A Dancer in Darkness Read online

  This introduction was prepared with kind assistance from Robert Brown, archivist at Faber and Faber, from Robert Nedelkoff, who has done more than anyone to encourage a renewed appreciation of Stacton, and from David R. Slavitt. It was much aided by reference to a biographical article written about Stacton by Joy Martin, his first cousin.

  For Madeline in small token

  of a very long friendship;

  and Harrison Ainsworth;

  and Antony Hope; and Ouida;

  with apologies

  Antonio, Antonio, our lives are only other men’s means.

  Thus fall Emperors and Queens to grease the kindling of another’s fire with the rancid renders of their own desire.

  There is no song soothes its listeners for long, except, escape with me.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  Copyright

  ONE

  I

  Bosola was on his way to see his sister, a woman he had not seen for ten years. He had seen no woman for ten years. The reason for that was that he had lost his footing, his patron had disowned him, his presence had proved inconvenient, and so he had spent the decade in the galleys. The Dominicans arrived once a week to haul their charnel cart from the galley barracks to potter’s field. He had escaped in that.

  He was no longer young. He no longer had that fire. He had become a dancer in darkness, a man who is free only when the lights are out and the audience has gone. He had been burnt to a cinder. But grace he had, and style. He would still be a gentleman, if he could. He meant to clamber back to that position, despite the galleys of Puteoli.

  In the back streets of Naples he struck down a lazzarone, one of the colourful rabble of that town, and switched clothes with him. Ten minutes later, dressed in skin-tight yellow hose, soft leather boots, and a jerkin, with a stocking cap on his head, and even a little money, he sauntered about in the belief that he was a free man. And perhaps he was right. His boots rang against the cobbles, and he liked the sound. He had learned his lesson. A poor gentleman is down for good. It is the poor themselves, in a bad age, who have the art of growing rich. And that is freedom.

  As for his sister, she was a dancer in light, and meant to stay there. She had a horror of the dark. Therefore blackmail would appeal to her more than a plea to her goodness. She passed these days for a future saint, but she knew best by what means she had achieved that sanctity, and so goodness seemed to her irrelevant.

  II

  His sister was Sor Juana, the famous Sor Juana, that Sor Juana whom all the world, so said part of it, except himself, conspired to adore. But in ten years she, too, had had the time to grow tired.

  She paused now at the top of the landing, slightly out of breath, and glad to reach her own rooms, for her fellow nuns fatigued her, as they always did these days. Often, in her heart, she had wanted to laugh at them. But that she dared to do only at night, over her writing desk.

  It was the writing desk that had made her a nun. And even to reach the writing desk, she had had to come a long way.

  Over fifteen years ago, one dusty morning in 1584, a barefoot girl of nine had come down from a village behind Sorrento. The shores of Vesuvius were then an arid plain. In the distance lay Naples, and Naples was her goal.

  Her name was Juana dal Nagro. Her face had an almost transparent beauty, but beauty, after all, is not so rare. The one quality that really set her apart was genius.

  Knowledge she absorbed as a blotter does ink. When she was saturated with it, she poured it all out again in a flood of clever, pious, erotic, or sophisticated verse. At the inquiry attendant upon her subsequent canonization, it was claimed that no child could be so brilliant without God’s grace. But God’s grace had nothing to do with it. You could tell that instantly, from the way she held her tongue between her teeth.

  The Court took her up. Dwarfs they had had. The Spanish always have dwarfs. But children of genius were something new. She charmed them. She amused them. She was a novelty. And so she prospered.

  At ten she knew Latin, Greek, three modern languages, and a smattering of Hebrew. Her portraits show a girlish face, but a girlish face without a hint of innocence. It is a face that willed to be pre-eminent at any price, a professional face, the face of a woman whose profession was herself.

  She knew she was nothing better than a clever animal in the eyes of those who petted her. She had not the family or the dot to make a good marriage. Only one course was open to her. She became a nun, at the cloister of San Severo.

  Now, on this May morning of 1611, she had been a nun for fifteen years. Her cell was fitted up as a library and the view from her window was excellent. It was rather like having a desirable chair at the University of Bologna, except that she could not leave. She received the fashionable and the great every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. The mother superior hated her. She was being taken up by the Cardinal. Her future was assured. She was twenty-nine.

  She also had the restless hands of a child and the face of a matriarch. Others had founded great convents. Why not she?

  She crossed the landing towards her room, shaping her thoughts to fit her pen, and went immediately to her writing stand, a Spanish travelling chest whose bronze and velvet front let down over a double trestle. Beyond lay the window, and beyond the window the soft scented murmurs of the night and the metrical insistence of the cloister fountain.

  Her cell was not one room, but two, for opening off it was a small private oratory stuccoed with columns and floral swags. She turned to it automatically, but took no more than a first step, for leaning against the doorway was a lazzarone dressed in yellow, with a young body, an old face, and a black beard. He lolled there, with one leg crossed over the other, at his ease. She blinked, but he was still there.

  It did not occur to her to cry out for help. She was not the sort of woman who would cry out for help. But her eyes grew solemn.

