Giulia:
I leave you my letters from my dear friend Gianfranco Ferraldi of Venice, which extend over most of the years I have been at Santa Marta. He is a painter of intelligence and worth, and it is my wish that you should write to him in your turn, not only to continue the friendship that he and I have maintained for so long, but to keep cognizant of the world that exists beyond our walls. A mind grows narrow if it cannot reach beyond itself, and art grows stale if it is not refreshed by new ideas. He may be a mentor to you, my dear Giulia, even if only from afar.
Your devoted teacher,
Humilità
Giulia’s eyes filled with tears. When had Humilità written this? Perhaps she had guessed, at least a little, about Domenica.
Giulia pulled her candle closer and began to read. She knew about Humilità’s friendship with Ferraldi, for he had sometimes sent prepared pigments from Venice, where the finest painting materials in the world were sold. He’d been an apprentice in Matteo Moretti’s workshop while Humilità was training there but had left soon after Humilità entered Santa Marta.
Now she learned of his dissatisfaction with Matteo’s autocratic leadership, of his decision to seek his fortune in Venice, of his struggle to establish his own workshop and his eventual success. The letters were full of technical details—discussions of his work, responses to Humilità’s descriptions of her own—but there were also many lively accounts of people and happenings, with deft, quick sketches to illustrate the stories.
Ferraldi’s affection and respect for Humilità shone clearly through this one-sided conversation. Giulia could find no trace of condescension in his writing; he addressed Humilità not as a nun and a woman but as a fellow painter, as an equal. And possibly, Giulia thought, as something more.
In the final letters Giulia found her own name. It gave her a little shock to see it, in a letter received soon after Humilità took her into the workshop: just a brief reference, Ferraldi congratulating Humilità on finding a talented apprentice. She read the subsequent letters with apprehension—would there be mention of the theft of Passion blue and her part in it? But though Ferraldi responded several times to Humilità’s reports on Giulia’s progress as a pupil, there was nothing at all about Matteo Moretti’s plot. It seemed Humilità had kept that secret even from her oldest friend.
The last letter was dated two months before Humilità’s death.
As for your extraordinary apprentice, Giulia, I am glad to learn that she continues to blossom. I cannot tell you how it delights me to know that you have found a pupil whose ability is worthy of your own—no easy feat within the walls of a convent, where you do not have the luxury of choice, as we artists do in the world outside. It is my earnest wish that she will fulfill all your ambitions for her. I hope to see her work when I visit Padua next spring. By then, God willing, you will be in good health once more.
It seemed Humilità had not told him the truth about her illness either.
Giulia let the letter fall into her lap. She felt closer to Humilità than she had since her teacher’s death, as if Humilità herself had spoken through the words of this man Giulia had never met. The evidence of her teacher’s faith in her was both joy and pain. For in the new world of Domenica’s workshop, she was no longer certain she could fulfill it.
At last she wiped her eyes and placed the final letter with the others, and tied the bundle up again in its cord. She’d write soon to let Ferraldi know of Humilità’s death. It would be a sad introduction, but perhaps they could indeed become friends, as Humilità had wanted. It would be a small spark of hope to light the days ahead.
—
Giulia was not surprised when, a week after Humilità’s funeral, Domenica confronted her again.
“Have you considered our discussion?” As before, Domenica had waited until after Vespers, when Giulia was alone. She stood in the workshop’s doorway, her white habit and black veil falling in perfect, sculpted folds. “Are you ready yet to do your duty?”
Giulia clutched the broom she was holding. “You said I had until my final vows.”
“So I did.” Domenica turned to go. “You would be well-advised not to delay so long.”
Giulia began sweeping again, scraping the broom across the tiles, her anger burning hotter and hotter as she thought of Domenica’s ultimatum and the petty persecutions of the past days. Yet what choice did she have? If she didn’t obey, Domenica would take everything away.
What if I give her Passion blue and she dismisses me anyway?
It struck her like a blow. She stood frozen, broom in hand.
