The Girl With the Painted Face (13 page)

Then he remembers.

Just before he left after the show – an invitation. An invitation from some well-to-do audience member. The troupe was to spend the night… God, where the hell was it to be? He scours his mind, trying to recall what Agostino told him after the show; he had been so focused on getting to Sebastiano’s in time, he had barely taken it in. Sinking to sit on a stone step, he puts his face in his hands and tries to remember.

Bloody Sebastiano, why had he let him take a dose straight away? He, Angelo, would have been back with the troupe… with that girl… with a dose ready to hand, if Sebastiano had refused him. If he’d told him to wait. Bloody man.

The heels of his hands press against his eyeballs, and bright giddying patterns erupt. Into the swirling colour comes a name. He remembers. The name of a road – the name of the house where the troupe will even now be sleeping. Angelo looks up, blinking away the black blotches which quickly replace the vivid colours. It is nearly dawn: too late (too early?) to knock on the door of a private house. No, he’ll go to a tavern, and join the troupe in a couple of hours.

Angelo strides away across the piazza. As he reaches the colonnade on the north side of the square, however, the toe of his boot catches on a cobble and he sprawls headlong, banging his hip and knee on the pedestal of a pillar as he skews sideways and falls.

A crack of glass.

Swearing profusely, Angelo gets to his feet and, as he straightens up, he treads on something brittle, which snaps beneath the sole of his boot. He scuffs it away. Brushing the dust from his doublet and breeches, though, he is dimly aware that something feels infinitesimally different about him. He runs his hands down the sides of his breeches: his pockets are empty.

A cold space opens up behind his face. ‘Oh God, please, no…’ he mutters and, squinting in the poor light, he crouches down to examine whatever it was he had kicked from under his boot. The last of the syrupy brown liquid is soaking away into the ground and only shards remain of the bottle – though the cork is still intact in the broken-off neck. Gasping out his helplessness, and fighting a frantic desire to dip his fingers into the rapidly diminishing puddle and suck them, Angelo gazes in dismay as twenty
scudi
’s worth of relief disappears into the dust of the piazza.

10

Sofia stares wide-eyed as Beppe clasps Lidia’s hands in both his own. Pulling her in towards him, he makes as though to kiss her; she resists for a token second, but then, sighing loudly, tilting her face up towards his and closing her eyes, she puckers her lips into a pink-painted rosebud. Beppe’s kiss is noisy, theatrical, and planted in mid-air an inch from Lidia’s mouth.

For a brief second they stand thus, hands clasped, eyes tightly shut, lips almost touching, while Sofia, who is sitting on the bottom step of the smallest wagon, half-hidden beneath a ballooning pile of crimson silk, swallows uncomfortably, hardly able to breathe. She cannot take her eyes from Beppe’s face. Her insides flip over. Her mouth has opened slightly and she has frozen with needle in hand.

‘Putting you off your work, are they, those two lovebirds?’

Angelo has appeared from the other side of the wagon. Leaning against the wooden boarding, he picks up a handful of the crimson silk. ‘I see you’ve made a start on this rag of Cosima’s,’ he says, fiddling the fabric between finger and thumb. ‘That hand of yours better at last?’

Startled, Sofia pricks herself with the needle and smothers a gasp. Squeezing the tip of her finger, she stares as a bright bead of blood swells, round and perfect as a crimson jewel. Lifting her finger to her mouth and sucking it, she tastes warm iron. Face flaming, she nods. ‘I’ve been working on this for a couple of days.’

‘Let’s have a look.’ Angelo reaches down and takes Sofia’s hand. She drops the needle, which falls to the ground. Angelo seems not to notice this, but makes as though to examine the damaged finger, which is still darkly bruised. He strokes her palm with his thumb, but Sofia pulls her hand away.

‘The swelling has gone down now, and it hardly hurts. It’s still a little stiff, but at least I can sew again.’

‘And you’re making a good job of it too, it seems.’

