Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel) (15 page)

That night at supper, Giulia sat as usual on one of Sofia’s clothing chests. Sofia was gracefully arrayed nearby on a folding chair, while Bernardo lounged on the cot, his long legs in their fine boots carelessly extended. The smell of the wood burning in the brazier masked the scent of the sea, which was stronger than it had been yesterday.

Sofia drew in her breath when Giulia put the portrait into her hands—the first one, without the smile. “This is beautiful,” she said. “Truly, Girolamo, it is exquisite.”

“And you thought him not a flatterer,” Bernardo said dryly.

“No, Bernardo, you cynical beast.” Sofia was usually tolerant of his occasional needling, but now she sounded almost angry. “That is not what I mean. Look.”

She thrust the drawing toward him. For a moment Giulia thought he would refuse to take it. But then he leaned forward and twitched it from his mother’s fingers.

“I knew you had ability.” Sofia turned to Giulia again. “But this is beyond anything I imagined.”

“It’s a small enough repayment for your kindness, clarissima.” Giulia was pleased, and also relieved. She’d learned that people did not always enjoy seeing themselves through an artist’s eye.

“One day, I wager, it will be you who’ll be paid, and far more than the price of a journey. Have you always had it? This sorcery in your hands?”

“Not the skill, clarissima. That has come with time and teaching. But I’ve always been able to draw. One of the first things I remember is scribbling on a flagstone with a bit of chalk. I was punished for it after my mother died—the woman who fostered me thought it a waste of time. But I never stopped. I couldn’t stop, any more than I could stop breathing.”

“I think perhaps I understand you better now.” Sofia tilted her head, embracing Giulia in her cool, amber gaze. “Why you would leave your home and travel so very far alone to a city where you are a stranger in order to apprentice yourself to a master you do not know. It is your gift that demands this of you, is it not? Your gift demands
everything
of you.”

Giulia felt a prickling down her spine at how exactly Sofia had touched upon the truth. She was suddenly acutely aware of her disguise—her exposed legs, the binding at her chest, the loose hair around her face.

“You have looked enough, my beast.” Sofia reached toward Bernardo, who all this time had been staring at the portrait. “Give it back to me.”

His eyes came up, as if she’d startled him. For an instant he didn’t move. But then he placed the drawing in his mother’s hand and sat back, turning his head to look at Giulia, not haughtily or dismissively, but in a way she couldn’t read.

“I see you’ve signed it,” Sofia said. “But only with an initial?”

“It’s the way I’ve always done it, clarissima.”

“
G
,” Sofia said in a musing tone. “Well. I shall treasure it.” Reaching for her writing desk, she slipped the portrait carefully inside. “Do you need another sleeping draft? I’ve nearly used up my stock of herbs, but there should be enough for one more night.”

“No,” Giulia said, even though she knew it meant she wouldn’t sleep. “But thank you.”

She rose carefully, and escaped into the dark.

—

They reached the coastal town of Mestre the next morning. There, Giulia knew, Sofia and her party would separate from the merchant train, leaving behind the cart, the horses, the tent poles and canvas, all of which had been rented for the journey. Bernardo, who’d seen to the unloading of the baggage, went off to hire boats, while Giulia and Sofia and Maria waited on the dock.

It was another damp, overcast day. The tide was out, exposing mudflats and salt marshes, which gave off a sulfurous stench of brine and rot that stung the inside of Giulia’s nose. A mist lay across the ocean and the town—not thick enough to
obscure objects close by, but completely obliterating the horizon. Huddled in her mantle against the chill, Giulia felt a keen disappointment. Sofia had told her how, on a clear day, it was possible to see Venice from the shore, rising like a mirage from the green waters of the lagoon. Now, Giulia thought, she might merely have been standing by a large lake, or on the banks of a tidal river.

Bernardo returned. He’d found two boats, but they would have to wait for the tide. He’d purchased food and drink, and they made a meal of roast fowl and thin wine in the open air.

