Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel) Page 15

  “I hear it at night.” Giulia kept her voice low, mindful of the open window arcade of the workshop one floor above. Lauro and Zuane and Antonio did not come in on Sundays, and the apprentices went home to their families on Saturday night; but Ferraldi often worked alone when everyone was absent. “It makes me dream of drowning.”

  “You’re as likely to die of cold or filth if you fall into the canals. Are you learning your way about the city?”

  “A little. It’s easy to get lost.”

  “There was once a man who disembarked on the Molo on a fine spring day. He set out for Cannaregio and was never seen again. They say his spirit still wanders the streets, trying to find its way.”

  “Is that really a story people tell?” Giulia looked up from her drawing board. “Or did you make it up this minute?”

  His lips lifted a little. “It’s really a story. Have you gotten lost, then?”

  Giulia described the nightmare experience of being abandoned by Stefano when she went with him to deliver a finished commission. Bernardo confessed that though he’d lived in the city for every one of his nineteen years, he still occasionally made a wrong turn when he traveled on foot.

  He went on to speak of his childhood in one of the poorer sections of the Rialto, where Sofia had lived before she reached the height of her success, and of how, thanks to her canny financial management and her shrewd acquisition of ever more noble and generous clients, they had moved to the house in Cannaregio when he was eight. In return, Giulia told him about growing up in her father’s household, about her friendship with Maestro Bruni and all he had taught her. It was surprisingly easy to recast her own real history as Girolamo’s. For the first time it struck her that in some ways she had really never lived a girl’s life at all.

  At last the light began to fail.

  “I think I have enough now.” She put down her charcoal, realizing that she was actually reluctant for the afternoon to end. Bernardo hadn’t been haughty or condescending; he had not mocked or interrogated her. They had simply . . . talked. Not since Santa Marta, and her nighttime conversations with Angela, had she really talked with anyone. Every day she responded to instructions or answered questions or fended off Stefano’s jibes. But that was not the same.

  Bernardo got to his feet and stretched. “How long do you need to complete it?”

  “Come back next Sunday. I’ll have it done by then.”

  She worked on the portrait at night by candlelight, using ink bought with Sofia’s money, a quill she’d cut herself, and chips of white and red chalk she’d salvaged from the rubbish of the storeroom. She drew him from the waist up: His body shifted slightly away from the picture plane, his face unsmiling, his black hair like a fall of night and his obsidian eyes challenging the viewer’s. It was a harsher likeness than she’d originally intended. She considered softening it for the sake of the girl who would receive it—but as many untruths as she had told with her mouth, her hand could not lie.

  This is how he is. Better his betrothed should see him true.

  Despite herself, she felt a fluttering anxiety when she gave him the portrait on the following Sunday. Men were not like women; they did not examine themselves in mirrors or seek their reflections in still water. Would he recognize himself? Would he deny the likeness? She could read nothing in his expression as he examined the portrait, angling the paper toward the candle she had set on a chest so he could see.

  “It’s strange,” he said, “seeing one’s own face like this.”

  “Is it what you wanted? If you don’t like it, I can make another.”

  “No. No, this will do very well.” He rolled up the paper and thrust it inside his doublet. From the pouch at his belt, he took a coin. “Here’s what I owe you.”

  Beyond the silver scudi Sofia had given her, Giulia had little experience of Venetian currency. But this coin shone gold. A ducat.

  “That’s far too much.”

  “Take it.”

  Giulia shook her head. “I don’t want charity.”

  “Not charity. Payment.”

  He laid the ducat by the candle and left.

  The coin gleamed dully against the dark wood. Giulia stared at it a moment before picking it up and stowing it in her belt pouch with the remainder of Sofia’s money. She felt ridiculously disappointed. But what had she expected? Praise? Gratitude? It had been a business transaction, that was all.

