Passion Blue (8 page)

Madre Damiana entered at last, austere in her white robes, accompanied by her second-in-command and the rest of her administrators. The
conversae
who worked in the kitchen brought in the meal: fresh bread and butter, hot soup, and water to drink, cold from the well. It was plain, like all the food at Santa Marta, but well-prepared and plentiful.

The refectory filled with the sounds of spoons clinking on crockery, mugs thumping on tables, and the voice of the nun at the lectern, reading excerpts from the life of Marta, the convent’s patron saint. With Suor Margarita distracted by her meal, Giulia was able at last to tug at her kerchief, which she had tied too tight. Around her, the other girls were also taking advantage of the novice mistress’s temporary lapse of attention. Bettina and Barbara traded whispers. Bice and Isotta, always playing games, stole spoonfuls from each other’s bowls. Alessia sat among her acolytes—Costanza, and Nelia, and Elisabetta, and Paola—managing to look pious even while chewing. Everyone ignored Lisa, who had a
hunched back and spoke as if her mouth were full of pebbles.

They ignored Giulia too. It didn’t have to be that way—Bice and Isotta would have welcomed her, if she’d cared to join them. But though she’d been grateful for their acceptance the first night, she had not tried to make friends with them. She was used to being on her own, and anyway, it was safer. She didn’t want to slip and let down her guard, even for a second. No one must ever guess the hatred she felt for this place. No one must ever suspect her burning determination to be free.

The meal ended, and the nuns separated to their work. For Giulia, this meant Suor Columba’s sewing room. If there were a more inappropriately named nun at Santa Marta, Giulia hadn’t met her. No one could be less like a dove than skinny old Columba, with her slash of a mouth and her wintry eyes and her willow switch, always ready to slice at the arms or shoulders of seamstresses who displeased her. She ran the sewing room like the tyrant of her own tiny city-state. Even the older nuns feared her.

Today the work was bedsheets, to be hemmed, seamed, and darned. Such simple sewing was far below Giulia’s skill—at Palazzo Borromeo she’d been a garment maker, working with complicated patterns and rich fabrics. But at Santa Marta, only the choir nuns were allowed to do fine needlework. And unlike the novices of noble blood, who worked only in the morning and spent their afternoons in the schoolroom, learning the duties they would follow once they
became choir nuns, Giulia, a
conversa
, had to sit stitching all day long, with only an hour’s break for noon prayers and the midday meal. There wasn’t even the relief of conversation, for Suor Columba and her willow switch strictly enforced the Little Silence.

The morning crawled by. Giulia finished a hem, knotted her thread and bit it off, picked up another sheet. And another. And another. Growing up, she’d often cursed her sewing duties for the time they took away from the drawing and reading and daydreaming she preferred—but if being the Count’s bastard had its disadvantages, there had also been compensations, one of which was that as long as she got her work done, she could come and go more or less as she pleased. Not until now had she fully appreciated that freedom. At Santa Marta there was no freedom at all, only rules: rules for behavior, rules for speech, rules for everything except perhaps breathing. Even worse was the sameness, every day exactly like the one before—the same waking up, the same stitching, the same meals in the refectory, the same hour of recreation—all of it marked, at the same intervals, by the same bells for the same Holy Offices.

It had been the end of April when Giulia arrived. Now it was the end of May. Just four weeks—yet it felt like four years. She wondered sometimes, with a catch of panic, whether she could bear the time until the talisman set her free.

The bell rang at last for Sext, the noon service. Giulia stood and stretched her back, which ached from the hours on the hard bench, then made her way
to the novice wing for midday prayers. Afterward, she lined up with the others for the walk to the refectory, where she ate her meal and then prepared to return to the sewing room.

As she stepped through the refectory door, a nun she had never seen before caught her arm.

“Come,” the nun said. She had smooth olive skin and wide brown eyes, and looked very young—not much older, perhaps, than Giulia herself. She wore the black veil of a noblewoman.

“But what—” Giulia stopped, remembering the Little Silence.

The young nun smiled and beckoned, then turned, her shoulder dipping. For a moment Giulia thought she had stumbled—but then she saw that the nun limped, as if one leg were shorter than the other.

