A Diva in Mourning Silk

Why would a woman who claimed to be weeping for her murdered stage lover spend twenty precious minutes pinning six yards of black Venetian mourning crepe over her petticoat before letting me through the curtain? That was the question I brought down to the lower gun deck, where the company had been penned between two eighteen-pounder cannon like unruly sheep in satin. I wanted the truth about her dressing trunk before First Mate Hollósy decided an empty sandglass was an excuse to string us from the yardarms.

The air on the lower gun deck was thick with salt vinegar, wet wool, and cheap tobacco smoke drifting from the marine sentries stationed at the ladderway. Behind a makeshift partition of patched canvas and faded theatrical drapery, Madame Gizella Nyáry had established her court of tragic grief.

She lay sprawled across two sea chests, her face turned toward the damp oak bulkheads, clutching a damp linen kerchief with fingers tipped in pink pomade.

"Enter, executioner," Gizella moaned without looking up. Her voice possessed that resonant, cavernous vibrato that usually signaled the death of an empress in Act Five. "Have you come to measure me for a hemp collar? Or did that brute Hollósy send you to inspect my corpse before he feeds it to the sharks?"

"Neither, Gizella," I said, setting my basket of mending wire on an iron carronade carriage. "I came to look at your powder pots and your embroidery box. And you can sit up. The black crepe is pinned crooked at your left shoulder, and if you lie on that silk taffeta another five minutes, you will put permanent accordion creases into the pleats."

Gizella stiffened. The theatrical despair vanished from her posture with astonishing speed. She sat bolt upright, smoothing the skirt of her gown with rapid, defensive twitches. Her cheeks were pale, but her dark eyes flashed with the territorial malice that had terrified chorus girls from Vienna to Trieste.

"Ignác is dead, Borbála!" she snapped, dropping the funeral cadence for her customary venom. "Cut down in his vocal prime! Ripped away from my duets! Who will sing the tenor cadenza in the second act finale? That tavern-squawking replacement from Pressburg? He cannot even find middle C without gagging!"

"You hated Ignác," I pointed out, pulling a stool toward her dressing table. "Three days ago in the mess room, you threw a heavy pewter butter pot at his head because his name appeared three lines higher than yours on the harbor playbill."

"Artistic passion is not murder," she hissed, dabbing at an entirely dry tear duct with the corner of her kerchief. "Ignác was an arrogant, tone-deaf peacock with the brains of a capon, but he possessed a magnificent chest voice. When he was on pitch, my high notes sounded like diamonds falling into velvet. Without him, I am cast among amateurs and illiterate sailors. I have every reason to want him alive and groveling at my hem."

I did not debate the point. Melodramatic vanity was Gizella's native tongue, and arguing with a soprano about billing was like trying to teach a sea bass to sew lace. Instead, I turned my attention to the cedar dressing chest tucked beneath the deck beam.

The brass clasp of the lid hung unlatched. Beside it sat three porcelain jars, two brass hair clasps, and a badger-hair cosmetic brush dusted in white residue.

I reached out and lifted the smallest jar. The porcelain was glazed in soft cobalt with a gilded Parisian maker's mark on the base. I unscrewed the ivory lid and leaned close.

The scent rose instantly: dried iris root, almond oil, and crushed rose water.

"Imported French rice powder," I said, rubbing a pinch of the dust between my thumb and forefinger. It had the exact silken, clingy texture of the grease-smeared residue I had scraped from the number-four haul line in the fly gallery twenty minutes ago. "Six silver florins an ounce in Pest."

Gizella sniffed with immense satisfaction. "A gentlewoman does not allow maritime brine to corrode her skin into boiled leather. I had three jars sent from Paris before we cleared the Danube estuary."

"Who touched this jar today?"

"No one," she declared, tossing her dark curls. "I powdered my brow during the second-act intermission, right before Ignác sang his aria from the poop deck set. Then I closed the box and locked it."