  Bosola stood with his feet planted wide apart and his arms crossed, looking down at her. “Sister, you do not know me,” he said dryly, and swaggered a little in his latest disguise.

  Sor Juana started, peered at him more closely, and then sat down in her field chair. “You escaped.”

  “I died,” he told her. “It was so much easier.” He looked around the austere security of her room and lost none of its prosperity. “The guards sold the dead to the anatomy school. They grow rich that way. It wasn’t difficult.” He felt suddenly tired and leaned once more against the wall.

  He knew any preliminaries with her would be useless. “You know the Cardinal,” he said. “I want you to write me a letter to him. A safe conduct, if you like.”

  “I have no power with him.”

  “I am your brother. Or don’t you wish that known?” He stood up, strode to her desk, and stood over her. “Write,” he said. “Write.”

  She wrote.

  When she had finished, for he did not trust her, he read the note before it was sealed. It was noncommittal and served to introduce one Niccolò Ferrante, which was the name he had told her to use.

  “Sleep well, sister,” he said.

  She bit her lip, opened one of the drawers in her desk, and threw him a small sack. It chinked in the air. “You will need money,” she said dryly.

  He did not need it, but he took it. If this was the only way she could show kindness, it was at least better than none. On the other hand, it was probably a bribe. Putting the bag in his jerkin, he turned and left the room.

  Sor Juano did not intend to be hampered by her brother. Once he had gone, she began to make certain plans.

  III

  The Cardinal and his brother the Duke were at Castel del Mare, at the Sanducci
Palace. Their sister was recently a widow. They had come there for the funeral.

  The appearance of a new lazzarone in their midst occasioned no comment, for the Cardinal kept about him a gang of soldiers, executioners, and toughs. They were, he said, his nightingales; and to his nightingales were added the unruly suite of his brother, who sang a deeper note in the same scale. The worst of these toughs was a man called Marcantonio.

  As Bosola rode across the piazza towards the palace, on a horse bought with Sor Juana’s money, and still in his lazzarone costume, he saw that some common street players had set up a platform before the palace gate.

  A woman stood on the platform, yowling her lungs out. Her voice was four-fifths gravel, and her fingers clicked like pistols missing fire. Bosola drew rein to watch.

  The other players capered around her, throwing their scrawny limbs into the wind. Signor Bombard held his bottom and threw out his legs to the attacks of Sganarelle with a three-foot syringe. The woman had a weary face. Her caterwauling aroused the soldiers loitering around her. They threw her money. The singer gathered up her skirts and began to dance.

  A tall guard made a lunge for her. She slapped him, and went on singing. Then the other guards closed in on her. The players capered themselves to the safety of the wall.

  The woman burst out from among the soldiers, her bodice torn, righted herself, and ran towards Bosola. The yellow guardsmen streamed after her.

  Bosola reached down, scooped her up to the saddle, and wheeled his horse. The woman made no sound. He cursed himself for a fool, and dug his rowels into the scarred body of the horse. A crowd was jammed in the far opening of the street, where it opened out into a small square.

  There was nothing to do but jump. The horse’s hooves caught on a basket a woman had on her head, sending bright slimy squid flying through the air. The horse stumbled on the cobbles on the other side, and its hind quarters went down. There was no time to worry about the horse. Bosola grabbed the woman, and ran for the portal of the church at the far end of the square.

  The church was draped with long black streamers over the façade. Bosola shoved the woman through the portal and ran into the nave. The woman sobbed and followed him. They were fortunate that the church was draped for a funeral: the crowds were superstitious, and would remain outside.

  He peered round the quiet darkness of the nave, and moved forward towards the catafalque which dominated it.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Rosina.”

  “You should know better than to provoke soldiers.”

  She shrugged. “I must earn my living, and some are not bad.” She sat down on a chair, untied her skirt, and took money out of it, counting.

  “Then why run?” he asked contemptuously.

  “I am six months with child.”

  Bosola grunted and went to inspect the catafalque.

  The church dated from Norman times, and it had the Norman gloom. The catafalque hid the High Altar, whose flicker was dimmed by the giant candles which stood at the head and foot of the sarcophagus. He jumped on a reed chair, to look on the bier.

  A little man lay up there, like the abandoned chrysalis of a butterfly. He had been small in life, and death had made him smaller. He was dressed in engraved pageant armour whose helmet was four times the size of his head. It stood at the top, its plumes nodding in the breath from the candles. The man had a grey beard and a pinched, mean, haughty face. Over his body was flung the scarlet cloak of the Knights of Malta.

  Bosola jumped down from his reed stool and caught the superstitious eyes of the woman.

  “Who is he?”

  “My Lord Piccolomini, Duke of Amalfi. That is why they are all here. The Duchess is a widow with a three-year-old son.”

  “The Duchess?” That would be the Cardinal’s sister. “She cannot be more than twenty.”

  Rosina dusted off her skirts and pulled her bodice into place. She was such a huge woman that her pregnancy was scarcely visible. “They must marry her off again, so they all come here. Poor thing, they say she’s beautiful,” she added wistfully, in that way that the poor have of pitying their betters.

