The Glassmaker's Daughter

Chapter 1

ONE

Scalding heat rose up before her, reaching deep inside like a selfish lover grasping for her soul. Fiery vapors scorched fragile facial skin. Yellow-orange flames seared their impression in her eyes.When she pulled away, when she finally turned her gaze from the fire, her vision in the dim light of the stone-walled factory would be nothing more than the eerie specters of the flames’ flickering tendrils.

Sophia Fiolario performed the next step in making the glass in an instant of time, instincts and years of practice led the way; from the feel of the borcèlla in her hand, from the changing odor, to the color of the molten material as it began to solidify.

The crucial moment came; the glass barely still liquid…on the precipice of becoming a solid. Then, and only then, did she use her special tongs to conceive its ever-lasting form. If she didn’t perform perfectly, if her ministrations were inelegant or slow in this tiny void of time, she would have to start again.

The layers of clothing encasing her body wrapped the heat of the furnace around her. With a stab of envy, Sophia pictured the men of Murano who worked the glass, clad in no more than thin linen shirts and lightweight breeches. As a woman, f*******n to work the furnaces, particularly during these prohibited hours after the evening vigil’s bells, she had no choice but to stand before the radiating heat clad in chemise and gown.

Sweat pooled beneath her breasts and trickled down the small of her back. Down her forehead, perching precariously on her brow. Within minutes of stepping into the circle of the furnace’s sweltering air—a heat over two thousand degrees—sweat drenched her. Her body’s pungent odor soon vied for dominance over the caustic scent of melting minerals and burning wood.

Sophia pulled the long, heavy blowpipe out of the rectangular door, the ball of volcanic material retreating last. With a mother’s kiss, she put her lips to the tapered end of the canna da soffio and blew. As the ball of material expanded and changed, she knew the thrill unlike any other she’d known in all her nineteen years.

The time came…the moment. She brought the glass to life. The malleable substance glowed. The once-clear material absorbed the heat of the flames, turning fiery amber. It waited for—longed for—her touch as the yearning lover awaits the final throes of passion.

Quickly Sophia spun to her scagno, the uniquely designed table. She sat on the hard bench in the U-shaped space created by two slim metal arms running perpendicular to the bench on either side of her. Placing the long ferro sbuso across the braces, her left palm pushed and pulled against it, always spinning, always keeping gravity’s pull on the fluid material equal. With her right hand, she grabbed the borcèlla and reached for the still-pliable mass.

For a tick, she closed her eyes, envisioning the shape. When she looked up, it was there on the end of her rod. She could see it, therefore she could make it. Sophia set to her work.

The man moved out of the corner’s shadows. Sophia flinched. He’d been quiet for so long, she had forgotten him. As he stood to stoke the crugioli, she remembered his presence and felt glad for it.

Uncountable were the nights they had worked together like this. From her youngest days, he had indulged her unlawful interest in the glassmaking, teaching and encouraging her, until her skills matched those of his—Zeno Fiolario, one of Venice’s glassmaking maestri, her papa.

Zeno moved from furnace to furnace, adding the alder wood wherever needed, checking the water in the many buckets scattered through the factory. The glow of the flames rose and spread to the darkest corners of the stone fabbrica. The pervasive, sweet scent of burning alder tree permeated the warm air. For his daughter, Zeno often fulfilled the duties of the stizzador—the man whose sole function was to keep the fires of the furnaces blazing—and his old frayed work shirt, nearly worn out in spots, bore the small umber marks of the sparks that so frequently leaped out of the crucibles.

He shuffled about slower than in years past, with shoulders permanently hunched from so many years bent over the glass. Yet he jigged from chore to chore with surprising agility. As he made his way past his daughter, Zeno brushed a long lock of her deep chestnut hair away from her face, thick and work-roughed fingers wrapped it behind her ear with graceful gentleness. The touch succor to her soul and a jolt to her muse. Her wide mouth curved in a soft smile; her large, slanted blue eyes remained focused on the work before her.

“It was the Greeks you know…uh, no,” her father began, faltered, tilting his head to the side to think as he often did of late.

Sophia nearly rolled her eyes heavenward as young people are wont to do when their elders launched into an oft-repeated tale, but she stifled the impulse. She could have finished the sentence for him; she’d heard this story so many times she knew it by heart. She gifted her father the silence to tell it at his own pace.

She would work, he would talk, and though he feigned unconcern for her methodology, his narrow, pale eyes, framed by thick gray lashes, followed each flick of her wrist, each squeeze of her pinchers. Her smile remained, dampened by but a twinge of impatience; she had learned too much, been loved too well by this man to begrudge him his rapt study of her work.

“The Phoenicians, that’s it,” Zeno’s voice rang with triumph. “They had been merchants, traders of nitrum, taking refuge on the shore for the night. They could find no rocks to put in their fires, to hold their cooking pots. So they pilfered a few pieces of their own goods.

“This was years and years before the birth of our Lord and they were simple, uneducated people. When the clumps of nitrum liquefied and mixed with the sand, the beach flowed with trickles of transparent fluid. They thought they witnessed a miracle, but they were seeing glass…the first glass.”

Her father’s voice became a cadence, like the lapping of the lagoon waves upon the shore that surrounded them; its rhythmic vibrato paced her work. Her left hand twisted the ferro sbuso while the right manipulated the tongs…pinching here, shaping there.

