Scarpia Read online

  SCARPIA

  Piers Paul Read

  Contents

  PART ONE

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  PART TWO

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  PART THREE

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Postscript

  Acknowledgements

  By the Same Author

  Also available by Piers Paul Read

  PART ONE

  One

  1

  In 1777, after the fall of his patron, the Marchese Tanucci, the cavaliere Luigi Scarpia returned to Sicily with his wife and youngest son Vitellio to live as best he could off the income from his estate. He did not reside on his estate but, like other Sicilian landowners, in a baroque villa in Bagheria, a suburb of Palermo. He rarely descended into Palermo but remained alone in the library of his villa, brooding on the reversal of his fortunes which he ascribed, correctly, to the Austrian influence at court. During meals he muttered abuse about anyone or anything that came from north of the Alps – the French philosophes, German painters, the English minister General Acton, and most particularly the Austrian Queen of Naples, Maria Carolina, who had engineered the fall of Tanucci.

  Italy in the eighteenth century was not a single nation as we know it now but a geographical area divided into a number of different sovereign states. Most were ruled by hereditary monarchs with absolute powers, the exceptions being Venice, a republic, and Rome, governed by its bishop, the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. Besides the city, the Pope also ruled the Papal States – a swathe of territory that straddled the Italian peninsula from the city of Bologna in the north to Gaeta in the south.

  The largest and richest of the Italian principalities was the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies – the first of these two Sicilies being the Kingdom of Naples which included the southern half of the Italian peninsula, and the second the island of Sicily itself. This double realm was ruled by a Spanish Bourbon, Ferdinand, who had been made king at the age of nine by his father, King Charles III of Spain. The governance of the kingdom was left in the hands of the Marchese Tanucci who deliberately neglected Ferdinand’s education. As a result, Ferdinand thought only of hunting, preferred the company of his grooms and whippers-in to that of his courtiers and ministers of state, spoke the coarse dialect of the Neapolitan underclass, the lazzaroni, and like them ate macaroni with his fingers.

  In 1768, a marriage was arranged between King Ferdinand and the Archduchess Maria Carolina, daughter of the formidable Empress of Austria, Maria Theresa. By the terms of the treaty, Maria Carolina was entitled to a seat on the royal council once she had given birth to a male child; and when this came about in 1774, though she was still only twenty-two years old, the force of her personality led the government of Naples to forsake Spain in favour of Austria. Tanucci was dismissed together with his allies, among them the cavaliere Luigi Scarpia.

  Like King Ferdinand, Luigi Scarpia had a strong-minded wife, Marcella di Torre della Barca, who on most matters took a contrary view to that of her husband. In common with other women at the time, she had received only a cursory education but her ignorance did not lead her to doubt her own judgements. She might not be able to prove to her husband that Voltaire was a great writer, or that those German artists living in Naples, Tischbein and Kniep, were great painters, but they were considered so in the best circles throughout Europe and Marcella had more faith in fashion than in her husband’s opinions. She yearned for Naples, where their house had had a magnificent view over the bay towards the volcano Vesuvius: in Bagheria her bedroom looked out over a scrubby, neglected garden. She loathed life in Palermo, blamed their exile on the cavaliere’s irascible nature and was impatient with his gloom. The man she had married had thought the world an oyster that would slip down nicely with a glass of chilled white wine. Now it was something toxic and indigestible. Isolated and bored in the villa in Bagheria, she watched him succumb to a paralysing depression that left him unable to address either his wife’s ennui or his son’s education.

  *

  Vitellio was aged fourteen when he returned to Sicily with his parents. In Naples he had attended a school run by the Jesuits until the order had been suppressed by Tanucci in 1767. There he had studied Latin, mathematics and ancient history. Like most young men of his kind, he could speak French and Spanish as well as Italian. Again, like other young noblemen of the period, he learned to ride a horse, load and fire a pistol, fence with a rapier and handle a heavier sword. He was aware that the many quarterings on the family’s coat of arms signified descent from Norman knights. In Sicily he had a tutor, the abate Eusebio, a priest who fed his love of history but had more difficulty when it came to Latin and mathematics.

