Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel)

by Victoria Strauss

  This is what matters. Not passing infatuations. Not false names or disguises. Not cruel, stupid stars. This. This is what I was born to do.

  She promised herself she would not forget again.

  Only when the last smear of blue had been used, and the muscles of her painting arm were quivering with exhaustion, did she step away from the easel to inspect what she had done.

  The Muse’s gown was complete. Against the monochrome of the underpainting, it shone brighter than a peacock’s plumage, singing sapphire harmonies.

  Did I make that? Giulia felt as if she were waking from a dream. Wonder swept her, tinged with sadness, because Humilità, who had given her this—all of it, not just the priceless color, but painting itself—was not here to see it.

  “That’s a lovely blue.”

  Giulia jumped, startled. Ferraldi was standing in the doorway. How long had he been there?

  “Thank you, Maestro,” she said, then added, “They’re my own materials. I didn’t borrow them.”

  Ferraldi stepped closer. “This is your competition painting?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hm. You’ll want to rework some of the modeling. The folds there look a little stiff.” He pointed. “Do you see?”

  Giulia’s exalted mood was slipping away. She saw that he was right. “Yes, Maestro, I do.”

  “Try blending the shadow a little more, there and there.” He pointed, indicating, then leaned toward the singing blue. Giulia tensed, though of course he could not guess its secret just by looking. “That really is an extraordinary blue. Natural ultramarine, yes?”

  “Yes, Maestro.”

  “It’s unusually pure. You must tell me where you obtained it.”

  “I made it, Maestro.”

  “You? On your own? Not from raw lapis lazuli, surely?”

  “Yes, Maestro. I’ve been working on it for the past two weeks.”

  “Hm. Impressive.” He stepped away. “Well, when I need more ultramarine, be very sure I will call on you to prepare it.”

  “Yes, Maestro.” She would make blue for him if he wanted, but not Passion blue. She thought of Domenica, and Matteo, and all the others who had coveted the transcendent color. She hoped Ferraldi was not like them.

  After he departed, she stood for a while before her work, trying to recapture the euphoria of creation. But it had left her, and doubt was seeping into the space where it had been, heavy and unwelcome. She could see her mistakes now, not just the flaw Ferraldi had pointed out but others: errors of execution, born of inexperience.

  She could address them, or try to. But the blue, the shining, singing blue . . . that could not be changed. And though it was brilliant, though it was beautiful, was it Passion blue? She had followed the recipe to the letter. She’d been sure she recognized its unearthly voice, its sapphire luster; but it had been months since she had heard or seen Passion blue—not since before Humilità had taken to her bed. Could she be certain that the bell-like tones that filled her senses now were exactly the same?

  It’s only the lateness of the day, she thought. And that I am so tired. It does no good to question anyway. What’s done is done.

  For the first time in several hours, she thought of Bernardo—Bernardo, who would never come back.

  She scraped her palette and cleaned her brushes and returned them and the painting to their hiding place. She climbed wearily to the workshop to clean up there as well. At last, too exhausted to be hungry, she lay down on her bed and fell into dreamless sleep.

  CHAPTER 20

  UNMASKING

  February wore on, its gray skies and raw cold pierced now and then with bursts of sun, making all of Venice shine and hinting at the possibility of spring. Giulia filled every moment with work, in the workshop when she was needed and at her easel when she was not. She had a painting to finish, and Bernardo to forget.

  With each new day she saw her foolishness more clearly. He’d never been her friend, for the boy he thought he knew was a figment. He could never have been her lover. All he’d been was a distraction and a threat—to her self-control, to her disguise, to her passion to paint. By allowing their companionship to continue, she had put at risk everything she’d come so far to gain.

  I should never have let it go on so long. I should have sent him away when he asked me to make his portrait.

  But if her intellect understood this, her heart did not. There was a hole in the world where he had been. On Sunday afternoons, she found herself listening for his knock at the door, for his footsteps in the storeroom. Only when she was painting could she forget him for a little while.

  It will change, she told herself. It’s only a matter of time.

