Wanda smiled sadly at all this useless bravery.
Tuesday, 14th February. Today I was startled to discover that I had spent all morning staring at a tiny rip in the wallpaper. I have to take care that I do not truly go mad. If only I could pull myself together and sit at my workbench! Patrizia has offered to buy me some more glass. She probably believes that she can keep me quiet this way . . .
“So? Have you read it all?”
Wanda gave a start. She hadn’t noticed Marie wake up.
“No,” she choked out. “But I have read enough! It’s a good thing you wrote everything down. What do you think the police would say if I showed them this?”
Marie shook her head weakly. “No, not the police.”
“But why ever not? They can’t go killing people and locking you up here and—”
Wanda stopped when she felt Marie’s cold hand on her arm.
“Please don’t, I’m begging you! You have to think of Sylvie. You have to use what you know to help her . . .”
“What do you mean? Surely it would help Sylvie if all of this was known and investigated?” Wanda asked, frowning. But Marie’s eyes closed once more. Her moments of wakefulness were getting ever shorter—the realization struck Wanda like a thunderbolt. She had to face the truth. Marie was not going to get better. She had been fooling herself.
Marie slept. Her breath came and went in gasps, and she tossed and turned restlessly.
The doctor had looked even more worried after his last visit. He had stood in the hallway, talking urgently to Patrizia. A little while later Patrizia had come into the room and taken Sylvie’s cradle away. Then she put a candle on the bedside table. Not long after that a black-clad priest arrived. He was very old. He read a passage from the Bible aloud to Marie in Latin. Soon the sickroom was filled with the scent of incense.
Wanda stood at the foot of Marie’s bed together with the count and Patrizia. Although she had never witnessed such a ceremony before now, she knew what was going on. This was the Extreme Unction. The priest anointed Marie with blessed oil as she lay dying to bring her closer to God, and he was saying a prayer for her comfort. As she lay dying . . . every fiber of Wanda’s being recoiled at the knowledge.
“Marie, darling Marie, you mustn’t die,” she whispered after the priest had left the room with Patrizia and the count. Her heart clenched with fear. “Stay with us, please. We love you. And we need you. I . . . don’t know that I’m as strong as you think I am.”
She stroked Marie’s cheek. As she leaned forward, the diary hidden inside her bodice pushed at her belly. She had only been able to forget for the briefest moment how Marie had suffered, how she had been mistreated.
How sanctimonious Patrizia had been, standing there next to the priest . . . Wanda had to struggle to stay calm. She had to think of Marie. And of what Marie had told her: she had to use what she knew to help Sylvie. By now Wanda knew what that meant, though everything within her struggled against it.
Marie opened her eyes. A strange light shone in them that Wanda had never seen before. It was as though they were glowing from within.
“Wanda, dearest . . . I still have so much I want to say to you. But . . . too weak. You must . . . take Sylvie back to Lauscha. You promised. My daughter must grow up among glassblowers, not among . . . murderers.”
“She’ll grow up with you!” Wanda called out in desperation. “You’ll be well again soon; the fever just has to leave you.”
Marie shook her head almost imperceptibly. “The fever won’t leave. I shall.”
And she shut her eyes for the last time.
31
The funeral took place the very next day. That was the way things were done in Italy, the countess explained. Wanda was tearful and devastated.
There was no time to tell Lauscha. No time for Johanna and Peter and Magnus to come and see Marie buried. No time even to get used to the idea that she was dead. Beautiful Marie. Marie with the sparkle in her eyes.
Only a few people gathered for the burial: the count and his wife, Carla and another chambermaid, and Wanda. Sylvie was with the wet nurse, and Franco was in prison in America. Nobody had even told him yet that his wife was dead.
The cemetery was not like the ones Wanda knew in New York. Nor was it like the one in Lauscha. Wanda watched, her eyes blank, as Marie’s coffin was placed in a niche in a huge stone wall. One niche among many, with a hastily chiseled inscription. All around, on either side, above and below, were more niches with their own dead bodies. No flowers, no crosses, no “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” no return to the bosom of Mother Earth. The ground here was too stony to receive the dead.