A Shadow All of Light (28 page)

“By Maestro Astolfo?”

“There is a venture afoot,” I said, and delivered a brief account of the visit of Veuglio and the girl Sibylla. “As you would expect, he is an old crony of Astolfo's, a most remarkable personage. You will find him impressive. The girl is new to me. They are to share bread with us this evening and we must be present to receive instruction.”

“I have no stomach for food, nor for instruction neither. I have mine own ends to pursue.”

“You seek the cat that beareth your voice in its body. I have asked about this beast where you did and received the same empty result.”

“I shall not leave off. I detest this cattish tongue I am forced to use. The sound of it curdles my belly juices. It sounds even worse when you essay to use it, as you are doing now.”

“I had thought I was finding the custom of it—the music, so to speak.”

“If you spoke as born to it, it would still be an ugly brangle, barbarous in every vowel.”

“Well, we must away to the villa. The sun hath passed its mid-afternoon mark.”

“You shall, if you please, convey my regrets.”

“I dare not,” I said. “The maestro is already displeased with us for leaving our task at the château unfulfilled.”

“How so? We took meticulous pains. All was in order.”

“This Veuglio marched through our snares, traps, mazes, and dead ends with less trouble than walking through cobweb.”

“Then,” said he, rising to his feet, “I should like to meet this signor and to learn of him.”

*   *   *

At table, Mutano appeared in a better state than he had in The Red Stallion. There his slovenliness of dress matched his bedraggled spirit, but now he was scrubbed and brushed and combed and togged in a dark green tunic new to my eyes. I had been studious of my ablutions also, washing away the musky perfumes that had engulfed me at the cattery door. I had no doubt, however, that Veuglio would detect the smell of that establishment.

Of the food I made little account, it being fleshless, fowl-less, and fishless. I dutifully made my way through groats, pulse, three different porridges, and an undistinguished cheese. Mutano and I refreshed ourselves plentifully with flagons while Veuglio and Sibylla drank water. Both of our guests fed themselves like herons a-fishing; they sat unmoving for intervals and then would dart their hands into the bowls and platters and take up victual with their fingers. This practice was convenable to blindness, methought, and the girl followed it also.

For a long time there was small converse. If Astolfo had not undertaken a long tale of a princess who had lent her beautiful shadow to a homely lady-in-waiting, silence would have immersed the large dining room and its carmine drapery and ornate silver candlesticks.

At last Astolfo too fell silent and Mutano redoubled his attack upon the wine jug; and then Sibylla spoke: “It is of no use, Signor Mutano, to try to lave from memory the face of a beloved with drink.”

Mutano did not reply but only stared upon this white, thin girl as if she had shied a candlestick at him. She gazed at him steadily with her haunted eyes.

I was alert upon the instant. The child was correct. Why had I not thought how my friend's despair proceeded from the fact that his fancy had lit upon a new beauty while he had not the means of speech to declare his passion, much less to ornament it with poems and songs after his custom?

Who his adored one was, I could not know, and it made small difference. In his usual course of love, Mutano would charm some beauty fair of form, delicate of manner, and refined of taste. He would worship her as acolytes of the Spring Goddess worship their deity. Then he would discover that she was no more than a woman like many another and his adoration would turn into indifference and the sweetness of his dreaming hours to bitter ashes. He had followed this path unchanging some seven or eight times that I had knowledge of, and it was likely there had been others of whom he had kept silent.

Now Sibylla had divined his secret and, though it explained much to me about his late comportment, I knew it could not alter Mutano's cast of mind. He would try to regain his voice and if successful would pay devoted court to this unknown female, waylaying her with ballads and springing sonnets upon her as from an ambuscado. She was likely to be burdened with violets and near drowned in roses until some coarse expression flew from her lips or some act of petty treachery betrayed her inmost character. Then my wide-shouldered colleague would sit in heartsore solitude and his ballads would turn acrid and his sugared sonnets degenerate into satires.

This latter stage I secretly welcomed, for his angry lines held four times the wit and savor of his amatory mewling.

