented actors that their neighbourhood afforded.

Her head buzzed with Mozart's music, her own part and everyone else's. She moved and sang and ate and slept as though in a dream, while the intrigues and strains of life in the Count's house became more real than her own life. For the first time she began to realise what the opera was about, that the ravishing music was more than just that, that the whole work was a profound and searing commentary on the nature of men and women and marriage. Which only made the hours more unreal and more tiring, for her own experience of marriage had been so entirely out of the sun that she had never stopped to think what marriage might really be about.

It took a while for Massini to coax her out of her English reserve. “You sing like a virgin, like an English lady spinster,” he complained to her privately. “Yet you are no virgin.”

How did he know?

“How old are you, seventeen, eighteen? Then you can enter into Cherubino's passion, his for women, as yours is for a man, or men. You look scared; put out of your mind the memory of the men who have mistreated you and given you a distaste for their sex, and remember the time when you loved without fear or unhappiness.”

Alethea shifted unhappily; what gave him this perception into her amorous experience?

“Ardour is what we must see in Cherubino; he is a wicked boy, desperate for every woman he encounters, he is shameless in his wooing and his desires. Prim and reserved will not do; you are in Italy now, a country of warmth and passion.”

“I'm not prim.”

“You are cold, and the voice is too pure and therefore unreal and unconvincing. You are on stage now, you have to perform, there can be no holding back. The role demands heart, passion; the notes, however beautiful, are not enough.”

So she unwillingly dragged up the passion she had felt for Penrose, the ardent yearning, the whole-heartedness of young love. She found it curiously cathartic; how odd that one should be able to make emotions come and go at one's bidding, that the bitter feelings engendered by her marriage to Napier could be put aside when she summoned the remembrance of her attachment to Penrose, and poured it into the music.

“Now you sing,” Salvatore Massini said with approval. “Like this, you move the audience's heart, and that is what they are paying for.”

No, it isn't, Alethea said inwardly. The audience was paying to peer at a prodigy.

 

Titus strode along the narrow streets, bounded up and down the steps of the steeply arched bridges, a man in a hurry, citizens remarked as he swept past them. The heat came back at him from the walls as though he were walking through a furnace; he was quite unaware of the temperature, so intent was he on reaching his destination.

He wasn't entirely sure what purpose going to Wytton's house would serve, but it was a starting place. Ten days ago, Alethea must have been there. Perhaps a servant had stayed behind in the house, a housekeeper who had taken Alethea in to await the return of her sister and brother-in-law. In any event, as it was the last place he knew Alethea to have been, it was there that he must enquire for her.

No housekeeper responded to his violent tugs on the bell pull, nor to his thunderous knocks on the door. After a few minutes, he desisted and stood back, shading his eyes to look up at the shuttered windows.

From a balcony next door came a voice, asking him who he sought, saying that the only residents of that house were Signore and Signora Wytton, who were at present away from Venice.

Titus thanked her for the information. He was seeking an acquaintance of the Wyttons, a young man who would have called some ten days ago.

“An Englishman, like yourself?” Yes, she remembered him quite clearly, a very young man, accompanied by a servant. He had been much cast down at the Wyttons' absence; he was a relative, she understood. She had suggested that he try for lodgings nearby, but as to whether he had taken the advice, she could not say. Titus might enquire there, if he wished, it wasn't far, the Pensione Donata, two streets away, over the bridge and to his left by the mask-maker's shop.

Titus followed the directions and found the pensione, a building with a faded and crumbling facade, but a clean entrance way and a respectable-looking if glum-faced landlady. His heart rose; if Alethea were here, she might be safe enough.

Two sentences were sufficient to disabuse him of any such hopes. “He was English, too, was he? Like that rogue of a young man who'd flitted owing two nights' rent, and his baggage worthless, no more than a thief, she was sure, else why would he have a woman's dress rolled up in his portmanteau, yes, and another one in the servant's bag? No, she had no idea where he might be; if she had she'd have sent her son after them to get her money.

