Passion Blue (20 page)

“I don’t know about constellations,” he said. “They’re all just stars to me.”

“When were you born?”

“Why?

“Just tell me.”

“November. Though I don’t know the day.”

“I don’t know my birth day either.” Another thing they had in common. “November…probably in Sagittarius. Sagittarius is the archer. There he is. You can see his bow, those three stars.” She traced the bright points with her finger. “Those stars were shining on the night you were born. I was born under Pisces, the fish.” She shook her head. “The journey from Milan seemed so far that I thought the stars would look different here, but they don’t. They’re just the same.”

He was not watching the sky now, but her. “I’ve never met a girl before who knew the names of stars.”

“I learned from a friend. An astrologer. He was my teacher, growing up.”

“Does it matter?” He looked up again. “The stars you’re born under?”

“Oh, yes. God writes His will for us in the skies of our birth. If you can read the heavens, you can know what He has decreed.”

Or try to change it
. She was aware of the talisman, pulling at her neck. For the first time it occurred to her
that if it had changed her stars, it must also have changed his. Or had it? Had God, knowing what she would do to defy her destiny, written her into Ormanno’s fate? Was it all written, even the actions that changed the writing? The thought made her dizzy.

Far away in the city, the bell began to toll twelve.

“I should go,” Ormanno said.

“Yes,” Giulia said reluctantly. “Best for me to be getting back as well.”

He corked the wine flask and stowed it and the empty napkin back in his bag, then got to his feet. She rose too.

“I’ll come every Tuesday and Friday,” he said. “At eleven, just like tonight. Can you get away that often?”

She nodded. In the flooding moonlight, they stood looking at each other. Hardly an arm’s length divided them. As on the scaffolding, she realized that she was nearly as tall as he; she hardly had to tilt her head to meet his eyes. Would he kiss her? Surely he would kiss her.

“You really are a pretty girl.”

He said it softly, so softly she almost didn’t hear. He reached to touch her cheek. Instinctively, she stepped toward him, turning her face against his hand. He traced her jaw, drew his fingers down her throat, then tipped up her chin, and, leaning forward, set his lips softly on hers. The shock of it echoed through her. Heat flowed along her limbs. A fizzing dizziness burst inside her head.

He broke the kiss and pulled away. Involuntarily, she followed—one small step, but he saw it and
smiled, and for just a second there was something in his face that made her feel ashamed, made her feel she had given him too much, let him see too much.

He cupped her cheek again, and now she saw only warmth. “Till Friday.”

He freed the rope and vaulted over the wall. She heard the scrape as he pushed the boat back into the canal, then the faint sound of dipping oars. Then silence.

On the way back through the convent, Giulia felt as weightless as a feather, invincible. She was careful, as she had been on the way out, but she knew she would meet no one. Anasurymboriel was protecting her, casting a cloak of magic over every step. She thought she could actually feel it, the faintest vibration against her skin, like the buzzing of a million bees.

Below the dormitory window she pulled off her gown, then slung it around her neck and climbed over the sill. The novices slept as if enchanted.

She slid into bed, huddling under the covers. Her body still glowed from Ormanno’s kiss. She could still feel the touch of his hand against her face, the gentle pressure of his lips. His voice spoke inside her head:
We’re two of a kind, you and I…two of a kind
.…It was true, they were alike; in their origins, their situations, neither with families, both alone in the world. And he was young…and handsome…and he was a painter….

She closed her fingers around the talisman. “Thank you,” she whispered.

Never before had she addressed the spirit directly. If it were blasphemy, she no longer cared.

That night in her dreams, Anasurymboriel let her capture it again. It trembled against her palms, a mothlike fluttering. Its light leaked through her fingers—Passion blue, the profoundest blue there was. When finally she let it dart away, her hands were stained with its color. So real did the dream seem that when she woke, she was surprised to see her own pink skin.

The next morning, as if to make up for the night before, things began to go wrong almost at once.

Picking a moment when Suor Margarita was out of the room, Nelia pretended to stumble against Giulia’s freshly made bed, contriving to drag all the covers to the floor. She made a mocking apology, then ran to join Alessia and the others. Giulia yanked the covers back into place, which made her late getting into line and earned her a reprimand from Suor Margarita.

