putting his heavy arm over Tonio, guided him forward.
The figure had moved away.
Tonio smiled, but no one saw it. He was thinking of his father’s words to him, very nearly his last words, and suddenly an anguish deadened him and left him solitary even in this little company.
“Once you have made the decision that you are a man, you will become one.” Could the mind thus instruct the flesh? He shook his head, communing with himself. Against Andrea he felt a sudden terrible anger.
And yet it seemed unforgivable that he should feel this, that he should be where he was, wandering with common singers in this mean and crooked place. Yet he walked on, leaning all the more on Ernestino.
They had reached the canal. Lanterns burned ahead beneath the dim shadow of the bridge where the gondoliers gathered.
And there appeared that figure again; he was sure it was the same, for the heavy build and the height, and the man stood by obviously watching them.
Tonio moved his hand to his sword, and for a moment he was fixed to the spot.
“Excellency, what is it?” said Ernestino. They were only a few steps from Bettina’s tavern.
“That one, there,” Tonio murmured, but the weight of his suspicion was breaking him, sickening him. Send death for me, like that, some paid assassin? It seemed he’d already been dealt the blow and this was not life any longer, rather some nightmare place where that sentinel stood on the bridge and these strangers urged him to a meaningless portal.
“Never mind, Excellency,” said Ernestino. “That’s only the maestro from Naples. A singing teacher come here for little boys. Haven’t you seen him before? He’s playing your shadow.”
It was dawn when Tonio lifted his head from drunken sleep at the tavern table. Bettina sat at his side, her arm under his coat and warm against his back as if she would protect him from the coming sun, and Ernestino, beyond coherence, kept up an angry argument with her father.
And against the wall at the door stood a stocky man, brown-haired, with large menacing eyes and a nose that was pushed flat to his face as if someone had smashed it. He was young. He wore a tattered coat, a sword with a brass handle. And he was staring rudely at Tonio as he lifted his tankard.
3
IT WAS ALMOST completely dark in San Marco, only a score of scattered lights pulsing throughout the immense church to give the faintest glint to the old mosaics. Old Beppo, Tonio’s elderly castrato teacher, held a single taper in his hand as he gazed anxiously at the young maestro from Naples, Guido Maffeo.
Tonio stood alone in the left choir loft. He had only just finished singing, and there was a distinct echo of his last note lingering in the church as if nothing could put an end to it.
Alessandro was standing mute, his hands clasped behind his back, looking down at the two smaller figures, Beppo, and Guido Maffeo beside him. He was the first to see the distortion in Maffeo’s features. Beppo did not see it, and at the first guttural blast from the southern Italian, Beppo was visibly stunned.
“From the greatest of Venetian families!” Guido repeated Beppo’s last words. He bent forward slightly to glare into the face of the old eunuch. “You brought me here to listen to a Venetian patrician!”
“But, Signore, this is the finest voice in Venice.”
“A Venetian patrician!”
“But Signore…”
“Signore,” Alessandro ventured softly, “Beppo did not perhaps realize that you are searching for students for the conservatorio.” Alessandro had sensed this misunderstanding almost from the beginning.
But Beppo still did not comprehend. “But, Signore,” he insisted, “I wanted…I wanted that you should hear this voice for your own pleasure!”
“For my own pleasure, I could have stayed in Naples,” growled Guido.
Alessandro turned to Beppo, and with obvious disregard for this impossible southern Italian, he spoke in the soft Venetian dialect. “Beppo, the Maestro is looking for castrati children.”
Beppo was miserable.
Tonio had come down from the choir loft and his slight, dark-clad figure appeared behind the echo of his footsteps in the gloom.
He had sung without accompaniment, and his voice had easily filled the church, its effect upon Guido being almost eerie.
The boy was so near manhood now that the voice had lost its innocence. And long years of study had obviously contributed to its perfection. But it was a natural voice, singing in effortless perfect pitch. And though it was a boy’s soprano which had not yet begun to