The Glassblower of Murano - Marina Fiorato [99]
And so it was. Alessandro's fingertips were suddenly soaked, and the thin vellum began to bubble beneath their wetness till he hurriedly wiped his hands on his robe. For here it was, proof - irrevocable and incontrovertible. The last pages were measurements and drawings that pertained to the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Alessandro sat back as the enormity engulfed him. In a legacy of treachery, that room had once housed Vittorio Orlando, Prime Minister of Italy. Had Orlando and the other signatories -Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau - looked into Corradino's glass as they had cut the heart and soul out of Germany in that `Treaty' of 1919, and set in train the inevitable grinding machine which led to the Second World War? Ill deeds bred ill deeds, never more so than here. Alessandro could have wept. He had solved the mystery, but brought the answer Leonora dreaded.
Leonora.
His eye caught her name on the page - the last pair of pages in the book. Here the writing was different - scrawled, passionate, not exact and mathematical, and here and there was a splash of brine or tears. So Alessandro sat and read the letter Corradino had written to his daughter, which could have been written to Leonora, his Leonora, herself.
CHAPTER 40
The Ruby
Someone was screaming and crying. Twisting in blood and mess on the sheets. It sounded like Leonora's own voice.
How many hours have I been this way?
Concerned nuns and a doctor in blue scrubs collected at her stirupped feet. Monitoring belts bound her heaving belly. A machine chattered at her side with a needle spiking over reams of graph paper in improbable peaks. The pain darkened her eyes and she called again for Alessandro, as she had done at every labouring of her body. At last, miraculously, he answered. Not as an ephemeral pain-filled daydream - for she had relived their time together to get her through this - but as a strong presence, here by her bed, his firm dry hand holding her damp one tight. She clasped his fingers, hard enough to bruise bone. The fog cleared and she saw him clearly then, raining kisses on her hand and forehead. He held something in his hand - a book. He whispered something in her ear - through the thrum of blood in her head as she pushed again, she heard:
`He came back! Corradino came back!'
The pain abated. She knew its dark ways now - there was time enough for her to say what she had to before it came again.
`I don't care. Don't leave me.'
She heard him say, `never again,' before the pain made her insensible. She was not aware that, as she laboured, he slipped onto her third finger a ring with a ruby red as the banked fires of a furnace. He had been carrying the little box around with him all day - he had meant to propose at the Carnevale, and that had been the reason for his excitement of last night. This was not as he had planned it. This way she knew nothing of the question that had been asked of her. He could have waited for tomorrow, for hearts and flowers, and the bending of one knee. But he wanted her to have the ring now.
In case tomorrow was too late.
CHAPTER 41
The Letter (part 1)
Leonora was still. Alessandro, his eyes still wet, still held her hand. The hand that wore his ring. Her suffering was over.
And the prize? He slept too, in a clear plastic box next to the bed. A small, perfect bundle with a face crumpled from his ordeal, but to Alessandro the most beautiful thing in the world beside Leonora. He would battle tigers for him. His son. He should be in a casket of gold, not this incongruous tupperware.
Alessandro had been there just in time for the birth. The events of last night were as a dream to him - returning in triumph to an empty house, fearing that Leonora had gone away, then spying the winking red light of the answer