Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel) Read online

  His voice shook. His fists were clenched at his sides.

  “Perhaps she doesn’t want you to repay her,” Giulia said. “Perhaps she’d rather you be happy.”

  His mouth opened, but no words came. Their eyes held—the full, direct gaze he’d lately made such efforts to avoid.

  “You’re just a boy,” he said. “Why am I listening to you?”

  He swung his mantle into place and strode past her without another glance. She heard the sound of his boots as he crossed the storeroom, the thump of the street door falling closed.

  She stood on the fondamenta for a time, the bowl of blue in her hands. She was aware of the sun on her face, the slap of water against stone, the call of gulls from the rooftops. At last, slowly, she returned to the shadows of the workshop, to mix another batch of lye and begin the fourth extraction.

  CHAPTER 18

  TANGLED LIVES

  Through the rest of the afternoon, Giulia’s mind turned and turned, like a dream in which she ran with all her might yet got nowhere. How angry had she made him? What if she’d offended him so much he never returned?

  Well, what if I did? Would it be harder than being with him? Than playing the friend, or the little brother, or whatever it is that Girolamo is to him, knowing I can never show him who I really am?

  Would it be harder than watching him marry?

  She shook her head, even though there was no one to see. She didn’t want these thoughts. She didn’t want these feelings, this stupid, useless, dangerous infatuation. She wished she’d never met him. She wished it had been he and not Sofia who had prevailed that night on the Vicenza road.

  She forced herself to concentrate on her work. She had worried she wouldn’t manage to complete the extractions before Ferraldi and the apprentices came back, but she finished in good time and was sweeping the storeroom floor when Ferraldi returned. He nodded to her and disappeared upstairs. The apprentices arrived a little later, all wearing Carnival masks. Marin raced up the stairs, followed by Alvise. Stefano paused, pushing up his mask and sniffing the air like a hound.

  “What’s that I smell? Lye?”

  “I don’t smell anything.” Giulia did not pause in her sweeping. “You’d better get rid of the mask. The Maestro is upstairs.”

  Ferraldi, who disapproved of Venice’s long Carnival season, forbade his apprentices mask themselves before Giovedi Grasso. Stefano snatched off his mask and shoved it under his mantle, then tossed back his hair and followed the others.

  Beata the maid had Sundays off, so there was no supper gathering that night. Giulia went out to buy a meal, retreating behind her curtain to eat it by candlelight. Then she brought out her studies for the Muse and resumed work on her final drawing, which was nearly complete. The light was poor, but she was used to making do. She welcomed the absorption of the task, which spared her thoughts of Bernardo.

  When enough time had passed for Ferraldi and the apprentices to be abed, she fetched out the beakers of blue, which she’d hidden behind a stack of lumber, and combined their contents as she’d described to Bernardo—a task she had not had time to carry out before. Then she took her candle and climbed upstairs, for she needed the covered mortar again.

  The mortar was not in its usual place. After some searching, she spotted it on one of the worktables. Whoever had used it had been crushing lead white and hadn’t bothered to wipe away the residue. She found a rag and began to clean it.

  “What are you doing?”

  Stefano’s voice came from behind her. She jumped around. He was standing one table over, dressed only in his shirt, a curious expression on his face.

  “Nothing.” Her heart was pounding. He had crept up on her as quietly as a cat; she hadn’t heard a thing. Thank the saints she hadn’t cried out or screamed, as a girl might have done. “What are you doing?”

  “I heard a noise.” He pointed to the rag, clutched in her hand. “That doesn’t look like nothing.”

  “I need to borrow it. The mortar, I mean.”

  “Hm.” He eyed her. “You were up here last week too, grinding something in the middle of the night. I heard you through the floor, and I know it was you because everyone else was in bed. And I did smell lye today, even if you tried to pretend otherwise. What are you up to that you don’t want anyone to know about? You had better tell me. I’ll find out whether you do or not.”

