Passion Blue (2 page)

“Now thank me, girl,” the Countess said. “For I am giving you a better place in life than ever you could have gotten on your own, and an opportunity to save your miserable soul in the bargain.”

Giulia raised her chin. She no longer had anything to lose. Even so, she couldn’t keep her voice from shaking, as she defied this woman who had absolute power over her, body and soul. “I will not thank you,” she said. “I will never thank you.”

Color flooded the Countess’s pale cheeks. She stepped across the space between them and slapped Giulia’s face—once, twice, three times, her rings adding weight to the blows.

“You go tomorrow,” she said, biting off each word. “Now get out of my sight. Never let me see you again.”

Head high, face throbbing, Giulia obeyed. She didn’t curtsy, a disrespect she never would have dared show before. But what difference did it make now?

She couldn’t face going downstairs, where Clara would be waiting to gloat. Instead, she climbed to the storerooms in the attic. She’d often hidden there as a child, to escape the unfriendliness of the other servants or the bullying of Clara’s brother, Piero, and it
was still where she went when she wanted to be alone. She found her favorite nook among the bags of grain and crates of spices and dusty furniture, and huddled there, breathing hard with horror and with rage.

I can’t be a nun. I can’t!
She was as devout as anyone, but to be locked away from the world in a cold cloister, dressed in a heavy habit, fasting and praying and doing penance day after day…even to imagine it made her feel as if she were being sealed inside a coffin, or falling down a well that had no bottom.

But what could she do? Run away? She had some money, and the topaz and silver necklace that had been her mother’s and was meant to be her dowry. But how far would those things take her? There was no one she could go to—her mother’s parents were long dead, and her mother’s brother, a soldier, had perished in an epidemic of fever. Survival would be hard enough for a grown woman with no relatives to depend on, no household to be part of, no village to take shelter in. For a girl of seventeen, it would be all but impossible.

Giulia had been brave enough, a few minutes ago, to look the Countess in the eye. But right now, this instant, she knew she was not brave enough to run away.

I wouldn’t escape even if I did. She’d do everything in her power to see me caught and punished, in return for all the years my father sheltered me
.

Giulia bowed her head onto her drawn-up knees, feeling the pain in her cheeks where the Countess’s rings had bruised her. The Count had left her a dowry. A dowry! It was as unexpected as snow in June. She
hadn’t loved him; it was impossible to love a man she saw so rarely, a man she could never quite convince herself not to be afraid of. But he had been her protector, and she’d always been grateful to him—now more than ever, knowing he had tried to extend that protection beyond his death.

The Countess had cheated him. She’d cheated Giulia as well, as thoroughly as if she’d kept the dowry for herself. It wasn’t just the money. It was Giulia’s whole future the Countess had snatched away—the dream Giulia had cherished since childhood, of a husband, children, a house of her own. A place where she belonged. None of those were possible for a nun.

It’s as if she knew the prediction of my horoscope
. In the chill of the attic, Giulia felt a deeper cold.
Short of killing me, what could be a more perfect way of making it come true?

“Oh Mama,” she whispered. “What shall I do?”

She’d been only seven when her mother died. It had comforted her, then, to imagine her mother looking down from heaven, like someone leaning over a high balcony. She’d long ago left that literal image behind, but she still spoke to her mother sometimes, half-hoping, half-pretending, she was close enough to hear.

And all at once, like an answer, Giulia saw what might save her.

She caught her breath. It was not a new idea. She’d first conceived it years ago. But it was frightening and
risky, and she had always held it at the back of her mind, saving it for a last resort.

Everything had changed today. Last resorts were all she had.

She wiped her eyes. With new purpose she got to her feet, and went in search of Maestro Carlo Bruni, the Count’s astrologer.

As she descended to the palazzo’s third floor, where Maestro Bruni’s rooms were, Giulia found herself remembering the first time she had ever gone looking for him.

