Free 4 - The Iron Tongue of Midnight by Beverle Graves Myers Page A

nod, encouragingly, I hoped.
    “All right, we go?” Karl raised his right hand high, his first two fingers ready to mark the tempo.
    Emilio muttered an indistinguishable reply, chin on his chest.
    The composer’s arm sank. “I know we’ve all had a difficult night, but it is time to put that unpleasantness aside. You are all professionals, so give me professional work.”
    “Of course, Maestro.” Grisella assumed an expression she had inherited from our father, a smile at once virtuous and deprecating to those around her. She then directed a nod toward the entrance, and I turned to see Jean-Louis reply with a tight-lipped grimace. The Frenchman was dressed in a suit tailored to fit his frame like a second skin. He crossed the salon with a courtier’s glide and settled in a wing chair with a stack of news-gazettes.
    “Emilio?” The composer’s question held a note of impatience.
    The castrato steadied himself and managed a gracious nod.
    “Good, we go. One, two, three—” Karl introduced a swaying meter of three-quarter time. Over the strings and the continuo provided by the harpsichord, Grisella’s voice took flight like a falcon rising on sleek wings.
    All the worries my sister had caused us over the years had made me forget what a truly fine singer she was. Her clear soprano was capable of the most elegant trills and divisions, but that was technique. Above the schooling she’d had as a girl, her singing flowed with a loveliness born of pure instinct.
    I sat forward with my elbows on my knees, drinking it all in and thinking back to the days right before she had disappeared from our lives. Father often set her to vocalizing scales at the battered harpsichord in our sitting room. Under his direction, she sang endless rounds of ascending and descending notes, striving to link them like a string of perfectly matched glass beads. But once her stern taskmaster was out of earshot, she would launch into lilting songs she had heard only from the gondoliers on the canal. She sang them by ear with joyous gusto, never missing a note. I couldn’t have done as well at thirteen, even with my conservatorio training.
    Karl appeared as delighted as I was. Grisella seemed particularly sensitive to the directions he gave with his right hand while he played the continuo with his left. A hint of Karl’s flattened palm and she extended her note; a precise wiggle of his fingers and she adjusted her phrasing accordingly. They made an excellent team: a skilled director and a talented soprano.
    Glancing around to see what Jean-Louis made of Grisella’s performance, I was surprised to see his beaked nose buried in a news-sheet. He must be so accustomed to her singing that it made little impression.
    Now it was Emilio’s entrance, and the castrato didn’t fare so well. Early on, he snatched a breath in the wrong place that threw him off tempo for several measures.
    Karl abruptly stopped playing and the Gecco brothers followed suit. “You know where you went wrong,” the maestro observed in a level tone.
    Emilio nodded, cheeks flushing.
    “That’s all right. Let’s have it again.” Karl sounded a chord and Emilio returned to the beginning. Better this time, I thought. With proper breathing, Emilio’s small mouth was able to produce tones of mellow, bell-like timbre. Just the thing for his role of Andronicus, the lovesick prince.
    He and Grisella were blending their voices in an energetic cadenza when Octavia joined us. She wore a loosely draped morning gown of screaming yellow dotted with red bouquets. If any of our eyes were still bleary from sleep, they were jolted to full wakefulness by one glimpse of our hostess.
    “Oh, don’t mind me,” she called gaily as she crossed to a settee near the open loggia doors. “I’ll listen while I work on my stitching over here in the good light. I promise to stay quiet as a mouse.”
    Nita followed her mistress, bearing a floor stand topped with an oval tapestry frame. Rehearsal