Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel) Page 25

  Ferraldi reached to take the Muse. Bernardo gripped her arm. She let him lead her down the stairs, the noise of the crowd falling away as they stepped out into the Venetian night.

  CHAPTER 26

  THE WORLD WILL CHANGE

  Carnival was in its final hours. The city blazed with celebration. Behind candle-gilded windows, on streets and quays, in rooms rich beyond dreams of avarice and campi as mean as any in the world, the people of Venice drained the last dregs of the season of excess.

  Above the Piazza San Marco, fireworks split the night, flowers of light unfurling in an instant and fading in a breath. Giulia tipped back her head to watch them as the gondola slipped through the black waters of the Grand Canal. In her mind, over and over, she heard Bellini’s voice: You are not a painter, nor will you ever be.

  I didn’t fail, she told herself. I exposed Stefano. I claimed my work. She held the Muse in her lap; in between the fireworks’ echoing concussions, she could just hear the crystal bell-song of her blue, whispering from the not-quite-dry paint that had betrayed Stefano’s treachery. Perhaps she hadn’t been allowed to stand with her painting, but at least no one else could claim it as his own.

  What if I’d waited to speak until the judging was finished? Might the Muse have won?

  But there was no purpose in such thoughts. And she knew now that the ultimate outcome would have been the same.

  Celebration was still in full swing in the Campo San Lio. The noise of revelry came out to meet them as Bernardo guided the gondola up to the water steps. Beside Giulia, Ferraldi turned.

  “You have courage,” he said.

  His face was a dark blot against the light of the fires and torches from the campo.

  “I don’t feel very courageous,” she said.

  “But you are. Never doubt it. I saw in you tonight the same bravery Humilità had, to stand against the scorn of the world and refuse to yield. I think she would have been proud.”

  Giulia felt something turn in her, a mix of hope and pain. “Do you really think so?”

  “I know it. The world will change, Giulia. It must.”

  He rose and ducked out from beneath the felze, nodding to Bernardo. Giulia looked back as they pulled away. Ferraldi stood against the fire glow, gazing after them.

  The world will change.

  You are not a painter.

  Ferraldi’s words, Bellini’s. A promise; a refusal. Which should she believe?

  Like the Grand Canal, the Rio dei Miracoli was crowded with illuminated boats. Revelers made their way along the fondamenta, bearing torches and lanterns. Venice, Giulia thought, was surely the brightest city in the world tonight.

  Bernardo moored the gondola at Sofia’s landing, then leaped out and reached back to assist Giulia. She set the Muse on the floor of the boat and gripped his fingers, remembering how he’d made no move to help her when she embarked that afternoon. Once on the landing, she would have stooped to retrieve her painting, but he held on to her hand.

  “I’m sorry they wouldn’t let you offer your painting to be judged.”

  They were the first words he’d spoken since they left Palazzo Contarini Nuova. Giulia looked away from him, down at the damp marble under her feet, glistening faintly in the light of the lanterns burning by the door. She hadn’t realized until now how exhausted she was. The memory of the evening turned inside her, a tangle of hope and disappointment—and also, obscured for a little while but as inevitable as the dark days of Lent that came after this season of light, the questions she must face: What to do next? Where to go?

  “Thank you,” she said. “For accompanying me. For speaking for me.”

  “Giovanni Bellini is a fool.”

  “He’s a great master.”

  “And a fool. I’ll tell my mother to turn that portrait to the wall.”

  Giulia had to smile. “It’s not the painting’s fault.”

  “Stefano is ruined, isn’t he?”

  “I should think so. In Venice, at any rate.”

  “Good.”

  He was still holding her hand. It was beginning to feel uncomfortable. She was too aware of his closeness, of the warmth of his fingers twined with hers. Yet she did not wish to pull away.

  “What you did tonight,” he said. His face was in shadow, but his eyes caught the lantern light, glinting. “It was . . . quite something.”

  “You got your scandal, I suppose.”

  “You won’t be able to disguise yourself again. Not in Venice.”

