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Between the full moon and the gradually brightening eastern sky, Floria could see her lover at the end of the platform at the apex of the Castel Sant'Angelo. She could not make out his eyes or his expression from the distance, but she caught the defiant shake of his head when the Sergeant offered him a blindfold. Mario would stare into the eyes of his mock executioners, fearless and defiant to the end, laughing to himself over how fleeting his supposed death would be. A thrill of excitement ran up Floria's spine as he turned to face the firing squad, and despite the pretense of it all, she gasped when the shots rang out and Mario crumpled to the ground.
She watched breathlessly from a distance as the Sergeant approached the body with his pistol at the ready to deliver the coup de grâce, then sighed with relief when Spoletta dismissed the action with a flick of his wrist and instead covered the body with a cloak. Her heart pounded frantically as the soldiers lined up and filed stiffly down the stairs off the platform and back down into the gut of the fortress, Spoletta trailing behind them. As they retreated, Floria rushed to Mario's side, whispering to him to feign death for just a little longer. Once or twice, she thought she heard footsteps mounting the stairs, but finally all was silent, other than morning birdsong out in the Prati beyond the walls of the fortress and the tolling of church bells across the Tevere to signal the end of Matins. Only then did Floria urge Mario to rise so they could flee, reaching out to help him up; but when she touched his shoulder, the cloak slipped to the ground, and Floria screamed when she saw the blood pooling beneath it.
She was screaming still when the shouts of Scarpia's name began down below, when footsteps began pounding back up the steps, Spoletta's face red with winded fury as he emerged onto the platform and saw there the opera singer crouched by her fallen lover.
"Ah, Tosca!" he shouted. "You'll pay dearly for his life!"
"With my own," Floria screamed back.
For Sciarrone and the soldiers blocked the stairs, and her Mario's blood was seeping across the flagstones of the Castel Sant'Angelo, and these sadistic beasts who called themselves men would certainly kill her after they'd had their fill of torturing her, if she did not take matters into her own hands first. Some sins were justifiable, after all—like slaying Scarpia, like slaying herself. She sprang to her feet, pushed past Spoletta, and clambered onto the top of the wall. To her left, the sun threatened to break over the distant Monti Simbruini, bathing in pale light the closer domes and palazzi across the river. The silhouette of the Basilica di San Pietro loomed in the distance straight ahead, and Floria shut her eyes in a moment of fervent prayer. Lord, I put my fate in Your hands, she thought; but immediately she recalled her fruitless pleas as she sprawled weeping on the floors of the Palazzo Farnese. Where would she be now, if she had not taken her fate into her own hands then? Floria bared her teeth in rage, suddenly furious that her tormenter's cruelty had made her forget her faith both then and now.
"Oh, Scarpia," she cried to the heavens, "we'll meet before God!"
And before she could question the rightness or wisdom of her actions, she leapt.
The Castel Sant'Angelo rests on the solid foundations of the great cylindrical mausoleum constructed by the Emperor Hadrian for his own entombment. Over a millennium after Hadrian was laid to rest in its base, the medieval Popes built decadently furnished apartments atop the mausoleum, to which they could retreat in the all-too-possible event of invasion. To the south of these papal apartments is a courtyard that would be shaped like a half-moon if other rooms did not nestle in its curve, rendering the courtyard an imperfect rectangle instead. A Renaissance-era statue of the Archangel Michael that once loomed above the rest of the fortress now stands watch in this courtyard, which is named the Courtyard of Honor, but which is known as the Angel's Courtyard.
The sun beats down arid and harsh upon the ramparts of the Castel Sant'Angelo through the long, draining days of summer, and no relief may be found in the Angel's Courtyard. The soldiers in the summer of 1800, piqued by the dearth of respite from the heat, took matters into their own hands and constructed in the courtyard a crude canopy of sailcloth, squeezed next to the pedestal from which the Archangel Michael looked on with mild disapproval. Beneath this canopy the soldiers could retreat to escape the merciless rays of the sun, swigging gulps of now-tepid water from jugs filled at the cisterns on either side of the erstwhile papal chambers.
Floria, of course, knows nothing of this when she flings herself from the battlements of the upper platform; even if she passed this strange addition in her walk through the Angel's Courtyard in the bleak, dark hours of predawn, she would not have recognized its location from so high above. Despite the brightening sky, shadows still dip deep into the crevices and courts of the Castel Sant'Angelo, and into this darkness Floria falls, fully expecting to never emerge. Her sudden collision with the sailcloth canopy knocks the wind out of her, and she is too dazed to even feel panicked as the structure teeters then topples a few seconds later, crashing down onto the herringbone bricks with the singer in tow.