  Giulia sighed. Passion blue was a secret, but there was no reason why her painting had to be. “I’m making paint. I’m going to enter Archimedeo Contarini’s competition. The Maestro has given me permission.”

  “The competition with the five-hundred-ducat prize?” Stefano frowned. “You can’t. It’s closed to Venetians. Anyway, you’re just an apprentice. Barely an apprentice, at that.”

  “It’s only closed to Venetians who are members of the artists’ guild. Nothing has been said about closing it to apprentices.”

  Stefano laughed. “You really think you can use that to cheat your way in?”

  Giulia shrugged. “I can try.”

  “Five hundred ducats. That’s a lot of money.” Stefano folded his arms, looking thoughtful. “I wonder . . . My master painting is well under way. If I finished it in time . . .”

  “There must be a theme of music,” Giulia said sharply.

  He shrugged. “I can add some angels playing instruments. What are you painting?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” Giulia lied.

  “And yet here you are, already making paint.” Stefano’s narrow blue eyes glinted in the yellow candlelight. “You’re an odd one, Girolamo, with your bed curtains and your dainty ways. Always going off by yourself, never joining in. It’s enough to make a man wonder, if he was the wondering type. But no one can say you aren’t clever. Talking your way into the workshop, showing up poor old Alvise as you did a couple of weeks ago—” He nodded. “Oh yes. I see the path you’re walking.”

  Giulia stared at him, cold with sudden dread. She felt the skin of her disguise as she rarely did these days, and her own true self beneath it, hiding in plain sight.

  “Don’t fear. I don’t care a whit what you’re up to. I’m away from here the minute I get my guild membership—go ahead and scheme, and good fortune to you. In the meantime, though”—he grinned—“I’m going to try my hand at that five hundred ducats. ’Night, Girolamo.”

  Giulia went back to cleaning the mortar. She was furious—both at the way he’d made her feel and his theft of her idea. Bernardo’s idea, she corrected herself. Now she could expect to have her free time curtailed, for while Stefano might not actually try to stop her, he’d surely throw every possible obstacle in her way.

  Ah well, she thought as she returned downstairs, the heavy mortar cradled in her arms, it’s not as if whatever he produces will actually be competition. As a painter, Stefano was no better than adequate, doing well enough with the Madonna and Child panels the workshop turned out in endless succession but faltering with anything more ambitious. I have nothing to fear from him.

  —

  As Giulia had expected, Stefano did his best to keep her busy in the week that followed, and she was hard put to snatch any free time at all. Even so, she managed to wash the lapis extracts clean of lye, burnish the final layer of gesso on the small panel she had prepared, and, working by candlelight in the evening, complete the transfer of her final drawing of the Muse.

  She also paid another visit to the color seller, where she used the rest of her portrait earnings to buy the additional pigments she needed. The bill came to more money than she had; reluctantly, she set aside the cinnabar she’d been planning to use to make vermilion and asked for madder lake instead. The color seller, however, inquisitive as always, had deduced that she was buying for herself rather than for her master. He winked and put the cinnabar back.

  “Pay me when you can,” he told her. “Don’t think I won’t forget you owe it, though.”

  On Sunday morning Giulia woke thinking about Bernardo. Would he come today? She
tried to banish him from her mind as she began work on the painting, concentrating on the voices of her paints as she laid in a monochrome ground of shadows and highlights over which she would later build up color. But every sound from outside made her jump. It was not until well after noon, when she could no longer pretend he might arrive, that she was able to give herself fully to creation, her brush flying across the smooth surface of the gesso, the disappointment and the hurt forgotten for a little while.

  A week later, on the first Sunday of February, Giulia climbed to the workshop to mix pigments. Once again she had the house to herself; the apprentices were with their families as usual, and Ferraldi was spending the day at the home of a friend.

