The Secret of the Glass (13 page)

Cries of astonishment mingled with those of fear and disbelief, then coalesced into a thunderous roar.

One voice rose above the others, a tender tenor, clear and crisp with its surety.

“It is indeed a harbinger.” The short mature nobleman raised his hand, as if beckoning to God and the heavens. “But it is a testament to signore Galileo and his beliefs in the Copernican theory.”

“Heresy! Blasphemy!” the nay-sayers screamed with disapproval.

“Splendido! Fantastico!”
the believers cheered in exaltation.

Man turned upon man; their red, enraged faces thrust together. Spittle flew from their lips as each group hurled argument and insult down upon the other, black-robed arms flailed in rage, and the room became a haven for swooping crows. The tumult grew to a cacophony and Doge Donato feared its physical resemblance at any moment. He turned a fuming look to the halberd-armed sentry standing guard at the door and gave one nod of his pointed chin, and ten such soldiers marched into the room. With pounding boots and a slam of their lances, incredulous silence reigned once more.

Donato’s rage at their uncontrolled behavior turned his face a mottled purple.

“What are we doing?” he demanded between clenched teeth. “We are the rulers…the leaders of one of the greatest territories in the world. Why are we behaving like spoiled children?”

No one answered him; no one dared. His violent vexation shocked them, stifling any further quarrels.

“True, we are not as powerful as we once were. The Turks have taken much of our land and the new sea routes have stolen much of our trade, but we are still a leader in advanced thinking, in art, culture…and science. To be open to Galileo’s viewpoints is but one facet of such openness, such advanced thinking.” Donato stilled himself with another deep, cleansing breath. “I will ask for a written report from professore Galileo. Every man in this room will read it before anything more is decided.”

The exhausted Doge stalked from the noblemen without waiting for any reply, passing the ducal guards, and storming out the room’s rear door. He would not, could not deal with any more this day.

Ten

G
alileo gripped the rail of the barge as tightly as he could, the aches in his finger and wrist joints allowing no more than a gentle pressure. The tremors had started, as they so often did when the fugue fell upon him, and his appendages had become like fragile fall leaves at the mercy of a gusting November wind. The fever made him light-headed and he needed to anchor himself, to brace against the rolling of the sea. Even upon the gentle Laguna Veneta, the lilting and confined stretch of ocean that flowed from the Molo of San Marco to the shore of Murano, Galileo felt as if he would lose his balance and tumble out of control to the deck of the wherry that ferried them to the smaller island.

In the shallow sea rushing past—its lack of depth never more pronounced than at these times of low water—he glimpsed the ruins of houses and churches strewn along the silt bottom, decimation and destruction wrought by the catastrophic floods that plagued Venice throughout her long history. In their skeletal reflections, twisting grotesquely beneath the undulating water, he saw the tenuousness of his own mortality.

“Are you all right?”

Sagredo stood by his side and placed one gentle hand upon his friend’s shoulder.

Galileo had not noticed his companion approach him; it took all his concentration to cage the pain and weakness of the descending illness. This time he was determined to keep it reined in—somehow, by the power of his mind, his ferocious will, he would. He was too close. The key to the heavens was in his grasp, he knew it; nothing would stop him as he stood ready to realize the fruition of so many years of work. Galileo squeezed his eyes shut, forcing the weariness from his mind and body, and lifted his face into the fresh tingling spray of the salty sea air.

“Fine,
amico mio,
just fine.”

Galileo put his back to the sea, keeping the steady banister in his hands behind him. The brisk wind off the sea blew on the back of his stubbly black and white hair, sweeping the strands onto his face in tufts at temple and forehead, heaving his light, torso-length cape out around him in billows.

“Tell me more about this glassmaker. You know him intimately? You trust him?”

Sagredo smiled with caution and collusion; Galileo could not fool him. He had seen the tremor in his friend’s hands, had seen the older man as he swallowed back pain and the brightness in his eyes that told of the low burning fever. Those closest to Galileo, friends who looked at him as few people do others, saw the signs, no matter how desperately he sought to camouflage them. The professor detested speaking of his infirmity, believing that to talk of it was to give it more power. Nevertheless, the men who sincerely called the scientist friend always detected the small clues and knew they must be on their guard, ready to catch him when his fight against the onslaught became too much.

