Cruel Music
by Beverle Graves Myers
Summary
The impending death of Pope Clement XII turns 1740 Rome into a seething cauldron of intrigue. Two candidates emerge as leading contenders for St. Peter’s throne: a high-born Venetian whose secret passion is tinkering with electrical experiments and a humble cardinal with a gift for healing and a mysterious past. Tito Amato is sent to support the Venetian contingent at the villa of Cardinal Fabiani, a music lover who will control the coming papal election. A beautiful corpse discovered in Fabiani’s garden complicates Tito’s mission. To snare the ungodly killer, Tito must learn to spy as well as he sings.
Excerpt
Chapter One
“Zio Tito,” asked my four-year-old nephew, “what do you think Befana will leave in my stocking?”
Little Matteo clung to my knee with candy-stickened hands and searched my face with grave brown eyes. It was the eve of Epiphany, only five days into the new year of 1740 and the night that the good witch Befana raced her flying goat all over the skies of Italy. In the morning, good children would awaken to find stockings stuffed with candy and trinkets. Naughty children would be rewarded with a single, bleak lump of coal. While I’d never actually known a child consigned to that terrible fate, Epiphany Eve could be an anxious time for a little boy whose curiosity often overcame his mother’s admonitions.
“Befana may not leave you anything.” I addressed the boy with mock severity, settling back into a stuffed chair after helping him hang two stockings over the sitting room stove. “It depends on how you’ve behaved.”
His huge eyes grew even larger as I pulled him onto my lap. “Now, you must tell your uncle the truth. While I’ve been away in Dresden, have you been into any mischief?”
Matteo shook his head quickly and tried to distract me with a question of his own. “What were you doing in Dresden, Zio?” The name of the unfamiliar Saxon town came out with a decided lisp.
“I was singing at the royal opera house. I played a knight in love with the sister of a wicked sorceress. For weeks and weeks, I sang every night and lots of people came to see me.”
“Did they like you?”
“Very much. After every aria, the people clapped and shouted for me to sing it again. They paid me so handsomely and gave me so many presents that now I can stay home in Venice and have a nice long rest.”
My nephew shrugged his shoulders with a contented sigh and began to twist the sparkling crystal buttons on my waistcoat. I raised his chin with my forefinger. “But tell me, little man, have you been behaving yourself? If you speak the truth, I may put in a good word for you with Befana.”
He darted a look toward my sister Annetta, who was bent over an embroidery frame trying to work by the flickering glow of a table lamp. “Have I been good, Mama?” he asked. “I tried to be.”
Annetta pushed her sewing aside, resisting a smile. The last few years had been kind to my sister. Marriage to my friend Augustus Rumbolt had erased the shadows of old worries from her eyes, and I was glad to see that she had traded her severely coiled braids for a loose chignon. As soon as I had stepped over our threshold, I had also noticed a new plumpness about the front of her apron that hinted I might soon have another niece or nephew to indulge.
Reviews
"...Amato is an endearingly sympathetic character whose company should be enjoyed for many more performances." Robert C. Hahn
"...smoothly readable writing, and a charming hero." Kim Malo
"A rich, full story.” Booklist
Author's Biography
Beverle Graves Myers hails from Louisville, Kentucky. Her Baroque Mystery series is set in the musical world of 18th-century Venice and features Tito Amato, an opera singer with a stellar talent for sleuthing. Bev also writes short fiction which has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and numerous anthologies.