The Black Opera Read online

  Conrad rapidly moved up, and fell in the half-pace behind a monarch that good breeding requires.

  Ferdinand beckoned him forward, to his side.

  “I’ll arrange for your family to be watched and guarded, and if it becomes necessary, moved to a safer place.”

  The King paused, and rested his hands on the sea-wall’s sun-bleached stone. He stared at the Amalfi coast. The fingers of his right hand drummed a tattoo.

  “As for you… I intend, first, to hide you in plain sight. Nothing attracts attention like guards. We’ll attach you to the Master of Music here at the Palace; say, as a copyist. If it’s discovered you’re writing a libretto, describe it as a oneact summer comedy in Neapolitan dialect, or a replacement opera to go on if another production fails.”

  The world fell into one of those moments of silence. It brought Conrad the lap of waves, and the cries of sea-birds over in the harbour. The wind shifted inshore, carrying the faint odour of umbrella pine over the smell of the city.

  “Tell me, Conrad. Have you ever heard of society that calls itself ‘the Prince’s Men’?”

  CHAPTER 6

  Now we begin to get answers! Conrad scraped at the barrel-bottom of his memory. With a jackdaw-mind that snaps up every shiny thing to store for opera librettos, have I ever… ever…

  “No, sir.” Conrad pushed away frustration. The first thing I’m asked, I don’t know! “Maybe I’ve been away from Naples too long.”

  “Being elsewhere in Europe need not necessarily preclude you coming across their activities. From St Petersburg to Madrid; from England to Egypt… The Prince’s Men are woven into the world like ivy.”

  “Not unlike those other organisations we suffer from in the Two Kingdoms, sir?”

  “They differ in key respects.”

  Ferdinand clasped his hands again behind his back, letting his turning movement carry him around to face Conrad. His gaze swept the palace walls and windows in a natural way. It wouldn’t tell any outsider he was checking to see if they were spied on.

  In his own palace.

  “The Prince’s Men resemble the Lodges of Freemasonry more than they do the cells of organised Sicilian criminals. They recruit by word of mouth, they meet behind closed doors, and their membership and existence is kept secret. If they are heard of, at all—”

  Here a brief amusement showed on Ferdinand’s face.

  “—It’s as men who meet for ‘philosophical and scientific debates’—”

  The King continued to turn on his heel. Conrad noted this allowed Ferdinand to survey all the Palazzo Reale, and what of the small royal dock was visible from this terrace.

  Doubtless we’re observed. But not overheard.

  Ferdinand shifted his attention back to Conrad.

  “—Naturally, this is believed to be a cover for a revolutionary political society, devoted to overthrowing European monarchies by violence. They’re hardly the only such society. I believe, however, that the Prince’s Men do have the widest and most heterogeneous membership. Everybody from wagon-drivers and charcoal-burners to magistrates and noblemen. Financiers, courtiers—in my court, I don’t doubt—and certain men of the Church… Lazzaroni… It appears that, as a society, they’re not interested in making money—their upper ranks largely have it, and donate it to the cause. Ostensibly, they do claim to desire the removal of reactionary ministers of state and kings.”

  Conrad couldn’t help his brows going up. “Ostensibly?”

  “As a ‘philosophical position.’ None have been caught in any illegal activity. I’ll assume you know this Kingdom has its own force of agents, spies, and secret police. Apart from organised crime, Europe is now riddled with political associations that are radical, revolutionary, or plain anarchist—most of whom are devoted to political change by way of terror, murder, and assassination. It took a number of years for us to discover that the Prince’s Men are—very different.”

  He turned towards a door into the Palazzo Reale. “I intend you to meet with the two men who can best explain the situation.”

  Conrad started forward.

  He nearly walked into Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily.

  The man remained motionless, his back to Conrad. Conrad felt that he shouldn’t move forward. Ferdinand doesn’t want his face seen at this moment.

  “Conrad—After this point, there’s no going back. Be sure. Are you sure?”

