The landlord showed him into an inner chamber where three men sat warming their hands before a small brazier that tinted their faces with its orange glow.  It might have been a cheerful scene if the men had been smiling but as they turned, the young man felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck.

"Sit," they said. "Don't interrupt."

He sat, feeling the jagged edge of a broken tooth with the tip of his tongue.

It was a brief interview: 

"Can you write quickly?"

"As quickly as a scalded-cat runs," he said.

"We don't want a joker.  Can you write musical notes on a stave?"

"I write my own compositions," he said with a flicker of pride.

"Don Carlo will dictate.  You will record what he dictates and you will keep your silence.  One word out of you and we'll cut out your tongue and feed it to the dogs."

"Very good."

"And if you steal Don Carlo's compositions, he will likely have you disembowelled , as he did the last one.  He's disposed of others so he would not baulk at getting rid of a common scribe."

"Very good," he repeated, but tasted bile as he put his name to the paper.  His father hadn't told him the world would be this cruel to a peripatetic musician.

"Where must I go?"

"The innkeeper will direct you."

When the men had left he continued sitting in a corner of the inn, watching the customers coming and going and attempting to fight down an urge to flee from the predicament he'd got himself into.

He thought of Angelika.  He needed the work.  With the money he'd earn they'd be able to set up home.  His mind leapt to the image of the house they would have.  Behind the door, painted blue, was the sitting room, the blue and white china on the dresser, the shining pots and pans; and children, she would like that.  When he set up as a music teacher, his private pupils would come to the house.  It was complete, the image of his future.

If only they'd not been such unpleasant men.

He followed the direction of the innkeeper's pointing finger across the plain to the rocky outcrop which dominated the horizon.

The wind that blew across the plains was hot and dry, bringing with it a sweet stench of carrion.  It disturbed the rags of curtains hanging in the tall narrow windows of the palace lifting the dust on the oak furniture.  The servants had fled.  Few villagers trudged along the road to serve in this place.  He climbed the ruined staircase leading to the great cedarwood doors and knocked at the portal.  A key scraped in the lock and a woman's face appeared between the gratings of the portal's lookout. 

"Who comes there?"

"Tomasso Ticino, the musician."

After a long silence, the bolts were shot back and keys turned in more intricate mechanisms. 

"Ah, so young," said the woman beckoning him in.

"Eighteen and a half."

The woman scrutinized his fair complexion and blond hair.  "All the same…" There was a kindly expression on the old woman's features.

She pondered then shrugged.  "Ah well, since you're here, I'll take you to Jacob.  My name is Anselma, but it's Jacob who directs."

"The Don," said Jacob, "is quiet these days but it is best to keep your distance."

When finally he entered the room where the Don spent his days to begin his task he was in a state of heightened anxiety.  He'd been told of the Don's cruelty, his disdain, his blistering musical talent and he was not expecting the mild-looking old man who sat huddled in his chair before a small fire, turning a soft milky gaze in his direction.

"The new amanuensis," said Jacob backing out of the room.

"Come, sit a little closer, you must be cold."

"I need the table to rest my paper and pens on."

"Ah, that is so." After a pause he said, "Listen, it is all around us..."

Tomasso listened but all he could hear was the wind rushing in the chimney and rattling the casement. "Tell me what you hear," he said and without thinking he edged his chair a little closer to the hunched figure.

And so it was that the Don began to dictate: sometimes with sweeping gestures, sometimes singing.  His voice rose to an eerie falsetto stooped to a low grumbling base--beautiful one moment, harsh the next.  Tomasso strove to keep up.  He was lucky in possessing perfect pitch and a sound understanding of harmonics but struggled with the discordant phrases, the leaps from dark to light.  Only later, in his little room rereading what he had taken down, he realised the genius of hunched, crazed figure.

Don Carlo dictated in the morning and as night fell the young scribe would set down the music.  Jacob came and collected the finished manuscripts.

Winter passed into spring as tiny mauve and yellow flowers dotted the hillsides.  Summer heat seared the castle.  At night the dogs howled in the town across the dry river bed.

Kneading the bread Anselma told him: "He had them put to death: his young wife and her infants.  Nothing could be proved, of course," she lowered her voice to a whisper, "but things were heard and seen; and Maria D'Este was no paragon of virtue."

One autumn morning when the Sirocco blew across the plains, flinging dust against the windows, the Don began to talk, feverishly.

