The Jewels of Paradise

Twenty-one

WHEN SHE FINISHED THE CALL, CATERINA HAD THE CHOICE OF going to bed or going to work. She returned to the article in Catholic Encyclopedia. Toward the end there was a remark that, in light of everything she had learned about Steffani, deserved closer scrutiny. “A delicate mission was entrusted to him at the various German courts in 1696, and in 1698 at the court in Brussels, for which office he was singularly fitted by his gentle and prudent manners.”

Could this “delicate mission” at the German courts have been related to the Königsmarck murder? In everything she read about it, the murder was referred to, even in the indices, as the “Königsmarck Affair,” a triumph in rebranding if ever she had seen one. Had that rebranding been the office for which Steffani was singularly fitted because of his “gentle and prudent manners”? Gentle and prudent men are not often believed to be in the employ of murders or of men who commission murders, are they? She switched away from the encyclopedia, determined to consult more reliable sources.

Duke Ernst August had for years longed to add the title and power of elector to his string of titles, and it was finally granted to him by the emperor in 1692. Soon after, his daughter-in-law’s attention-getting lover disappeared, leaving not a trace save in the memoirs and gossip of members of his court and of the North German aristocracy. His disappearance was referred to as an “Affair,” and the man who stood most to profit from it remained unblemished by it.

She dived into the catalogue of the library of the University of Vienna, in whose waters she had been swimming for years, and quickly discovered the precise honors and powers that came along with the title of elector. Besides electing the Holy Roman Emperor, they got to call themselves a prince. “Big deal,” Caterina muttered to herself, having picked up the phrase from an American friend. More interestingly, the electors had the monopoly to all mineral wealth in their territories, this in an age when currency was based on gold and silver. They could also tax Jews and mint money. Thus “elector,” beyond being an honor that would satisfy the urgings of vanity, would satisfy those of greed as well. Who could resist such a combination?

But if your fool of a daughter-in-law put your reputation at risk by her public carryings-on with a noted rake, how seriously would your position be treated by the gilded and titled, or even by the common people? And how likely was it that the other electors would vote you into the club, a prerequisite her reading had revealed to her? Caterina had but to think of the death, three centuries later, of another beautiful young princess believed to have taken a lover, even though she was no longer married to the heir to the throne. When she died a very public death along with her lover, the world had exploded into an orgy of wild surmise and gossip about the true cause of their deaths. Would it have been any different if the death of Königsmarck had been a public event? Official information always moved with glacial majesty, while gossip travels at the speed of light. Softly, then, softly in the night; how much better a quiet disappearance that left behind only the “affair” than a corpse at the side of the road.

She opened the book about Steffani and had another look at the portrait, said to have been painted in 1714. Take away twenty years of fat, remove the double chin, give him back some of his hair, and he’d look as able as any man to stick a knife into another man’s back. Many accounts spoke of the sweetness and peacefulness of Steffani’s character. He was in Germany as a diplomat, a class of man not known for breaking up pubs in drunken brawls while in pursuit of their goals. But still his mission was the reconversion of Germany to Catholicism, and with whom better to start than with the Protestant duke of Hanover, and how better to win his favor than by doing him an enormous favor by eliminating an inconvenient relative who would make a mockery of his claim to the electorship? As Stalin was later to observe, “No man, no problem.”

Steffani might have failed to reconvert north Germany to the true religion, but he did win religious toleration and a new church for the Catholics of Hanover, and his Vatican masters might well have calculated this as a fair exchange for the death of a man who was, after all, only a Protestant. Caterina came upon another reference to Nicolò Montalbano and the 150,000 thalers. She might have been a bit hazy about the exact value of a thaler in 1694, but she was in no confusion about the size of 150,000.

The next year, Steffani’s opera I Trionfi del Fato presented the idea that humans are not entirely responsible for their emotions and thus neither for their actions. What more anodyne sentiment with which to calm the gossip-bestirred waters of the electoral court? Was this part of Steffani’s “delicate mission”?

It was past midnight, and she decided she had had enough of speculation and wonder and moving around to see events from a perspective that might make them look different from what they seemed from some other point of view.

She went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water, then went into the bathroom and washed her face and brushed her teeth. As she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw a woman in her mid-thirties with a straight nose and eyes that were green in this light. She took the toothbrush from her mouth and put it in the glass on the side of the sink, cupped some water in her hands, and rinsed out her mouth. When she was upright, she looked at the woman again and told her, “Your sister is a historian. She’d know how to find this Montalbano guy. Besides, she’s living in Germany, and that’s where all this happened.” Nodding at her own sagacity, she went back to the desk and turned on the computer again.