Nonplussed by this flood of ill-will, Titus stepped back into the street, trying to gather his wits together. Alethea had been here, but not for more than a week. By the sound of it, all her possessions were here. What had happened to her? What ill fortune had taken her from the shelter and safety of the Pensione Donata? She had seemed to be in funds; was it merely that her money had run out, that she had only enough to reach Venice and no more?

His blood ran cold at the thought of the perils a young woman without money or friends would be exposed to in a city like Venice. How could she contrive? She must have other acquaintances in the city, have blown discretion to the winds and asked for assistance.

In which case, why had she not returned to pay her bill and collect her possessions, or sent her servant? Unpaid bills never loomed large in the minds of young gentlemen, he knew, but she wasn't a gentleman, and she would surely want her portmanteau returned to her.

Or maybe not, if it contained men's clothes. He knocked once more on the door of the pensione. The landlady frowned out at him—what extraordinary eyebrows she had, to be sure—and made as though to slam the door in his face. An intention that changed rapidly at the sight of money in his hand. No, she hadn't yet disposed of the young scoundrel's baggage, although she was going to do so as soon as she had a moment to spare. The money owing? She named a modest sum, adding an amount for her inconvenience, Titus was sure, and he counted it out into her outstretched hand.

The door shut in his face, and then, a few moments later, an upstairs window opened and a leather portmanteau, that he recognised as being Alethea's, landed beside him, only just missing him. It was followed by a canvas bag and the triumphant clash of shutters closing.

 

Hot, alarmed, and cursing himself for letting Alethea's welfare concern him so much, Titus arrived back at Harry's palazzo, and handed over the portmanteau and bag to a surprised servant, with orders to convey both items to his room.

The signore was at home, he had company.

The last thing Titus wanted was to be in company. He began to mount the stairs.

The signore had requested that Signore Manningtree should join him when he returned.

Cursing, Titus followed another servant into the wide, high-ceilinged room on the second floor.

“Here you are, Titus,” Harry said, raising his hand in greeting. “Champagne for Mr. Manningtree, he is hot and exhausted; what have you been up to, dear fellow? Here is Lady Hermione come to call.”

And there she was, cool and composed and looking rather amused.

“Such a fire-eater as you are, Titus,” she said. “You never told me that you'd been out at dawn to meet your man.”

“It was in the evening,” said Titus, flushing with vexation that word of the affair had so quickly got around.

“In Venice, we all know each other's business,” she said. “And it was a public affair, not one of those sneaking off to the mainland to kill a man and flee the repercussions.”

“I am profoundly grateful that I merely winged Warren,” said Titus, taking the proffered glass of champagne, an exquisite, slender glass ornamented with gold that set off the foaming, chilled wine. “Your health, ma'am. It was a stupid business, and one that I feel ashamed of; my hope is that it will be soon forgotten.”

“Oh, yes, certainly, as soon as the next scandal comes along,” said Lady Hermione tranquilly. “You left in such haste this morning, that's why you omitted to tell me of the duel, I dare say.”

“Hardly a fit subject for a lady's ears.”

“How pompous you are become,” she said. “I'm not a squeamish modern miss, I thank you. My husband was for ever fighting duels when I first knew him; I was heartily glad when they began to go out of fashion. So dangerous, for one may be killed, or kill the other man, and then there is so much distress and trouble. What had Warren done to rouse your ire? It was over a woman, rumour says, but that is what rumour always says.”

“We fell out over a painting,” said Titus. “However, I wish that you will keep that information to yourself; it does neither of us much credit.”

“A painting! You cannot be serious.”

“He is, he is,” said Harry. He waved to the servant to fill Titus's glass again. “I admit, I never heard of men meeting over a painting, but there is a first time for everything. The fact is, Titus's father owned a painting which was unfortunately in Italy and not in England, and Warren came to Venice to buy it illicitly, knowing full well that it belonged to the Manningtree family.”

“A special painting, one assumes.”

“A Titian.”

“A Titian! Indeed, and in whose possession in Venice was this painting?”

“One Mr. Delancourt, a dealer in such works,” said Titus.

“What does Warren want with such a picture? I never heard of him as a collector of paintings.”