Again Vivaldi saw me home in the small hours of the morning, and I made it back to my rooms undetected. We planned to meet again in another two days’ time, but I feared what his state of mind would be then. Would his resolve to end our relationship have returned, or had his doubts been effectively silenced? The only thing I could do was wait, and so I waited, beginning the torture all over again, like a prisoner counting the minutes until her release.
When the awaited night came at long last, my heart pounded as I reached his house. What man would I find looking out at me from his eyes tonight?
When I arrived, breathless, he was again pacing the room, waiting. I froze, certain he was about to unleash another litany of regrets, but upon seeing me, he crossed the room and in an instant had me in his arms. Wordlessly we returned to his bed, and he made love to me with an excruciating slowness that both tortured me and caused me to cry out with pleasure. So this is what everyone whispers and writes and sings of, I thought, before being consumed by sensation. I felt him smile against my mouth as he kissed me, and I clung tightly to him, hoping that this glorious fall would never end.
We did not know how many nights, how many hours, we might have together, and so each moment, each tick of the clock, had to be made to last. And he made it last exquisitely.
* * *
Afterward, neither of us slept, so we lay together in the bed, holding each other and talking, when we had something to say, and embracing the silence when we did not, hands lightly exploring each other’s skin.
Eventually he asked me, “Why did your father forbid you to study music?” One hand absentmindedly caressed the curve of my waist. “I know that he did, of course, but you never told me why.”
I shifted a bit, turning toward him. “It has something to do with my mother,” I told him. “She was a famous singer, a soprano.” I glanced up at him in the dark. “Lucrezia della Pietà.”
He drew in his breath sharply in surprise. “She is your mother?” he asked.
I nodded against his shoulder. “My father heard her sing when he was a young man, and fell so in love with her just in hearing her voice that he made her an offer of marriage.” I laughed. “That is the story, in any case. Whether it was really quite so romantic, I could not say.”
“Incredible,” he said. “She is still much talked of at the Pietà, one of the greatest, they say. I never heard her sing myself.”
“Her voice was…” I paused. “To call it beautiful would not do it justice. As I child I thought that all of God’s angels together could not sing as magnificently as she.”
“But she was never allowed to perform again once she married,” he said, knowing even better than I the restrictions that governed the wards of the Pietà. He sighed. “A waste. But what had this to do with you, and your father?”
“When I was about six, and it was plain that I had not inherited her voice, she hired a violin teacher to come to the palazzo to teach me,” I went on. “It was the instrument she had always wanted to play, but never had the aptitude for. And, clearly, I turned out to have quite the affinity for it.” I smiled. “She always called me her little miracolo, for after Claudio was born the midwife told her the birth had so damaged her that she would never bear another child. Yet I was born all the same.
“She died of a fever when I was thirteen, and my father stopped my music lessons. I suppose I do not really know why,” I said, considering it all anew. “He says it is unseemly for a woman to learn music, which is certainly not how he felt when he met my mother; and of course, he is in the minority in his belief. Perhaps it is just that after my mother died, he could no longer bear to hear music anymore, could not bear the sound of anything beautiful.” My fingers traced the lines of his chest as I spoke. “Perhaps it would have been different if I had been a singer like her; if I had inherited her voice. Then maybe he would have felt that there was a part of her he could still keep.” I smiled. “But alas, I was only born to be a violin player, it seems.”
“Then I thank heaven for that, cara mia,” he murmured in my ear. “For that is what brought you to me.”
My whole body flushed with happiness at his words. I tilted my face to look at him, smiling. “And now it is my turn to ask you something,” I said.
“Ask away.”
My smile faded slightly as I spoke, my expression growing serious. “Why were you dismissed from the Pietà?”
He sighed heavily. “I did not much care for their rules,” he said bluntly. “Rules for performing, for practicing, for the types of music that could be performed. It is hard to create in a place such as that. But the governors of the Pietà did not see it that way, and I disagreed with them, strenuously and often. Eventually they decided I was not worth the trouble, I suppose.
“And I miss it, in truth,” he went on. “The skill, the talent of those girls, and the music they were capable of making…”
There was a part of me that, as his lover, could not help but be jealous to hear him speak so of these faceless, cloistered young women, whom few people were permitted to lay eyes on. Yet the musician in me was impressed and intrigued by the reverence with which he spoke of their abilities. “I have not heard the coro of the Pietà for many years, not since my mother would take me to Mass there,” I said. “I doubt I would be allowed to go now.”
Vivaldi raised an eyebrow at me. “Your father will not let you go to Mass?” he asked.
“He will not go to the Pietà—it is too painful for him—and in his current mood I do not think he would let me go alone, or with one of the servants,” I said. “No doubt he would suspect me of some trickery.”
“Then I do not suppose he would let you attend an opera, either?” Vivaldi asked.
I laughed. “It is quite doubtful. Why do you ask?”
“I know you would enjoy it immensely, even if none of the divas sing as beautifully as Lucrezia della Pietà. And perhaps,” he admitted, with an almost sheepish smile, “it was a bit of a self-serving question as well, for I have been playing as the soloist for the orchestra at the Teatro Sant’ Angelo for several weeks now.”
“Aha,” I said playfully. “Now I discover your true aim, amore mio. Rest assured I would come just to hear you play, but I fear the chances of that are nonexistent at present.” As I spoke, sadness began to descend on me. “Let us not talk about this anymore,” I said, my voice wavering slightly. I closed my eyes, resting my head against his shoulder.
I felt his lips brush my tousled hair. “Do you think things would be different for you if your mother still lived?”
I had no answer. So much had happened since she died that I had become accustomed to thinking of my life as divided into two separate, almost unrelated lives: the one before her death and the one after.
If she had lived, there would always have been music, and my father would not be so bitter and angry.
I struggled to pull my voice from where it had retreated, deep down inside me. “Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, I daresay things would be different.”
He sighed and rested his cheek against the top of my head. “If only there was some way,” he murmured. “Something I could do to change things—”
“Please, let us not speak of such things,” I said, cutting him off.
He looked as though he meant to argue, so I pressed my lips against his to silence him. After a moment, he pulled away, albeit regretfully. “Should we not be getting you home?” he asked.
I smiled and shifted my position, drawing him atop me. “Not yet, my love. We were quite successful at this a short time ago, no? I am anxious to see if we can repeat that success … Oh.” I sighed as our bodies fitted together once more, and everything else was forgotten.