The Girl With the Painted Face Read Online Free PDF Page A

with enough respect.’

‘Isn’t his misbehaviour just what we’re after?’ Vico says quietly. ‘Let’s take ourselves off after the rehearsal. We need to plan this carefully.’

‘We do indeed. I have it pretty clear in my mind what we need to do.’

‘Where shall we go?’ Sofia asks, turning from Beppe to Vico and back.

‘Good question. It’s too cold now to sit out.’

‘I could ask Nicco for the little cart.’

Beppe nods. ‘Perfect. Tell him…’ He considers.

‘Tell him the truth?’ Sofia suggests.

Beppe, Vico and Lidia all stare at her for a second, then Beppe says, ‘Yes. Tell him the truth.’
     
    A mile or so away down the road, Beppe steers Nicco’s cart off the track and onto a flat piece of waste ground. ‘Here will do as well as anywhere,’ he says, pulling Violetta to a stop under a tree, knotting the reins and draping the resultant loop over a peg on the side of the cart. Picking a net full of hay from under the seat, he hangs it on a low branch and Violetta begins at once to tear the contents from it, shaking her head when wisps catch on the mesh as she pulls.

Sofia jumps down from where she has been sitting beside him up front, while Vico and Lidia climb out of the covered space at the back.

‘So, Niccolò wasn’t surprised when you told him what we think?’ Vico asks.

Beppe shakes his head. ‘No. He just nodded – sort of screwing up his mouth as though sad that he’d had the same thoughts himself.’

‘And he thinks it’s a good idea to introduce Fosca into the proceedings?’

‘His exact words? He said it was a stroke of genius …’

‘Good, so let’s —’ Vico begins to speak, but Beppe interrupts.

‘I think you’ll want to know what else he said.’ He pauses.

Vico and Lidia are frowning curiously, but Sofia, having been told this already, holds her breath, feeling her heartbeat high in her chest.

‘I told him what you’d said about the contents of that little brown bottle, and the way Angelo had snatched it from you that time – and he looked badly shocked. He says he thinks…’

‘What?’

‘… that it’s something called laudanum.’

Vico whistles, but Lidia says, ‘What’s laudanum?’

‘Opium,’ Beppe says, and Lidia gasps. Beppe nods. ‘Yes, exactly. But – so Nicco told me – it’s opium in a new form, which some man in Switzerland invented a few years ago, to use to treat pain more efficiently. Made from opium, crushed pearls, musk, amber and saffron, he said, and a number of other things I can’t remember, dissolved in alcohol. Nicco says that he’s heard it works really well, though he’s only ever come across it once before… but because it’s so strong, he says, people have started taking it for the wrong reasons. I think this must be what Sebastiano da Correggio has been selling.’

‘Crushed pearls…’ Sofia says quietly to herself.

He says, ‘It was the smell that proved it to Nicco, I think. When I told him what you’d said the contents of that bottle smelled like, Vico, his mouth opened and he said that, given how Angelo had reacted, he was fairly certain that’s what it was in there. Nicco says once someone has started using it, this laudanum, they’ll do… almost anything… to keep up the supply.’

‘Almost anything?’ Lidia says softly.

‘Exactly.’

‘So – should Fosca know about it? About the laudanum?’ Vico says.

Beppe nods. ‘Oh yes, definitely. And, now you come to mention him, I think now is probably as good a time as any for Sofia to meet our friend Signor Fosca, now we’re away from the others.’

Vico and Lidia murmur their agreement.

Looking around, wondering where this new person is supposed to be coming from, Sofia sees Beppe reaching back up into the cart. He grabs his leather bag. Turning his back on the others, he opens the drawstrings and pulls from it firstly a black object that appears to be a hat, then something else she cannot properly see. She sees him duck