The name “Monteverdi” finally rang a bell. An alarm bell. Mary caught the slight wince on his face and laughed.
“Oh, please! I am not going to apologize for forcing you to sit through—once only, for pity’s sake—a performance of the entire Vespers of the Virgin Mary.” Firmly: “No person who claims to be civilized should go through life without hearing it. I will admit, I’m personally more partial to his operas.”
She broke off her monologue as she went to the side table and rang a little bell. Almost instantly, a young German girl appeared in the doorway. Their house servant, having heard them enter, had obviously been waiting for a summons.
“We’ll have some tea, please, Hilde.” She spoke in English, not her still very-poor German. Hilde had been hired in part because she was fluent in English.
The girl nodded and left for the kitchen. “That’s one good thing about this century,” said Mary, lowering herself onto a divan. “The service is not only cheap, it’s good. And I’ll say this, too—”
She patted the divan she was sitting on. “Furniture like this would have cost us a fortune back then. Even if we do have to spray it with DDT before taking it into the house.”
When Mary looked at him, her smile was a bit sly. “But, to get back to what I was saying, Monteverdi himself, of course, is probably immovable. But the Landgravine tells me that her cousin Luise tells her that Monteverdi’s student Cavalli is very frustrated with the situation in Venice. Frightened too, of course. The epidemic there two years ago took off a third of the city’s populace, you know.”
Knowing the decision Mike Stearns had made to send all of the chloramphenicol to Luebeck and Amsterdam, Simpson winced again—and no slight wince, this time.
Mary shook her head. “Horrible, isn’t it? But let’s look on the bright side. Cavalli’s not the genius that Monteverdi is, to be sure—I saw his opera Giasone once, and while it wasn’t bad at all it certainly didn’t match up to Orfeo or L’incoronazione de Poppea—but he’s the other great composer of the day in Italy. Will be pretty soon, anyway. He’s still a young man. And Cavalli’s apparently just as upset about the state of musical affairs in Venice as he is about the danger of plague. He wants to build a theater especially for opera—opera houses don’t exist yet, as amazing as that seems—and with the city’s desperate situation he’s having a hard time getting the financial backing—what’s so funny?”
“You are,” said Simpson, shaking his head. “Mary, I hate to break the news to you, but you are no longer ‘the Dame of the Three Rivers.’ And—” He shrugged. “While I’m reasonably well-off by today’s standards, with my salary as admiral, I am no longer ‘Mr. Moneybags.’ ”
He lowered himself on the divan next to her. “I’m sorry, Mary, but we have to face it. We lost everything.”
Her face was pale, and even stiffer than his own. “No, John. That’s not quite right. We didn’t lose everything. What we lost was our money. What we threw away was our life—starting with our son.”
Simpson felt the wooden mask clamp down.
“Oh, God help us,” she whispered. “Here it comes again. John Chandler Simpson, the man who can never be wrong about anything.” She turned her face away from him, her eyes starting to water. “I hate that man. Now, more than I ever have.”
“Mary—”
“Shut up. Just shut up.” She rose to her feet, hands pressed to her thighs, and stared at the far wall. There was nothing on the wall. No painting, no tapestry, nothing. Simpson’s salary had been enough to cover the house and the furniture and the servant. There had been nothing left over for Mary’s beloved art works.
She seemed to be reading his mind. Not surprising, perhaps, for as long as they’d been married. “I don’t blame you for that. I don’t blame you for not having the money you used to have. The Ring of Fire was not your fault. I don’t even blame you for Tom. That was probably my fault more than it was yours, to be honest. I think I was even nastier to his fiancée than you were.”