  She carried the candle to her curtained sleeping area, where the sheets of paper she’d filled last Sunday lay stacked on the floor. She picked them up and spread them on her mattress, examining them in the unsteady light: His face turned toward her, his face in profile. His long-fingered hands clasped together on his knee. Details of his sleeves, his cap, the collar of his shirt above the high neck of his doublet. The curve of his eyelid.

  A sudden anger took her. What’s wrong with me, mooning over these drawings? It doesn’t matter that he makes my pulse leap. It doesn’t matter that I’ve begun to like him a little. Nothing can come of it.

  Sweeping the drawings into a pile, she brought them outside onto the fondamenta, where, although she never destroyed her own work, she tore them into pieces and fed them to the canal.

  This time, she thought, he might really be gone for good. She knew it was for the best, despite the small, stubborn part of her that refused to stop hoping he would return. She could hardly have said what she felt when, the following Sunday, he did.

  “Get your mantle,” he commanded. As before, he’d arrived just after noon. “If you’re to live in Venice, you must know her. It’s time you started properly learning your way about.”

  “I have work.” With Ferraldi’s permission, she had begun to put the warehouse into better order, and she’d planned to spend this day inventorying supplies.

  “What work? This is the day of rest.”

  “Do you not have something better to do?”

  “Very likely.” He glanced away. “But I don’t wish to do it.”

  He would not allow her to say no, and in truth—and against her better judgment—she did not want to refuse. He’d brought the gondola, which he piloted expertly himself, as well as wine to drink and sweets to share. She was tense at first—far too aware of his physical presence, of her own true self beneath the shell of her boy’s clothes. But as they navigated the canals, gliding beneath shuttered windows, eeling past other watercraft, skimming under bridges so low that Bernardo had to crouch, she began to relax.

  Standing at his oar, his cap and mantle tossed aside and his normally sleek hair tangled by the wind, Bernardo was at ease in a way she’d never seen before, his handsome face alight with enthusiasm as he pointed out landmarks and shared bits of Venetian history and legend. His love for his city, in all its glorious uniqueness, was clear—the first real passion, other than anger or pride, she’d known him to show. By the end of the afternoon, she could almost feel that passion too.

  He returned her to their starting point, at the landing near Campo San Lio. She stood watching as he steered the gondola away, turning to leave only when she realized she was waiting for him to look back.

  There was never an agreement or a stated intent. But the Sunday visits became a regular arrangement. He accompanied her on sketching excursions, reading one of the books he always seemed to carry with him while she drew. He brought her to the western seawall to watch the sun set over the lagoon in a blaze of rose and gold. He piloted the gondola to the gates of the Arsenal, Venice’s famous shipping yard, closed to all but those who worked there, for what went on inside was a state secret. On one of the city’s many feast days, he brought her to see the doge and the Great Council in procession: a line of black- and red-clad nobles so long it snaked all the way around the Piazza San Marco.

  He insisted that she witness one of Venice’s famous battagliole, the mock battles fought by laborers from adjoining parishes for possession of a bridge, and laughed when she could not hide her distaste at the spectacle of men trampling each o
ther, beating each other bloody with sticks, and shoving each other into the filthy, freezing waters of the canal, all accompanied by howls of approval from a huge crowd of spectators.

  “You’re as delicate as a girl sometimes, Girolamo,” he told her. “The way you turn up your nose at things! Have you never seen a good fistfight before?”

  “I’ve seen fights,” Giulia replied, pretending affront to conceal the shock his remark had given her. “I just don’t see the point of fighting over a bridge that doesn’t belong to anyone.”

  “It’s tradition,” Bernardo said. “Tradition is its own point.”

  They were not becoming friends, exactly. It was more as if Bernardo had decided to adopt her—as if, like his mother, he was given to taking stray creatures under his wing, though this was not something she would have suspected lay in his character. He treated her like a younger brother: someone to be instructed, sometimes teased, occasionally confided in.

  Why? Giulia could not quite make up her mind. He had no siblings of his own—perhaps he had always wanted one. Maybe the Sundays were an opportunity to escape his responsibilities—collecting rents, overseeing Sofia’s household, managing her schedule for the few patrons she still entertained—duties Giulia knew, from the tight-lipped way he spoke of them, that he did not enjoy.

