Chapter 43 The Ghost at the Table

Otto Brandt received Isabella in a private room at the Royal Hotel, a room with tall windows and heavy curtains and a table set for tea that neither of them touched. He was a tall man, sixty, with a face that had been handsome once and had been worn, by something, into severity — the face of a man who had spent eighteen years not making glass and had never stopped thinking about it. He did not stand when she entered. He did not offer his hand. He looked at her the way a man looks at a painting he has been waiting a long time to see in person. "Signorina Moretti," he said. "I wondered when you would come. I expected you sooner." "You knew I would come," Isabella said. She sat down across from him, not waiting for an invitation. "You left a trail. The visitor's pass. The register. The name that means nothing to anyone. You wanted to be found." Brandt's smile was thin, and it did not reach his eyes. "I wanted to be seen," he said. "There is a difference." "Tell me about the crack." "The crack was a message," Brandt said. "It was not an attack on you, Signorina. It was an invitation. I could not destroy your commission — no single crack could. Twenty-four vases, made by twenty-four hands, unveiled one by one, each one a statement of a month fully understood. It is the most beautiful work of glass that has been made in my lifetime. I know. I have been watching it." His voice was level, precise, the voice of a man who had practiced this conversation for years. "I cracked the November vase so that you would come to me. Because I have been waiting eighteen years to say what I am about to say, and you are the first person in the glass trade who has ever been willing to listen." Isabella said nothing. She let the silence sit, the way you let a fish take the hook. "In 2006, I was the most promising glassblower in Munich," Brandt said. "I had trained for twelve years. I had a studio, a furnace, a reputation. The Royal Glassworks commissioned me to design a series of vases for the palace — twelve vases, one for each month, the same commission they have given you. I designed them. I made them. I worked for a year, and I produced the best work of my life." He paused. "And then the palace told me that the vases would be unveiled under the name of the court favorite — a man who had never held a blowpipe. They told me that my name was not fit for a royal commission. That a glassblower from Munich, without lineage, without title, could not be the maker of the King's twelve months." Isabella felt something cold move through her, the same cold she had felt on the bridge, reading his name. "You sued." "I sued. I lost. The court found that the palace owned the work by contract, and that the name on the plinth was a matter of palace privilege. I lost my studio to the legal fees. I lost my furnace, my tools, my apprentices. I lost my name, because no one would work with a man who had been erased by the palace." He looked at her directly for the first time. "I have not made glass publicly in eighteen years, Signorina. I have made it in secret, in rented rooms, in borrowed workshops, for no one. I have kept my hands alive so that I could be ready for the moment when the palace needed me." "The palace needs no one," Isabella said. "The commission is nearly complete." "The commission is a trap," Brandt said. "And I did not set it. I am here to warn you." He stood, walked to the window, and looked out at the city. "The court favorite who took my name — his name was Altdorf. Friedrich von Altdorf, the director of the Royal Glassworks, the man who wrote to you, the man who gave you the commission." He turned. "Altdorf has spent eighteen years hiding what he did to me. And now you have delivered into his hands the one thing that could expose him: a commission more beautiful than anything he ever stole. When the twenty-four vases are unveiled on the winter solstice, and the world sees what you have made, the first question will be who made it. And Altdorf will answer. He has never once, in eighteen years, answered that question without destroying someone." Isabella was silent for a long moment. Then she said, "You cracked my vase to warn me." "I cracked your vase to stop time," Brandt said. "To give you a reason to come to Berlin before the unveiling. To give you a chance to ask the question I could not ask for myself: what is the King's commission really for?" The question hung in the air between them like glass waiting to cool. Isabella thought about the letters, the deadlines, the bells, the court that had grown accustomed to the sound. She thought about Sofia's face when the vase broke. She thought about Marco, in the Venice workshop, making October's amber while she traveled, never complaining, never asking her to choose. "Who will be at the unveiling," she said, "besides the court?" Brandt's smile, for the first time, was not thin. "The King," he said. "The King himself has asked to see the maker of the twenty-four months. And Altdorf has spent three months deciding which maker it will be." Isabella stood. She did not know, yet, what she was going to do. But she knew the glass well enough to know this: a vase that has been cracked can be remade, and a vase that has been remade is never the same as the first one. It is stronger. It has been tested. "I am not your war," she said. "And you are not mine. But the commission is mine, and the kingdom is mine, and I will not let a ghost from twenty years ago decide how it ends." She walked to the door. "If what you say is true, you will be at the unveiling. And you will see what a maker looks like when she has been warned." Behind her, Brandt said, very quietly: "You sound like me. Eighteen years ago, before I lost everything." Isabella paused at the door. "No," she said. "I sound like someone who has something to lose. That is the difference. And it is why I will not lose it."