  During the summer the family left the villa in Bagheria for their estate at Castelfranco. The castle of their Norman ancestors had been demolished after an uprising of Sicilian nobles against the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II; only the chapel with the family sepulchre remained intact. A villa had been built a mile from the ruins with a garden that had run wild and here Vitellio’s parents would sit semi-comatose in the terrible heat, the cavaliere with a book on his knee, his wife with a fan on her lap. They showed no interest in their land or the tenants who farmed it. The running of the estate was left to their agent, Ottavio Spoletta – a devious and brutal man, as agents of absentee landlords often were at the time. He extracted rents and taxes from the impoverished peasants and exercised the judicial powers delegated by Luigi Scarpia, their feudal lord.

  Ottavio Spoletta had a son, Guido, who was Vitellio Scarpia’s seasonal friend, and together they would ride out among the olive groves early in the morning, and up into the hills above Castelfranco, filling their lungs with the cool pine-scented air. The physical appearance of the two young men reflected their different stations in society as if nature was conversant with rank. Vitellio was handsome – not tall but slender with blue eyes, a small sharp nose, good teeth and dark hair tied in a pigtail. His habitual expression was one of amusement as if he could see the comic in every aspect of life. In adolescence he was perhaps a little vain, glancing sideways at a looking glass every now and then, and giving what he took to be an aristocratic tilt to his head. He was mercurial – mostly cheerful but occasionally, particularly when thwarted, falling into a black mood. He could be earnest when planning a day’s hunting, as if the chase were a military exercise – a frown coming onto his delicate brow if his troops – the beaters and stable boys – disobeyed his orders; but his expression would change to a look of delight when, with a shot from his musket, he brought down a partridge or, with a thrust from his pike, he skewered a wild boar.

  Guido Spoletta was taller than Vitellio Scarpia and stronger. His skin was a shade darker than Scarpia’s, his eyes brown, his hair black – a colouring from Byzantine or Saracen ancestors. Each admired the other for the qualities he did not possess. Scarpia wished that like Spoletta he could climb trees, dive into pools and gut a boar or a deer with a few deft strokes of his jagged knife – drawing out the warm entrails with his bare hands. Spoletta admired Scarpia for his handsome face, his slender form and for his learning. But neither envied the other, ascribing their particular advantages to their birth and upbringing. Scarpia saw Spoletta’s practicality – his readiness to do what had to be done – as a quality reserved for those raised close to the soil; while Spoletta knew that Scarpia’s intelligence and refinement came not just from his education but a pedigree stretching back to days when Roger de Hauteville and his Norman knights took Sicily from the Saracens.

 
; Like King Ferdinand, the two young men loved hunting, in particular pursuing wild boar where there was real risk of being gored after falling from a rearing horse. For Spoletta, riding alongside the son of his feudal lord was an honour that raised his standing among the peasants. For Scarpia hunting was a simulation of battle, giving substance to the fantasies sown in his mind by the books he had read from his father’s library such as Gatien de Courtilz’s Mémoires de M. d’Artagnan, capitaine lieutenant de la première compagnie des Mousquetaires du Roi, which stood on the shelf next to Cervantes’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha.

  *

  As he passed the age of sixteen, Vitellio became aware that his ability to ride a horse bareback, parry with a sword or bring down a partridge with the shot of a musket might not be enough to make a mark on the world. He began to pay more attention to the lessons of the abate in Latin, history and rhetoric; to converse with his mother in French; and, sitting in the library, to attempt to draw his father out of his dejection to talk about politics and his past. Vitellio came to enjoy sitting in the corner of this library, confident that, though his father rarely spoke, he was content that his son should be there. On the leather-topped desk lay open ledgers and the half-dozen books that the cavaliere was reading at the same time – Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois side by side with Augustine of Hippo’s City of God; Voltaire’s Candide and Febronius’s Galician manifesto alongside Francis of Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life and Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ.

