The Secret of the Glass (15 page)

“No, Zeno, no!”

The scream pulverized any peace she’d attained, any serenity she’d imagined was hers. She rushed through the portal and ran down the stairs. Fear blinded her, for she couldn’t find her father, couldn’t see what caused such a shriek.

There, there he was. He stood at a furnace aperture, its door open wide like the mouth of a monster intent on devouring him, his shaking hand reached up and toward it.

Sophia ran, arms outstretched, lunging for her father’s arm. Her force launched her toward him. Their bodies collided and flew in the air. They landed on the hard stone floor with an audible pounding of bone and flesh, both father and daughter grunting in pain. Sophia’s eyelids fluttered against the onslaught of stars bursting in her vision. She heard the groans, knew only that one was her father’s, and flung herself up.

“Sophia! Zeno!
Dio Mio!”

The cries rang out around them.

A hand thrust against her shoulder.

“Don’t get up.”

Sophia recognized Ernesto’s voice, but threw its warning and his hand away, twisting to see her father.

Zeno lay on the floor, rocking side to side across his spine, moan mingled with incoherent babble.

“Please, Ernesto.” Sophia clung to the arm of the man standing above her. “Get him out of here.”

Ernesto gave a curt but assuring nod. “You two,” he barked, pointing at two of the youngest men. “Lift him; take him to his bed.”

Sophia jumped up, again her head swam. She shook it fiercely as the boys gathered her father in their strong arms and started away. She had no time or patience for any malaise of her own, and followed fast on their heels.

“If you do not hold still, I will not be able to clean the blood from your hair.”

Nonna’s voice was stern in her ear. Her grandmother stood behind her, applying a cool damp cloth to Sophia’s torn scalp. Nonna spoke with austere command, but Sophia heard the quiver in the voice, felt the tremor in her hand.

“It is clumped and dried, like a paste.”

Sophia had refused any aid, refused to leave her father’s side as he lay, still dazed, in his bed, until the physician had come. Only when the bent and wizened healing man entered the room, did Sophia remove herself below stairs to allow her grandmother’s ministrations.

“Sophia.”

Her mother’s call filtered down from above. The strain of fear hummed through it, like the screech as a violinist broke a string.

She jumped up from the chair, pushed away her grandmother’s hand, and flew to the stairs. On the first step, she stopped abruptly.

“Stay here, Nonna.”

Marcella’s tawny skin appeared ashen and wrinkled, old in a way Sophia had never seen her before. She nodded silently, unable to speak through trembling lips.

Sophia ran up the stairs, down the narrow, dark wood paneled hall, halting at the threshold to her parents’ room. Her father lay in bed, inert and silent under the periwinkle and mustard quilt. For one devastating, afflictive moment, Sophia thought him dead, until she saw his chest rise with a shallow breath. She sought her mother’s face, but found no succor there, only more to fear in the decimated countenance.

“Please, signore Fucini,” Viviana asked the tall man, “please tell my daughter what you have just explained to me.”

Shrouded in his birdlike mask and black, all-covering cloak, the uniform of every physician since the age of the Black Death a few decades ago, the
dottore
resembled a nightmare caricature of the grim reaper. Sophia wanted nothing more than to jam her hands over her ears, to block out any words this harbinger of ill will had to say, but her need to know, her fear of that not known, forced her to look his way.

“Your father…” the deep voice behind the mask began, faltered, and began again. “It is the disease of the brain. It is the dementia.”

“What?” Her shock forced the question, not lack of hearing.

“His brain is withering, dying. Where the brain goes, the body must follow.”

Sophia heard the regret in his voice but it did little to dispel the certainty of his diagnosis. She couldn’t breathe. Her glare darted from physician to mother and back again.

“How long?”

“Oh, it could be months, maybe even years. There will be times, as much as days perhaps, when you cannot tell he is diseased at all. Then there will be others when he will be like a stranger to you all.”

Sophia seized upon her mother, like any child needing assurance, something to hold onto, no matter how tenuous.

“Is there nothing that can be done? Nothing we can do?”

Signore Fucini shook his head as he gathered his tools and made for the door. He paused, placing an age-spotted hand upon Sophia’s shoulder. She shuddered from the touch, no matter how comforting its intent.

