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

on such a drawing, accenting the highlights with white chalk, adding dimension to the shadings with ink wash. But for what it was, it was a good effort, an excellent likeness that captured something deeper: the little girl’s utter trust as she dozed against her mother’s shoulder, the mother’s radiant love for her child.
    She held the drawing toward the stallholder’s wife. The wife caught her breath.
    “Is that—is that really me?”
    “To the life,” Giulia said.
    “And Carmela—oh, it is exactly like her! What a wonder, to see her there on the paper!” The wife reached out, took the drawing from Giulia’s hand. “I had a little boy,” she said. “Jacopetto, we called him, after my husband. He died of the fever this winter past, and it’s growing hard to remember hisface. But now I’ll have Carmela with me always.” She raised her eyes to Giulia’s. They were shimmering with tears. “What is your name?”
    “Giulia,” Giulia said, knowing she should use a false name but unwilling to lie in the face of the wife’s sadness. “Giulia Borromeo.”
    “You have magic in your hands, Giulia Borromeo. Wait there a moment.”
    The wife went to lay Carmela, still dozing, on a heap of blankets in a corner of the stall, placing the drawing carefully beside the little girl. She piled the things Giulia had chosen on the mantle she’d selected, then reached under the trestle. When she straightened, she was holding a pair of boots.
    “For your brother,” she said. “My husband won’t mind, once he sees Carmela on that paper.”
    She placed the boots on top of the clothes and tied everything up in the mantle.
    “May God bless you,” she said, pushing the bundle toward Giulia. “And your brother too.”
    “Thank you for your kindness.”
    Giulia had taken no more than a few steps when she felt a hand on her arm. She jumped, startled.
    “I saw what you did for that rag seller there.” It was a woman in a sober gown of good cloth, her neatly dressed hair covered by a veil. “Could you do the same for me?”
    “You wish me . . . to draw you?”
    “My sons.” She gestured to the two boys who stood behind her. “They’re to travel with my husband on business, and I would like to have a likeness to look at while they are gone. I’ll give you a soldo to show them both on one paper.”
    “I—well—that is, yes. Yes, I’d be glad to.”
    Near the boundary of the piazza, where there were not so many people, Giulia seated herself on the edge of a fountain, balancing the Alberti manuscript on her knee and the drawing paper on the manuscript, her charcoal scratching as she sketched the two boys, trying to capture the edge of mischief in the face of the younger, the older’s watchful seriousness.
    A little crowd gathered as she worked. As the woman, delighted, pressed a silver soldo into her hand, a young man came forward with his sister, and then a father with his son. Giulia heard her own voice, as self-assured as if she’d been selling sketches on the street for years; she watched her own hands flying over the paper. Inside herself, she was amazed.
    I can sell portraits all the way to Venice. I can support myself while I look for Ferraldi. I won’t have to sleep in the gutter, and I won’t starve.
    Could it really be that easy?
    She might have had customers all morning. But she knew her absence would have been discovered soon after sunrise; by now Madre Magdalena might have searchers out combing the streets. Already, she had stayed too long. She accepted the father’s soldo, then packed up her things and hurried away from the market, back into the winding avenues.
    At the end of a dark and malodorous alley overlooked by blind walls, she dragged off her dress and chemise and, standing naked and shivering, bound her kerchief tightly around her breasts to flatten them, glad for once that she wasn’t better endowed.
    She put on the garments she had bartered—first the shirt, then the doublet, then the