  During a free hour on the last Saturday in February, she set up her easel inside the water door, out of reach of the rain sluicing down outside. She still hid the Muse when not working on the painting, but she no longer troubled to work in secret. The entire workshop knew what she and Stefano were doing. Even Alvise had sneaked down to spy, though he’d jumped back into the shadows the moment she noticed him.

  As for Ferraldi, he had been a regular visitor, and she knew the painting was better for his advice.

  “It’s a remarkable effort for one so young,” he’d told her as she was brushing in the final details. “I am almost tempted to attend the banquet, just to see you show it.”

  “I’d be honored if you would, Maestro.”

  Ferraldi shook his head. “Contarini has invited every Venetian painter of note, but only so they may experience their exclusion anew. I will not acknowledge so childish a provocation.”

  The painting was finished. The Muse sat on a stool, her face and upper body lit to incandescence by the candles at her side, the chamber around her veiled in shadow. She had lowered her lyre, her attention caught by something else; her lips were parted, her eyes wide with wonder. Above the dusk-dimmed landscape beyond her window, a tide of stars swept the night-blue sky. Within those twilight depths lay the suggestion of great crystal rings: the ever-turning spheres of the cosmos, whose aetheric music the Muse had just perceived.

  At the bottom left, near the Muse’s bare foot, Giulia had painted a small half-unrolled scroll, marked with black letters: Gamma Me Fecit. Gamma—the Greek letter for G, which seemed a better attribution than the simple Latin G with which she’d marked Sofia’s and Bernardo’s portraits—Made Me.

  She felt a fierce pride. This was far beyond any of the practice paintings she had done at Santa Marta, even the Annunciation she’d shown Humilità, which she had considered her best. She did not think it was too much like hubris to imagine it could stand beside the work of any professional painter.

  Yet, honest in her recognition of her strengths, she could not deny that there were also weaknesses, which even Ferraldi’s astute critiques hadn’t enabled her to eliminate entirely: a slight shallowness to the perspective framed by the window, a ropiness to the Muse’s twining tresses. The Muse’s hands, painted and repainted a dozen times and still not quite right.

  And the blue—the glowing cobalt of the Muse’s gown, the deeper sapphire of the star-strewn sky . . . it was beautiful, unquestionably superior to the ready-made ultramarine the painters upstairs used for the cloaks of their Madonnas. But Giulia was certain now that she’d been correct the day she’d first laid on the color. It was not Passion blue. It lacked the radiance she remembered from Humilità’s paintings, the near-magical quality of seeming to shine from within. For all her care, even with the assistance of the color song, she had not been capable of duplicating Humilità’s achievement.

  This was not the perfect work that had existed in her mind. It was only the imperfect rendering that was the best her skill could manage. Yet Giulia was not dismayed. For she knew that she would try again—and again, and again, for as long as it took to gain the experience, the judgment, the understanding to get it right. And perhaps she never would get it right. Perhaps she would never attain that flawless blue, never create that perfect image, never
find the ultimate point of balance between what she could accomplish and what she could dream. Yet wasn’t that the point? To be drawn onward, ever onward, in pursuit of your deepest passion? To look back at the end of the race and know that you had never done less than the most you could do?

  Gamma blue, she thought. Giulia blue. She shook her head, embarrassed by her own vanity. How absurd, to imagine that her blue might deserve a name.

  She moved to stand by the water door, wrapping her arms around herself against the cold. Rain streamed from the eaves, pouring off the pavement and pimpling the surface of the canal. Just three days until Giovedi Grasso. Three days until she would make her way to Palazzo Contarini Nuova and test the loophole in Archimedeo Contarini’s rules.

  If she were allowed to enter . . . could she win? It didn’t seem entirely impossible, though it was surely highly unlikely. But winning was no longer what drove her. To test herself; to stand with other painters beneath the eye of the great master, Giovanni Bellini, and be acknowledged as one of them, woman though she was—though, of course, none would know the truth of that. To prove, if only to herself, that all she’d done—the choices she’d made, the lies she’d told, the risks she’d taken—had been worthwhile. That was what she wanted now. That was what mattered.

