Free Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel) by Victoria Strauss Page A

Giulia’s choices over with one hand, balancing her little daughter on her hip with the other. “Two soldi for the lot,” she said.
    “Would you barter?”
    “Barter what?” asked the wife, suspicious.
    “I’m a painter. I can make your portraits—you and your husband and your daughter. All of you together or each separately.”
    “You? A painter?” The woman laughed. “What would the likes of us want with portraits anyway? We’re working folk, not nobility.”
    “Wouldn’t you like to remember your little girl as she is today?” Giulia nodded toward the child, as plump as her mother, with the same red hair. “Or your husband? I can draw them to the life. Look here.” She knelt and unknotted the cord of her bundle, awkward with her one good hand, and shuffled through her drawings, pulling out a sketch of Lucida that she’d done several months ago without her nun’s wimple and veil. “I drew this of a friend of mine.”
    “Oh!” The wife gazed at the drawing. “You made that?”
    “I did. I’d charge more than two soldi for it if I was in my . . . my workshop, but since I’m not I’ll give you all three drawings—you and your husband and your daughter—for just these clothes here.” The words tumbled forth, fast and breathless; Giulia was astonished at what was coming out of her mouth. “They’re for . . . they’re for my brother, he has hadsome hard luck lately, there are many things he needs, but clothes are what he lacks most.”
    She stopped herself, afraid the lies were becoming too obvious. But the wife’s attention was still focused on the sketch.
    “Jacopo,” she called. “Come see.”
    The husband finished with a customer and came to peer skeptically at the drawing. The wife pulled him aside, speaking in a voice too low for Giulia to hear. The husband listened, his arms folded, frowning. Giulia held her breath. She’d never in her life done anything like this and had no idea what would happen.
    The husband shook his head. He reached out and set his hand on his wife’s shoulder, then turned away, glancing at Giulia as he did, a quick flash of hard brown eyes that told her she was about to be sent packing. But the wife was smiling as she came forward.
    “My husband says yes. These clothes for a portrait of me and my little Carmela.”
    “Truly?” Giulia could hardly believe it. “I mean, good. That’s good.”
    She took one of the smaller sheets of blank paper and a stick of charcoal from the bundle, and also the Alberti manuscript, which had a leather cover that would do for a drawing board. She was grateful it was her left hand she’d cut rather than her right.
    The wife cleaned her daughter’s face with a corner of her apron and smoothed the little girl’s curling hair. “What should I do?” she asked.
    “Just stand and hold her. Turn your head a little, to look at her. There, that is exactly right.”
    Giulia examined them, assessing the light and the angles. Then she set charcoal to paper. Drawing was the one thing inher life she was always certain of; but what she was doing now was new and strange, and her hand was shaking. She pressed too hard on the first stroke, snapping the point of the charcoal stick.
    “Sorry,” she muttered, fumbling out her knife to sharpen it. Her cheeks were burning. Any moment now the wife would see through her pretense, would realize she was not a painter but only a runaway novice with no idea of what she was doing. But when she looked up, the wife was still waiting, her head turned as Giulia had instructed, as serene as a saint. The little girl, Carmela, had laid her head on her mother’s shoulder and closed her eyes.
    This time Giulia’s hand did not falter. She roughed in the outlines of the two figures, a linked geometry of shapes and angles, then began to add detail, crosshatching the shadows and smudging them with her fingers to blend the strokes. She finished quickly. In the workshop, she would have spent much more time