The Blind Contessa's New Machine (6 page)

She let the scarf fall back into place and went out to meet him.

For days afterward, Carolina imagined her father’s footsteps on the grass, thought she heard him breaking twigs in the woods, or confused the bright flashes of bird wings glimpsed through the trees for a scrap of silk at his neck. But as the days turned to weeks, the weeks completed a season, and the leaves of late summer dropped so that she could see clearly through the trees, she realized that he wasn’t coming to surprise her again. In fact, even the innocent visits he had been used to making on his haphazard rambles had stopped. It was a pattern she remembered, finally, from her childhood. Her father hated to punish her, so when he caught her in the act of some mischief, he went to great lengths not to catch her again. If he discovered her happily dunking sections of a mutilated lemon directly into the sugar jar, he issued a strict reprimand, but then he avoided the kitchen as if it had ceased to exist, sometimes for weeks on end. The fact that her misbehavior caused her father such obvious distress had always pained Carolina and made her want to do better. But now, when she felt he had misunderstood her so deeply, his absence simply came as a relief.

Just as the lake forgot the impact of a stone or the touch of the wind, Carolina and Turri returned to their familiar habits. That fall, he made an intricate set of wings out of saplings and twigs, copying from the skeleton of some small bird he unearthed during a walk through the forest. Carolina helped him line the frame with fallen leaves, which Turri half hoped might have similar properties to feathers. After weeks of work, Turri tested them himself with a jump from the roof of Carolina’s house. He landed with a spectacular crash that seemed to come as no surprise to him at all. That night he returned with the now-useless contraption. As Carolina watched from the shore, he climbed back on the roof, set the damaged wings on fire, and launched them over the few paces of land between the house and the lake. The sudden burst of flame as air rushed over the burning frame gave the wings a strange, wobbly lift for one short moment. Then they swooped dangerously low, showering Carolina with red sparks before crashing into the lake with an enormous splash and hiss. Steam rose into the night, tinted orange by the surviving fire. Some of the bones of the contraption still glowed fierce red as they sank through the dark water.

In mid-December a deep freeze set in, closing the last small patch of open water where the black ducks had swum melancholy circles as the rest of the lake was lost to them. When the cold hadn’t broken after a week, Turri began to harvest ice from the edges of the lake just beyond the reeds, sawing out over a thousand brick-sized blocks to build a castle on the heart of the lake: four modest walls with a pair of turrets facing the small house on shore. The day before he completed it, the weather changed. The temperature climbed so high it felt like spring, and in the forest it rained all morning as ice melted from the grateful branches and dropped down into the thick mud below. The cloudy walls of the castle began to shine as the scuffs of Turri’s saw melted away. All morning, he fought a losing battle with the sun, packing wet snow around the foundation and arranging and rearranging insufficient groups of tarps. But when the thick layer of ice that covered the whole lake began to creak and moan in the early afternoon, Carolina came out of her house and insisted that he come back to shore. Less than an hour later, the entire structure crashed through into the frigid water, resurfacing as a jumble of jagged icebergs. When night fell, the bobbing chunks of ice froze into a spiky wound that marked the smooth surface for the rest of the winter.

Christmas Day, Carolina made her way to the lake through the new fall of powdery snow on the forest floor, clutching a box of marzipan and oranges. When she arrived at her house, she could see the unsteady light of a fire within already casting blue shadows on the snow outside. Turri was waiting with his overcoat still on, although he’d clearly been there for so long that the bright color that cold always called up in his face had faded away. On the table beside him stood a small elephant in blue enamel, about as tall as Carolina’s thumb, its legs joined to its body at strange angles. A wheel like a captain might use to guide a ship protruded from the creature’s right side.

Carolina set her box down on the desk and lifted the top to reveal the hand-painted pastries and oranges.

“Would you like a piece?” she said.

Turri shook his head. “I just lost a marzipan- eating contest with Antonio,” he told her.

Carolina selected a bunch of sugar-coated grapes for herself and closed the box.

“I don’t know why elephants always seem so sad,” she said, looking at the little figure.

“Wind it up,” Turri said.

Carolina set the creature on her palm and lifted it to her face so that they could see eye to eye.

“The wheel,” Turri said. “You turn it.”

Carolina twisted the wheel. Slowly, the enameled feet began to move. First both right legs took a step, then both the left.

Turri broke into a proud grin. “Put it on the table,” he said. “Watch it!”

Carolina set the toy down carefully on the desk. It marched gamely over an entire field of writing paper and came to a stop just before the marzipan box, regarding it with all the wonder and respect with which an explorer might confront a new mountain.

