The Black Opera (7 page)

Conrad met the King's eyes and was pinned by an unwavering, amiable, but surprisingly keen gaze.

This could be as dangerous as the Dominicans
.

A formal bow was difficult, chains clasped to his body. Conrad thought he managed it without looking a complete fool, although his face heated. “Your Majesty.”

“You'll forgive this not being a formal audience.” The King visibly came to some decision. “Walk with me, Signore Scalese.”

King Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily stepped through the outer door. Conrad followed, emerging onto a stone terrace above the sea.

He blinked at the muted sunlight—and realised that a canvas awning was stretched above, shielding the walkway from the light. It was made of ship's canvas, Conrad noted, after the ancient Roman style, with slits cut throughout so as not to become a sail in reality. Sun and shadow cast hieroglyphic patterns on the pale flagstones at their feet.

“Your family is from the Two Kingdoms, signore.”

“My father was court musician severally in Bavaria and the Prussian territories, Your Majesty. But I have some claim through my mother's family, who own property in Catania.”

Ferdinand dragged his gaze back from clouds racing inland towards the mountains, as if the sight of the Bay were magnetic. He gave Conrad a frankly speculative look.

“I'm told you may settle in Naples, given your professional success here.”

“I
had
intended to stay, Your Majesty.” Conrad let his tone make it a reference to the burning of the Teatro Nuovo, if the King should care to interpret it that way. “My mother lived a lot in Naples in her youth, though her family's from the other Sicily. I spent some of my childhood here, Your Majesty.”

“Call me ‘sir' when we're private.”

“‘Conrad,' then, sir, if you wish.”

I'm not yet certain that Tullio and JohnJack are safe; I need to know what's going on!

Conrad spoke bluntly but politely, ignoring the etiquette that says one does not question a king. “Sir, may I ask: what do you want from me?”

Ferdinand's inoffensive smile sharpened. He spoke mildly. “Do I want something?”

“This morning I appear to have been saved from the Church, sir, only to fall into the hands of the State. I wonder what the State wants of me.”

The King inclined his head, evidently not offended. “The State wants a private conversation. As to the nature of it… Come with me, Conrad.”

Conrad, bare-faced about the necessity, scooped up his chains more securely, and walked beside King Ferdinand down the awning-shaded terrace. He could see past the old royal Angevin palace, Castel Nuovo, square and granite and
grim; to the curve of the Bay and Naples harbour. Spring clouds scudded up the sky, casting shadows on early, crowded streets.

They passed another set of French doors. Ferdinand glanced inside the palace.

Ah—
This
is why we're walking out here!

The air might be only just warm, but the sound of the breeze, as well as the noise of the waves, meant no servant indoors stood a chance of overhearing them.

Conrad's hands sweated, carrying the steel of his chains.

“You're an atheist,” Ferdinand said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

Conrad deliberately abandoned the ideas of prevarication, or tact.

I'm deep enough in, in any case! Let a monarch have the undecorated truth told to him.

“Because I never believed, sir. I don't know why.”

Seeing Ferdinand's expression, he made the effort to give a wider picture.

“I remember when I was six, believing in
die Großmutter
who brings coal on St Stephen's Day for bad little boys. And the next year, I didn't believe, being too old for fairy tales. I don't know if I ever had any such belief in the Holy Virgin and Mother Church…”

Conrad frowned, struggling for memories too far back, and too well-handled, to be certain.

“If I'm remembering correctly, I never
had
to disbelieve in God. By the time I was nine, I had been in heretic churches—”

Impolite to call them
Protestant
, here.

“—And I remember listening to them sing of the all-seeing, all-punishing Deity, and thinking they sounded the way mice would sound, if mice worshipped a cat.”

Ferdinand's eyebrows shot up, his bland expression surprised into keen intelligence. “Rather an Old Testament view… So you've been exposed to heresies as well as the true Faith. Your opinion of the Holy Father and the Church is—?”

Conrad closed one fist around the chain-links, tight enough to leave marks.

Tullio always tells me I don't have the brains for a convincing lie
.

“I don't deny the Church's miracles, sir. Or rather, I don't deny that, by the singing of Mass, the sick are healed, daily, and ghosts are laid to rest, and the walking dead appeased. I've seen this.”

“But?”

“But—!” Conrad gestured, and restrained himself at the sound of clinking metal. “I
do
deny that this has anything to do with a Deity! Nothing about it
demands
a god in explanation. Why aren't these things regarded as a part of the natural world which we don't yet understand?”

Ferdinand's pace slowed. He clasped his hands behind him as he walked. His bright gaze appraised Conrad. “The natural world? Do you hold with Dr Schelling's ideas of
Naturphilosophie
, then—that all of nature is a single organism, aspiring upwards to a more spiritual stage, no matter how low it may be? A speck of dust, a weed, a reptile; all aspire to rise and become part of the single great World-Spirit?”

Conrad couldn't help an impolite snort. “I rather think that's religion under another name! Wasn't Schelling a poet as well as a professor of philosophy, sir? Poets often have a difficult time telling science from mysticism.”

Conrad could have sworn the King of the Two Sicilies momentarily looked highly amused.

“And this from a man who writes poetry for a living!”

“I don't write poetry, sir. I write librettos.”

“And the difference?”

“The English poet Mister Lord Byron doesn't have to take his poem back during rehearsals and turn one stanza into one line—or one line into six lines on a different subject altogether.”

“Ah…”

Man-sized Roman
amphorae
stood against the palace wall. Vines grew up from urns, curling around the stanchions that held the awning. The sun cast coiling shadows on the flagstones, at which the King tilted his head, appearing thoughtful.

