The Blind Contessa's New Machine (20 page)

Carolina shivered. “What is it?” she whispered.

“It’s a writing machine,” he answered, his voice low and gentle, as if not to spook a shy animal. “Look.”

He covered her right hand with his own, and pressed her index finger down. The key below it gave way. Nearby, something hit the paper with a determined slap.

“That’s a letter,” he whispered.

“Which letter is it?” she whispered back.

“I,” he said. He spread her fingers over two rows of keys. “There is one for each letter. All twenty-one,” he said. “They are in order by the alphabet.”

Carolina extracted her hands from his and ran her fingers over the unfamiliar keys. Turri’s arms still encircled her from behind. Faint heat pulsed through his thin shirt and vest.

She struck another. “That is a letter?” she asked.

Turri nodded. His chin brushed her cheek.

“Don’t tell me,” she said. Leaving one finger on the key, she counted away from it, to the beginning of the row, and then counted back again. “G,” she said.

“It works with two pages,” Turri said. “One is black paper, covered with soot. The key makes an impression through it to the next sheet.”

“You carved the letters?” Carolina asked.

“No,” Turri said. “I robbed them from a little press my father gave me years ago, when he still thought I might make something of myself.”

“So it looks like a book?”

“Like a page torn out,” Turri said.

After the G she had already struck, Carolina hit the R and the A in rapid succession. She had to hunt for a moment for the Z, followed quickly by the I and E.

Then she turned to face him, caught a handful of his jacket, and pulled at it. In a clumsy rush, he knelt on the floor beside her. For a long moment, the only sound she could hear was his breath. Then, gently, he turned her chin so that her lips could find his. In Carolina’s mind, the roof above them swung open on a great hinge, exposing the room to the clear sky.

Turri was the first to pull away. One of Carolina’s hands closed on the collar of his shirt, the other in the hair at the back of his neck. “No,” she said.

“Carolina,” Turri whispered. “Anyone can come in here.”

This seemed impossible to Carolina. The kiss had unmoored her. It was easier for her to believe that the room had put out to sea than that the daily operations of the house continued around them as always.

But as if to prove his warning, a door rattled down the hall and footsteps approached.

Turri kissed her cheek and stood. “Write to me,” he said. “Tell me when you’ll be at the lake.”

“I can’t get out,” she told him. Looking up into darkness at a face she couldn’t see, it felt like saying a prayer.

The footsteps stopped in the door.

“Good morning,” Turri said.

Fabric whispered to itself as someone bowed or curtsied.

“May I bring you anything, Contessa?” a woman asked. Carolina recognized the voice as Dolce, one of the maids who served her dinners with Pietro.

“Oh, no,” Turri said. “I was just about to go.”

“Shall I show you out?” Dolce asked.

“Thank you,” Turri said. He bent over Carolina and kissed her hand. “Write me,” he said again. Then he crossed the room.

In the hall, a key clattered in the lock. Turri and Dolce exchanged thanks and good wishes. Then the door swung shut and the key rattled again. A moment later, Dolce returned to Carolina.

“Will there be anything else?” she asked.

“No, thank you, Dolce,” Carolina said.

She listened, but Dolce didn’t retreat. “What is it?” the old woman asked after a moment.

“It is a writing machine,” Carolina answered.

“A writing machine?” Dolce repeated.

Carolina nodded.

“What does it do?” Dolce asked.

“It writes,” Carolina said.

“That’s all?”

Carolina nodded again.

Dolce made a sound in her throat, unimpressed but tolerant, as if one of the boys had brought her a basket of windfall fruit instead of bothering to climb up in the high branches for the best specimens. “The Holy Father has a philosopher’s stone,” she offered. “It turns water into gold.”

“Can you sleep with your eyes open?” Pietro asked. He perched on the curved arm of the conservatory divan where Carolina nestled. She hadn’t moved from the spot since Turri left, hours earlier. She’d spent the afternoon adrift with the memory of his kiss, which returned to her each time with a new feeling: longing, desire, shame, and gratitude so deep she was afraid her heart might attract God’s attention by giving thanks when she ought to be making confession. Most of the time, the moment seemed like a dream. When it began to seem too real, hope paralyzed her or fear filled up her lungs.

“No,” she answered. For the first time since she had gone blind, she wished that she could see her husband’s eyes. Instead, she closed her own.

Pietro smoothed her hair. “But why would that be,” he said, “when the light can’t wake you now?”

“I don’t know,” Carolina murmured.

“It’s a question for science,” Pietro concluded.

He kissed the top of her head and went to the piano, where he played a few disconnected notes, and finished with a strong but clumsy major chord.

“They tried to teach me music,” he said, and laughed. “It was like teaching a dog to sing.” He played the first bars of a famous waltz, then let the left hand drop away but marched through to the close of the melody.

“Your violin player is all right?” he asked as the last notes died.

At the mention of this small kindness, Carolina’s heart lurched like a boat struck by a swell. “He’s wonderful,” she said, and sat up. “Thank you.”

“He’s very ugly,” Pietro told her. “But he plays as if no one can see him.”

As he spoke, he left the piano, passed the ledge of marble that hung over the fireplace, then stopped at the desk where Turri had set his machine.