  When he had last seen the Duchess, she had been seven. Bosola jumped on the stool to look at the catafalque again. Then he drew the dagger in his boot and tossed it in the air thoughtfully. If the whole brood were here, his chances would be the better, but he scarcely knew which he was after, preferment or revenge.

  TWO

  In the ten years since Bosola had been sent to the galleys, the Sanducci had climbed far. This palace was what they had come from, provincial nobles with one horse, who had ridden the Spanish coat-tails into power. Bosola looked round the courtyard. He knew the place well.

  Ferdinand, it was true, was sixth count and second Duke of Bracciano, but Bracciano was a sterile vineyard in the hills, with a strawberry patch down by the lake. Now there was Capelmonte, Astri, the fief of Erculano, Calabria (but Calabria did not recognize the fact), and Papal lands for all. In power or out, the Spanish had made them rich. Bosola was only one of many they had trampled underfoot in their greedy scamper after power.

  Unobserved, Bosola mounted the stairs and made his way into the palace. That was the advantage of his dress. If he had been tricked out as a gentleman the world would have wanted to know his business. As it was, they assumed he was on some errand the nature of which it would be better for them not to know.

  He made his way up the state staircase to the loggia above, and found himself walking warily, on the balls of his feet, and hugging the wall. It was in a corridor such as this that he had murdered the man for whose death he had gone to the galleys. He smiled grimly, wondering what the Cardinal would make of his resurrection.

  The light grew dimmer. He was now in the oldest part of the palace. Dust lay heavy on the floors. When she was a child, these rooms had been the Duchess’s. She had lived here almost alone and almost unseen, ignored in a stone cul-de-sac, until she was old enough for her brothers to marry her off.

  A door opened ahead of him, and he had just time to draw into shadow. A large buxom woman came into view, holding in her arms an enormous pile of stuff whose silver threads caught the light. She could not see him. He could see her.

  It was Cariola, the Duchess’s nurse, and now her gentlewoman. She was a heavy-skinned woman of forty, and her eyes glittered with a coquettishness gone sour. She scurried down the corridor and despite himself he was upset. She might prove difficult.

  When she had gone down the corridor a little way, he stepped out of the shadow and followed her.

  She looked over her shoulder. Light from the window hit him, lighting up only his hose and boots. She stopped. He had seen that look of listening attention in frightened birds. He did not move. From a distance of thirty feet they peered at each other in the tricky light, then she went into a room at the end of the hall and closed the door.

  He did not think he had been recognized. He walked on and stopped before the door she had entered. The light was very bright here. He heard Cariola’s voice raised loudly and grinned. That voice had lost none of its peculiar mixture of cloying sweetness and the nag. That was what came of being a gentlewoman in reduced circumstances.

  Then he heard the other voice. It was a voice of a curious silvery lightness. The Duchess, who had been Aemelia Sanducci, had none of her brothers’ cruel Spanish tastes. Yet the voice had authority. It was as though she would not be put down. Her will was taut as wire.

  The two women went on talking and he could not make out the words. There was nothing more for him to learn here. He went in search of her brothers.

  II

  Ferdinand was not hard to find. He was in the courtyard.

  The courtyard of the palace was its one pleasant feature. On two sides there were open second-floor galleries, and the third had double casement windows. The fourth was a wall. A crowd was gathered there when Bosola entered. He was a short man and the crowd hemmed him in, but he could just catch a g
limpse of what was going on.

  Ferdinand must now be thirty-three. He moved through life jerkily, and it probably never even occurred to him that his elder brother, the Cardinal, pulled the strings. He was little more than a young tough with a title.

  Because they were poor and preferment had only been available to them through the Church, Duke Sanducci had become Cardinal Sanducci, and left the title to his younger brother. Thus, as they began to rise, it was Ferdinand who reaped the pomps. His brother the Cardinal kept only the power.

  Now Ferdinand swaggered down below. It could not be denied that he swaggered well. He had a certain blind phallic ardour. Bosola peered at him scornfully.

  The Commedia del Arte players had come into the courtyard, and Rosina was back with them, looking none the worse for her experience. Ferdinand had had chairs set up to watch them. He sat clicking his fingers clumsily. Bosola forced his way to the front of the crowd, folded his arms, squinted in the sun, and watched Ferdinand.

  Ferdinand was either drunk or tipsy with his own importance. He got up from his chair, swept Captain Bombard aside with his arm, and began to prance around Rosina. Rosina looked startled and then gave him a smile reserved for the quality. Ferdinand flung off his hat and stamped up and down, throwing out his arms and shouting. After an instant of hesitation, the other players capered around them both.

  Rosina wanted to stop. She looked worried about her belly. Ferdinand would not let her stop. His face was flushed with that maddened blindness only Spanish dancers seem to feel. Sganarelle was still carrying the two-foot syringe which he used to squirt Bombard’s behind. He aimed it at Ferdinand and rammed down the plunger. The air blew against Ferdinand’s rump. He reached out a leg and kicked Sganarelle in the face.

  The musicians scraped faster and faster. It was a jota. Ferdinand snapped his fingers and reared up on his toes over Rosina. It was clear he was proud of the slim arc of his body.