Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel) Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2014 by Victoria Strauss

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Skyscape, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Skyscape are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13 (hardcover): 9781477847787

  ISBN-10 (hardcover): 1477847782

  ISBN-13 (paperback): 9781477825044

  ISBN-10 (paperback): 1477825045

  Book design by Jeanine Henderson

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014907001

  For Ann, who gave me Bernardo, and so much more. I miss you, buddy.

  CONTENTS

  Part I THE FIRST SONG

  CHAPTER 1 TRANSFORMATION

  Part II THE BEQUEST

  CHAPTER 2 A SECRET REVEALED

  CHAPTER 3 THE SIN OF PRIDE

  CHAPTER 4 MATTEO MORETTI

  CHAPTER 5 LETTERS FROM VENICE

  CHAPTER 6 WORDS SET FREE

  CHAPTER 7 THE ORCHARD WALL

  Part III THE DAUGHTER OF THE SEA

  CHAPTER 8 GIROLAMO LANDRIANI

  CHAPTER 9 A PORTRAIT IN DARKNESS

  CHAPTER 10 SOFIA GENTILESCHI

  CHAPTER 11 LA SERENISSIMA

  CHAPTER 12 REVELATIONS

  CHAPTER 13 GIANFRANCO FERRALDI

  Part IV THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

  CHAPTER 14 KING DAVID

  CHAPTER 15 BERNARDO

  CHAPTER 16 A THEME OF MUSIC

  CHAPTER 17 A LOOPHOLE

  CHAPTER 18 TANGLED LIVES

  CHAPTER 19 PASSION BLUE

  CHAPTER 20 UNMASKING

  CHAPTER 21 SURRENDER

  Part V SEASON OF LIGHT

  CHAPTER 22 LOST

  CHAPTER 23 A GIRL AGAIN

  CHAPTER 24 A SOUND OF BELLS

  CHAPTER 25 GAMMA ME FECIT

  CHAPTER 26 THE WORLD WILL CHANGE

  CHAPTER 27 REBIRTH

  Part VI EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  TRANSFORMATION

  Painting workshop of Maestra Humilità Moretti

  Convent of Santa Marta, Padua, Italy

  November, Anno Domini 1487

  On the day the colors first sang to her, Giulia woke with a restless sense of anticipation, a breathless certainty that something was about to change—although within the high brick walls of the Convent of Santa Marta, change was rarer than roses in November.

  The weather was raw and blustery, the sky thick with clouds. Midway through the morning, Giulia’s teacher, master painter Humilità Moretti, set up her easel in the courtyard and summoned Giulia from her duties in the workshop to assist.

  From among the pots of paint that crowded the small table at her side, Humilità selected one whose tight-corked throat was sealed with wax. Only a single paint was ever closed this way. Without meaning to, Giulia drew in her breath. Humilità glanced at her, and for a moment their eyes held: an acknowledgment of secrets, of a shared and painful memory.

  With a knife, Humilità broke the wax and levered out the cork. The wind snatched the cork as it popped free, whirling it to the ground and tumbling it across the flagstones, the vivid gleam of the paint it had protected flashing as it rolled: the color known as Passion blue—bluer than sapphires, bluer than oceans, the most precious of all the workshop’s paints. Giulia chased after it, catching it before it could fall into the drain at the courtyard’s center. As she picked it up, she thought she heard the sound of bells.

  Returning to Humilità’s side, she watched her teacher measure Passion blue onto her palette. It glowed like a sun-struck jewel amid the duller smears of umber and bone black and verdigris, though there was no sun in the clouded sky to make it shine—a mysterious illusion of inner light that no other painter could duplicate, though many had tried. The formula for its making was known to Humilità alone, a secret she had guarded for more than twenty years.

