Chapter 54 The Window

They fired the pane over three evenings, because the fold could only be made in the hour when the light turned. It was, Isabella would think afterward, the hardest work of her life and the simplest. Rosalba carried the first gather — the nineteen-year-old color, smoke-grey with that buried hesitation in it — rolled thin on the marver while the sun went low, and then Isabella gathered the second from the same furnace, a gather of the clear winter metal Marco batched that week from the old Moretti recipe, sand and soda and the ash of beechwood like every gather her family had ever taken, and between the last of the daylight and the first of the lamps they folded them through each other: not layered but braided, two colors passing into one another the way dusk passes into evening, no seam, no line, only a slow exchange of one hour for another. Four hands on the tools. Two breaths down one pipe. When it cooled in the annealer overnight, neither of them slept well, and at dawn they drew it out whole — round, flat-rimmed, plain to any eye that did not insist — and set it upright against the December vase in the empty gallery to wait for evening. At dusk the gallery filled with light that had already been used once. The second color opened in the space where sunlight still lay across the floor, without dusk's help, without ceremony: a slow bloom beneath the surface of both pieces, the thirteenth answering the pane, the pane asking the thirteenth, and in the color — faint, moving, unmistakable now that she knew how to look — letters, names, the year signing itself. Tommaso sat down slowly on a packing crate. Sofia, who had come from Berlin two days early with Katja and half her studio, said nothing at all for a full minute, which those who knew her understood to be applause. "It works at noon," Rosalba whispered. She had seen the trick a hundred times at dusk and had never once dared hope for this. "Isabella. It works at noon." Otto Brandt arrived the following day, unannounced, in the same wrong-sized coat he had worn to the Royal Hotel, and stood in the doorway of the workshop as if asking permission of the building itself. Isabella walked him through the warm room herself — past the racks, past the remade November vase standing guard by its sisters' empty pedestals, past the pane — and told him everything: Cremona, the Queen, Matteo's letter, Trevisan, the solstice. "You understand what will happen in that room," Brandt said. They had paused by the furnace, and its heat moved across his face like something remembered. "A man who has never been refused is going to stand in front of his king and reach for the year, and the year is going to be given to someone else, publicly, before witnesses. I have waited eighteen years to watch a thing like that. I am not sure I survive watching a thing like that." He looked down at his hands, the ruined-and-mended hands of a glassblower who had kept his craft alive in rented rooms. "I came to ask for nothing, Signorina. I want that stated plainly, before you involve me further. No restitution, no commission, no speech. There is only one thing money has never been able to buy and courts have never been able to award, and it is what happens tomorrow evening in the Queen's room. I would like to stand in the corner and see a taker refused. After that, whatever is left of my life belongs to whatever furnace will have me." "Mine will," Isabella said. "In January. Bring your own paddle; mine are all spoken for." Brandt laughed — a rusty, astonished sound, the laugh of furniture being moved after years in storage. On the last evening, the palace sent word that the Queen wished to see her alone, and Isabella crossed the water in a boat that seemed to know its way without instruction. The shutters were already coming down from the high windows of the small room at the top of the palace; scaffolding of bare poles leaned against the wall; two servants worked with folded cloths, letting the winter afternoon into a room that had watched forty years of afternoons through other people's eyes. Dust burned gold in the new air currents. The Queen sat wrapped in grey wool with the thirteenth vase beside her and the second pomegranate open on the table, its ninth lobe spread wide like a hand relaxed after decades of being closed. "Tomorrow they will fill this room," the Queen said. "Ministers, courtiers, the Director, the man whose name I spoke aloud for the first time in forty years because silence had stopped protecting anyone. And the King, who is a better man than his father and a worse one than his grandmother, which is the usual arrangement." She looked up at Isabella, and her eyes were tired in the way old glass is tired — clear all the way through, worn only at the surface. "I want to tell you what to expect from me, Signorina, so that tomorrow you are not surprised. I am eighty-six years old. I have spent more of my life keeping a promise than keeping anything else, including my health and most of my patience. Tomorrow I intend to keep it entirely, once, in public, and then I intend to put it down. What happens to the kingdom after the light turns is yours — yours and Fiorenza's and whatever hands you gather. Do not waste time mourning me in advance. I have been dying since spring, and the waiting has been the pleasant part, because for the first time in forty years I have known how the story ends." "The kingdom needs three hands," Isabella said quietly. "The kingdom needed three hands to be *built*," the Queen said. "What it needs now is many, which is why I am leaving mine to all of them." She touched the rim of the thirteenth vase with one finger, lightly, the way you touch the shoulder of someone sleeping. "Go home, child. Sleep if it comes. Tomorrow the year is whole." She crossed back to Venice under a sky dropping toward snow. On the quay, Marco was waiting with his coat collar up and his tools already packed for morning, and they walked the last stretch together along the water, the lamps doubled in the black canal, neither of them speaking until the factory door, and there he stopped, and took her cold hands in his warm ones, and stood a moment as if balancing something on a pipe. "Tomorrow," he began. "Tomorrow what?" Isabella asked. "Tomorrow, when the light turns," Marco said, "there is a question I have been carrying since the unveiling, and I am done rehearsing it. But it goes in the turning of the light or not at all — you taught me that, everything worth saying in this family does." He pressed her hands once, hard, and let go, and grinned at her like an apprentice who had just survived his first pull of hot glass. "So. Tomorrow." Snow began to fall as they went inside, fine and dry, the first of the year, settling on the moored boats and the empty pedestals and the whole patient kingdom of glass.