Falcon in the Glass (9 page)

Renzo shrugged. Chests, tables, chairs, paneling . . . they were all the same to him. Heavy. Earthbound. Lightless. He felt sorry for men who worked in wood. It was a slow and tedious and pedestrian art. Nothing about it of quickness, of grace. Nothing to test a man's courage. Nothing to fire his soul.

The path narrowed; Mama and Signore Averlino edged ahead of Renzo and Pia, as there wasn't room for them all in a row. Renzo noticed, for the first time in a long while, how pretty Mama was. Graceful and lithe, with hair the color of honey. She laughed now, a warm, low rumble. How long since he had heard that laugh?

A sudden wind gust stirred up sand at his feet and flung it into his face. Renzo blinked and rubbed his eyes. Who was this Signore Averlino to come sniffing around, speaking so familiarly with Mama, taking her elbow, replacing Renzo at her side? Renzo was head of the family now. He could take care of them.

But could he? Things were going slowly in the glassworks.
Far too slowly, no matter how fast Letta learned. The children lurched from one crisis to the next. There were scrapes and cuts and bruises, there were toothaches and stomachaches and earaches, there were tears to kiss away and noses to wipe. And though Taddeo seemed to have taken to the children, perhaps he doted
too
fondly. He no longer went home early. He brought food — more food, Renzo feared, than he could possibly afford to buy. Renzo had heard rumors of pies vanishing from windowsills, of bread disappearing from the communal oven. If Taddeo had stolen them, and if he were caught, and if it were to come out why he'd stolen . . .

“Lorenzo!”

He lifted his eyes from the paving stones and looked up at Mama. “Where is Pia?” she said. “I thought you were watching her.”

Renzo felt the heat of shame creep up his face, made all the more humiliating by the patient, concerned gaze of Signore Averlino.
He was but a boy. Couldn't even take care of his little sister. Must be reprimanded by his mother.

Renzo turned to scan the path behind him. The churchgoers had mostly dispersed by now, though a few black-clad matrons still stood about talking. And there she was, all the way back at the church, holding out her hand to a beggar, perhaps the selfsame one she had given to the week before.

Renzo hurried along the path, skirting the matrons. Above him gulls cried, reaching to touch the sky with their feathertips, teetering in the air. Light glinted off the water,
diamond hard. The wind, smelling of salt and fish, buffeted his ears, making them ache with cold. “Pia!” he called, hearing the sharpness in his voice.

She turned to him as the beggar's knotted fingers closed about her coin, the blue-black shadow of the wall veiling his face.

Renzo took Pia's hand and dragged her away. “Didn't you hear Mama last week? You're to put the coin in the alms box. We have none to spare for beggars.”

“But he's hungry,” Pia protested.

Renzo hauled her back down the path, remembering the night this past week when he had risen to go to the glassworks and had found Mama in the kitchen bent over the accounts, moving stacks of coins around the table.

How much longer could they survive on the dwindling supply of coins and the pittance Renzo made? Even if he became an apprentice, it would be years before he could truly support his family. And what if he didn't pass the test? How could they keep their house, feed themselves?

He glanced back to where the beggar had sat crouched against the wall. But he was gone.

Still, Renzo knew the silent, creeping dread that Mama must have been feeling.

There but for the grace of God went they.

I
t is possible, Renzo found, to work through fear. You can push it down, hoard it deep inside you, and breathe it into the glass. You can watch the glass swell, grow bubble-thin and gossamer, and know that fear is making it lovely, fear is giving it shape.

With glass, joy is the preferable medium. But fear is powerful, and it will do, when joy cannot be found.

He and Letta worked on through the night, though Renzo knew there was far too little time and far too much to learn. The footed bowl, the long-stemmed goblet, the crested wine flask, the eared jug . . . You could spend years coming to know them. You
must
— to master them. But Renzo did not have years. He had five weeks.

That first night, when the children had come out into the open, their green eyes had followed whatever he'd done, hardly changing in expression whether the glass shattered at the end of the blowpipe, or slumped to the floor, or formed itself into a perfect, symmetrical bowl.

