The Blind Contessa's New Machine (29 page)

Blood rushed from all corners of Carolina’s body to her heart, which sent it flying back out again. Her chest and face burned. Her hands were frozen. “Pietro—” she began.

“No!” he said, his voice thick with some deep emotion.

Carolina sank into silence.

Pietro collected her other hand, pressed her palms together, and cupped them both gently in his own, like a boy trying to carry a captured butterfly home.

“Carolina,” he said, as quietly as she had ever heard him speak. “I have not been true to you.”

“True?” she repeated.

“Faithful,” he said, his voice rising slightly, as if surprised by the sound of the words he must use to confess. “I have—with Liza,” he finished.

Carolina’s mind made several false starts. Then darkness began to pour into the room from every window, sweeping away the tables, the rugs, the piano. She took her hands from his.

“How dare you?” she said, very low.

“I thought you knew,” Pietro said, as if trying to work out a math problem aloud. “You caught me in the hall that night. And you asked me about the perfume I gave to her.”

When Carolina didn’t speak, he plunged on. “She’s just a girl,” he said. “A foolish thing.”

“I know what kind of girl she is!” Carolina said, rising.

Pietro bowed his head against her belly. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice breaking.

Carolina lifted his face to meet the gaze of her blind eyes. Whatever the effect was, it startled him to silence.

“Would you have told me this if I could see?” she asked.

His chin turned in her hand. She held his face steady.

“I am your wife, not your priest,” she said. “I don’t want your pity.”

She walked precisely through the maze of furniture, out of the room.

Upstairs, she didn’t hesitate.

She rang immediately for a servant. Then she went to Turri’s machine and tapped out a message:
I’ll leave with you tonight.
Below, she set the time and place, two in the morning, the lake house.

“Here I am,” Giovanni said.

Carolina pulled the paper from the writing machine and folded it.

“You will take this to Signor Turri at once,” she said, extending it to him. “If you have any other tasks, make another boy do them.”

“I will be back before they know I am gone,” Giovanni promised.

“Good,” Carolina said. “Thank you.”

Still, Giovanni hesitated. “But you haven’t sealed it,” he said.

“That doesn’t matter now,” she told him.

She waited out the day in a seat by the window, her heart numb and her mind gone still, not through any effort of her own, but like a machine stopped by a shock. Still, her remaining senses worked. She heard the anniversary clock measure each fraction of the hours, and when it chimed twelve, she rose, found her cloak, and fastened it at her throat.

As she passed, she brushed her fingers over the double rows of keys on Turri’s machine. They were cool to the touch, as if the moon’s light actually leached heat from them, instead of warming them like the sun. The machine contained no paper, but she tapped a few stray letters on the familiar keys. Then she turned and went out.

The footsteps must have been waiting outside her door.

Halfway down the stairs, they started after her, following close. At the foot of the staircase, instead of crossing to the door, Carolina doubled back down the long hall. The footsteps followed, along with the faintest trace of perfume.

Carolina whirled where she stood.

“Liza,
” she said.

The footsteps stopped.

Carolina lunged forward and caught a slim arm and a handful of hair. She loosed the hair, caught the other arm, and shook the girl, hard.

“You’ve followed me like a thief since I came to this house,” she whispered fiercely.

“I wanted to see where you went,” Liza said. Raised in pleading, her voice sounded like a child’s.

“You left me out in the yard with no way to get back.”

“You wanted to go out, but the door was locked,” Liza said. “I saw you try it.”

“So you are just a good servant, day or night?” Carolina asked.

“I don’t know,” Liza said, her voice breaking.

Carolina released her grip and pushed past Liza to the door.

“Where are you going?” Liza whispered, frightened.

Carolina found the knob. This time, it turned under her hand. She stepped out into the darkness.

For the first time since she had gone blind, she ran.

The landscape around her buckled in her mind. One moment, the house and trees stood just where they had always been. The next, stars glinted below her feet and strange mountains loomed in the distance. Somehow she descended the slope to the river’s edge. Using the sound of the water as a guide, she made her way along the bank, catching at the reeds to keep her balance. This was the long way to go, but the only one that wouldn’t leave her wandering in circles in the woods. They could pull up the stakes of the path she’d made, but they couldn’t change the river’s course to her lake.