No. She wouldn’t be so faithless.
But then she thought of how skillfully Domenica had concealed her resentment of Humilità. Of how she’d pretended to bow to Humilità’s wishes, including the bequest of Passion blue. Of the hard, flat stare she’d turned on Giulia that night in Humilità’s office, and the hatred in her final words: She should never have let you back into the workshop . . .
Nausea surged into Giulia’s throat. She dropped the broom and fled the workshop, ignoring the nuns’ disapproving stares as she ran through the hallways. Reaching her cell, she fell onto her bed, curling up on her side, taking deep breaths to calm her thudding heart and roiling stomach.
After a little while she felt better. She sat up, realizing that she was still wearing her apron, which in her haste she’d forgotten to remove. She took it off, then carried her stool over to the cell’s high window and climbed up onto it. Resting her elbows on the sill, she gazed at the sky, seeking reassurance, as she’d done most of her life, in the ancient, unchanging beauty of the stars. Orion was rising, the three stars of his belt rolling up above the roofs of the convent. Taurus hung just above him.
She’d learned the constellations from Maestro Carlo Bruni, her father’s astrologer, with whom she’d forged a secret friendship after her mother died—he a lonely man held in small regard by his employer, she a bereft child suspended between worlds: neither commoner nor noble but something awkward in between. Maestro Bruni had taught her how to read and write. He’d given her used paper to scrape clean for drawing. He’d told her the names of stars; and though he’d never shared his own art of astrology, she had absorbed some of his knowledge from the copying she’d done for him.
On impulse she pulled the little pouch at her neck from beneath her gown and teased it open. Reaching past the recipe for Passion blue, she drew out the other paper inside and unrolled it on the windowsill, using the very tips of her fingers, for it was as old as she was and brittle with the years. She hadn’t looked at it in a long time—not since just after she’d brought Humilità’s book of secrets back to Santa Marta. The starlight was too dim to make out the writing on it, but that did not matter, for she knew it by heart:
. . . major affliction by Saturn, and the Moon and Sun in barren signs, there is thus no testimony of marriage, or of children. She shall not take a husband’s name, nor shall she bear her own at the end of life, but shall . . .
The words were part of her natal horoscope, commissioned for her by her mother just after she was born: a prediction of the entire course of her life, written in the stars by the hand of God at the moment of her birth. It was one of the few gifts her mother had ever been able to give her, intended to protect her against misfortune by warning her of what was to come. But her bullying foster brother, Piero, had destroyed it soon after her mother died. This fragment was all Giulia had managed to save.
She hadn’t learned to read until long after the horoscope was gone. She’d never known the horoscope’s full prediction—just this small part of it. The lonely life the broken sentences seemed to promise terrified her. Never to have the love of a man . . . never to bear children . . . to lose even her name. What could it mean but that she would live and die alone, like a beggar in the street?
Yet from Maestro Bruni, who had taught her so much, she had learned that the stars could be defied, through God’s own gift of free will. With determination, she might
be able to change her fate, find a way to seize for herself the love and comfort her stars wanted to deny her.
For most of her life she had been fighting to do just that. When her father died and she was sent to Santa Marta, she was certain the stars had won, for to become a nun was surely the most perfect possible fulfillment of the fragment’s desolate promise. Purchasing the talisman, with the little spirit Anasurymboriel sealed inside it, had been a final, desperate effort to escape. But then Humilità had taken her into the workshop. And in that extraordinary place she had seen the possibility of a future that turned the horoscope’s prediction on its head: a life without the love of a man, yet not without passion. A life without children, yet not without creation. A life without her true name—yet the religious name she would receive when she took her final vows would live on through her art.
If Domenica banished her from the workshop, the prediction would turn again. She’d be face-to-face once more with the destiny she feared. Her final vows would seal her to it forever: to the loveless, barren, nameless life of an ordinary nun, who would never hold a brush again.
Oh, Maestra. How could you not know that this would happen? Anger turned in Giulia, bitter and unreasonable. Why did you never see Domenica for what she is?
