Chapter 57 The Full Light of the Year

The Queen died three days after the equinox, in her sleep, in the small room at the top of the palace with the shutters down for spring. She had seen the winter whole. That was what Isabella held to, in the weeks that followed, when the bells rang and the boats went black on the water and the whole city seemed to walk more quietly, as if passing a workshop where someone was still working. The Queen had seen the second color open in front of her King; she had heard Fiorenza Moretti thank her by her full name, witness-style, before the assembled court; she had put down a forty-year vow exactly where and how she had said she would. On the last morning, her secretary found on the table beside the bed the second pomegranate, its nine lobes all closed now, arranged — this was the detail that undid Isabella completely — facing the window. The funeral filled the city. Every furnace in Murano was allowed to go cold for one day, an honor not issued since the last war, and the glassmakers came from Bohemia and Bavaria and the Baltic coast and stood in their best coats along the quay with their ruined beautiful hands folded. Otto Brandt carried one corner of the pall and did not once look at anyone's face, because he had told Isabella the truth in winter: there are things a man survives only by watching something smaller, like brass letters being hung straight. They set the Queen's pomegranate in the Venice gallery, on its own low pedestal between the twenty-four months and the first pomegranate — the two of them together at last, seven lobes and nine, the visible year and the hidden one, both cores burning their old deep ruby under full gallery light. And before the glass was finally cooled on that arrangement, Rosalba did the thing she had been saving: she gathered clear metal from the Venice furnace and drew from it a thread no thicker than a violin string, and fired it around the rim of the Queen's pane — the pane itself had passed to the gallery after the solstice, standing permanently in the window light — and worked into the thread, letter by letter, in the turning of an afternoon, the name *Caterina*. So the color holds five names now. Visitors ask why one of them is newer than the rest, in a higher hand, slightly proud, like a signature added at the last moment before delivery; and the keepers tell them it is because the pane was made to hold every name the kingdom ever restores, and the rim was built for additions, and the kingdom intends to keep needing them. In May they cut the window. It took masons four days to open the sealed eastern wall of the hidden workshop in Cremona — nineteen years of quiet brick, removed course by course under Rosalba's eye while the twelve months stood swaddled in cotton up on trestles, complaining, as old glass does, about the vibration. On the fifth morning the sun rose down the street of violin makers, cleared the opposite roofs, and came through the new window for the first time, and walked across the floor of a room that had been lit only by lamps since before some of the apprentices were born. Emilio's thirteenth vase stood in its proper niche at last, home out of exile, his year complete on his own shelves; and beside the drawing on the furnace arch — the arch, the curve, the circle, the thread of light — someone, Rosalba would admit to nothing, had carved one word into the stone below the empty space where the ledger used to lie: *whole*. The first lesson in the Cremona school was given by Fiorenza Rosalba Moretti on the last Monday of May, to eleven students seated on packing crates, and it concerned breath — how much of it a gather can take, how little a name needs. She signed the attendance book at the end of the hour, her own name, in full, unhurried, the first document she had ever signed with it, and then looked up and found every student watching, and said: "Well. It gets easier. Everything does except the annealing." They were married in June, in the gallery in Venice, among the months. It was not a large wedding. The collective came — Sofia bearing rings already, laughing, because hers had been predicted in Berlin since the year of the flood — and Tommaso gave the bride away and wept without embarrassment, and Katja played something on a borrowed violin that made even the furnaces seem loud, and the apprentices lined the stairs in their work clothes because nobody had thought to forbid it. The vows were short, as the couple had insisted: whatever else a Venetian wedding might want, these two had both spent enough of their lives inside long sentences. Marco said his plainly, holding both her hands over the rail of the gallery with the canal light coming up gold behind him. Isabella answered with one sentence she had written the night before and rewritten six times and finally left as first drafted: "I choose you in front of witnesses, in full light, by name." The ring on her hand threw a small round of light onto the floorboards, and the trapped air at its heart caught the color of the nearest vase — December's red, October's amber; it could never settle on just one, which everyone agreed was correct. Late, after the boats had gone and the gallery stood empty except for family — which now included, by unanimous vote of people too happy to vote sensibly, every maker in the building — Isabella and Marco and Rosalba climbed down to the hidden workshop beneath the waterline, where it had all begun. The lamps were off. The first pomegranate glowed on its pedestal, patient as ever, and through the high slit of window that the old builders had left above the tide line, the last of the long June dusk lay in a thin bright bar across the stones. A sound came down the stairwell: small feet, and then a child's voice — the youngest apprentice's daughter, who had escaped bedtime — calling anxiously into the dark, "How do you find your way back up?" Rosalba called up, warm and unhurried: "By the light, piccola. There is always a window somewhere above you. That is the whole of the teaching." Isabella stood between her aunt and her husband in the room where the kingdom had been born, and listened to the water move against the five-hundred-year-old stones, and thought about years — the one her grandfather hid, the one her family kept, the one she had been given and had given away until it belonged to everyone — and how a year, like a vase, like a promise, is only ever finished by the hands that hold it whole. Above them, faint through stone and brick and forty feet of Venetian air, the furnace ticked as it cooled, keeping its heat the way the city keeps its bells: not because anything needs it tonight, but because tomorrow, someone will come to make something true, and the fire will be ready.