The Blind Contessa's New Machine (26 page)

Pietro laughed. “You don’t have to be afraid of bandits in our valley,” he said. “All they could steal are books and lemons.”

Slowly, with none of her usual sure-footedness, Carolina made her way down the hall toward him. Each step she took felt like a risk, as if the sound of his voice had torn holes in the unseen walls, or opened up new gaps in the floor.

When she reached him, he kissed the side of her face tenderly. “You couldn’t sleep?”

Carolina wondered how much light had broken through the tall, narrow windows that flanked the door, and if it was enough to betray her bare feet.

“It doesn’t matter when I sleep,” she told him. “Sometimes I like to walk around the house when no one can see me.”

“Shall I take you to your room?” he asked.

“Thank you,” she said, her chest tight with fear. “I know where it is.”

As she turned away, she swept her shoes over the folds of her dress and pressed them tight against her belly, so her slim back blocked them from his view as she climbed the stairs. It wasn’t until she swung the door of her room shut behind her that she realized she hadn’t asked him where he had been.

That afternoon, the cello seemed to be missing the home of its youth. It waxed eloquent about the long days it had spent wandering beloved roads, thought of the way light had glinted off the river that ran by its house, and remembered a chorus of familiar voices. Then it mourned, searching the streets of a new city for comfort, finding none.

When the song ended, Carolina lifted her head from the divan. She had never spoken with the old cellist before except to thank him or ask him to continue with another song, but now she wanted, suddenly, to talk with him as a friend. The desire to lay her burdens down at someone else’s feet surprised her with its strength.

Almost as quickly, she realized how complete a stranger he was to her.

“I don’t know where you come from,” she said.

The old man was silent. The silence was so deep that the darkness in Carolina’s mind began to eat up the walls and windows of the room. Involuntarily, she threw her hands out, searching for something to prove that vision wrong.

When the old man saw this, he answered, “Florence.”

“Like the poets,” Carolina said. Her hands had found the table of trinkets that sat beside the divan. She lifted a metal soldier from his place, explored the crisp lines of his uniform with her fingers, and put him back.

“Where did you learn to play these songs?” she asked.

The old man didn’t reply. Carolina settled her hands in her lap and turned her gaze toward him, like a believer staring blindly through the screen at confession.

“Child,” the old man said, “I don’t want to know your secrets.”

“The king is riding an elephant,” Liza said. “That is like a cow, with a lion’s mane.”

She was narrating the life of an unnamed Caesar, told in illustrations. Liza was an able liar, but she was rarely inaccurate, sticking, with a liar’s instinct, to topics she knew well, or ones that no one could know. Today, however, she was taking wild guesses.

“How frightening,” Carolina said. She thought she caught a faint trace of a new scent in the room: lily and musk, some kind of perfume. When Liza turned the next page, the scent came to Carolina again.

“Now he has built a great tower out of sticks, and set it on fire. It’s so hot that the sparks turn into stars.”

“Liza,” Carolina interrupted. “Is that perfume you’re wearing?”

The book snapped shut. Liza said nothing.

Carolina laughed, delighted. “Is it a secret!” she said. “A present from a sweetheart?”

Stony silence answered her.

“Liza!” Carolina teased. “Are you having a romance?”

Fabric rustled, wafting the scent to Carolina again as Liza stood and dropped the book on her chair.

“Are we finished then?” Liza asked. “I am wanted in the kitchen.”

“He seems to think we built this whole place just for him,” Pietro said, bemused.

Babolo twittered for silence, then waited to make sure he had his audience’s full attention before bursting into a song that Carolina had begun to recognize as his waking exultation. It was full of boasts, war stories, and rash promises, and Babolo reserved it exclusively for sunny mornings. On gray days, he was apt to fall into reverie, with missed chances, distant shores, and unspoken love as his themes.

“I really think you brought me a little king,” Carolina said. “Or at least the king’s singer.”

At the sound of her voice, Babolo broke off. He shuffled pointedly on his perch, his feelings extravagantly wounded.

“Oh, Babolo,” Carolina said. “That was a compliment.”

“Musicians are sensitive,” Pietro said.

Carolina laughed.

Pietro had brought her an orange as a morning snack. Holding half of it in the palm of one hand, she traced the outlines of a single section, pulled it free from the others, and held it out to him. The touch of his fingers was warm on her hand, which had turned cold from the chilled fruit.

“And Liza!” she said. “Have you seen her in the yard with any of the boys? I teased her for having a sweetheart yesterday, and she stalked out of the room and won’t come back.”