“During his good days, you should treat him as normal as possible. On the bad…” his voice trailed away, “…just try to keep him comfortable.”

Sophia stared, dumbstruck, at the hazel eyes she glimpsed through the holes in the crude mask.

“Please see the signore to the door, Sophia.”

Sophia spun back, astonished at Viviana’s calm, until she saw the tears that pooled in her mother’s sunken and soot-rimmed eyes, and suddenly Sophia longed to escape the presence of their desolation. Viviana needed to stay with her husband, and her grief.

“
Sì
, Mamma.”

Closing the door softly behind her, Sophia led the surgeon down the stairs, past her grandmother sitting in soundless tears of her own, and to the portal. She opened the door, then looked down into her own empty, open hands.

“I’m sorry, signore, I have no money…I don’t know where…”

“Don’t worry about it, child. I’ll be back tomorrow to check on your Papà. No need to concern ourselves with that right now.”

Sophia bobbed her head in gratitude, retreating from the door and the quiet
fondamenta
.

“Signorina,
mi scusi?”

“
Sì?”
Sophia leaned back out the not yet closed door.

The voice beckoned from out of the darkness accompanied by the clack of running footsteps. The squire stepped into the light cast by the torch by the door, his young man’s features distorted in the pale illumination. Sophia accepted the papers he held out toward her with eerie silence and a nod of thanks.

She fastened the door, the portal to her mind inching shut. She recognized the handwriting upon the tawny parchment and wanted no part of it. Breaking the eggplant-colored wax seal on the thick vellum with trembling hands, she read the first few words and stopped, dropping her hand holding the missive to her side.

Oriana and Lia stood beside her grandmother, their frightened scrutiny heavy upon her.

“Who was that, Sophia?” Oriana asked.

Sophia thrust the thick stack of papers at her sister, crossing to stand at the open back door, breathing heavily upon the cool night air. Oriana grasped at them, the crinkle of parchment loud as she flipped the pages.

Time stretched out like a meandering road of questionable destination. Oriana’s head lifted, blinking eyes wide.

“They are your marriage papers. The da Fulignas have signed them.”

Sophia glowered at her sister, at the papers in her hand, at the ceiling and the upper floor and rooms beyond. Her heart hammered in her quivering being. “I must get us out of here.”

Eleven

I
will stay calm. I will reveal nothing.

The thrumming cadence echoed in her mind with each clack of her wooden heels on the stone pavement. Sophia shuffled along the
fondamenta
, heading north and east up the Rio dei Vetrai toward her friend’s home, an oft-traveled route trod by rote. She crossed the Ponte de Meso and the brilliant sparks of light reflecting off the canal below blinded her, coaxing more tears to her eyes. She brushed them away with a rough, brusque hand, rubbing them off until her skin felt raw. She would have no more tears.

The morning had dawned with its usual brilliance and bustle, the sun prodding the world to wake, the bells calling all to their day. For the Fiolario family, the day had come from a night that never ended; their lives forever changed as the moon played among the stars. Mamma had insisted Sophia keep her plans with Damiana, to travel with her friend to Le Mercerie, off the piazza, to purchase the lace for the new curtains, and enjoy her childhood companion’s company, a rarity in her life of late. Sophia had argued, adamant that Viviana needed her to stay, that she must remain near to Papà, but Mamma would not be swayed. Sophia had sat by her father’s side through the night, long after his wife had collapsed with exhaustion. Sophia needed to get out, if only for a while.

She drew near to the tall
campanile
of the San Pietro Martire. The curved, onion-shaped dome, topped by a long, thin cross, cast its shadow like a compass’s hand to her friend’s home and the family’s small factory. The Piccolomini glassworks was not as sizeable or, historically, as profitable as La Spada, but it had grown over the last few years, as had the family’s fortunes. Recently the Colombina Bianca glassmakers had turned their talents to the manufacture of looking-glass, a method of backing a plate of flat glass with a coating of metal, a fusion of tin and mercury, that was fast becoming an enormously popular item among nobility the world over. Not long ago Damiana had expressed hope, the first she’d ever felt, that the family could afford a marriage portion to a noble family, an aspiration Damiana, like so many young Murano women, coveted greatly.

