Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel) (25 page)

Giulia saw, now, how things fit together: the marriage he did not want, his dark mood last week, and his bleak words about change and chances. Even his bruised ribs—for in his frustration, perhaps he had not merely happened upon but sought out a violent confrontation with a stranger.

“Bernardo, if you don’t want this marriage, why did you agree to it?”

“It’s what my mother wants. For me to have an ordinary life. A wife. Children. Security. Everything she lacked for so long.”

“Does she know that
you
don’t want it?”

“She believes I will come to want it. And who’s to say she’s wrong?” He shook his head. “It’s too late for second thoughts, in any case.”

“But if the agreement isn’t signed—”

“It would be an insult to withdraw now. She’s a pleasant enough girl, my betrothed. Pretty enough too. I shall have nothing to complain of.”

The third extract was finished. Giulia put down her dowels and poured the lye, the color of a cloudless summer sky at noon, into its beaker. All the while words pressed at her lips, words she knew it might be wiser not to say.

She rose to her feet, the bowl of lapis mixture in both hands. Bernardo stood against the flooding sunlight, dark in his dark clothes, gazing down at the water, where reflections
fragmented, reassembled, broke apart again. Something rose in her, a strange melding of sympathy and anger. She ached for his distress, but even more she burned at his passive surrender to it.

“You told me once,” she said, the words coming easier because she did not have to look him in the face, “that you couldn’t ask your mother to release you to go to Padua, to the university, because you were afraid you might hate her if she refused. I think it’s the same now with this marriage. You’re doing what you think she wants, at the cost of what
you
want. But have you ever thought that in the end it may be
that
that will bring you to hate her? All the choices you are making to place her wishes above your own?”

He turned, and in his expression she saw the affront she had expected.

“You know nothing about it,” he said. “You’ve had hard luck in your life, I’ll grant you, but you’ve never been responsible for someone else’s welfare.”

Giulia thought of Sofia, amber eyed and cool. “I don’t think she needs you to be responsible for her.”

“Who are you to judge? You traveled with her for a week. I’ve lived with her my whole life. She could have abandoned me when I was born. Many in her profession do, for what patron wants his lover’s brat underfoot? But she never did. There were nights, before she became famous, when she ate nothing so that I might have a meal. She gave her favors to a scholar in exchange for my education—for years she serviced that old man, all so I might learn to read Latin and Greek and figure with numbers. The wealth she has built, the property, the house in Cannaregio—it is all for me. I owe her everything, do you understand? And now it’s my turn. I can never
repay her for all she has done for me, all she has given up, but I can at least try. I can at least do what I can to make her happy.”

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.