For a long moment, Floria lies tangled in sailcloth, utterly disoriented, thinking she might actually be dead. But when her mind finally snags on reality, she nearly screams as pain shoots up her leg from her ankle, twisted beneath her after her second, shorter descent. She clenches her teeth together, willing herself not to give her foes the satisfaction of her agony, even as she hears them shouting orders up on the platform. With some effort, she drags herself through the mess of wooden poles and ropes, her vision blurring as her ankle throbs; and she has just reached the exit of the courtyard when a strong hand seizes her shoulder, and Floria, shocked anew, succumbs to the darkness.
She awakes with a start and immediately bites her tongue to keep from crying out. Her captor has laid her on a mattress and covered her with a simple blanket. Next to the bed is a desk covered in haphazardly stacked papers, and a trunk sits against the opposite wall. Shouts from beyond the walls of the whitewashed room imply that she is somewhere in the Castel Sant'Angelo still. Floria pushes herself upright, nearly is sick at the sharp throbbing of her bruised and swollen ankle, then forces herself to think. She is still inside the fortress, in the quarters of someone who seemingly does not wish her harm, at least for the time being. If only she knew how close she was to an exit, and how many people might see her if she left, and what her captor intended with her in the future, even if not in the present...
The handle of the door turns, and Floria, torn from her musings, jumps. Through the door slips a pimply young man in a soldier's uniform, who himself jumps slightly upon seeing that she is awake and sitting up.
"Don't try to stand on it, Signora," he warns her, shutting the door swiftly behind him and rushing to her side. "I don't know how to set it properly, and you don't want to make it worse."
Floria knows this is true, and the fact of her weakness enrages her.
"Who are you?" she hisses. "Why am I here?"
"I'm... I'm sorry, Signora." The young man flushes. "I'd been sent down to unlock the gate for you, but I saw you struggling across the bricks of the Angel's Courtyard, and they were all rushing down from the platform to see if you were still alive. The only thing I could think to do was to bring you here."
"And where is here?" Floria demands, still in too much a state of shock to consider thanking the soldier.
At that moment, the door swings open again, and in strides the Sergeant who had led the firing squad.
"Praise be to God," he mutters as he shut the door and crosses to Floria's side. "Signora, are you all right?"
But Floria has already recoiled from the Sergeant, images of Mario's lifeless body flashing before her eyes.
"Get away from me, get away!" she spits, her voice rising in volume.
"Quiet, Signora, please!" The Sergeant glances anxiously towards the door, then continues addressing Floria in an undertone. "They're still looking for you out there. We need to set your ankle and find some way to sneak you out of the fortress."
"Oh, let them find me," sobs Floria hysterically. "Or, better yet, go shoot me dead on the flagstones, before Spoletta and Sciarrone can do me any more harm. If I cannot live by my Mario's side, let me die by his side instead!"
The Sergeant exchanges a glance with the young soldier, who quickly crosses to the door and slips out. The Sergeant, meanwhile, crosses to the chest at the other side of his room, opens it, and rummages about its contents for a moment.
"Put these on," he tells Floria, tossing her a shirt and a pair of trousers. "Everyone will be looking for you in your concert attire. It will be easier to get you out of the fortress if you're disguised."
Floria raises a haughty eyebrow, still sniffling, but at that moment, the door opens yet again, and the pimply young soldier steps aside to admit two more soldiers, carrying between them a blood-soaked cloak that sags with the weight of a body.
"Mario," Floria gasps as the soldiers carefully place the cloak on the ground. The Cavalier's shirt is saturated with blood, and its sharp, salty tang fills the room. Mario's face is gray and ashen, but as the soldiers lift his feet and prop them on the mattress next to Floria, his mouth moves in a faint groan.
"He's alive!" She slips from the edge of the bed with a muffled cry and seizes his hand. "Oh, Mario!"
"Your pardon, Signora," grunts one of the soldiers who carried Mario in. "I'll need to remove the bullet and staunch the bleeding as soon as possible."
Floria nods and moves aside, but she does not loosen her grip on Mario's hand as the soldier pulls off the Cavalier's shirt, even when the sight of his bloody left shoulder makes her stomach contract.
