Read Online The Blind Contessa's New Machine by Carey Wallace - Free Book Online Page A

branches graced the arch of the church door, held in place with swags of cheesecloth, varied here and there by the clouds of white blossoms Carolina’s maid called starlight, or by long tufts of river grass. Roses littered the tables the servants had arranged the evening before on the lawn, where two kitchen maids now stood guard against further attempts by a strapping black crow who had neatly stolen a pair of forks and a shining knife in the small hours of the morning, before a stable boy, defending his own honor in the matter, discovered the true thief and surprised the bird into dropping the spoon that would have completed his setting. Roses lay in heaps on Carolina’s dressing table as her maid helped her into her dress and her mother toyed with her hair. The blindness had advanced so far that she saw the world now as if peering through a sheet of rolled paper—a few sentences on a page, a single face. It made the whole thought of marrying Pietro, which had always seemed to her like a strange dream she might wake from at any moment, seem even more unreal.
    At the church, her failing eyes reduced the blossoms that wound over the church door to a haze of white and green, and her gathered neighbors and relatives to a murmuring mist. She made her way down the aisle by memory and guesswork, taking small steps to avoid stumbling over her yards of silk and lace, catching her balance from time to time when she trod on one of the unfortunate roses that had been scattered in her honor on the worn stones. About halfway down, she caught the sound of a familiar voice and turned to see Turri. He gazed back at her as if it were any other day, and he was only waiting for an answer or her next move in a game. Beside him, Sophia stared up at her with the unreasoned but unerring cunning of a cat, taking in every detail of her dress with greed and suspicion.
    Then Carolina looked back at the altar where a hundred candles wavered, pale in the strong afternoon light, dropping hot wax onto the faces of the uncomplaining crowd of asters and blue phlox massed at their feet. Pietro stood beside the priest, the light bending all around him: handsome, certain, grinning.

    “You’re like a bird,” Pietro complained. “Hold still. The ocean can’t run away.”
    Carolina, who had been turning her head swiftly from side to side in the vain hope of capturing the entire shoreline in a single glance, did as he said. The vast expanse of white sand and the blue band of ocean that stretched beyond it to the sky vanished, replaced by the sea in cameo, a glimmering oval fragment small enough to dangle from a woman’s neck, surrounded by darkness.
    Pietro turned her face to his and kissed it.
    “You are so beautiful,” he whispered. “Maybe I will never love you more than this.”
    Darkness had never frightened Carolina, but during the blazing seaside days of her honeymoon, it became a friend. The bright ocean was a real torment to her, with all the light from a thousand waves streaming into her limited eyes, but when night came, she was again equal: the whole world had also gone blind. In fact, she had the advantage. The blindness had cured her of superstition about the secret qualities of darkness, the dread that things shifted and became strange when not governed by a human eye. Through long association, she had learned that the darkness had no power to alter what it hid. Her hairbrush or pen might be obscured by the blindness, but when she reached for them, they were the same as they had always been. As a result, shadows no longer held any magic for her. Her confidence remained even as the evening sky sank from blue to black. By night, she was even more sure-footed than Pietro, whose dependence on the sunlight made him clumsy in the dark. So she was the one who led him through the unlit corners of the seaside town after the shops had closed and the restaurants had emptied out, as the waiters poured buckets of water onto the stones to wash away