The Mirror Thief(58)

Here, dottore, the linkboy says. The Salamander.

Crivano gives him a few copper gazettes and sends him on his way. No sign marks the building: an ordinary two-story shop, its shutters replaced by rectangles of clear aqua glass, firelight falling through the drapes behind them. There’s another window set in the door, this one stained a startling orange, with a translucent red lizard wriggling at its center. The door swings open with a touch.

He’s not sure what to expect inside—knife-wielding gamblers, bare-bosomed whores—but it’s a quiet place: a large room lit by oil lamps with a hearth at the far end; an old woman and what must be her grown son at work behind a long wooden counter; a ceiling hung thickly with game, sausages, cured hams. In the corner a young man strums a cittern, singing wordlessly. A halfdozen or so laborers are scattered across eight tables, dining or sipping cups of wine. Crivano spots the two he’s looking for right away, but stands empty-faced in the entrance until the old woman comes for his stick and robe.

Would you care for soup, dottore? We have good sausage, too. And a pheasant.

Just wine.

Crivano seats himself at an empty table. After a moment, the glassmaker Serena appears at his elbow, his hat in his hand. Dottore, he says.

Maestro. Will you join me?

Thank you, dottore. Please allow me to present my eldest son, Alexandro.

The boy is twelve or thirteen, with a serious face. He already bears small scars on his hands and forearms from the furnaces. His bow is dignified and respectful. His eyes are a man’s eyes. Crivano thinks briefly of his own youth: when he and the Lark left Cyprus for Padua, they were this boy’s age. He doubts greatly that either was so poised.

You help your father in the workshop? Crivano says.

Yes, dottore.

He also studies with the Augustinians, Serena says. He’s a good student.

Serena musses the boy’s chestnut hair with his broad right hand. His first three fingers lack their tips; each ends abruptly with a variegated whorl of scar tissue. Crivano hadn’t noticed this before. Do you enjoy your studies, Alexandro? he asks the boy.

No, dottore.

Serena laughs. He’d rather be working the glass, he says. He thinks the lessons are worthless. Sometimes I agree. The friars make him learn Latin, and the language of court. Why? Better for a tradesman to learn English, don’t you think? Or Dutch.

As he says this, Serena gives Crivano a pointed look that makes him uneasy. Well, maestro, Crivano says, those are the languages of the nobility. And tradesmen want to sell to the nobility. Is this not so?

Tradesmen want to sell to those with access to money and markets, Serena says. Like the English. And the Dutch.

As Serena settles into the chair his son pulls out for him, Crivano steals a glance across the room. The silverer Verzelin hasn’t moved from his spot by the fire. He’s slumped forward, his head on the table. Crivano knows him by the tremors in his legs.

Serena has placed a parcel on the oak planks. Those sketches you gave me were very good, dottore, he says. Very clear and detailed.

Yes. I didn’t make them.

Serena smiles. My compliments, then, to your friend’s draughtsmanship, he says. He leans forward. I understand why your friend wants to remain in the shadows, he says. This kind of work—not everyone will do it. Not these days.

You don’t want the job?

I’ll do the job, dottore. But I’ll have to choose my help with care. As you’ve seen, there has been—how to put it?—an increase in piety throughout the patriarchate. Piety of a particular sort. And all of us praise God for this, of course. But often we’re surprised to find practices once thought merely eccentric now being decried as heresy. I see this happen in my own workshop. So I must be cautious. For this piece, of course, we also need a metalworker who can be trusted. Fortunately I know of one.

Crivano nods. He has opened his mouth to reply when a yelp comes from near the hearth; Verzelin is upright in his chair. He jerks his head left and right, barking gibberish, then slouches to the table again. The cittern player shoots a quick look at him, but never breaks time.

He’s drunk? Crivano says.

He’s mad.

Crivano looks at Serena, doing his best to feign surprise.

Serena shrugs. It happens to them sometimes, he says.

To whom?

To the silverers. They go mad. No one knows why. Runs in their families, I suppose.

Crivano looks at Verzelin again. He’s rolling his forehead back and forth across the wood, spilling his wine. Can he still work? Crivano asks. As if this concern has only now occurred to him.

Serena is silent for a moment. Then he flips aside the folds of white cotton that envelop the parcel before him.

The gesture seems to uncover a hole cut through the tabletop. Leaning forward, Crivano expects to see Serena’s legs, but his eyes find instead the exposed beams of the ceiling—and then a face, his own, with terrible clarity. He puts a hand on the table’s edge to keep his balance.

Go on, dottore. Pick it up.

Crivano slips his slender fingers beneath the cloth and lifts the mirror to his face. It’s about a foot long, several inches across, rounded at the corners, in precise accordance with Trist?o’s sketch. The glass is perfectly flat, uniformly thick and clear. Crivano tilts it toward the firelight to check the silvering and finds no blemishes. A dancing ghost-light appears across the room, on the wall above the hearth, and then vanishes when he tilts the glass back.