"But, how...?" She turns to the Sergeant, who is watching the scene with one eye on the door.
"I apologize for your fright, Signora," sighs the Sergeant. "I whispered to the Cavalier Cavaradossi as I offered him the blindfold that he must pretend to be dead, no matter what happened."
"But why did you shoot him, in the first place?" Floria demands. "If Scarpia's orders for a mock execution were genuine..."
"Scarpia? Genuine?" The Sergeant laughs hollowly. "No, Signora. We were given no orders for a mock execution. But not every soldier within the Castel Sant'Angelo is a lackey of Scarpia's, and we already had our own plans to rescue your Cavalier. Your presence was an unexpected complication, actually."
"Your own plans..." Floria inhales sharply. "Ah. You released Angelotti, as well."
"A coordinated effort," confirms the Sergeant with a grim nod. "One of our comrades took the fall alone, to dispel any suspicions of a conspiracy. May he rest in peace."
"And Mario?" Floria insists.
"He did not know anything about us or our intentions. I did not see him until we were on the platform, and we could not risk sending him a message in his prison cell. When we conduct an execution, Signora, one gun amongst the firing squad is loaded with powder only, so each man can do his duty while clinging to the belief that his shot may not have been capable of delivering the fatal blow. A shot of powder is lighter than a bullet, and the recoil is softer. But if each man thought he was the powder-bearer this execution, then who would ever know how many shots were harmless? Yet one of our trusted men had to shoot with an actual bullet, so those loyal to Scarpia would see a corpse drenched in blood, as they expected." The Sergeant claps the third soldier on the shoulder, and the soldier nods seriously. "My comrade here is the finest shot I know, but he is only human, and it seems hit the Cavalier a hair too low, such that he lost too much blood too quickly. Thankfully, Cavaradossi did not cry out, and so saved himself even as he bled; unfortunately, he had already gone into shock by the time you tried to revive him. It took longer than usual for us to retrieve the body from the platform, thanks to your attempted suicide. I am only grateful he was not yet dead by the time we reached him."
"My God." Floria shudders. "And to think Spoletta may have required you to deliver a coup de grâce, after such careful planning..."
"Oh, Spoletta never does." The Sergeant snorts derisively. "For all his bloodlust, the man cannot bear the sight of blood itself. Why else do you think Sciarrone and Roberti supervise all the dirtiest work, instead of Scarpia's right-hand man? No, we knew that a sufficiently bloody shirt on a sufficiently still corpse would be far more than he'd want to examine in greater detail before declaring the prisoner dead. Even if we'd pretended to deliver a coup de grâce, I doubt Spoletta would have dared to peek and see whether any brains were splattered across the platform."
The soldier finishes neatly binding Mario's shoulder in clean bandages, and when he gestures towards Floria's ankle, she takes a deep breath and extends her leg towards him. The Sergeant rummages in a box of ammunition and offers her a bullet, and Floria, releasing Mario's hand, puts it between her teeth and lets it absorb the force of her howl as the soldier jerks her ankle back into place. At this, Mario's eyes flutter open.
"Floria?" he breathes.
"I'm here," gasps Floria, eyes closed in pain as she spits out the bullet. "I'm fine, Mario. Don't worry about me. Rest."
"Not yet, Cavalier, with my apologies." The Sergeant squats down next to Mario. "Can you hear me?"
"Yes," whispers Mario faintly.
"We need to get you and La Tosca out of the fortress, and convince Spoletta and Sciarrone that she also is dead. A prisoner died in her cell yesterday, a young woman of about your size and build and coloring, Signora. If we put her corpse in your dress, and let the river do its work, then in a few days we can discover the body of La Tosca who somehow escaped from the Castel Sant'Angelo but drowned in her flight."
Floria grimaces, but nods.
"And our escape?"
"Spoletta will confirm that the Cavalier is dead; we don't need to worry about that. But you, Signora..." The Sergeant frowns pensively. "We'll have you ride out with the soldier taking the bodies out to the ditches where we dump the bodies of the executed. Unconsecrated ground." The Sergeant reflexively crosses himself, and Floria follows suit. "The Cavalier will have to lie motionless in the wagon, along with the body of the other prisoner, which we can clothe in your dress once we are out of sight, past the Porta Cavalleggeri. Signora, dress yourself in the clothes I gave you, and pretend you're one of the shepherd boys who sometimes helps with chores around the fortress for a coin or two. Can you do that?"
