A word came to him. Information.
The professor valued information. Particularly concerning one subject.
The whereabouts of Brazio Valeriani.
He sat up. His head spun for a few seconds and then settled itself.
He thought…if he could find out something from Valeriani’s cousin Rosabella that Fell did not know…that might be the weapon he needed.
It might be worth going to the tavern. If Madam Candoleri was there, all the better; if not, surely someone could tell him where she was. Or she might be at the theater, wherever that was, rehearsing her program. If he could find Di Petri, that would also serve him well, or he might just stumble upon the makeup girl herself.
In any case, he was doing himself, Berry, Hudson and Judge Archer no good in hiding himself here. He felt able to walk now without staggering like a drunken fool. He stood up to test his legs. They were weak but they held him up. He walked to the wall and back again. Maybe he still couldn’t walk a straight line yet, but what mobility he had was all he required.
He put on his cloak and his tricorn and left the house.
At the Question Mark, the barkeep told Matthew he had no idea what cottage the diva occupied, but of course Matthew knew the man was lying. Fell’s people were not going to make anything easy for him. The barkeep did tell Matthew that the meeting hall was on Thresher Street just past Redfin and there Madam Candoleri’s performance would be given tomorrow night.
Matthew headed off against the wind. Passersby greeted him as if he was already part of the community, their smiles offered below drug-hazed eyes. On the way to Thresher Street he got an idea of some of the communal activities here. He took note of a house with a sign proclaiming it to be Madam Hennischild’s School Of Art. Another house was marked Y Beautiful Bedd Basketweavers’ Society. And still another, just down from the basketweavers, John Mayes’ Stargazers Club. He figured the gardening guild and the bubble-blowers bunch would be somewhere near as well. He passed a shed under which three men were jovially occupied in making the small casks Matthew had earlier seen on the wagon, and he half-expected to see a sign marking the territory of the cooper confederation.
The pair of guards Matthew spotted on patrol with their muskets against their shoulders, however, looked anything but clubby.
He wondered if there had been any instance of someone suddenly coming out of their trance, or having a delayed violent reaction to some potion they’d been given. That might call for a musket ball or two, depending on the circumstances. Matthew shuddered to think that Gentry’s book of poisons and formulas, gathered evidently from the botanicals of many countries, might include one that gave a human being an enraged super-strength.
The theater was not hard to find. Though still single-storied, it was a larger structure of weatherworn brown stones that was not a barn, as the madam had so disdained it, but may at one time have been a church, for the belltower atop the roof. Matthew went up two steps to the oaken door and opened it. He stepped into an anteroom where cloaks and hats could be hung.
“Can you not play one single clean note?” shouted the thunder before the storm. “Mi fai cosi pazzo io esplodere! Giancarlo, make these idioti understand the English!”
Matthew entered the main chamber. Light entered through two windows, one on each side of the building, that were probably recent additions. A dozen pews with aisles in the center, on the right and the left faced an upraised platform that appeared to have been newly constructed, for the wood was still green. Steps led up on the right. A colorful and expensive-looking rug had been laid down over the platform’s floor. The beautiful but terrifying madam was standing at its center, wearing a voluminous purple gown, her black hair piled high and glittering with golden combs, her hands on her hips and her eyes shooting fire at her poor orchestra.
They sat at the foot of the platform in chairs that had been brought in for the occasion. Music stands had been supplied to hold copies of the score. There were the two fiddle players Matthew had seen in the square and the twelve-year-old boy who’d taken four trumpet lessons, and all of them were clinging to their instruments as if the items might be blown out of their hands. The accordionist and the tambourine girl likely had jumped ship, for they were nowhere to be seen. Matthew did see Di Petri sitting in the front row, along with the person he’d hoped to find: a dark-haired girl who must be the reason Fell had brought them here.
