Masks and obsessions

On a cold London night in 1770, a lady sits by a window with a lighted candle next to her. Her dress is Turkish, her hair curled in dark brown tendrils, her eyes bright and cold. She is Lady Petronella Beauclair, and over several nights, like Scheherazade, she tells the curious story of a castrato singer named Tristano and the unlikely connection she claims to him. Her listener is a young man painting her portrait.

The story is fantastic: A man gelded before puberty; his journey from an Italian village to the great stages of Europe; a cruel Venetian lord with a taste for collecting oddities; an English lady with a jealous husband; a scandalous tryst; and, as if this weren’t enough, another twist.

“But -- I do not understand,” says George Cautley, the young painter.

”... what is it you do not understand?”

“Many things, my lady ...”

”... without these misfortunes ... I should not be sitting here this evening,” she says.

Anyone who’s read Ross King’s other works knows that, whether in his fiction (“Ex Libris”) or nonfiction (“Brunelleschi’s Dome,” “Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling”), he is a master at exploiting the eccentricities of history. So masterful, in fact, that we are put in the same spot as George. Could it be true? Could a eunuch sire a child?

The delicious improbabilities of her story come enfolded, like a gem in a roll of velvet, in a lavish novel that takes us into London society as it was lived long ago. Taking its key motif from the title, which refers to a half-mask and cloak, “Domino” is steeped in images of costumes, masks and masquerades. And Cautley, who tells this story, is now a wrinkled, carbuncled old wretch whose life was ruined as a result of knowing Beauclair.

“I am, I shall confess at the outset, a murderer,” he begins, recalling his arrival in London as a 17-year-old lad with a box of paints tucked under his arm. Tucked under the other was a manuscript, “The Compleat Physiognomist,” written by his father, which asserts that “the countenance is the Mask of the Soul ... it is a Mask which does not disguise its Wearer, but instead reveals him to our Eyes.”

Like any good son, George follows his deceased father’s naive advice, even though the city speaks to him, in all its aspects, about the unreliability of appearances. Daytime streets “thick with newspaper-boys, shovel-hatted porters, pot-boys carrying belch” are transformed at night by “witches, nabobs and Floridian kings ... a party of Harlequins and Pierrots in a hackney coach....”

Befriended by Beauclair and by the portraitist Sir Endymion Starker, Cautley spends his days shuttling between Starker’s studio and Beauclair’s lodgings, safe harbors in a city teeming with cheats. When he finds that Starker keeps a poor girl named Eleonora as a mistress, there is a further shock: He recognizes this helpless waif as the figure in Starker’s great allegorical paintings of, yes, Truth and Liberty.

Beauclair’s hypocrisies, however, are much more formidable. A testament to King’s inventiveness as a novelist, Beauclair is a unique femme fatale whose secrets are best kept for readers. Like everyone else in this story, she is on a masquerade. She is weary of tags, labels and the prohibitions of the older, conservative generation. When she tells Cautley about Tristano’s Venice days, she gives us something rare: a glimpse of her own opinions.

“In Venice, during the Carnival,” she says, “everyone wears a mask at all times, from the doge to the lowliest kitchen-maid.... And because of these masks and disguises -- because their wearers become anonymous, mysterious, incognito ... all of the citizens of the republic share equally -- if unwittingly -- in their joys. For you must understand, Mr. Cautley, it is a time of innumerable possibilities!”

Her hero is Tristano, a being whose hard-to-define sexuality (the grim result of the suppression of women from the stages and choirs of Europe) challenges conventional notions of identity, not to mention the belief that the castrati were impotent. The creation of the castrati was a brutal and sometimes imprecise practice, Beauclair explains, “the operations were often of a primitive and inexpert variety ... and thus I believe they were capable....”

Can Beauclair be trusted? After all, she toys with Cautley’s affection while a dandy named Robert Hannah hovers at her door; and her interest in convincing him of her story seems to border on obsession. Is she intent upon preserving a scandalous personal history, or, in that feverish age of gossip, is she inventing one?

When Cautley learns that Hannah is responsible for Eleonora falling into Starker’s hands and for Beauclair’s poor situation, he’s driven to revenge that ends badly. And, during this crisis, a stunning deception is brought to light.

In King’s other works, the hapless protagonists, even in nonfiction, find a way to overcome. Brunelleschi beat his rivals to design a dome for a new cathedral, while Michelangelo was baited into the impossible task of painting the Sistine Chapel only to stun his conspirators.

But there is no final triumph in “Domino.” Cautley’s simple beliefs are so completely shattered that he gives up, going on to lead a debauched, dissolute life. The disillusionment of the young, however, is such an oft-told tale that thankfully King has dressed up this rather familiar story in an exotic costume embroidered with details of 18th century English life. Long after closing the book, one remembers the glare of richly lighted salons, the pungent odors of a rainy cobblestone lane.