Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

You are very generous, Senator. I shall comply happily with your request. May I also ask a question of you?

You may.

Why did Perina wish to speak with me about Lepanto?

The senator’s shadowed form is very still for a long time. She didn’t tell you? he finally says.

No, Senator.

I had thought she would have.

A brightly festooned galley passes on the canal outside, on its way to the Bacino. Young men in bright stockings sing and caper on its quarterdeck. The last night of the Sensa, Crivano remembers.

Perina, the senator says, had a brother who was killed at Lepanto. A brother she never knew. She was too young, you see. Did she tell you — who she is?

Crivano tries to moderate his breathing, the tone of his voice. Through the window, the blazing sun seems to spend all its dying light on him. She said she is your cousin, he says. She told me only that.

Yes. She is the youngest daughter of my kinsman Pietro Glissenti, whom I am certain you remember from your youth in Cyprus. Your father was his chief secretary.

My God.

Pardon me?

Her brother—

Was named Gabriel, I believe. He was quite young when he died. About your own age, I should guess.

That is not possible.

I’m sorry?

Lord Glissenti’s daughter died in the plague. She and her mother fled Cyprus before the invasion, and they came here, and they both died in the plague, seventeen years ago. So I was told.

And that is all quite correct, dottore. But you are speaking, I believe, of Lord Glissenti’s elder daughter. Perina left Cyprus in her mother’s womb. She was born here. When her mother and sister died, she was five years old. Her father and her two eldest brothers were slain at Famagusta. And as I said, her youngest brother, Gabriel, died at Lepanto. She never knew those men. But you knew Gabriel quite well, didn’t you?

Crivano realizes with a start that he’s been staring at the setting sun: when he turns toward the senator, the man’s face is blotted by a drifting gobbet of green. Gabriel was my dearest friend in my boyhood, Crivano says. We came here together from Cyprus to enroll at Padua, and we both signed on as bowmen when we heard that Nicosia had fallen. I was next to him when he died. He was blown to bits by a cannonball.

I see. When you narrate your experiences to Perina, dottore, you might consider the omission of that last detail.

I don’t believe it, Crivano says. I cannot believe it.

But Crivano does believe it. He knows it to be true. Or true enough.

Perhaps now, Contarini says, you can see why I was eager for you to make Perina’s acquaintance, even if my coordination of the event was shamefully inept. You are for her the only tangible connection to her family’s past, about which she is quite curious. And — if you will forgive me once again for speaking frankly — I think it’s clear that a close friendship with Perina could be a substantial boon to you, as well. I am an old man, with few years remaining on this earth, so I shall come to my point. Perina is my charge, and I have great fondness for her, but she is not my child. The dowry I am reasonably able to supply for her is insufficient to attract a noble husband, and until now I have been at a loss to find a suitable match for her among the citizenry. As I said, her dowry will not be that of a Contarini daughter, but it will be a considerable sum, particularly for a gentleman like yourself: not old, but no longer young, and seeking to become established in short order. Keep in mind, too, that she is the last of the Glissenti, a noble line. Her children will sit in the Great Council. But, enough! I have said enough. Visit her. Speak with her. Consider.

Everywhere Crivano looks he sees pulsing green shapes — ghost-images of the sun, obliterating everything. The floor beneath the chair seems to move, as if the palace has slipped off its piling and now floats freely on the waves. A sound fills his ears like someone blowing softly into them.

But, Senator, Crivano whispers, the young lady is wedded to Christ. Is she not?

She is not. She is betrothed to Christ. And I am not at all certain that he is the best husband for her. No man could be more constant, of course, but it is not difficult to imagine others who might be more attentive. Are you feeling all right, Vettor? In this light you look quite pale.

By the time Crivano is on his feet again — roused from his faint by a pinch of sal volatile from the senator’s laboratory, fortified with a glass of strong brandy — the sun has nearly set, and he’s late for the Uranici banquet. He makes his apologies, says his farewells, and pulls on his cloak, stepping through a side entrance off the courtyard, where the grizzled porter packs crates for the trip to the mainland. Old Rigi trains a skeptical eye on Crivano as he rushes past.

The Morosini palace is halfway back to the Riva del Vin, on this same bank of the Grand Canal. The fastest way to reach it is by boat, but Crivano feels like walking, so he walks. He needs to think, to clear his head, to situate himself. If that means he must miss the banquet as a result, well, at the moment he’s not particularly hungry.

The Sensa is approaching its frenzied end. Every palace spills its inhabitants into the dusk: greasy boys with skintight hose stretched across their buttocks, plump girls divulging their breasts’ upper hemispheres to the cooling air. Crowds of them teeter into boats, parade through secluded alleyways. All wear masks. Soon the night’s first bell will ring, linkboys will emerge to sculpt the darkness with their lanterns, and the city will begin to play at forgetfulness once more: what is permitted, what is forbidden. In the milling street Crivano feels invisible again, a tessera blended into a mosaic.

His feet move him at the pace of his thoughts, carrying him past glazed windows, frescoed walls, the opened and closing shutters of unfamiliar thoroughfares. No matter which way it roams or how far, his mind returns always to the same location: the girl Perina, the question that her existence poses. How is it possible? How is it possible? How is it possible?

He and the Lark left Nicosia some nine months before it fell, almost two years before their fathers and brothers died at Famagusta. The news came while the fleet was at anchor at Guiscardo, about to sail inland for fresh water. The Lark had been scraping the pan of his arquebus, blowing down its barrel. We have just gotten word, my boys, that Famagusta has fallen . Captain Bua on the quarterdeck, his voice quaking with rage. General Bragadin, God rest his soul, surrendered to Lala Mustafa with honor. And that son of a whore, he cut off his nose and his ears. The infidel savages flayed him alive, they stuffed his skin with straw, they paraded it through the streets on the back of a cow. And they will suffer heartily, my boys, for what they have done . The expression on the Lark’s face — anguished, frightened, furious, thrilled — echoed the contents of his own heart. Fatherless now. The last of their clans. Both thirteen years old.

Until today he has never once tried to imagine what it must have been like for the women: searching the harbor at Kyrenia for some Genoese or Ragusan captain willing to make arrangements, then crushed in the dark hold of a rolling ship among splintered crates and bolts of cloth, palms clamped over their children’s wet faces, because what if the Turks were to hear? During the sack of Tunis in 1574, word got round to Crivano’s orta that the wife of a Spanish officer had barricaded herself and her five daughters in a house on the harbor’s edge. The taunting janissaries took an hour to break her door, by which time the wife had smashed each young skull with a belaying pin and slit her own throat. What stories did young Perina hear from the downturned mouths of her mother and sister before the plague came for them? What might she remember of those stories now? How is it possible?