  Conrad folded his arms, marvelling at the easiness of moving without fetters. “I’ve had time to think, sir, now the Inquisition aren’t wrestling with me… As far as managements are concerned, no impresario’s going to want the man who got the Teatro Nuovo burned down by lightning. Too dangerous. It’s a fortnight to the end of the month. My payments to Father’s creditors will be coming up. I need this job.”

  The King rasped an interruption. “You need a job.”

  “Yes. I can leave Naples, change my name, flee to Rome… Or, I can take your offer, sir, which means keeping my name and spitting in the eye of anyone who thinks I’m atheist scum. Even if I can’t claim it’s more than a petty royal sinecure, it’s still connected with the court. Gossip can’t say I ran off like a yelping dog and Giuseppe Persiani found me a job out of charity!”

  The other man took an irresolute step towards the French windows. Conrad glimpsed servants behind the glass. They looked uncertain whether to open the doors or not.

  “Conrad, at this moment, I still know more about this business than you do. I’m warning you. Be certain.”

  Is this business so terrible that he thinks I’ll refuse anyway, once I know?

  Is it something in which King Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies has qualms about involving another man?

  “Sir, you have a guaranteed place in life.” Conrad considerately did not add: revolutions and foreign Tyrants aside. “As for me—there are always more poets besieging impresarios, offering to write librettos at half the price! I value my reputation. It’s hard-won, and I worked for it. I don’t see why a random lightning-bolt should take it away!”

  Ferdinand glanced back. Conrad met his gaze. He felt ashamed of his attempts at humour.

  The King regarded him with a long considering stare. “Very well.”

  Ferdinand walked forward, and the doors opened for him.

  As unwritten law demanded, Conrad did not raise the subject again while they walked into the royal palace. The usual gadfly crowd of gentlemen-in-waiting, aides, officials and servants congregated around the King within moments. Ferdinand curtly waved them away. He took what Conrad later understood must have been short-cuts through the warren of a building.

  The Palazzo Reale was two quite different palaces, it became apparent: one all grandiose white space, grand marble staircases, and frescoed barrel ceilings, and the other, behind the scenes, being full of dusty passages and green baize doors, and wood-panelled rooms too small to keep a cat in, never mind swing it.

  They emerged from one such door, Conrad treading almost on the King’s heels so as not to become lost, and turned a sharp corner into a long gallery.

  The ceiling rose up high and pale. Every few yards on their left-hand side, the outer wall held a tall sash-window. The glass was cunningly offset to cast light into every corner of the long gallery. Together with the white gauze curtains that veiled the row of windows, it gave an impression of mist shot through with sunlight—counteracted by the right-hand wall, that was all solid colours.

  “The map room,” Ferdinand announced.

  Whatever I expected as a “map room”… this isn’t it!

  His eyes adjusting to the dim light, Conrad made out that every section of the long wall was painted with maps. The images shone bright on the plaster, blue and green and ochre and gold. To look was to have the odd sensation of flying, like a hawk, above Naples or France or the Adriatic shores.

  Most of the maps were of Europe, and some of the Americas; one at least of the South China Sea, another of Indonesia, and the coastal lands of Australia. The ochres and greens
of Europe were here and there brighter, where new paint changed the boundaries after the end of the Emperor’s War.

  An eight foot long map-chest stood against the wall, by one of the windows. Servants had just finished setting up a linen cloth incongruously on top of it, with chairs and bright silver place settings, and were bringing out coffee.

  Conrad realised, My mouth is dry as a furnace!

  The King instructed a nearby footman. “See we’re not disturbed.”

  Absently watching the last man’s back as the footmen paced away, Conrad realised, This is another place one can’t be spied on. No furniture to hide behind. No one can approach without being seen—or eavesdrop through a retaining wall. Or spy by clinging outside the window like a fly.

  The King seated himself on a baroque chair beside the map-chest, and gestured for Conrad to take one of the others.

  “Ah—” Ferdinand glanced past Conrad’s shoulder, and gave a welcoming smile. “Major Mantenucci!”

  Precipitated into remembering his manners, Conrad stood up again. This must be one of those two men he mentioned; the ones who can best explain this situation.

