Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel) (18 page)

“Signor, I don’t want another master. I will do anything. I’ll scrub floors, run errands, polish gesso till my fingers bleed. I’ll work day and night. I will work harder than any apprentice you’ve ever had. Just look at my work.” Giulia heard her voice break, as no boy’s would, but in that moment she didn’t care.
“Please, I beg you, don’t send me away without looking at my work. Give me that chance at least before you make up your mind.”

He fixed her with his blue-green gaze. She could see no softening in his face; and with utter despair she knew that the worst had happened, and she had failed.

But then he sighed. Shaking his head in the manner of a man acting against his better judgment, he reached for the drawings and unrolled them. Giulia had placed Sofia on top, glancing back over her shoulder, smiling her enigmatic smile. Ferraldi’s face changed when he saw her. Giulia saw the shift, the sudden sharpening of attention.

“You drew this,” he said.

“Yes, signor. I will prove it if you let me.”

He laid the portrait aside. One by one, he examined the other sheets: the portrait studies, the tiny sketches of trees and animals and the men of the merchant caravan. Giulia waited, her heart beating, every muscle tense. From beyond the door, faintly, she could hear the sound of the artists at work.

“How old are you, Girolamo?”

“Fifteen, signor.”

“Who was your master in Milan?”

“Marco Signorelli.” It was the name of a painter with whom Maestro Bruni had been acquainted.

“I don’t know the name. How long did you study with him?”

“A year and a half. But I’ve been drawing all my life, ever since I can remember.”

“Describe how you would go about making gesso.”

Giulia did. Other questions followed: purifying oils, preparing tempera, the qualities of various pigments. Giulia
answered as fully as she could. A flame of hope had kindled inside her, flaring a little brighter with each query.

At last Ferraldi rose. “Wait here.”

He went out into the workshop again, returning after a moment with a sheet of paper and a stick of black chalk. Shoving aside some of the clutter of his desk, he laid them in front of Giulia.

“Draw,” he said. “One thing, whatever you choose.”

Giulia took up the chalk, her fingers curving around it with the same deep sense of familiarity she’d felt as she crossed the threshold of Ferraldi’s house, and began to shape Humilità’s face. She drew her teacher as she had been in health: round-cheeked and robust, her deep-set eyes meeting the viewer’s in her customary expression of challenge. It was the image Giulia carried in her mind’s eye—the image that she hoped, one day, would blot out the memory of the gaunt ghost Humilità had become at the end of her life.

She laid down the chalk and offered the paper to Ferraldi, who’d seated himself across from her again. She could read nothing in his face as he looked at it. This was her last chance, she knew. Whatever he decided now would be final.

He set down the portrait at last and folded his hands on top of it.

“Very well, Girolamo. You may stay.”

The rush of relief was so powerful that for a moment Giulia feared she would lose consciousness.

“Understand that I am not agreeing to take you as an apprentice—not yet, at any rate. You are gifted, that is clear, but a gift is only part of what makes a painter. For now, you may work with the other boys, doing as they do and learning as they learn. We shall see how well you get along.”

“I understand, signor. Thank you. Thank you!”

“Am I correct in guessing that you do not have a place to stay?”

“I’m sure I can find one, signor.”

“Well, you may make a bed for yourself downstairs in the storeroom. I have a blanket I can spare for you, but otherwise you are responsible for your own equipment and expenses, and that includes food. Do you understand?”

“Yes, signor,” Giulia said, more glad than ever for Sofia’s purse, secure beneath her doublet. “You won’t regret it, I swear.”

“Only God can make such promises.” Ferraldi rose. “Now, let me introduce you to my painters.”

—

That night Giulia spread her borrowed blanket on a makeshift platform of scrap lumber, which she’d scavenged from the storeroom and arranged in an empty corner. The storeroom occupied the whole of the ground floor, with the weight of the upper floors supported on columns. In addition to the entry from the street, big double doors opened onto a wide paved walkway, known in Venice as a fondamenta, alongside the canal. From the smell, Giulia guessed that the room had flooded more than once in the past. But the floor was dry, and she was alone, without the need to guard her secret from prying eyes.

She’d been introduced to the apprentices: Stefano, a husky young man of eighteen with narrow blue eyes and long blond hair; thirteen-year-old Marin, with the face of an angel in a Nativity painting; and Alvise, Ferraldi’s nephew, the scruffy, unfriendly boy who’d let her in. She’d met the painters: Lauro, the workshop’s second in command, the hard-faced man to
whom Ferraldi had been talking when she arrived; Zuane and Antonio, cousins who looked almost alike enough to be twins.

Introductions finished, she’d been handed over to Stefano, who showed her around the workshop and took her up to the third floor, where Ferraldi, who was unmarried, had his living quarters and the apprentices slept crammed into a single room. Though curious about where she was from and how she’d convinced Ferraldi to accept her, Stefano was more interested in talking about himself, making sure she knew that he was nearly at the end of his apprenticeship and working on studies for his master painting—which, to hear him tell it, was certain to be a masterpiece.

