Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel)

by Victoria Strauss

  She was not supposed to go to Matteo until Friday. And Domenica’s ultimatum ran until Sunday, when she would take her final vows. But she knew she would be foolish to test Madre Magdalena’s patience.

  I can’t wait. If I am leaving, I have to leave tonight.

  In the afternoon, when Domenica vanished into her study, Giulia went to the shelf where she kept her own drawings. She could not say good-bye to the other artists, but she couldn’t bear to leave without acknowledging their trust, their friendship, their forgiveness. She wanted to do something that, looking back, they would realize had been farewell.

  She’d drawn them all many times. She sorted quickly through the sheaf of sketches, picking out the best: Lucida in charcoal with white chalk highlights, her face alight with laughter. Perpetua in black chalk on gray paper, concentration smoothing away her homeliness. Old Benedicta dozing in the sun, contented as a cat. Angela in profile—a simple sketch, just quill and ink, yet none of the more finished drawings Giulia had done captured her friend so well.

  She went first to Angela’s easel. “For you,” she said, laying the portrait on the little table where Angela kept her pigment pots and other materials.

  “What is it?” Angela set down her brush. She was highlighting an angel’s wing feathers with vermilion; Giulia heard the color’s voice, a musical sizzle like oil in a hot pan. “Oh, Giulia, what a lovely drawing! But you’ve made me look so . . . so . . .”

  “Beautiful? You are, you know.”

  “Oh, well.” Angela made a dismissing gesture. “Thank you. What made you think of it?”

  “I thought you might like it. Angela . . .”

  “Yes?”

  I never imagined I’d have a friend like you. Someone who cared about me, who stood up for me. I’m going to miss you so much.

  “Nothing. I love you, Angela.”

  “I love you too.” Angela frowned. “Giulia—”

  But Giulia, already hurrying away, pretended she had not heard.

  Lucida was delighted with her portrait and kissed Giulia on both cheeks for thanks. Perpetua was embarrassed, blushing as she looked down at herself. Benedicta had stayed in her cell that day; Giulia placed her portrait by her easel, where she would find it the next time she came in.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Giulia went about her duties with a calm efficiency that amazed her, while fear vibrated in her like a swarm of bees and her pulse beat high and fast against her throat. She felt outside herself, unable to believe what she was about to do.

  The Vespers bell rang at last. She stood by the grinding table after the artists departed, counting to a thousand to make sure they were truly gone. Then, half-certain she was dreaming, she crossed to the supply shelves, where she spread a square of linen on the floor and stacked it with her Annunciation painting, the best of her drawings, a supply of unused paper, a pouch of charcoal sticks, and a knife for sharpening them, which she could also use to cut her hair. She added Humilità’s bequests: the Alberti manuscript and the rosewood brushes. She’d left the workshop earlier to retrieve them, smuggling them back in under the bodice of her gown.

  Last, she fetched a small silver plate from one of the chests that held the costumes and other items the workshop used for the models who posed for drawings. She hated stealing. But she had to have something to sell or barter for the clothing and food she’d need on her journey.

  I’ll pay it back, she promised silently. I swear I will.

  She folded the linen around the items and tied the bundle with cord. She loosened her belt and pushed the bundle up under the front of her gown. It was bulky; but if she clasped her arms around her midsection and hunched forward as though her stomach pained her, it was more or less hidden.

  She was ready.

  She stood a moment, looking around. The candle flames shook in the draft from the courtyard, sweeping light and shadow across the big room so that everything in it seemed to shift a little, to breathe a little, as if the workshop were a living thing. At the grinding table, the marble slab was still smeared with bone black, the last paint she’d mixed: She could hear its thrumming, drumlike voice, rising and falling in steady rhythm. How long will it be before I hear the color songs again?

  For an instant she was sure she sensed Humilità’s presence, as if her teacher were standing just behind her. Approving? Accusing? She could not tell.

  This is the only way I can think of to become what you wanted me to be, Maestra. I wish I could see another. But I can’t. I can’t.