Sofia starts and looks around as she hears Lidia squeal and Beppe laugh. Angelo turns too. Beppe is shaking his head, grinning, while Lidia has her hands on her hips, glaring in open-mouthed mock-outrage at Vico, whose face is a studied picture of wide-eyed innocence.

‘Piss off, Vico, you lecherous toad!’

‘Ooh, such delicate language,
cara…’

‘Shut up! Beppe and I
have
to get this right before Friday, and I can do without
you
creeping up and grabbing handfuls of my bloody backside every five minutes.’

‘But it
is
such a delectable backside…’

Angelo snorts softly and turns back to Sofia. ‘Vico is undemanding. I’m not sure a woman of Lidia’s age can ever be said to have a…
delectable
backside, are you?’

Sofia does not reply.

‘Just give us a few moments more, will you, Vico, then her backside is all yours.’ Beppe pats his friend’s cheek with the flat of his hand; then he and Lidia resume their positions.

Angelo runs the tip of his tongue along his upper lip. Sofia finds herself watching him, despite herself intrigued by the perfection of his symmetrical features; then, catching his eye, irritated with herself, she looks away quickly, leaning down to search for the dropped needle. Fiddling in the dust at her feet, she frowns in concentration as she scours the ground.

A glitter of silver – the metal catches the light. She picks it up.

‘Yes,’ Angelo is saying. ‘She must be – what? – well into her thirties by now.’

‘What? Who?’

‘Lidia. More a matron than a maid now, I think anyone would agree, and Beppe, her would-be on-stage lover, not more than… ooh, he can’t be more than twenty-two or -three, can he?’

Sofia says nothing. Angelo’s comments embarrass her. She has no wish to be sharing these confidences with him but does not know how best to extricate herself. She does not want Beppe to see her in conversation with Angelo, either. Feeling her face burn, she nips the tip of her tongue between her teeth, trying to banish the blush she knows is glowing in her cheeks. Something about Angelo’s sculptural good looks and air of experience discomfits her and drags fierce colour into her face whenever he talks to her – though this is much against her will, for it has been many days since she has realized that Angelo da Bagnacavallo is not a kind man.

‘I think Lidia makes a lovely Colombina,’ she says now, gathering up the red silk skirts. ‘If you will excuse me, I must put this away. I’ll finish it tomorrow.’ And, with a covert glance at Beppe, who is now hopping from foot to foot, bent-kneed and gesticulating wildly at a now furious-looking Lidia, she turns on her heel and scrambles up the wagon steps, pushing her way through into the dimly lit interior. Holding the dress up by the shoulders and shaking out the skirts, she lays it out across the little truckle bed at the far end of the wagon and neatly in-and-outs the needle near the neck of the bodice. She wraps her long length of leftover thread around and around two fingers, then tucks it behind the needle.

It feels good to be earning her keep at last, and her fears of being seen as an unproductive burden – even of being asked to leave – are beginning to recede. These unspoken anxieties haunted her for days as she waited for the hurt finger to mend; she tried not to admit to herself that alongside the genuine fear of being once again on the streets, friendless and grubbing for work, her main worry has been the thought of losing Beppe.

Losing him?

But surely, she says to herself now, you can only lose something which belongs to you. And Sofia can no more imagine Beppe ‘belonging’ to anyone than she can contemplate picking up a bead of quicksilver in her fingers. The stern little voice in which Sofia argues with herself has been telling her in no uncertain terms, ever since the evening of the
scelta
ceremony, that she is behaving like a child. Yes, it’s true that Beppe has held her hand and invited her to sit close to him on numerous occasions – he has even put his arms around her a number of times – and she is sure that she has seen him watching her covertly when he thinks she is unaware. At those moments, her heart lifts and she convinces herself that he might indeed be interested in her – but then she sees him with Lidia and Cosima and the girls who work at the market stalls and the taverns; he smiles and laughs with them too, bending in close to them, touching their sleeves and holding their hands – and Sofia knows he means nothing by it. Nothing at all. He is not trying to seduce – Sofia firmly believes seduction is not in his nature – it’s simply as though Beppe needs to touch whoever he’s with, to reassure himself that they are really there. As if he wants to prove to himself that whoever it is is not just a figment of his imagination.