Floria nods, hesitantly at first, then more resolutely, for she is not one of the great performers of her generation for nothing.
The soldiers step out of the chamber to allow Floria to change into the Sergeant's spare garments. Her ribs and stomach are bruised a violent purple from her ungentle collisions with first canvas, then brick, and she winces as she uses the remaining strips of bandages to bind her chest flat, as she's seen countless women do when playing trouser roles. She uses spit and caked dirt from a pair of worn boots tossed into a corner of the room to smudge her face and clothes, and she tucks her hair beneath a felt cap hanging on a peg. When the soldiers return to the room, they smile at her transformation, impressed.
"Ready?" they ask her.
"Almost."
At a gesture, the soldiers help lift Mario so that Floria can help tug his bloodied shirt over the bandages and his clammy skin. He opens a bleary eye as they lay him back down on the cloak, and he huffs softly at what he sees.
"Don't laugh," she warns him, the corner of her mouth curling up into a smile even as her lip trembles. Her Mario, always laughing in the face of death. "Stay awake until we're outside the Castel Sant'Angelo; that way, you won't cry out in your sleep and give us away. Breathe from below your diaphragm only, so your ribs don't move—short, shallow breaths."
"Like this?" whispers Mario, whose breaths are already shallow and haggard.
"Perfect." Floria leans forward and kisses him gently, taking comfort in the gentle rush of air from his nostrils on her skin. Her beloved still breathes, and while he does, there is still hope. "What an artist you are, my love."
Mario smiles, his eyes closed. Floria sits back, crosses herself, and says a silent prayer for their safety.
Finally, it is time. The soldiers carry out Mario's body in the cloak first, Floria clutching her lover's hand until she must let it go. When the coast is clear, the young pimply soldier mutters an apology, then picks Floria up and carries her in his arms down the ramp that runs through the bowels of the fortress's mausoleum foundations, their shadows moving across the walls against the flickering of the torches ensconced along the walk. In a quiet courtyard at the base of the mausoleum, a donkey wagon waits, in which the soldiers have already placed Mario amidst the bodies of the dead, Floria's concert finery discreetly cradling his head from within a crude burlap sack. Floria does her best not to look at the woman whose body will become hers in death, but she catches a glimpse as her eyes seek out Mario, and immediately she is filled with pity and revulsion at the poor woman's fate. The pimply soldier lifts Floria carefully onto the front of the wagon, where she sprawls in her best impersonation of a surly teenager.
"Is everything ready?" The Sergeant appears from the entrance to the mausoleum, casts an eye over the setup, and nods his approval. "Godspeed, Signora."
"Thank you, for everything," Floria responds. "It's best I don't know your names, but please know that my heart will always be more filled with gratitude than I can express for your goodness."
The soldier with medical training climbs into the front of the wagon with Floria, and with a flick of his switch, the wagon begins to bump its way over the cobbles. The others briefly salute Floria before disappearing back into the darkness of the fortress.
Only when the gate itself draws into sight does Floria's stomach tense, as it hasn't since she was a very young singer and still experienced the occasional bout of stage fright. The soldier next to her sits grim and silent, no doubt equally anxious. The guards by the gate are chatting casually, and Floria breathes a tiny sigh of relief to hear their strong Neapolitan accents.
"Stop!" shouts one of the guards.
"Taking the bodies out to the fields," explains the soldier tersely.
"Yeah, but who's the kid?" asks the other guard.
"He was helping move those cannonballs around the Bastione San Marco," says the soldier. "Hurt his foot, and lives near the ditches, so I'm giving him a ride."
"That so?" One of the guards peers down at Floria's foot and curses in surprise. "How the hell did you do that?!"
"You ever tripped and dropped a cannonball on your foot?" Floria asks him disdainfully, carefully making use of as much Romanesco as she's picked up from listening to the stagehands around the Teatro Argentina, thanking the Madonna and all the saints for the fact that these guards from Napoli might not notice that it's not her native dialect. "Hurts like shit."
"I'll say." The guard rubs his jaw, still wincing at Floria's foot, but his comrade narrows his eyes suspiciously.
"Now, where have I seen you before?" he tells Floria.
"Dunno?" Floria gives a careless shrug. "I graze my sheep just over there in the fields. You've probably seen me around."
"Oh really?" The guard's eyebrows twitch upwards. "You the kid who sings sometimes? Your voice is high enough for it."
