by Imogen Rossi
‘All right. Thank you, di Sarvos,’ said Duchess Catriona, dismissing the priest with a wave of her hand before he even had a chance to respond to Bianca’s offer. ‘Stand up, Bianca.’
Bianca clambered quickly to her feet and bowed to the Duchess.
Duchess Catriona sat back in her throne. ‘I don’t mean to be harsh,’ she said. ‘I know what it’s like to have to deal with a huge responsibility when you’d rather be off with your friends,’ she added, meeting Bianca’s eyes and flashing her a lopsided smile. Then her face turned serious again. ‘I know I could have picked one of the older apprentices, or Carlo de Seville or Laura Dexteris – her reputation especially is growing by the day. But I didn’t, Bianca. I chose you. And I want you to fix this. For the sake of Master di Lombardi’s legacy.’
‘I will,’ Bianca said, and she meant it. The Duchess was right – she needed to do better.
‘OK then, shoo,’ said Duchess Catriona, and she threw her a wink.
Bianca set off at once for the studio, hurrying through the secret passages to the painting in Filpepi’s office so that she would be there before any of the apprentices arrived. She’d half-hoped that the Duchess was mistaken, that the Cathedral’s painting would be on its easel where she’d left it. But it was gone. Bianca spent a few minutes tidying up the paperwork, which she wasn’t even surprised to see had been scattered across the floor, and then sat down to wait.
The apprentices all arrived together. Bianca could hear Lucia giving them orders as they came down the corridor. She tried not to feel annoyed – she had walked out on them yesterday, after all. Lucia was just being a good head apprentice. Then Bianca heard her own name and stiffened.
‘ … wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t even show – Oh.’ Lucia stopped, her jaw dropping when she saw Bianca sitting in the studio.
‘Good morning,’ said Bianca coolly.
‘Morning, Mistress Bianca,’ Gabriella chanted in a childish sing-song voice. Bianca put down the papers she’d been reading and tried to give them all a stern look.
‘I need to know what happened to the Cathedral painting. Who saw it last?’
The younger apprentices all looked around with expressions of perfect innocence, which was pretty suspicious, but not as suspicious as Rosa, Ezio, Cosimo and Lucia’s nonchalant silence.
‘Rosa, did you finish it?’
‘We all worked on it together,’ said Rosa. ‘After you left. We worked all night.’
Bianca nodded. ‘And who packed it up to be transported?’
‘I did,’ said Lucia.
‘And who handed it over to the courier?’
There was silence again. Bianca waited as long as she could bring herself to, hoping the uncomfortable pause would get one of the others to speak – but it was no good. Each apprentice looked as clueless as the next.
‘So we don’t know whether they actually picked it up? Or who let them in? So it could have been lost, or stolen, or anything? And you have no idea what happened?’
‘I bet it was stolen,’ said Gabriella.
Lucia nodded. ‘I should think so,’ she said. ‘I know if I was Laura Dexteris … ’ Lucia paused and put her hand to her mouth dramatically as if she had said too much.
Bianca couldn’t believe Lucia was blaming Laura Dexteris – an artist from the south of the city whose detailed religious frescoes were earning her a growing reputation and increasingly valuable commissions. It just didn’t make sense that she would steal another artist’s painting. Bianca addressed the bowed figure of Lucia with gritted teeth. ‘Please … go on, Lucia.’
Lucia looked up at Bianca with a cool gaze. ‘If I was Laura Dexteris I’d want to make sure the di Lombardi name was ruined. The name is all we have, after all.’
‘That’s not true,’ said Bianca. ‘I know Master di Lombardi has gone, but you’re all wonderful artists. And di Lombardi and Filpepi’s secrets are still safe with us – with me. We’d be in a perfectly good position if … ’ She swallowed back the words if you’d all just stop fighting me at every step. ‘If we could just catch up on the schedule.’
‘You really are in your own little world, aren’t you?’ Lucia sneered. ‘Face it, girl. None of us would be here if we didn’t owe the Duchess a debt for not throwing us all in jail when Filpepi betrayed her. Cosimo and I could’ve set up our own studios. The rest would’ve found work with other artists. But no – we stayed here, to be bossed around by an incompetent child.’