  Normally Giulia could lose herself in watching her teacher work, imagining herself into Humilità’s hand and Humilità’s eyes until it almost seemed it was she who held the brush. But today she was distracted by the malicious wind, the penetrating cold, the restlessness that prickled through her body and made it impossible to stand still. And the bells. She could still hear them, an insistent, chilly chiming that made her feel even colder, for it reminded her of ice, of sunlight shimmering on snow. She’d never heard such a sound at Santa Marta. Where could it be coming from?

  At last Humilità set aside her brush and carried her painting indoors, leaving Giulia to clear the worktable. Humilità had taken the pot of Passion blue as well, to lock up in her study; but a residue of the shimmering paint remained on the palette, seeming to draw to itself all the light of the cloudy day. Beneath the hissing of the wind the bells chimed on—fainter now, Giulia thought, as if whoever was ringing them had moved farther away.

  In the warmth of the workshop, she returned the paint pots to their places. Still the bells teased at her ears, sounding exactly as they had in the courtyard, and it struck her suddenly that this should not be. Inside, surely, they should be fainter, or clearer—but not the same.

  The chiming followed her as she set Humilità’s used brushes in a jar of turpentine to soak, then carried the palette over to a table to clean it. Pausing, she closed her eyes, concentrating on the slippery fall of notes. She hadn’t realized quite how lovely they were—and, somehow, less like bells than she’d first thought, almost unearthly in their silvery cadences. They sound like . . . She groped for comparisons. A cascade of stars. A rain of crystal.

  She opened her eyes. On the palette, the smear of Passion blue gleamed, as if the candles burning on the table favored it above the other colors. It drew Giulia’s gaze like a tether. She let her vision blur, let her eyes fill up with blue, with swirling azure currents and glinting sapphire radiance. The bell-music deepened, reaching into her, resonating inside her head.

  It’s the paint that’s singing. The thought rolled up from indigo depths. It’s the voice of Passion blue.

  Something flashed through Giulia’s body, a bolt of cobalt light. The palette snapped back into focus. The blue was just a smear of paint again. But she could still hear the bells, chiming, chiming; and her heart, suddenly, was pounding with dread—at the absurd, no, the mad thought that had felt utterly true in the instant it came to her. True in a way impossible things should never be.

  She snatched up a scraper and dragged it hard across the palette’s wooden surface. The soft oil paints came up easily, the colors smearing into mud. Even the jewel essence of Passion blue could not survive such mingling. Again and again she scraped, until the palette was clean.

  The bells were silent now. She could hear only the ordinary noise of the artists at their labor. But around her, the familiar landscape of the workshop had grown strange, as if she were looking through someone else’s eyes. She was cold, as cold as she’d been in the wind-chilled courtyard.

  Am I going mad? She put her hand to her throat, thinking of the talisman she’d worn all summer and then destroyed, of the celestial spirit that had been imprisoned inside it. Am I being punished for the sin of putting my trust in magic?

  No. They were just bells. Real bells, rung by rea
l hands. I’ll never hear them again.

  But within herself, she knew differently. And the next morning, when Humilità uncorked the pot of Passion blue and the crystal chiming rose, Giulia understood that something inside her had irrevocably changed. She would never be the same.

  CHAPTER 2

  A SECRET REVEALED

  Convent of Santa Marta, Padua, Italy

  September, Anno Domini 1488

  Ten months later

  Giulia paused before Humilità’s door, preparing herself. Each time she visited, she found it harder to bear the changes in her teacher, harder to pretend she was not desperately afraid.

  She knocked and stepped inside, breathing the chamber’s familiar odor—medicine and sickness—imperfectly masked by the herbal infusion simmering on a brazier, a scent she had learned to loathe. As usual, the windows were shuttered and the room was drowned in shadow. The only illumination came from a pair of candles burning on a table by the bed.

  Humilità lay propped on pillows, her wasted body hidden under heavy quilts.

  “How are you, Maestra?” Giulia knelt by the bed and took the hand Humilità held out to her. The workshop mistress’s fingers, once so strong and capable, felt like a collection of twigs.

  “Less than I was yesterday.” Humilità smiled with a ghost of her old sardonic edge. “More than I will be tomorrow.”