  Today she would be painting flesh: the Muse’s face and neck, her bare arms and shoulders. She ground the colors to paste with walnut oil, their voices rising one after the next: the thrumming growl of bone black, the velvet purr of lead white, raw umber rasping like a locust, and lead tin yellow trilling bright and tart, like the taste of lemon peel. Vermilion she needed also, a sizzling cadence as if hot oil could sing, and green earth, its mossy hum rising and falling like the breath of secret growing things. The paints told her when they were ground fine enough, though she could not have put into words how she knew. Each one, completed, joined its voice to the rest, a rising, unearthly harmony.

  The familiar joy of creation filled her. She was thinking only of painting as she returned downstairs, carrying the pigment pots on a tray. She bundled herself in an extra tunic and put on her fingerless gloves, then went outside, where she’d set up her easel by the rio. The sky was overcast but the clouds were high, and the bright, shadowless light was perfect for working.

  She was kneeling on the fondamenta, scooping dollops of paint onto her palette, when she heard the street door open. She got to her feet just as Bernardo came striding through the storeroom.

  She saw the change in him at once. The darkness of two weeks ago was gone. He blazed with energy and purpose.

  “I have news,” he said.

  “News?” All week Giulia had hoped for his return. But for most of the morning, her eyes color-saturated and her mind filled with the singing of the paints, she hadn’t thought of him at all. His presence now seemed unreal, as if she’d called him out of her imagination.

  “Yes!” The word burst from him, exultant. “I’ve broken my betrothal. I’m free.”

  “Bernardo! But . . . how? What changed?”

  “I was angry, Girolamo.” He began to pace, unable to keep still. “About what you said. But I couldn’t get it out of my head, and when my anger began to pass I saw that you were right. Last week I spoke to my mother. I explained everything. She’d guessed I was reluctant for this marriage, but she never realized how much I dreaded it. I never told her, you see. It was just as you said—I was so determined to do what I believed she wanted for me, what I believed she needed from me, that I never thought that she might wish for me only what I wished for myself.”

  “So she agreed to call it off?”

  “Yes. The family will be angry, but no contract was signed and no announcement was made, so my betrothed will not be shamed, nor will my mother and I be liable for broken promises. I’ll stay through the summer to make sure that all here is in order, and to hire a reliable man to oversee our properties. Then, in August—” His face shone with joy. “Girolamo, I am going to Padua!”

  “To the university?”

  “Yes! My mother has given me her blessing—and she didn’t hesitate, Girolamo; she gave it gladly. I cannot believe I waited so long or feared so much.”

  “I’m glad for you, Bernardo,” Giulia said. And she was, though it was a strange, regretful kind of gladness.

  “She will miss me, of course, and I her. But Padua isn’t far. I can come back when I’m needed. And I won’t stay forever. Venice is my home—one day I will return for good, and marry and have children and fulfill all the things she wishes for me. But not yet. Not yet!”

  He came toward her, alight with jubilation, as if the sun had come out to shine on him alone. Giulia, dazzled, could not look away.

  “How tangled in our lives we are,” he said. “All of us, wrapped up so tight we can’t see clearly. Sometimes it requires a stranger to perceive the knot. To understand where to cut. This is all because of you, Girolamo, and what you said to me that I did not wish to hear. Thank you.”

  He placed his hands on Giulia’s arms, gripping them strongly, then pulled her into an embrace. She was sure, when she thought about it later, that he meant it to be the kind of embrace men exchanged: rough, quick, accompanied by backslapping and shoulder pummeling. But the change in him, or the singing of the colors, or the certainty of farewell—she would never afterward be sure—had temporarily breached the guard that caused her to flinch or stiffen at any contact between them. Without thinking, she softened against his chest, leaning into him. She thought, for just an instant—for just the flickering space of a breath—that he responded, pulling her more tightly against him.

  But then her hands touched him.

  He jerked back, shoving her away with enough force to make her stagger. Their eyes met. She saw the confusion in his face. Horror at her mistake rolled over her like icy water. He’s guessed. She had pressed herself against him, and he had guessed.

  But then disgust clamped like a Carnival mask across his features. And she realized, with a different kind of horror, that he’d guessed something else entirely.