  “Girolamo!” Lauro’s gravelly shout jolted Giulia from her daydreams. “Where in blazes has the boy got to? Girolamo!”

  Giulia removed the Muse from the easel and returned her to her hiding place. Most of the color songs had sunk to silence as they dried; but blues slowed the hardening of the oils with which they were mixed, and the Muse’s gown was still a little soft, though it was the first color Giulia had laid on. As she headed for the stairs to answer Lauro’s call, she could hear its bell-like tones, faint but still perceptible, whispering from concealment.

  —

  Lauro put Giulia to work with Stefano at the grinding slabs, displacing Alvise, who was sent to scrub the worktables.

  “You done with your painting?”

  Stefano’s tone was casual, but Giulia wasn’t fooled. He’d been keeping track of her progress—appearing at odd moments, justifying his presence with dismissive or mocking comments. Of course he pretended to be unconcerned, but the fact that he came as often as he did told its own story. His own painting was an Annunciation of the most conventional sort, to which, as he’d promised, he had added a troop of instrument-playing angels, crammed awkwardly into a corner of the room where the Archangel Gabriel knelt before the Virgin.

  “Yes.” Giulia began to break up a block of ready-made lead white in a mortar. “You?”

  “I’m putting in a fifth angel, with a viol. I’ve got practically an entire orchestra now.” He grinned. “Maybe you should think about adding an angel or two. Your lyre-playing lady could use company.”

  “The paintings are supposed to be about music,” Giulia said. “Not simply to include musicians.”

  “Musicians make music, don’t they?” He paused in his grinding to look at her. “How is yours better, anyway? A girl with a lyre, looking startled?”

  “A Muse of song, her attention captured by the music of the spheres.”

  “How will anyone know that just by looking at her?”

  “I’ll tell them. While you’ll have to explain why the Archangel Gabriel needed to bring an orchestra to the Annunciation.”

  For a moment Giulia thought she saw uncertainty in his face. Then he shrugged and turned back to the grinding slab.

  “I suppose we’ll just have to see.”

  They continued working. Giulia dumped the lead white out onto her grinding stone and added oil, making the color purr. Beside her, Stefano’s red ochre sounded just as it should; he might be an indifferent artist, but he was a competent paint maker. The rain still drummed down outside, a counterpoint to the singing of the paints and the voices of Zuane and Antonio, bickering over a girl they both fancied. Then—

  Boom! Boomboomboomboom! A ferocious pounding on the street door echoed up the stairs.

  “Christ’s blood!” exclaimed Lauro. “Alvise, go see who’s in such a lather.”

  Alvise dropped his scrubbing brush into his bucket and slouched from the workshop, wearing his usual put-upon scowl. Giulia heard him thumping down to the storeroom, heard the creak of the door and the sound of conversation. Then Alvise’s voice, raised—“Wait! You can’t go up there!”—and then footsteps on the stairs.

  Something flashed in Giulia’s mind, an explosion of black light. Recognition? Premonition? She would never afterward be sure. The muller slipped from her hands. She turned—

  Matteo Moretti stood in the doorway.

  It was like being struck blind, for she could not believe the evidence of her eyes. It was impossible. He could not be here. She was dreaming. She’d gone mad.

  He was looking past her, toward the far end of the workshop. If she’d spun around right then, he might not have recognized her. But shock held her frozen. As if in a nightmare, she watched his head turn, watched his eyes sweep the room, watched them find her. Amazement blanked his face, followed at once by triumph. His mouth opened, shaping words that to her disbelieving ears sounded as if they were issuing from underwater:

  “Giulia Borromeo!”

  It catapulted her from her immobility. Her frozen wits leaped forward. Escape, she had to escape, right now, this instant. Not the door—he was blocking it—but the window arcade, she was closer to it than she was to him—if she sprinted, she might reach it before he caught her—if she leaped with all her might, she might clear the fondamenta and land in the canal—

  She flung herself forward, shoving Stefano aside.

