The Secret of the Glass (28 page)

Teodoro’s face flashed into Sophia’s mind. He could not be had at any price, yet he was one of the nicest, most intriguing men she had ever met.

“If things continue, I will become no more than a servant in my sister-in-law’s kitchen.” Damiana shivered, shrugging the pall of the bleak thought from her shoulders. “Have you met anyone?”

The question shattered Sophia’s musings.

“
Scusi?”
A warm blush marched across her cheeks.

Damiana frowned with confusion. “Have you made any new friends? You’ve been to these interesting affairs. There must be some nice people amongst the nobles.”

“Oh,
sì
, a few, perhaps,” Sophia said. “I sat with Florentina Berton. Do you remember her, from Lionfante?”

“Of course.”

“She is married now to a noble. She introduced me to a friend of hers. We watched the performance together.”

Damiana leaned forward, engaging Sophia’s downcast eyes.

“Are they nice?”

Sophia shrugged, tilting her head to the side in a forced, dismissive gesture.

“They are…pleasant.”

Damiana slipped her hand under Sophia’s where it tapped an arrhythmic beat upon the cold, metal surface. “I want you to make friends. I know I will never lose you, but neither can I bear to think of you so lonely among all those people.”

Sophia smiled at her loving friend, squeezing back the hand in hers.

“Your father will find you a husband, a nobleman he can afford, then you will come and be as bored as I and I will never be alone.”

“That sounds perfect,” Damiana agreed. “We will be two of the haughtiest
nobildonne
in all the land.”

Sophia chuckled as Damiana craned her neck, looking over her shoulder toward the old man still off at the far end of the room.

“Until then, may I ask a favor?”

“Anything, Damiana, you need not question.”

The petite pale girl stepped around the table to stand close to Sophia.

“Show me how.”

Sophia’s brows knit in puzzlement. “Show you how…to what?”

Damiana smiled impishly, a grin Sophia recognized from their days as naughty schoolchildren.

“To make the glass.”

Sophia’s head jutted out from her neck like a goose waddling hastily along the road and her indigo eyes popped from their lids.

“Really?”

“
Sì.
”

Sophia stood on tiptoes and craned her head about, searching for Cellini. He kept to his duty, his slow trudging progress drawing him closer and closer.

“But we can’t let him see, keeping my secret is one thing, seeing me teach another, well…”

“Call him over,” Damiana urged.

“What—”

“Call him over and tell him my beau has left me, I will take care of the rest.”

Damiana winked and Sophia’s lips flapped with a puff of laughter.

“Go on,” Damiana insisted.

Sophia raised a skeptical brow at her friend, then shrugged with capitulation. “Signore Cellini, could you come here a moment?”

The man shuffled toward them. As he bowed gingerly, Damiana erupted into fake yet disconsolate tears. Sophia flinched as much as Cellini.

“Dear child,” he warbled, patting her shoulder. “Whatever is the matter?”

Damiana wailed louder, covering her face with her hands, bending over with her weeping. Sophia rolled her eyes at her friend’s exaggerated performance.

“Her paramour has passed her over for another,” Sophia explained, biting on her bottom lip to hold back her smile.

Damiana looked at her incredulously from between her fingers, her wail now verging on a howl.

“Could you give us some time alone, signore? Let me console her in private?”

Girolamo Cellini peered at her with silent curiosity. Just as Sophia thought he would question them, he nodded.

“The fires should be fine for an hour or so, no more,” he said, grabbing a table with an age-spotted hand to steady himself, and turned. “I’ll be back then, no later,” he tossed over a sloping shoulder.

The girls watched his bowed retreating figure, held their breath as he inched his way up the stairs and out the creaking door. As it clanked to a close, the girls fell upon each other, sputtering, eyes tearing as their released laughter burst forth like the ocean into a ruptured keel of a mighty sailing ship.

Sophia clasped her hands together in delight.

“This will be such fun,” she exclaimed, taking Damiana by the hand and placing her before the furnace.

Opening its small square door, she thrust a
ferro
in her friend’s grasp. The rod dipped toward the ground and Damiana let out a gasp of surprise at its weight.