  Without a word, he left her. She heard his hurried footsteps, the slam of the street door—exactly as she had two weeks ago, except that this time there was no doubt in her mind that he was gone for good.

  CHAPTER 19

  PASSION BLUE

  Well. That’s it, then.

  A strange calm had settled over Giulia. It was actually better this way, she thought: a quick, sudden severing, a door closed and locked. Now I can forget about him. I can give myself to work and learning without distraction. I should be relieved.

  Should be.

  She looked at the easel, where the Muse awaited her brush. At her feet, the color songs wove unceasing harmonies. All at once their voices were not enough. She wanted—she needed—to hear the voice she had been waiting for, the voice she longed for: the icy, silvery, secret voice of Passion blue.

  She returned to the storeroom. From their hiding place, she took the beaker that held the first two lapis extractions, fully dry now at the bottom of the glass, and the four other ingredients she had prepared.

  Upstairs in the workshop, she measured out the brilliant blue powder, placing half on a grinding slab, returning the other half to the beaker. The little heap on the slab seemed tiny; she wasn’t sure it would be enough even to finish the Muse’s gown. But if she made a mistake today, she wanted to have some pigment in reserve.

  She set out the bowls that held the additional materials, then closed her eyes for a moment, visualizing Humilità’s recipe, reviewing the proportions to make sure she’d calculated the amounts correctly.

  Carefully she began adding ingredients to the slab, arranging them in smaller heaps around the blue: an eighth part lead white, to bind with the oil she would add last. A pinch of powdered gold leaf, to add subtle warmth to the blue. An eighth part pearlescent powdered alabaster, to absorb the light. And to give the light back, to lend Passion blue its extraordinary luster: a sixth part water-clear Murano glass, from a roundel crushed flour-fine in the mortar, scintillating like star stuff even in the gray light of the day.

  Ordinary ingredients, unremarkable on their own. But if she’d followed the recipe as carefully as she believed she had, joining them together would produce an alchemical transformation, creating something greater than the melding of individual parts.

  With the muller, she gently swirled the powders together. She added a measure of walnut oil, and took up the muller once more.

  The song began to rise the instant she started to grind—faint at first, a shimmering bell-like musi
c drifting up through the silence of the workshop—just as she had heard it more than a year ago, standing at Humilità’s side in the windswept courtyard at Santa Marta. She rolled the muller around the slab, spreading the color over the marble, scraping it back to the center, starting again. All blues chimed—azurite like a silver cymbal, smalt brittle and off-key, natural ultramarine pure and resonant—but not like this. Nothing on earth was like this. With each repetition the song intensified, drawing closer, growing clearer, as if she were opening the substance of the world and summoning something incomparably beautiful from underneath.

  How could I ever have thought such a thing was sinful? How could I ever have imagined that hearing this music was anything but a gift from God?

  Humilità’s recipe cautioned against overgrinding. Giulia had feared she would not know when to stop. But the instinct for rightness that was part of her strange sixth sense was as sure now as ever. Between one breath and the next the song achieved its peak. She rolled the muller a final time and set it aside.

  She scraped the paint into a pot, gathering every speck. The song was unmuffled by the clay that held it; unconsciously, as she descended to the storeroom, she matched her footsteps to its cadences.

  She added the blue to her palette. Its voice rose above the voices of the colors already arrayed there but did not obscure them, like a principal singer surrounded by a choir. Stepping to the easel, she dipped her brush. For a moment she held back, letting the tension build. Then, with a rush of release that felt like flying, she set brush to panel.

  Working quickly, she laid the color over the area of the Muse’s gown, which she had previously prepared according to Humilità’s instructions—for that was also part of Passion blue, that it must be supported by a dark ground rather than the more conventional light one. Then she began to incorporate darks and pales to model the folds of the fabric, referring often to her master drawing, which she’d laid out on the pavement at her feet. These shadings deepened or brightened the timbre of the song but did not alter its glorious, crystal essence.