Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel)
Read Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel) Online
Authors: Victoria Strauss
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 by Victoria Strauss
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Skyscape, New York
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ISBN-13 (hardcover): 9781477847787
ISBN-10 (hardcover): 1477847782
ISBN-13 (paperback): 9781477825044
ISBN-10 (paperback): 1477825045
Book design by Jeanine Henderson
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014907001
For Ann, who gave me Bernardo, and so much more. I miss you, buddy.
CONTENTS
Part III THE DAUGHTER OF THE SEA
CHAPTER 9 A PORTRAIT IN DARKNESS
CHAPTER 13 GIANFRANCO FERRALDI
Part IV THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES
CHAPTER 26 THE WORLD WILL CHANGE
CHAPTER 1
TRANSFORMATION
Painting workshop of Maestra Humilità Moretti
Convent of Santa Marta, Padua, Italy
November, Anno Domini 1487
On the day the colors first sang to her, Giulia woke with a restless sense of anticipation, a breathless certainty that something was about to change—although within the high brick walls of the Convent of Santa Marta, change was rarer than roses in November.
The weather was raw and blustery, the sky thick with clouds. Midway through the morning, Giulia’s teacher, master painter Humilità Moretti, set up her easel in the courtyard and summoned Giulia from her duties in the workshop to assist.
From among the pots of paint that crowded the small table at her side, Humilità selected one whose tight-corked throat was sealed with wax. Only a single paint was ever closed this way. Without meaning to, Giulia drew in her breath. Humilità glanced at her, and for a moment their eyes held: an acknowledgment of secrets, of a shared and painful memory.
With a knife, Humilità broke the wax and levered out the cork. The wind snatched the cork as it popped free, whirling it to the ground and tumbling it across the flagstones, the vivid gleam of the paint it had protected flashing as it rolled: the color known as Passion blue—bluer than sapphires, bluer than oceans, the most precious of all the workshop’s paints. Giulia chased after it, catching it before it could fall into the drain at the courtyard’s center. As she picked it up, she thought she heard the sound of bells.
Returning to Humilità’s side, she watched her teacher measure Passion blue onto her palette. It glowed like a sun-struck jewel amid the duller smears of umber and bone black and verdigris, though there was no sun in the clouded sky to make it shine—a mysterious illusion of inner light that no other painter could duplicate, though many had tried. The formula for its making was known to Humilità alone, a secret she had guarded for more than twenty years.
Normally Giulia could lose herself in watching her teacher work, imagining herself into Humilità’s hand and Humilità’s eyes until it almost seemed it was she who held the brush. But today she was distracted by the malicious wind, the penetrating cold, the restlessness that prickled through her body and made it impossible to stand still. And the bells. She could still hear them, an insistent, chilly chiming that made her feel even colder, for it reminded her of ice, of sunlight shimmering on
snow. She’d never heard such a sound at Santa Marta. Where could it be coming from?
At last Humilità set aside her brush and carried her painting indoors, leaving Giulia to clear the worktable. Humilità had taken the pot of Passion blue as well, to lock up in her study; but a residue of the shimmering paint remained on the palette, seeming to draw to itself all the light of the cloudy day. Beneath the hissing of the wind the bells chimed on—fainter now, Giulia thought, as if whoever was ringing them had moved farther away.
In the warmth of the workshop, she returned the paint pots to their places. Still the bells teased at her ears, sounding exactly as they had in the courtyard, and it struck her suddenly that this should not be. Inside, surely, they should be fainter, or clearer—but not the same.
The chiming followed her as she set Humilità’s used brushes in a jar of turpentine to soak, then carried the palette over to a table to clean it. Pausing, she closed her eyes, concentrating on the slippery fall of notes. She hadn’t realized quite how lovely they were—and, somehow, less like bells than she’d first thought, almost unearthly in their silvery cadences.
They sound like . . .
She groped for comparisons.
A cascade of stars. A rain of crystal.
She opened her eyes. On the palette, the smear of Passion blue gleamed, as if the candles burning on the table favored it above the other colors. It drew Giulia’s gaze like a tether. She let her vision blur, let her eyes fill up with blue, with swirling azure currents and glinting sapphire radiance. The bell-music deepened, reaching into her, resonating inside her head.
It’s the paint that’s singing.
The thought rolled up from indigo depths.
It’s the voice of Passion blue.
Something flashed through Giulia’s body, a bolt of cobalt light. The palette snapped back into focus. The blue was just a smear of paint again. But she could still hear the bells, chiming, chiming; and her heart, suddenly, was pounding with dread—at the absurd, no, the
mad
thought that had felt utterly true in the instant it came to her.
True
in a way impossible things should never be.
She snatched up a scraper and dragged it hard across the palette’s wooden surface. The soft oil paints came up easily, the colors smearing into mud. Even the jewel essence of Passion blue could not survive such mingling. Again and again she scraped, until the palette was clean.