第46章 The Second Pomegranate

Isabella did not sleep that night. The pomegranate sat on the workbench in the workshop, warm from being held, its nine lobes dim in the lamplight, its core dark with the old, deep ruby that had been waiting in the glass for longer than she had been alive. She knew the hand that had hidden the signature — she had read a hundred letters in that flowing hand, in the hidden workshop beneath the flooded factory, in the secret room her grandfather had sealed when he died. But the signature in the pomegranate was dated a year after his death, and there was only one way the old masters could sign a work after their own dying, and it was not a way a dead man could manage. At dawn she found the woman. It took her most of the morning, because Venice is a city of hiding places, and the woman had chosen the best of them — a ground-floor workshop on the far edge of Cannaregio, down a calle so narrow that the sun never reached the bottom of it, behind a door with no name and a window that had not been cleaned since before Isabella was born. She knocked. There was no answer. She put her hand against the wood the way she had put her hand into the furnace a thousand times, feeling for the heat before trusting it, and the door gave, and she stepped into a workshop that was already lit. The woman was not alone. She was standing at a workbench with her back to the door, and on the bench before her, in the soft gray light of a Venetian workshop in winter, lay the tools of a glassmaker — the paddles, the shears, the blocks, the marvers worn by a lifetime of hands — and she was rolling a gather of glass on the marver table, slowly, the way a person rolls a thought before she lets it go. She did not turn around. "Signorina Moretti," the woman said. "You made better time than I hoped. I left the pomegranate on the balustrade last night, and I thought it would take you a week to find me." She turned. "It took you eleven hours. That is the Moretti in you." "Who are you?" Isabella asked. The woman set the gather down and wiped her hands on her apron, and in her eyes there was something that Isabella had seen once before, in the portrait in the hidden workshop — the particular light of a person who has been waiting for a conversation for a very long time. "My name is Rosalba," she said. "I was Emilio Moretti's apprentice for seventeen years. I was the last one. I was the one he taught when he was too old to teach the world and too stubborn to stop. And I am the one who finished his final work after he died, and signed it with his hand, and dated it the way he taught me to date it — with the year it was completed, not the year it was conceived." Isabella stepped forward. "The pomegranate is my grandfather's work." "It is his work," Rosalba agreed. "And it is mine. Nineteen years ago, when Emilio died — the first time — he left a box in my keeping with instructions to finish what he had begun. He was old, Signorina. He was tired. And he had spent his whole life being careful, being quiet, being the most famous unknown glassmaker in a city that loves its secrets. The box contained the last secret: the second kingdom." "The second kingdom," Isabella said, and the words sat in her chest like a gather too hot to hold. "The thirteenth month. The space between the notes." "You know of it," Rosalba said, and her face changed, the way a face changes when hope, long held, is finally allowed to show. "Good. Then I do not have to convince you that it is real. The first kingdom — the practice, the truth, the twenty-four names, the collective — that was the visible kingdom, and you have made it whole. I have watched you do it, from a distance, for seven years. I watched you keep the factory alive when the water rose. I watched you make the November vase in three days. I watched you stand before the King and name Otto Brandt. And I have been waiting, all that time, to see whether the visible kingdom, made whole, would send someone to ask about the kingdom that was never visible — the one Emilio built in secret, in the years after the fire, in a workshop that was not the one you inherited." Isabella looked at the pomegranate on the bench, at its nine lobes, at the dark ruby core that held a signature and a year. "The second kingdom has a workshop?" "It has a workshop," Rosalba said. "It has twelve vases — a second year, made in secret, never shown, never sold. And it has a thirteenth plinth, where the thirteenth vase should stand. It has been empty for nineteen years." She reached into the pocket of her apron and drew out a key — an old iron key, the kind that opens the doors of houses that are no longer on maps. "Because the thirteenth vase was taken, Signorina. The year Emilio died — the first year — it was taken from the workshop, and it was taken by the man your grandfather trusted most." Isabella was silent for a long moment. The key lay in her palm, old iron, still warm from Rosalba's pocket. The pomegranate glowed its dark nine-lobed ruby in the gray light. And somewhere beyond the walls of the little workshop, in a city of canals and silences, the man who had taken the thirteenth vase was still holding it — had been holding it for nineteen years — the missing piece of the second kingdom, the half of the story that had never been told. "How do I find him?" Isabella asked. Rosalba looked at her for a long time. Then she said, "You do not find him. You find the workshop first. You learn the space between the notes. And then, when you have the twelfth vases and the empty plinth and the weight of what was taken, you will understand something that neither of us can tell you, because it is not a thing told. It is a thing held." She closed Isabella's hand over the key. "The workshop is in Cremona, Signorina — the city of violin makers, the city where the notes live in the wood. Go there. Learn what your grandfather was making when he died the first time. And bring back what was taken from the second kingdom — not to display it, not to sell it, but because the thirteenth vase is the last thing Emilio Moretti ever made, and no one has ever seen it whole." Isabella walked back through the narrow calle with the key in her pocket and the pomegranate wrapped in her scarf, and behind her, in the workshop that had no name, Rosalba stood at the bench and watched her go, and when the door had closed, she picked up the gather she had rolled and blew it, slowly, into a shape that was neither vase nor vessel, neither letter nor lobe — a shape that had been waiting nineteen years for the right afternoon to be made.