The Blind Contessa's New Machine (24 page)

“Shh!” he said.

At the break in Pietro’s song, the low voice of a sleepy bird answered him with a kind of exasperated mumble, as if to ask if Pietro’s business could possibly be more important than the dream he’d interrupted.

“There!” Pietro exclaimed. “You see!”

At this exclamation, the bird apparently gave some other indication of discontent, because Pietro immediately apologized to it, his voice full of real remorse.“I am sorry,” he said. “You will forgive me.”

The bird, inexorable, refused to sing again.

“Maybe if you speak to it,” Pietro whispered to Carolina. “I think he believes I’m to blame for all the jostling he suffered in the carriage today.”

“I don’t think they sing at night,” Carolina said softly. “Other birds don’t.”

“They do!” Pietro insisted. “Some do. What is that story—with the girl in the palace? The boy she loves comes to her window at night, but the king turns him into a nightingale. Then the nightingale sings,” he said, triumphantly.

Fear tapped a cold finger on Carolina’s heart.

“Is this a nightingale, then?” she asked.

“No,” Pietro said, taking on a professorial tone as he began to recite the details he’d gleaned at purchase. “This bird is from Africa. The captain of a ship collected two dozen of them for himself, but when he returned to Italy his wife had ruined him with debts from wild living, so he had to sell them. They filled his whole cabin. He fed them by hand every night, but not all of them sang.”

“Does he have a name?” Carolina asked.

“The mate didn’t know,” Pietro said. “He was selling them because the captain couldn’t bear to. I thought it would be some music, when the old man isn’t here. And birds don’t need to be paid in gold, eh?” he said, turning affectionate as he tapped the cage. “Just some fruit and seeds.”

“There’s only one?” Carolina asked. “Will he be lonely?”

“He’ll have you,” Pietro said.

Carolina reached out. Her fingers brushed delicate wire. Something shuffled inside.

“What does he look like?” she asked.

“Like a sparrow, but with green bands on his wings,” Pietro said. “He’s not much to look at, but he was the best singer. I chose him with my eyes closed.”

“A pirate ship?” Giovanni asked. The cage rattled faintly as he tapped on the wire. Inside the bird shuffled, in a huff.

“I don’t know,” Carolina said. “It very well might have been.”

“My uncle is a pirate,” Giovanni claimed, leaving the bird behind to lean on the arm of her chair. “I have his glass eye. When I was born, his parrot was bigger than me. That’s when he gave my mother his eye. He didn’t need it to see.”

“Really?” Carolina asked.

“No!” Giovanni said emphatically. “He only used it to scare people.”

“I’m sure it’s scary,” Carolina said.

“It’s green,” Giovanni said. “No white like in our eyes. They say it looks like—” He paused, for effect. “
A piece of the sea.
”

At this, the bird burst out into energetic song, a celebration so intense that Giovanni left her side to investigate.

“What’s his name?” he asked when the bird fell silent.

“What do you think?” Carolina asked him.

“Babolo?” Liza repeated. She lifted the two braids she had just completed from Carolina’s neck, twisted them together expertly, and began to pin them in place.

“Apparently it is the name of a singing pirate,” Carolina said.

“Giovanni knows as much about pirates as I do about building a cathedral,” Liza said. Carolina smiled. Recently, on her imagined pages, Liza had been constructing a whole suite of architectural fantasies: sprawling Arabian mansions, lousy with minarets; churches that thrust so far into the heavens that they made specks of the men and women who passed over their thresholds.

The bird trilled with perfect expectation of obedience. When their two voices fell silent, he broke into a raucous, rising song that might as well have been laughter.

“Were you king?” Carolina asked him. “Of your little cabin? Of all the trees?”

In answer, the bird began another song. His voice was a pure, flutelike whistle, and his catalogue seemed vast: scraps of dirges and laments smashed side by side with triumphant marches, wedding hymns, and lovers’ fantasies, all of which broke off just at the moment they threatened to become melody.

“Carolina,” Pietro said. “A card for you.”

The bird’s singing had masked the sound of his steps as he entered her room. Surprised, Liza let the necklace she had been fastening at Carolina’s neck slip through her hands. Carolina caught her breath, then released it slowly as Liza retrieved the jewelry from the folds of her dress.

The bird scolded for a moment, then lost interest.

“Who is it from?” Carolina asked.

“Turri,” Pietro said.