They made him clumsy, the children's eyes. They made
him think too much. Especially with the birds watching too — though, true to Letta's word, they stayed perched on the children's shoulders as if fastened there.

By the next night, he had managed mostly to forget them. He breathed his fear into the glass, and when he looked up, he saw the children curled in a heap together, sleeping like kittens. The cough had swept through them, erupting here and there. But the new coughs didn't sound so dire as the old ones. Even the marsh boy's cough had abated, though he still seemed listless, his cheeks aflame.

The marsh boy. That was how Renzo thought of him. He didn't want to know the boy's true name. He didn't want to know any of their names. He didn't want to care about them.

After a few more nights, as the children grew accustomed to warmth and food, they began to stir and move about. The two older boys handed off their birds and began performing acrobatic tricks to amuse the others —cartwheeling across the floor, or somersaulting one over the other, or the younger one standing on the older one's shoulders and summoning his crow. Renzo cast a worried eye toward the crates and racks of finished glass; Letta barked out an order, and the two boys moved away. Still, there were stubbed toes and bloody feet, pricked by stray bits of shattered glass. There were skinned knees and barked shins. Once, the little light-haired girl shot out of the group and was nearly to the furnace before Taddeo's long arm reached out to snag her and pull her back.

Where you find children, Renzo observed, you will also find mud and mucus, vomit and blood. They wet themselves;
they poke their fingers where they don't belong; they babble; they shriek; they cry.

And through it all the birds stayed close — though they sometimes strayed from shoulders to perch on heads, on wrists, on knees. Birds pecked at cheeks and at strands of hair, they stretched their wings, they scratched their heads, they fluffed out their feathers and napped. Truly, they didn't seem forced to stay put but seemed somehow, mysteriously,
willing
.

Only once did a bird interfere with Renzo's work —when the magpie fluttered overhead and let fly a dropping that sizzled on the hot glass and burst into flame. Renzo cracked the vessel off the blowpipe, flung it into the pail. “Where are these children's parents?” he demanded. Then bit his tongue. Did he really want to know?

“Gone,” Letta replied.

He scowled at her, feeling dismissed.

He breathed
that
into the glass too, along with the fear.

Soon some of the older children began to help. The tallest boy, with eyes that drooped at the corners. The twin girls. The sleek-haired boy with the crow. They hunted down stray feathers and pellets and droppings; they chopped wood; they swept shards of glass from the floor.

This eased Renzo's fear a little, but it never ended. Fear sent him vivid waking dreams of shattered cups and bowls, of the
padrone
's angry face, of pulling Pia through the marketplace, begging for scraps.

Renzo breathed . . . breathed it all into the glass.

◆      ◆      ◆

Late one night, as he hastened through a dark alley on his way to the glassworks, Renzo heard a noise.

He stopped. Held up his lantern. Peered deep into the narrow cave of the alley.

Light shivered across the pavement at his feet and bloomed on the walls beside him. But beyond, darkness clotted thick.

He heard the plash and ripple of waves against the sides of the canal nearby. The creak of straining boat lines. The soft, hollow
thunk
of one boat drifting into another. A scuttling sounded somewhere up ahead — a rat, no doubt — and the soft wing beat of a bat or a night bird. He breathed in the smells of tar, of fish, of salt, of smoke.

Nothing uncommon. No cause for alarm.

He set off again, a little faster.

Renzo never relished his midnight walk to work. As he hunched against the chill, his lantern throwing long shadows before him, he couldn't stop fear from conjuring phantasms of lurking robbers and assassins. Now his heart began to beat faster; he longed to see the glassworks door before him and know he would soon be safe.

In a moment, though, he heard the sound again. No doubt this time — a footfall.

He took off running — but a voice hailed him, a voice he knew: “Renzo!”

He stopped. Turned round, ready to flee at any moment. Above, a corner of moon peeked through tattered clouds,
but the alley was dark. He held up his lantern. Light seeped across the stone walls, into niches and corners — across a heap of rocky debris where one of the walls had begun to crumble, over a pile of fish bones, up to a window grille. And then down again, just below the window, not ten paces away:

The shape of a man.