The nun led the way through a maze of corridors. Giulia followed, the brief pleasure of escaping the sewing room fast chilling into apprehension. They had left the parts of the convent she knew, and she had no idea where she was being taken. Had she done something wrong?

The room into which Giulia’s escort ushered her at last was enormous. One whole side of it was open to the air, facing a sunny courtyard—the same courtyard, Giulia realized, that she’d seen on her first day at Santa Marta, for there was the chapel, snugged up against the wall. In the flooding light, two black-veiled nuns sat before small desks or lecterns. Two more nuns worked at a long drafting table strewn with paper, pens, inkpots, and other drawing materials.
They raised their heads briefly as Giulia and her guide entered, then bent back to their labor.

Another table was crowded with glass vessels, pottery bowls, and flasks and bottles of every description. Here, a fifth nun was grinding something in a mortar, her sleeves tied back, her habit covered by a bibbed apron. She wore a white
conversa’s
veil.

Giulia’s escort continued into the chamber, but Giulia stopped short at the threshold. The bright space smelled of dust and raw wood and plaster, and of other things, musty and unfamiliar. What kind of place was this?

The nun at the mortar put down her pestle and came forward, cleaning her hands on her apron.

“Angela, you may go back to work.” The young nun dipped her head in acknowledgment and limped toward the table. “Giulia, welcome! I’m Suor Humilità, the mistress of this workshop. Come, let’s talk.”

She led the way toward a door on the chamber’s far side. Giulia followed, more confused than ever. A workshop? With a
conversa
as its mistress?

Beyond the door lay a small chamber furnished with another paper-strewn table, a large cabinet, and a pair of chairs.

“Sit,” Suor Humilità said. Giulia obeyed. The nun rummaged among the documents on the table. She was a short, stocky woman, not young but not old either, with a wide mouth, apple-pink cheeks, and deep-set eyes as dark as olive pits.

“Ah!” she exclaimed, extracting a sheet of paper. She held it out. “Is this yours?”

It was one of the drawings Giulia had brought with her from Milan: the
cortile
of Palazzo Borromeo, looking down from Maestro’s window. She stared at it, shocked. Had they discovered her mattress hiding place?

“Child.” The nun sat down beside her. “You have done nothing wrong. I just need to be sure that this is from your hand.” She touched the initials at the bottom of the sketch. “G.B. Giulia Borromeo. Yes?”

There was no point denying it. Giulia nodded. “Where…how did you find it?”

“It was in the box you brought with you.”

“The box?” She’d been sure she had removed all her drawings.

“The abbess herself discovered it. Who taught you to draw?”

“No one, Suor.”

“No one?” The small dark eyes were uncomfortably keen. “You had no painters in your family? No drawing master?”

“No, Suor. I’ve always just…drawn, ever since I can remember.”

“Well, God has given you talent, and I’d like to have the use of it. I want you to become an apprentice in my workshop, to train to be a painter.”

“A painter? But women can’t be painters!” Giulia caught herself. “I’m sorry. It’s just that—I mean, I’ve never heard—”

“Ah, child. Women can be many things—if only in the convent.” Suor Humilità rose and took Giulia’s arm. “Come, I’ll show you.”

She led Giulia back into the big room and over to the drafting table.

“Lucida and Perpetua, my journeymen. They are well beyond their apprenticeships, but not yet masters.” Suor Perpetua, white-veiled, nodded; Suor Lucida, in choir-nun black, flashed a dimpled smile. “Many of the paintings we make here are for the glory and beauty of Santa Marta. But we’re in demand elsewhere as well, God be praised. Paintings from my workshop hang in holy places all over Padua, and beyond it too.”

Giulia heard the pride in Suor Humilità’s voice—the sort of pride nuns were not supposed to have, at least according to Suor Margarita.

“Lucida and Perpetua are making studies for an altarpiece for the monastery of San Giustina. And over here”—she drew Giulia toward the lecterns—“are my two master painters, Domenica and Benedicta. They are working on a private commission, six paintings of scenes from the life of Santa Barbara.”

The two artists—one tall and stern, the other tiny and ancient—were working on wood panels. On each of these, a scene had been drawn in ink or charcoal and overlaid with shadows and highlights in shades of brown. The painters were layering color atop this monochrome, fleshing out the figures and the background around the saint, who was already complete. The saint was slender, with elegant hands and long golden hair, clad in a dress of profound, glowing blue.