The tour finished, he’d brought her back to the workshop and put her to sweeping up. Work ended for the day as soon as the light began to fail; Lauro and the other painters departed, while Ferraldi and the apprentices retired to the third floor and Giulia was dismissed downstairs. She’d built her scrap-lumber platform, then ventured out to find a tavern and used a little of Sofia’s money to buy bread and cheese and sour wine, which she’d consumed by the light of the candle Ferraldi had given her.

Now, with everything silent, she longed to creep back up to the workshop—to wander among the materials and tools, to hold her candle close to the half-finished paintings, to uncork the pigment pots. She hadn’t realized how deeply she missed the voices of the paints until she heard them again this afternoon, or how dull and quiet the world was without them. She wanted nothing more now than to listen to them sing, and if that was a sin, as she had sometimes feared, she did not care. Better, though, not to risk it. Tomorrow would be soon enough.

“Do you see me, Maestra?” she whispered to the shadows and the flickering candlelight. “I have a master. I have a
workshop. I will be a painter, not a slave under Domenica’s command.”

All afternoon and evening she’d been repeating this to herself, trying to believe she had actually, against all the odds, achieved everything she had planned. Well . . . not quite everything, for Ferraldi had not yet made her an apprentice. But that would come. Warm under the blanket and Bernardo’s mantle, her stomach full and her head buzzing pleasantly from the wine, she could finally allow herself to admit how much, in her heart of hearts, she had doubted she would get even as far as this.

In the time she’d been traveling, she had only vaguely considered the future. All her planning, all her energy and hope, had been bent on reaching this moment. Now her mind leaped forward: to the days she would spend in the workshop, proving herself to Ferraldi so that the last piece of her plan could slip into place. To everything she would need to do and learn in order to survive in this unfamiliar workshop, this alien city. And to the challenge of guarding her secret, of maintaining her disguise. Of pretending every moment to be someone—something—she was not.

A thread of cold rippled through the drowsy warmth enclosing her. Had she ever thought of her disguise as anything but temporary? But the reason for it was not temporary. If she could not apprentice as herself—as a female—would she ever be able to paint as herself?

Will I have to wear this disguise forever?

Something unfurled inside her chest, the same trapped, breathless feeling that had seized her at Santa Marta when she had considered her final vows. She thought of the words of her horoscope fragment, God’s will for her life written in the stars of her birth: never to love or marry, to die without her name. A
nun at Santa Marta, Girolamo Landriani in Venice—was it not the same? How many times had she tried to outrun her fate; how many times had the stars brought her back? Would every choice she made always bring her back?

But Girolamo Landriani will paint. That must be God’s will as well, for did not God give me my gift? And if I must spend my life alone and unloved, shall I not at least spend it painting?

She thought of what Sofia had said to her on the night she presented the portrait:
Your gift demands
everything
of you.
It was so. She could feel it: her gift, the core of fire that was the heart of her. Burning, always burning, no cold or doubt or cruelty enough to put it out.

Only God knew the future. As in the meadow after the brothers robbed her, she would do one thing at a time, take one step at a time, and see where it led her.

I’m here, with Ferraldi. For now that’s enough.

She blew out the candle. The room fell dark. She curled into the shelter of Bernardo’s mantle, feeling the presence of the great city around her, and herself within it, a new seed cast on fertile ground, ready to grow.

CHAPTER 14

KING DAVID

Venice, Italy

Early January, Anno Domini 1489

The great voice of the Marangona bell, which pealed each morning from the Campanile in the Piazza San Marco to summon Venetians to work, and again each evening to send them home, rang out as Giulia turned the corner into the narrow street where the color seller had his shop.

The spice vendors and jewelers who did business in this part of the Rialto were only just starting to raise their shutters, but the pavement was already crowded with shoppers and tradespeople. Shouts, voices raised in bargaining, the sound of hammers and other tools echoed from the housefronts; whiffs of cinnamon and clove caught at Giulia’s nose, mingled
with the smell of charcoal smoke and the metallic odors of the forge. Her breath plumed out in front of her as she walked. She’d never experienced anything quite like the cold of the Venetian winter: damp, raw, incredibly penetrating.

The color seller’s shop was near the end of the street. She pushed open the door and stepped into the welcome warmth.

“Master Landriani!” A smile of welcome creased the color seller’s plump cheeks. “I have your order ready.”

“I also need twenty sticks of black chalk, if you’ve got them.”

“I do indeed. Just give me a moment.”

The color seller bustled over to the crowded shelves that held his goods. Giulia warmed her hands over a brazier as he counted out the chalk, then counted it a second time for good measure. She breathed deeply, savoring the shop’s distinctive aroma: the dense, mixed scents of the hundreds of items sold here, overlaid by the sharp tang of vinegar boiling in another room, where an apprentice was steaming lead to extract white pigment.