"It is not locked now."

Gizella glanced down at the open brass hasp, her brow twitching. "The ship rolled during the blast. The catch must have slipped."

"Trunk latches do not unhook themselves against a brass mortise, Gizella." I set the powder jar down and picked up the short wooden ramrod I had brought from the props locker. I held it out to her, handle first. "Take this."

She drew her hands back into the folds of her black mourning crepe as if I were offering her a viper. "I will not touch that foul mariner implement."

"Take it," I repeated, my tone leaving no room for a stage faint. "Grip the handle as tight as you can and press the brass tip against my palm. Push down."

Scowling, she snatched the rod from my fingers. Her hands were soft, meticulously smoothed with cold cream, and unblemished by any trace of physical labor. She braced the wooden grip against her chest and shoved against my hand with an irritated squeak.

The rod barely wobbled against my skin. Her fingers slipped along the waxed shaft, lacking the basic calluses and tendon strength required to compress even ten pounds of resistance.

"Stop," I said.

To force a jagged, three-ounce naval grape-shot pellet into a fouled blunderbuss barrel—past the tight friction of thick hemp paper and hardened carbon fouling—required eighty pounds of downward mechanical force. It took the hardened wrists of a deckhand or the iron sinews of a trained acrobat. Gizella could not have forced that iron scrap six inches down the bore without breaking three manicured fingernails and bruising both her palms.

Yet the blank paper cartridge in the munitions chest had not been loaded by brute strength alone. It had been slit open with mathematical neatness. The linen twine had been severed at an angle that only an exceptionally fine, sharp blade could produce—far too delicate for a privateer's coarse rigging knife.

"Open your dressing case, Gizella," I said calmly. "I need your embroidery scissors."

Gizella’s eyes flared with renewed indignation. "My scissors? Why would you need my embroidery tools? Do you think I tailored Ignác's death warrant?"

"I know how the cartridge was cut," I told her, stepping closer to the open chest. "The paper was sliced with a razor-thin convex edge, the kind fitted to Parisian lace shears. The sort of scissors you keep in that blue velvet tray."

"They are an heirloom from my godmother in Lyon," Gizella muttered, sweeping her heavy sleeves aside as she bent over the trunk. "Engraved mother-of-pearl handles, curved blades of hardened surgical steel. They cut silk ribbons like fresh butter. I would never lend them to anyone in this wretched company."

She reached into the cedar chest, shoved aside a heap of embroidered silk chemises, and lifted the hinged blue velvet tray where her needles and threads were organized.

She went completely still.

Her hands hovered over the velvet recess. The rectangular impression where the pearl-handled shears usually rested was entirely empty. Beside it lay an untied packet of black silk ribbons and three brass bodkins, untouched.

"Where are they?" Gizella whispered. The grand operatic timbre was suddenly gone from her voice, replaced by genuine, brittle confusion.

"You tell me," I said.

She tore through the velvet tray, turning over spools of gilded twist, throwing aside bundles of bone buttons, and overturning her jar of pomade into the bottom of the trunk. Her breathing turned short and ragged.

"They were here," she stammered, her fingers shaking as she rummaged blindly through the folded crinolines below. "I used them at noon to trim the lace cuffs on my Act Two gown. I locked the box! I swear by the Holy Virgin, I turned the little iron key and slipped it into my reticule!"

She snatched her beaded reticule from the deck and dumped its contents onto the sea chest. A silver vinaigrette, a mother-of-pearl fan, a packet of violet pastilles, and a tiny iron key tumbled across the wood.

The key had not been lost. But the lock had clearly been breached.

Gizella sank back onto the sea chest, her hands trembling against her skirts. A single, unfeigned tear spilled down her cheek, cutting a jagged white track through her expensive Parisian rice powder.

"Someone took them," she whispered, looking up at me with wide, terrified eyes. "Borbála... someone was in my trunk while I was singing on stage."