“I wish . . .” she whispered, then stopped. I wish you’d never given me Passion blue. But in spite of everything, that was not true.
She thought of Gianfranco Ferraldi and his workshop in Venice. How easy it would be if she were a boy. She could pack up her brushes and her sketches, make her way to Venice, and apprentice herself to Ferraldi—and if he wouldn’t have her, she could search out another artist, and another, until she found someone who would agree to take her on.
Of course, if I were a boy, I wouldn’t be in this situation. I’d have apprenticed myself to a master long ago. I might even be a journeyman by now.
A journeyman.
A boy.
A mad idea unfolded in Giulia’s mind, a flash of inspiration like a star exploding in the night. For an instant she stood dazzled. For an instant it made perfect sense.
Then she remembered who and where she was.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she whispered to herself.
She shivered. The September nights were growing chilly. She rerolled the delicate horoscope fragment and concealed it in the pouch again. Then she lit her candle and knelt before the crucifix on the wall.
“Almighty God,” she whispered, “I’m a sinner, I know. Almost all my life I’ve fought the destiny You wrote for me in the stars on the night of my birth. When I broke the talisman last year, when I committed myself to the workshop and to painting, I swore I would stop fighting and accept my fate as it came to me. I want to keep my promise. But please don’t let painting be taken away from me. You gave me my talent. You gave me this fire inside me. Please let me use it.”
She felt the hollowness of the words even as they left her lips. For it wasn’t in her simply to accept. She had to fight. She would always have to fight.
CHAPTER 6
WORDS SET FREE
At night in her cold cell, Giulia lit her candle and reread Ferraldi’s letters. She wanted to know him before she wrote to him, so she could compose a letter intelligent enough to make him want to write her back.
She pored over his discussions of technique. She memorized the layout of his workshop, of which he’d provided many sketches. She tried to build an image of the great city of Venice from his drawings and descriptions: an impossibly exotic place where the streets were made of water, where magnificent palazzi and richly furnished churches spoke of centuries of wealth and power, where the Piazza San Marco, home to the vast golden-domed Basilica, was as big as an entire village and one might, walking across it, hear a dozen different languages spoken at once. Where sometimes the acqua alta, the high tide, swamped the streets and the squares and the ground floors of the palazzi so that the city seemed to rest not on hundreds of wooden pilings driven deep into the mud of the lagoon, but on the surface of the ocean, raised not by man but by magic.
Now and then as she read, her mad idea would stir, nudging like an insistent finger. It was just a fantasy, and fantasies were useless. But it was a relief sometimes to escape into dreams of what could never be.
At the end of another seven days, Domenica cornered her again, reminding her that only a week remained until her final vows. I can surrender, Giulia thought, staring at the floor so she would not have to meet Domenica’s angry glare. Right now, I can give her what she wants. But her mouth refused to open.
That evening she returned to her cell to find it had been searched. The bed had been dragged out from the wall, the mattress and pillow slit and their stuffing pulled out onto the floor. For a long moment she stood in the doorway, too shocked to move. Then she remembered the bundle with Humilità’s bequests, which she’d kept under the bed, and forced herself to go in. She found the bundle beneath a tangle of bedclothes. It had been opened. The Alberti manuscript was still inside, and Humilità’s rosewood brushes. But Ferraldi’s letters were gone.
Giulia didn’t know how long she knelt there. Her knees were numb by the time she got up and began to set things to rights. She was still shoving straw back into her mattress when Suor Margarita came to lock her in.
The next day was Sunday. Giulia passed it in a daze of misery and uncertainty, imprisoned in her cell as she always was when the workshop did not open. On Monday morning she arrived at the workshop to find a servant nun waiting for her, with a summons from the abbess, Madre Magdalena. Light-headed with dread, she made her way to the abbess’s office.
“It was I who ordered the search of your cell yesterday.” Madre Magdalena paced back and forth before her desk. She was a small, gaunt woman with pinched features and a dislike of being still. She’d been elected just two months earlier, after the sudden death of the previous abbess, Madre Damiana. “I think you know why.”
