“You speak strangely,” Manzerotti had said as he stood upright again.
“I was born in Germany,” Johannes replied in his clear bell-like voice. “I have studied here two years. Every language I speak now, I speak with a foreigner’s tongue.”
Molloy twisted the top of the table and moved away. The King’s Messenger with him stepped forward and pulled out a neat roll of papers.
“There we have it then,” he said. Molloy nodded and began to feel about in the hidden drawers a little more, but the messenger put a hand to his sleeve. “Why don’t we have the witch woman with us, or that boy?”
Molloy pulled his hat down over his ears and wrapped his cloak around him.
“Mrs. Bligh has other business.” He found and picked up the brooch of flowers. The messenger watched him with narrowed eyes, but Molloy put the brooch in his pocket anyhow. The man would make nothing of it, and he had been asked to fetch it. He heard a whistle on the street outside and was satisfied.
Johannes thought of the river. If he could get to the far shore, then to the anonymity of Southwark, he could send to Manzerotti for help from there. He limped toward the crowd of men at the Black Lyon Stairs. The whistle came from behind him. The watermen turned and looked at him a moment, then without speech to him or to one another, each retired to his boat and cast off. Johannes lifted his pocket watch so it caught the light of the oil lamp guttering greasily by the steps to show he had money, but the skiffs and wherries drew away. Johannes swallowed and put the watch back in his pocket. Fear flowered into a sweat on his brow. He turned up the hill again, making for the rookeries of Chandos Street, where he had tracked one of the witch’s spies. There a man could hide. The significance of the watermen pulling away from him so silent and of one mind, he would not think of.
Mr. Palmer stood in the center of Carmichael’s study, a still moment in the activity of the room, and looked through the papers that had been found behind the Latin texts and in the false front of the fireplace. There was a considerable amount of money in banknotes and gold, and a letter in French confirming “the recommendation of the man that carries it, who can be recognized in the usual way.” Fitzraven, Palmer supposed. There were four charts showing details of Portsmouth and Spithead and the arrangement of vessels within them, and a model of a gun he had himself given into the hands of his secretary to be placed in one of the vaults. There was also a dense page of notes full of fresh gossip from the Admiralty and the competing political factions within it. He paused in his reading to push the little model to and fro across Lord Carmichael’s desk.
“Field?” he said.
One of the men shaking out the neat volumes in the rear bookcase paused in his work and turned around.
“Yes, sir?”
“Go and tell Lord Sandwich we are ready for him.”
Johannes did not know at what moment he realized his voice was leaving him. During a practice, a strange hum had begun at the back of his throat. When he spoke, the edges of his words started sounding a little shrill. He thought he was merely tired, as he had sung for the school several times in the evenings, and still had to be awake at dawn for the morning service. It was about a week after he had helped Manzerotti to his feet. He saved the little Italian boy and suddenly the boy’s voice was beginning to flower and grow. A few days later, Johannes had opened his lips to sail across the surface of Scarlatti’s Stabat Mater like a swan on water, and as the first phrase lifted into the second, the ice of his voice had cracked and a strange yelping croak leaped from his mouth like a toad. He had stopped. Horrified. The boys next to him began to look afraid. He gazed across to the singers on the opposite side of the choir, terrified, and had met Manzerotti’s black eyes. They were calm, loving; he gave Johannes the faintest ghost of a smile, then turned his attention back toward the priest.
Johannes bowed his head and submitted; his great grief seemed to rise from the center of the earth, poured up his body through his throat and out into the world. It was a wave of silence, taking whatever was left of his voice with it. He never opened his lips to sing again.
Mrs. Service rapped lightly at the door and went in.
“Mrs. Bligh, a young man called Ripley just called. He said you and Crowther should attend at the place thought of. Do I have the message right?”
Jocasta swept up her cards and pocketed them. Crowther shrugged on his frock coat and smoothed the sleeves.
“Aye, Mrs. Service. You have it right.”
When the audience heard the introduction to the “Yellow Rose Duet” they called and wept afresh. The leader of the band stood and put his violin to his chin, and as Manzerotti gracefully stepped aside and offered him up to the audience, he began to play Isabella’s part. From the back of the stalls Mr. Harwood observed his theater. It was a world of light; the oil lamps blazed above him and cast down across the gilt moldings on the boxes, across the jewels and dresses of the women and threw their shimmerings to and fro like fireworks, blessed by the colors around them.
It was a woman in one of the boxes closest to the stage who began it. With trembling fingers she undid the yellow rose from her bodice and threw it down onto the stage at Manzerotti’s feet. Then, from the box opposite, another woman in red silk did the same. Soon the theater was alive with the rustle of foliage and paper, and the roses began to flow forward. Those who could not reach the stage dropped their flowers into the stalls, and they were passed forward and overhead till those nearest the footlights could gather them in armfuls and, passing them over the heads of the musicians in the pit, lay them with the other tribute.
Manzerotti began to sing his line, stepping forward so the petals made a carpet for the jeweled heels of his shoes to rest on. That clarion call of his voice. . it seemed to Harwood that the song of duty and loyalty was not simply the voice of a single man, but the spirit of all he loved about the opera sculpted into sound. He knew he was an illusionist and a businessman, knew better than any the petty betrayals and rivalries, the viciousness of ambition and ambition thwarted that lay behind the music and the golden stage; knew too his house was full because his audience came to see where blood had been shed, and try and imagine they could see the stains, but for a moment he let his spirit rest on the glories of Manzerotti’s voice and forgot that anything else had ever existed in time but music and light.
Lord Sandwich watched Carmichael across the auditorium. He was observing the stage with such profound satisfaction one could believe Manzerotti was his man, not his master. Lord Sandwich was not a man easily shocked, but the story Mr. Palmer had laid out for him that morning in his office at the Admiralty had shaken him. Worst was the note he had received telling him that Carmichael’s stepson Longley had been killed attempting to flee the King’s Messenger sent to stop him at Harwich. He had panicked and been trampled to death by a startled horse on the main thoroughfare of that town. They had hoped to turn him. Give him a chance to redeem himself in their service, but on being approached, the child had only thought of the executioner’s noose and knife, and was dead before Palmer’s letter could be put into his hand.
And there sat Carmichael in his box as assured and comfortable as a cat on silk. Sandwich crushed in his hand the note received from Mr. Palmer’s man. It was a singular pleasure to be about this business himself. The First Lord then bent over the delicate white palm of the lady with whom he was seated and with a smile left her to flirt with her fan alone for a little while. He closed the door to the box behind him and began to walk the corridor around to the other side of the auditorium, nodding to a man waiting there as he went.