  She blew out the candles and left the workshop. The torch-lit corridors were deserted; the noble nuns were all in church, singing Vespers, and the servant nuns were at their duties. She was aware of the bundle, uncomfortable beneath her clothes—and of the other treasures she was carrying out of Santa Marta: the secret of Passion blue, the bright flame of her own gift.

  She reached the last of the convent’s garden courtyards and hurried along its paths, gravel crunching under her feet. Then she was in the orchard, the branches a dark tracery against the starry sky, the smell of windfall apples all around. She was trembling now, shaking with the chill of the night and with fear, her teeth chattering so hard they hurt.

  The breach in the wall, where Ormanno had climbed in a year ago, had been repaired. But the repair was rough, and the sloppily mortared bricks offered hand- and footholds. Giulia pulled the bundle from under her gown and slung it by its cord over her elbow, then tucked her skirts into her belt and began to climb.

  The top of the wall was wide, embedded with tile shards all down its center to deter intruders. The drop on the other side seemed huge, and the ledge at the bottom was narrower than she remembered. The canal lapped below it, a heaving black surface stinking of sewage.

  Carefully she crawled over the tile shards and twisted around, thinking to lower herself by her hands to make the distance to the ground a little less daunting. But as she tried to walk her feet down the wall, her sandals slipped and the whole weight of her body dropped. Her grip broke and she fell, landing on the ledge with a jolt that snapped her teeth together. Bolts of pain shot through her ankles. She staggered, tipping sickeningly backward toward the filthy water of the canal, but at the very last second managed to grab hold of a sapling that had sprouted from a crack in the ledge and haul herself to safety.

  She rested against the wall, gasping, as her pounding heartbeat slowed. Her knees burned where she’d scraped them, and there was pain in her left hand. When she turned her palm to the sky, she saw darkness there: blood. She’d cut herself when she lost her grip.

  She wrapped the wound with a strip torn from her chemise. Then she pulled her skirts out of her belt and, still shaky, set off along the ledge, keeping her shoulder to the wall. The wall gave way to the backs of houses; she began to worry that the ledge would end before she found a way up into the city. But soon she reached a stone dock, jutting out into the canal. A set of stairs connected it to the street.

  At the top she paused. The cobbles of the street glinted faintly in the starlight. Arcaded housefronts rose on either side, twin walls of shadow, candlelight glimmering between drawn shutters.

  Padua lay before her. Then Venice. Then the world.

  With no warning, panic roared out of the night, a black terror that felt as if it would rip her apart. What was she doing? Had she lost her mind? What madness possessed her, to imagine she could succeed?

  It’s not too late. Compline hasn’t rung. If I hurry, I can get over the wall and back to my cell before Suor Margarita comes. No one will know I’ve been outside . . .

  She wheeled around. She stumbled down the stairs. But by the time her feet touched the dock, she felt sense returning; and as she stepped onto the ledge, she remembered her decision and why she had made it.

  She stopped then, closing her eyes, letting the turmoil in her settle until she could feel again the familiar fire at her core—the passion that had driven her from Santa Marta, and must drive her farther still.

  She
returned to the stairs. As she reached the end of the street, she heard the Compline bell begin to ring.

  Too late now.

  She put her head down and walked on.

  CHAPTER 8

  GIROLAMO LANDRIANI

  Padua, Italy

  October, Anno Domini 1488

  Giulia passed the night crouched in the doorway of a church. Shortly after leaving the dock, she’d realized that trying to find her way to the market in the dark, in a city she did not know, was foolish. The church steps seemed as safe a place as any to wait for morning.

  The air was autumn-chill and the steps were cold. Even so, she managed to doze, jolting awake from time to time, her heart pounding as she remembered all over again what she’d done and why.

  As dawn began to gray the sky, she climbed to her feet, her body aching. The bandage on her injured hand was stiff with dried blood; she peeled it away, making the cut bleed again. The torn flesh gaped. With nothing to clean it, the best she could do was to tear another strip from her chemise and wrap it up again.