Babolo trilled up and down a pair of scales, to remind them what they were missing.

“The cook even sent Giovanni up with breakfast,” Carolina said. “Liza never lets him bring breakfast. I think it’s because she steals half the fruit. There was twice as much this morning.”

“Well, women are mysteries,” Pietro said carefully. “Even when they’re young.”

“Yes, but you must watch for me,” Carolina said. “In the kitchen, or the yard. She’ll never tell me herself.”

“I will,” Pietro promised.

“Where are we?” Turri said.

They stood just inside the door of the lake house, slightly out of breath from the walk through the forest. Turri’s head was bowed so that his forehead touched hers. His hands toyed with the clasp of the cloak at her neck. She understood the question: a request for her to invent another location in their ongoing game.

Turri kissed her. The lake house in her mind rose gently from its foundation and floated away into the sky. For a moment, shadows surrounded them. Then stone walls began to emerge from the darkness, glossy with mist. The two of them stood on a walk between pools of green water, under a low arched ceiling. The water was lit from below. Where the lights shone up through it, it glowed gold. The cloak slipped from her shoulders.

“A grotto,” she said. “There are lights under the water.”

Turri had been working down the buttons at the back of her neck, his fingers brushing the thin skin over her spine as he went. When he reached her waist, he unfastened the final clasp. The dress dropped to the floor. Turri’s breath left him in a rush. For a long moment, he didn’t touch her. Then he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her again. She searched for the skin beneath his shirt. One of his hands flattened over the wing of her shoulder blade, and pulled her to him.

Outside, a twig snapped in the dark.

The two of them froze.

“It’s nothing,” he said, speaking low. “Some animal. Listen.”

This time it was not only a twig, but dry leaves crackling and shuffling as something walked through them, making no attempt to disguise its presence.

“The ghost,” Carolina whispered.

“No,” Turri said. “A dog, or a fawn.” He stroked her hair gently, as if she were a worried child.

The sound from the woods stopped. Turri lifted her chin with his thumb. “See?” he said.

A step fell on the stairs of the house. Carolina shrank against Turri, her bare skin cold with fear. The visitor hesitated for a moment, then ascended to the door. Turri crossed his arms behind Carolina’s back as if bracing against a high wind.

It was a child’s voice, thin with fright. “Papa?” he asked.

The next instant, Carolina was alone.

The door thudded shut and Turri’s step sounded on the stair outside. “Antonio,” he said, his own voice changed by fear. “What’s the matter?”

Carolina crouched, searching the dusty floor for her dress. When she found a handful of lace, she pulled it close.

“I went to find Mama,” Antonio said. “But she was gone.”

Carolina could hear the stairs creak as Turri lifted Antonio in his arms. Still crouching, she scrambled into the dress. She managed to thread her arms through the sleeves, but when she tried to straighten, she discovered she was standing on the skirt, forcing her to bow.

“You weren’t in the library or the laboratory,” Antonio said, working through the possibilities with scientific precision.

“So you came here,” Turri concluded. “That was very brave.”

At this praise from his father, Antonio’s courage finally failed. “I was afraid!” he said. His voice rose and choked with tears.

“It’s all right,” Turri said. “All right. I’m going to take you home.”

His familiar footsteps, heavy under Antonio’s weight, descended the stairs.

Carolina untangled herself from her skirts and rose. For a few more moments, she could hear him passing through the grass. Then even that sound vanished.

Inexpertly, she fastened as many of the buttons of her dress as she could reach. She found her cloak and threw it over her shoulders. Darkness roiled at the windows and drank up whole swaths of the lake in her mind, but the prospect of being discovered by sunlight in the same place was even more frightening.

She slipped out of the house to the lake’s edge, where she knew a few of the stakes she had planted the previous summer still stood, the twine she’d tied lax between them. Swiping at the reeds, she managed to find one stake that led her along a twisted string studded by broken wood to another stake still standing halfway down the bank. With countless false starts and missteps, she followed her half-ruined path around the lake and through the forest. When the strings and stakes ran out among the pines, she followed the rise of the hill to the road, then struck into the yard until she reached the stucco face of her home. She traced its walls back to the kitchen door and slipped through the house to her room. Her fingers clumsy with cold, she unfastened her dress and let it fall to the floor again. When she crawled into bed, the darkness consumed everything: the lake, the road, the house, her hands, stopping only at the threshold of her heart. For the first time, she welcomed it as it pulled her down into dreamless sleep.