  Vitellio left to his father the reading of works of philosophy and religion, but progressed from the adventures of d’Artagnan and Don Quixote to Herodotus, Suetonius, Froissart, Joinville and other chroniclers of war. He continued to enact scenes of triumph and glory in his imagination, and decided that he would like to be a soldier even though in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies it was not a calling that brought wealth or prestige. Should he seek his fortune abroad? Vitellio knew enough about the King of Prussia to imagine himself as one of his grenadiers, but he did not speak a word of German and he had heard that recruits had to be at least six feet tall. And then he thought that Prussia would be cold and misty and he was told by the abate Eusebio that it would jeopardise his salvation if he was killed in the service of a Protestant king.

  Sometimes Vitellio Scarpia looked at his parents, wondering whether, when he reached their age, he would come to resemble one or the other. It was hard to think of himself as his mother because she was a woman but he noted that, in the few years following their return from Naples, she had seemed to grow taller and more commanding; while his father, so imposing when he was a child, appeared now to shrink and shrivel behind his desk in his book-lined library. Sometimes in the dusk, before the servants brought in a candle, it would seem as if a gnome were sitting on the cavaliere’s chair.

  Vitellio also noticed that his parents did not say much to one another beyond the discussion of everyday practicalities. Even here, his mother’s questions often went unanswered; or they would be answered later in the day with a handwritten note delivered not by a servant but by the cavaliere himself. ‘It is easier to collect one’s thoughts in writing,’ he once said in reply to a puzzled look from his son. ‘And it is more discreet. The servants can hear, but they cannot read.’

  In 1780, when Vitellio was seventeen, his mother finally cajoled her husband into considering the future of their younger son. He would have to make his own way in the world. The income from the estate in Sicily could not sustain two households. Her estates in Basilicata on the mainland, her dowry, had been made over to her first-born son, Domenico, and the rest of their substance had gone on the dowry of their daughter, Adelina, who had made a good marriage before their father’s disgrace. In Naples, Marcella had thought of a career in the Church for her younger son – a quite plausible calling to consider, even in an anti-clerical household. Not all priests were Jesuits and a bishop could live as a prince. The Archbishop of Taranto, for example, never visited his see, delegating all his duties to a coadjutor and devoting his vast revenues to his magnificent collection of art and antiquities.

  As Vitellio had grown older, it had become clear that he was not made for the life of a priest. By aptitude and inclination he was better suited to a military career. Influence at court could obtain a commission but, after Tanucci’s fall, the Scarpias had lost any that they had once possessed. More could perhaps be done in Madrid. At his wife’s dictation, the cavaliere therefore wrote four letters of introduction to Spaniards he had known when working with Tanucci, and a fifth all-important letter to the Spanish king, Charles III. One morning, he summoned Vitellio to the library. From the drawer in his desk he took out a leather bag containing one hundred Sicilian piastres and twelve Spanish dollars. He handed it to Vitellio together with the five letters and his German sword. ‘You may need this. I will not.’ It seemed to Vitellio that there were tears in his father’s eyes.

  Beyond the money, the letters and a sword, Vitellio would need a valet, and so Guido Spoletta was summoned from Castelfranco and from there went daily to Palermo to learn from a tailor how to take care of a gentleman’s clothes, and from a barber how to shave off stubble and dress a wig. Before Vitellio left, his mother gave her son the new tunics, breeches and linen that had been prepared over a number of months and put fifty Venetian sequins into his purse. On 17 April 1782, Vitellio Scarpia, with Guido Spoletta as his servant, set sail from Palermo for Barcelona.

  2

  The Spanish brig set a course north to distance itself from the coast of North Africa and passed through the strait of Bonifacio between Corsica and Sardinia. Spain was at war with Great Britain, but all the British warships were at the western end of the Mediterranean defending Gibraltar. A greater danger for any ship from a Christian country came from North African corsairs. In the war between Christendom and Islam that had lasted a thousand years, the Saracens had been driven out of Italy, Sicily and Spain, but the Ottoman sultan still ruled lands in an arc running from Belgrade to Tangier. In reality, his viceroys in Egypt, Algiers and Morocco were left to rule as they pleased, and what pleased them, because it was profitable, was to allow pirates to use their ports. Scarpia half hoped for an encounter with these Barbary pirates in which he could show his skill with his pistols and wield his father’s German sword – until he became seasick and for the rest of the voyage lay groaning on his bunk.