Floria shrugs insolently.
"Well, give us a song then." The guard crosses his arms and sits back. "The one you were singing just this morning."
Beside her, the soldier is sitting rigid and immobile. Floria takes a deep breath, opens her mouth, and tentatively begins to sing.
I give you sighs,
There are as many
As there are leaves
Driven by the wind...
It's pure dumb luck that she heard the shepherd boy singing as she was led into the Castel Sant'Angelo in the haunted hours of predawn this morning, not to mention that she recognized the song despite her impatience to reach Mario in his prison cell. She only knows the version sung in Veneto, amongst the goatherds in the vales around Verona, and even if she knew the song in Romanesco, all her attention would instead be focused on the effort of holding her vocal chords as still as possible, of keeping her resonance narrow enough to obtain the crystalline straight-tone of a boy soprano. When she is done, she holds her breath in fear for a moment, but then the guard nods, satisfied.
"You've got a good voice," he says. "Don't stop singing after it drops."
"We'll see," Floria responds carelessly.
The other guard has been counting the bodies in the back of the wagon, in the meantime, and he signals to his comrade that they are cleared to go. As the wagon clatters out of the fortress, Floria and the soldier breathe a collective sigh of relief. Neither speaks until they are past the Porta Cavalleggeri and are skirting the Leonine Wall of the Vatican, fields stretching into the distance beyond them. The sun is up properly by now, and the countryfolk are going about their business, ignoring the wagon juddering through their midst along the dusty roads outside the city limits. Finally, some time before they reach the ditches in question, the soldier stops the wagon and helps both Floria and Mario out and into the shade of a towering haystack.
"Pay whatever price you must to reach Corsica," the soldier advises, handing Floria back her bag of gold and jewels, along with a flask of water and a crust of bread. "You should be safe there, until you can send word to the Cavalier's friends in Paris. Someone from our network will bring a carriage at nightfall; only call out to him if he's humming the Marseillaise when he stops by this haystack, and only ask to travel with him if he tells you he's heading to Civitavecchia but won't be stopping at the Villa Palmieri. Until then, stay here, and stay out of sight." The soldier pauses, then adds, somewhat shyly, "It was a privilege to hear you sing, Signora. I regret it was the first and last time."
"God be with you," says Floria, clasping his hands. "I... I hope you avoid the fate of your comrade."
"My ring," rasps Mario suddenly, making Floria jump. "I gave my ring to the Jailer of my cell, in exchange for paper and a pen. If any suspicion falls upon you or the others..."
The soldier nods gravely, then turns his back on the couple and climbs back into the wagon. Floria watches him clatter along the road, dusty clouds pooling in his wake, until he is lost from view. She cannot deny the cold shudder that went up her spine, to have heard her beloved instruct a man to falsely accuse yet another innocent whose life would be forfeit to the ongoing tragedy. But within the past day, she has sacrificed both the life of a friend and the life of an enemy to keep Mario alive, and so she cannot blame him for the world in which they live.
"I've often imagined lying in the hay with you," Mario mumbles at Floria's side, "but never quite in this context."
"Oh, hush," Floria laughs softly, suddenly flooded with a delirious, dizzying relief. They are far from free of danger, but they are still alive, and the sky above them is blue and clear, and somewhere over the hills and sea lie France and safety. She reaches out and takes his right hand, grateful beyond belief. "Mario, I was unspeakably afraid that you actually were dead. When I saw all that blood..."
But Floria's words catch in her throat, for she does not want to remember that her only point of comparison was the body she left in a pool of blood on the marbled floors of the Palazzo Farnese. Guiltily, she reflects on the fact that, had her suicide been successful, her final thoughts and words would have been ones of vengeance against her tormenter, not ones of adoration for her beloved. It is not something she wants to tell Mario, or consider further for herself.
"I was afraid I was actually dead, too," Mario offers, and Floria kisses his forehead.
"We'll tell anyone who asks that you were shot in a duel," she improvises. "And that you cut your head when you fell to the ground. I will be your faithful page boy, and we are fleeing the allies of the man you shot and killed in said duel. We'll have to think up fake names for ourselves, of course."
"My Floria." Mario smiles, his eyes still closed. "Always the brilliant protagonist of an opera of her own making."
Floria's eyes fill with tears, and she touches Mario's cheek gently.
