The Blind Contessa's New Machine (19 page)

His voice was full of gravel: an old man’s.

“I do like music,” Carolina said. Surprise had made her uncertain of everything. She reached out with both hands and found the doorway on either side of her just where it had always been. Marking her position by it, she stepped into the room and took a seat in the corner of the nearest couch. “I’m Carolina,” she said.

“Silvio,” the old man told her. A stroke, another note, and a song broke forth: fire licked at a single stick before the pile burst into flames, then a moment spent near dark water before the opening theme broke open again in variations as inevitable and unfamiliar as the speech of angels.

When it came to a close, she could hear the tip of the bow come to rest gently on the floor.

“Another?” the old man asked.

“Yes, please,” said Carolina.

In her dreams, the flat roof of the Turri house was covered with white shells, despite the fact that she had never been on the Turris’ roof in waking life, and that the cost of importing those shells from the coast would have been enormous. However improbable, the effect was striking. No matter how high she climbed, the white cross formed by the house’s four wings stood out like a beacon among the gold roads and the dark heads of the trees. The ghostly shape was even visible at night, illuminated by the moon, as it was now.

Carolina wheeled through the night sky over Turri’s house and grounds. Only one light still burned in the Turri home, on the second floor. She flew low over the back garden, then rose until she hung even with the lit window in the darkness.

Inside was a laboratory and workshop. Turri sat at a desk that faced the window, his head bowed over some complicated mechanism. To his right a small balcony jutted out from the house. It communicated with the laboratory by a narrow glass door. Carolina alit and tried the handle.

It opened so silently that for a sickening moment she wondered if she had gone deaf as well. Then she heard the scrape of metal against metal and a rhythm of clicks and clacks as Turri tested the machine on the table before him. He didn’t look up when she entered, and Carolina didn’t disturb him with a greeting.

Instead, she slipped past him to explore the workshop. The space was vast: only ten paces across, but so deep that the far wall was lost in darkness. The area where Turri worked was brightly lit by tiny gaslight fixtures set in the ceiling every few paces. To the left were glass cupboards filled with boxed specimens of moths and insects, as well as tall containers full of feathers carefully sorted by color: black, blue, brown, white, red, and a small unbound sheaf of green. A black marble counter, streaked with quartz and flaked with shiny mica, supported a small forest of boiling beakers mysteriously linked by lengths of thin yellow tubing. Steam billowed from each beaker, giving off the scent of anise, lemon, and iodine. Beyond the counter were shelves of jars filled with strange fruit, lengths of thick roots, unborn animals, birds without feathers. All these specimens had lost their true colors and taken on the faint blue of the thick liquid that suspended them.

Opposite the jars were books. Treading carefully, as though afraid to wake Turri, Carolina crossed the short span of glossy floorboards to read their titles:
Successful Flying Machines; New Italian Chemistry; A History of Tears; Five Thousand Constellations with Lost Stars
. In the lower corner of the bookcase, more than a dozen oversized volumes were missing—perhaps the ones he had chosen to send to her. In the shadows where they should have been, tiny lights glimmered. When Carolina peered closer, she discovered a globe: blue gone black in the dim light, marked with lines of dusky gold that traced the shape of constellations between the false stars. Somehow, the stars glowed from within, surrounded by halos of midnight blue where the light illuminated the dark surface. When she touched it, she realized it was made of paper, stretched tight over a wire frame, each star carefully punched out by hand. The back of the globe seemed to shed more light than the front, casting strange shadows in the bookshelf’s deepest recesses. Curious, Carolina turned the sphere gently on its stand. A small tear split the globe, from the breast of a dragon to the horns of a bull. Inside, she could see the faltering shape of a naked flame.

Gently, she turned the globe to hide the tear. Then she walked back to where Turri still sat. He frowned as he pressed a silver lever that lifted a hammer to ring a small bell. Her skirts rustled, but he paid no notice. Carolina stood at his side as he pressed the lever again, swore softly, then tapped at the bell with his finger. It gave a muted peal.

Blood singing in her ears, she laid a hand on his shoulder.

Before he looked up, she awoke.

For days, Carolina expected Turri at every moment. Any sound might mark his arrival: a footstep outside her room; a servant running to the front door; the thud of a small bird, transfixed by her window. One morning the rooftop doves woke her with their cooing, and for several minutes, still in the throes of a half dream, she was convinced that he had crawled up into the eaves and was trying to speak to her in some new code. These hopes came unbidden, despite all her attempts to despair. She reminded herself of his failed experiments, the derision his name inspired, his unpredictability and his nonsense. She rehearsed the stories she had heard, of how slight a wind can snuff out a man’s love. It made no difference. Her heart had been convinced by some secret math.