“The Fiolarios have been master glassmakers for centuries.” The mass of lustrous, raven hair crowning Sagredo’s head swirled above him in shimmering black waves. “Pieces created at La Spada are some of the most coveted, and most expensive, among all the glass.”

“The
maestro,
he is an intelligent man, a craftsman?”

“Oh,
sì,
” Sagredo assured his friend in earnest, sincerely placating the depth of Galileo’s fervor, all the more intense if a tide of illness crested in his blood. “Our families have been acquaintances for many, many years. He is getting a bit older now but he is a learned man, a man of books who has a special interest in architecture, if I’m not mistaken.”

Galileo smiled, encouraged; he too found engineering and building intriguing, there was a science to the art.

“Is there a son apprenticed to the aging man?”

Sagredo shook his head. “No, there are only daughters, three of them.”

The dashing young man’s gaze floundered over the sea as he recalled the young women. There had been so many females in his short but rollicking life, it took a moment’s thought to separate one from another.

“Strangely, the oldest is not married, though I believe she is nearing twenty. A bit past her prime. If I remember correctly, she is a very quiet girl, though not from any defect or abnormality. No, Sophia is a shy but sultry, curvaceous beauty,” he ticked his chin outward, “like the rolling waves of the deepest sea, but she stays close to her family and appears to like it that way. There is not a glimmer of wanderlust in her eyes.”

Sagredo turned back to his friend, brightness illuminating his gaze, a salacious grin meandering upon his full lips.

“The middle girl, Oriana, now there’s a young woman panting for a man’s firm embrace. From what I hear, she began scouting for a husband the day she became seventeen. The other daughter, Lia, is the youngest, still a girl.”

The young, experienced gallant dismissed these girls with the ease of a blink, but Galileo pondered their plight, empathizing with the glassmaking father. As a man financially responsible for his sisters and mother after the comparatively early death of his father, Galileo lived with the burden of these feminine lives, and the debts of them he still labored under, like chains upon a drowning man. As the father of two daughters, beings whom he revered as if the stars themselves had come down from the heavens to light his life, he saw the unfairness and cruelty of life for women who lived in a world devoid of choices and opportunities.

“So when the
maestro
passes, who will get the glassworks? What will become of the daughters? Surely the eldest won’t inherit; few women have broken the stigma and publicly plied a craft. All who dare suffer the stigma of a fallen woman or worse.”

“Her father would never allow it.”

“Then?”

Sagredo shrugged. “The husband of the oldest married daughter will inherit all, of course. Hopefully he will be a kind man and pay for the marriages of the others or at least allow them to remain in the family home, making themselves useful as servants. If not, it will be the convent for them.”

Galileo glanced over his shoulder and out to the vast emptiness of the sea.

“It is an unhappy fate if there is no true calling.”

“Indeed,” Sagredo agreed.

Their bodies shifted, their knees bending to the changing rhythm and the dip of the sea beneath their feet as the barge carrying them slowed and the vehicle’s own wake rolled below them. Sagredo looked beyond the prow.

“Ah,
ecco!
There is the Fondamenta Serenella, we have arrived.”

Galileo followed Sagredo as he made his way through the smattering of other passengers to the front of the barge, scanning the horizon as they crossed the plank from vessel to shore. From here, the very tip of the Rio de Vetrai, the fuse of this bustling industrial center found its spark. Barges arrived and departed from this main port as gondolas and wherries entered and exited from the crowded main canal. Well-dressed and wealthy merchants strode the walkways with clean but plainly attired working men. Here and there groups of women skipped by, bright and festive in their summer dresses, market baskets in their hands. For all the commotion, a quaint and charming atmosphere permeated the ambiance; villagers exchanged fond greetings as rich aromas and spirited music drifted out from open balcony windows, beyond the overflowing flower boxes, and swirled about on the fresh and vigorous breeze.

