Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel) (31 page)

“I couldn’t stay at Santa Marta. I had to take the chance, no matter where it brought me. You saw that when we were traveling, even though you knew almost nothing about me. I still remember what you said to me when I gave you your portrait.”

Sofia shook her head a little. “What did I say?”

“That my gift demanded . . .
everything
. . . of me.” Giulia’s breath hitched again, but she refused to shed more tears. “And I almost succeeded. I almost did. But
almost
doesn’t matter, does it? Oh, if only I hadn’t told Maestro Ferraldi so many lies! Signor Moretti never would have found me then. I’d never have had to break my promise to my Maestra.”

“You were right to do so. It would have been foolish to resist.”

“It was selfish. I did it to save myself from going back to Santa Marta.”

“And why is that selfish? You didn’t choose to be a nun, and if you had gone back they would have made you a slave. I faced a choice like yours once, Giulia. My mother did what I do, only in the gutter rather than a palace. She died when I was just thirteen. I had no family, no one to take me in. I could have gone to the nuns, to be a
conversa
like you, scrubbing floors and doing penance for my mother’s sins, though I had no part in them and was still a virgin then. Or I could become a whore myself.” She smiled, with a strange mix of bitterness and pride. “You see what I chose.”

“But you are not just . . . that. You have learning, and independence, and . . .” Giulia looked around the shadowy room, with its great bed and painted chests and coffered ceiling. “All this.”

“Oh, child. A whore is a whore. The trappings change, but the act does not, nor the abuse, nor the disease, nor the tedium. I have won, perhaps, the best a whore can hope for: the right to be a whore no longer, and not to starve in my retirement. But had I been as foolish as others in my profession and lost it all, I would still rather that than live as I’d have had to live if I’d become a nun. I understand, Giulia, why you chose to break your promise to your teacher. I’m certain she would have understood as well.”

“She was proud of how fiercely she resisted him. She would have wanted me to do the same.”

“One must be strong to keep a secret. But stronger still, sometimes, to let it go.”

Giulia shook her head. “I can only hope I didn’t let it go completely.”

Sofia tilted her head. “How so?”

“When my Maestra first gave me the recipe, I thought I had it all—the entire secret of Passion blue, just a matter of ingredients and proportions and instructions. I knew I might make a mistake in mixing it, but I thought if I was careful, if I followed the formula without fail, there was no reason why I shouldn’t create Passion blue, exactly as my Maestra did. But . . .”

Giulia paused, searching for the words to explain the elusive insight that had come to her during the day and two long nights she’d spent as Matteo’s prisoner.

“But I didn’t think about the different skills of different hands. Every hand has its own touch, and I think that the work of each hand is different. So it was for me. I did everything precisely as the recipe required, and my blue was beautiful. But it wasn’t
Passion
blue. And I don’t know if it ever will be, if ever I get the chance to try again. I think . . . well, I hope . . . it’ll be the same for Signor Moretti. He will make blue—but not my Maestra’s blue.” She drew in her breath. “Perhaps the real secret, the one even my Maestra didn’t know, is that the secret of Passion blue cannot be given.”

They sat in silence for a time. The fire was burning low, and the corners of the chamber were lost in shadow.

“Have you thought what you will do now?” Sofia asked at last.

Giulia looked down at the glossy tiles of the hearth, at the tray with its empty plate. “I don’t know.”

“You’ll want to find another teacher, surely. I can help you, if you wish to disguise yourself again.”

“I don’t know.” Giulia put her hands over her face. “Please don’t ask me to decide.”

“Ah, Giulia. Poor girl. You need decide nothing until you wish it. You are safe here, and you may stay as long as you like.”

“Thank you, clarissima. You’ve been so kind to me.”

“Come.” There was a rustle of silk. Gentle hands took Giulia’s wrists, pulled her fingers away from her face. “You need to sleep.”

Like a child, Giulia let herself be drawn to her feet. She stood while Sofia removed the clothes Matteo had given her and slipped a clean chemise over her head, made of linen almost as fine as silk. The great bed with its pile of feather coverlets was the softest thing she’d ever felt, the sheets smooth and lavender-scented.

She felt the mattress shift as Sofia lay down beside her. She closed her eyes on the red glow of the coals in the grate, feeling the ice inside her beginning, at last, to melt.

CHAPTER 23

A GIRL AGAIN

A sound pulled Giulia from sleep. She opened her eyes on an expanse of crimson: a bed-canopy.

Sofia
, she thought.
I’m in Sofia’s house.

She sat up, the heavy covers slipping from her shoulders. Through the windows flanking the fireplace she could see sunlight on the wall of the house across the alley. The noise that had roused her was Maria, bending down to replenish the fire.

Maria straightened. Seeing Giulia was awake, she gestured to the tray that had been placed on the hearth. Giulia wondered what the silent woman thought of her transformation.

“Thank you,” she said.

Maria inclined her head and departed. Giulia slipped out of bed, pulling the quilt with her, displacing one of Sofia’s cats,
which had been curled up beside her. She wrapped herself in the quilt and sat down to eat her meal: cold meats, olives, and some sort of pickle, spicy and delicious. The cat sauntered over to join her, with a cat’s assurance of its absolute right to whatever place it happened to occupy. Giulia smoothed its silky fur. She felt calm, cleansed of emotion like a street after a hard rain. The events of the past few days were there inside her mind, but for now, in this quiet room with the cat for company, she was at peace.