“I made it for you,” Turri said with barely contained excitement.

“Thank you,” Carolina said, gazing down at the gift.

Turri took her hand.

Surprised, Carolina looked at him.

“You know that I love you,” he said.

The words rang in her mind like an alarm bell.

“I know,” she said, and took her hand away.

The following spring, when Carolina was seventeen, Pietro marked his twenty-fourth birthday, which meant that he stood just one year shy of the age of majority his father had stipulated in his will. But for Pietro to receive full control of his lands and property, his father had also dictated that he should be married. Pietro confronted this requirement with his customary goodwill. “I guess the old man knew what was best for me!” he said at party after party, shrugging with a mixture of mischief and ruefulness that made the girls shiver with hope and their parents nod in approval.

Carolina received this news with a terror so sweet she could barely distinguish it from thrill. It was impossible that he should choose her, but: he must choose somebody. Like a child with a lottery ticket, she understood the slimness of her chance, but until another name was called, while her paper ticket melted in her damp hand, she had just as much right to dream of stepping up to receive the prize as anyone. Her fantasies focused and became simple. She returned the pirates and invisible ink of her youthful dreams to the prop boxes in her mind, and began to construct realistic prayers: he might find her on the road during a cloudburst and give her a ride home. He might catch her glance across a crowded room, and smile. These new dreams were so modest that they never lasted any longer than a moment. Carolina never knew what might happen after she smiled back, or he lifted her onto his mare.

Nobody, including Carolina and perhaps Pietro himself, ever knew why he began to single her out halfway through that season. Her mother was a remarkable beauty, which is what had led Carolina’s father to pick her from the crowd of local girls on his two-week holiday to a seaside town so many years ago. Carolina, though slightly taller than her mother, had inherited her thick dark hair, small waist, and pale, perfect face. But her eyes were her father’s, dark under a strong brow, rather than her mother’s delicate blue. The effect was so compelling that it struck many boys speechless and made the rest want to torment her in revenge, a project they embarked on so early in her memory that she never even thought to resent their taunts, but simply navigated them as she would any feature of her small landscape: a river to be crossed, or a hole to step around.

But her beauty alone was not sufficient to explain Pietro’s interest. There were other beautiful girls who were not nearly as strange or difficult. They had gold hair as smooth as coiled wheat, rounder figures, pale hands that had not grown chapped from plucking at things in the forest. And that spring, every charm was on display, every gem and flower arranged to capture Pietro’s heart. Carolina could hardly have won it by outshining them.

In fact, it might have been her terror that originally caught his attention.

In early June, after a blur of spring parties during which nobody, including those who considered themselves his closest friends, was able to penetrate the mystery of Pietro’s intentions, Carolina turned her head as she walked up the stairs to the Ricci ballroom and found Pietro on the step beside her. When she had seen him last, he was halfway across the great hall below, where the servants had constructed a fragile canopy of twine from which a thousand votive candles dangled in colored glasses just above the heads of the guests. Carolina wasn’t actually hoping to dance: during all of the dozen parties since the season opened, Pietro hadn’t asked her once, and with the fierce, foolish loyalty of first love, she had turned away all other requests. Her plan was to stop on the landing and look down through the lights as everyone else looked up at them, something like the way God must peer down at the earth through the stars.

But before she reached the landing, Pietro had bounded up the stairs behind her, two at a time. He wasn’t coming after her—he made that clear enough by leaping another two steps past her before he halted mid-stride, perhaps distracted from his goal by her pretty face.

“Carolina!” he said.

Carolina was always somewhat bewildered when confronted with Pietro in the flesh, who spoke and acted so differently than the Pietro of her daydreams. In this emergency, she could only stare back at him, thrilled but speechless.

Pietro raised his eyebrows. “They are playing a
monferrina
later,” he said. “You will save it for me?” He grinned, certain that he was offering a gift that would please them both.

Fear froze Carolina’s hands to fists in the folds of her dress. The
monferrina
was a complicated courting dance, new to their valley that year, and she still didn’t know it. There was no way she could dance one as Pietro’s partner, with all eyes on her. She looked down at the blue carpet, then glanced over the marble balustrade at the canopy of flames in their colored glass. “No, thank you,” she said.

Pietro’s grin widened. This was a tactic he was familiar with, and easily enough disposed of. He laid a hand on his chest, mocking real agony. “But you will break my heart!” he said.

His refusal to let her go with grace woke anger in Carolina, warm enough to melt the fear that froze her fingers. She gathered her skirts and climbed the next step. “I don’t think so,” she said, and swept past him.