Di Petri was getting up to place himself in harm’s way between the lady and her targets of wrath. “Please, Alicia!” he said, holding up his hands in a manner of appeasement. “They’re doing their best! Won’t you—”
“Their best is un grande mucchio di merda!” she shrieked. “How can I sing to such garbage of a noise?”
“Lady,” said one of the fiddlers, “I just can’t play these notes. There’re too many of ’em.” He gave an exasperated sigh and got up from his chair. It seemed to Matthew that, even though the men—and likely the boy too—were held in the warm embrace of some happy narcotic, they had all come to the end of their witless smiles. “I can’t speak for Noah or Alex, but I believe I’m past done to well-done and near burnt alive. I’m headin’ for home.”
“Noah can speak for himself,” said the second fiddle-player, also getting to his feet. “Right as rain. I’m goin’.”
“You cannot walk out on me!” she shot back. “I am one of three females in this entire world who sings the opera! Do you know how hard I have worked and what I have done to earn my place among the ball-less men with the child voices?” A quaver of desperation entered. “What am I to do for the music?”
The boy had stood up and was following the others to the door. He turned back, trumpet in hand, and he said in the lofty tone of someone much older than he appeared, “Perhaps you can find someone who hums.”
Then the three musicians left the theater and did not witness Madam Alicia Candoleri grab at the air as if trying to tear holes in it. Matthew was sure however that the three did hear her scream of outrage; he felt sure Lady Puffery would be reporting in the next Pin the sound of a shrieking meteor heard across Wales as it sizzled into the Atlantic.
“Caro Signore,” said Di Petri. “Let us all take this one step at the time.”
“It is insane crazy madness!” the lady fumed, as she stalked back and forth. “I have not even the dressing room! Am I expected to—” The red mist of her anger must have lifted a bit, for she stopped her pacing and pointed at Matthew. “Do you get a good laugh out of this, mister?”
“Not at all.” Matthew removed his tricorn. “I have empathy for everyone involved.”
“In pathy? What is this he’s saying, Giancarlo?”
“He feels sorry for us,” said Di Petri, a little too bluntly and incorrectly.
She began looking around, it seemed to Matthew, for something to throw. “Gloom!” she shouted, and Matthew thought for an instant she was going to start tearing her own hair out. “Disperazione! Agonia su di me!”
Matthew strolled down the left side aisle. He glanced quickly toward Rosabella, who was watching him, and had the impression of a pretty oval-shaped face, large brown eyes and an expression of bewilderment. She was younger than he’d surmised, maybe seventeen at most.
“Pardon me,” Matthew said when he reached the platform, “but do you really need an orchestra?”
“Of course I do! Are you mad? What is an opera without the music?”
“Well,” he answered quietly, “doesn’t the music come from you?”
Madam Candoleri gave a strangled sound, indicating she did not follow his line of reasoning. Her hands rose up as claws, her teeth clenched together and Matthew feared that when she threw herself off the platform at him there would be blood.
“Alicia! Ascoltatelo!” said Di Petri, moving alongside Matthew. “He has something!”
“He has a brain in his fever!” she shouted, none too sensically.
“No, no, signora! Think of this as a challenge! This young man is correct…th
e music comes from you! Whether you have accompaniment or not is beside the point. You know the score and the libretto…what more do you need?”
“Ha!” That single exclamation had almost blasted the dimpled glass out of the windows. “Open your eyes, Giancarlo! Siamo nel piu profondo di merde!”
Di Petri drew himself up a bit taller and straighter. It appeared to Matthew that the harried manager realized his time had arrived. Di Petri said calmly, “We are only in the deepest of shit if you allow it to be so.”
Madam Candoleri’s bosom swelled like the sail of a fifty-gun warship. Her red-lipped mouth began to open to deliver the cataclysmic volley.
“He’s right, signora,” came the soft voice of the makeup girl, who had gotten up from her pew to join them. “No one can defeat you but yourself.”