She’d just finished eating when Sofia entered, in a gown almost the exact color of her hair, which was braided around her head and caught at the back with a veil as translucent as spider-silk.

“Good afternoon, sleepy one!”

Giulia put down her plate and wiped her fingers on the napkin Maria had provided. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sleep so long.”

“You needed the rest.” Sofia knelt at Giulia’s side in a swirl of gleaming skirts. “Now, I don’t wish to press you. But you must be clothed, and while you are considering what next you will do, will you let me turn you into a girl again?”

That took Giulia by surprise. “I have the clothes I came in.”

“Bah. Those are servant’s weeds. I will give you something better. Come, indulge me. It would give me pleasure to make you pretty.”

Pretty.
Giulia hesitated. Yesterday she’d despised her skirts, for they had seemed like Matteo’s proclamation of his mastery of her. But now she felt the pull of temptation: to be female again, free of the mask for a little while.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’d like that.”

Maria was summoned to bring a copper bathing tub, which she filled with hot water and scented with aromatic oils. Giulia sank into the delicious warmth, the chemise, which she still wore for modesty, billowing around her. Sofia unlaced her sleeves and rolled them up, and lathered Giulia’s hair with a foaming cake of scented soap, while Giulia washed her body with another. It was the greatest luxury she’d ever experienced. What would it be like to live this way—to grow so used to it, perhaps, that it ceased to seem extraordinary?

Giulia climbed at last from the tub, gloriously clean but for the ingrained ink and charcoal on her hands, which even soap could not remove. She toweled herself dry and slipped on the fresh chemise Sofia gave her.

From the painted chests against the wall Sofia drew an array of elaborate gowns, which she laid out on the bed for Giulia to inspect. Giulia chose the plainest, which was still finer than anything she’d ever imagined she might wear: a sleeveless underdress of russet silk, round necked to display the embroidered band of the chemise, and a high-waisted overdress of bronze brocade, its skirt split at the front so the underdress would show. Sleeves of the same brocade, loosely laced to the shoulders of the overdress, were held along their seams with more laces, leaving gaps through which Sofia teased the fabric of the chemise into decorative puffs.

“This is an outdoor gown,” Sofia said. “On me it would be too long, unless I wore chopines. But you are taller than I, so for you it will do for indoors.”

“Chopines? What are those?”

“A device with which the ladies of Venice delight in tormenting themselves.”

Going to the chests, Sofia drew out the oddest footgear Giulia had ever seen: leather slippers fastened to wooden platforms more than a hand span high.

“How in the world can anyone walk in those?”

Sofia laughed. “It’s an art, learned with pain. There are laws to limit how high chopines can be, of course, just as there are laws to say how many yards of material may be used in a lady’s gown or a pair of men’s sleeves, or how many pearls may be sewn to a bodice. But we Venetians wink at such rules.”

She tucked the chopines back into the chest, then settled Giulia once more on the hearth cushion and began to tease the tangles from her hair—exclaiming at the unevenness of it, for Giulia had kept it short by sawing it off with a knife. When it was smooth and nearly dry, Sofia combed it lightly with oil, then did complicated things with braids and pins and golden laces.

“If you remain a girl, we can obtain a hairpiece to fill you out while you grow it again. I know an excellent supplier—he buys only from the convents, clean hair, free of vermin. There.” Sofia drew Giulia to her feet and stepped back, examining her handiwork. “You make a striking girl, just as you did a convincing boy.” She smiled her close-lipped smile. “In my trade, such flexibility could earn you a fortune.”

“May I see?”

“Of course.”

Sofia fetched a hand mirror of silver-backed glass. Giulia held it before her face. How long had it been since she’d seen her own reflection? She barely recognized the person looking back at her: a long-necked girl with large dark eyes and smooth olive skin, her black tresses braided away from features too pronounced to be truly feminine: the nose too proud, the mouth too wide. Not the boy she had been until yesterday,
with his shaggy hair falling over his cheeks; not the girl she’d been before that, with her simple plait and high-necked chemise. Someone else. Someone in between.

“What do you think?” Sofia asked.

“I hardly know myself.”

“That was the intent. Now come. I have household duties to attend to. You will be more comfortable in my sitting room.”

—

The sitting room was just as Giulia remembered, with its attractive arrangement of tables and chairs and its writing desk in the corner. Sunshine flooded through the windows, printing lattices of light upon the floor. Between the sun and the fire, it was warmer than the bedchamber; but Giulia was wearing so much clothing she would not have been cold in any case. She’d thought she might feel like herself again, dressed in woman’s attire; but these tight, stiff garments were like nothing she had ever worn.

She went to look at Bellini’s portrait of Sofia, but its fine details and glowing hues reminded her too sharply of what she had lost. She moved to stand instead before the windows. The cat, which had followed from the bedchamber, sprawled in the sun at her feet.

Today was Tuesday:
Giovedi Grasso
, the last day of Carnival. In Palazzo Contarini Nuova, they would be preparing for the competition. Giulia thought of her painting in its hiding place in Ferraldi’s storeroom—the best work she had ever done, saturated with the blue that was not Humilità’s blue but instead was her own. It would never fulfill its intended purpose now—would never be placed beside the work of other painters and, perhaps, judged worthy.

She looked down at her hands, at the black graining her fingers and bedded beneath her nails. A painter’s hands. Yet she was not a painter now. And if she was not a painter, what was she?