In the refectory, she tipped her cup over, sending water flooding into her lap and the lap of Bice beside her. This time the annoyed novice mistress gave her not just a reprimand, but a penance: half an hour on
her knees that evening. As she made her way to the workshop, the sodden cloth of her gown clinging to her legs, she was stopped by a fat old choir nun, who scolded her for the immodesty of the large wet stain as if she’d done it on purpose. And when she finally reached the workshop, she learned that Angela was ill with a stomach fever and Giulia would have no help assisting the artists that day.

Usually quick and efficient, she was able to get nothing right. She broke egg yolks, fumbled pigment recipes, forgot instructions. She dropped an entire bowl of lacquer, which Domenica had needed for the last of the Santa Barbara panels, splattering her sandaled feet, the front of her apron, and a huge area of the floor with clay fragments and sticky, smelly liquid. Domenica stood over her, scolding, as she cleaned it up, until at last Humilità intervened.

“Really, Giulia,” she said, after she had sent Domenica back to work. “I don’t know what has gotten into you. Are you sure you are not ill as well?”

“No, Maestra. I’m not ill.”

But in a way she was. She felt as if she had a fever. No matter how she tried to keep her attention on what she was doing, the world around her would vanish and she would be in the orchard, under the stars, with Ormanno. She heard his voice again, felt the gentle brush of his fingers against her cheek and throat. He came to her in flashes: the tilt of his head, the way he tucked his hair behind his ears, his wide, wicked smile. Again and again she relived the kiss,
the rush of heat and dizziness when his lips touched hers.

By the afternoon, she had managed to pull herself together, enough at least to focus on the daily drawing lesson, though she was aware she was not working well. Normally this would have brought sharp criticism from Humilità. But the workshop mistress seemed distracted. Her comments were uncharacteristically mild.

“That’s enough,” she said at last. “You’re not at your best today, and truth to tell, nor am I.”

It was an unusual admission for her to make. But she was visibly tired, her normally pink cheeks pale, her dark eyes puffy. She had finished transferring the San Giustina cartoons and had begun the underpainting, coming in before dawn, pausing only for the midday meal and the drawing lessons.

“I’m sorry, Maestra. I slept poorly last night.”

“I too. But then I never sleep when I’m starting a painting. Too many ideas, too many images. They trouble my dreams.” She let out her breath, not quite a sigh. “Especially with this painting. Especially this one.”

All the artists had seen her studies for the altarpiece, and Lucida and Perpetua had contributed both faces and background details. But Humilità had created the cartoons in secret, and when she finally unrolled the finished drawings on the drafting table for the others to look at, there had been an awed hush. It was not just the masterly composition and the exquisite draftsmanship that held them silent, but
the suffering the drawings depicted, so graphically rendered that it was difficult to look at—Jesus’ brutally pierced palms and feet, the agony-stretched tendons of His neck, the thieves’ pain-contorted limbs and faces, the Virgin’s despair. Even Domenica had seemed affected, the harsh creases between her brows momentarily smoothed away.

“Because of Jesus’ suffering?” Giulia asked now.

“That’s one reason. I had to go deep into my soul to find those images. Very deep. It was not an easy journey.” Humilità added, with a little of her usual tartness, “I wonder whether it has ever occurred to the abbot of San Giustina to consider the irony of commissioning such a work from a painter who barely ever sees the male form at all, much less that form unclothed.”

“No one would know, Maestra. Your drawings…they are so real. As if you’d actually been there, at the foot of the Cross.”

“Yes.” Humilità nodded—not with pride, simply acknowledging a fact. “My father doesn’t believe a woman is capable of painting the world as truly as a man can. But I
am
capable.” She shifted on the bench, looking toward the huge panels in their scaffolds. “This painting will be my masterpiece. It won’t hang in some private chapel, or in a convent to be viewed only by monks and nuns. It will hang above the altar in the great church of San Giustina, where anyone may see it. It will be the painting for which I am remembered—the one that will place my name beside Mantegna’s, beside Lippi’s. If that is pride, God
forgive me.” She crossed herself. “But I know it as I know these hands of mine.”