  When the boat reached Barcelona, he disembarked with Spoletta and, after three nights in the Catalan capital, took the diligence to Madrid. There, from modest lodgings, Scarpia went daily to the Escorial. After two months of waiting, he was admitted to an audience with the king who, remembering the father’s services to Spain under Tanucci and needing any good men he could find for the army then besieging Gibraltar, granted Vitellio a commission in the Royal Guards. A portion of Scarpia’s funds was spent on a uniform, a horse and other equipment an officer was expected to provide for himself. On 10 September 1782, with Spoletta as his servant, he reported for duty to the commander, Martin Álvarez de Sotomayor, in Algeciras.

  Three days later, the Spanish launched their long-planned assault on Gibraltar, watched by a crowd of fashionable spectators. It was thought that the assembled gunboats and floating batteries would soon demolish the British defences, but three of the batteries were set on fire and exploded, while the remaining seven were disabled and scuttled. The 35,000 Spanish and French troops waited in vain for an opening in the British lines. However, Scarpia – untrained, undisciplined and frustrated by the inaction – broke away from the main body of the Royal Guards and led a small contingent newly placed under his command in a sortie against an outlying battery of the defenders. It was a futile excursion; two Hanoverian gunners were wounded, one by a pistol shot from Spoletta, another by a thrust of Scarpia’s sword; but no other officer had followed his lead, and the gun could not be turned. Scarpia and his troop galloped back to the Spanish lines.

  Few of the Spanish spectators saw this act of bravado,
and those who did could not identify the young officer. The colonel of the Royal Guards was enraged by Scarpia’s act of insubordination; so too the commander-in-chief, General Álvarez de Sotomayor, who had waited passively for the Spanish navy to clear a path into Gibraltar. When Admiral Barceló came to hear of the Sicilian’s madcap escapade, he made much of it to his staff. It exposed the pusillanimity of the 35,000 soldiers and diverted attention from the naval fiasco.

  There was talk of a court martial, but in the end it was decided to punish Scarpia’s excess of zeal with a transfer from the Royal Guards to a more mundane regiment then on garrison duty in Almeria. There were no opportunities here for acts of valour. The Moorish Alcazar, with its fine view of the Mediterranean from the ramparts, was like a mausoleum, with ageing, embittered officers the cadavers. Scarpia saw no alternative but to sit it out and wait for a return to favour.

  Spoletta distracted himself with forays into the cantinas and bordellos in the town below; but Scarpia was too fastidious and too romantic to follow his example, and he was aware that the moral climate was less clement in Spain than in Italy. Even in Almeria there were agents of the Inquisition, making sure that anyone in a position of authority attended Mass on a Sunday and, at Easter, confessed their sins and took Communion. And there was a reason beyond fear of God or the Inquisition that made Scarpia behave correctly at this time. He fell in love with the daughter of the commander of the garrison and, to judge from appearances, she with him.

  Colonel Rodrigez Serrano was a kindly man married to a younger woman. They had a single child, a daughter, Celestina, who at the time of Scarpia’s posting to Almeria was aged seventeen. Scarpia himself was still only twenty and so it was quite natural that, when he was invited to dine by his commander, the daughter should enjoy his company and he hers. The mother, too, Doña Inez Serrano de Romero, was pleased to receive this young officer who, despite the disgrace that had brought him there, was ‘a breath of fresh air’. Doña Inez was also quite conscious that it was time to start thinking about a husband for Celestina and, had she the means, would have taken her to Valencia or Seville. She and her husband had relatives in both cities, but she knew a girl with no dowry to speak of was never welcome and so it might be better to find a husband for their daughter closer to home.