Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel) by Victoria Strauss Read Free Book Online

she remembered who and where she was.
    “Don’t be ridiculous,” she whispered to herself.
    She shivered. The September nights were growing chilly. She rerolled the delicate horoscope fragment and concealed it in the pouch again. Then she lit her candle and knelt before the crucifix on the wall.
    “Almighty God,” she whispered, “I’m a sinner, I know. Almost all my life I’ve fought the destiny You wrote for me in the stars on the night of my birth. When I broke the talisman last year, when I committed myself to the workshop and to painting, I swore I would stop fighting and accept my fate as it came to me. I want to keep my promise. But please don’t let painting be taken away from me. You gave me my talent. You gave me this fire inside me. Please let me use it.”
    She felt the hollowness of the words even as they left her lips. For it wasn’t in her simply to accept. She had to fight. She would always have to fight.

CHAPTER 6
    WORDS SET FREE
    At night in her cold cell, Giulia lit her candle and reread Ferraldi’s letters. She wanted to know him before she wrote to him, so she could compose a letter intelligent enough to make him want to write her back.
    She pored over his discussions of technique. She memorized the layout of his workshop, of which he’d provided many sketches. She tried to build an image of the great city of Venice from his drawings and descriptions: an impossibly exotic place where the streets were made of water, where magnificent palazzi and richly furnished churches spoke of centuries of wealth and power, where the Piazza San Marco, home to the vast golden-domed Basilica, was as big as an entire village and one might, walking across it, hear a dozen different languages spoken at once. Where sometimes the
acqua alta,
the high tide, swamped the streets and the squares and the ground floors of the palazzi so that the city seemed to rest not on hundreds of wooden pilings driven deep into the mud of the lagoon, but on the surface of the ocean, raised not by man but by magic.
    Now and then as she read, her mad idea would stir, nudging like an insistent finger. It was just a fantasy, and fantasies were useless. But it was a relief sometimes to escape into dreams of what could never be.
    At the end of another seven days, Domenica cornered her again, reminding her that only a week remained until her final vows.
I can surrender
, Giulia thought, staring at the floor so she would not have to meet Domenica’s angry glare.
Right now, I can give her what she wants.
But her mouth refused to open.
    That evening she returned to her cell to find it had been searched. The bed had been dragged out from the wall, the mattress and pillow slit and their stuffing pulled out onto the floor. For a long moment she stood in the doorway, too shocked to move. Then she remembered the bundle with Humilità’s bequests, which she’d kept under the bed, and forced herself to go in. She found the bundle beneath a tangle of bedclothes. It had been opened. The Alberti manuscript was still inside, and Humilità’s rosewood brushes. But Ferraldi’s letters were gone.
    Giulia didn’t know how long she knelt there. Her knees were numb by the time she got up and began to set things to rights. She was still shoving straw back into her mattress when Suor Margarita came to lock her in.
    The next day was Sunday. Giulia passed it in a daze of misery and uncertainty, imprisoned in her cell as she always was when the workshop did not open. On Monday morning she arrived at the workshop to find a servant nun waiting for her,with a summons from the abbess, Madre Magdalena. Light-headed with dread, she made her way to the abbess’s office.
    “It was I who ordered the search of your cell yesterday.” Madre Magdalena paced back and forth before her desk. She was a small, gaunt woman with pinched features and a dislike of being still. She’d been elected just two months earlier, after the sudden death of the previous abbess, Madre