A Dancer in Darkness Read Free Page B

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. “Youknow 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. Hervoice 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