  “Seize her!” she heard Matteo cry. “Don’t let her get away!”

  She almost succeeded. But inches from the sill, hands closed on the loose fabric of her painter’s smock and yanked her backward. She felt her arms crushed in someone’s grip—Lauro, his hands like iron.

  “Girolamo! What’s possessed you, boy?”

  “Let me go.” She fought against his hold. “He means me harm. Let me go!”

  “Be still! Signor, what is your business here?”

  “She is my business.” Matteo pointed. His gray curls were dark with rain, his heavy mantle soaked. “That girl you hold.”

  “There is no girl here, signor. This is Girolamo Landriani, an apprentice in Maestro Ferraldi’s workshop.”

  Matteo stepped forward, leaving the man he had brought with him waiting in the doorway. Giulia’s heart felt as if it would tear from her chest. Alvise peered around the henchman’s back, goggle-eyed. Antonio and Zuane stared openmouthed over the tops of their easels. Stefano still leaned against his grinding slab; he’d caught himself on it when Giulia pushed him, and his palms were covered in red ochre.

  “What is all this shouting?”

  It was Ferraldi, emerging from his study, a quill in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other. Matteo halted.

  “Gianfranco.”

  “Matteo!” Surprise spread across Ferraldi’s face. There was no pleasure in it. “This is unexpected. Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”

  “My business is not with you, Gianfranco. It’s with your . . . apprentice . . . over there.”

  “With Girolamo?” Ferraldi turned. “Lauro, what is this? Has the boy done something?”

  “That is no boy,” Matteo said. “That is Giulia Borromeo, a runaway novice from the Convent of Santa Marta in Padua.”

  “No, no, Matteo,” Ferraldi said. “I don’t know how you conceived such a notion. Girolamo is Giulia Borromeo’s cousin. Giulia Borromeo is dead.”

  “Very far from dead, in fact. She stands before you now, having disguised herself, betrayed her vows, and stolen a valuable secret in the bargain. I have come to Venice to retrieve her.”

  Of course. Giulia felt a sickening despair. Of course he found me. How could I ever have thought he wouldn’t?

  Ferraldi stepped toward her. The quill and paper had slipped from his
fingers. “Girolamo, is this true?”

  “It’s easily proved,” Matteo said. “Order her to remove her doublet and shirt.”

  Ferraldi ignored him. “Is it true?”

  She thought of denying it. But all Matteo had to do was rip away her clothing. And in Ferraldi’s face she saw unwilling comprehension, and knew that all the odd things he’d noticed about her were falling into place inside his mind. He believed Matteo already, even if he hadn’t yet admitted it. She closed her eyes.

  “I’m Giulia Borromeo. That’s true.”

  “Humilità’s pupil,” he whispered.

  “I did run away from Santa Marta.” She opened her eyes, though she could not meet his blue-green gaze. “But it isn’t true that I’m a thief. I’ve stolen nothing.”

  “She lies,” Matteo said. “She fled Padua to keep from revealing a secret to which she has no right.”

  “That’s not so! The secret was mine; she gave it to me of her own free will!”

  “What secret?” Ferraldi demanded. “What are you talking about?”

  “Passion blue,” Giulia said. “The recipe for Passion blue.”

  Once again she saw comprehension in Ferraldi’s face. “Humilità’s famous color.”

  “My daughter was not in her right mind before she died,” Matteo said. “This girl, coveting the color for herself, took advantage of that to obtain the recipe. Then when my daughter’s successor quite rightly demanded that the secret be shared with her, this girl betrayed her vows and fled. She is a viper, Gianfranco. See how she has already tricked you. She would have taken your secrets too.”

  “It’s not true. None of it is true.” Giulia realized that Lauro’s hands had fallen away. She was free—but where was there to go? “He wants the color for himself. He has always wanted it. You know that, Maestro—I saw your letters, I know she wrote to you about how he coveted the recipe, how he pushed her and pushed her to give him Passion blue, though she never would. She knew what she was doing when she gave it to me. To her last breath, she knew.”