Free The Secret of the Glass by Donna Russo Morin Page B

she were wading in deep water. Features came into focus and she approached a middle-aged-looking man as he rose from a tall, leather, winged-back chair, his body creating an almost vulgar sound as it slid against the buckskin.
    “Here, Sophia.” Viviana took her daughter brusquely by the arm and spun her to the two people seated on a faded, garden-print sofa. “Pay your respects to ser and signora da Fuligna.”
    Sophia’s legs trembled as she made her obeisance. With a jolt, she realized her error. The man she thought to be her future father-in-law was in fact her future husband.
    “It is my great honor to meet you, signore, signora.”
    “Young lady.” The elder man gave a curt nod of his head, looking at Sophia with small, beady eyes from beyond a long, curved Roman nose. He wore a grand doublet and waistcoat and a long gray beard below his bald head.
    The woman to his left said nothing at all, but bowed almost imperceptibly from her waist. Sophia thought she saw pity in the wrinkled woman’s face and light eyes but recognized it instead as timidity.
    With a lowered head, she acknowledged the man now standing beside her, offering him a silent curtsy.
    “Signorina.” He took her hand, and bowed over it, making no pretense to kiss it as was custom. “How do you do?”
    His voice and diction were precise and clipped, as meticulous as his extravagant attire of midnight blue doublet trimmed with gold braid, matching breeches, and fine lawn shirt. He lifted Sophia up and out of her bow.
    Pasquale da Fuligna resembled his father, a few less wrinkles perhaps, and a few more hairs on his head, a few of them still brown, but otherwise he was a duplicate of the elder man. Sophia couldn’t fathom his age; she didn’t think he was as old as her own father, but thought he looked to be more of Zeno’s generation than her own. His dark eyes appeared intelligent and hard, the closed and shuttered windows of an armored soul.
    “Please sit,” he offered, but no warmth or courtesy reverberated in his voice, only instruction.
    Sophia sat beside her mother on the smaller rose-colored loveseat across from the larger sofa while her father stood behind them.
    “You have a lovely home.” Viviana’s words skipped along the finely strung tension filling the room.
    “It has been in our family for over two hundred years,” the elder da Fuligna informed them with more than a little superciliousness. “We have more rooms than any other house on the canal.”
    “Really?” Viviana turned to the woman of the house. “I’m sure that keeps your servants busy.”
    Renata da Fuligna didn’t open her mouth; her thin, pale lips spread in a pale imitation of a smile. Eugenio da Fuligna answered for his wife. “They are proficient at their work.”
    Sophia glanced about. The massive home shone clean, not a speck of dirt lay on the corners of the marble floor or on the intricately carved wainscoting and many-faceted chandelier above their heads. With a critical eye, Sophia saw beyond the pristine cleanliness, to the chipped stone, peeling paint, and distinct absence of art and ornamentation, save for the painted ceiling coves. Above her, naked, plump cherubs floated upon fluffy white clouds, their grins sardonic, as if they mocked her. On her hosts’ attire, she saw the same shabby grandeur in the frayed cuffs and yellowed lace of their demodé garments.
    “You must be quite pleased,” Viviana said.
    “Tell me, young lady, have you been educated?”
    Sophia’s eyelids flapped, taken aback by the abruptness of the elder da Fuligna’s question, by the personal nature of it so soon upon their acquaintance. Pasquale showed no reaction to his father’s brusque rudeness. He sat stiff in his chair, chin in hand, flat stare intent and unsurprised. Understanding dawned upon Sophia with the flash of a fire’s first spark. This is why they were there; she must pass muster in the eyes of the father who dominated this peculiar family. She was a