She’d been just seven years old, and her mother had been dead only a few weeks. Her mother hadn’t had much to leave behind. Just a pouch of coins she’d saved, the silver and topaz necklace she had inherited from her own mother, and a cedar box holding a few small gifts from the Count, the velvet dress and linen chemise that were meant to be Giulia’s trousseau, and Giulia’s horoscope, rolled into a scroll case for safekeeping.

Giulia had moved in with Annalena right after the funeral, in a room just down the hall from the one she’d shared with her mother. She’d already stitched the coins into the hem of her skirt and the topaz necklace into her waistband; the cedar box she brought with her, pushing it under the bed where she now had to sleep with Annalena’s two children, Clara and Piero. She left her father’s trinkets and the trousseau clothes in the box, but the horoscope she concealed under the mattress, where she thought it would be safer.

She was wrong. A few days later, she returned to find the box lying open on the floor. The garments her mother had so lovingly made and embroidered were ripped and smeared with mud. The Count’s trinkets were gone. So was the horoscope—all but a single torn fragment, which had fallen behind a chest.

Giulia had known Piero was responsible, just as she’d known he was the one who pulled the head off her doll and dropped it in the chamber pot and smeared the soles of her shoes with dog dung so that she tracked it about without realizing. But she was only seven, and she was afraid of Piero, who was twelve and twice her size, and she’d learned that complaining to Annalena only made things worse. So she said nothing. She packed the clothing back into the cedar box and found a hiding place in the attic. She hid the necklace and the coins there as well. For the horoscope fragment, she sewed a waxed canvas pouch that she could wear around her neck.

She’d been sad about the ruined trousseau, though she cared little about the stolen trinkets. But it was the
loss of the horoscope that really hurt. The horoscope had been her mother’s special gift; she’d spent all her savings to commission it from the Count’s own astrologer, and it was as fine as the horoscopes of the Count’s legitimate children. On one side, against a deep blue background, was a large circle divided into twelve segments, each containing clusters of spiky symbols that represented the stars and planets that had been in the sky at the exact moment of Giulia’s birth. On the other side, neat columns of black-ink script described the symbols’ meaning.

“This is the story of your life, my love,” Giulia’s mother would murmur on the nights when she allowed Giulia to take the horoscope out of its case and unroll it on the bed to admire. “Everything that will ever happen to you is written here, everything you will ever be and do. I hadn’t enough to pay the astrologer to read it to me, but one day we’ll go to a notary and he’ll tell us what it says.”

“When will we go, Mama?”

“When you’re old enough to understand. This horoscope will guide your life, my love. You’ll never have to be like me, stumbling blindly through the years, never knowing what choices to make, letting all your chances slip away. You’ll always know what’s coming, and you’ll always be prepared. You don’t yet know how important that is, but you will one day, I promise. Because in the end, Giulia—in the end, the only person you can rely on is yourself.”

Giulia had known that Piero hadn’t just torn up the horoscope, but utterly destroyed it. Even so, she hadn’t
been able to stop herself from looking for it—among the kitchen scraps, in the ashes of the fires, even in the foul-smelling darkness of the privies. She’d come to fear it a little, for her mother’s death had taught her that the world held awful pain as well as happiness, and the star-map of a life must surely show both. Yet she wanted it back, as painfully, as hopelessly as she wanted her mother back.

Or
was
it hopeless?

A month after Piero found the cedar box, Giulia finally scraped up the courage to make her way to Maestro Bruni’s rooms. He’d created the horoscope—perhaps he remembered it well enough to re-create it. “I can pay you,” she told him, offering her mother’s coins. But he shook his head.

“I’m sorry, child. I’m not the astrologer your mother commissioned.” He was a small man, thin as a wire, with soft brown eyes and a hooked nose that reminded her of a bird’s beak. She liked his gentle manner, and the serious way he listened to her. “I came into the Count’s employ only two years ago.”

“There’s this.” She held out the fragment. “Doesn’t it help?”

He glanced at the symbols, then looked at the side with the writing. He frowned. “This is not a happy prediction, my dear. It says—” He seemed to catch himself. “That your stars are not favorable for marriage.”

“They aren’t? But why not?”

“I don’t know, my dear. It’s just a fragment.”

