Leda covered the drawing immediately with another sheet. But Caterina had already seen the portrait. A young, handsome face. A small mole.
“Is it . . . Filippo?” she asked. She sat down next to Leda.
“It is—but no matter,” said Leda. “Goodness”—she yawned—“I am tired.”
“Do you . . . still miss him?” Caterina asked.
“No,” Leda said. “Only sometimes,” she added. Caterina saw her lips were quivering just a little.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she said, reaching to hug her. She realized she felt a mother’s protectiveness for Leda. Still, there was not much more she could really say. She could not predict the future, and it felt wrong to make false promises. Besides, Leda would not believe any. She was no fool.
“It’s alright,” Leda said, struggling to get up.
Caterina tenderly slid the blank sheet off the portrait, exposing Filippo’s unfinished face.
“It’s a fine portrait,” she told Leda. “Do not give up on it.”
CHAPTER 44
“I have a surprise for you!” Leda greeted Zulietta and her children—the baby Ginevra, nine-year-old Giovanni, and Zulietta’s eldest, fourteen-year-old Maria Maddalena—when they came to visit the next time.
The children mostly ignored her, running instead to see what dessert Caterina was making for them in the kitchen (fritelle—which she would let them shape into rings before she fried the dough in bubbling oil). Caterina coaxed them out of the sweet-smelling kitchen so she could greet her cousin.
“I want to do a portrait of the children!” Leda was exclaiming to Zulietta when Caterina came upon them in the entrance hall.
“She has been practicing with her pastels every day,” said Caterina, proudly. She kissed Zulietta on the cheeks to welcome her.
The three of them paused at the table to admire Leda’s piles of sketches, and then Zulietta and Leda took seats on the sofa. Caterina stayed standing, as she planned to finish preparing the meal. Little Ginevra climbed into her mother’s lap.
“Perfect,” said Leda. “Giovanni,” she spoke to Zulietta’s son, who was busy watching the boats out the window, “will you come over and pose for me with your sister?” Reluctantly, Giovanni came over, sat in an armchair, and took Ginevra onto his lap. But the little girl quickly squirmed off and ran back toward the kitchen. Maria Maddalena, who had been busy stealing glances at herself in the entrance hall mirror—she was lovely-looking, but a bit vain—went in pursuit of her.
“You can draw just Giovanni,” suggested Zulietta. “Like Rosalba. We can pretend he is here to have his portrait done on his Grand Tour!” She used the English phrase, laughing, and squeezed Giovanni’s skinny knee. He giggled and kicked his leg in the air. Leda grinned widely, which set Zulietta laughing more.
Caterina interrupted the fun to tell them she was going back to the kitchen. Maybe she was mumbling, but no one seemed to hear her. Or even notice when she left.
Leda continued working on the portrait of Giovanni for several hours. He came and went from the chair, returning whenever she needed to see his eyes, his chin better. Caterina watched the picture take form: Giovanni turned three-quarters, his gray-green eyes alive with a miraculous spot of white showing light in his pupils. Zulietta was thrilled.
“Leda, it is wonderful!” she cried. “I can’t wait to show Giovanni’s father! He is too modest to ask for one of himself—but we must get it done. And the girls—!”
“And you, Zulietta,” Leda broke in. “You will be my Galatea.” Zulietta did not seem to know the story, but recognized she had been complimented by some reference to a classical beauty from long ago. She blushed with pleasure.
Caterina watched it all and said nothing. She felt strangely alone at the sight of the two happy friends—the two happy mothers. A deep, heavy feeling settled inside. She realized she was as tired as the grave.
* * *
It felt like forever until they left. At times, the clouds over Caterina parted, and she managed to join the conversation with forced words. But a storm was brewing within. Jealousy spun into a great well of sadness. She longed for nothing so much as her own bed.
Once everyone had gone home and she was finally alone, she reached under her pillow for her letters. The ones she had already shared with Leda. But even more than the comfort of these, she felt a terrible longing to read the others still left in her ivory box. The next part of her story.