The face of a ghost.

He was thinner than he used to be, and a matted beard hid half his face. But Renzo had no doubt who stood before him now, breathing puffs of frozen steam.

His uncle Vittorio.

Who was supposed to be dead.

“You!” Renzo whispered. He felt tears prickling his eyes, surprising him. He blinked them back; he
wouldn't
let Vittorio see.

Vittorio advanced, seeming to drink in the sight of him. “How is Gabriella?” he asked. “How is Pia?”

“Not well. Because of you!”

“I never thought . . . They've never been so harsh before. Never killed family.”

“
You
killed him, as surely as if you'd snapped his neck yourself!”

Vittorio flinched but didn't look away. “I had ideas for the glass, things I wanted to try. He wouldn't let me. Everything had to be
his
way.”

“He was
padrone
. Of course it had to be his way.”

“He was my
brother
.” Vittorio pursed his lips together, shaking his head. “And there was this . . . rage,” he said.
“By the time it loosed its grip, I was halfway across the Mediterranean and it was too late. I wanted to go home, but I knew they'd be coming for me.”

Renzo felt the fire in him cool and shrink and darken. No, surely Vittorio hadn't intended what had happened. He had acted first and thought later, as was his wont. “But what are you doing here now? You're endangering the rest of us! Can't you see that?”

“I thought I could hide from them — and I did! But I was all alone, Renzo. When you're a stranger, when you can't even speak the language . . . When you don't dare to ply your craft . . . I kept my ears tuned for news from home, and I heard about Antonio. I can't understand it, Renzo.”

“They found that letter you sent him,” Renzo said. “Where you asked him for help. It was with him when we found him. It was affixed to the wall with a knife.”

Renzo saw it now — the tipped-over benches, the shattered glass, the spattered blood on the tiles. And Papà, lying on the floor as if sleeping.

Vittorio turned away.
“Maria santissima.”

“Go. Tonight. Stay away from us.”

“But I want to be useful. To Gabriella and Pia and you. There's no place for my mind to rest; every thought is like a knife to the flesh — too painful to abide. If I could but help, I could find peace.”

Peace?
He
wanted peace? “What about us? What about the danger you put us in?
You
want peace?”

Papà used to rail at Vittorio for his carelessness, and
Mama had defended Vittorio. Said that there were worse sins. Said that Vittorio's heart was good.

But after Vittorio had left them — left the republic — she too had seen the evils of carelessness. Of doing what one liked, not heeding one's duty to one's family. Papà — though he'd raged at Vittorio, though he'd said things that in the end could not be unsaid — had loved his brother all the while. But Mama had closed her heart against Vittorio forever.

Even if Renzo could have forgiven Vittorio, Mama would not. But now . . . He would put the family in danger because he wanted
peace
?

“Renzo, please — ”

“You've come,” Renzo said. “You've seen what you have done. Isn't that enough? Now go. You're dead to us. We never want to see you again.”

T
he glass was balky that night. Renzo couldn't concentrate, haunted by his encounter with Vittorio.

One vessel after another went clattering into the broken-glass pail, until Letta held out a hand and offered to wield the blowpipe herself. “Or maybe Federigo should try,” she said, indicating one of the larger boys. “Or Sofia.” She nodded at the leg-clinging girl.

It was a jest, Renzo knew. But he did not laugh.

His uneasiness infected the whole of the glassworks. The children, calm and drowsy at first, began to quarrel. Taddeo's pains grew worse, his complaints louder and more plaintive. Even the birds began to flutter and twitch and pluck at their own feathers.

Still, it looked to be no worse than the waste of several hours, though a waste that Renzo could ill afford. Until the marsh boy — who had recovered from all but the last remnant of his cough — broke out of the circle of children and turned the night into a calamity. Renzo heard a thump, a cry, an ominous rattle. He whirled round to see a crate teetering
dangerously. He dropped the blowpipe and ran, but too late.