  It was true. She hadn’t considered that. Yet if she had, she did not think she would have acted differently.

  “This afternoon . . . in my mother’s sitting room . . .” Bernardo paused, then went on in a rush. “I told you that I never guessed. About you, who you—what you really are. But I think that’s not wholly true. Somewhere in myself I must have known. Otherwise, how could I—”

  He bit off the words. He’d dropped his eyes, fixing them on their clasped hands. Giulia held her breath. Her heart had begun to race.

  “I thought I must be unnatural. Or that you must be. I told myself I had to overcome it. I told myself that was why I kept returning, to prove to myself that I didn’t—” Again he stopped himself. “And then I learned the truth, that there was nothing unnatural after all. But I’d been telling myself for so long that there was . . . I didn’t know what to feel, about you or about myself. And so I was angry.” He raised his eyes to hers. “But you were right in what you said to me. You did not owe me the truth. I see now . . . I see now that I was angry not at you, but at myself.”

  It shook Giulia to the core to hear him admit so much. She would never have expected it. She wanted to tell him she understood, that she bore no grudge, but she could not find the words.

  “Giulia.” He had never spoken her real name before. The sound of it thrilled her. “I want to offer you something. A home.”

  “A . . . home?” she repeated, not sure she had understood.

  “With my mother and me. A true home, one you will never have to leave.”

  She looked up at him, disbelieving. “You are asking me to . . . to live . . . here?”

  “Yes. You are all alone in the world. You have nowhere to go.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, that was badly spoken. But it’s true. You need a place to rest. A place where you can be safe. We could give you that.”

  “Bernardo . . . I have nothing. No money, no family, not even the clothes I’m wearing. I’ve just made a spectacle of myself in front of the highest nobility of Venice, and before that . . . well, you know my story. You know what I come from.”

  “My mother came from less. And if you think either she or I care about such things, you very much mistake our characters.”

  Giulia felt longing sweep her. To have a home. Not to make my way alone again . . . not to disguise myself or lie . . . and if he is offering this to me, does it mean . . . could it mean . . .

  “Your mother. Does she . . . is this her wish too?”

  “I haven’t asked her yet. But I know she’ll welcome you.” All this time Bernardo had not let go of her hand. Now his fingers tightened, until his grip was almost painful. “Say you will stay. Say yes.”

  “Yes,” Giulia said. Her eyes, suddenly, were full of tears. “If your mother agrees, I’ll stay.”

  He did not move. His searching gaze did not shift. But something had changed—Giulia sensed it, a tightening of the air, a tingling on her skin. The night leaned in around them, alive with anticipation.

  When he drew her toward him, it felt inevitable. And then she was in his arms and his mouth was on hers, just as she had sometimes dreamed but never allowed herself to hope. A lightness burst inside her head, a swirling dizziness that threatened to sweep her away. She rose into the kiss, sealing herself against him, feeling his heart pounding like a hammer, beat for beat with her own; and then they were spinning, spinning, and the great city of stone and black water spun with them, wheeling like the celestial spheres around the Earth; an
d the night embraced them, the gorgeous glittering mad Venetian night, so urgent with life that it seemed, for just these moments, life could never end.

  When she heard applause and laughter, it seemed to her at first that Venice itself must be speaking. But then Bernardo lifted his head and Giulia, returning abruptly to Earth, realized that it was only a group of revelers who’d paused on the fondamenta across the canal to watch.

  “I’ll wager you won’t be giving that up for Lent!” one of them yelled.

  “Mind your business,” Bernardo called back, producing more laughter.

  The men moved on. Bernardo’s arms had loosened, and like a door cracking open to the cold, Giulia wondered if he was regretting what they had just done. But then he looked down at her. In what she saw in his face, she knew he felt no regret.

  “Giulia Borromeo,” he said softly. He reached up to smooth back a tendril of her hair that had escaped its braid, his fingers lingering on her skin. “The girl who was a boy. I think I fell in love with you tonight.”