"Sleep, my love," she urges him. She will happily keep a vigilant watch for the carriage come nightfall. In the meantime, Floria surveys the road for danger and ignores the burning ache of her ankle and softly sings to Mario more of the rustic tunes of her youth, even after he has long since drifted into a fitful sleep. Even if they somehow survive, it somehow feels as though they may be the last songs she ever sings, a farewell to the Tosca of her beloved homeland.
Floria has performed in many of the crown jewels of the Italian peninsula—Milano, Venezia, Napoli, of course Roma. But never before has she encountered a city like Paris, with its cold stone façades and gilt ornamentation. Despite her utter relief at finding sanctuary in the heart of the French capital, far from her tormentors in Roma, Floria longs for the brick and painted stucco exteriors of the palazzi of her homeland, for the ornate frescos on their ceilings and walls. She misses the smells and flavors of Italian food on her tongue, the expressive percussiveness of the Italian language on her ears. She immediately begins to learn French with impatient diligence, desperate to be able to communicate beyond the Italian-speaking servants in Mario's household, but Italian is still the conduit for her thoughts, her prayers, her dreams.
Her nightmares, as much as her dreams. For all too often, Floria wakes herself with a scream and sits in bed staring at her unstained palms, waiting for her breath to slow. Mario, roused from his uneasy rest, wearily comments that she's like a righteous Lady Macbeth; but Floria's nightmares stem less from her remorse than from her unending anxieties, and in such moments, she needs to caress Mario's face, to reassure herself that he still lives, that her violence was not in vain. Mario, for his part, startles Floria awake just as often with his cries, often pleading for an end to the pain, sometimes begging Angelotti for forgiveness. On such nights, she rocks him back to sleep gently in her arms, her heart breaking anew at all he has suffered.
She never dares ask Mario whether he still blames her for Angelotti's death, and he never mentions it. But the question hangs unspoken over their silent household, as Mario slowly regains strength without vigor. Word arrives that the Marchesa Attavanti has been arrested and executed for her role in her brother's escape, and Floria almost does not tell Mario, but she knows he would want her to tell him at once, even if the news only compounds his anguished isolation. He sits for hours without moving in his chair, staring out the window towards the gray sky without seeing anything, his right hand listlessly rubbing the slow-healing wound on his left shoulder. Floria knows Mario has experienced pain she cannot imagine, but she still considers the situation with equal degrees concern and anger. Mario is her lifeline in this monochrome city, her reason for being here, her reason for living. She cannot and will not watch him crumple irretrievably into a shadow of his former self, not when she nearly died for him, not when she once killed for him, not when she has possibly damned herself for him in one way or another.
La Tosca has not sung in months, since the cantata that night at the Palazzo Farnese. She cannot sing publicly if she wants to keep their many enemies across the sea from learning of her survival; and even in private, Floria cannot will herself to sing, the loss of her former life too recent and raw. But Mario no longer can see the world around him, and so she must reach him as she can. When will my beloved come and see his grieving love? Floria's voice is unpracticed and coarse, sticky around her passaggi, lacking the orchestral accompaniment she knows so well, squeezed for breath at the ends of lines she can usually support with ease throughout. Yet when she stops singing, Mario's eyes are filled with tears, and he is looking at her, not through her, as he has so often since their arrival in France.
"Ah, Tosca," he breathes. "For a moment, you made me forget."
"We may never forget what happened to us," she reminds him, taking his hands. "We may never again return to Roma, or see the friends we left there. But we cannot let them destroy who we are, Mario. In spite of everything they did to us, we cannot forget how to live. If we do, then what was the point of fighting so hard to survive?"
Something of the old fire has reignited in Mario's eyes, and he pulls Floria to him and kisses her, slowly and deeply, as he last did on that fateful morning in Sant'Andrea della Valle. Since that evening at the Palazzo Farnese, their infrequent embraces have held a frantic edge of desperation, too needy, too fearful that each moment might be the last. Now, though, they rediscover how to savor moments together, trusting they still have many tomorrows to come. Mario is still healing, to be sure; they both are. But that night, for the first time, Floria believes he will let her into his grief and allow her to help him as she can.
The next morning, Floria calls for an easel to be set up and pushes a palette into Mario's hands.
"I am a singer, and you are a painter," she tells him simply. "So, paint."
