“Freedom once born is life’s true gift.”
She stood deathly still in the soundless courtyard.
Immediately upon their return to the house on the Via Porto Rosso, Viviana sent Jemma and Nunzio to their rest, though they tried to stay. She shushed them away instead, longing for solitude.
Yet now surrounded by it, she knew not what to do. But only for a moment.
Viviana rushed up the stairs, into her sitting room, and pulled out her chest of art supplies and sketches. She dragged it not only out of its hiding place but into the master bedchamber, where she was now master.
She stood in the room, but found no peace within these walls. Not yet. Her breath heaved. Her nostrils flared. Even now, the memory so fresh with the torture and death of her tormentor, the fear returned just entering the room.
Viviana stared at the bed. As in most households of similar stature, it was the grandest piece of furniture in the house. The two mattresses, the four bolsters, the richly carved wood frame, the canopy that had enclosed around her, imprisoning her. Running to the bed, she ripped at the canopy and curtain with clawed hands.
The linens were her next victims. Big and heavy though they were, she yanked them from the mattress, carried them in a bunch to the window, opened it, and tossed them out. Viviana laughed as the street urchins pounced on the expensive fabrics.
“Take them,” she yelled down. “They are yours. I have no more need of them.”
Next came his clothes. From out of the guardaroba she took them and carried them into the Great Room. Back and forth she went until a pile as tall as she grew in the middle of the room.
“Nunzio!” she cried out to the man who was not there. “Take these to whatever orphanage or monastery would have need of them most.”
Rushing back into her sitting room, she threw herself upon the floor and, breaking fingernails, she pulled up two slats of floorboards. From beneath, she pulled out the collapsed easel. Viviana stumbled but did not fall as she strode into the bedchamber, unfurled the easel, and with a hard, resilient crash, planted it firmly before the south facing window of the room, that which let in the most light.
Laughing like a child on a Christmas morn, Viviana pulled out her brushes and paints, her palette, quills, and silverpoints. With particular placement, she set them about the room, a room now not only where she slept, but her own private studiolo, one she held dear with the reverence of a chapel.
She should paint this moment; Viviana knew she had to paint this moment.
Pulling the full-length looking glass beside her, she found her subject.