  Joy filled Giulia so full that for a moment she could not speak. “And I with you,” she said, her voice unsteady. “Though much longer ago than that.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know exactly. One day I looked, and there it was. I never thought—I never dreamed—that anything would come of it.”

  “Then perhaps we owe Matteo Moretti a debt of thanks.”

  He kissed her again, less urgently than before but all the sweeter for that. When he pulled away, his face was grave.

  “Understand, Giulia, I can promise you nothing. Not now. I must go to Padua, and it may be years before I can return.”

  “I understand.” She had not expected promises. She had not expected even so much as this.

  “But I will return, be certain of it. Venice is my home. One day I will come back for good.”

  It was a promise of a sort—if only of the possibility of a different promise. She looked into his shadowed face, into his glinting eyes.

  “I can promise nothing either, Bernardo,” she said. “I don’t know yet what I will do—even what I can do, after tonight. But I do know—” She caught her breath. Something surged in her, like the fireworks exploding over the Piazza San Marco, a pure, hot radiance that lit up everything inside her. “I do know that I will paint.”

  “Yes,” Bernardo said, as if it were completely to be expected.

  “And I will do more . . . I will do more than simply use a brush. I will be a painter. As my profession.” In her mind she heard Ferraldi’s voice: The world will change. That was what she must hope. That was what she must believe. “Maestro Bellini told me it was impossible, but I will prove him wrong. I don’t know yet how I’ll accomplish it. I don’t know what I’ll have to do or where I may have to go. I only know that I will be a painter, and I will do anything, everything, to make that so.”

  He watched her. “Even disguise yourself again?”

  “If I must.”

  A silence. Then he nodded. “But you will have a home. And if you leave it, you can return. As I will.”

  “Yes.”

  Not a promise. The possibility of a promise.

  “Come.” He stepped away. The cold night air rushed into the space between them, but his hand was still folded around hers, warm and firm. “Let’s go in and see my mother.”

  “Wait! My painting.”

  She stooped to the gondola to retrieve it. He bent with her, for he would not let her go. Hand in hand, they crossed to the door, where the servant who had been drowsing in the passage held a candle to light their way.

  As she passed inside, Giulia looked back, her eyes rising to the distant, circling stars, fully visible tonight in a sky that was icy-clear. The words of her horoscope fragment returned to her: the prophecy that had dogged her life. But now, for the very first time, she understood it differently. It barred her from family and children. It denied her name. But it did not forbid her to love, or to be loved in return.

  CHAPTER 27

  REBIRTH

  Giulia woke from dreamless sleep to gray light and the sound of church bells.

  Cocooned in the comfort of feather quilts, she lay looking up at the ceiling of the cabinet-bed where she’d slept on her first night in Venice, the events of the day before taking shape in her mind like ships emerging from fog. Almost, it seemed a dream—a long, complicated dream of many parts.

  Bernardo. The warmth that unfolded in her was no dream, nor the shiver of delight that ran through her, transporting her back to last night: his body against hers, his arms so tight around her she could hardly breathe. I think I fell in love with you tonight. She closed her eyes, hearing it again. The girl who was a boy . . .

  He’d held her hand all the way into the house, all along the pòrtego, releasing her only as they reached the fan of fire glow that spread from the open door of Sofia’s sitting room. When they’d entered, they had been separate. From her chair by the fire, Sofia had smiled in welcome, enclosing them in her tawny gaze. Giulia sensed that she knew exactly what had just happened, outside on the landing.

  Bernardo pulled up a chair for Giulia and seated himself on the hearth. Giulia sat silent as he told the story of the evening, while Sofia listened and exclaimed.

  “It will be the talk of the city!” Sofia said when he had finished. “One of the contestants at Contarini’s splendid event exposed as a fraud by a mere girl, who then had the audacity to demand a place among the men! And her accomplice, the son of a famous whore!” She laughed, a ripple of delighted amusement. “Oh, it is delicious!”

