The Last Breath in the Glass

On Murano the furnaces never went cold, and Lucia had learned to sleep through the roar of them the way a sailor's child sleeps through the sea.

She had come to the island at eleven, the year after the fever took her mother, apprenticed to Maestro Orsini because her uncle owed him money and a girl was cheaper to give than coin. That had been four years ago. She was fifteen now, and her hands bore the small white scars every glassworker wore like a guild badge, and she could already do things with a blowpipe that made the journeymen mutter. Orsini's workshop made mirrors — the great clear Venetian mirrors that the French and the Austrians paid fortunes for, smuggled out under the Republic's nose, each one a sheet of silvered glass so flawless it seemed less a thing made than a hole cut in the world. The doges had once forbidden the masters to leave the island on pain of death, so precious was the secret. Lucia had thought she knew all of it.

She was wrong about one mirror.

It hung in the room Orsini kept locked, the room behind the cooling shed, and she had seen it only once, by accident, when she came at dawn to bank the fires and found the door ajar. It was no larger than a serving tray, oval, its frame plain dark wood, and it did not behave the way a mirror should. The glass held a faint motion in it, a slow clouding and clearing, like breath fogging a cold pane and fadingand fogging again, though no one stood before it and the morning was warm. Lucia had stood in the doorway with her candle and felt the hairs rise on her arms, and then Orsini's hand had come down on her shoulder, gentle as a confessor, and turned her away, and said only, "Not that one, child. That one is finished."

She had not forgotten it. You do not forget a thing that breathes.

What troubled her, in the weeks after, was the pattern of the Maestro's errands. Orsini was an old man and a famous one, and famous old men did not, as a rule, leave the island. Yet twice that winter he had gone to the city in his good coat, carrying an oval case wrapped in felt, and twice he had gone to a house where someone lay dying — Lucia knew, because she had followed the second time, telling herself it was only curiosity. She had stood in the calle below in the cold and watched the candlelight in an upper window, and watched it gutter, and watched, much later, the black-clad mourners come, and watched Maestro Orsini emerge before them all with his felt-wrapped case held close against his chest like something newly born.

He came back to Murano humming. The next morning the locked room held one more mirror than it had before, and the new one, too, breathed.

Lucia told herself a dozen reasonable things. That the glass was simply cooling. That a draught moved through the shed. That old men were strange and famous old men stranger, and that an apprentice who valued her place did not ask. But she had silvered a hundred mirrors with her own hands, and she knew the cold dead stillness of good glass the way she knew her own face, and these were not still. These held something. And on the night the Maestro returned humming, Lucia lay awake under the furnace-roar and let herself think, at