  Or . . . could he simply be lonely? From the hints he’d let drop about his life, Giulia had the impression that he did not have close companions, apart from Sofia. He never spoke of friends; the names he mentioned were all of business associates or his mother’s tenants. Partly, she thought, this must be temperament. Even before they’d reached Venice, she had seen that he was solitary, prone to silence and dark moods. But his ambiguous social status, so much like her own when she was growing up, must also play a part, with the additional element of scandal from his mother’s profession.

  She picked at these questions, rolling them around in her mind like beads, wondering if she was foolish to surrender to this friendship, or whatever it was. For if she was honest, she could not deny that from liking him a little, she was growing to like him much too much—a far more troubling feeling than the quick burn of physical attraction, rooted in the time they were spending together and the bits and pieces of himself he’d allowed her—or as he thought, Girolamo—to glimpse beneath the arrogance he wore like armor.

  Nothing can come of it. On the day Giulia had torn up her sketches, this thought had made her angry. Now it seemed like reassurance. If nothing could come of this odd companionship—if she assumed nothing, expected nothing—surely there was no harm in letting Bernardo be Girolamo’s friend.

  CHAPTER 16

  A THEME OF MUSIC

  As Giulia had predicted to the color seller, the fresco was finished by the end of the week. Each morning, Ferraldi called her to position the template for the day’s work and to incise its lines into the intonaco.

  Over the past three months she had worked hard to establish herself in the workshop: obeying orders without complaint, volunteering for unpleasant jobs, keeping herself in Stefano’s good graces by deference and flattery. She seized every chance to prove herself at the grinding stone, where her ability to judge her paint mixes by ear as well as by hand and eye gave her an advantage over the other apprentices. Lately, Zuane and Antonio had begun to call on her, especially when they needed one of the more valuable colors. Even taciturn Lauro sometimes singled her out. Ferraldi, however, had never summoned her to assist him—until now.

  On Friday, the last day, he allowed her to stand by him as he applied paint to the wet plaster. In his workshop, as in Humilità’s, many paintings were collaborative, with Ferraldi creating the principal figures and his assistants completing secondary figures and backgrounds; but for fresco he preferred to paint alone. He worked at speed, racing the drying of the intonaco, using broad brushstrokes and, except for a few areas of very bright or very dark, only a single layer of color.

  Giulia stood spellbound as the rosy nude figure of Bathsheba bloomed beneath his expert hand. The voices of the paints dwindled almost as soon as they were laid on, swallowed by the water-hungry plaster. Never at Santa Marta would she have been permitted to view such a scene; except for the sacred body of Christ, it was considered sinful for a nun or novice to look upon the human form unclothed. She held her own hands behind her back, her fingers burning as they did when she longed to grip the brush. She was aware of Alvise’s sullen glare—and also, occasionally, of Stefano’s sharp blue gaze. She knew he would do something to humiliate her later, to remind her of her place at the bottom of the apprentice hierarchy. But it would be worth it, for this chance to stand by Ferraldi as she’d once stood by Humilità—learning, always learning.

  —

  Bernardo arrived on Sunday just past noon, as usual. He was dressed with his customary sober elegance, his fur-trimmed mantle the single touch of luxury. When he threw it back, he winced, and Giulia saw that he was holding his left arm close against his side.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Bernardo shrugged, which made him wince again. “I went walking the other evening. I met with a man who was unwilling to let me pass.”

  He’d told her how he sometimes ventured out alone late at night, a lantern in one hand and the other on the pommel of his dagger. He liked the solitude, he said, the empty streets and deserted campi. Giulia suspected that he also liked daring the attention of thugs and footpads, the breath of danger in the dark.

  “And did you persuade him?”

  “Oh yes. He’s nursing more bruises than I.”

  “One day you’ll get more than bruises, wandering about alone at night.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “They can chisel that on your gravestone.”