A bitter laugh lodged in Sophia’s throat, a tight lump of emotion, and she tasted the irony on her tongue. Arriving at her friend’s maroon
attinelli
brick home with its deep cerulean-painted door, she bit the taste and the tears back and brushed her face with her hands as if to wash away any shred of sentiment. She forced the taut muscles of cheek and jaw to relax, as she donned a mask of surreal serenity. She knocked on the door with a hand that trembled disloyally.

Within seconds, Damiana thrust the plank open, warmth and excitement bursting from her sparkling blue eyes and blushing cheeks, bright above her saffron silk gown.

“
Buongiorno
, Sophia! I cannot wait—” Damiana’s words screeched to a halt, her broad smile vanished and her jaw dropped. She grabbed her friend by the arm, gaze searching the
calle
behind Sophia as if the devil himself dogged her heels. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Sophia dropped her head into her hands, bereft at her own transparency, genuine emotions unshackled by her friend’s instantaneous and intuitive concern. She tossed her head back and forth, chin to chest, tears released upon her pale cheeks.

“I am going, Mamma,” Damiana flung the words over her shoulder, picked up her sweetgrass basket from the entryway table, and grabbed the door to pull it closed behind her.

“Wait, let me say hello to—”

Damiana flung the portal shut upon her mother’s call and any prying ogle. She entwined Sophia’s arm in hers, tugging her along the
fondamenta,
and away from the house.

“I can not believe how warm it is today.” Diminutive but determined, Damiana prattled on as if they were small girls once more, heading to the
trattoria
for a treat with a
soldi
in their pockets.

Damiana asked no more questions of Sophia, for she could have answered none. Sophia struggled to keep her feet moving, so constrained were they by the chains that suddenly bound her life. She surrendered to Damiana’s lead, relinquishing herself to the safety of her dearest friend’s care.

The walkway filled with a swarm of people as the sun rose in the morning sky; everyone had somewhere to go, something to do. Merchants rushed to their businesses, women to market, as the cart peddlers hawked their wares up and down the
fondamenta
. The energetic crowd, fresh with the promise of the day, called out greetings and good wishes to their neighbors, and to those on the
gondole
that filled the waterway. Damiana called back, raising their interlocked arms as if both she and Sophia offered the greeting.

“
Oca,
” Damiana cursed under her breath, flicking her eyes heavenward as if pleading for divine intervention at the sight of the flightly and intrusive signora Gramsci and her equally annoying sister.

“Look at this, Sophia, isn’t it beautiful?”

With fierce protection worthy of a lioness defending her cub, Damiana led Sophia to a window display, any display, as the passing acquaintance seemed ready to strike up a conversation. Pointing and peering at the delights, real or imagined, on the other side of the clear pane, she kept them tucked away until the possibility for interaction came and went. She would allow no one to see Sophia’s splotched and mottled skin, the reddened eyes, would allow no gossiping tongues to speculate on their cause.

Sophia saw nothing but wavy, distorted images. The vivid colors of the buildings and the garments, the azure of the sky reflected on the seafoam waters of the canal, the smiling faces of the passing crowds, all swam and blurred in her watery sight. She allowed Damiana to lead her the entire distance to the shore and the ferry docks, obedient and submissive as a child.

As they arrived at the bustling port, they watched a wherry launch from the shore, its replacement still small on the horizon, a small dark dot where the sun-sparked sea met the cloudless sky.

Damiana released her hold on her friend’s arm, turned her by the shoulders so that they stood face to face, and beseeched her without a word.

Sophia swallowed hard, her throat bulged, and the clamp upon her tongue released its tenacious hold.

“My father is dying, and I am officially contracted to marry Pasquale da Fuligna.” The words rushed from her, a jumble and slur of sound. They hung in the air as if falling upon them from a great height.

Damiana’s shoulders slumped; her mouth fell open like a freshly caught fish gasping for breath. Without response, she snagged Sophia’s hand from where it hung limp by her side and dragged her to the farthest bench along the dock, where distance and privacy protected them as they waited for the next barge. In relief they sat, the cool breeze and tangy scent of the ocean enveloping them in a shielding mantle.