  She had admitted to her illness in the spring, when she could no longer hide the wasting that was stealing her strength and melting her flesh away like candle wax. There was nothing the infirmarians could do. Through the summer she’d kept working, but toward the end of August she had taken to her bed. She had not left it since.

  “Please don’t speak like that, Maestra.”

  “Ah, Giulia. Should I lie to you when you ask me such a question?”

  Giulia looked away from the knowledge in her teacher’s face. “I’ve brought my Annunciation to show you.”

  “In a moment. I have something for you. There’s a paper under my pillow. Reach it out for me.”

  Giulia laid her painting on the floor and obeyed. The workshop mistress unfolded the paper and smoothed it flat. She gazed at it a moment, then offered it back to Giulia.

  “This is yours now.”

  Giulia held the paper near the flickering candles so she could see. It was a paint recipe, written out in Humilità’s familiar script. A recipe Giulia had never seen before.

  Or . . . wait . . .

  She gasped. “Maestra—this is—Is this . . . ?”

  “Yes. It is Passion blue.”

  Giulia felt something terrifying expand inside her chest. “No.” She tried to thrust the paper back into Humilità’s hands. “I don’t want it.”

  “It’s time, Giulia.”

  “Not yet! It’s not time yet!”

  “Don’t be foolish.” Humilità’s tone was sharp. “You are stronger than this.”

  Giulia had never felt less strong. She dropped the paper on the bed and hid her face in her hands, knowing as she did how selfish it was to trouble her teacher with her grief. But the paper and the recipe it held—a secret Humilità had never shared with anyone else, ever—were too much of a shock. Normally she could hold her thoughts away from the inevitability of Humilità’s death; but now, all at once, it was a black pit right at her feet.

  After a moment she felt Humilità’s hand on her head. “Hush,” the workshop mistress said. “Calm yourself. I have more to say.”

  With enormous effort Giulia raised her head, using her sleeves to dry her cheeks.

  “This was not an easy decision, Giulia. For more than twenty years I have kept the secret of Passion blue. It has brought me fame, but it has also brought me grief.”

  Giulia nodded. She knew the grief Humilità meant: her betrayal by her father, Matteo Moretti, also a painter of fame, who had schemed to steal Passion blue for himself.

  “I thought perhaps I would let the formula perish with me. But it is beautiful, this thing I created, and beauty should not be allowed to die. So I’ve chosen to let it live on, with you—with you and you only, Giulia, for you are the most gifted pupil I have ever had, and I know that you will use it well. I cannot make you Maestra after me, as I’d hoped. I cannot give you the workshop. But I can give you Passion blue.”

  “You honor me, Maestra.”

  “Be truthful. Don’t tell me you did not hope for this.”

  “Someday,” Giulia admitted. “When I became a master painter. Not now. Not like this.”

  “Now or later, it is God’s will.”

  God’s will is cruel. Giulia looked down at the recipe where it lay on the shadowed covers of Humilità’s bed—written not in cipher, as she had often seen it in Humilità’s leather-bound book of paint formulas, but in words she could read. There was not a painter in Padua who did not covet this formula, even those who would never admit that a woman was capable of painting as magnificently as a man. How many would give gold to see what I am seeing now?

  “Does Domenica know?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “She’s not . . . angry?”

  “It is not her place to be angry. It is my recipe, and my decision, and she well knows it. But she has accepted with good grace.”

  I’m not so sure of that. Inwardly, Giulia sighed.

  “There is something else, Giulia. I must ask something of you.”

  “Anything, Maestra.”

  “It has been more than a year since I’ve communicated with my father, but I doubt his greed has lessened. He will certainly suspect that I have given you Passion blue, and he may come to you to find out. If he does”—Humilità shifted, turning so she could look into Giulia’s eyes—“you must not give it to him.”

  A chill rolled up Giulia’s back. “I never would, Maestra.”