“As for Mutano's capacity for wine,” I replied to the girl, “there you need not fear. I have seen him down goblets by the dozen without showing effect.”

The old man spoke. “What is not shown without wreaketh more direly within. Yet let that pass and tell how you and he sought to set safeguards upon the baron's château with your placement of shades.”

I looked to Astolfo, not willing to share the secrets of our trade without his permission. He remained impassive, so I followed my own discretion. “It is difficult to describe. It will be easier and more instructive to demonstrate.”

I rose from my place, took up a candelabrum, set it at the end of the table, and advanced to the edge before it. “If a man walk along a corridor with light behind him, he will swerve to a new direction when he sees upon the wall before him the shadow of a mastiff large enough to tear out his throat.” With my hands before the candle flame I projected such a shape on the wall. With the fingers of my left hand curled to represent a shaggy mass, I placed my right fist in that palm, wrist bent to form a plausible leonine face. I sounded a growl low in my throat.

Sibylla giggled lightly, but Veuglio frowned. “This is nonsense,” he said. “You must be making a shadow-play of the hands that does not deceive even the children whom it amuses. Its effect is lost upon me, a blind man, even though I know what you are doing.”

“You must recall the circumstances,” I replied. “You are a thief whose life hangs in the balance. You hardly know this dark corridor by daylight and not at all by night. Your senses are overwary and you fear making the softest sound. Suddenly on the wall before you appeareth the shape of a lion. You are in a state of mind easily to be misled.”

I bent back my wrist so that the lion head lifted and then bent it forward so that the shape fell. There sounded a heavy knocking upon timber. An expression of puzzlement crossed the girl's face.

“What you have taken to be the shadow of an animal was only that of a sculpted door knocker,” I said.

“Your accomplice, Signor Mutano, rapped the underside of the table,” Veuglio said.

“True, but your young assistant was taken in, if fleetingly.”

“She hath the disadvantage of being able to see. It has betrayed her more times than two.”

“If all the world were as you, friend Veuglio,” said Astolfo, “my table would lack sorely. No one would buy my wares.”

“Do not the olden philosophers declare that most men are as in my case, blind and without true understanding?” Veuglio said.

“The sages are glad to point out the failings of others,” Astolfo said. “Upon the subject of sightlessness, they are wont to say that all who shun their particular strains of wisdom are blind.”

“Tomorrow Signor Veuglio will accompany Mutano and me to Baron Rendig's château,” I said, “and there he will point out to us our failings in regard to the guarding of the treasure, whatever thing it may be. We saw nothing precious there but the ring we ourselves had placed. Can we not let the matter lie until then and strike upon another theme?”

“Perhaps we shall enjoy to have music,” said Veuglio. “Sibylla hath a singular voice for tune.”

“Let us hear her sing,” I said. “What music, child, dost thou know?”

“I have five songs,” she said. “‘The Dolors of the Faithful Knight,' ‘The Ballad of the Unjustly Hanged,' ‘The Queen Who Would and Yet Would Not,' and ‘How Jason Came Home from the Thirsty Land.'”

“What is the other?”

“The fifth I do not sing and keep hope that I never shall.”

“Thy choice, then,” I said.

She sang out in a fine, thin voice like the trembling of a silver wire: “O Jason was a brave seafarer, And none was fairer than he…”

Forty verses this song entrained, and they were sufficient to send us to a bed each and all.

*   *   *

The commission upon which Mutano and I labored at the baron's château was on a vastly different scale from most of our undertakings. Here we did not dispose dribs of shadow to the allurement of Signorina Millifiore's bosom nor tapered curlicues of colored shade to the ringlets of her coiffure. Large spaces confronted us, walls and ceilings and, of our most particular concern, floors. Stairs we studied and corridors and the great drains of courtyard and kitchen and stables. We investigated the one dry well in the center of the courtyard, Mutano letting me down on ropes to a sort of small chamber at the bottom. We traveled the upper stories with their dim hallways and the under-roof space where a pair of red owls nested. The cellars and larders we went through and we made everywhere extensive notes and sketches.

