The Blind Contessa's New Machine (23 page)

Another boy might have laughed, but Antonio waited.

Carolina’s father chuckled. “But no one could be angry with her,” he said. “She was too pretty.”

“She’s still pretty,” Antonio offered.

“That’s right,” Turri said, as if his son had looked to him for confirmation.

A hand seemed to close on Carolina’s heart. The pang echoed through her body. She struggled to keep her face still. But almost immediately Turri must have extended his hand, because her father leaned away from her to shake it.

“We certainly didn’t mean to interrupt your visit,” Turri said. “We ought to be getting back now. Thank you.”

“Thank you,” Antonio repeated.

“You’re very welcome,” Carolina’s father told the boy. “Come and explore anytime.”

“Thank you,” Antonio said again.

“Contessa,” Turri said, in parting.

Carolina nodded.

Their footsteps faded on the soft grass.

“Would you like me to take you to the cottage?” her father asked.

Hot fear washed over Carolina. She had no idea how she and Turri had left the house or what evidence it might contain. She shook her head. “This is enough,” she said.

Her father drew her closer. His hand covered hers. “There’s so little I can do for you,” he said.

Tears sprang to Carolina’s eyes. She caught her breath but when she let it out the tears escaped down her face.

“No, no,” her father said. He folded her into his arms as if settling the extended wing of a frightened bird back against its own chest. “And now I’ve made you cry,” he said.

“An island,” Carolina told Turri. “The sand is white and the moon is out.”

As the summer wore on, Turri had developed the habit of asking her where they were each time they met. At the question, a vision always sprang up in her mind’s eye: hidden waterfalls, new gardens, unknown shores. Perhaps lured by these imaginings, her dreams had begun to return as well. They still came to her in fragments, but they didn’t wink out as soon as they began. In them, doors that had been locked now opened under her hand. When she rose in flight, it was over familiar lands. The flock of fears and doubts still interfered with her thoughts, but she had learned to keep them at bay by never letting her mind settle too long on certain topics. The result was not peace, but an uneasy truce under which she was barred from inspecting the corners of her heart for fear the darkness would rise up and strip her of her dreams again.

The island was an invention, but the moonlight was real. Since she had gone blind, she’d suspected she could feel the faint weight of it on her skin on clear nights, and she felt it now, falling through the window of the lake house.

“I can feel the moon on my skin,” she told Turri. “Like sunlight, but lighter.”

“And it is cold, where the sun is hot?” he teased.

“No,” Carolina said stubbornly, and laid a finger on her shoulder. “Here, see?”

“You’re right!” Turri said, surprised. “Try again.”

“Scientist,” Carolina said, and touched her belly, high, just below her breast.

“How did you know that?” Turri asked.

“I can feel it!” Carolina insisted, and touched the hollow of her throat where the bones that supported her shoulders met.

This time, Turri kissed it.

“You know why they have invited us?” Pietro said.

Carolina laid down the heavy linen notepaper, which he had handed to her despite the fact that she couldn’t read the message, and shook her head.

“They want a line from your machine,” he told her. “All the ladies in the valley you’ve sent one to have been lording it over the ones you haven’t. They’re worth more this season than a dress from Milan.”

Over the past weeks, Carolina had sent out a handful of thanks and greetings as politeness dictated, using the machine. None of them had seemed especially noteworthy to her. “Who have I sent them to?” she asked.

“To Princess Bianchi, in exchange for a box of oranges,” Pietro began. “Alessa Puccini, regretting that you could not join her for a ride in the country. Ser Rossi, when he offered you a quartet for the afternoon.”

“I already have your cellist,” Carolina said.

“Princess Bianchi has actually pinned your reply to an arrangement of ivy on her mantel,” Pietro said. “She thinks it’s very Oriental.”

Carolina had never heard a trace of bitterness in his voice before, and it didn’t suit him. She rose and carried the invitation to where he stood. He lifted the paper from her hand. She curled her arm through his and laid her head on his shoulder. She had planned to speak, but when her face touched the fabric of his jacket, she simply closed her eyes.

“It’s true,” Turri told her later that night. “They’ve got bits of your writing displayed in every house you’ve sent it. You should be a poet.”

“Do they really?” Carolina asked.

“Sometimes they set it up right on the mantel,” he said. “The more tasteful ones only leave it scattered about where you can’t help seeing.”