  “Swear to me.” In the past weeks Humilità’s gaze had become distant, as if part of her were already gone. But now she was fully present, her dark eyes blazing with all their former force. “Swear on your mother’s soul that you will never give him Passion blue.”

  “I swear it. On my mother’s soul, I swear. Maestra . . . do you really think he’ll come?”

  “He is not one to forget, or to relent.” Humilità settled back against her pillows. “Remember, Giulia, he is only a man. He cannot touch you inside these walls. Santa Marta will keep you safe.”

  Memories unfurled inside Giulia’s mind: a dark night, a locked attic, Matteo Moretti’s face looming over her like a thundercloud. She bent her head and took up the paper, folding it again into quarters and stowing it in her sleeve.

  “Do you ever think of that boy?” Humilità’s eyes were closed. “The thief, the one my father hired to steal Passion blue. Ormanno Trovatelli.”

  For a moment Giulia was too surprised to answer. This was their secret, known only to the two of them, and they never spoke of it. Ormanno’s face appeared inside her mind, handsome and sly—a memory that carried a scalding rush of shame, though it had been more than a year since he had beguiled her by pretending that he loved her, then tricked her into telling him the workshop’s secrets.

  “I try not to, Maestra,” she said. “I was such a fool, not to see that all he wanted was to get his hands on Passion blue.”

  “Don’t put him out of your mind completely. Our mistakes shape us. We forget them at our peril.” Humilità opened her eyes again. “Show me your Annunciation now.”

  Giulia bent to undo the canvas that wrapped her painting. Some of the paints were still sticky; faintly, she could hear them singing, dwindling toward silence as they dried. My own secret, she thought, wishing with sudden intensity that she could share it with Humilità, as Humilità had just shared Passion blue with her. But who would believe that the paints she made and used sang to her, each with its own voice? Humilità might think her mad, or cursed. She’d never been quite brave enough to speak.

  She placed the painting in Humilità’s hands and pushed one of the candles closer so Humilità could
see. The painting was small, an ashwood panel only two hand spans wide, but even so, Giulia could tell that it was hard for her teacher to hold it.

  “I know it needs improvement,” she said when Humilità did not speak at once.

  “Not so very much,” Humilità said. “The folds of the angel’s garments hang a little stiffly, do you see? And you’ve not got the light on the Madonna’s face quite right—if your sunlight comes through the window at this angle, your shadows should slant more to the left.” She skimmed her finger above the painting’s surface, illustrating what she meant. “But overall it is a fine effort. Very fine indeed.”

  “I’ll work on correcting it, Maestra.”

  “Ah, Giulia.” Humilità let the painting fall and reached out both her hands. “How I wish God had allowed me to live long enough to see what you’ll become.”

  Her eyes glittered in the candlelight, and Giulia realized with a shock that they were filled with tears. She had never seen her teacher weep, just as she had never heard her complain about or question or grieve her fate. She took Humilità’s hands in her own, resting her forehead on their joined fingers. Her entire body ached with the effort not to cry.

  After a moment Humilità pulled gently away.

  “I’ll rest now. Perhaps you could stop at the infirmary and ask Sapientia to bring me another dose of poppy.”

  Giulia nodded, for she did not trust herself to speak. She wrapped her painting again, then rose and stood looking down at her teacher. Humilità’s hands were folded on her breast, and her eyes were closed. In the shifting candlelight, her face looked like a skull.

  A year and a half. Only a year and a half since I came to Santa Marta and she took me as her apprentice. Yet I feel as if I’ve loved her always.

  What will I do when she’s gone?

  The candle flames fluttered, their light too weak to reach the edges of the room. Giulia felt the loss that crouched in the shadows, an emptiness waiting to devour her.

  —

  Giulia stopped at the infirmary to relay Humilità’s request for poppy. Then, instead of returning to the workshop as she was supposed to, she headed for the little nun’s cell where she lived alone, hurrying along as if she were on an important errand and hoping none of the sisters she passed would challenge her. She closed her door and sat on her bed, and carefully pulled the recipe out of her sleeve.