Serena strolls up beside him, wiping his forehead with a cotton cloth. He still holds the lump of raw glass in his left hand, kneading it like a worry-stone. Crivano rises and returns Serena’s bow. I was just examining your materials, maestro, he says. This is potash, I suppose?
Soda ash, Serena says. From the Levant. The guild buys it through a syndicate with the soapmakers and the majolica makers, who also use it. I’m told it’s made from the ash of a plant that drinks saltwater like the freshest rain, that can uproot itself and move about on the wind to spread its seed, although whether this is true I cannot say.
It’s true enough: Crivano remembers seeing wagons laden with the dry round shrubs along the Syrian coast, and more blowing free along the roadsides. In Tripoli he saw laborers burning it, packing it for shipment to the West—al-qaly, it was called. What of the crushed quartz? he asks. Where does that come from?
The riverbeds of the Ticino and the Adige. The magnesia is from Piedmont. There are other sources, of course, but these—
Alexandro’s angry voice cuts through the shop: he’s just returned from leading Crivano’s gondoliers to the storeroom, and now stops to berate the man who rakes the contents of the smaller furnace. The workman had become inattentive, probably watching Serena with Crivano; now he blanches, refocuses his attention.
Serena grins. We calcine the batch in the small furnace for five hours, he says. It must be raked all the time, so it will heat uniformly, and fuse into frit without melting. If it melts it becomes worthless. It can even destroy the furnace. Every man you see here, dottore, has the capacity to ruin us all at any moment. This is why you often find glassmakers with black eyes, bloody knuckles, absent teeth.
I fear I have become a spectacle in this room.
Serena’s damaged right hand makes a dismissive gesture, but his expression is not so cavalier. Don’t worry yourself, dottore, he says. All the same, perhaps you’ll indulge me in a respite from the heat. Let us retire to my counting room, where I’ll show you what your friend has purchased.
He leads Crivano to a side door bearing an impressive German lock, which opens with a heavy key. The room beyond is small, neat, lit from beside the desk by a window of modest size; Crivano is seated and leaning toward it for a breath of fresh air before he realizes that it’s glazed. Uniform and colorless, the panes appear in the fog of his breath, then vanish again as he moves away.
On the floor behind the desk Serena casts open more bolts, these on a massive strongbox that looks as if the entire building must have been fashioned around it. After a moment he rises, lifts the lid, and reaches inside.
When he turns, the sun blazes out of his broad chest. Crivano lifts his hands to shield his eyes, then lowers them when the brightness fades, only to meet his own wincing face suspended between Serena’s rag-bundled fingers.
Serena sets the mirror on the table. Crivano leans to inspect it, blocking the sight of himself with an open palm. Verzelin’s glass is even larger and clearer than he remembered it, and Serena’s artfully affixed frame hides little of its surface. The frame is crafted from three braided strands of chalcedony glass, perfectly symmetrical, with seven wire threads wound around them. The glass strands, cream-white and identical on their surfaces, flare like opals when caught by the sunlight, disclosing veiled interior colors: fiery red, near-black indigo, the variegated blue-green of a peacock’s tail. The frame must be shaped around a hidden armature of some kind, because it also supports a series of medallions, each about the size of a gold sequin, that float along its outer edge. Crivano notes the designs struck on them—a naked archer, two fighting dogs, a man mounted on a lion, a woman being beaten—and he knows without counting that there are thirty-six. Serena is right to want this out of his shop.
Will this satisfy your friend’s expectations, dottore?
Yes, Crivano says. I’m certain that it will.
Turning again, Serena closes the strongbox lid and begins assembling items on it: twine, thick paper, raw cotton, slats of wood, dry gray-green leaves. I am not a pious man, dottore, he says. As you have probably gathered. But now that this is done, I’m going to make a very sincere confession, and I’m going to give Saint Donatus a few of your friend’s coins. With this item under my roof I have slept not well at all.
I hope for my sake, maestro, that you will keep your confession brief, vague, and tightly focused on the topic at hand.
Serena turns with a wink and a grin. And not mention my impending travels, you mean? he says. No, dottore, I’ll confess those sins after I’ve committed them. I’m sure Amsterdam contains priests of some variety.