The Seventeenth Arch

About this book

Paris, 1684. Isotta Zanon runs the silvering shed that is making the last mirrors for the King's new gallery at Versailles. She is exacting and feared, and she has cast no reflection in any glass for seventeen years. When her apprentice Margot breathes on a freshly silvered plate with the young carter Luc, Isotta sees a second face appear behind the girl's shoulder. Margot has done what Isotta once did. She has quickened a glass and bound herself to a near-stranger: they will share pain, faces and, if one dies, a slow death. Now a commissioner of the King's Buildings is asking about a phrase in Colbert's old files, and Isotta must decide how much of her own buried winter of 1666, the Venetian informer she loved and the price she paid, she can afford to teach.