“See the pool of liquid inside? That’s the melted material just waiting for you to make it glass,” Sophia instructed. “Dip the tip into the pool and spin until you form a gathering on the end of your rod.”

Damiana did as she was told, squinting into the hot fumes emanating out of the oven.

“That’s it, keep turning, keep turning,
bene
. Now lift the rod out of the pool.”

Damiana raised the end of the tool ungracefully.

“Turn, turn!” Sophia urged.

But Damiana’s unskilled hands spun the
ferro
too slowly, and the viscous lump oozed down the left side of the rod, a grotesque, malformed blob of nothing.

“Oops,” she giggled and Sophia laughed with her.

“Let’s try it again, yes?” She dropped her friend’s ruined creation into a bucket filled with discarded scraps of glass. Hissing smoke rose from it like a hypnotized snake.

Damiana nodded, laughing at her clumsy, inexpert attempt.

This time Damiana knew what to expect, how quickly the gelatinous material would loose its shape if she spun the rod too slowly. Soon a gracefully shaped bulb formed at the end of the
ferro.

“You’ve got it now,” Sophia encouraged, explaining the process as Damiana continued to spin the staff within the oven. “When you pull it out you must step quickly to the
scagno
behind you, sit down, and place the rod on the supports. Grap the
borcella,
the tongs there,” Sophia pointed, “and pinch off the end by squeezing with your right hand as you keep spinning the
ferro
with your left.”

Damiana stared at Sophia, face scrunching with dismay.

“
Capisce?”

Damiana nodded, but the befuddled expression remained on her delicate features.

“All right, go!”

Damiana burst into action, following Sophia’s instructions to the letter. But her pressure upon the tongs was too weak, too uneven, and the perforation formed in an irregular shape, turning her once-perfect ball into a lopsided globule.

Their laughter rang out boisterously through the factory, the trilling sound filling the cavernous room with its joyful noise.

“Give it to me,” Sophia took the tools from her friend’s hand, dipping the pinchers once more into the water bucket and tapping the end of the rod expertly with the cool, wet tip. The misshapen piece dropped off cleanly into a waiting pan.

“I will cool it for you anyway and bring it to you when it is done.” Sophia picked up the odd piece in her leather-gloved hand, heading toward the annealer and placing it within its depth. “It will be a souvenir of this night.”

“I will be glad to have it, though I should never let my father see it, he would be outraged.” Damiana embraced Sophia, resting her head gently on her friend’s shoulder. “But I need no reminder of you or the times we have spent together.”

Sophia closed her eyes, leaning her head against Damiana’s. Where they were headed, she could not fathom, but this love she would take with her always.

Twenty-one

“D
o you attend many wedding fetes, Signore da Fuligna?” For more than a half hour they had moseyed side by side through the crowded
campo,
their uncomfortable silence punctuated by the sharp flapping of the multi-colored banners and flags decorating the bricked courtyard and the heady fragrance of the flower garlands strung across each of the four arched entrances. Sophia had no wish to become familiar with her intended, cared little to learn of his previous social escapades, but she could bear the silence between them no longer.

“Not if I can help it.” Pasquale offered the short, clipped reply from between tightly drawn, thin lips. His sullen voice was almost inaudible over the laughter and conversation of the vivacious crowd and his narrow eyes were mere slits in the wrinkled flesh as he squinted against the dazzling afternoon light.

Sophia spared the taciturn man a quick glance. Pasquale’s heavily padded, emerald green doublet, intended to give a muscular cast to his silhouette, served to enhance his round, stout stature. She was surprised at the lengths he made to attempt a
bella figura
. For all her dislike, she had not imagined him as vain.

“It was a pleasant ceremony, don’t you think?”

With a few hundred other attendees, the unamiable couple, thrust together once more for the sake of the public appearances, had watched as the young bride and groom, brimming with the bright hope of their future, took their vows and were blessed in matrimony by the Bishop of San Paolo. Sophia and Pasquale had followed along as the entire wedding procession paraded down the Calle Madoneta, crossing a bridge of boats spanning the Grand Canal, and arriving
en masse
at the home of ser de l’Albero, a nobleman who had generously offered the family
palazzo
and its accompanying piazza as the site of the wedding party.

