The Blind Contessa's New Machine

by Carey Wallace

  “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.

  “Shh!” he said.

  At the break in Pietro’s song, the low voice of a sleepy bird answered him with a kind of exasperated mumble, as if to ask if Pietro’s business could possibly be more important than the dream he’d interrupted.

  “There!” Pietro exclaimed. “You see!”

  At this exclamation, the bird apparently gave some other indication of discontent, because Pietro immediately apologized to it, his voice full of real remorse.“I am sorry,” he said. “You will forgive me.”

  The bird, inexorable, refused to sing again.

  “Maybe if you speak to it,” Pietro whispered to Carolina. “I think he believes I’m to blame for all the jostling he suffered in the carriage today.”

  “I don’t think they sing at night,” Carolina said softly. “Other birds don’t.”

  “They do!” Pietro insisted. “Some do. What is that story—with the girl in the palace? The boy she loves comes to her window at night, but the king turns him into a nightingale. Then the nightingale sings,” he said, triumphantly.

  Fear tapped a cold finger on Carolina’s heart.

  “Is this a nightingale, then?” she asked.

  “No,” Pietro said, taking on a professorial tone as he began to recite the details he’d gleaned at purchase. “This bird is from Africa. The captain of a ship collected two dozen of them for himself, but when he returned to Italy his wife had ruined him with debts from wild living, so he had to sell them. They filled his whole cabin. He fed them by hand every night, but not all of them sang.”

  “Does he have a name?” Carolina asked.

  “The mate didn’t know,” Pietro said. “He was selling them because the captain couldn’t bear to. I thought it would be some music, when the old man isn’t here. And birds don’t need to be paid in gold, eh?” he said, turning affectionate as he tapped the cage. “Just some fruit and seeds.”

  “There’s only one?” Carolina asked. “Will he be lonely?”

  “He’ll have you,” Pietro said.

  Carolina reached out. Her fingers brushed delicate wire. Something shuffled inside.

  “What does he look like?” she asked.

  “Like a sparrow, but with green bands on his wings,” Pietro said. “He’s not much to look at, but he was the best singer. I chose him with my eyes closed.”

  “A pirate ship?” Giovanni asked. The cage rattled faintly as he tapped on the wire. Inside the bird shuffled, in a huff.

  “I don’t know,” Carolina said. “It very well might have been.”

  “My uncle is a pirate,” Giovanni claimed, leaving the bird behind to lean on the arm of her chair. “I have his glass eye. When I was born, his parrot was bigger than me. That’s when he gave my mother his eye. He didn’t need it to see.”

  “Really?” Carolina asked.

  “No!” Giovanni said emphatically. “He only used it to scare people.”

  “I’m sure it’s scary,” Carolina said.

  “It’s gr
een,” Giovanni said. “No white like in our eyes. They say it looks like—” He paused, for effect. “A piece of the sea.”

  At this, the bird burst out into energetic song, a celebration so intense that Giovanni left her side to investigate.

  “What’s his name?” he asked when the bird fell silent.

  “What do you think?” Carolina asked him.

  “Babolo?” Liza repeated. She lifted the two braids she had just completed from Carolina’s neck, twisted them together expertly, and began to pin them in place.

  “Apparently it is the name of a singing pirate,” Carolina said.

  “Giovanni knows as much about pirates as I do about building a cathedral,” Liza said. Carolina smiled. Recently, on her imagined pages, Liza had been constructing a whole suite of architectural fantasies: sprawling Arabian mansions, lousy with minarets; churches that thrust so far into the heavens that they made specks of the men and women who passed over their thresholds.

  The bird trilled with perfect expectation of obedience. When their two voices fell silent, he broke into a raucous, rising song that might as well have been laughter.

  “Were you king?” Carolina asked him. “Of your little cabin? Of all the trees?”

  In answer, the bird began another song. His voice was a pure, flutelike whistle, and his catalogue seemed vast: scraps of dirges and laments smashed side by side with triumphant marches, wedding hymns, and lovers’ fantasies, all of which broke off just at the moment they threatened to become melody.

  “Carolina,” Pietro said. “A card for you.”

  The bird’s singing had masked the sound of his steps as he entered her room. Surprised, Liza let the necklace she had been fastening at Carolina’s neck slip through her hands. Carolina caught her breath, then released it slowly as Liza retrieved the jewelry from the folds of her dress.

  The bird scolded for a moment, then lost interest.

  “Who is it from?” Carolina asked.

  “Turri,” Pietro said.

  Liza succeeded in fastening the necklace on the second try. Then, without asking leave, she turned away. At the door she hesitated, as if momentarily stymied by the problem of navigating around Pietro. Then her light footsteps descended the stairs.

  Fear beat in Carolina’s temples. “Read it to me,” she said.

  “He says he has been reviewing the movements of the stars. There were showers of meteors last evening, and he expects to see them again tonight, around one in the morning.”

  This struck Carolina as unforgivably careless. “Why would he write that to me?” she asked, genuinely annoyed.

  “It’s not as if you can see them,” Pietro agreed.

  Carolina shook her head at the unseen mirror and turned on the seat of her vanity to face her husband.

  “I’m smiling,” Pietro told her after a moment. “You are so beautiful.” He crossed the room and bent to kiss her, disturbing the jewels at her neck.

  “Turri is a madman,” he said. “Don’t let him bother you.”

  “Please,” Turri said.

  The heavy scent of the kitchen roses on the night air made it hard to think. Turri had caught her as soon as she slipped out the door. Now he lifted her feet off the ground and dragged her a few unsteady steps toward the forest.

  “No!” Carolina whispered. “I only came down because it was too dangerous to have you lurking around the house all night, with the servants sleepwalking and God knows who else making their own patrols of the yard.”