They embarked at last, Sofia and Maria in the first boat, Bernardo and Giulia in the second, the baggage divided between them. Giulia had traveled in a boat before, on the night Ormanno had kidnapped her—but that had been a brief ride on the calm waters of a canal. This was the sea, its choppy swells much bigger than they appeared from land, tossing the boat sickeningly up and down. She clung to the side, her knuckles white, rigid with fear as Mestre vanished behind a wall of fog and the clean saltiness of the ocean replaced the stench of the marshes. She could see Sofia’s boat a little way ahead, but apart from that there was only the mist and the heaving water—not rich blue green as Sofia had described, but as dull and gray as lead.

Without landmarks she had no way to judge their progress. How could the boatman tell where he was going? But at last she glimpsed something within the obscurity ahead: light, at first just a single point, but quickly joined by others. In the space of a sigh Venice appeared, melting through the mist, a line of close-packed buildings that seemed to rise directly from the waves, as if they had grown like trees from the bottom of the ocean.

Giulia felt wonder thrill through her. It was as if the city had not existed before that moment, as if a spell or a wish had conjured it into being.

“
La Serenissima
,” Bernardo said, startling her; he hadn’t spoken a word since they’d cast off. “The daughter of the sea. What do you know of her?”

“Only a little,” Giulia said.

“She is not simply a city, but the heart of a great republic.” Pride filled his voice. “She has never been conquered, not once in all her history—how many places can say the same? Her trade extends across the sea, her dominion across the land. There is no city in Europe to match her for wealth and beauty. You’ll see as we travel down the Grand Canal.”

The boatman pulled steadily at his oars. They were so close now that Giulia could count the windows of the houses.

“Look.” Bernardo pointed. “There is where we enter.”

Ahead, Giulia saw a forest of poles rising from the ocean.
Channel markers
, she thought, remembering Ferraldi’s sketches. Sofia’s boat was already passing between them, into the canal beyond.

The swells diminished, the boat slipping along more smoothly. Long brick buildings—warehouses?—rose on either side, their contours softened by the mist, interspersed with smaller structures crowded as close as teeth. There was water traffic here: barges, other rowboats, and slim, curve-prowed craft guided with a single rear-mounted oar by a boatman standing on a platform at the back. These too Giulia recognized from Ferraldi’s letters: gondolas.

Ahead, where a great church towered above the buildings alongside it, she saw another waterway.

“The Grand Canal,” Bernardo said. “It runs through the city from north to south, all the way to the Molo and the
Doge’s Palace. It used to be a river—that’s why it bends so, in the shape of an
S
. But long ago our engineers dammed the source and turned it into a canal.”

Giulia braced herself against the tipping of the boat as the boatman steered left. The Grand Canal was much wider than the canal they’d come from, and the traffic was heavier; the air was filled with curses and shouts of warning as craft drew too near one another.

Ferraldi had written of the splendid palazzi that adorned the entire length of the Grand Canal, and sketched them, too, in all their astonishing variety. Now Giulia saw the reality, more amazing than words or drawings could convey: palazzo after palazzo, two and three and even four stories tall, their façades of patterned brick and colored marble embellished with columns and balconies, their immense windows framed in elaborate stonework, and their red-tile roofs crowned by a forest of trumpet-shaped chimney pots. Torches and lanterns burned in water-level entryways, gilding the mist. Many of the entryways had steps or landings extending out into the water, but others opened onto internal docks, so that the canal seemed part of the palazzo itself.

Giulia had grown up in a great palace. But never in her life had she seen so many magnificent buildings together in one place, or imagined such a display of opulence and grandeur. She forgot she was cold, forgot she was queasy from the motion of the water. Bernardo, grown suddenly talkative, named the palazzi as they passed: Barbarigo, Foscari, Morosini, Gritti—the names, he said, of Venice’s great families; but she barely heard him. She had become a pair of eyes: painter’s eyes, entranced by mist and shadow, by form and color. Her hands burned with the desire to put brush to panel. In her mind, she could hear the singing of the paints she would use.