  A lively spare-bodied man came down the gallery, moving with alacrity. Mopping his forehead free of the sweat of his energetic movement, he took off his hat, showing himself crop-haired, iron grey still present in his hair and moustaches.

  “I forwarded the request, sire. An answer will arrive when it can.” His bow to the Majesty of the Two Sicilies could be charitably describable as perfunctory. All his attention focused on Conrad himself.

  Conrad noted that the man had police insignia on his uniform. A Commendatore. That will make him Luigi’s boss; the overall Chief of Police for Naples.

  “Sire, I heard that you were directly interrogating the criminal responsible for burning down the Teatro Nuovo.”

  The King gave Mantenucci a look of long acquaintance, and considerable amusement. “And so you hurried here, hoping to see that the King isn’t messing the case up through direct intervention?”

  “Wouldn’t dream of saying that, sire… If I were to remind Your Majesty that police investigations are my purview, rather than Your Majesty’s…”

  The King’s look was far more friendly than the man’s words seemed to justify. “Really, Enrico, I have absolutely no desire to take on the Chief of Police’s job along with my own. Any more than you would choose to be King.”

  “Too right I wouldn’t.” Mantenucci snorted.

  They spoke to each other, Conrad thought, like a General and his most trusted officers, with the humour of shared experiences, good and bad, and with the air of men who will fight.

  Conrad remembered etiquette sufficiently that he waited until after the Major seated himself to sit down. Enrico Mantenucci served himself coffee, that smelled quite wonderful, and drew up a chair to the end of the map-chest. A glance at Ferdinand assured Conrad the King had begun to drink from his own bone china cup.

  Conrad brought his cup to his mouth and drank, just as the Major turned and raked him with an assessing glance.

  “So this is our atheist pyromaniac, is it?”

  Conrad managed, superbly, not to sneeze his coffee out of his nose.

  He rose from his seat again and bowed. The police chief did the same.

  Ferdinand waved them both to sit down.

  “I’ve asked you here, Enrico, to introduce Signore Conrad to what we know of the Prince’s Men.” He turned with perceptible authority to Conrad. “I have few men who are more knowledgeable.”

  “Know your enemy!” Mantenucci helped himself to more coffee. His tone of voice turned gruffly apologetic. “You won’t find a police officer in Naples who thinks highly of humanity in general; we see too much of men at their worst. So I dare say I hold these scum in too much contempt. You must judge for yourself, Signore Scalese.”

  Mantenucci visibly collected his thoughts.

  “I will say one thing. The beliefs of the Prince’s Men are dangerously strong. And, as with any madmen, if their recruits spend a lot of time around them, they come to believe the same things by a kind of contagion. We’ve had a few of their runners and messengers for interrogation, and it’s always the same. They’re serving God, and they won’t let any of us sinners stand in their way.”

  Conrad startled. “They’re a religious association? His Majesty described them as a radical political conspiracy.”

  Ferdinand demurred. “Not just that. I’ve said I think them like the Freemasons.” Mantenucci ejected air from his nostrils sharply. “Oh aye! Or the Rosicrucians, Alchemists, Zoroasters, Hospitallers, Knights of St Gaius, and the rest. I say they’re as much a religious order as the Dominicans or the Franciscans. They just happen to be utter heretics.”

  Ferdinand, catching Conrad’s eye, murmured, “Good Catholic,” with a tilt of his head towards Mantenucci that appeared more amused than anything else.

  The Commendatore of Napoli’s police gave his King the look of a man both long-suffering and sharing an old joke. “If I might continue, sire… These Prince’s Men. Religious, yes, because of their belief in God. But Devil-worshippers, too, because for them the universe is arsey-versey—”

  “Devil-worshippers?” Surprised into interrupting, Conrad put his tiny cup loudly down onto its saucer. “Are you certain? Not just worship of the wrong deity?”

  Mantenucci’s expression warmed, briefly, as if to someone scoring a hit in fencing. “I see you’re not to be frightened by a few heresies.”

  Conrad found his own smile equally ironic. “I am a heresy, I’m told, signore.”