Liza succeeded in fastening the necklace on the second try. Then, without asking leave, she turned away. At the door she hesitated, as if momentarily stymied by the problem of navigating around Pietro. Then her light footsteps descended the stairs.

Fear beat in Carolina’s temples. “Read it to me,” she said.

“He says he has been reviewing the movements of the stars. There were showers of meteors last evening, and he expects to see them again tonight, around one in the morning.”

This struck Carolina as unforgivably careless. “Why would he write that to me?” she asked, genuinely annoyed.

“It’s not as if you can see them,” Pietro agreed.

Carolina shook her head at the unseen mirror and turned on the seat of her vanity to face her husband.

“I’m smiling,” Pietro told her after a moment. “You are so beautiful.” He crossed the room and bent to kiss her, disturbing the jewels at her neck.

“Turri is a madman,” he said. “Don’t let him bother you.”

“
Please,
” Turri said.

The heavy scent of the kitchen roses on the night air made it hard to think. Turri had caught her as soon as she slipped out the door. Now he lifted her feet off the ground and dragged her a few unsteady steps toward the forest.

“No!” Carolina whispered. “I only came down because it was too dangerous to have you lurking around the house all night, with the servants sleepwalking and God knows who else making their own patrols of the yard.”

“Your servants sleepwalk?” Turri asked, suddenly a scientist.

“I don’t know!” Carolina said. “Somebody walks through the house at night.”

“A ghost!” Turri exclaimed.

“I thought you were a man of reason.”

“Reason believes the most obvious explanation,” Turri said. “Something you can’t see, roaming the house at night: a ghost, obviously.”

“But I’m blind,” Carolina said. “Someone else might see them.”

“I’m not ready to relinquish ghosts, even to science,” Turri said. “I still have some things I want to ask them.” He kissed her forehead, renewed his grip on her waist, and pulled her off balance so that she stumbled a few steps farther in the general direction of the lake.

“
No!
” Carolina said. “It’s impossible. I can’t be gone every night. Someone will catch us.”

“Then I’d
have
to take you away,” Turri said.

Carolina sighed with impatience.

His next kiss was tender: an apology, or a promise.

Behind them, something crashed to the floor in the kitchen. His arms tightened like a vise around her and she buried her face against his chest. Just as quickly, they parted.

“What was that?” Turri demanded. He pushed her aside, to sweep past her into the house.

“You can’t!” she whispered fiercely. She shoved him back into the kitchen yard, stepped inside, pulled the door shut between them and threw the bolt, leaving him in the darkness beyond. She could hear his feet scrape on the stone outside, but to her relief, he didn’t knock.

She crossed the small room inside the yard door and stopped at the kitchen’s threshold. Inside, nothing now broke the night silence. Carolina pointed her toe and described a brief arc just beyond the doorway. The ball of her bare foot caught the texture of fine grains: sugar, or salt. She knelt.

Sugar. She lifted her finger from her tongue, then swept her hands lightly over the tile in a wider circle. This time her hands caught a shard of pottery: about the size of her palm, and razor sharp. Depending on the size of the vessel that had broken, the floor between her and the rest of the house might be littered with dozens of other dangerous fragments.

She turned again toward the door to the yard. She knew Turri still stood on the other side: he was liable to wait there a whole hour, after he’d heard the last sound she made. But despite the danger before her, the prospect of Pietro discovering Turri in the house at this hour of the night frightened Carolina more. She took a deep, silent breath, and turned back to the kitchen.

The sugar seemed to have scattered from the left, as if someone had hurled it at the floor instead of simply dropping it. To her right, the grains were not as thick. Her arms thrown wide for balance, she crossed the room with long strides, carefully exploring each new step before putting her weight into it. If she brushed the rough edge of a piece of pottery, she quickly sidestepped. She only hoped that she wasn’t leaving a trail of bloody prints from cuts by smaller shards she couldn’t feel.

In the doorway to the dining room, she stopped, listened, and then set out again, moving quick and quiet. When she had almost reached the other side, she caught the sound of footsteps.

Carolina froze.

The footsteps strode toward her purposefully from the sitting room next door, making no attempt at concealment.

For the first time, Carolina ran from the sound. She ducked into the cellar and pulled the door shut behind her. Hidden on the stair, she held her breath. As she feared, the footsteps entered the dining room, where they paused for a moment as if surveying the territory. Then they crossed to the kitchen, hurried: giving chase or making an escape.

As soon as their sound faded, Carolina slipped out the cellar door again, ran lightly down the main hall, and flew up the stairs to her own room.