Giulia swallowed against the dryness of her mouth. How could she have been so foolish as to think the struggle would remain between herself and Domenica? That Domenica, her patience at an end, would not look beyond the workshop for help?
“A bundle of letters was found, left to you by Maestra Humilità. I’ve only glanced at them, but I believe I am correct in guessing that they do not contain what we seek.”
“No, Madre Magdalena,” Giulia whispered.
“Tell me now, and do not think to lie. Where is the recipe for Passion blue? Where have you hidden it?”
Giulia felt the tiny weight of the pouch at her neck. “It’s somewhere safe, Madre Magdalena.”
“Somewhere safe? Somewhere safe? Do you dare answer me so slyly, girl?”
Giulia stared down at the red tiles of the floor, biting her lips against the tears that wanted to fall. Even if she’d wished to surrender the recipe, she could not reveal the existence of the pouch, for then she would lose her horoscope fragment too.
“I order you to produce it without further delay,” Madre Magdalena said. “I am giving you this one last chance to do your duty willingly; but willing or not, we will have that recipe. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, Madre Magdalena,” Giulia said, because there was nothing else to say.
“I have no wish to dishonor Maestra Humilità’s memory, but her actions in this matter defy comprehension. The workshop is the glory of Santa Marta, not only for the beautiful paintings it gives the world, but for the income it contributes to our community. And the reputation of the workshop is built largely upon Passion blue. To give so valuable a thing to a mere apprentice, a girl of questionable character, is scarcely less disgraceful than your defiance.”
“I’m sorry, Madre Magdalena,” Giulia whispered.
“God knows what is truly in your heart. I do not. Whatever discipline Maestra Domenica decides for you, you should know that I myself will be evaluating whether it will be possible for you to continue in your current situation once you take your final vows.”
Giuli
a’s head snapped up. The abbess had paused in her restless motion. Her lips were pinched together, her gaze deeply cold.
“You understand me. Good.” Madre Magdalena began to pace again. “Now, there is something else I wish to discuss with you. I have had a letter from Signor Matteo Moretti.”
Giulia gasped.
“He wishes to share with you reminiscences of his daughter, whom he loved so dearly, as a comfort for his grief. He has asked that you be allowed to visit him occasionally in his house, as his daughter used to.”
“Visit him?”
“As you may imagine, I am not inclined to grant you any privileges. But Signor Moretti is a generous donor to this convent, and he has just suffered a grievous loss. I do not feel I can refuse his request. Accordingly, I have arranged for you to go to him on Friday.”
“This Friday? But—Madre Magdalena—please, I can’t!”
Madre Magdalena wheeled around, fixing Giulia with a flinty glare. “Can’t?”
“He’s not . . . Signor Moretti is not my family.” Giulia trembled with desperation. Madre Magdalena, like the rest of the convent, knew of Ormanno’s theft of Passion blue and Giulia’s part in it; but the truth about Matteo, and what had happened to Giulia in his house, had been Giulia’s and Humilità’s secret. “It isn’t proper for me to be . . . to be alone with him.”
“Don’t be foolish. I shall make sure you have a chaperone.”
“It won’t be enough! Please, Madre Magdalena, he’s not the man you think he is. He’s lying about why he wants to see me—he only wants to force me to give him Passion blue—”
“Wicked girl! Matteo Moretti is a leading citizen of Padua, a man of reputation and piety, a famous painter in his own right. How dare you slander him so?”
“It is the truth, if you’d only let me tell you what he did last year when the Maestra’s book of secrets was stolen—”
“Be silent!” Madre Magdalena stepped forward and slapped Giulia hard across the face. “You will be fetched at noon on Friday. If I learn that you have shown Signor Moretti anything but the greatest humility and gratitude, you will have cause to regret it. Now get out. I shall expect soon to hear from Maestra Domenica that you have done your duty.”
Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel) Page 4