第42章 The November Glass

November's vase was the last one made before the unveiling, and it was the first one to break. Isabella was in Dresden when the news reached her — a phone call from Sofia, and Sofia's voice, which had been steady through floods and furnace failures and the chaos of the early commission, was not steady now. "The November vase cracked," Sofia said. "It was cooling. It had been perfect. It was cooling, and it cracked, top to bottom, like a wound. We don't know why." Isabella was on the night train to Berlin before she had finished asking the questions. The crack, she learned, was not a crack in the usual sense — not a flaw in the anneal, not a bubble in the glass, not a mistake in the cooling schedule. It was a crack that ran along the length of the vase like a fault line, clean and straight and deliberate, the kind of crack that glass makes when it has been struck, not when it has failed. The vase had not broken. It had been broken. The workshop gathered around the broken piece in a silence that had a shape to it, the way a room has a shape when everyone in it is feeling the same thing. Sofia stood with her arms crossed, her jaw set. Katja had come up from the cooling room and was standing in the doorway, not speaking, watching Isabella's face. Even the apprentices had stopped their work, their blowpipes cooling in their hands, and they were waiting the way you wait when the thing you love has been hurt and you do not know yet whether it can be fixed. Isabella knelt beside the vase. She ran her hand along the line of the crack — gently, the way you touch a wound to find out how deep it goes — and she felt what the glass had felt: a single, precise strike, delivered at the moment when the piece was most vulnerable, when the interior was still hot and the surface had already set, so that the flaw would run through the whole of the form like a vein. It had been done by a hand that knew glass. That was the worst part. It had been done by a hand that loved it. Sofia had gone through the workshop like a detective, checking every log, every schedule, every hand that had touched the piece. Nothing was missing. Nothing was out of place. The only anomaly was a visitor's pass, issued on the night the vase was cooling, for a man who had signed the register with a name that meant nothing to anyone: Brandt, Otto. Workshop guest. "I gave him a tour," Sofia said, and her voice cracked on the word tour. "He asked to see the furnaces. He said he had been invited by the palace to observe the commission. He was charming, Isabella. He knew every name in the glass trade, every technique, every master. He asked about the annealing schedule like a man who had spent his life asking about annealing schedules. I left him alone for seven minutes. Seven minutes, and the night watchman said he passed by the cooling room twice." Isabella did not answer. She was looking at the broken vase, at the clean line of the crack, at the way the glass had split along the fault that a careful hand would have known how to find. She had been in the trade long enough to know that you do not crack a cooling vase by accident. You crack it with a tool — a small, sharp tool, a diamond point, a flaw traced into the surface at the exact moment the glass is most vulnerable. It was the oldest trick in the trade, and it had not been used in her workshop, in her presence, in seven years. "Where is he now?" she asked. "Berlin. He's staying at the Royal Hotel. He's supposed to attend the unveiling in three weeks." Sofia paused. "Isabella, he's not a guest. I checked. The palace has never heard of Otto Brandt. The Royal Glassworks has no master glassmaker by that name. He's not who he says he is." Isabella looked at the broken vase. Then she looked at the wall of the workshop, where the eleven completed vases stood in their order, January through October, each one a month fully understood, each one the work of hands that had trusted a stranger. Eleven vases, waiting for their twelfth. "Who is he?" she said. The answer came the next morning, from Marco, who had been making calls while Isabella slept on the train. Marco had spent the night in the Venice workshop, working the furnaces alone, thinking, and he had found it — not in the records of the glass trade, where a master like Otto Brandt should have appeared, but in the records of a court case, twenty years old, in Munich. A young glassblower named Otto Brandt had sued the Royal Glassworks for breach of contract, claiming that a series of vases he had designed had been produced without his name attached, claiming that the palace had taken his work and given it to a court favorite. The case had been dismissed. Brandt had lost everything — his studio, his reputation, his name. He had not made glass publicly in eighteen years. "He's not here to observe the commission," Marco said. "He's here to destroy it. The way the palace destroyed him." Isabella stood in the Berlin workshop with the broken November vase in her hands, and she felt the weight of the cold that had come through the crack in her chest — the cold she had felt on the bridge, reading the name Otto Brandt. She had thought it was a rival. It was not a rival. It was a ghost — a man who had been silenced twenty years ago, who had spent eighteen years watching the kingdom grow, who had waited for the moment when the world's eyes were on the glass, so that he could break it. She set the vase down. She looked at Sofia, at Katja, at the eleven completed vases standing in their order. "We don't stop the commission," she said. "We don't postpone the unveiling. We don't give him that." She picked up her phone. "We make November again. We make it better. And then we go to Berlin, and we talk to the ghost." The furnace was lit before noon. The December vase, the final vase, had been scheduled for Venice, for Isabella's own hand, the last of the twenty-four, the one that would close the year. She looked at the schedule, at the eleven vases standing in their order, at the empty space where November belonged. "The December vase can wait," she said. "November is mine now." And in a hotel room across the city, Otto Brandt — if that was his name — read the morning papers, and saw no mention of the crack, and smiled a smile that had been waiting eighteen years to be used.