“So are you a hero now?” Carolina asked.

“Of course not,” Turri said. “Too many of them fell out of trees in my machines or had their eyebrows burned off when we were children. I’d need to save a life to be redeemed. And even then it would be:
Ah, Turri, he seems to have come out all right in spite of himself.
But Sophia is already clamoring for a machine of her own.”

“And?”

“I reminded her she isn’t blind,” he said.

“What did she say?”

“She doesn’t care,” he said. “So I told her I forgot how to make it.”

“Did she believe you?”

“Of course not,” Turri said. “But maybe it’s how we make our escape. We can go to the city, and I’ll build writing machines.”

Carolina was silent. She hated it when he spoke of the future. His jokes about it were forced, his hopes so simple and impossible they made her seasick. His fantasies never lit any dreams in her own mind. Instead, they snuffed out whatever paradise she’d imagined for them, and even threatened the real walls of the lake house.

“Would you like that?” he asked.

To keep him from speaking again, she kissed him.

“This is the book of palaces,” Liza said.

A few weeks earlier, Liza had taken a new risk in her narration of Turri’s books: she had invented not just new pages, but an entire new volume:
Famous Shipwrecks.

That first time, Carolina had insisted on detailed descriptions of forty artist’s renderings of the unlucky vessels. Liza had cheerfully doomed each of her new inventions to a bitter end: one run aground in soft sand, but pounded to pieces by a warm southern wind; one splintered on black rocks as three bolts of eerie lightning struck the shore; one turned turtle by the storm that sank it, so that it struck the bottom masts first, and balanced upside down on the ocean floor to the consternation of passing sea monsters; one set aflame by pirates while at full sail, which gave the effect, Liza related with her passion for simile, of a birthday cake sinking into the sea; one glassed in by the ice of an arctic storm, all her sailors frozen to death at their stations. One, perhaps a favorite, suffered only minor damage after grazing the peak of an underwater mountain, then drifted gently to its final resting place on a bed of white sand, where the current pulled its ragged sails taut again, just as if it were still sailing merrily along in true wind.

Now, several invented volumes later, Carolina had become more discriminating: she was liable to make Liza reel off four or five options before picking one. “No, not that,” Carolina said. “What else is there?”

In turn, Liza had also become cagey. Carolina, she knew, never picked the first book she offered, so if Liza had a taste that day for jungles, or cloud formations, she mentioned them later in her list. “Drawings of clocks,” she said. “A bird springs out of this one.”

“Is that all?”

“Blackbirds,” Liza said.

“A whole book of blackbirds?” Carolina asked.

“No,” Liza said. “They’re all different birds, but each one is black.”

“Not today,” Carolina said. “But maybe later this week.”

Liza paused for a moment. Then, trying not to betray her own enthusiasm, she said: “Deserts.”

This was what Carolina had been listening for. There was no use, she had discovered, in asking the girl to fabricate blackbirds if she had no taste for them. But each afternoon Liza came to her room with a new scheme, guarding it as carefully as a hearth maid guarded a young flame. If Carolina could guess it from among the others, their time together was far more rewarding. “Yes,” she said. “That’s good. What was on the first page?”

“The desert at night. The sand is blue and the sky is black. There are—”

She fell silent as a heavy tread mounted the stairs below. A moment later it reached the threshold of Carolina’s open door. “Cover your eyes!” Pietro crowed, then laughed at his own joke.

Carolina turned to face him. She heard Liza shift in her seat.

Pietro stopped in the door, as if to get his bearings or catch his breath. Then he announced: “I have brought you a present!”

“Thank you,” Carolina answered.

Pietro crossed the room. He stopped opposite Carolina, beside the chair where Liza sat. “What’s this?” he said. “The same old book of maps?”

The book swung shut with a slap. Carolina hid a smile. “You may go,” she told Liza. Liza’s skirts rustled as she rose, then receded through the door.

Metal scraped on polished wood as Pietro set something on the table beside Carolina’s chair. Fabric whispered, then snapped like a flag in the breeze.

“Hello!” Pietro said. “Don’t be afraid.”

“Why should I be afraid?” Carolina asked.

Now he was whistling: fragments of a song they had sung as children when a game was over but someone was still missing, hidden in the woods or the far reaches of the house.

“You’ve already found me,” Carolina reminded him.