“But…Mama wanted me to marry.” Giulia’s eyes filled with tears. “She said I had to
find a husband to protect me. She said it was the most important thing of all. She said…she said I must never end up like her, living in a little room at the bottom of a big house, with a child who has no father.”

“Oh, my dear.” Maestro Bruni’s brow creased with sympathy. “Such predictions are possibilities, not certainties. What’s written on that bit of paper doesn’t have to happen.”

“It doesn’t?”

“Our lives are written in the skies of our birth. But God gave us free will. That means we can resist the influence of our stars, and shape our lives through our own choices. Suppose…suppose your birth horoscope showed there was danger to you of death by drowning. You could stay away from water, from boats—anything that might cause you to drown. Or suppose, as in your case, your stars say it will be difficult for you to marry. If you do everything you can to look for a husband, rather than waiting for him, as most girls do, perhaps you will marry after all. Do you see?”

“I…I think so.”

“There may have been predictions in the original chart to balance this one.” Maestro Bruni smiled. “Would you like to find out? Shall I cast you a new horoscope?”

“Oh, sir! Would you?”

“Indeed I would. And put away your coins, my dear, I won’t take even a penny. When were you born?”

“In March, sir. I’m seven.”

“In Pisces, then, in…hmmm…1470. And the day and hour?”

Giulia opened her mouth to reply. Her mother had always celebrated her name day in March. But the day and the hour…

“I don’t know,” she said in a small voice.

“Did your mother never tell you?”

Had she? Giulia couldn’t remember. She shook her head.

“Then I’m sorry.” He sounded genuinely regretful. “Without at least the day of your birth, there’s nothing I can do.”

He held out the fragment. Giulia took it, trying not to cry.

“Don’t look so sad, child. Most people never know their stars. Others do, and pay no heed to the warnings written there. One can live a good life without a horoscope, and a bad life with one. Better the former than the latter, don’t you think?”

“Thank you, sir.” Giulia curtsied. “For your time.”

“Come back and visit me if you remember more.” He smiled. “Even if you don’t, eh?”

Giulia never did remember more. But she had returned to Maestro’s rooms whenever she could slip away. He’d been kind to her, and unlike the servants’ quarters, his cluttered study held no painful memories of her mother. She was too young, then, to question why he would welcome her; it was only as she grew older that she began to understand how lonely he was, for he was unmarried, just as her horoscope predicted she would be, and his family was far away in the city of Vicenza.

He indulged her curiosity about his instruments
and books. As she proved how quickly she could learn, what had been a game became something more. He taught her to read and write, both in Italian and in the practical Latin of scholars and the Church. He let her delve into his books on history and philosophy and geography. She began showing him her drawings, which he praised as only her mother ever had before; it was he who gave her the leather-covered sketchbook that she carried always in her belt-pouch. By the time she turned twelve, he’d come to rely on her as a kind of secretary, to copy out his scribbled interpretations of the elaborate horoscopes he created for the Borromeo family: natal horoscopes for the birth of children, electional horoscopes to determine the proper times for important events, horary horoscopes to answer important questions.

The visits to Maestro fed Giulia’s hunger for knowledge. But also, they were a refuge—from the tedium of the sewing room, from Piero’s bullying and Clara’s malice, from her uneasy position in the household, excluded from the upstairs world because of her bastardy, isolated within the downstairs world for the same reason. By long practice, she was able to ignore the other servants’ coldness and occasional mockery—making fun of her charcoal-stained fingers, mincing along behind her with their noses in the air and pinched expressions on their faces, to show they thought she put on airs. But she could not always fully armor herself against the hurt and the anger. It was good to have a place where she was not only accepted, but valued. Even, perhaps, loved.

“You’re as clever as a boy, my dear,” Maestro sometimes told her. “I don’t know what God was thinking, to give such an intellect to a girl.”

Giulia knew he didn’t mean the words to sting. But they did. A boy who could read and write could do so many things—even if he were a servant, even if he were a bastard. But a girl…no matter how clever a girl was, no matter how full of learning she stuffed her head, all a girl could do was to get married and have children.