She spread them before her, small and strong, the fingers marked with ink and paint.

“Maestra…may I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Could you have become a painter, even if you hadn’t come to Santa Marta?”

There was a pause. Giulia held her breath. It was a bold question. She knew there was a good chance Humilità would refuse to answer. But when the workshop mistress folded her hands and looked at Giulia, there was no anger in her face.

“Why do you ask?”

“It’s just that I’ve been thinking, since we visited your father…. He trained you. He built you the balcony. Wouldn’t he have let you stay with him and be part of his workshop? If you hadn’t wanted to become a nun?”

“No. But not for the reason you might assume.”

“Why, then?”

“My father is a great man. But he’s not always a good one. He can tolerate no rivals, even among the men who work for him. I am a woman, and I would have been his rival. He couldn’t bear to waste my talent, and so he trained me, but he also could not bear the challenge of it, and so he sent me to Santa Marta. It was the best choice, for both of us.”

“So you wanted to go?”

“I wanted to be a painter.” Humilità regarded Giulia. “I think I know the source of these questions.
It’s our conversation in the market, yes? About your future?”

Giulia nodded.

“Even if my father were a different man, I would not have asked to stay with him. He might have been willing to accept me into his workshop, but I could never have had my
own
workshop. He might have been willing to make me a journeyman—but I could never have become Maestra. Not in a world of men. Not in his shadow. Santa Marta is the one place on Earth where I can fulfill the whole of the gift God gave me, where I can shine with my own light. Do you understand?”

Giulia nodded again, struck by how similar Humilità’s words were to Ormanno’s, last night.

“This is so for you as well, Giulia, with the difference that you do not have a father, even a jealous one, to start you on your way. For you, there is only here, with me.” Her dark eyes held Giulia’s. “Even if you do not yet realize it.”

Giulia looked away, down at the half-finished drawing in her lap.

“Does that answer your question?”

“Yes, Maestra. Thank you.”

“Never fear to ask questions, Giulia, even difficult ones. And now I must work.” Humilità braced her hands on her knees and got to her feet. “Try to get through the rest of the day without dropping any more bowls.”

The shortened lesson left Giulia with unexpected free time. Humilità allowed her apprentices to sketch as much as they liked as long as they got their work done,
so she took some sheets of paper and a stick of red chalk into the court, and, sitting on the edge of the fountain, attempted to draw Ormanno’s face. She had the idea of making a portrait she could give to him. But though she tried several times, the results did not satisfy her, and in the end she crumpled them all up and fed them to the brazier.

When the bell rang for Vespers, the choir nuns departed, leaving Giulia, Humilità, and Perpetua—all three
conversae
—alone in the workshop. Giulia finished the washing up, tipped the dirty water down the courtyard drain, and dragged the heavy washtub back to its place. Then she went to stand before the scaffolded panels to watch the painters.

Lamps and torches had been lit to supplement the fading evening light, amplified with an ingenious series of brass reflectors devised by Domenica. Humilità stood before the central panel, applying the shadows and highlights that would later be overpainted with color. The crowd, including the small portrait figures of San Giustina’s abbot and several of his administrators, would be completed first. Next would be the figures in the foreground—the Virgin, Mary Magdalen, the disciple John. The Cross, with the pain-wracked form of the Savior upon it, would be last.

At the right-hand panel, Perpetua worked on the ground at the foot of the thief’s cross. She, Lucida, and Domenica would share the painting of the backgrounds, the same in all three panels: stony earth, spiky shrubs and small dry grasses, distant desert hills
and a threatening, cloud-clotted sky.

Over her weeks in the workshop, Giulia had observed the painters as often as she could, trying to learn not just from what they told her but from what she saw them do—noting their use of the different shapes and thicknesses of brushes, how they mixed prepared pigment with tempera or oil, how they applied the colors to the panels, how they layered and blended different paints to achieve the effect they wished. Color, its making and its employment, was a subject of almost infinite complexity. She could better understand, now, why there must be so much learning before an apprentice could begin to paint.