  “You sound like my mother.”

  He turned irritably away and began to pace, while Giulia loaded drawing supplies into a leather satchel. There was more space for him to move than the first time he’d come, for Giulia had finished her reorganization of the storeroom. The shelves were dust-free, the supplies well-ordered. The piles of rubbish she had either salvaged or dumped into the rio, and there was now a large, clear area in the center of the floor where deliveries could be received and paintings set to dry. Giulia had managed all the work herself—when she’d tried to enlist Stefano to help with the heavier items, he had rolled his eyes and told her not to bother. “It’s always been this way. If you think the Maestro will thank you, you’re mistaken.” He’d been visibly displeased when Ferraldi praised her.

  “I’m ready,” she said, slinging the satchel over her shoulder and tucking her drawing board under her arm. “Are you sure you want to come with me today?”

  “I’m here, am I not?”

  The sky was overcast, the air raw with that penetrating Venetian cold. They headed for the Rialto on foot, then followed the twisting course of the Merceria. Usually they talked as they went, but today Bernardo was silent, preoccupied perhaps by the need to guard his injured ribs against the jostling crowds. Even on a Sunday the Merceria bustled, some shops shuttered but others open, the many taverns doing good business.

  They passed through the arched gateway at the Merceria’s end, emerging from the cramped confines of the street into an enormity of light and air: the Piazza San Marco, the vast plaza on Venice’s southern waterfront. Here were no leaning housefronts, no crowding walls—only open space and soaring sky. To Giulia’s left rose the glorious bulk of the Basilica, with its shimmering mosaics and golden domes. Ahead of her lay the long loggia’d façade of the Doge’s Palace, and the twin columns that rose at the edge of the Molo, the great quayside that was the main point of arrival for trade vessels from overseas. Opposite the palace, the thrusting pillar of the Campanile, Venice’s tallest bell-tower, challenged the clouds.

  As he always did when he accompanied her on these expeditions, Bernardo fell back, leaving Giulia to go on alone. The piazza heaved with activity: butchers and produce sellers and bakers at their stalls,
money changers in their booths, porters lugging bales and bundles from the waterfront, beggars and black-robed nobles and young men in bright attire going about their business, with every now and then a glimpse of more exotic folk: turbaned Saracens, dark-skinned Africans, bearded Jews. Pigeons congregated on the paving, and gulls wheeled overhead, their cries audible even above the great noise of this place. With every step Giulia breathed in a different odor, fair or foul—and beneath them all, unmistakable, the tang of the sea.

  She chose a spot well away from the one she’d picked the last time, near a man who was doing a brisk business selling roasted pears from a brazier. From the satchel at her shoulder she drew a finished portrait: the face of a stranger she’d glimpsed on the street. Drawing a breath, she added her voice to the din of commerce that echoed from the ancient stones of the piazza.

  “Portraits! Portraits! Drawn to the life upon the page! Buy a portrait for your wife or your mother, your sweetheart or your sister! Only a scudo!”

  Three months ago, she could not have imagined herself doing what she was doing now. But from the night she had arrived in Ferraldi’s workshop, she’d known she must find a way to earn money. The coins Sofia had given her would not last forever. Selling portraits, as she had in Padua on the day of her escape, had been the only thing she could think of.

  It had taken her weeks to pluck up the courage to try. The first time, she did not sell a single drawing. She forced herself to return, to shout her wares as brazenly as the vendors and stallholders did. Just as she was about to give up, a pair of tipsy youths tossed a scudo at her and demanded she draw them both for the price of one. After that a nearby meat seller offered half a dozen sausages in trade for a portrait of his young son. She’d cooked the sausages that night over her brazier in the storeroom, encouraged but knowing she must do better.

  The third time, Bernardo had come with her. And that had made all the difference.

  He strolled toward her now, just another well-dressed young man taking leisure on a Sunday, pretending interest in the goods displayed on the stalls nearby. His eyes slid over her as if he did not know her. Then he paused, as though his interest had suddenly been caught.