Her Deadly Mischief

Poisoned Pen Press

Chapter One

It was opening night at the Teatro San Marco, with all the attendant bustle and confusion on both sides of the crimson curtain. Though the performance had barely begun, I'd already torn the tunic of my soldier's costume on a nail protruding from a piece of scenery and had my toes mashed by a nervous white stallion awaiting his appearance near the end of Act One.

Several of my fellow singers were as jumpy as the horse, but they needn't have been. In all my years on the stage, I'd seldom performed such a jewel of an opera. In Armida, Maestro Torani had crafted a spectacle certain to make even the most jaded Venetian sit up and take notice. Besides its delightful score, Armida served up a fiery chariot belching white-hot sparks and an enchanted palace hung with rotating globes that mimicked an array of silver stars. Our wily maestro had even persuaded the Senate to cough up sufficient funds to uniform the orchestra in scarlet and gold to match the interior of the vast theater.

The singing wasn't half bad, either. Thanks to me and my talented colleagues.

I was playing Rinaldo, a knight of the Crusades and hero of the piece. My longtime rival, castrato Emilio Strada, was playing the Crusader captain and would sing an aria while mounted on the white stallion. Better him than me. The rest of the cast were also singers I had worked with before. All made pleasanter colleagues to sing alongside than the arrogant Emilio, who had recently seen fit to inflate his stage name to Emiliano.

While awaiting my entrance cue, I took stock of the house by means of a peephole concealed by a curtain flap. Every taper in the auditorium's massive ceiling chandelier was aflame, as well as those in the smaller chandelier above the stage apron. Surrounding the tiers of boxes, mirrors amplified the light from triple-sconces so that the auditorium was filled with thousands of bright pinpoints. I favored my throbbing foot as I squinted through the smoke-hazed light that fell on patrician and commoner alike.

On the other side of the orchestra, a noisy crowd had gathered on the floor of the auditorium—what we called the pit. Wooden benches sagged beneath high-spirited students who might well have sacrificed their dinner money to see the opera. They rubbed elbows and traded insults with clerks who had flung their arms around black-eyed women in tattered finery. Then there were the gondoliers, the music-loving boatmen who were already stamping their feet and hooting for their favorite singers.

I chuckled. Maestro Torani had arranged a surprise that would soon shut them up. I glanced up into the maze of catwalks and ropes and flying scenery above the stage. Any minute now. Yes!

A stagehand detonated a vivid green lightning flash, and through the clearing smoke a mechanical cloud shuddered downward. The machine bore our prima donna, Vittoria Busanti, costumed in a mantua gown of glittering gold with a matching petticoat. I applied an eye to the peephole and watched hundreds of jaws go slack with surprise and delight.

Vittoria was past her first youth, but she had kept her figure and was a fine little actress. Stopping mere inches from the footlights, she struck a dramatic pose before nodding her readiness to the conductor at the harpsichord. He replied with a stirring chord. As Vittoria launched into the sorceress Armida's menacing aria, her full breasts rose and fell and her panniered skirts swayed with the suggestion of generously rounded hips. My colleague was certainly on voice tonight. Trill followed trill, up and down the scales, sending her admirers into paroxysms of delight. In a perfect melding of song and motion, Vittoria's sultry femininity spilled over the rim of the stage like summer waves lapping at the sands of the Lido. Every man in the pit would have gladly dived in. Even those who couldn't swim.

Satisfied that the rabble was suitably impressed with our opera, I lifted my gaze to the boxes that curved around the auditorium. The first tier, elevated only a few feet off the floor, held courtesans and other persons of dubious repute. Pointedly ignoring Vittoria's performance, the brightly dressed ladies of pleasure were bantering with young bucks promenading the perimeter of the pit. The higher tiers were occupied by noble families and wealthy merchants who rented boxes by the season, year after year. They were passed down from father to son, these miniature drawing rooms that served as nightly rendezvous for much of the populace.

It was the third week of Carnevale, so masking was in order. Venice had acquired her unsavory reputation partially based on this extended opportunity for disguise, but most mask wearers were not fleeing creditors or hiding out from foreign authorities. They simply enjoyed the frivolity of going incognito. Women from lowest to highest station favored the moretta, an unadorned oval of black velvet that lent an air of mystery to their pale, painted faces and didn't compete with complicated hair arrangements.

The men's masks were more varied. I saw several naval officers sporting flat pig snouts; the pointed beak of the plague doctor and the chronically happy Arlecchino were also popular that season. For complete anonymity, many men settled on a traditional bauta that combined a white mask of leather or papier-mâché and veiled tricorne.

If I had observed the tragic Zulietta that night, she would have been sitting among the upper tiers, hobnobbing with the ladies and gentlemen dressed in silk and lace. But just then I took no note of anyone in particular. I was searching for my family's box.

It was mere curiosity. A failing of mine, I admit. My sister Annetta and her husband, Englishman Augustus Rumbolt, weren't in attendance. Gussie had turned in his key to the box office before leaving Venice last month. For any other opening, they would have been in their regular place, loyally cheering each one of my arias.

Gussie and I had been fast friends ever since he landed in Venice to sample life as an artist. I was pleased when a bequest from one of his doting aunts liberated him from the ancestral duties he found so onerous, and absolutely delighted when he and my sister announced their intent to wed. Now Gussie had taken Annetta and their three children to visit England for the first time since he had made our island his permanent home— sheer rebellious folly his mother had accused in one of her infrequent letters. I'd often wondered how they were all getting on. Did England seem like a foreign country to my brother-in-law who had become thoroughly steeped in Venetian ways? Was the frosty Lady Rumbolt welcoming Annetta or making her feel like an uncouth barbarian? And to assuage my curiosity, who was occupying their usual box on this special evening?

There, just as Vittoria hit her top note, I spotted Gussie's box to the right and one tier up from the Doge's more ornate accommodation. The figures framed by the looped-back curtains applauded furiously. They were strangers to me: two unmasked men in full, starch-white bob wigs flanking a masked woman. Colored jewels glittered on the woman's bosom and her fan fluttered in excitement. Behind the three at the railing, anonymous maskers occupied extra chairs brought in for the...