The Blind Contessa's New Machine (21 page)

Carolina took a few experimental steps toward his voice. Giovanni hurried down, caught her elbow, and helped her back to the road at the crest of the hill.

“So you really are the fastest boy in the yard?” Carolina asked.

“That’s what I told you!” Giovanni exclaimed, stung by her doubt.

“Of course you did,” Carolina said, and added, to soothe him: “I never call for anyone else.”

“You could call them,” Giovanni said, feigning indifference, “if you didn’t care how soon a thing got there.”

Carolina crossed the dark road and stepped back onto the skirt of Pietro’s lawn.

“How far do you run?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Giovanni said. “Down the road and back. There are paths, in the forest.”

Carolina laid a hand on his wiry shoulder.

“How do you go back to the house?” she asked.

Giovanni didn’t even approach the front door. Instead, he led her diagonally across the lawn to the kitchen entry off the servants’ yard. The door was unlocked. He pulled it open with one sure motion and led her into the kitchen, through the dining room, to the foot of the stairs. There, for the first time, he hesitated.

Carolina squeezed his shoulder, then released it to reach for the railing.

“Thank you, Giovanni,” she said. “I can find my way from here.”

Giovanni gave a sharp, involuntary sigh. “It was such a beautiful evening,” he said wistfully.

The next morning, Carolina settled a single sheet of paper into the machine. Then she lifted a piece of Turri’s black paper and deftly checked which side was which. One face of the thin onionskin was smooth, but the other was dusty with soot. She placed the sooty side down on top of the other page in the machine, and set her hands on the delicate keys.

My dear father,
she began.

When she had finished, she pulled the pages from the machine, set the black paper aside, and pulled the bell that rang in the servants’ quarters. Then she folded the letter into thirds and pushed it across the desk until it butted up against the foot of the candle Liza had brought her earlier. The letter in place, Carolina picked up the stick of sealing wax and ran it up the stalk of the candle until the wicks met and the wax burst into flame with a small gasp. She lowered the wax close to the lifted edge of the letter, pressed the edge down, and listened for the sound of falling drops. Once several fell, she blew the wick out, picked up the seal, and counted to ten before pressing its face into the warm wax.

“Yes?” Liza said from the door of Carolina’s room.

“Cut some of the lilies by the cellar and the roses near the kitchen door,” Carolina said. “And take them to my father with this.” She held out the letter.

Liza retrieved it far more quickly than Carolina had thought she could, judging by the distance Carolina had guessed lay between them.

“Shall I send Giovanni?” Liza asked.

“No,” Carolina said. “Send Giovanni to me.”

She didn’t hear a sound from Liza until a stair creaked halfway down the first flight.

Then Carolina turned back in her chair, picked up another sheet, replaced the black paper, and began a second letter.

Carolina had only taken a few breaths of the night air when Turri pulled her into the shadow of the white roses that had almost overgrown the kitchen door.

“There’s a light on,” he whispered.

“A light?” she said. “Where?”

In reply, he kissed her. Answering heat flashed through her so quickly that it made her dizzy.

“In the front of the house?” she whispered when he released her. “It’s only Pietro in his room.”

“It’s not a lamp,” Turri said. “More like a candle. In the back, the corner window.”

Carolina thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said.

“I couldn’t stand to wait at home, so I sat by your lake until midnight,” Turri told her. “You have a perfect moon on the surface, and a pair of loons who smash it to pieces every time something frightens them.”

This time Carolina kissed him. When she let go, he made a small sound of recognition in the back of his throat, as if he had just grasped the results of some long running experiment.

“Take me there,” she told him.

Turri shepherded her quickly across Pietro’s lawn and into the pines, pulling her back when she took a false step, his clothes and skin breathing a spice she didn’t recognize. Under his touch, Carolina’s dreams seemed to overrun the boundaries of sleep. The night forest around them, which usually lived in her mind as black shadow and scraps of sky, had turned bright as day, the branches crowded with white blossoms one moment, ablaze the next with blue and orange flames. The stars beyond the branches struggled to find their balance, reeling crazily, some burning twice as bright as she’d ever seen, some flaring out.

“You know the way?” she asked, pausing to catch her breath.

Turri stopped beside her. He folded their hands together over her belly and pressed his cheek against hers.

“I’ve been this way a hundred times,” he said. “When I can’t sleep I stand in the woods and watch your lights.”

“But I don’t use any lights,” she said.

“I know,” Turri answered.

When they reached her cottage, he settled her hand on the weathered railing and let her climb the steps alone. Inside, the familiar smell of the lake, faint smoke from the fireplace, all the mingled perfumes she had worn among the velvets as a child, brought tears to her eyes. She turned back, suddenly lonely for Turri’s touch. But he had stopped somewhere and gone silent.

“Where are you?” she asked the darkness.

For a long moment, no one answered. Then a hand turned her face up to his. Shaking like a branch in the rain, he kissed her mouth, her ear, her eyes.

When she woke, Carolina knew immediately that she was at the lake house, but she had no memory of how she had gotten there. Slowly, the early hours of the night returned to her, but tangled with her dreams and in fragments so blurred by heat that they didn’t seem real. Seeing her stir, Turri pulled velvet over her bare shoulder. She found his hand and folded it under her chin as if it were a favorite possession.

Then her eyes sprang open.

“Is it still dark?” she asked. “You have to take me back before dawn.”

“But we’ve been here for days,” Turri said. “There are already two armies camped on our doorstep.”

Carolina listened: no birds yet, no militant locusts. She sat up. “I have to go back.”

Turri twined her hair in his fingers. “What if you don’t?” he said. “Let me take you to a Greek island instead. We’ll get a house by the sea and live on figs.”

Carolina knew the book he had chosen this dream from: a collection of drawings of daily life in the ancient world that had been one of her favorites among those he sent, because of the pure turquoise in the watercolor oceans. For a moment, the image of the whitewashed house high on a cliff rose up, achingly sharp, but then it began to lose shape around the edges, like a paper model melting in the rain.

“I have to go,” she said, and pushed the velvet away.

“He says he brought you some balm,” Liza read. “But now he needs it for his experiments. He wants to know when you could send it back.”

“Nothing else?” Carolina asked, sitting up in bed. Turri must have written her as soon as he reached home. It wasn’t even noon yet.

“There are some lines of verse,” Liza said.

Carolina turned this over in her mind. The unspoken bargain the two of them had struck regarding Liza’s lapses in reporting the contents of Turri’s books was a new problem now that Liza held a letter from Turri in her hands. Liza was not a stupid girl. She knew better than to distort the central contents. But Carolina couldn’t be completely certain what she omitted or embellished.

“Read them to me,” Carolina said.

Liza read,

Carolina measured the lines and judged them original. “Thank you,” she said.

“Shall I call Giovanni?” Liza asked.

“Yes,” Carolina said. “And leave me the letter.” She held out her hand. Liza seemed to deliberate for a moment, then complied.

When Carolina heard Liza’s light step on the stair outside, she settled the folded page in a drawer and turned to the writing machine. Quickly, she tapped out a time and meeting place. Giovanni mounted the steps with a great clatter as she blew out the sealing wick. He reached her room as she pressed the metal signet into the wax.

“Giovanni,” she said, extending the new letter. “This is for Signor Turri. Can you read letters?”

“I can sing like an angel!” he answered.