“Humph,” Pasquale replied with little more than a grunt.

Her obstinance, passed to her by her father, surged up in response to his lack of effort at civility. Her deep apricot gown, another recently purchased, flowed around her body in a layer of thin silk above creamy underclothes, and though the clear weather was cooler than it had been in many days, the burning rays of the sun on her exposed chest and arms scorched her, or was it just her ire?

“I hear there’ll be goose-catching later. Do you wish to take part?” Her words sounded like the taunt they were, laced with sarcasm and cutting with a sharp edge of impatience. With his physique, this man was fit for catching a cold and little else. She’d had enough of his ill manners.

“Only if I am dead,” Pasquale grumbled, his abhorrence for the frivolity of the day clear in his venomous tone.

His gaze had not once met hers as they strolled around the square; it cast about the merry crowd, but what he searched for she had no clue. Not once had he initiated conversation with her and she felt like a dog he had taken out for a walk, one that snapped and yelped at his heels.

Sophia froze, unable to take another step. Pasquale continued on a few paces before he realized Sophia no longer remained by his side. He turned back with a glare of impatience.

Sophia stared at him and his ill-disguised annoyance with complete derision. The stress born of her father’s illness and the presence of this man in her life that had simmered just below the surface boiled over and the dove she had been all her life became a hawk.

“Why do you want to marry me?” she asked.

He snorted a contemptuous breath through his nose. “I don’t.”

The small, robed man raised his face to the sunlight and sent a quick thought of thanks to the good lord for its blessing. Such a cool day, the air dry and crisp, a rarity for Venice even this early in the summer season. He meant to enjoy it, opting to take the circuitous, convoluted journey home. He passed the preserved home of
Emilione,
the traveler Polo, who had achieved such renown for this land, and was reminded of the many wonders to behold in this home he loved so passionately.

He strolled with hands clasped comfortably behind his back, in no hurry to confine himself within the dreariness of the Servite monastery after a long day in the small, dim chamber of the Doge’s Palace. More thoughts whirled through his mind, more words he was inspired to write by the vigorous climate. They formed exquisitely in his mind, like notes he scribbled on a scale, as his sandal-clad feet shuffled along the quiet
calle
.

Sophia tilted her head at Pasquale as if she hadn’t heard.

“Beg pardon?”

“I. Don’t.” Pasquale’s face was devoid of emotion as he repeated his words, slowly, as if she were an idiot unable to fathom his meaning. “I do not want to marry you.”

Sophia shook her head with a bewildered gesture, slim shoulders rising toward her ears.

“Then…then, why do it?”

Pasquale laughed, but there was nothing pleasant about it.

“You are not that naïve, are you?”

He resumed his nonchalant stroll and she had no choice but to catch up with him.

“I am doing my duty, as you must. Though I must admit, there are certain benefits.”

Sophia hated herself for her own curiosity. “Benefits?”

A small, repulsive smile formed on his thin lips as he stared far off into the distance.

“
Sì
. Benefits for me. With this marriage, I alleviate myself of my father’s nagging, and, with your money, I may buy my intellectual freedom and all the time that I desire to pursue my interests, all my interests.”

She inhaled a sharp, ragged breath of air.

Pasquale cast his small withering stare toward her for a brief moment.

“You knew.” It was an accusation, a hissing snake of truth. “You’ve known from the beginning that I hold no love for you. That you are naught more than a means to an end.”

He turned into the still and peaceful Campo di Santa Fosca, heading toward the small Ponte della Pugna, the small stair bridge built without parapets. The sound of his flapping footwear echoed in the shadows of the three-and four-story stone buildings on either side. Here the quiet was almost overwhelming, the peace enormous. The narrow, flower-plumed balconies above his head were empty, their small tables and chairs devoid of life. Doors were shut; no one stirred beyond the small, street-level windows.