Just past the Ca’ d’Oro—so startlingly ornate, with its blue- and gold-painted stonework and its rooftop crenellations clad in gilding, that Giulia had to blink to be sure she wasn’t imagining it—Bernardo leaned forward with an instruction for the boatman. They steered left, into a narrow canal—a
rio
, Giulia corrected herself, seeing the word in her mind in Ferraldi’s handwriting: the Venetian term for smaller waterways. Houses closed in like cliffs, not palaces now, but modest dwellings with fronts of unadorned brick or stucco—yet in their way no less extraordinary, with their feet in the water and their doors opening directly off the rio. The air smelled of brine and sewage, an odor that intensified as they glided beneath a bridge. She coughed. Bernardo chuckled.

“If you think that’s bad, wait until the summer. It’s so strong sometimes it will scorch your throat.”

The boatman steered around a turn into a rio so constricted that when a gondola glided by, both boats scraped against the walls. Giulia trailed her fingers along the brick, damp and a little slimy. She’d begun to feel as if she’d passed into a dream.

They turned again, entering a wider canal lined with more substantial houses, with a broad, paved walkway running along one side.

“There.”

Bernardo pointed to a house just ahead, its yellow-stuccoed front pierced by graceful pointed windows. The boatman steered toward the landing and tied the boat to one of the painted mooring posts that jutted from the water.

Sofia’s boat had already docked. She stood at the door, Maria beside her. As Giulia left the boat—stepping carefully, for the landing was slippery with waterweed—the door opened and a gray-haired man in a belted tunic bowed low. He
gave Sofia the lantern he carried, then came forward to assist Bernardo, who was starting to unload the baggage.

“May I help?” Giulia asked her customary question, to which Bernardo gave his customary response.

“No need. Go with my mother.”

Sofia and Maria had disappeared inside. Giulia hurried after them, down a dark passageway that ended on a paved courtyard with a wellhead at its center. A flight of steps rose to the second floor, the
piano nobile
; Giulia followed Sofia and Maria up into a wide hallway that appeared to run the length of the house from front to back. The pointed windows she’d seen from outside opened at one end, admitting the light of the fading day.

A middle-aged woman was waiting, holding a candle. She curtsied when she saw Sofia.

“I’ve ordered a room prepared for you, Girolamo.” Sofia turned to Giulia. “Chiara will show you where it is and bring you something to eat. She’ll clean your clothes as well—just leave them outside the door. Sleep well. I will see you in the morning.”

With Maria, she moved down the hall. Chiara led Giulia in the other direction, showing her into a small chamber that contained only a copper bathtub and a pair of chests pushed against one wall. But if it was poor in furnishings, it was rich in other ways, with a floor of patterned marble and walls covered in embossed leather. Windows were set on either side of the fireplace, glazed with glass disks set into a lattice of lead.

Giulia crouched in front of the fire, holding her hands to the warmth. After a little while Chiara returned, first with a tray of food and then with water for the tub: two buckets of hot, two of cold. Giulia turned the key in the door lock, then pulled off her boy’s clothes and sank into the tub, feeling the
warmth soaking all the way down to her bones. Never before in her life had she experienced the luxury of a heated bath. She wondered if she shouldn’t find it strange, to be lying in hot water in this little room . . . actually to be in Venice, the city she had run away to find. But the sense of dream was stronger than ever. Or perhaps she’d simply exhausted her capacity for amazement.

She leaned her head against the tub’s high back and closed her eyes. Images of mist-wreathed palazzi filled her mind. Faintly, she could still feel the heaving of the boat.

She woke abruptly. The water had gone cold. Outside, gray day had yielded to black night. The only light came from the fire and the candles flickering on ledges by the door.

Giulia climbed out of the bath and dried herself on the towels Chiara had left, then pulled her ragged mantle around herself and dropped her clothing in the hall outside, as Sofia had instructed. She ate the cheese and sausage Chiara had brought. At last, utterly weary, she blew out the candles and climbed into bed—not the kind of bed she was used to, freestanding on the floor, but a cabinet built into the wall, with a mattress on a platform and a curtain to pull across. The mattress was stuffed with feathers, the coverlet and pillow filled with down. It was like being wrapped in clouds, and she sank quickly into sleep.

CHAPTER 12

REVELATIONS