And Mario does paint, compulsively, obsessively, an expansive allegory that consumes his waking hours and focuses his attention on something other than his despair. Floria watches his progress with hope, for the Mario she knew in Roma would have tackled this project with equal fervor, if perhaps for different reasons. She reminds him to eat, helps him wash his brushes at the end of each day, bites her tongue on her objections and criticisms. It's the only way to vanquish their old ghosts, Mario insists when he sees how her glance flickers uneasily over his painting, and so long as it's her Mario arguing his beliefs as passionately as he always has, Floria cannot disagree.
Only when he has finally finished his painting, and exorcised himself of his demons accordingly, does Mario ask Floria to marry him. And Floria, who has defied danger and death for Mario's sake, who finally sees once more in Mario's eyes the man who captured her heart, accepts.
Floria is done with revolutionaries and the trouble they entail, but escaping politics proves more difficult than she had hoped. When Bonaparte declares himself Emperor, Mario flies into a rage and declares he'll go protest in the streets of Paris himself against his idol's betrayal.
"Mario, absolutely not." Floria scowls at her husband, arms akimbo and framing the generous swell of her stomach. "You have done more than your fair share in the fight against tyranny, and I will not let you bring the wrath of the state down once more upon either of us."
It's a cruel shot to take, but it hits its mark. Mario throws himself angrily into a chair, overcome by both his fury and his sudden guilt. Floria sighs and goes to him, her gait just slightly unsteady on her bad ankle, and she reaches beneath his shirt and touches the smooth round scar on Mario's shoulder.
"Let others do what they will, but for God's sake, don't you do anything reckless," she murmurs. "I want our child to know your face and your voice, not only heroic stories of a brave man who fought for his principles and ended up imprisoned or dead."
And when the child is born, Mario's taste for revolution abates, at least for the moment. Floria watches him cradle their daughter in his stronger right arm, his face filled with light and hope that it has lacked since the days of the Repubblica Romana, and some burden lifts from her shoulders. She will live the rest of her life with the pain of having betrayed Angelotti's location, but now she cannot regret it, not when it saved her Mario, not when it spared him for such future bliss. When they are christening their son several years later, it is Floria who suggests they make Cesare one of his names, a living memorial to the man they could not rescue. Their children remind Mario how to live freely, how to laugh fully, how to love purely. Floria knows that Mario loves her completely and absolutely, but the very history that binds them so closely is woven as much of sorrow as of joy. By contrast, Mario only ever associates their children with happiness, and even when their son tries to clamber too quickly onto Mario's back and jostles his bad shoulder, the pain is fleeting.
(They never tell the children, not outright. Floria knows they are inquisitive enough to ask around and receive sufficient answers to piece together why their parents departed Roma so swiftly and so finally. But if they do learn, they never bring it up with her or Mario, and for this, Floria is oddly grateful. Like Mario, she wants their children to exist in a world untouched by the spectre of Scarpia and the terror he inflicted upon them.)
Floria has resigned herself to a future of motherhood and nothing more, but Mario has finally recovered enough of himself to help Floria regain her own footing, as well. Even as he takes in commissions of portraits and other paintings, Mario begins to quietly inquire amongst his friends as to the salons they frequent, and whether any might accommodate the occasional performance from a talented soprano. Floria, with her now-fluent French, ventures hesitantly into these glittering gatherings of the intelligentsia, afraid that she won't be able to keep up with the conversation. Instead, she discovers a community of artistic friends who recommend new chansons and Lieder from across the Continent, who complain to her about the slow progress of their half-drafted novels and plays, who always give Floria a standing ovation when she sings for them. Mario tells her that the salons make her seem more vibrant somehow, that she carries the fearless persona of La Tosca back to their home on such evenings; and Floria laughs and reminds him that she does live for art and love together, after all.
The Eroica is slow to reach Paris and does not premiere there until the year of Napoléon's defeat, some decade after its completion. The children sit politely throughout, but Mario seizes Floria's hand at the first few chords, electrified, and the two sit breathlessly throughout the symphony's duration. In Beethoven, Mario finds a means of communicating the spirit of revolution to Floria that she can understand and embrace whole-heartedly; she gladly accompanies him to any and every concert of the composer's works that Mario can find. They travel together to Vienna some years later for the revival of Beethoven's first and only opera, and this time Floria seizes Mario's hand and holds it fast throughout the tale of an undaunted young woman masquerading as a man to free her husband from prison. "I kept seeing you up there, on that stage," Mario tells her that evening as she lies in his arms; and Floria does not know whether that means the singer she was, the shepherd boy she used as her disguise, or both. All Floria knows is that, despite how happy she is with her present life and her current musical community, a part of her will always ache to experience the power of opera only as a spectator, a reminder of the glamorous life she had before that fateful night in June 1800. She never says as much to Mario, but she knows he can sense her quiet grief, and on such nights he holds her closer than ever, as if seeking to absorb her sorrow.