  The police Commendatore set his elbow on the map desk, and subjected Conrad to a closer scrutiny than was comfortable. Finally he gave an amiable nod. “All right, signore. Let’s put yourself in their position. For the sake of argument, suppose that we’re Prince’s Men—”

  The King raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  “Not you, sire,” Mantenucci qualified. “You’re too good a son of the Church. Now Signore Scalese—”

  “Conrad.”

  “—Conrad, here,” the police chief echoed, good-humouredly, “is a damned atheist, and I’m equally damned for what I see every day among the scum of Naples. So let’s say that he and I are Prince’s Men. Here’s our first question. Who made the world?”

  “No one?” Conrad offered, having no idea of his theoretical role. “It began by natural processes, developing from—Leucippus’s atoms? Heraclitus’s fire?”

  Ferdinand interrupted, enthused. “Ah! The old pagan philosophers before Plato! Pythagoras, Anaximander; with their perennial search for first causes… You’re one of the physiologoi, Conrad!”

  It was impossible not to respond to the other man’s intellectual delight. Conrad smiled. “’Physiologoi,’ ‘Natural Philosopher’—it’s only another word for scientist, sir.”

  Enrico Mantenucci glowered briefly at his sovereign, cutting the interruption short, and turned back to Conrad. “We’re supposed to be Prince’s Men, the two of us, and their answer is, God made the world—”

  “Of course,” Conrad remarked.

  “But.” The Commendatore ticked off a point on an upraised forefinger. “It’s not the God of good Catholics like his Majesty here. It’s the Watchmaker God of English Signore Newton and the French Deists. God made the world, gave it universal laws to tick and function—and then ran off somewhere, never to be seen again. So, if we’re Prince’s Men, who’s now in charge of the world?”

  Conrad allowed himself a hopeful note. “No one?”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But, no—” Mantenucci checked off a second point on his fingers. “Devil-worshippers, remember? As Prince’s Men, we hold that the Creator God’s nature was evil. He set up a universe in which everything that lives suffers pain. The penalty for original sin is visited on every head, even babies too young to do more than breathe and blink.”

  Conrad caught a glimpse of pain in Mantenucci’s expression, and wondered what accounted for it.<
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  Mantenucci took a breath and regained enthusiasm. “Fortunately, in the moments after Creation, before He departed, He left a deputy in charge—known as Satan, or the Devil. But this isn’t a good Catholic Satan, but what we Prince’s Men call ‘the Prince of this World.’”

  Ferdinand, as if he continued a long argument, interjected, “Which is the Manichaean heresy of the Albigenses!”

  “Yes, sire, but I doubt they’ve been in Naples that long.” Mantenucci prodded the map-chest with an arresting finger. “The Prince of this World, hence the name of his followers—”

  “You don’t consider,” Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily interrupted, his tone melancholy, “that we’re creatures of the Fall, and need pain to teach us morality? Or, at best, that pain’s an inescapable accompaniment to free will?”

  Mantenucci shook his head. “As a Prince’s Man, I wouldn’t consider it. Pain is evil.”

  “I could have some sympathy with that view,” Conrad said aloud.

  He found the police chief aiming the next question at him:

  “Signore Conrad, who’s responsible for good?”

  It felt as if he discussed a libretto with a composer, rather than the censor; one of those moments when all the possibilities of a story present themselves for due consideration.

  Conrad mused. “I’m a Prince’s Man… So. Let me turn it around. I don’t attribute responsibility for evil to the ‘Prince of this World.’ He didn’t create it. Has he even been given enough power to prevent it? Evil must be inherent in the Creator-God, since it was one of His first principles. So good, which opposes evil, has to come from… Satan? The Prince of this World?”

  Mantenucci nodded like a professor whose pupil advances.

  “Exactly! The God that created us all quickly abandoned us all. The Devil, the ‘Prince of this World,’ is the only hope we have for good in the world; hence his followers, the Prince’s Men—”

  He interrupted himself to add, “I know you have different ideas, Majesty, but I see no possible origin of the name except the Gospel of the Sainted Apostle John!”