This quietly-delivered truth pinched out the burning fuse. Madam Candoleri looked from Di Petri to Rosabella and then to Di Petri once more. Her warship began to shrink back again to the size of a noble yacht. She released a whoosh of a breath and scratched her forehead in dismay like any common human might. “You think I can do this?” she asked.
“I am certain,” said Di Petri. “And…even if you are off-key once in a little while, who among these wax-eared English will know it?”
“I surely wouldn’t,” Matthew added.
Madam Candoleri’s index finger tapped her chin. “Si!” she said after a short period of contemplation. “If I cannot do this thing, no other can do it…for certain no other woman!”
“That is the proper attitude, signora. We press on into the unchartered territory.”
“Si, and who can say that before tomorrow night the ransom is not paid?” said the lady. “Very well then, let me start at the beginning once more, without that garbage noise banging my head drums.”
“Ear drums,” Di Petri corrected.
“May I ask a favor?” Matthew spoke up before he was drowned out. “May I take Rosabella away from you for just a few minutes?”
“Me?” the girl asked. “What for?”
“Si! For why?” Madam Candoleri looked like she was getting ready to ruffle up again.
“I have some questions to ask you,” Matthew said, addressing Rosabella directly. “We can step outside. As I say, it won’t take very long.”
“Questions? About what? And who are you?”
“This is the young man I was telling you about, we met in the tavern last night,” said Madam Candoleri. “He was kidnapped, like us.”
Matthew decided not to correct the lady, but to let that stand as it was. “I have some of the same questions Professor Fell asked you, about your cousin Brazio.”
Rosabella frowned. “Why is it that Brazio is so important? I have not seen him for years!”
“Why Brazio is important to Professor Fell is exactly what I’m trying to find out.”
Perhaps emboldened by his success in calming the star, Di Petri said, “Go ahead, Rosabella. There is no harm in speaking to the young man.”
“All right,” she answered, but still a little uncertainly. It was clear to Matthew that she had not an inkling of what her cousin’s value was to the professor, but if Matthew had his way he was going to find out.
Rosabella put on a pale blue hooded cloak over her gown and Matthew donned his tricorn again. They went outside and stood in a splash of sunlight.
“What is it you want to know?” she asked. When she frowned, two small lines came up between her chocolate-brown eyes, even as young as she was. Matthew reasoned that working anywhere near the diva was not a pleasant experience, but he imagined the job paid very well. “I already told the professor everything I remembered about Brazio,” she went on. “What more is there?”
“I’m not the professor,” Matthew said. “I know nothing about your cousin, except the fact that Fell is searching for him. And very desperately, I might add.” He watched a well-dressed man and woman stroll past, arm-in-arm, as if they were walking a high-class London promenade.
Rosabella chewed for a few seconds on her full lower lip. “Is it true…what Giancarlo has told me? That we may have been taken because the professor is after my cousin? He told me not to say a thing about this to Alicia.”
“It’s true.”
“Then…there’s not going to be a ransom demand? Is that also true?”
“That I can’t say.” He thought it best to remain mute on the subject, but he doubted Fell would ever release anyone from the beautiful grave. Once you were brought here, for whatever reason, here is where you would live out your days as subjects of experimentation until you died.
“What is it you wish to know about my cousin?” Rosabella asked, perhaps reading in his eyes the unspoken reply to her last question.
“Just this, and think on it if you will. Professor Fell has a highly-intelligent mentality, though unfortunately of the criminal nature. Look around and see what he’s capable of creating. He went to a lot of effort to get you, and I imagine he had contacts in various places to tell him what your sailing schedule would be and who you expected to meet in Portsmouth. Also, he had to have a contact who knew your connection to Brazio. That was a lot of time, effort, and money. Spent for what reason? What is it you can think of—anything at all—that Brazio might offer to the professor?”
“Brazio working with a criminal? Is that what you mean?”
“Not exactly, but possibly. Does Brazio have some talent Fell could use? Forgery? Safe-cracking? Is he a chemist?”