Pietro, in the brief hour they spent together over dinner each evening, seemed to see none of this. He reported on the progress of the vineyards and complained about the vintner. Until this summer, Pietro had taken no interest at all in his father’s winery, so the old man had grown used to working his dark magic in perfect freedom. Now he responded to Pietro’s presence with suspicion and his questions with exasperation. After a few weeks of tramping cheerfully through the rows of grapes and inspecting the copper tubs where the new wine brooded, Pietro had begun to offer suggestions. The old vintner was speechless with rage. Since the old man seemed unwilling to reason, Pietro tried reissuing his ideas as orders. This resulted in a complete breakdown in negotiations, after which the old man responded to anything Pietro said with a single word:
impossible
.

“He acts like the whole vineyard is planted in gunpowder,” Pietro told Carolina. “And if we cut the wrong vine it will blow us all to kingdom come.”

In the meantime, the front door remained locked. At first she thought it was only a passing fancy that led him to turn and take the key on the evening of the Rossi party. But as the days wore on, the old knob still refused to budge, not just at night, but by day as well. Carolina listened to Pietro’s evening soliloquies with growing amazement, trying to understand how this genial, simple man could double as her jailer.

Finally, she asked.

“I wanted to go to the lake today,” she said one evening, after a long disquisition on the merits of various grapes that even Carolina could tell Pietro had hopelessly scrambled. “But the door was locked.”

“Yes,” Pietro said agreeably.

Carolina laid her knife along her plate and lifted her eyes to his face. “I think I’d like to have a key,” she told him.

His hand covered hers on the rough lace tablecloth. “It’s not safe for you to go alone,” he said.

When she didn’t answer, he lifted his hand to her cheek, traced the curve of her chin, then leaned in to kiss it, and asked, “What does it matter where you are, if you can’t see?”

“A man is here,” Giovanni announced from the doorway of Carolina’s room, with an air of betrayal.

“Thank you, Giovanni,” she said, wondering as she rose from her chair how the child could possibly have conceived a jealousy of the old cellist.

She stopped just short of the threshold, because she hadn’t heard his retreating footsteps. As she had guessed, Giovanni still waited in the doorway.

“I could take your arm to help you with the steps,” he suggested.

Carolina smiled at him with what she hoped was some accuracy. “I walk up and down the stairs every day,” she said.

“But what if someone is hiding on them?” he asked. “Or a glass that fell from a tray?”

“I will be very careful,” Carolina promised. “Thank you, Giovanni.”

“I am the fastest boy at the stables,” he declared in closing, then reinforced his point with a noisy, headlong descent.

After a moment, Carolina followed him.

“Your young friend distrusts me,” Turri said when she reached the first landing. “Children are excellent judges of character.”

For a moment, the impression of him standing at the bottom of the stairs, his blue eyes so bright they seemed lit from within, was so strong that she was surprised when the moment passed to find herself still blind. The vision had stopped her halfway down the stairs. Over the weeks since the Rossi party, she had imagined meeting him a thousand times, always in a haze in which the whole world fell away as soon as he touched her hand or spoke her name. But the actual sound of his voice had the opposite effect: instead of leading her into a dream, it returned her to herself. Her spirit, which had grown used to roaming fretfully between shadow and memories, settled back into her chest.

“I thought you were an old man,” she said, and began to descend again. “With a cello.”

“My worries age me every day,” Turri said. “But so far none of them have resulted in music.”

Carolina came down the final step. Turri kissed the side of her face. Something sharp dug into the bodice of her dress. She pulled away.

Turri laughed. “You have discovered your present,” he said.

“You brought me a pony,” Carolina guessed.

“A very small pony,” Turri conceded. “With sticks for legs. If you’ll sit down, I’ll make him dance.”

With an even step, Carolina led him into the conservatory, but when she turned to take a seat on the divan, he caught her hand. For a few breaths, he held it tight, like a giddy man catching at the limb of a tree to regain his balance. Then he released her.

“No,” he said. “Sit at that little desk.”

Carolina crossed to the desk. Turri followed close. The instant her hand rested on the back of the chair, he pulled it out for her. Dutifully, she sat.

“Now,” Turri said, his voice strange with excitement. “A moment.”

The coarse fabric of his coat fell against her bare arm as he set something on the desk. Paper rustled and the faint, sharp smell of charcoal came and went. He turned some kind of gear, as if winding a clock, and the paper rattled and cracked.

“There,” he said, and stepped back.

“Should I sing?” Carolina asked.

“Sing?” Turri repeated, surprised.

“How can he dance without any music?”

Turri laughed. Then he leaned over her chair so that his shoulders sheltered hers. His fingers brushed down her arms to her hands, which he caught in his and lifted. When he released her fingers, they settled on the keys of a new machine.