The Blind Contessa's New Machine Read Free Page B

dust behind him.

    Turri, when the time to marry came, had been widely considered an unsuitable husband by the girls his age. For years, he had tormented them with his questions, pranks, and inventions. Most famously, he had trapped a pair of local beauties in the upper reaches of a plane tree for the better part of a day when the primitive pulley elevator they were helping him test failed under the weight of two strapping young men who had hoped to join them in the seclusion of the leaves. As the girls told it, they had only barely survived the ordeal. While Turri worked feverishly to replace the broken boards and repair the twisted mechanism, the lunch hour passed. Now dizzy from hunger, the girls had survived only by catching the wild apples and handkerchief full of cherries their suitors heroically tossed to them in the high branches.
    This was the stuff of legend, but Turri also had a string of lesser crimes to his name. For Loretta Ricci’s fifteenth birthday, he had created strange black candles that burned with green flame. They were the sensation of the evening, until they began to stutter and spark, singeing the hair and dresses of half a dozen young ladies before a resourceful maid drowned the remaining tapers in the punch. He had taught Contessa Santini’s bird to count to one hundred, after which the creature became so proud he refused to sing. Contessa Santini, unable to bear the bird’s constant tally of each second of her life, finally threw the window open and shook the poor thing out of its cage, condemning it to a freedom in which, everyone agreed, its intellectual accomplishments could not be expected to protect it from the wind and the rain. Worse, Turri had no discernible ambition, and beautiful manners that he chose to use only as the spirit moved him, making his frequent social blunders all the more unforgivable.
    But young women’s warm hearts can forgive far more than rude words, and while these were the reasons the girls whispered among themselves or presented tearfully to their parents, the roots of their reluctance to marry Turri sprang from a hundred smaller impressions that the girls themselves could barely name, in part because they were hardly worth mentioning. Sometimes his eyes lit up when speaking with a girl, not at a tender revelation or a witty turn of phrase, but with curiosity about a crystal in her jewelry, or an exotic flower in a nearby vase. His face often remained blank as everyone around him burst into laughter. Most unnerving, he often seemed to hang on a girl’s every word only to reveal under questioning, just moments later, that he hadn’t heard a thing.
    And though he couldn’t seem to hold the thread of conversation in polite society, when a girl, by pure coincidence, stumbled on a subject that was of interest to him, she was lost for the evening. He was capable of ruining an entire dance, talking for hours about salt mines, constellations, metallurgy, lizards, with the innocent confidence of a child convinced that everyone else found the world as strange and fascinating as he did.
    This posed a problem for Turri’s parents, but not one the family was unfamiliar with. The Turri line was known for producing two distinct kinds of men. The majority were careful stewards who had turned the Turri lands into some of the richest in the region through judicious innovation and a remarkable talent for numbers. Turri’s father was a prime specimen of this type: well-respected despite his noticeable shyness, he personally inspected his vast plantings of grain instead of leaving the task in the hands of overseers, and was also responsible for upgrading and expanding the meticulously planned irrigation system his grandfather had introduced to the property half a century before.
    But in a memorable minority of Turri men, this bent toward innovation produced full-blown dreamers of the very worst sort: those with the energy, resources, and intellect to inflict their fancies on the