  “It’s certainly not what Contarini hoped,” Bernardo said with satisfaction.

  “You are famous now, Giulia. Or perhaps notorious would be a fitter word.”

  “I take no delight in that,” Giulia said, a little stiffly.

  “Ah, Giulia, I am sorry. You must excuse the pleasure such scandals give my son and me.” Sofia’s smile became mischievous. “But you might take a little delight. Notoriety has its benefits. I’ll wager you could get patronage from this, if you wished it.”

  This had not occurred to Giulia. “Do you really think so?”

  “The lovely girl painter whose beautiful blue caught the eye of Giovanni Bellini himself?” Sofia gestured to the Muse, propped against Giulia’s chair. “Venice loves novelty, the more shocking the better. If you are careful and clever, you could turn this to your advantage.” Her eyes gleamed. “I can advise you, if you wish.”

  “Mother.” Bernardo shifted on the hearth. “There’s something I wish to ask you.”

  “Indeed?” Sofia turned to him. “And what might that be?”

  “I have offered—that is, I would like to offer Giulia a home here, with us. Not a temporary refuge, but a true home that she will not have to leave. The benefit won’t be to her alone. She can be a companion to you while I’m gone.”

  “And to you?” Sofia looked into her son’s upturned face. “What will she be to you?”

  “A friend,” he said, his eyes sliding away from hers. “And one day, perhaps, something more.”

  “I see.” Sofia turned her amber regard on Giulia. “What do you say, Giulia? Is this what you wish? To live with me?”

  “Yes, clarissima, if you’d allow it.”

  “Consider well. This is not an ordinary house. For one who does not delight in notoriety, the household of a courtesan might not be the wisest choice of residence.”

  “You know everything I’ve done, and you don’t condemn me for it. You know all I want to do, and you don’t condemn me for that either. And there is freedom here.”

  “A kind of freedom, yes. But I wonder if it is the kind you seek.”

  “I seek only the freedom not to be judged. Never again to be told I cannot paint. Clarissima, you have been so kind to me. You had no reason at all to help me and yet you did, and I’m already in your debt more than I can ever repay. You know my history—you know I have nothing. What Bernardo is asking is too much—I know t
hat. But I would like more than anything to call your house my home. If you consent, I swear that I will never take advantage of your generosity. I swear I’ll find a way to pay you back.”

  “Then it is settled. This shall be your home, for as long as you wish it.” Sofia held out her hands. “Come. Kiss me to seal the bargain.”

  “You see?” Bernardo was smiling as Giulia settled back into her chair. “I told you she would welcome you.”

  “My presumptuous beast.” Sofia looked at him with affection. “One day you’ll presume too much, and then what will you do?”

  “Persuade you it was your own idea.”

  Sofia laughed. “Go now, Bernardo. I would like a word with Giulia alone.”

  Bernardo departed, with a kiss for his mother and a lingering look for Giulia. She could not help turning to watch him out of sight. He glanced back when he reached the door, and their eyes met. Then he was gone.

  Giulia turned back to the fire, and to Sofia’s knowing gaze.

  “There is something I must ask you, Giulia. Is there an understanding between you and my son?”

  “No, clarissima. That is . . . he has promised me nothing. But we . . . I . . .”

  Giulia trailed off. Her cheeks were aflame.

  “I understand,” Sofia said. “I suspected as much.”

  “I would never presume, clarissima. I know . . . I know you wish him to make a good marriage.”

  “What I wish is that he be happy. If he were happy with you, it would be no presumption.”

  “Clarissima, I don’t know what will become of me.” Giulia looked down at her hands, clasped together on her knees. “There’s nothing in the world I’m certain of, except that I will paint. Also—” She hesitated. “When I was a baby, my mother had a horoscope cast for me. It said—” She raised her eyes. “That I would never marry.”

  Sofia made a dismissive gesture. “I set no store by horoscopes. The stars are the stars. We make our own fates.”

  “I believed that too when I was younger. But everything I’ve done to fight my stars has only brought me back to the prediction.”