Free The Blind Contessa's New Machine by Carey Wallace

the ocean, Carolina awoke to find herself alone. Pietro’s sheets were thrown back, already cold. Slightly giddy with the sudden freedom from his constant company, she dressed and found her way down the front stairs and out the door, moving toward her lake with the compulsion of a migrating bird that follows a map buried deeper in his mind than his own thoughts. She spent the day staring at the black water. Her sight had dwindled now so that her field of vision was almost completely overtaken by shadow, with two small bright spots through which she could still see the world, as if through windows on the other side of a room. Through them, she watched the mist burn away and the white sky appear in reflection on the lake. Mirrored clouds drifted across the surface and vanished in the weeds. Waterbirds landed with a rush of back-beating wings and threw the whole world into chaos.
    As evening fell, she thrashed back through the waist-high grass that grew along the river, to Pietro’s house.
    She found him in the kitchen, eating a cold chicken.
    “Where have you been hiding?” he asked.
    “Where do you think?” she said.
    This wasn’t a joke, but on another day he might have taken it for one and smiled. When he didn’t, Carolina crossed to where he sat, leaned over him, and pressed her face against his. He smelled as if he had just come in from riding—traces of new sweat and the sweet, dusty smell of feed from the barn.
    “Where have you been?” she asked.
    Pietro planted a greasy kiss on her cheek. “I bet you were out there all day dreaming without anything to eat,” he said. He lifted a piece of chicken from the cloth on the table. “Well? Aren’t you hungry?”

    Because there was no path from her new home to her lake, Carolina went by a different route each day: through the pines that faced Pietro’s house just beyond the great lawn, or tramping down waist-high swamp grass along the river. In her new rooms, the trunks and boxes of her things, carefully packed by her mother’s maids, stood untouched by her until, in exasperation, a pair of Pietro’s servants broke them open, hung her dresses in the wardrobes, and set her combs and vases on the vanity and tables, executing all these tasks with flawless precision to underscore their disapproval of Carolina’s lack of interest in both her own things and her new home.
    Three days after her return, Turri had still failed to appear.
    The following morning, Carolina opened her window to watch the children of the servants in the side yard. Each figure flared up from the shadows of her blindness only when she looked directly down on them, almost as though she were spying through a glass. A pair of small girls gleefully flung feed at a crowd of white geese, as if their aim was to blind rather than feed the birds, who remained imperturbably greedy despite the hail of hard corn. Boys carried buckets of water from the well to the kitchen, shouting jokes and threats at the older girls, who went right on pinning up the morning linens as though they were deaf. The only exception was a tall girl of perhaps thirteen or fourteen who gave one boy an answer sharp enough that it seemed to freeze him in place for a long moment before he frowned in confusion and ran away. The girl’s features were delicate, framed by a long fall of glossy black hair. She might have passed for an artist’s angel at a distance, but the anger in her eyes was unmistakably of this world.
    When one of the maids arrived with her morning pitcher of water, Carolina tapped on the glass. “Who is that?” she asked, pointing to the girl.
    “Liza,” the maid said.
    “Send her to me, please,” Carolina said.
    A few minutes later, the girl stood in Carolina’s room, taking in all the rich details with furtive, eager glances she seemed to believe she took too quickly for Carolina to notice.
    “Do you know where the Turri house is?” Carolina asked.
    “It is the house on the hill, with the lions,” the