I turned to Maria at breakfast and, instead of my wife's face, I saw an oval of white flesh in which three holes had been carved. "What's the matter, Carlo?" she said. (Here the Don's voice changed to a comical falsetto). She repeated the question but I turned away and pretended to be occupied with my papers.  We did not see each other again until lunchtime and I was relieved that she had regained the appearance of normality. Then, as she began to eat, my revulsion returned.  She opened her mouth.  I saw her tongue, the way it curled around a sliver of chicken, I saw the meat between her lips and then she sucked it in.  I cannot describe the way the lips closed on that morsel.  And then she began to chew.  I sprang up and fled.  I really had no choice since the sight of the elliptical shining hole of Maria's mouth was unbearable.  That night, the stars burned and I gazed up and prayed for my music.  I would have sacrificed anything.  There was an enormity about the silence of the moon and stars and I longed for isolation.  The woman carrying my child had thrown my mind into chaos.  I could not bear her to be in the same room.

Don Carlo stopped.  He seemed to come to his senses.  He stared at his amanuensis as though for the first time.

"What's that hanging round your neck?  A locket?  Show me."

He took it up, hungrily, crouching over the little painted image like a hawk hanging over its prey.

"Pretty, those dark curls and ruby lips,"  he crooned.  "Very, pretty.  You love her?"

"We are engaged.  As soon as I have money…"

"Ah money.  Such a little thing.  But she will make you suffer.  Like all women she's a heartless minx.  Take a glass of wine with me." 

And he drew his chair closer.

"I'm not supposed to drink.  Anselma says…"

"Anselma is my servant. I pay her to do the cooking."

"Jacob has forbidden it."

"I pay Jacob's wages too.  And tomorrow you will be gone."

With a swift gesture, he dipped his finger tip in his glass of wine and reaching up, he traced a
cross on Tomasso's forehead.

"A blessing," he said, "to keep you from evil.  A little blessing.  We are twins, you and I, Tomasso; formed in the same mould.  Don't you feel it?"

That night Tomasso read through the notes he had taken down.  The dissonance and the lack of melody disturbed him, still he marvelled at the way the vocal parts at first worked against one another yet developed into passages in which strange new sounds were revealed, explosions of light and sudden drops into darkness.  He imagined how it would echo in a cathedral for the service of Tenebrae, shining like a jewel in the midnight silence.

He thought of the dog-eared book holding his own scribbled compositions, written for travelling musicians to play in village halls--for clodhopping peasants to dance to.  He could see them, swaying uncertainly in a slow circle, arms linked, faces ruddy with heat and beer.

As the coach taking him back to Ticino rattled over the highway, he took out the little locket.  The image was the very same, the exquisite brushwork unchanged.  Yet the face it depicted--something about the smile caused a little shudder in his heart.  "Like all women…"  The words reverberated in his head.

Angelika was overjoyed to see him hiding her shock at the sight of Tomasso's emaciated body, his haunted expression. 

Within three months they were married.  Some said with indecent haste but Tomasso could not rest until he had arranged everything.

In the neat newly whitewashed house they had rented, plates glinted on the dresser and a pair of kittens tumbled over each other on the living room floor.  Angelika had planted geraniums in the window boxes.  The sun streamed in through the windows in the mornings.  At night the only sound was the tolling of a restless bell in the next village and the barking of a dog.

Tomasso lay in bed, listening.  Angelika's body next to his lay quite still.  It occured to him that they were lying next to each other, yet isolated; they had no idea what the other was thinking. 

He slept then woke again: he could hear a very high sustained castrato, then a lower voice a feminine alto, a harmonic combination of two musical strands, weaving like threads of silk, scarlet and gold against black.  Somewhat deeper, a male voice joined in, a throbbing indigo.

I will keep quiet yet in my silence
My tears and sighs
My pain
My cruel fate gives voice to silence and to death

He had the urge to get up and set down the notes, by morning it would be gone, but again he slept. 

He dreamt that he woke and found on the bedside table a plate from a late supper with apple parings and a small fruit knife.  In the dream he picked up the knife and tested its point against his thumb, then the knife turned into a quill pen and the apple parings into an inkpot.  He took a piece of paper and began to scribble down the music that came pouring out.  He heard Angelika stirring beside him.  She began to murmur in her sleep, reciting a childish song:

Down in the meadow where nobody goes
Down in the meadow where nobody knows

"Be quiet, Angelika!"

With a little wash here

"Silence.  I need silence."

And a little wash there

He turned, the quill raised in his hand.

Later, he woke and gazed at his wife in the moonlight.  Dark flakes like soot had settled on the white sheet.

And the idea popped into his mind that their bodies (not strictly corpses but empty bodies all the same, as if waiting to be filled with something) had been washed up on the shore of the sea, by chance.  Then he thought they were lifeless corpses after all, judging from his body's numbness.  A series of images rushed through his mind.  One almost made him cry out:  a woman's face, half veiled. 

He woke in the late morning, groggy from lack of sleep.  He felt as though he had been dredged up from the depths of the ocean, his body still sluggish.  He turned and looked at his wife.