  She untied her belt from around her waist and knotted it below her breasts so her novice gown would look a little more like an ordinary woman’s dress. She unwound the kerchief that hid her hair, pulling it over her shoulders like a shawl and letting her long braid fall free. From the bundle she took the silver plate, which she slipped into her bodice. Then, hooking the bundle’s cord over her arm again, she set off into the city.

  Her fear was still with her. But it was far too late for second thoughts. If she returned to Santa Marta now, there was not a chance in the world she’d ever be allowed to set foot in the workshop again. She could only go forward. Knowing this was oddly liberating. As she moved toward the next hurdle of her journey she felt, if not brave, at least determined.

  The city was waking: housewives throwing back shutters, laborers hurrying to work, tradesmen bringing their wares to market. Giulia followed the flow of traffic, and in less time than she expected found herself at the edge of Padua’s great market piazza, with rows of stalls being set up for the day and the long bulk of the Palazzo della Ragione rising above them, the lead plates of its vast domed roof gleaming in the first light of the sun.

  She began to wander among the stalls, already thronged with early shoppers. The clamor of commerce beat against her ears, and with every breath she drew in the market’s odors: produce fresh and spoiled, wood smoke, animal dung, crowded humanity. At last, among the stalls crammed into the palazzo’s ground-floor portico, she found a seller of metal and leather goods. She paused a moment, gathering her resolve, then approached the stallholder.

  “Do you buy?” she asked, trying to sound confident.

  “I might.” The stallholder, a skinny man with a mouthful of bad teeth, eyed her skeptically. “Depending on what’s being offered.”

  She pulled the plate from her bodice. He took it, turning it in callused fingers, biting it and examining the mark.

  “Silver,” he said. “Not the best quality. Still, it’s a decent piece. I’ll give you twelve soldi.”

  Giulia knew nothing of the value of silver; but she knew good quality from bad, and she could see that the stallholder was more eager than he wanted to appear. “Twenty soldi,” she said boldly. “It’s very good quality, I know it for a fact.”

  “Thirteen soldi, six piccoli. That’s a better offer than I’d make to most.”

  “Give it here, then. I’ll sell it somewhere else.”

  “Fifteen. You’re robbing me, my girl.”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Sixteen and six, and not a piccoli more.”

  Giulia hesitated. “Done.”

  The stallholder counted out the coins, fingering each one as if reluctant to let it go.

  “You’re not as innocent as you look,” he said as he put them in her hand. “If I was the kind of man who stuck his nose into other people’s business, I might wonder where you got that plate.”

  Giulia felt the blood rising to her cheeks. She turned away, holding tight to the money.

  There were several stalls selling rags and old clothes. At the biggest, she sorted through piles of garments laid out on a trestle, selecting a mantle, a cap, a shirt, a pair of woolen hose, a doublet, and a peasant’s thick woolen tunic. The clothes were patched and darned, but otherwise whole and reasonably clean, and not infested with fleas as far as she could tell.

  “How much?” she asked the stallholder’s wife.

  The wife, a plump, pretty woman with red hair escaping from beneath a kerchief, turned Giulia’s choices over with one hand, balancing her little daughter on her hip with the other. “Two soldi for the lot,” she said.

  “Would you barter?”

  “Barter what?” asked the wife, suspicious.

  “I’m a painter. I can make your portraits—you and your husband and your daughter. All of you together or each separately.”

  “You? A painter?” The woman laughed. “What would the likes of us want with portraits anyway? We’re working folk, not nobility.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to remember your little girl as she is today?” Giulia nodded toward the child, as plump as her mother, with the same red hair. “Or your husband? I can draw them to the life. Look here.” She knelt and unknotted the cord of her bundle, awkward with her one good hand, and shuffled through her drawings, pulling out a sketch of Lucida that she’d done several months ago without her nun’s wimple and veil. “I drew this of a friend of mine.”

