Cross My Heart (17 page)

F
austina’s not so pleased with another new friendship I’ve made—a nocturnal neighborhood tomcat, whom I’ve christened Nero on account of his imperious bearing. She’s forever shooing him out of the kitchen. But he’s sleek and comforting and creeps up on me to nestle into my dress with disarming, arrogant familiarity. I sit in my room with the cat curled on my lap and thoughts of recent days in my mind.

Raffaello’s funeral has been and gone. The word went out that the ceremony was closed to all but immediate family. The events of that night flash into my head, however much I wish they wouldn’t. The strange blank look that fell over Raffaello’s face. The smells and noises of the aftermath of the hunt, and the soft composure of the Duchess and the surprise of our easy conversation. We talked the way sisters might talk to each other, or perhaps a mother and a daughter. I stroke Nero’s back. Just then, there’s a heavy thud on the door.

“Come in, Father,” I sigh.

“How did you know it was me?” he asks, looming into my room.

“I have a sixth sense,” I say.

His face is grim, and he looks on the verge of anger. “I have some
news
for you,” he says. I tense, and Nero lifts his head sleepily.

“What is it?”

He plucks a scroll from inside his jacket. “A letter,” he says. “About you.”

Several possibilities present themselves, but the most frightening is that I haven’t been careful enough regarding the Segreta. Perhaps someone has found out about my midnight assignations. The consequences don’t bear thinking of.

“Oh yes?” I manage to respond.

Suddenly, his face breaks into a grin. “My dear,” he says with an exaggerated flourish. “It’s from the wife of the Doge. The Duchess herself. Can you credit it?”

He tosses the scroll on the bed. The cat jumps off my lap and scurries away.

Dear Antonio
,

You would do me the greatest honor if you would permit a likeness of your daughter to be hung in the ducal residence. Since the tragic events at Count Raffaello’s residence, I’ve thought upon her many times, and in recognition of her kindness that night, I would like to commission a portrait by an artist of my choosing. I trust this will be acceptable
.

Yours ever
Besina

“Do you understand what this means?” My father dances around the room like he’s a little child. “She’ll send a ducal artist. They’ll paint you in a perfect light and put your portrait in the palace corridor! The Continent’s rulers and their sons will see your face and ask about you! In no time we’ll have found a match for you, and, my darling girl, don’t you see? The family will be saved.”

I cannot quite find the right words. “I thought the Doge didn’t care for the della Scalas any longer,” I say. “You said we should have two, three minutes at least.”

My father grins and wags a finger at me. “Don’t get clever with me, my girl,” he says. He claps his hands and leaves the room, muttering, “All will be well!”

His certainty weighs heavily on me, but somehow it also manages to make me feel happy and a little powerful. What strange mixtures of things I’ve felt since I stepped through the doors of the convent. What concoctions of fear and excitement and despair and joy. I wish I could untangle all of them and feel just one thing at a time, but it doesn’t seem possible anymore.

For two nights I sleep with lavender and thyme leaves under my pillow, and that aromatic combination lingers in my dreams. I see a picture of myself hanging on different walls of the Doge’s palace. The same picture falls into dark waters, and looms behind the head of the Abbess as she caresses the bookmark ribbon of her Bible the way she always used to do. And in my dream the picture changes. First I’m in my brown novice’s clothes, then the resplendent liquid red dress that so dazzled me when I first wore it. Finally that becomes the heavy wet clothing that my sister wore the night she drowned. On my face is the swan-feather mask.

I wake sweating. Beatrice knew the Segreta too. She trusted them, so Carina says, and look what fate befell her. I wonder just how embroiled she became.

I’m to sit for my portrait in the morning. Faustina bustles into my room and tells me that Bianca is making a special breakfast, “to get your color up.” The portrait will be completed here, in the back salon, where the light will be at its best.

After I’ve bathed and eaten, Faustina brings one of my mother’s dresses down to me. “Your father requested that you wear this,” she says. The garment is the finest shell-pink silk with shimmers of pearl. White velvet lattice on the bodice, and tendrils of darker pink hanging at the waist. I think I remember her wearing it. Echoes of its color and its tone are mixing in my mind with the sound of my mother’s singing.

“I’ve set the painter up in the salon,” Bianca says, peering around the door. She’s blushing slightly, which I think is rather strange for a girl as bold as she is.

Faustina smooths my hair, smiling with pride. “Come now, Laura. I’m to attend the sitting.”

She speaks as if it’s an invitation to a royal wedding. I’m touched by her excitement but can’t imagine it’ll be that interesting an event. At least Faustina’s presence will mean I won’t die of boredom, sitting still for hours.

Faustina leads me down the stairs, carefully holding the hem of my dress clear of the floor as I walk. She pushes open the salon door and ushers me inside.

The painter stands at the far end of the room with his back to us—and I know. I know by the curve of his back
and the way his feet are planted on the ground, and the way his hands are resting on his hips. I don’t even have to see his face.

It’s him.

And suddenly I hope Bianca and Faustina really have made me as beautiful as I could ever possibly look.

G
iacomo turns around, and his eyebrows disappear for a second under the curls of his bangs; he knocks a jar of water on the floor but doesn’t even seem to notice.

“That’s not the greatest start to the proceedings, is it?” Faustina tuts. “We expected a painter, not a vandal.” But I can see her eyes twinkle as she hurries towards the broken glass, clearly charmed by this handsome man.

“Please don’t exert yourself because of my clumsiness,” says Giacomo. “I’ll clear everything up.”

Again he’s dressed in that loose white shirt. A silver pendant hangs around his neck, and his skin is olive beneath, and perfectly smooth like polished wood. He holds my gaze and smiles, and I hope Faustina doesn’t see me flush.

“I’ll just sit in the corner here,” she says. “Don’t take any notice of me.”