She had been aware of this desire growing inside her for a while now. Was this part of Marina’s cruel game of cat and mouse with her? That she should feel this awful urge to revisit what had happened so many years ago?
The rest of the letters sat compressed at the bottom of the box. True—maybe she had stolen a kiss or two from the top of the pile over the years. For their memories of love. But these others? These, she had kept suffocated down below.
“Caterina?” Leda startled her now in the doorway of her bedroom. She stood with her hand still in a fist to show she had knocked.
Caterina slammed the box closed.
“Are you alright?” Leda asked.
“I am fine.”
There was an awkward pause while Leda simply looked at her. Caterina felt trapped in her own bedroom.
“I prefer to be alone right now,” she said. But as soon as the words came out, she realized how untrue they were.
Leda studied her a little longer. She looked confused, and a little sad. Then, obediently, she pulled the door closed and left Caterina alone.
* * *
“Caterina,” Leda whispered to her much later in the night, “you have fallen asleep. Let me help you.”
Caterina lay on her bed still wearing her clothes from the afternoon: a bad habit she had gotten from her mother. Not being able to say good-bye to the day in a final way, always thinking more might come of it.
Leda started to make a gentle pile of the scattered letters and pulled the shutters in the room closed. She sat down close to Caterina on the bed, and Caterina felt comforted by her warm weight.
“Tell me why Giacomo did not become your husband,” Leda said, softly. “What happened to your lover?”
“No—sweetheart. It’s a story you had best never hear.” Caterina took the pile of letters from Leda’s hands. She laid them on the nightstand, rather than back in the box.
“Please tell me. How is it you believed Saint Catherine was going to get you out of the convent?”
“I—I can’t say.”
“Why?”
“The story will frighten you.” And that was only the beginning. Leda would be frightened—then horrified.
“I want to hear what happened,” Leda insisted. “Not knowing things is worse. Not knowing where Filippo is. Not knowing where my father is. Or my mother. Where do we go after we die? Is my mother in the ground, or in the sky, with God?”
The shuttered room was entirely black around them. Leda’s words floated in the dark air around them, seeming separated from the act of speaking.
“It is true,” whispered Caterina. “Sometimes not knowing things is more frightening than anything else.”
She sat up slowly. And she began to talk to the girl in the cover of night. But she vowed to hold on to some secrets too awful to tell.
CHAPTER 45
Murano, 1753
My father surprised me with a visit at the convent. The abbess sent hunchbacked Arcangela to fetch me in my room with the news. I had planned a long nap after pranzo—I was sleepy all the time in these late summer days—and not happy to be interrupted. Or to have to face my father.
“Vieni, vieni!” urged Arcangela, pulling on my hand. I lay on my bed in a loose linen chemise. Strange how comforting the bed felt, hard as it was. My little room had become my home.
“You mustn’t keep your father waiting!” she warned me. She threw open the shutters I had closed and flooded the room with sharp sunlight. I put my hand over my eyes and did not move.
“Caterina, vieni!” Arcangela trie
d again. She seemed frantic, burrowing through the clothes chest for a dress, tossing one onto the bed at my feet, then grabbing a comb off the dressing table, and shuffling over to me as fast as she could.
“Stop!” I said, shielding myself. “What do you care? Leave me alone!” The cruel words just came out.
She looked stung, and stopped dead where she stood over me.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, after a few moments. “The truth is, I don’t want to see my father.”
“You don’t realize how lucky you are that he comes to see you at all,” she said, unable to meet my eyes.
My mouth hung open in shame. I obediently put on the dress she had picked out and followed her mutely downstairs.
She led me into a small room where I sat down behind a window fitted with iron bars. I was lucky? I felt like an animal in a menagerie.
“Caterina, figlia mia!” My father came in and approached me with arms outstretched, reaching through the bars for my hands. I was revolted by the feel of his calloused fingers. He sat in the armchair in front of me. I noticed his hair had more gray in it than when I had left.