  “Oh!” The wife gazed at the drawing. “You made that?”

  “I did. I’d charge more than two soldi for it if I was in my . . . my workshop, but since I’m not I’ll give you all three drawings—you and your husband and your daughter—for just these clothes here.” The words tumbled forth, fast and breathless; Giulia was astonished at what was coming out of her mouth. “They’re for . . . they’re for my brother, he has had some hard luck lately, there are many things he needs, but clothes are what he lacks most.”

  She stopped herself, afraid the lies were becoming too obvious. But the wife’s attention was still focused on the sketch.

  “Jacopo,” she called. “Come see.”

  The husband finished with a customer and came to peer skeptically at the drawing. The wife pulled him aside, speaking in a voice too low for Giulia to hear. The husband listened, his arms folded, frowning. Giulia held her breath. She’d never in her life done anything like this and had no idea what would happen.

  The husband shook his head. He reached out and set his hand on his wife’s shoulder, then turned away, glancing at Giulia as he did, a quick flash of hard brown eyes that told her she was about to be sent packing. But the wife was smiling as she came forward.

  “My husband says yes. These clothes for a portrait of me and my little Carmela.”

  “Truly?” Giulia could hardly believe it. “I mean, good. That’s good.”

  She took one of the smaller sheets of blank paper and a stick of charcoal from the bundle, and also the Alberti manuscript, which had a leather cover that would do for a drawing board. She was grateful it was her left hand she’d cut rather than her right.

  The wife cleaned her daughter’s face with a corner of her apron and smoothed the little girl’s curling hair. “What should I do?” she asked.

  “Just stand and hold her. Turn your head a little, to look at her. There, that is exactly right.”

  Giulia examined them, assessing the light and the angles. Then she set charcoal to paper. Drawing was the one thing in her life she was always certain of; but what she was doing now was new and strange, and her hand was shaking. She pressed too hard on the first stroke, snapping the point of the charcoal stick.

  “Sorry,” she muttered, fumbling out her knife to sharpen it. Her cheeks were burning. Any moment now the wife would see through her pretense, would realize she was not a painter but only a runaway novice with no idea of what she was doing. But when she looked up, the wife was still waiting, her head turned as Giulia had in
structed, as serene as a saint. The little girl, Carmela, had laid her head on her mother’s shoulder and closed her eyes.

  This time Giulia’s hand did not falter. She roughed in the outlines of the two figures, a linked geometry of shapes and angles, then began to add detail, crosshatching the shadows and smudging them with her fingers to blend the strokes. She finished quickly. In the workshop, she would have spent much more time on such a drawing, accenting the highlights with white chalk, adding dimension to the shadings with ink wash. But for what it was, it was a good effort, an excellent likeness that captured something deeper: the little girl’s utter trust as she dozed against her mother’s shoulder, the mother’s radiant love for her child.

  She held the drawing toward the stallholder’s wife. The wife caught her breath.

  “Is that—is that really me?”

  “To the life,” Giulia said.

  “And Carmela—oh, it is exactly like her! What a wonder, to see her there on the paper!” The wife reached out, took the drawing from Giulia’s hand. “I had a little boy,” she said. “Jacopetto, we called him, after my husband. He died of the fever this winter past, and it’s growing hard to remember his face. But now I’ll have Carmela with me always.” She raised her eyes to Giulia’s. They were shimmering with tears. “What is your name?”

  “Giulia,” Giulia said, knowing she should use a false name but unwilling to lie in the face of the wife’s sadness. “Giulia Borromeo.”

  “You have magic in your hands, Giulia Borromeo. Wait there a moment.”

  The wife went to lay Carmela, still dozing, on a heap of blankets in a corner of the stall, placing the drawing carefully beside the little girl. She piled the things Giulia had chosen on the mantle she’d selected, then reached under the trestle. When she straightened, she was holding a pair of boots.

  “For your brother,” she said. “My husband won’t mind, once he sees Carmela on that paper.”