Beyond Pietro’s landing, the river grass leapt up to her waist and slashed at her hands. Carolina wrapped her smarting fists in the folds of her cloak and pressed on until the grass gave way to thorny scrub and untamed trees. Head down, she clambered through them, her coat yanking and tearing on the unseen branches. Finally the brush gave way to mud, and the mud began to curve in a long arc. She had reached the lake.

Hands extended, she made her way along the far bank, marking her progress between the trees. She found the twins by a lucky guess, took a heading from the way their trunks branched, and located the sapling just down the bank, then the thick oak beyond it. The apple tree led her on by the sweet smell of its rotting windfall. From there it was only a few steps into the branches of the willow that leaned over the bridge to her side of the lake. A moment later, she had found the railing: a slender limb that led her over the low rise of the dam where the river muttered under its breath as it collected itself after the drop from the lake.

Now she knew the way. Even as a child, she could have taken these last steps with her eyes closed. She followed the waterside reeds until she found the place where her father had rooted them out to create a landing. Then she turned and climbed the slight hill to her house. Her unconscious calculations were exact: when she reached for the railing that led up the steps, it was just where she guessed.

Inside, a short, angry sob escaped her. She let the cloak drop from her shoulders and kicked off her shoes. Her skirts were still heavy with mud and dew, but she curled into the cold blankets anyway. Darkness rolled in and took her under like a wave.

When she rose through the crowns of the trees, the light of the stars faded, as if someone had pulled a veil over her face. Then they winked out. Carolina guessed that she must have flown into a night cloud and rose higher. Still no stars, no shadows.

Frightened, she dropped back toward earth. The descent seemed endless and the darkness absolute. Breathless, dizzy, she spread her hands out in hopes of catching a branch or leaf. Nothing but cold air slipped through her fingers. A new terror began to set in: that she might also be blind now in her dreams.

The instant this thought broke in her mind, she touched down on soft carpet. When she found her balance, she reached out in search of clues to the room she was in. She caught the beveled edge of a familiar table, found the anniversary clock just where she had left it, and leaned down to gather a handful of the covers on her own bed. Following its contour, she found the window and threw the curtains open.

But in this dream, as in her days, she could see nothing but darkness. She laid her palms flat on the glass, waiting for the dream to end and another to begin, but the ground held steady under her feet. She sank into a chair and bowed her head, pressing the heels of her hands into her useless eyes.

Green lightning cracked through the dark.

Carolina caught the light and froze it in her mind with a fierce blend of memory and will. She had taught herself to move freely in her dreams, but she had never tried to change the dream itself. For several ragged breaths, she held the image captive. Then she glanced away from the lightning bolt to see what it illuminated. Outside her window, a cliff plunged down into a black ocean. White foam swirled around the foot of the rocks like punished ghosts. She let out a long sigh. Lightning cracked, and the scene vanished.

“No,” Carolina said. She rose and beat on the window, tears running over her face. Her mind raced through the dark, throwing open doors, knocking over cabinets, searching for anything it ever remembered seeing. Then the lightning flashed again.

Carolina captured it before it even struck land, a jagged scar of silver light suspended over the black chimneys of a sleeping city. She narrowed her eyes at the incomplete bolt until it shimmered and broke. With one sweeping glance, she cast the bits of light across the eastern sky as stars. Thunder roared in her ears and lightning cut the sky again.

Her stars held steady over a ghostly desert. Another bolt charged down the night, but she caught it before it could turn the sand to glass, broke it into pieces, and lit the west. Thunder grumbled in the distance. Miles away, a dark dune consumed a slender tendril of lightning in perfect silence. Carolina closed her eyes and erased the rolling sand. She thought for a moment, and opened them on the dip of Pietro’s yard and the old hills of Turri’s land.

Then she decided it was time for dawn to break, and the first rays of the sun slipped over the familiar horizon.