Silence.
“You look well,” he said. “Well fed!” He winked at me. I gave him a weak smile.
“There is my happy girl. Now, Caterina, as you know, the abbess does not encourage visitors. But I am leaving for a long trip abroad at the end of the week. I may not be back before Christmas. I wanted to see you—and tell your mother that you are well—before I go.”
At the mention of my mother, my heart softened. How I suddenly missed her! I had hardly realized it. The longing for Giacomo was so huge, it ate up everything else.
“How is she?” I asked. “Why did she not come with you today?”
He cast down his eyes, avoiding my anxious face.
“Your mother has been—sad. You hurt her very much by your irresponsible actions. She—needs rest. I let her rest.” Rest was the word used when my mother was experiencing one of her collapses. I was being blamed for my mother’s heartbreak? It was my father who had sent me away, and probably nearly killed her doing so.
“And Pier Antonio?” I didn’t ask about my brother because I truly cared, but because speaking about him always pained my father.
He sighed heavily. “I paid his debts. What else was there to do? I couldn’t let him rot in prison. He has rented rooms on Via Maranzaria, near the fruit market. The place smells like fresh oranges all day.” At this, he laughed. I almost did, too, but stopped myself.
“He assures me he is beginning a new life. We can only pray,” he said, meeting my eyes.
Ha. Pier Antonio with a new life. “Yes, pray,” I echoed with spite.
Another silence. I squirmed in my chair. I felt nauseous and must have looked green and miserable.
“Caterina—” he started. “I know you do not agree with my decision to send you here. But it is a good place. The abbess tells me you are thriving under her care—keeping to your prayers, and making friends with the nuns and other boarders.”
I stared at him blankly, not interested in how the abbess drew me for him. My life as seen by her was a lie.
“You have to understand—” he went on with no encouragement from me, “my decision was made to protect you.” I noticed his teeth were yellow. He never took good care of himself when my mother was ill. “Venice is full of evil vices. Fools who gamble day and night, frivolous lives made up of theatergoing and parties. Did you know, Caterina, there are more hairdressers in the city than merchants?”
I did not know this. I found it funny, and smirked a little. He missed it.
“And these vices are only spreading! Like a disease—a pox. Pier Antonio has already fallen prey. He is weak in spirit, like his mother. My Sebastiano—he was stronger, but the Lord took him from me—”
He stopped, wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. I started to feel a little pity for my father at the mention of my youngest brother. I saw his aching heart.
“Caterina, when you reach eighteen”—he changed course abruptly—“I will help you find a suitable husband. There is too much about the world you do not understand for this to be your own decision.”
I froze. I stared in open challenge to his rule over me.
“Consider that I don’t plan to abandon you here like so many of the other girls,” he reminded me, his jaw tensing. “Consider the generous dowry I have set aside for you.”
I rolled my eyes, knowing it would bring on the storm of his fury.
“That’s right!” he said, beginning to shout. “Your dowry, which no doubt played a large part in attracting Signor Casanova’s attention! Like a wolf to the chicken coop!”
He got up to go, cursing and sputtering. But he took a deep breath and gripped the wood sill between us. His nails turned white.
“I do not fault you for your foolishness, figlia mia,” he said with forced calmness. “Wisdom comes only with time. I do not expect it to have ripened yet in so young a girl.”
“Yes, Father.” I seethed with loathing. I could feel my dress pulling tight across my chest and stomach. “Things ripen only with time.”
I smiled with my secret as I left him.
CHAPTER 46
By this time, I knew I was pregnant. My bloody flow had not come for two months. My breasts felt tender to the touch, and I realized, looking back, that my occasional spells of dizziness and nausea were signs. Alone in my bed at night, I found it thrilling to hold a hand over my firming belly, already protecting my baby. How strange to love someone you cannot see! But I did. I was convinced it was a son.
