Lucifer's Shadow

28 The saddest loss

Is it in my small room, the third to the right on the third floor, and stare mournfully out of the window at the square of San Cassian, listening to the distant whores and drunks winding their way through the streets. And I can do nothing but weep and damn creation. There was a brief letter from Seville this afternoon. My beloved sister, Lucia, is dead. They speak of some sickness of the stomach. What would the Spanish know of such things? If she had fallen ill here in Venice, Jacopo would have set her right with a single penetrating look and a potion. Now she lies cold in a foreign grave. I shall never hear her laughter again, nor feel the warmth of her soft hand.

Why is she dead? Is this God’s revenge for the way I have played hide-and-seek with Rebecca through His houses these past few weeks? Are these God’s rules? Or those of the men, all wealthy, all worldly, who are His self-appointed ambassadors in this place? What kind of deity would wreak His vengeance on two such as us, young, stupid, happy, and overflowing with the life they would have us believe was His gift in the first place?

And yet… my sister is gone. Some Spanish infection has stolen her precious life. My mind races with possibilities, decisions, actions I might have undertaken which would have meant Lucia would be alive today, smiling as ever, waiting for the world to entertain her. It is all quite futile. Time bears down on us, without mercy, without pause. We have no way of knowing when the jaws of the lion will shut tight around us, and must therefore accept a duty to embrace each hour to the full and let the priests take care of the hereafter. Why should I agonise over whether I have abandoned God? Is it not more relevant to ask whether He has abandoned me, left me alone with my own dark thoughts?

When I was sufficiently composed, I broke the news to Leo. He looked at me queerly. He has had his own losses, I think. Something in his expression seemed to indicate Lucia’s death made me his peer, a co-conspirator in some secret whispering about the true nature of our lives. He came over to the table where I was slumped in misery and placed a hand on my back.

“Lorenzo. I am genuinely sorry to hear this.” There were no tears in his eyes. Since I gave him Rebecca’s music, he has seemed quite preoccupied. “But you must not be surprised.”

I felt some mindless, angry heat rise inside me. “Surprised, Uncle? My sister was twenty-one and as strong as an ox when she left here for Spain. Of course I am surprised.”

“Yes, boy. Yes, boy.” I tire of being addressed as a juvenile. I was about to tell him as much when he said something that quite took my breath away. “But you must know, Lorenzo, it always comes to this. When you love someone, they will leave you, one way or another. Be a solitary man and circumvent the heartache. That’s my advice.”

There is a point in everyone’s upbringing where one realises that adulthood is not synonymous with wisdom. I think I was a late developer in this field. Leo is a fool, a sour, narrow-minded fool to boot. He inhabits a monochromatic universe where the only warmth and joy are those that come from his own introverted thoughts. He gives nothing and, consequently, receives nothing in return.

And he steals too. I looked at the papers on the table which seemed to interest him much more than my loss. One was the frontispiece to a part for Rebecca’s concerto, back from the outside copyists we had been compelled to employ in order to meet Delapole’s deadline. In the place where the composer’s title would normally have been printed — which I assumed would be left blank in the circumstances — I was astonished to see the name “Leonardo Scacchi.”

“Uncle! You cannot do this.”

“Of course not,” he replied with more than a hint of sarcasm in his voice. “Not immediately, anyhow.”

“Not at all! This is not your work.”

“No? And who knows that? When someone steps forward and claims title to this, how do we know he’s telling the truth? Why this charade in the first place? There’s some funny business going on here, I’ll bet. Don’t assume it’ll pan out the way our anonymous joker hopes. Why shouldn’t I see what it looks like with my name on the cover? I could have been a musician, too, if it wasn’t for this damn claw. There were plenty of corrections needed to that scrappy script that came through the door. Do I get no credit for that?”

Speechless, I left the house abruptly and sat for a while in the parish church, refusing to tell the priest my news for fear of how my temper might receive his predictable show of sympathy.

Instead I crouched silent on a pew for an hour or more, as if in meditation. These ramblings have lost their purpose. There is no pretty hand in Seville to receive them. I am no longer the amiable, fraternal chronicler, sanitising the truth for my distant sister. Instead these thoughts may work their way inwards to my soul with all their truth, as harsh and bitter as it may be.

So let me admit this to myself now. My sister was not uppermost in my thoughts for long. My head rebelled at the injustice, the impossibility of her death. So I sat in the church of San Cassian and stared at that ancient painting which I once described to Lucia: the schoolmaster being martyred by his pupils. In the darkness I allowed my imagination to rise up, like Lucifer ascending from damnation. Leo was the master, I was the pupil. In my right hand the adze, in my left a sharp pen, the nib cut as sharp as the finest dagger.

How many men are murdered daily in the mind’s eye? Millions, I believe, and the next morning they rise and go about their business, oblivious to the agonising fate their midnight selves suffered in another’s mind a few hours before. The penknife and the adze. The sword and the scalpel. If Leo could peer into my head and see what wonders I worked upon his scrawny frame that night, he would faint away dead in horror. But no man knows what thoughts run through another’s brain. The following day, over breakfast, Leo bestowed upon me quite a fetching smile, then said, “It’s off to Ca’ Dario and a word with that Gobbo chum of yours. I must keep Delapole in my power, boy. I must have him tight within my grasp.”