“No God, only material nature. That sounds very much like ‘denying the Church's miracles.'”

“Sir, the Church claims miracles are caused by a deity rewarding and punishing us according to the condition of our immortal souls… But even a glance shows virtue often isn't rewarded, and sin isn't punished. Besides, I met during the war a Monsieur Xavier Bichat, a physician, who developed an analysis of human tissue types. He found no ‘soul' there, no matter how deeply he dug.”

Conrad glanced away off the terrace, at where the bare masts of merchant ships rocked rhythmically; crews rowing between them and the shore. One warship—an English frigate, from the flags—cut white water at her prow, running down towards Sorrento. Flocks of bum-boats, lateen-sailed feluccas and dhows, and fishing boats (all equally full of traders) disconsolately tacked back towards the harbour.

“Bichat theorised there might be some vital Galvanic force of life that arises
purely
from our material bodies—a vital force which may be capable of things
we don't yet understand—a force which produces our conscious souls. Yes, I've attended Madame Lavoisier's
salon
, and heard other natural philosophers claim M. Bichat is wrong! But they won't go to Church doctrine when they seek to disprove his findings. They'll theorise and
experiment. Porca vacca!
these aren't amazing speculations—even the Mister George Lord Byron has written about them! And Madame Shelley, too. My ambition, sire, one day, is to adapt her ‘creature given life by man' to the opera stage.”

Better the King have it all now
, Conrad decided.
Along with a chance to throw me out, rather than explode at me later.

“All these unexplained phenomena—miraculous healing, the Returned Dead and the like—they should be
investigated
. Nothing should be sacrosanct!—I was for example in London when Signore Buckland himself showed off the bones of his
Megalosaurus
, which he discovered in their southern quarries. The bones of an amazing saurian sixty or a hundred feet in length, never yet found alive by explorers anywhere, and discovered in fossils that make the world
hundreds of millions
of years older than the Church Fathers tell us!”

“Mines and canals are a more reliable gauge of the Earth's age than the generations of ‘begats' in the Old Testament?” Ferdinand suggested the blasphemy with gentle humour.

But then, he's a King. He can
.

“Signore Conrad, doesn't it require faith to believe that this Earth is hundreds of thousands of years old? Or
billions?”

“Logic and reason can be applied to fossils and strata. I don't believe or disbelieve it. I think it's a hypothesis with some compelling proof. But I'm perfectly capable of swapping to a later theory, if it's well supported.—The advances we could make in Naples if we had an Institut here, as in Paris, or a Royal Society like England's!”

Conrad broke off, too late to avoid implying a lack in the kingdom.

Ferdinand stopped walking. “All things ought to be made the subject of experiment, you mean, by Natural Philosophers, and examined to see if they're miraculous or secular in their operation?”

“Yes!”

“I don't disagree.”

Conrad, caught off his stride, almost tripped as he stopped and turned.

Ferdinand appeared to be enjoying Conrad's expression. “If God is all-powerful… An omnipotent God ought not to be frightened away by Natural Scientists and their investigations, should He? If He made the Earth and the Heavens for us to study and learn from, I can hardly imagine He wouldn't expect us to turn that learning eye on the Divinity.”

Conrad struggled for a word—polite or impolite—but found nothing.

The King of the Two Sicilies laughed out loud, with no malice. “I know, I know! There are men among his Eminence's Inquisitors who would happily put Ferdinand of the House of Bourbon-Sicily on the rack for such opinions… But really, this
is
the nineteenth century.”

Ferdinand unclasped his gloved hands, and waved south, towards the promontories and islands and the sails of distant ships.

“When Signore Darwin the younger from London stopped here, on his voyage back from South America, I all but kidnapped him to start just such an Institute as you describe.”

“Signore Darwin was in Naples?” Envy flooded Conrad.
And I wasn't here!

“I discovered that Gabriele Corazza, our current Cardinal, has the greatest objection to being told he's the heir of an ape—a mere soulless animal arisen by chance—and so an Institute is currently impossible. I think sometimes the Church is the greatest obstacle to religion!”

Not all men are Kings who can say what they please in private conversation.
Perhaps he just wants to hear me condemn myself out of my own mouth
.

But the Inquisition could have discovered all this, and put a report on his desk. This man is head of the Church in his kingdom. Why is he taking the trouble to
conciliate
me?

Conrad spoke with challenging coolness, ignoring the wrenching apprehension in his belly.

“I find the Church an obstacle primarily to
knowledge
, sir. Suppose Darwin's beloved wife, for whom he would do anything, had
not
been a notorious free-thinker after Madame Wollstonecraft's mode? Suppose he had married that cousin of his instead: a demure, ordinary, religious woman? How long might we have had to wait for Signore Darwin's theory of life evolving through natural selection, if he faced the concern that his wife thought he might end in Hell? It might have been another twenty years…”

Now—am I a dead man walking?

“Sir, the Dominicans have everything well in hand. I expect my trial for blasphemy can take place by this afternoon!” It came out more intractable than he intended.

Conrad didn't back down.

The wind ruffled at Ferdinand's carefully-cut hair. He was otherwise completely still. His pale eyes focused, and rid Conrad of any idea that the man's quietness meant weakness.

“Think of the power it shows you invoked, Conrad, if you got the Teatro Nuovo struck down. Blasphemy… Yes, I suppose they would charge you with that.”

Would
. Not
will
. Conrad's mouth dried up with hope.