“Oh!” Giulia exclaimed. “The blue! It’s the same blue as in the painting in the refectory, isn’t it?”

Suor Humilità’s wide mouth curved in a smile. “You’ve got a good eye, child. That certainly is my blue. It’s my own invention. I took more care with it than I did with the gold of Our Lord’s halo, for the blue is rarer.”

“
You
painted the fresco?” Giulia spoke before she thought, but Suor Humilità did not seem insulted.

“Indeed I did. With my artists’ help, of course.”

Giulia was awed. She’d assumed the fresco was the work of some famous artist—a male artist, of course. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

“All of us give glory to God in our own way,” Suor Humilità said, pleased. “My way, the way of every woman in this room, is the painter’s way. God gives us this beautiful world, and we give it back to Him, humbly and with gratitude, in our painting.”

Giulia could have stood for hours watching the details take shape under the artists’ skillful brushes, but Suor Humilità pulled her away, toward the table where the young nun who had come to fetch her was carefully scooping a dark powder from the mortar onto a marble slab.

“This is where we prepare our pigments. Angela has just finished grinding charred animal bones, which she will mix with water and make into a pigment that we call bone black.”

Suor Angela looked up and smiled, then went back to her work.

“So, Giulia Borromeo. What do you say, now that you’ve seen my little kingdom? Will you join us?”

“But the sewing room—”

“You’ll never sew another stitch, unless you want to. Come, say yes, for Angela’s sake! I know she’s been longing for another apprentice to help her grind colors.”

Giulia felt as if she were dreaming, as if she were still lying on her crackly straw mattress and any moment would be roused by the ringing of Prime. It wasn’t just the bewildering suddenness with which this had happened. It wasn’t just the prospect of being able to draw again, much as she wanted that—oh, how she wanted it! It was this workshop of women—women artists, creating paintings and altarpieces as if they were men. Before today, she had never imagined such a thing was possible.

Suor Humilità was waiting.

“Yes,” Giulia said. “Oh, yes.”

Suor Humilità’s sudden smile was like the sun. She seized both Giulia’s hands in hers. “Then tomorrow, we’ll get started!”

In the dormitory that evening, the novices talked and laughed in the daily hour of recreation—all but Lisa, who looked on longingly from a distance, and Giulia, who sat on her bed, her head free at last of the hated kerchief.

She was aware of Isotta and Bice, playing another of their games on the bed by hers. They hadn’t bothered to invite her to join them tonight. She was aware also of Alessia and her clique, gathered in their usual spot by the window. Alessia was eating nuts; she always seemed to have a supply on hand, sometimes sharing
them with the others, but more often consuming them all herself. Alessia was a bully—she reminded Giulia of Piero, except that she forced others to do her dirty work, looking on while Nelia or Costanza or Elisabetta trod on heels or whispered taunts or pulled the hair of the girls they disliked. Giulia was nursing a bruise on her arm where Nelia had pinched her last night at supper.

Just now, though, Giulia’s thoughts were far from Alessia and her cronies. She could hardly believe her good fortune. No more sewing room drudgery, no more switch-cuts from Suor Columba. She’d be free to draw again—maybe even to learn something about painting. Most amazing of all, she would be in the company of painters—real painters! Even if they were nuns.

When her father had been alive, he’d summoned her to his study every year. He always asked the same questions—was she healthy? Happy in her work? Treated well?—and she always gave the same dutiful answers, wondering if he really paid attention to anything she said. When they were done, he would allow her to stand for a little while before the small painting of the Annunciation that hung on the wall. It had seemed, then, the most beautiful thing in the world. How had the artist made the colors so bright and clear? The faces of the Madonna and the angel Gabriel so otherworldly, and yet so real? What would it be like to have the skill to create something so exquisite? Giulia had sometimes let herself daydream about that, about what it might be
like to apprentice in a painter’s workshop, though she knew it was stupid even to think about such things. Girls could draw, if they were permitted. But they could not become painters, any more than they could become astrologers or scholars or merchants. Like most everything else in the world, that was reserved for men.