第27章 The Master of Murano

The visitor came on a Sunday, when the workshop was closed and the yard was quiet, and he arrived in a gondola the way old men arrive in Venice—slowly, with dignity, and with a small wooden case held against his chest like a sleeping child. His name was Tommaso Dolfin, and he was the last of the old masters of Murano, the last man alive who had stood beside Emilio Moretti at the furnace in the years before the war. Marco went very still when he heard the name, and then he crossed the yard with both hands extended, and the two men embraced the way men embrace who have survived the same fire. "This is her," Tommaso said, looking at Isabella. "This is the granddaughter." He had eyes the color of old glass, and he looked at her for a long time before he nodded once. "Emilio used to say the Moretti eye had skipped a generation. He was wrong. It had not skipped. It had waited." He had come, he said, because of the school. The old masters of the island had watched the second chimney rise, and they had argued about it among themselves the way the old masters of the island had always argued, and they had sent him to see whether the new fire was a promise or a vanity. But when Beppe came out of the furnace room and saw him, the two old men stood looking at each other across the yard, and Beppe said, "You're alive, then," and Tommaso said, "Still," and something passed between them that Isabella could not name. He stayed for the afternoon. He walked the schoolhouse slowly, his hand trailing over the racks, and he watched the apprentices with the sharp, silent attention of a man who had been judging glass for seventy years. He asked Tomaso one question about the furnace draft, and when Tomaso answered it correctly, he nodded once and moved on. He did not speak again until dinner, and then he set down his glass and looked at Isabella across the table. "Your grandfather and I made a bet in 1954," he said. "He said the red would come back to this family. I said it was gone forever, that the color had died in the war and the formula with it. He said it would not die. He said it was waiting for the right hands." He looked at the ruby pendant at her throat. "I lost that bet. I have carried the loss gladly for sixty years. It is the only loss I ever made that was worth it." Isabella touched the pendant, warm against her skin, and she understood that she was not just an heir. She was the answer to an old man's prayer, and the weight of it settled onto her shoulders like a mantle. It was not until the table was cleared and the apprentices had gone up to their rooms that Tommaso brought out the wooden case. He set it on the bench in the old workshop and opened it slowly, and the light that came out of it was the color of a sunset over the lagoon, deep and red and alive. Inside, wrapped in black velvet, lay a fragment of the chandelier—one arm of the seven, broken off near the shoulder, the glass cracked but whole, the thread of gold still running through it like a river through a field. It was the color her grandfather had spent eleven years chasing. It was the piece she had made with Marco in the hidden workshop, the piece that had shattered in the fire. It was, impossibly, alive. "Where did you get this?" Marco's voice was very quiet. "Paris," Tommaso said. "An auction house, last autumn, under the glass of anonymous. I bought it the way a man buys back a piece of his own childhood—because I knew it, and because it should not have been there." He looked at Isabella. "They said it came from a private collection in Mestre. They said it was salvaged from the lagoon after the fire. And they said the seller knew exactly what it was." The silence in the workshop was heavy as glass. "Salvaged from the lagoon," Isabella repeated. "Everything that burned in that room was destroyed. I saw it. We both saw it. How does a piece of the chandelier end up in the canal?" Tommaso shook his head. "That is what I came to ask you. Because I know the way it came to be sold, and I know the man who sold it." He folded his old hands. "There is a waterman on the lagoon who has cleaned the canals all his life. His name is Nico, and he is the one who pulls things out of the water that other people put there on purpose. He was paid the night of the fire to keep a secret, and he has kept it, and he will not keep it for the same price twice." Marco's face had gone to stone. "You're saying there was something in the canal that night." "I am saying," Tommaso said, "that the story of that fire is not finished. And I am an old man, and I have come to the end of what I can carry alone." He closed the case and slid it across the bench toward Isabella. "This is yours. It always was. Whatever the waterman knows, it belongs to you now, and it will not rest until you know it too." Isabella took the case, and the weight of it in her hands was the weight of her grandfather's whole life, and she understood that the kingdom was not finished growing, and that the past was not finished speaking. "Where do we find this Nico?" she said. Tommaso smiled, and his old eyes were bright. "I thought you would never ask. He keeps his boat under the Rialto. He is there most nights, waiting for the water to give back what it has taken. I will take you to him myself, in the morning." He stayed the night in the room above the schoolhouse that had been meant for a visiting master, and Isabella lay awake for a long time with the case on the floor beside the bed and Marco's arm around her, thinking about the canal and the fire and the piece of red glass that had survived a thing that should have destroyed it. "What if we don't want to know?" she said into the dark. Marco's hand found hers. "Then it will come for us anyway. The glass remembers, Isabella. It has a way of coming back." In the morning they took Tommaso's gondola to the Rialto, and the waterman Nico was there, waiting, mending a net in the grey light as if he had known they were coming all along. ---