The Blind Contessa's New Machine (5 page)

Pietro was only seventeen when his father was found dead one morning among his long rows of beloved vines. Relatives took in Pietro’s younger sister and married her off a few years later to a bookish military man in a seaside capital. But Pietro, the named heir although too young to inherit, remained at the ancestral home under the care of family servants who had long since given up all pretense of trying to turn him from any path he chose. Of course, the natural result was a string of conquests among the local maids and small farmers’ daughters. But Pietro never took advantage of girls from the better families, with a delicacy of class feeling that their fathers could look on with nothing but approbation. Among young ladies of his own circle, Pietro was a perfect gentleman, so full of respect that the girls despaired.

Carolina’s fascination with Pietro, at the outset, was little more than a symptom of her age. At sixteen, her notion of love was largely a dream: secrets confided in the shelter of rose gardens, letters pinned to young trees, rescue from roadside bandits. For this purpose, from a distance, Pietro was the perfect cipher. No other boy was as tall as him, or as handsome. Unlike the other boys, he never looked uncertain, or childish, or worried that the horse he was riding might slip from his command and bolt for the stables. No other boy had run toward the fire that consumed half of the Rossi granary one icy winter night, instead of away from it.

The summer that Turri began to visit her lake, when she was sixteen, Carolina had no reason to believe that she was a favorite with Pietro. But she had several well-worn bits of hope. Pietro knew her name. He had asked her to dance at a party the previous year, and several parties later, when he finally asked her again, he still remembered it. He had complimented her dress at a garden lunch. This season, he had taken the opportunity at a baptism to ask Carolina if she would like some punch. When she said yes, he returned with a glass and spoke with her for several minutes about his opinions on children, which he believed to be both angels and demons, trapped together under the same new skin.

Carolina’s fresh young heart could not resist. From that moment on, she was another devotee of his: at parties, she watched his every move and lost her breath if their eyes met. The memory of a smile from him, carefully hoarded, could make her heart race for days. He stood proudly at the center of all her fragmentary plans, returning to her from some as yet undeclared war, riding on a black horse over fields of foreign snow; striding toward her down a row of vines, a bunch of dark grapes in each hand; standing beside her at the threshold of a great ballroom, her hand in his as a servant recited their names, a momentary hush fell, and the curious crowd turned as one to regard them.

But despite the purity of her devotion to Pietro, her parents frowned on Turri’s visits to the lake. A month or so after Turri’s first appearance there, Carolina’s father discovered the pair of them standing together on the bank. Turri was testing a theory of his about the number of rings that formed on still water, throwing pebbles through the mirrored surface while Carolina counted for him. Carolina’s father emerged from the woods about fifteen paces from them. When she caught sight of him, Carolina turned and waved. Then she realized that she had lost her count of the black and silver rings.

“I’m sorry,” she said to Turri. Turri glanced up, a white pebble between two fingers.

“It’s all right,” he said. “We have more pebbles.”

Her father strode across the river grass lawn between the forest and the lake.

“Hello, Papa!” Carolina said. She closed the distance between them, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed his cheek above his dark beard. It wasn’t a surprise to her to meet him. Every few weeks he visited the lake in the course of his aimless rambles, perhaps spurred by the same restlessness that had driven Carolina through the forest since she was a child: not the disease of a true explorer but a nobleman’s lazy curiosity, easily satisfied by a tour of the property that confined him.

Her father kissed her cheek in return. Then he looked at Turri with evident displeasure. “Turri,” he said, in greeting.

Turri grinned, transferred the cache of pebbles from his right hand to his left, and extended his right hand in welcome. “This is a pleasant surprise,” he said, taking so little notice of her father’s coldness that Carolina wondered briefly if it had actually escaped him.

After a pronounced pause, Carolina’s father extended his own hand. The two of them shook.

“Welcome to our humble experiment,” Turri said.

“We’re investigating fluid dynamics,” Carolina explained, linking her arm through her father’s. Her father covered her hand completely with his.

“A rock never makes more than a dozen rings, no matter how hard you throw it,” Carolina told him. “They just get wider and wider until they disappear into the reeds.”

“And I suppose this discovery will cure cholera,” her father said.

Turri laughed and nodded, as if the older man had made a good joke at his expense.

Carolina squeezed her father’s arm, silently protesting his coldness. “But if you watch for another second,” she continued, “sometimes the wave bounces off the bank and all the rings begin to collapse.” This small mystery was her favorite part of the day’s experiment. “Show him,” she told Turri.

Turri opened his hand to select one of the white pebbles.

“Oh, no,” Carolina’s father said. “I’m not a man of science. The sun rises and sets. I don’t ask it why.”

