He had risen from his desk before he realized what he was doing, and passing quickly into the bedchamber, he stopped when he saw Tonio at the window looking down into the yard.
“You know what these Roman audiences are,” Guido said. “You know what I have before me. Be patient with me.”
“I am,” Tonio said.
“You must do everything that I ask of you! You must give me that!”
He felt sharp, eager for argument. Everything that angered him and irritated him in Tonio came to the fore. But he knew this was not the time. There was plenty of time….
“I will do anything that you ask,” Tonio was saying politely in that rich, measured voice.
“Oh, yes, anything except perform in female dress when you know that is what you must do. In Rome of all places, and of course you will do anything but that which it is absolutely essential that you do!”
“Guido,” Tonio interrupted him. For the first time he evinced anger and impatience. The transformation of that angelic face never failed to amaze Guido. “This, I can’t do. There is no reason to argue it anymore.”
Guido gave a low, scornful sound. He had what he wanted now, strife, and plenty of it, and angry words coming to his lips, and Tonio’s face coloring, the eyes growing colder. But why was Guido doing this? Why on their very first day in Rome, when he did have time, a great deal of time to take Tonio to the theaters, to show him the castrati in female costume, to make him understand their great power and appeal?
Tonio turned abruptly and went to the open dressing room. He was removing the robe. He would dress now and go out, and these rooms would be empty. Guido would be alone.
A desperate feeling came over him.
“Come here!” he demanded coldly. He moved to the bed. “No, bolt the doors first,” he said, “then come.”
For a moment Tonio merely gazed at him.
He pressed his lips together ever so slightly and then with that small patient nod so characteristic of him, he did what he was told. He stood waiting by the high bed, his hand on the coverlet, looking serenely into Guido’s eyes. Guido had opened his breeches, and he felt his passion collecting his other emotions and fusing them into one strength.
“Take off the robe,” he said crossly. “And lie down. On your face, lie down.”
Tonio’s eyes were actually a little more beautiful than eyes should be. With the slightest betrayal of his disapproval of all this, Tonio did again what he was told.
Guido mounted him roughly; the nakedness under him, against his clothes, maddened him. He pressed Tonio’s face into the bed with the heel of his hand, and took him with his crudest thrusts.
It seemed a long time he lay still beside Tonio before Tonio rose to go.
Without complaint, Tonio dressed, and when he had put on his jeweled rings and taken up his walking stick, he came quietly to the side of the bed. He bent to kiss Guido on the forehead and then on the lips.
“Why do you put up with me?” Guido whispered.
“Why shouldn’t I put up with you?” Tonio whispered. “I love you, Guido,” he said. “And we are both of us just a little afraid.”
2
THAT STREET, the stars overhead, the ceiling of the room, his teeth biting down into flesh, and the knife, the actual slash of the knife, and that roaring sound which was his own scream…
Then he awoke, his hand to his mouth, realizing he had not really uttered a sound.
He was in the Cardinal Calvino’s house; he was in Rome.
It was nothing really, that old dream, and the faces of those bravos whom he sometimes imagined he had seen in the streets. Of course he had never really seen them; that was a little fantasy of his, seeing one of them, catching him unawares: “You remember Marc Antonio Treschi, the boy you took to Flovigo?” and the stiletto driving between the ribs.
Just before leaving Naples, he had spent an afternoon with a bravo learning even more about how to use the little dagger. The man, paid well for his instruction, seemed to enjoy an apt pupil.
“But why attend to this yourself, Signore?” he had said under his breath as he eyed Tonio’s clothes, the rings on his fingers. “I am out of work just now. My services are not as expensive as you might think.”
“Just teach me.” Tonio had smiled. Smiling always made him feel