“Or the latest one?” added Jan, whom Brigitte sent another hard look.
“Hmm,” said Fulla, apparently intrigued by the question, and Brigitte prayed it was by hers. “Well, you can’t be an artist if you have too strong a sense of propriety. We routinely copy each other’s work, and sometimes even the greatest of artists will copy nature, too.” He threw a beaming smile at Brigitte, almost daring her to protest at the blasphemous implications of that reply. “In your northern lands, you must surely have heard of the captivity chronicles of Frú Steinunn Guðbrandsdóttir.”
Jan could see that Fulla was the kind of anxious artist who memorized such erudite allusions and spent their days waiting for a chance to mention them. “In the printing business,” he started, but Brigitte’s kick under the table told him he was getting too close to revealing who they were. “I mean, that’s one of the businesses where I’ve invested—one does come across such books all the time. They enjoy a popularity that baffles me. The edification of a decent character can scarcely profit from those accounts of savagery and cruelty.” He lamented not being as skilled with words as his wife. The point he had tried to make was that there were, indeed, numerous autobiographies by former slaves of the Ottoman Empire and its possessions circulating throughout Europe, and he wondered what Fulla’s purpose had been in picking the raid of Iceland as his example. It was rare enough to print a book written by a woman, but one where the enemies of Christendom were depicted in anything less than a scathing light was unspeakable. After a moment, he thought he’d finally caught Fulla’s meaning. “Was your first opera based on that book?”
That was the exact question Brigitte wanted to ask, but the wording struck her as too blunt. “Not just that one, I’m sure,” she offered, while casually sticking a fork in her piece of chicken. “Just by looking at the collections in this house, one can surmise Signor Fulla has access to many of those stories. So many authors have told the same tale so many times, it’s only too easy to—”
“The Sultan’s Captive is based on no book,” said Fulla, with a stern expression on his face that Jan didn’t understand but that Brigitte was expecting. She suppressed a smile of victory. She had bet on an indirect jab at his artistic pride, and it had paid off. “It tells my own life. I was a slave in the Mohammedan countries for eight years.”
That opened plenty more questions, and before Brigitte could formulate a proper one, Jan blurted, “Were the Turks the ones who castrated you?” Fulla nodded, not seeming to mind the personal question, and Brigitte’s mind started connecting dots. From the captivity novels, she knew the Turks routinely castrated their slaves, but only the little boys. If Fulla had spent his childhood years as a slave in foreign lands, he couldn’t have had the rigorous vocal training of professional castrati, which would explain why, once in Italy, his voice didn’t qualify for anything better than hiding at the back of a choir. In fact, he was lucky to be able to sing at all.
“Did they teach you to sing?” she asked.
The composer’s face twisted into a knowing smile. “Can your chaste ears bear the list of all the arts they taught me?”
She strived to control her breath as she deduced what he meant. “I’m not an unmarried girl. I know of the matters of the flesh. You may speak.”
He seemed pleased with that, and stood with a dramatic pose. “Here I may never be a noteworthy castrato, but as a child, in the halls of the imperial palace, I was the best köçek.” He took two spoons from a side table and started clanking them in his hands. “I learned to charm the eyes of a man like no harem ever can,” he added, gradually twirling his shoulders and tracing endless circles with his hips. “I sweetened the weary days of palace officials and ministers.” The rhythmic sound of the spoons became hypnotic, and he moved around the dining table with a gracefulness that should have been impossible for his massive frame.
“You’ve made your point, Signor Fulla,” said Brigitte, but he continued dancing, oblivious to their astonished stares.
“Can you imagine this being the fate of your child?” he said, twisting his hands in lewd gestures around his body, looking at them with an undecipherable mixture of pain and old anger. “Can you picture a boy, a proper Christian boy, raised in deliberate ignorance of the evils of the world, suddenly snatched by pirates, denied his manhood, and thrown into a life of boundless sensuality?” Jan averted his gaze, too disturbed to consider those words. “Can you imagine having so precious an art beaten into you every day, for interminable years, as your only way to survive?” He clanked the spoons one last time and ceased dancing. He looked at the Willemszoons with self-satisfaction. “I’m not a tender youth anymore, but I can still be enchanting when I want.” Seeing their quiet shock, he returned to his chair and started biting into his chicken. “You said you were moved by my work. I’d like to hear you elaborate on that opinion.”
The Willemszoons exchanged a confused look. Finally Jan said, “About Moorflower… we were especially interested in the story of the travelers. As you just described, awful things happen at sea.”
“You have no idea,” said Fulla to his meal.
“But the sort of adventures that you tell in that play…” he paused, unsure of whether that was the right time to be open. “I’m not saying they’re not an enrapturing narration, because I wouldn’t be here if that were not the case, but—”
“You want to know how much of it is real,” interrupted Fulla. The couple nodded nervously, and he rolled his eyes. “You think Moorflower is hard to believe? Pay more attention to the world. Look at what’s happening with the Spanish galleons: one out of every three gets lost and no one knows why. Look at the trade with India: it has plummeted because suddenly the Portuguese forgot how to sail through a storm. Look at the English and how they all had to run away from their little island to avoid being butchered by the Danish.” He stopped when he saw the Willemszoons’ faces darken at the mention of England. Their spirits were too drained by the evening’s heated conversation to keep concealing how much the topic mattered to them, even though, by Fulla’s reckoning, it had been ten years since the end of that kingdom. His attention was drawn to Jan’s hands, which were grabbing the tablecloth with fury. “I see that maritime tragedies have a personal significance to you. In any case, you should be the least offended, seeing as Dutch ships are doing just fine. Doesn’t this mystery gladden you, that every sailing nation is having unheard-of trouble keeping their ships from sinking—except the Dutch? One wonders what sorcery they have learned in the United Provinces, don’t you think?” He looked around the table, satisfied with their silence, and switched to fluent English. “Of course, you aren’t Hollanders. You were raised there, but your blood is English. It’s the only way Moorflower could have affected you so deeply.” His face appeared transformed to them. He was no longer the shining star of the theatre; he was just a tired man whose youth had ended too soon. “Look at yourselves. You aren’t good at this game. Last night I found it unbelievable that you’d come all the way to Venice just because you saw my name in the play, but I figured out what you wanted since the instant you mentioned you’d come from Leiden.”
Brigitte let out her breath, tired of caution. “We want the truth,” she said in a broken voice. “My father went on that ship. So did Jan’s. We never heard back from them. We thought they were lost forever.” She caught Fulla halfway through trying to compose a look of snide pity that he couldn’t sustain. “You know more than you wrote. You must have heard of our families, of the Brownists. We had placed so much hope on the Mayflower; when we finally accepted that they’d been lost, our hearts broke.” She contained a sob and kept talking. “I prayed for any news, any rumors, anything, until I was too tired to keep praying.” She tried to say more, but couldn’t.