  “Your servants sleepwalk?” Turri asked, suddenly a scientist.

  “I don’t know!” Carolina said. “Somebody walks through the house at night.”

  “A ghost!” Turri exclaimed.

  “I thought you were a man of reason.”

  “Reason believes the most obvious explanation,” Turri said. “Something you can’t see, roaming the house at night: a ghost, obviously.”

  “But I’m blind,” Carolina said. “Someone else might see them.”

  “I’m not ready to relinquish ghosts, even to science,” Turri said. “I still have some things I want to ask them.” He kissed her forehead, renewed his grip on her waist, and pulled her off balance so that she stumbled a few steps farther in the general direction of the lake.

  “No!” Carolina said. “It’s impossible. I can’t be gone every night. Someone will catch us.”

  “Then I’d have to take you away,” Turri said.

  Carolina sighed with impatience.

  His next kiss was tender: an apology, or a promise.

  Behind them, something crashed to the floor in the kitchen. His arms tightened like a vise around her and she buried her face against his chest. Just as quickly, they parted.

  “What was that?” Turri demanded. He pushed her aside, to sweep past her into the house.

  “You can’t!” she whispered fiercely. She shoved him back into the kitchen yard, stepped inside, pulled the door shut between them and threw the bolt, leaving him in the darkness beyond. She could hear his feet scrape on the stone outside, but to her relief, he didn’t knock.

  She crossed the small room inside the yard door and stopped at the kitchen’s threshold. Inside, nothing now broke the night silence. Carolina pointed her toe and described a brief arc just beyond the doorway. The ball of her bare foot caught the texture of fine grains: sugar, or salt. She knelt.

  Sugar. She lifted her finger from her tongue, then swept her hands lightly over the tile in a wider circle. This time her hands caught a shard of pottery: about the size of her palm, and razor sharp. Depending on the size of the vessel that had broken, the floor between her and the rest of the house might be littered with dozens of other dangerous fragments.

  She turned again toward the door to the yard. She knew Turri still stood on the other side: he was liable to wait there a whole hour, after he’d heard the last sound she made. But despite the danger before her, the prospect of Pietro discovering Turri in the house at this hour of the night frightened Carolina more. She took a deep, silent breath, and turned back to the kitchen.

  The sugar seemed to have scattered from the left, as if someone had hurled it at the floor instead of simply dropping it. To her right, the grains were not as thick. Her arms thrown wide for balance, she crossed the room with long strides, carefully exploring each new step before putting her weight into it. If she brushed the rough edge of a piece of pottery, she quickly sidestepped. She only hoped that she wasn’t leaving a trail of bloody prints from cuts by smaller shards she couldn’t feel.

  In the doorway to the dining room, she stopped, listened, and then set out again, moving quick and quiet. When she had almost reached the other side, she caught the sound of footsteps.

  Carolina froze.

  The footsteps strode toward her purposefully from the sitting room next door, making no attempt at concealment.

  For the first time, Carolina ran from the sound. She ducked into the cellar and pulled the door shut behind her. Hidden on the stair, she held her breath. As she feared, the footsteps entered the dining room, where they paused for a moment as if surveying the territory. Then they crossed to the kitchen, hurried: giving chase or making an escape.

  As soon as their sound faded, Carolina slipped out the cellar door again, ran lightly down the main hall, and flew up the stairs to her own room.

  “Fifty white roses, from the kitchen bush,” Giovanni announced. “Master sent the order, but I picked them all myself.”

  Carolina’s heart choked, then began to race with fear. “What a job that must have been!” she said, sitting up in bed. “I hope the thorns didn’t prick your hands.”

  “I cut all the thorns off them,” Giovanni said stoutly. “See?”

  When she turned her head, he brushed the bouquet over her cheek, clumsily but with enormous tenderness, like a boy still learning how to kiss.

  “I’ll put them on the table,” he said. “Where you can reach.”

  “Thank you,” she said. Her heart began to slow, but now her
mind ran to catch up. “Is it a little late?” she asked. “Was there any trouble in the kitchen?”

  “Someone took the cook’s sugar jar,” Giovanni said, emboldened by the intimacy. “So she had to open the bag she’d put away to take for herself.”

  Carolina smiled briefly at the fierce old woman’s dilemma. Then reason set in and her smile faded.

  “You don’t have to tell Master,” Giovanni said anxiously. “She doesn’t steal much, just sugar and chocolate, and oranges in winter.”

  “But they didn’t find it?” Carolina asked. “The sugar was gone?”

  “Someone took it,” Giovanni repeated. When she was silent, he confided: “I think it was the ghost.”

  At the word, her whole body turned cold. “The ghost?” she forced herself to murmur.

  “You don’t have to be afraid,” Giovanni told her. “When I go after it, it always runs away.”

  “I don’t see why Carolina wouldn’t enjoy going out in a boat,” Pietro said agreeably. “You don’t need to see to swim.”

  “No one said anything about swimming,” Contessa Rossi replied, unable to resist an imperious tone despite the fact that she had come to ask a favor. Her parties always marked the open and close of the summer season. This year, as fall set in, she’d conceived a final event that traveled over water. The idea was to embark at Pietro’s river landing and float down the current to refreshments and music at Carolina’s lake. Carolina’s father had already agreed to the use of his property. Now the contessa just needed Pietro’s blessing—and Carolina’s cooperation for the pièce de résistance: invitations from Turri’s machine.

  “I don’t know,” Carolina said. “I hate to use it too often.”

  “Well, I’ve been to Turri,” the contessa said. “A number of us have. I asked him his price and he asked for half our ancestral land. He told Marta Scarlatti he’d need six live pear trees, plated in gold. Sophia says it’s because he can’t remember how to do it again. So I’m afraid yours is the only one in the valley.”