She is beginning to wish that she
were
a figment of Beppe’s imagination. That way she would belong especially to him.

Sitting down on the truckle bed next to the dress, Sofia thinks through the past days. Two hectic weeks have passed since the day of the
scelta
. Niccolò Zanetti, who travelled with the Coraggiosi as far as Ferrara, has finally headed off, after many fond farewells and promises of meeting again soon, making for the mountains and his much-missed daughter. The troupe has been working hard – they have performed eleven times in the towns and villages of Emilia-Romagna – and not once have they faced a hostile crowd, which is, as Cosima has several times pointed out, something of a departure from the usual. In jubilant mood, Agostino declared earlier this morning that, seeing as the money-bags are now bulging, as soon as the next few secured performances have been successfully completed, a rest may be taken. The Coraggiosi will spend two nights in a comfortable tavern; somewhere, he says, with nothing to do other than eat, drink and sleep. Giovanni Battista has suggested that they go to an inn he knows in the tiny hill-hugging town of Montalbano, a couple of miles north, as the ale there, he seems to remember, is well worth the journey.

Agostino has agreed to this and – after the next few performances – this is where he says they will go.

Everyone has congratulated Sofia on bringing them luck.

Sofia has watched every one of the eleven performances, entranced by the magic the troupe always seems to conjure, and she is slowly starting to unravel the web of complexity that lies at the heart of each show. Each character is becoming more familiar to her by the day. She knows now, for instance, that Agostino’s white-faced Pedrolino is almost always sad, often tired and frequently falling asleep; time and again he is on the point of dissolving with remorse at what he perceives to be his many failings. She has learned that Cosima, in her guise of the beautiful
inamorata
,
will always walk and talk with elegance and poise, will move like the most delicate of dancers, will never, ever look ridiculous, however much inanity is erupting all around her. Dear Giovanni Battista (in reality, she has discovered, a sweet old man of gentle humour and great affection), once he has been well padded and wool-stuffed around the belly, will portray Il Dottore on the stage: a fat, pompous, arrogant fool in long black clothes and a black skull-cap. His normally lilting voice will parp out like a trombone, he will strut and posture and preen, and will – almost inevitably – fall foul of the machinations of Beppe’s mischievous, agile and utterly amoral Arlecchino.

Beppe.

Sofia chews on her thumb. She cannot stop thinking about Beppe.

She dare not make her feelings clear to him. Or to anyone else – though on several occasions she has thought that perhaps she should confide in Cosima or Lidia. What if she were to do so, though, and then discover that her fears are justified – that Beppe cares no more for her than any other of his acquaintance? How could she stay with the troupe if he came to know of her partiality but did not return it? To see him every day after such a revelation would be torture. The others might laugh at her – no, that’s probably not true, she admits; but they would almost certainly pity her. She imagines the looks on their faces. She’d have to leave – and even after these short weeks, Sofia feels a dreadful pang at even the prospect of leaving the Coraggiosi. They have been more of a family to her than she can remember having since the death of her mother.

A tinny fanfare from Vico’s battered old trumpet sounds outside the wagon, startling Sofia out of her reverie. She climbs back out of the wagon.

Angelo, she is glad to see, has disappeared, as has Lidia.

Beppe is now practising a complicated little piece of nonsense with Vico, with the newly made six-rung ladder. Vico has his trumpet to his lips again and, as Beppe tumbles off the ladder with a startled shout, and rolls neatly to one side, Vico makes a farting noise through the mouthpiece.

Sofia bites her lip, smiling.

Beppe rubs his forehead where he has just banged it on the edge of the ladder. The
lazzo
almost worked that time; he has been wanting the little set of steps to seem as though it is fixed to the floor as he goes up and down, up and over, never reaching the place he is supposed to reach – and he almost managed it that last time. Almost. It is far harder than he thought it would be.