Atop the stone buildings that held hands all in a row, chimney after chimney rose into the firmament, like the pickets of a long, curving fence. Taller and wider than those in the other districts of Venice, these brick monoliths spewed plumes of thick white smoke, vivid against the deep azure sky, curling into the air, up into the white, puffy scudding clouds as if they fed them and made them fat.

“Come, Galileo, this way.” With an outstretched hand, Sagredo led his older friend down to the right, along the Fondamenta dei Vetrai. “We’ve not far to go, so we’ll walk, if that’s all right?”

“Oh,
sì
,” Galileo agreed affably. A soft smile, the first of the day, came out to play upon the scholar’s thin lips as he entered gladly the amiable ambiance of Murano, allowing it to envelope him like the warmth of the emerging spring sun. Blinded by the small island’s beauty, he could not see the spots of tarnish that lay scattered here and there like the pockets of waste created by so many glassmakers confined to such a small space. “I can not believe I have never been to Murano before. This is not a place to be missed.”

Pleased at his companion’s blatant enjoyment, Sagredo led him along a short distance of the coast then onto another
fondamenta.
Like the main territory of Venice, Murano was an
arcipelago
, linked together by bridges. After crossing a small footbridge, jostling against the dynamic crowds upon its gently arched stone surface, they turned north, heading inland where the glassmaking
fabbrice
stood. Galileo ambled along by Sagredo’s side, slowed not only for comfort’s sake but for the pleasure of his discovery, peeking in the windows of the glassworks that lined the quayside, marveling at the colors and shapes artfully displayed within. Sagredo hesitated at the first corner, squinting through the clear panes of the last house before the bend, looking beyond the reflections of the canal and the buildings on the opposite shore. The young man’s dark eyes crinkled up at the edges in a secretive smile but said nothing as he led Galileo around the corner and down the Calle Miotti.

“We will not disturb the house, but go directly to the factory.”

“As you wish.” Galileo trailed along agreeably.

The men followed the exterior of the long stone building on their right, entering a courtyard through the small but lush garden, passing beyond its pointy-tipped iron fence through a squeaky gate.

“Signore Sagredo!”

The spirited call crossed the courtyard seconds before the young brunette woman rushing toward them with a beckoning smile upon her lips, one hand clutching her gathered skirts, the other waving frantically, as if hailing a sailor far out at sea.

“Ah, well,” Sagredo muttered under his breath, forcing an obligatory smile across his white teeth. He had seen her in the front windows, seen the primping hand upon the braided hair, her assuring glance down at her full, high bosom. “There’s nothing to be done for it now.”

Galileo’s brows knit in confusion.

Oriana rushed at the two men and offered a deep curtsy, one that best revealed the tops of her firm, heaving breasts.

“Oriana,
cara,
how wonderful to see you again.” Sagredo took her hand, leaned over, and brushed it with a perfunctory kiss. “May I present professore Galileo from Padua? Galileo, this is Oriana, signore Fiolario’s
middle
daughter.”

Galileo’s glance caught his friend’s for a quick moment and understanding dawned with a tempered smile; the puzzle had been solved. In a characteristic gesture, Galileo tipped his head a fraction to the right, and made a shallow, controlled bow.

“It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, young lady.
Come stai?
”

“
Bene, grazie,
signore,” Oriana answered politely, her upturned, smoldering eyes lighting upon him and away from the handsome face of Gianfrancesco Sagredo for the briefest of moments.

“You must stay for
pranzo a mezzogiorno,
signore Sagredo.” Her eyes sent an invitation all their own, but it was not to the mid-day meal, unless she planned to serve herself as the main course. “And you also, of course, signore Galileo. Mamma insists upon it.”

Sagredo doubted if Viviana Fiolario knew they were here; a woman running such a large household would be far too busy to notice everyone coming and going to the busy factory throughout the day.

“Not today,
piccola,
we have pressing business with your Papà. Perhaps another time.”

Sagredo dashed Oriana’s hopes with a deep bow and a debonair grin, one that assured her of her blossoming feminine wiles. Galileo bowed, though his gesture went unnoticed by the besotted girl.