“Tina-Lina, I’m sorry to leave you in existential high water, but I want to ask you a favor. Hunt around and find me more about Nicolò Montalbano, a Venetian living at the court of Ernst August when Königsmarck was murdered and who came into a lot of money soon after his death. His name is already familiar to me, but I think it’s familiar because of his involvement with music and not for murder and blackmail. I’d be very grateful if you would try to find him in other places. I also came across mention of him in a lurid novel about the euphemistically called “Affair,” an exact reference to which I can send you, should you want to read it and learn. If Uncle Rinaldo can’t take you on as an apprentice, perhaps you could give a thought to a literary life. Think of the use you could make of your years of historical study; think of the passionate scenes you could toss into novels about the Council of Worms or the War of the Spanish Succession, and I’m sure there’s some neck-and-neck competition to be bishop of Maienfeld that you could transform into the Gone with the Wind of our times.

“It’s late, I’m tired, and I’m having dinner tomorrow night with a very attractive man I’ve met here. I almost hope nothing comes of it because he’s a lawyer, and I’d hate to have to revise my opinion of them as bloodsucking opportunists.

“There’s a spare room in this apartment they’ve given me, just in case you think about coming home and maybe don’t want to stay with Mamma and Papà. Love, Cati.”

As soon as she sent the mail, she realized she should not have said that last, about coming home. That’s the trouble with emails: you write them in haste and send them off, and that means there’s never time to steam the letter and read it through again to see if you should say it or not.

She turned off the computer and, leaving the open books where they were, went to bed.

The next day she awoke filled with an inordinate sense of expectation, and for the first few moments she could not locate the source of the feeling. But then she remembered her dinner date with the bloodsucking opportunist, laughed out loud, and got out of bed.

Andrea was to come by and pick her up at the Foundation at 7:30. This would give her the chance to stop at the Foundation before going to the Marciana, to spend the day in the library, and then return to the Foundation to send a report of the day’s reading. She could not rid herself of a conspiratorial glee at the thought that she would go to the Foundation to send her email to Dottor Moretti to send on to the cousins and then go out to dinner with him.

As soon as she stepped outside, she felt that the weather had changed and the spring had decided to become serious about itself. She had spent time in Manchester, she reminded herself, and had learned to mistrust the weather, but still she saw no need to go back up four flights of stairs to get a heavier jacket or a scarf. When she came out onto the Riva, however, she was hit by the wind coming off the water and hurried toward the Arsenale stop, deciding to take the vaporetto, even if for only one stop. A number 1 came from behind only a minute after that but her automatic calculation told her there was no way to get it, even if she were to break into a run, which she refused to do. She watched it pass her by, and she kept on walking, cutting in at Bragora to get away from the wind.

She let herself into the building and went down to Roseanna’s office. The door was open and she looked in to see Roseanna at her desk, her telefonino at her ear. The other woman smiled and waved her inside, said a few polite words into the phone, then ended the conversation. She dropped the phone on her desk, got up to come around to give Caterina two kisses. “Any progress?” she asked, but with curiosity and not reproach.

“I’ve been doing background reading at the Marciana,” Caterina explained. Roseanna leaned back against her desk, her hands propped flat behind her, ready to listen.

“I found a letter he wrote to two men called Stievani and Scapinelli.”

“Really?” Roseanna’s curiosity was splashed across her face.

“Yes. The original two cousins,” she said and was pleased to see Roseanna’s answering smile.

“What did he tell them?”

“They—he and the two of them—were heirs to some houses near San Marcuola that had been taken over by the Labia family. He wanted to meet them to discuss what to do about getting possession of the houses and selling them. It sounds like he was short of money.”

When Roseanna didn’t respond, she continued. “They didn’t answer him.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. There was no answer from them in the archives.”

“What did he sound like?” Roseanna asked thoughtfully, as if she were speaking of a person Caterina had just met.

“Excuse me?”

“Steffani. What did he sound like in his letter?”

“Polite,” she said after a moment’s reflection, not having given this conscious thought while she was reading the letter. “And weak,” she added, surprising herself even more. “He all but begged them to get in touch with him, and he kept insisting that his only motivation was the good of the family, almost as if he thought they’d have reason to doubt that.” She thought about the letter a bit longer and added, “It made me—I don’t know—uncomfortable.”

“Why?”

“Because the tone was so humble. People then were more formal with one another than we are, and the language was more elaborate and full of all sorts of formulaic courtesies,” she conceded. “But this was too humble, and I suppose it troubled me because it was so out of place in a man of his stature.”

“As a musician?”