The blood rushed to Bianca’s cheeks. She got up from her chair and stood in front of her apprentices. ‘I might not be the best master ever but I’d be a lot better if you weren’t such a bully!’ she snapped.
‘What, do you think the Duchess gave you this position because of your talent? Because of your experience?’ Lucia’s hand snaked out and she snatched di Lombardi’s letter out of Bianca’s pocket. She held it up to the other apprentices. ‘This is the only reason you’re even here – because you were di Lombardi’s pet. It’s not going to help you find the Archbishop’s painting, is it?’
‘Give that back!’ Bianca shouted. She made a grab for the paper and it crumpled in her hand as she tugged it out of Lucia’s grip. She folded it carefully and shoved it in her pocket. ‘It was you, wasn’t it? You snuck down here last night, or this morning, and got rid of the painting somehow!’
Lucia crossed her arms. ‘I didn’t. And I can prove it. Can’t I, Cosimo?’
Bianca planted her hands on her hips, feeling more than a bit ridiculous as she looked up into Cosimo’s face. He looked uncomfortable, his face flushed, and then he met Lucia’s eyes and nodded.
‘Yes. Lucia didn’t come down here last night. She was, um … she was with me. All night.’
Gabriella and Gennaro burst out into giggles, and Rosa’s cheeks darkened as she stared at the ceiling.
Yuck! Bianca met Cosimo’s eyes, and her shoulders slumped. He might be bossy and annoying and way too susceptible to Lucia’s bad influence, but she knew he wouldn’t lie to her. Anyway, who in their right mind would say they were Lucia’s boyfriend if it wasn’t true?
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘But there’s still a rule, you know! Apprentices need to concentrate on their work, not their fellow apprentices!’
Lucia gave a short laugh. ‘That’s a stupid rule. Are you going to fire us, girl? I’m trembling, honestly.’
Bianca ground her teeth together. She knew she couldn’t get rid of Lucia without also firing Cosimo, and anyway she couldn’t afford to lose either of them. I’m not going to give her the satisfaction.
‘No, I am not going to fire you. You’re going to help me redo the Archbishop’s commission,’ she said. ‘All of you. I don’t think there’s much chance of finding it, so we’re going to work on it in sections until it’s done.’ All the apprentices groaned, but Bianca held up her hands. ‘It’ll go quicker if we all do some. I won’t slack off, either. It’ll be done in no time – I promise.’
There was a general shrugging and muttering, but at least none of them seemed to actually be about to mutiny. Cosimo even helped Bianca to stretch the canvas over a new frame without being asked.
She couldn’t help sneaking a look at him as they worked. She knew he was basically an adult now, old enough to marry Lucia if he’d really wanted to – though the idea gave her the creeping chills. But she still kind of wanted to ask him why – for the love of paint, why Lucia? She was a bully, and she wasn’t even as good an artist as him! But she managed to control herself, deciding to focus on her work.
As the morning wore on, Bianca allowed herself to hope that the pressure was actually going to be good for them all in the end. Francesca and Sebastiano worked well together on the background washes for the sweeping hills and little dips of the golden valley, carefully copying di Lombardi’s original sketches for the layout, and they seemed pleased when Bianca told them they were doing good work. Gabriella took charge of the far left hand of the painting, adding trees and the distant blue of faraway
mountains, and even though Bianca didn’t think she’d ever like her, she did at least seem to want to do the best work she could. With Ezio working on the right and Domenico in the middle, it wasn’t long before Rosa and Gennaro were able to begin the pilgrims, and Rosa took Bianca’s suggestion of repositioning the white-robed priest without complaint.
Bianca herself moved around the canvas, focusing on small details, trying to contribute without getting in anyone’s way. She painted small white flowers that dotted the grassy hill in the foreground, then climbed up on a stepladder and animated a flock of birds that shot across the sky. Cosimo and Lucia worked around them all with the ether and the shimmer, adding space and glow to the painting. Even Lucia’s work was beautiful – she certainly knew how to make it seem as though the soft golden light was pouring out of the painted sky into the room.