“What is this?” he asked.

“What?” Carolina said.

A key rattled unsteadily against paper.

“Look at that!” Pietro exclaimed. “It makes a letter!”

“It’s a writing machine,” Carolina said.

Another key struck, this time more forcefully.

“How do you know which letter is which?” Pietro said.

“They are in order by the alphabet.”

“Aha!” Pietro said. A flurry of keystrokes followed. “I have spelled your name,” he announced after an interval. “With one extra letter:
Casrolina
. Where did you get this?”

“Turri,” Carolina said. “It is one of his experiments.”

“Turri,” Pietro repeated.

“This way I can write to my father,” Carolina said. “Or to our friends. I tried to write before, but the ink went everywhere.”

Another flurry of keystrokes. Then Pietro pushed the chair back, crossed the room to kiss her, and turned to go.

When he reached the door, she couldn’t stand it any longer.

“What did you write?” she asked.

“You have to guess!” he answered, and laughed.

When Carolina awoke that night, someone stepped lightly away from the side of her bed. Even with the deafness of sleep still fading from her ears, she knew how close they had been: so near it could have been their touch that woke her. She threw back the covers and sprang to her feet, but the footsteps were already outside, paused at the head of the stairs. When Carolina crossed her own threshold, they hurried down.

She rushed after them along the curve of the staircase, through the hall, to the dining room. By the time she reached it, they were already on the far side. A few steps more and they could easily have lost her, darting into the kitchen or the pantry. Instead, they seemed to wait until she had almost reached them. Then they opened the door to the cellar and plunged in.

Carolina hesitated at the top of the cellar stairs, held back by old fear of the dark, but her months spent in full night had robbed the fear of its power. She caught the worn railing and followed it down. On the hard-packed dirt of the cellar floor below, the footsteps no longer creaked and echoed. They were reduced to a faint padding and an occasional scrape, still unmistakable in the silence.

The only time Carolina had ever opened the cellar door, the cook had chased her away, defending her territory with all the sound and fury of the fowl that ruled the corners of the yard. Carolina had assumed that the space must be a single room, perhaps mirroring the shape of the kitchen, but as she followed the scuffle and slap of the footsteps, the chambers beneath the house seemed to run on and on. Her hands brushed rough walls, a row of bottles, a table strewn with tools. She stumbled on the raised stone thresholds of at least three rooms.

She guessed they must have crossed below the dining room, gone under Pietro’s office, and struck into the outer reaches of the house. As they pressed on, she began to wonder if perhaps they hadn’t already passed beyond the mansion’s foundations and entered some secret tunnel dug by one of Pietro’s ancestors a hundred years ago to smuggle lovers or other valuables.

Then the footsteps stopped. An inhuman groan split the darkness.

Carolina froze, her hands clenched at her sides, her mind black with fear, until a cool summer breeze touched her face, carrying a faint trace of lemon. Some part of the cellar had opened to the yard.

Carolina stepped forward and reached out. Her fingers caught a vine. Following its trail led her up a shallow set of stone stairs into the back garden. The footsteps vanished in the soft grass, leaving no hint as to whether they meant this latest adventure as a trick or an escape.

It was a little of both. For the first time since she discovered the front door locked, Carolina was free of the house—but she didn’t know if she could find her way back through the unfamiliar labyrinth of the cellar. The lure of freedom decided her. First she knelt to find the cellar door, which was set into the slope of the garden. She lifted it from the flowers it had fallen open on. With a brief shriek and a whimper, it dropped back into place. She yanked the old wood a few inches to make sure it would still swing free when she returned. It did.

The night was warm and in the heart of the garden the scent of lemon gave way to the heavy perfume of lilies, fainter rose, and mint. Carolina let her head drop back, remembering the stars.

Then she turned toward the house. She tramped a few steps through the invisible growth to the foundation. She laid one palm flat against the pebbled stucco, and then, using the house as a guide, she began to trace its outline, following the walls from the back garden, through the ancient lilacs that screened the side yard, to the front walk. She followed it out to the road, and darted across to the tall grass on the other side.

This was where she should have found the garden stakes that would lead her to her lake, but although she found the break in the grass where she had tramped out a path, she didn’t find the twine or sticks. She covered about twenty paces, bent low to touch the tall grass that marked the path on either side, but then the grasses dropped away, leaving her in a clearing with no hint of what direction to take. Beyond the clearing was the pine forest, small enough to cross if she knew the way, but large enough to disappear in if she was lost.

Behind her, grass rustled.

Then it rustled again. Another time, and the footsteps were unmistakable.

Carolina whirled where she stood.

“Contessa!” Giovanni cried, his boy’s voice high with the effort of controlling his fright. “Are you all right?”

Carolina laughed.

The footsteps stopped in the grass. “I didn’t know it was you,” Giovanni said, his pride wounded. “I thought it was a ghost, or a witch.”

“Giovanni,” Carolina said. “What are you doing out at this hour?”

The prospect of an intimate interview with the object of his young affection distracted Giovanni from asking her the same question. “I like to run at night,” he said. “If I run during the day, they throw things, because none of them can catch me.”