Chapter 50 The Other Hand

The call came from the palace at dawn, and it was not from Altdorf and not from the auditor and not from Elena Moretti. It was from the King's own secretary, and the message was four words: the Queen requests you. Isabella dressed in silence. Marco stood in the door of the workshop with his tools in their case, ready to go with her, and she almost asked him to stay, because there had been queens in the Moretti story before, hidden in letters and portraits and the space between the notes, and she had never once been ready for one. But the King's secretary was waiting, and the barge was at the quay, and some doors in Venice only open for the people who arrive without a plan. The Queen met her in a small room at the top of the palace, a room with no glass in the windows — only light, northern light, the light that fell on the hidden workshop in Cremona. She was an old woman with white hair and a straight back and eyes that had been looking at the same four walls for forty years, and on the table before her, in a patch of that northern light, stood a vase. It was the thirteenth. Isabella had seen it in a photograph and Elena had described it and it had been in the palace for nineteen years, and it stood now in the Queen's room, tall and dark, unlit, unshown, and it was not what she had expected. Because it was whole. It was the only thirteenth she had ever imagined missing, and it was whole. And beneath the dark surface of its glass, held in the turning of the northern light, there was a color that had no name, a color that belonged to the space between the notes, and in that color, the Queen's voice said, "Do you know who ordered the first vases, Signorina? The twelve that your grandfather made before you were born, the twelve Friedrich von Altdorf stole in 2006 and unveiled under a court favorite's name?" "Elena Moretti believes it was a man in the court," Isabella said. "A man who trained Altdorf. A man who outlived two kings." "Elena believes what Matteo believed," the Queen said. "And Matteo believed what he was told. He was told that his brother's work was wanted by a courtier, the first taker, a man who could make the palace's business his business and no one would question him." She looked at Isabella, and for the first time there was something in her eyes that was not age, and not distance, and not the careful neutrality of forty years of windows. "The man exists, Signorina. He is real, and he is patient, and he has been waiting nineteen years to hold the second kingdom's last piece. But the first vases were not for him. The first vases were ordered by me." Isabella stood very still. The northern light turned in the thirteenth, and the nameless color moved beneath the surface like a note held and bent and released, and she understood, with the deep, wordless clarity of a maker who has just been shown the true mouth of the furnace, that everything she had learned about the kingdom was true, and that the half that had never been told was not about her grandfather at all. "Emilio came to me after the fire," the Queen said. "He came to me because he knew that the palace could protect his name the way the water could not, and he made me a bargain. He would make me twelve vases — a year no one would ever see, a year the court would never touch — if I would protect the Moretti name and the hidden workshop and the thing he was learning to make in it. I kept that bargain, Signorina, for forty years. I am the reason the second kingdom survived the flood and the fire and the auditors and the thieves. I am the hand that was never shown, and I am showing myself to you now because the thirteenth is whole, and because the man who outlived two kings has been waiting nineteen years to take it, and because I am old, and I will not outlive him." She reached into the sleeve of her dress and drew out a small glass vessel — a pomegranate, dark, nine-lobed, the second one, the one Rosalba had set on the balustrade in the colonnade after the unveiling. "Your grandfather finished his final work, Signorina, but he did not finish his final story. Rosalba did. She is the one who wrote the signature in my pomegranate, in his hand, dated with the year of its completion. She is the last apprentice of the first kingdom, and the keeper of the second, and the half of the story that was never told." The Queen held the pomegranate out to her. "Its ninth lobe opens, Signorina. Ask it what Rosalba has been keeping for you. Ask it what Emilio Moretti's daughter has been waiting all her life to give her brother's granddaughter." Isabella took the pomegranate. It was warm, the way the first one had been warm, held for a lifetime. She turned the ninth lobe, slowly, the way you turn a gather on a marver, feeling for the heat, and the lobe opened, and inside it, folded tight as a sealed note, there was a name. Not her grandfather's. Not the Queen's. A name she had never heard, a Moretti name, a name that had been carried in silence for five decades by a hand that had never been shown. "We are two hands," Isabella said. "The kingdom has always been two hands." "It has always been three," the Queen said. "Your grandfather's. His daughter's. And the hand that held the name over them both, waiting for the day when the year would be whole and the second kingdom would be found — so that it could be given to the one who would make it three again." Outside, in the corridor, a door closed softly, and footsteps moved away — not the footsteps of a servant, but the light, patient, polished footsteps of a man who had heard his name spoken in the Queen's room and knew that the thirteen years of waiting were over. And in the northern light, in the glass of the thirteenth vase, in the space between the notes, a second color opened — a color that had never been seen before, a color the whole palace would see at the turning of the light, a color that was the Queen's name, and the daughter's name, and the name in the ninth lobe, and the name of the hand that had always been waiting, patient as glass, for the moment when the room with a window would finally be opened to the full light of the year.