“Our family has always made the glass. Since Pietro Fiolario’s time four hundred years ago, we have guarded the secret.”

Sophia stole a glance at him; young eyes found the old and embraced in understanding. This secret had been the family’s blessing as well as its curse. It had brought them world renown and an abundance of fortune greater than many a noble Venetian family. And yet it had made them prisoners in their homeland, and Sophia, a woman who knew the secret, doubly condemned.

Time became Sophia’s rivals; the glass grew harder and harder to contort with just gentle guidance. Already its form was a visual masterpiece…the delicate base, the long fragile flute, the bowl a perfectly symmetrical shape. Her hands flew, waves undulated on the rim; she captured the fluidity to the rapidly solidifying form.

A deep sigh, an exhalation of pure satisfaction. Sophia straightened her curled shoulders, bending her head from side to side to stretch tense neck muscles, tight from so long in one position. She studied the piece before her, daring to peek at her father. In his eyes glowing with pride, she saw confirmation of what she felt, already this was a remarkable piece…but it was not done yet.

“Now you will add our special touch, sì?” her father asked as he retrieved the special, smaller pinchers from another scagno.

This smile of Sophia’s came from indulgence. Keeping alive the delusion for her father was yet another small price to pay him. The technique she would do next, the a morise, to lay minuscule strands of colored glass in a pattern on this base piece, had made their fabbrica famous. Since its release to the public, her father had reveled in the accolades he received over its genius and beauty. Her father had never, could never, reveal that the invention had been Sophia’s.

“Sì, Papa.” Sophia lay down the larger tongs, flexing the tight muscles of her hands. She gathered the long abundance of brunette hair flowing without restraint around her shoulders, unbound from its usually pulled-back style, and laid it neatly against her back and out of her way. Taking up the more delicate pinchers from her father’s hand, she rolled her shoulders once more and set to work.

Zeno hovered by her shoulder, leaning forward to watch as her long, slim hands worked their magic, as she wielded the pinchers to apply the threads of magenta glass, smaller than the size of a buttercup’s stem, in precise, straight lines. Dipping the tip of the tweezer-like device into the bucket of water at her feet, releasing the hiss and smoke into the air, Sophia secured each strand with a diminutive drop of cool moisture.

“A little more this way,” Zeno whispered, as if to speak too loudly would be to disturb the fragile material.

“Yes, Father,” Sophia answered automatically.

“It’s patience, having the patience to let the glass develop at its will, to cool and heat, cool and heat naturally,” Zeno chanted close to her ear, his voice—the words—guiding her as they had done she was young. His muted voice small in the cavernous chamber; their presence enveloped by the creative energy. “As the grape slowly ripens on the vine, the sand and silica and nitre become glass on the rod. Ah, you’re getting it now, bellissimo.”

“Grazie, Papa.”

“Next you’re going to—”

The bang, bang, bang of a fist upon wood shattered the quiet like glass crashing upon the stone. The heavy wooden door at the top of the winding stairs jangled and rocked. Someone tried to enter, yet the bolted portal stymied the attempts, locked as always when father and daughter shared these moments.

Zeno and Sophia stiffened, bulging eyes locked.

“Are we discovered?” Sophia’s whisper cracked, strangled with fear. She shoved the rod into her father’s hands, dropping the slender mental pinchers on the hard stone floor below, wincing at the raucous clang that permeated the stillness.

“Cannot be.” Zeno shook his head. “It can no—”

“Zeno, Zeno!” The urgent, distraught male voice slithered through the cracks of the door’s wooden planks. “Let me in.”

Parent and child recognized the tone; Giacomo Mazzoni had worked at the Fiolario family’s glassworks since he was a young man, his relationship evolving into that of a dear and familiar friend. The terror in his recognized voice undeniable; the strangeness of his presence at such a late hour was nothing short of alarming.

With an odd calmness, Zeno pointed toward the door. “Let him in, Phie.”

The dour intent upon her father’s wrinkled countenance screamed that he would brook no argument. Gathering the front of her old, soiled gown, she sprinted up the winding stairs, glancing back at the wizened man who stood stock still, rod and still in hand.

Sophia pushed aside the bolt with a ragged, wrenching screech. The door gave way the instant she freed it. Giacomo rushed in, pushing past Sophia where she stood on the small platform by the door. Clad in his nightshirt, a pair of loosely tied knee-breeches flapping around his legs, he looked a fright with his short hair sticking out at all angles, and his black eyes afire…fear-ridden. Flying down the stairs, he ran to his friend and mentor, grabbing him by the shoulders.

“They’re dead, Zeno. Dead.”

Zeno stared at his friend as he would a stranger, pale eyes squinting beneath his furrowed brow. “Who, Giacomo? Who is dead?”

“Clairomonti, Quirini, Giustinian, those who tried to get to France.”

“Dio mio.” The words slithered from Zeno’s lips as his jaw fell. His legs quivered beneath him visibly. With a shaking hand, he reached into empty air, groping for a stool.

Rushing to his side, Sophia grabbed the wooden seat, yanking it forward, and guiding her father into it with a hand on his arm.

Zeno looked at his beloved daughter’s face. Once more, their eyes locked, frozen by fear. “They have killed them.”