‘That’s great!’ Bianca said, standing back to take in the whole. Then her eyes fell on the rolling hills, and her pretty white flowers … and they were gone. They’d been painted over with swaying grass, as if they’d never been there. She looked up at the patch of sky, searching for her birds, but they’d vanished too. Her gaze flashed back and forth over the painting – every change she’d made had been rubbed out or painted over. Even the fat priest was back in his original position.
Bianca turned on Lucia, her nostrils flaring with anger. ‘Lucia, I can’t believe you! Do you hate me this much? You can’t even stand it if I paint a couple of flowers on this picture?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Lucia shrugged. ‘Last I saw, Gabriella was working on that section.’
Gabriella sniggered behind her hand. Bianca sucked in a deep breath to yell at her, but then Cosimo laid a hand on her shoulder.
‘Bianca, I think you might be a bit too invested in this,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘It’s just … I know it hurts when your work doesn’t make it into the final painting,’ he said, ‘but it’s not the end of the world. It’s just Gabriella being silly. It hasn’t hurt the painting.’
‘If you can’t deal with a little insubordination from the youngsters, it doesn’t seem like this is going to be a very good job for you,’ said Lucia. Bianca took a deep breath, allowing herself to briefly fantasise about dunking Lucia head first into a bucket of really strong paint remover.
‘Well, I promised Duchess Catriona I’d try,’ she said, and turned away to pick up the teetering pile of paperwork. ‘I don’t want to make more work for Gabriella, so I’ll be over here, trying to make our supply accounts add up.’
She sat at a nearby bench and sighed at the big pile of receipts and invoices and lists and columns of numbers. They meant little to her except she could recognise that all the numbers seemed intimidatingly large. She was going to try and do this job, and do it properly, if only to spite Lucia. But still, there was a small voice in the back of her head that nagged and tugged at her.
She’s right. Even if I could do the job, they’ll never let me do it properly.
Maybe it was best for everyone if she gave up trying.
Chapter Nine
‘Did you get the cat hairs?’
Marco was waiting in the palace courtyard when Bianca arrived with the last purple rays of the setting sun. He held up a small leather pouch. ‘I’ve got about twenty!’
Bianca shifted the leather bag on her shoulder, and the ingredients inside clinked in their pots. ‘And I’ve got the rest. Come on, let’s use my studio in the palace. I don’t want to take this to Filpepi’s house.’
Marco raised his eyebrows, but he didn’t say anything until they’d passed the guards at the door and the lamplighters working on the glowing golden orbs that hung in the halls. When they’d climbed the wide stone steps and turned into the long corridor to the courtiers’ apartments, Marco spoke. ‘Don’t you trust them? Filpepi’s apprentices? Do you think they’re still working for him?’
‘I almost wish I did! No. I’m pretty sure they’re not traitors.’ Bianca sighed. ‘They just hate me.’
Marco furrowed his brow and raised his hands as if about to protest.
‘It’s OK, I can deal with it,’ she said, with a lot more confidence than she felt. ‘But I’m not leaving anything of mine there for them to mess with.’ She put a hand up to her neck and twisted a finger under the bright blue string that held the obsidian medallion, tucked securely under her bodice.
Marco blew out a heavy breath between his teeth. ‘I dunno. I think I’d still swap with you. I’d rather be hated than pitied.’
Bianca winced as she let them into her rooms. ‘That bad?’
‘Father can barely look at me. He keeps saying he wishes he knew how to help me get over it. Because that’s helpful,’ he added, rolling his eyes.
‘Well, I’ll think of something. But right now, let’s make a storia!’ she said, tugging one of her hairs out at the root and holding it up with a flourish.
‘Whatever that is,’ Marco added with a grin.
Bianca lit all the lamps around the room until the shadows were chased into the corners, then pulled di Lombardi’s letter out of her pocket and unfolded it carefully. ‘Ugh!’ she groaned. ‘Lucia’s torn it!’ Or maybe I did when I grabbed it back. Either way, it was Lucia’s stupid fault.
‘It’s all right, I think I can still read it,’ said Marco. He smoothed down the ragged tear along the middle of the paper and held it up to the silvered mirror on the wall.