The edifice contained three secret chambers; these were small, windowless, silent rooms that were barely furnished. One was located off a dank cellar corridor; a shabby little oaken door that looked as if it would open to a little-used storage space was sheathed with steel plate on the inside. This door guarded a room not much larger than the fireplace in Astolfo's main library. In the center of this room stood a small, sturdy table with a low stool beside. The table was bare, but on the single wall shelf opposite sat a short pewter candleholder. It was empty, but three dirty candle stubs lay beside it, along with flint and steel and a tinderbox.

There was another secluded room like this one on the second floor, and on the third and uppermost floor, still another. These doors looked most ordinary, but they too were steel-sheathed, as if shabby tables and dingy candle ends were handsome treasures.

The one other appurtenance for each room was a small stoneware bowl set unobtrusively in a corner. Mutano lifted one to his nose. “It hath held cow cream,” he said.

This then was the domicile we were to protect from intruders and thieves by arranging and disposing everywhere our deceptive shadows. Baron Rendig would not set a troop of guards in his house. He seemed to rate this unknown treasure so precious that he could trust no one to stay by it. Other systems of trapdoors, tripping wires, suspended broadaxes, and the like had proved as ineffective as the shadow mazes Mutano and I had set in place.

I thought it a useless exercise to go with Veuglio through the château. He and Sibylla had traveled this house before, as he recounted, and had come to the secret rooms without being misled. That had been in the dark o' the night and they had walked as stealthily as any jewel thief. He told us that the girl held a lantern before them as they walked.

“What aid can a lantern lend a blind man?” I asked.

“So that if there be others in the house they may recognize who we are and offer no threat,” he said. “Your Maestro Astolfo advised the baron I would be making a midnight trial of the shadow-tangle, so as to prevent my being taken for a thief, my cranium battered and my guts run through.”

“Very well,” I said. “We have brought one of our lanterns from our Nighthouse and Sibylla must carry it just as she did at midnight, though it is now only forenoon. I will walk beside her to see how you wend your way and Mutano shall follow thee.”

“Let us begin,” he said, and made straightway for a set of steep stone steps that led to the cellar passageway. I had to go smartly to keep pace with the old man.

Here was a tedious chore. When we had completed our commission at this château, Mutano and I surveyed our work with no small pride. We had laid shadows athwart shadows and overlaid these with others. A thief who trusted to his eyes would find that an oblong darkness he took to be a corridor was a swift exit to the stony floor below; this passageway that opened to the upper balcony was actually an adit to the empty void around a parapet; that slant of light ahead that promised admission to the largest bedchamber was actually a slanted and shadow-applied mirror that would send one tumbling down a flight of breakneck stairs.

One deception in which we took particular pride presented the sight of a gauzy curtain wafting in the breeze at a casement. Yet it was the rippling umbra of the surface of a stream that we had excised from the underside of a bridge and hung beside the large drain that fell two stories to a rock-ribbed culvert. To step through that imagined window was to step to a painful death.

Many another ingenious illusion we had set in corners, at doorways, inside closets, and along galleries, and Veuglio and Sibylla passed by or through or about each one, finding sure footing at every step. He located each of the three secret rooms, advanced to their small tables, and felt his way to sit upon the stools. In the last one he said, “I detect the smell of tallow, but there is no candleholder on this table.”

“The holder with the four stubs beside it sits in a shelf behind you,” I told him.

“Ah,” he said, nodding.

“And now this exercise is completed. Will you return to the villa?” I said.

“Yes. I am beginning to tire.”

We were concluded here for the time, I thought, but just as we were exiting the courtyard gate, Mutano gave a quick
“Mrrr”
and spun round in his tracks and lifted his head to look at the overhanging balcony. On top of the balustrade there sat a great orange cat looking down upon us with piercing gaze. Mutano returned this gaze steadily for a moment before following us outside and pulling shut the wide gate. I saw that he was excited but was trying not to show his agitation.