“Yes. And he was a bishop, for heaven’s sake. So to hear him use this tone with two cousins from a provincial place like Castelfranco, to try to convince them to help him get money . . . well, it was difficult to read.” It occurred to her that, if anyone knew for certain whether Agostino was a castrato, it would be members of his family; perhaps this explained his painful deference toward them.

“Does that mean you’ve come to like him? Steffani?” What strange questions Roseanna asked. Caterina had never thought in terms of liking him or not. His life puzzled her, but she had persuaded herself that her main interest was in trying to find out enough about him to be able to do her job.

She raised a hand and made a seesawing gesture. “I don’t know if I like him.”

Her answer took her by surprise. She liked his industry, the fierce pace at which he drove himself, but those were qualities, not a complete person. “I have to keep on looking,” she heard herself say.

“Upstairs?” Roseanna asked, following the question with an upward gesture with her chin.

“No. In the Marciana. I’ve still got a few things to look at.”

“Good luck.”

Caterina smiled her thanks and, spirits suddenly uplifted, started toward the Marciana.

She found her carrel as she had left it the day before. She had stopped on the way to replenish her supply of chocolate and energy bars, though her researcher’s conscience did not rest easy about having done this. Before turning her attention to the books, she stood at the window and considered her reading of the past few days. What she had read, both in the documents at the Foundation and in the books in her carrel, had raised as many questions as they had answered.

She sat and opened her notebook and pressed it flat, then opened a new book. This one separated its analysis into biography and music. She’d started it two days before but had been waylaid by the allure of the so-called affair. Well, enough of that and back to work.

She read carefully, skimming over the by now familiar details of his early life, until he went to Hanover in 1688 as court composer. As happened each time she read or thought of it, she was struck by how odd that combination seemed in these times.

Vivaldi was a priest as well as a musician, but he had used his position in the Church as a means to further his music, the center of his life. He had lived and worked as a musician, and he had composed up until his death, probably in the arms of his life’s companion, Anna Girò. Caterina knew precious little about his life, but she knew that things ecclesiastical, other than sacred music, played no part in it, nor did he ever aspire to any higher clerical position.

This was not the case, surely, with Steffani, upon whom benefices and titles rained. The shining purpose of his life, for which he apparently abandoned composing, was the return of northern Germany to the Catholic Church, at which he proved a dismal failure. She found accounts of his endeavors in two histories of the Church in northern Germany, written in Latin and German. Each praised his enterprise and dedication, describing his achievements in Hanover and Düsseldorf. The German text devoted a mere five pages to his work as a musician.

When she emerged from the second of these, hunger drove her from the library and to the nearest bar, where she had two sandwiches and a glass of water before returning—unquestioned and unexamined—to her place in the library.

The next book was a 1905 edition of the correspondence between Sophie Charlotte and Steffani, in French, which both of them wrote with ease and grace. One of his letters found him at a low ebb. “The bitter grief I suffer because of the affairs of the world; the pain I suffer in seeing so many people whom I respect wishing to destroy themselves entirely.” He wrote of leading a life “that is truly a burden” and of his “unlimited hypochondria.” He described a life in which his only friend and source of safety was his harpsichord. It seemed to Caterina that, after saying all of this, he suddenly realized he had to try to joke his way out of the truth he had revealed, but the tone did not ring true to Caterina. What did ring true was the ease with which he addressed the recipient. She hoped the queen had accepted it because of his musical gifts rather than for his clerical position. Or was it the unspoken awareness that he was a castrato that rendered his liberties harmless?

She continued reading the letters, trying to think of them as the performance of a person whom fate had moved up the social ladder but who remained aware, no matter how high he rose, of just how precarious his position was. Seen in this light, a new tone became audible in his prose. She noted the excessive gratitude he poured upon Sophie Charlotte for the simplest favor, the flattery that sometimes became overwhelming: “since you have power over all”; “the graces that your Majesty deigned to bestow upon me”; “the letter with which your Majesty honored me”; “Your Majesty cannot do anything that is not at the peak of perfection”; “I have the pleasure of serving your Majesty.”

At this point, Caterina told herself to bear in mind that Steffani was corresponding with the Queen of Prussia, a woman renowned throughout Europe for the depth and breadth of her learning. Caterina remembered the palace in Berlin named for her and the enormous, passionate support she gave to countless musicians. This thought was enough to dispel her last opposition to Steffani’s deference to her. “Narrow-minded liberal,” she whispered in self-accusation.

But still, but still, she was filled with the desire to take Steffani and shake him by the dangling ends of his alb and tell him that, three hundred years later, Sophie Charlotte had been remaindered to footnotes in histories of Prussia read by a few hundred people, while his music was still performed and admired. “Narrow-minded snob,” she whispered to herself this time.