Turri’s fingers curled slowly back over the pebbles, like a flower closing for the night.

“Your mother is asking for you,” Carolina’s father told her. This was not only a lie, but such an improbable one that Carolina glanced at him in astonishment.

For the first time, Turri seemed embarrassed. “Please, don’t let me keep you,” he said.

“You understand,” Carolina’s father said, as if this were an order.

Turri nodded.

“You are welcome to stay until the experiment is finished,” Carolina’s father told Turri, as he led his daughter away.

Carolina and her father walked in silence through the sun-shot forest. When they reached the main house, he released her arm with no further mention of her mother’s request. But that evening, her mother sent a servant to summon her.

Her mother’s rooms were on the second floor of the house, overlooking the forest that hid Carolina’s lake. As always after dark, candles glimmered from every corner. A candelabra lit the pages of the romance her mother closed as Carolina entered. Half a dozen other dark wax columns flickered on the vanity, the bookcase, the table beside the bed. Carolina’s mother was in her favorite spot, on the divan by the window.

Carolina paused in the doorway, uncertain. Her mother rarely invited Carolina to her room, and as a result Carolina never came on her own. Carolina often begged a bundle of cheese and bread from the cook on her way to the lake, and her mother preferred to take meals alone, so it was possible for the two of them to go without speaking for days. As a child, Carolina had peppered her mother with questions, since her mother rarely spoke unless asked directly. But as Carolina grew, the questions she wanted to ask became more difficult to put into words, until the problem of saying what she meant finally baffled her into silence. Now their exchanges were marked mostly by long pauses punctuated by unimportant observations. But for Carolina, her mother still held the force of an oracle, and whether she believed her mother’s statements or not, she worried them in her mind as if they were a divine riddle.

Her mother patted the cushion beside her. Obediently, Carolina crossed the room and sat. The window she now faced was black. Orange candlelight wavered on the uneven glass.

Her mother settled back. “How is the lake today?” she asked.

“It’s pretty,” Carolina said. “The cottonwoods are out. The false cotton hangs in the air like snow.”

Her mother looked at her with slight impatience. Carolina had the familiar sensation that she had managed to disappoint her without ever having been told the task.

“Your father says he met Turri by the lake today,” her mother said.

Carolina nodded. “Sometimes he walks over.”

“You know he is a married man.”

Carolina nodded again.

Carolina’s mother leaned forward. Her dress rustled like a pile of dry leaves. “You are not married yet,” she said. “Until you are, you must be very careful.”

The back of Carolina’s neck tingled with shame at the implication. Heat rushed into her face. “There is nothing—” she began.

“That doesn’t matter,” her mother said. In the low light, her eyes were almost entirely consumed by the black of her pupils. “A girl does not have many choices. This is the most important one. There must be no whisper against your name until you are married.”

Carolina stared at her like a fascinated animal. “After you are married,” her mother continued, “many things may happen. You will not speak of them. Neither will your husband, if he is a gentleman.” She looked out the dark window. “Do you understand?”

Carolina nodded.

Her mother nodded as well, not at Carolina, but as if agreeing with words spoken by some other, inaudible voice. She leaned back into the divan.

“Will you ask Stefi to bring me some warm milk when you go?” she asked.

“Of course,” Carolina said, rising.

She paused in the door, but her mother had already thrown her arm over her eyes, as if protecting them from some unbearable light in the sky.

Carolina rose the next morning while it was still dark and slipped down the stairs more by the touch of the railing than by sight. She had slept only in fits, and when she was tired her eyes acted like prisms, warping some things, duplicating others. Now they found the starlight on the dew so dazzling that the whole yard blurred. In the forest, the trees doubled and bent. She blinked, and they were straight again. She could still see some stars beyond the unreliable silhouettes of the topmost branches, but when she tried to focus on them, they flared into full suns or winked out altogether. Despite all this, she reached her house, sank down into the rumpled velvets on her couch, and gave herself up gratefully to a second sleep.

When she woke, afternoon sun streamed through the scarves in the windows, leaving the faintest traces of their design where the light landed. The ghost of a peacock bloomed in the dark folds of a blanket. A lily dissolved on her desk. Carolina pushed the covers away and lifted the corner of the simple blue scarf in the front window. Turri lay on his back on the bank, his eyes closed, his hands comforting each other on his chest. He looked just as familiar to her as the trees that shaded the opposite banks, and her heart greeted him with the same welcome. The world around him was clear again, each tree where it belonged, each reed as she remembered. Every bit of glowing cottonwood that floated over the black mirror of the lake was crisp and perfect.