“A chemist? I don’t know this word.”
“Does he make drugs? Medicamenta?” He waited for a reply. She shook her head. Of course, he wondered, how might this seemingly-innocent young girl know if a cousin she hadn’t seen for years had turned to the criminal life? “Let me ask this: how old is he? Near your age?”
“No, he was…I think…twenty-six or twenty-seven years old when I saw him last. That was more than three years ago.”
“So you say he’s likely around thirty?”
“Si, that.”
“What work was he doing the last time you saw him?”
“I don’t know. When I saw him it was with the rest of my family. It was in Salerno, at a funeral.”
“A funeral? Whose?”
“His father’s,” she said. “My uncle, Ciro.”
“Ah. And had you known your uncle very well?”
“No, not well. He had a house and a laboratory in the hills above Salerno. He was a man of science, but they told me he lost his mind.”
Matthew paused. Two things she’d said had caught his attention: man of science and lost his mind.
“Your face has changed,” Rosabella said.
“Pardon?”
“Your face. Something about it changed just then.”
“Tell me,” Matthew said, probing at a possibility, “what kind of scientist Ciro Valeriani was.”
“I don’t know, exactly. My mother and father never talked of it. It was only much later I found out he hanged himself in his laboratory.”
“Hanged himself? Do you have any idea why?”
“What I understood,” she said, “was that…well…he had made something. This was all I overheard my parents saying. He had made something that caused him to go mad, and…I know this sounds…as I would say, pazzo…but…he tried to destroy it, and it wouldn’t let him.”
Matthew was standing in the sun, but suddenly he felt very cold. “This thing…was it alive?”
“I can’t say. That’s all I know about it. I asked my mother once, and she said it was not to be mentioned again, that Uncle Ciro was a good man who had broken when Laurena—his wife—had died of a fever, and when he went into dark things he was no longer the brother she knew.”
“Dark things?” Again Matthew experienced a chill. “Your mother never explained that?”
“No, never.”
“I’m sure the professor would love to get his hands on your mother.”
“She wouldn’t know where Brazio is. No one does.” r />
“I see,” Matthew said. But he was thinking now that Brazio was only a means to an end. Professor Fell wanted to find this creation that Ciro Valeriani had made in his lab. Possibly Brazio had it? Or knew where it was?
He tried to destroy it, and it wouldn’t let him.
“So it destroyed him, instead,” Matthew said.
“Perdono?”
“Sorry, I’m thinking aloud. I suppose you told all this to the professor?”
“I did.”
Matthew looked deeply into the girl’s eyes. “Do this for me. It’s very important. I want you to think hard about both Brazio and his father, and anything you might have overheard about either of them. Can you think of any small detail that you remember now that you did not tell the professor?”
“I told him all I know, that the last time I saw Brazio was at Uncle Ciro’s funeral in Salerno, and he said to me—” She stopped and blinked as a memory resurfaced. “Wait. I do remember something else! What he said to me at the funeral! I didn’t tell that to the professor.”
“Yes? Go on.”
“He asked how old I was, and I told him thirteen. He said…I think I’m remembering this right…that thirteen was a good age, especially for Amarone.”
“Amarone? What does that mean?”
“It’s a red wine, very strong.”
“Brazio had a particular interest in wine?”
She shrugged. “I just remember he said that.”
Matthew couldn’t let this go. It seemed he was on the edge of something vital. “Was Brazio living with his father when Ciro hanged himself?”
“No, I believe he had to travel from somewhere.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He came two days late. The funeral was delayed until he got there.”
“Did you tell that to the professor?”
“Yes,” Rosabella said. “He asked if Brazio had been living in Salerno or had travelled there. I told him just the same as I’m saying now. Also that my mother and father had not heard from Brazio for years and they didn’t know where he was living.”
“He didn’t tell your parents or someone else at the funeral?”