What-The-Maestro-Kept
She got into the locked room on the feast of the Ascension, when the whole island went to Mass and the furnaces were left to the lowest apprentices, and Lucia, who had volunteered to mind the fires, let herself in with a key she had pressed into a cake of soap a week before.
There were nine mirrors now. They hung in two soft rows, and the room was full of the faint sound she had felt rather than heard before — a low, layered breathing, nine slow tides out of phase, the room itself seeming to rise and fall. Lucia walked the rows with her candle, and in each clouded oval, just before the glass cleared, she thought she saw a face. Not her own. A different one in each: an old woman, a young man, a child with a gap in its teeth. They surfaced in the breath-fog like swimmers coming up for air and sank again before she could be sure, and she understood then, fully and finally, what her Maestro made when no one paid him for mirrors.
"You found the workshop's true trade," said Orsini, from the doorway.
He was not angry. That was the worst of it. He came in and set down his cane and looked along the rows of breathing glass with the plain tenderness of a man surveying his life's work, which, Lucia realised, was exactly what it was.
"When a person dies," he said, "there is a last breath. You have heard the phrase; everyone has. What no one tells you is that it is *real* — a true and