Boy or girl, a scandal was my way out of the convent. I would not be allowed to stay. I knew Santa Maria degli Angeli was too old and prestigious a place to house a pregnant boarder. I would dishonor the whole convent, waddling through the hallways on my way to prayers. Being gaped at by flocks of curious virgins. No. The abbess would be forced to send me home.
Home. Not to my father. Not to some lesser convent on the mainland where he might try to hide me. But, as I dreamed it, to Giacomo. Oh, the hours spent in fantasies! Lying in my shuttered room, lost in a better world. A new home with Giacomo, filled with books and frescoed walls. A crib in the nursery, where the baby slept on sheets sewn by my mother. Zulietta holding the swaddled bundle over her shoulder, rubbing his little back. Giacomo’s huge pride in his son—and love for me.
I wrote to Giacomo hinting at the news, that I believed I would be coming home in a few months’ time. But I said no more. I kept my secret joy to myself, nursing it until I was further along.
“You seem changed,” Marina said to me boldly one day. She closed the French grammar book we had been studying together on her sofa and eyed me head to toe.
“Changed?” I felt my face flush and pulled my hands onto my lap.
“Yes—you used to be more . . . jumpy. Always running off here and there. You seem more . . . settled now . . . is that it?” She regarded me longer, until I felt undressed down to my swelling belly.
“Oh—I suppose I am more content.” If only she knew the truth! “How sleepy I am!” I yawned. “I should go.”
“Yes—I’ve noticed you sleep more these days,” she continued. “And you eat less, but you look . . . my dear, you are a little heavy.”
“Am I?” By now I was panicked to get out of there. I did not trust Marina with my secret. I stood quickly and knocked over a crystal vase filled with porcelain flowers. A few of the glazed petals chipped off onto the table. The hard flowers were scented—just like Madame du Pompadour herself had in France, Marina had once told me—and the sweet smells floated around us.
“Oh Marina—forgive me!” I said, righting the vase. “See—I am still jumpy after all!”
Marina took my hand. She looked me in the eyes, and I was surprised to see some softness in her expression. “I know what you are hiding,” she said. “You can tell me anything.”
Tears sprang to my eyes. I needed a friend so much! Truthfully, I was frightened.
I felt alone. I sat back down and let her hug me.
“There, there,” she comforted me, rubbing my back. I felt her warm breath near my ear, her soft lips brush my neck. “What happy news!” she whispered closely. “But how will I ever stand it here without you?”
I melted in her arms. I was not ever able to keep myself away from her. But even then, I feared her more than I loved her.
CHAPTER 47
A few days later, waking up and using my chamber pot, I found a reddish-brown stain on my chemise. Fear seized me. My mother had had several miscarriages between Pier Antonio and myself, which was why he was so much older. But she had also told me she bled through all her pregnancies. I prayed I was not in danger. I had no pain in my womb. I lay back down on the bed, tried to stay calm and think of what to do.
I needed medicine. I remembered the smells of the mixture my mother used to soak into a rag and put on her belly when she bled with Sebastiano. Rosemary. Marjoram. Wine. And something else that smelled like the woods. Pine, was it? Cypress?
White cypress, that was it. And she used to hold a glassy stone about the size of an egg in her right hand. She called it an eagle’s stone. It fascinated me because she said you could only find it by an eagle’s nest. The stone was hollow, with a smaller stone inside. “It is like my womb with the baby inside,” she would say to me. “I hold the stone to keep my baby safe.”
I went to find Concetta in a storeroom near the refectory. She often cleaned in there, sweeping up dustings of flour and sugar spilled by the younger girls baking. I told her I had a terrible headache and begged her to go to the pharmacy for me. I had to give her double the coins since it was not Wednesday, when she usually left the convent to do errands for the abbess.
“An eagle’s stone?” she repeated when I told her what I wanted. She gave me a sharp look.
“Yes—an eagle’s stone. My mother always used one for her headaches.”
“For headaches, vero?”
“Yes.” I was flushing wildly. This was not going well. Concetta was a loose-lipped gossip. She could ruin me.
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