‘Read it out to me,’ said Bianca, pulling a large ceramic bowl down from a shelf and setting out a steel spoon and an iron stirring stick.
‘One bottle of lux aurumque,’ said Marco. Bianca fished in her bag and pulled out the bottle.
‘I hope we get this right,’ she muttered, as she uncorked it and let the thick, glowing golden liquid meander its way out into the bowl. ‘I’d never normally use a whole bottle! I don’t know how much more of this we’ve got, and all I know is it’s made from some kind of flower … ’
Bianca caught her breath, wondering how she hadn’t realised before. The glowing golden flowers! The ones that grew in the gardens and around the statue of di Lombardi in Oscurita!
There had to be a way back to Oscurita. How else would di Lombardi and Filpepi have been able to keep making their magical paintings? They had to get fresh ingredients from somewhere …
‘Bianca? Are you all right?’ Marco said. Bianca blinked.
‘Fine.’ She tried to think how to explain Oscurita to Marco without sounding like she’d gone a bit mad, but he gestured at the lux aurumque.
‘Only, your paint looks like it’s trying to climb out of the bowl.’
‘Oh!’ Bianca picked up the iron stirrer and tapped gently on the ceramic to make the swirling, shifting lux aurumque settle back in the bottom of the bowl. ‘Thanks. What’s next?’
‘Add a spoonful of ani … ani … ’
‘Animare,’ said Bianca, pulling the last of the batch out of the bag.
‘ … to a mixture of fifty/fifty water and ether, and then add to the lux.’
‘Oh, hang on, I need another bowl.’ Bianca grabbed a second bowl and carefully measured out the ether and the water. They glittered and steamed as they mixed together. She caught Marco staring with wide, fascinated eyes.
‘This is so weird,’ he said. ‘This is like sorcery or something!’
‘Well, it basically is sorcery,’ Bianca admitted, with a smile. She’d forgotten just how magical it all looked when you hadn’t seen it done before. ‘It’s just that we use it to make paint.’ She fished in a drawer and handed him a pair of shaded goggles. ‘Here, put these on. We don’t know what’s going to happen when we mix all this stuff together!’
She carefully picked up the single long, brown hair and lowered it slowly into the bowl.
At once, the mixture stopped bubbling and settled. The hair lay on the surface for a second, then fizzed and melted away. Without Bianca even stirring it, the paint turned a glassy silver colour like a mirror, its
surface more flat and perfectly reflective than the actual mirror on the wall. Bianca leaned over it and gazed into her own face.
‘What now?’ she asked Marco.
‘Two crushed, fermented Indigofera leaves.’
Bianca used a pair of tweezers to remove the flower petals from the smelly purple liquid they’d been pickling in. ‘I guess this is for colour,’ she told Marco as she dropped them into a mortar and ground them up quickly. ‘These are just normal ingredients. We use them for making indigo paint.’
She scraped the crushed leaves into the mixture and stirred it up with the iron stick – and yes, it slowly turned a deep, metallic blue colour.
‘And a single flake of gold leaf,’ Marco went on.
Bianca very carefully removed the silk covering from a sheet of gold that’d been pounded so thin it was like a piece of tissue. The corner flaked off at the lightest touch of her tweezers and she held her breath so it wouldn’t blow away before she could drop it in the mixture.
‘And now, Nimbus’s contribution,’ Marco said, holding out the small bag. Bianca reached inside and carefully separated two of the short black hairs from the clump that clung to the sides of the bag.
She dropped the hairs in, and they fizzed and melted into the paint just like her own hair had, but instead of silver, the mixture instantly turned a deep, glistening blue-black with strange highlights of green and purple, just like the shell of a beetle. Or like the surface of the obsidian medallion.
‘Now just add some ground bone for texture,’ Bianca muttered, carefully stirring in a few spoonfuls of the grainy white substance. ‘And then speak the words … ’ She peered over Marco’s shoulder and he held up the letter to the mirror so she could read them. ‘Argh,’ she muttered, ‘they’re right on the tear!’
She pulled the torn halves of the paper together, held it up to the mirror and squinted at the words: