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of order in the mock rococo mirror in her bathroom. She
looked so different to the way she had looked in her own
mirror at four in the morning. She looked at her Venetian
self in the Venetian glass. Her hair was wild, her cheeks
ruddy from the sea breeze, her eyes shining with a zealot's
light. The glass heart was the only constant, as it still hung
from her neck. She thought she looked a mess - even a
little crazy, but at the same time, rather beautiful.
    Someone else thought so too.
    He sat across the aisle from her in the church. Probably thirty or so, extremely well groomed like most Italian men,
tall as his legs tucked uncomfortably behind the pew. And
his face - before she realized, the thought had formed in
her head.

    He looks like he has stepped from a painting.
    At once, she remembered her mother's story, was horrified
that their thoughts had chimed in the same way thirty
years apart. She turned away. But having thought it, she
couldn't take it back. She looked again, and he was still
looking at her. Her cheeks burned and she turned determinedly away once again.
    The music sweetened her thoughts and Nora focused
her eyes on what she had come to see; the great, decorative glass chandelier that was suspended high above her
head, looming out of the dark of the roofspace like an
inverted crystal tree. Numerous droplets hung from decorative branches which seemed so impossibly delicate that
they could hardly support their diamond fruits. Nora tried
to follow each arm of the glass with her eyes, to see how
it curved and turned, but each time she lost her place as
the design bested her. Each crystal teardrop seemed to
capture the candle flames and hold them within the perfection of the prism. She could hear, ringing in her head,
the resonant note she had heard earlier as she passed Murano,
but in another instant realized that this note was real,
tangible. The glass itself was sweetly singing, the timbre of the strings and their vibrations caused every branch and
pendant crystal to sound their own, almost imperceptible
counterpoint. Nora looked at her pamphlet for information
on this miracle her own ancestor had wrought. There was
nothing, but Nora smiled to herself with what she knew.

    It was here when you were alive, Antonio Vivaldi.
    Then, as now, you heard your own compositions echoing back
to you in this crystalline harmony. In point of fact, it was here
before you were even born. And it was made by Corradino
Manin.

     

CHAPTER 5

The Camelopard
    The great chandelier crossed the lagoon, hanging in the
dark barrel. Submerged in water, swinging in complement
to the waves, muffled from all sound and sense. The water
that surrounded it was ink dark, but tiny motes of moonlight hit the prisms here and there, like single diamonds
in pitch. The fluid was cushioning, safe, amniotic. Tomorrow
the chandelier would be born into its purpose. Last night
it had been completed. Tonight it waited. The barrel was
lashed upright in the boat by so many ropes that the great
dark mass looked to have been captured in a fisherman's
net. The boatmen splashed and heaved their oars, singing
an old song of the Piemontese. From inside the barrel, the
chandelier began to sing too.
    Corradino ached, but he would not stop. The chandelier
hung before him on an iron chain in a near-finished state,
shining gold in the flamelight from the furnace. Its crystal arms reached out to him in supplication, as if begging for
completion. One of its five delicate limbs was missing, so
for the final time Corradino reached in the fire. Pushing
his canna da soffio rod into the heart of the melt he rolled
it expertly, drawing out a gather of molten glass, which
clung to the end of his blowpipe. He began rolling the
glass against a hardwood paddle, marvering it into the
correct shape to begin its transformation. Corradino
thought of the glass as living, always living. He had made
a cocoon from which