And so time passes. Mario's frequent commentaries on Wellington and then Waterloo, which his children tolerate throughout their youths, shift by the time they are grown to his discontents with the Pax Britannica and the Bourbon Restoration. After all, there will always be conquerors to challenge and wars to wage. As she runs her fingers through his still-thick but graying hair at night, her fingertips lightly tracing the scars on his forehead, Floria often reminds Mario that he may grumble as much as he wishes, so long as he doesn't go charging off into battle himself. The time for such exploits is over, they both know; revolutions are for the young and hale and fearless, and here their own children are old enough to leave their parents' house and pursue their own futures. Mario, meanwhile, can feel the stiffness of age beginning to set into his knuckles, and when winter sweeps through Paris, the cold works its way painfully into the old fractures of Floria's ankle and forces a cane into her hand for support. They're getting old, Floria complains; and Mario, laughing softly, kisses her gently and reassures her that she is still as radiant as she was on the day he first laid eyes on her. Whenever she considers the path they've travelled together between then and now—Roma to Paris, young lovers to grandparents, refugees to respected citizens—Floria thanks the Madonna with a silent prayer for letting them grow old together, when so much could have gone so wrong. She adds Mario's thanks to her prayers, as well, knowing that he will never add them himself, and knowing that he would forgive her for doing so.
"Nonna, is that you and Nonno?" asks Floria's little granddaughter one day. She is newly a big sister, and Mario, giddy with excitement over a second grandchild, insisted then and there that his daughter and her two children visit for a few weeks and sit for a family portrait, to capture forever this moment of his grandchildren's youthful innocence. The young girl, wandering about restlessly between sittings, has stopped in the entrance hall of the mansion and is staring up at the dramatic monumental painting hung on the wall.
"In a sense," Floria replies, fondly squeezing the girl's shoulder. She too gazes up at the painting, the one Mario feverishly created as he worked his way slowly out of his melancholy upon arriving in Paris.
"Who are they, then, if not you?"
"Courage and Justice, defending Loyalty and Freedom from Tyranny," Floria explains.
Her granddaughter nods solemnly at the flag in Courage's hand, the sword in Justice's. Floria has long since learned to live with the quiet sorrow of her losses, but she feels it twinge as she looks behind the sword her painted self brandishes, to where the Marchesa Attavanti defiantly shields her brother, a closed fan clutched in her hand like a dagger. Mario has not painted Angelotti as he once appeared in his role as Consul, but rather as the haggard and frail figure whom Spoletta dragged from the well in the garden of the Villa Cavaradossi. "If we paint Freedom as eternally strong, we forget how fragile and vulnerable it truly is, how vigilantly we must guard it," he explained to Floria then. Her eyes flit towards Tyranny, his self-assured sneer and hungry stare all too familiar, and she shudders, but does not look away. He tried to take everything from her, and yet she and Mario still live, while he has been burning in the fires of Hell for the past thirty years. And the woman who was La Tosca refuses to tremble before her defeated foes.
"Is it a true story?" her granddaughter asks, looking up at Floria.
The girl has inherited her father's blonde hair and pale skin, but she has Floria's dark eyes. Fleetingly, Floria wonders what ever became of that painting of Mario's in Sant'Andrea—if anyone ever finished it, and what color they painted the eyes of the Maddalena, if so. Yes, she wants to answer, and also no, for art inherently memorializes while smoothing over the painful imperfections of the truth. This allegory did not capture Angelotti's suicide, the gashes torn in Mario's temples, the candles flickering on either side of Scarpia's bloodied corpse. But neither was it a lie—rather, it was the synthesis of truth and deception that any artist or art lover knew to accept for what it was. One day, her granddaughter too would understand this.
"Come," she says instead, taking the girl's hand. They will slowly make their way together back to the room in which Mario has set up his easel, where he will look up from remixing his paints to greet them both with a smile. And perhaps later, when Mario's hands have grown weary from their work, their daughter will call for a bit of music, and because her loved ones have asked, Floria will sing once more.