She carries her basket of embroidery over to the chair and gets to work. Loudly she settles herself, humming a
little tune. Amazing how my kind old nursemaid could have been transformed so quickly into this noisy intruder! All I want to do is talk to him.

“Greetings, Signorina della Scala,” says Giacomo.

It should be an ordinary thing for me to hear someone say my name, but I’m enchanted by the sound of it coming from his mouth.

“Would you like to take a seat?” he says, gesturing to a chair positioned by the window. I do so, and he strides over, circling behind me.

“Would you mind?” he says, lightly touching my shoulders and turning them a fraction.

As he makes his way back to his easel, my father sweeps in.

“Ah, yes, excellent,” he says, clapping his hands together. “Boy, can I speak with you for a moment?”

Carefully Giacomo sets down his stick of charcoal and my father takes him aside. There’s some muttering, and then he hands Giacomo a few coins.

“Signor, it isn’t necessary,” says Giacomo. “The commission has been paid for.”

“Please,” says my father. “I want your best work. You’ll receive the same again if you deliver it.”

Giacomo blushes and places the coins in his pocket. After my father has gone, Giacomo moves his easel closer, so that we’re only a few paces apart. Giacomo, his eyes flicking from me to the canvas, goes to work. I’m not sure where I’m supposed to look, so I lower my eyes.

“Look up, please,” he says, with professional seriousness. “I can’t paint your eyes unless I can see them.”

I stare at him, smiling.

“And no smiling,” he adds, though a smile tugs at the corners of his lips.

I smile more, then gather myself. I wonder if I’m allowed to speak. Probably not. Faustina is no longer humming. The silence, but for the scraping of his outlines, is hypnotic. He’s not the only one who is painting a picture. Even though it looks like I’m just sitting there with my face tilted to the sun, I too am capturing a likeness. I relish this opportunity to look on him without embarrassment. His nose, I see, is delicate and slightly upturned, his jaw shaded a little with an even beard. He chews his lower lip and the creases by his eyes deepen as he concentrates.

The silence is broken by a rasping snuffle. It’s Faustina, snoring softly in the big-cushioned chair, her sewing dropped idly in her lap.

His face softens. “How are you, Laura?” he whispers, and from his lips, my Christian name sounds almost dangerous. “I was worried, especially after the awful news about the count. Your friend must be very shaken.”

“It was a terrible night,” I say.

He takes a little pot of paint and a tiny trowel and he pastes some of it onto the palette he holds in his hand.

“Is that your secret blue?” I ask him.

“No,” he says, “I’m trying to mix something completely new, another color that no one has been able to make before. But I fear, my lady, that I’ll fail.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m trying to find a way of capturing your eyes, and I’m in despair.”

A shudder passes through me, like pleasure and panic mixed together. From another, the easy charm would make
me roll my eyes, but his troubled look disarms me, and I laugh. He walks past the easel, coming towards me. He puts out his hand and holds my chin and he tilts my face up a little. I close my eyes. I keep them closed for a couple of seconds.

“There,” he says, “that should do it.”

When I open them again, he’s walking back to the easel, saying, “You know, if we spend the whole day in silence, the hours will pass very slowly.”

Faustina snorts and shifts in her sleep.

“I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to speak.”

He picks up his palette. “Some artists are like that, but not me,” he says. “I like to know about the person I’m painting.”

“Did you finish your sketches of the hunt?” I ask.

“Some,” he said. “But they’re only preparatory drawings. I heard that you took care of your friend.”

How would he know this? I suppose that servants talk and gossip as much as their masters, if not more.

“It seems so strange that poor Raffaello would have been so full of life one moment, and then the next … just gone,” I say.

“It seems in Venice that death is never natural. At least, not the cases that I’ve heard about.”

“You don’t think it was natural?” I ask. “They say his heart was in poor condition.”

Giacomo shakes his head. “It didn’t seem so to me.”

His certainty, tallying as it does with my worst suspicions, makes me a little angry. How could a painter know what happened?

“You seem very sure of your opinions,” I say, more harshly than I intend. He doesn’t seem to notice.

“Everyone in Venetian society is part of a scheme or a plot. If you’re lucky, you can disentangle yourself from it—but if you’re not, then you go the way of Raffaello.”

His blunt dismissal of Carina’s husband doesn’t quell my rising temper. Faustina would probably be delighted with the color in my cheeks if she were awake and could see them now.

“You think it was
his
fault he was killed?”

Giacomo looks at me with concern. “Probably not,” he says. “Chin up, please.”

I think he’s only saying this to steer the conversation back to safer waters, but my mind has returned to my sister.
She
wasn’t part of any scheme, I’m sure of that. Not my sweet, innocent Beatrice.

“I’ve upset you,” he says. “I’ve spoken out of turn. Accept my apologies.”

“Nonsense,” I reply. “Please, tell me more about the life of a painter.”

“It would bore you, I think.”

“It must be more interesting than the life of an unmarried woman,” I reply.

“I expect, then, that your life won’t be dull for much longer. You’ll have suitors queuing all the way to the harbor.”

“Is your skill with a brush so great?”

His eyes seem warm as he looks at me. “It doesn’t need to be,” he says.

Faustina sits up suddenly. “Yes, yes, Antonio …,” she says confusedly. As she comes to her senses, her eyes focus on us. “That’s good. Back to work.” Her eyes droop shut and her plump chest rises and falls.

“Where do you live?” I ask Giacomo.

“Sometimes at the Duke’s palace,” he says, “with one of the grooms. But I rent a small studio down by the Lido. Mathieu takes care of it. It can be noisy, but the people there are like family to me. I’m sure you’d like them too.”

“It sounds wonderful,” I tell him. “What are your friends like? What do they do?”