lured out of her solitary life to see the young one from Naples, whom they called The Boy, Farinelli. Tonio cried because he couldn’t go. And waking hours after, saw she’d come home, and sat at the harpsichord in the dark, her veil sparkling with rain, her face as white as a porcelain doll’s as in a faint uncertain voice she echoed the threads of Farinelli’s arias.
Ah, the poor do what they must for food and drink. We will always have these miraculous high voices. Yet every time Tonio saw Alessandro outside the church door, he could not help but wonder: Did he cry? Did he try to run away? Why didn’t his mother try to hide him? But there was nothing in Alessandro’s long face but that sleepy good humor, his chestnut hair a lustrous frame for skin that was as pretty as a girl’s, and that voice slumbering deep inside, waiting for its moment in the choir loft, waiting for the backdrop of hammered gold that seemed to make him one—for Tonio—with the angels.
But by this time, too, Tonio knew he was Marc Antonio Treschi, the son of Andrea Treschi who had once commanded the galleys of the Serenissima on foreign seas, and after years of service in the Most Serene Senate, had just been elected to the Council of Three, that awesome triumvirate of inquisitors whose power it was to arrest, to try, to pronounce sentence, and to carry out that sentence—even if it were death—upon anyone.
In other words, Tonio’s father was among those more powerful than the Doge himself.
And the name Treschi had been in the Golden Book for a millennium. This was a family of admirals, ambassadors, procurators of San Marco, and senators too numerous to mention. Three brothers of Tonio, all long dead—the children of a first wife gone to the grave, too—had served in high places.
And on reaching his twenty-third birthday, Tonio would certainly take his place among those young statesmen promenading that long strip of the piazzetta before the Offices of State known as the Broglio.
It would be the University of Padua before that, two years at sea, a tour of the world perhaps. And for now, hours spent in the library of the palazzo under the gentle but relentless eyes of his tutors.
Portraits hung on these walls. Black-haired Treschi with fair skin, men cut from the same mold, delicate-boned but tall, with broad foreheads that rose straight to the full hair that grew up and back from them. Even as a little one Tonio perceived his resemblance to some more than others: dead uncles, cousins, those brothers: Leonardo who had died of consumption in an upper room, Giambattista drowned at sea off the coast of Greece, Philippo of malaria in some distant outpost of the empire.
And here and there appeared a face that was more perfectly Tonio’s own, a young man with Tonio’s wide-set black eyes and the same full but long mouth always on the verge of smiling; he peeked only from great clusters of richly clad men in which Andrea might be yet young with his brothers and nephews around him. But it was hard to fix a name for each face, to distinguish one from another among so many. A communal history absorbed them all in wonderfully wrought tales of courage and self-sacrifice.
All three sons with their father and his somber first wife peered from the grandest of gilt frames in the long supper room.
“They’re watching you,” Lena, Tonio’s nurse, teased as she ladled the soup. She was old but full of good humor and more a nurse to Tonio’s mother, Marianna, than she was to him, and she only meant to amuse him.
She couldn’t guess how it hurt him to look at this spectacle of ruddy and perfectly painted faces. He wanted his brothers alive, he wanted them here now, and he wanted to open doors on rooms filled with gentle laughter and commotion. Sometimes he imagined how it would be, the long supper table crowded with his brothers: Leonardo lifting his glass, Philippo describing battles at sea; his mother, her narrow eyes, so small when sad, grown wide with excitement.
But there was an absurdity to this little game that made itself known to him over the years. It frightened him enormously. Long before he knew the full import, he’d been told that only one son of a great Venetian family marries. It was custom so old it might have been law, and in those days it