Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel) (21 page)

“I wasn’t wondering,” Giulia said, though it was not true.

“For a little while he was my mother’s only patron. She thought—” He stopped, clamped his lips together. “But then she fell pregnant, and he cast her aside. He knows about me. But he has never chosen to acknowledge me.”

He said it matter-of-factly, but something in his voice betrayed a deeper feeling. Giulia remembered the moment when his arrogant shell had cracked on the Campo San Lio, and she had glimpsed a different self beneath.

“My father didn’t acknowledge me either,” she said.

“You’re illegitimate?” She heard the surprise in his voice.

“My father was a nobleman. My mother was his seamstress. She died when I was seven. He favored her, so for her sake he kept me under his roof, but he never acknowledged me. I grew up among the servants. I was trained as a servant myself, as . . . as a scullion. When my father died in his turn, his wife lost no time getting rid of me.”

“So.” The whites of Bernardo’s eyes caught what little light there was, gleaming like ice, the irises as black as inkblots. “We have something in common.”

And for just a moment Giulia felt that it was true.

It wasn’t long after he departed that she began to regret agreeing to the portrait, and to remember all the reasons why it was better to cut him—and Sofia—out of her life. Should she send him away on Sunday, telling him she’d changed her mind? But that meant inventing an explanation. And he would certainly be angry.

It’s only a portrait
, she told herself.
An afternoon of sketching, a week of composing. I’ll give it to him, and that will be that.

She attended Mass on Sunday at the church of San Lio and returned to Ferraldi’s house to find Bernardo already waiting. He had brought paper for her to use—thick, fine-quality sheets, far better than she could have afforded on her own.

The day was overcast but bright, so though it was cold, she brought him onto the wide
fondamenta
outside the water door, posing him on a tarpaulin-covered load of lumber that had been delivered a few days earlier. He was as good at immobility as his mother, seeming barely to blink as he stared across the rio at the houses on the other side. Perched on a stool, her drawing board balanced on her knee, Giulia sketched him from different angles, preliminary studies that she would later consider in planning the perspective and approach of the final portrait.

At first they were silent. Then a gondola glided by, its oar dipping, its wake slapping against the foundations of the houses, and Bernardo said softly, “For me, that is the sound of Venice. Water, imprisoned between walls.”

“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 other, 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