Signora Trevisan is mending her daughter’s dress by the light of an oil lamp, the children having been put to bed. I hesitate on the landing of the stair and watch her silhouette through the half-open door to the painter’s private chambers.
For the first time, one of the doorways of the piano nobile stands partly ajar. I dare not take another step in case the wooden planks should creak under my foot. I crane my neck to peer inside. The painter’s wife is framed by an arched opening behind her. I perceive a richly patterned textile on the wall, a stone parapet overlooking the canal, and flecks of dust hanging in the evening light.
“Stefano? Is that you?” The painter’s wife seems to sense my presence.
“It is I, signora.” I take two steps forward. “Maria.”
Signora Trevisan lays her mending on the side table and stands awkwardly, pressing her stomach forward as if it is already heavy with child even though she shows no sign yet. When she reaches the door she pulls it nearly closed behind her, her hand resting on the knob. The narrow glimpse of the Trevsians’ private bedchamber disappears again behind the heavy door.
“Is something the matter?”
“Excuse me for disturbing you, signora. I…” I hear my voice echo in the stairwell and I am rendered nearly mute. “I want to apologize for having spent so much time in bed of late. I have not been feeling well.”
Signora Trevisan makes a clucking noise with her tongue, then brings her thumb to my chin. She raises my face to the waning light that remains in the corridor and I dare to take in her blue eyes, her creamy, fair skin. For a long moment, she peers into my eyes. “You seem quite recovered now,” she says, lowering her hand.
“Yes,” I say, hesitating again. “Thanks be to God. It’s just… I feel remorse on your husband’s account. It was not my intention to miss days of work in the studio. I fear that I have not lived up to Master Trevisan’s expectations. I did not have a choice, you see… The malaise…” I gesture to my stomach. I hear shuffling in the stairwell above me, and I pause.
I watch the signora’s mouth pull into a thin line and she seems to bristle uncharacteristically. “I cannot speak to the affairs of the workshop. Those arrangements are entirely between Master Trevisan and your father.” She blanches. “And our gastaldo,” she adds. “I cannot… I am busy managing my children and my household.”
“Of course, signora,” I say.
“When you have your own husband and children, you shall see.”
I feel my face flush and I muster a laugh that comes out almost as a cough. “That may not be for some time. I…”
The thin lips turn into a smile that is almost a grimace. “Then I would advise you to do your best to rouse yourself and take advantage of the opportunity that the men have arranged for you. It is more than my father ever did on my account,” she adds under her breath. It has not occurred to me that the painter’s wife might trade fortunes with me if she could. “Your father must care very much for your welfare.”
“Yes. You are right, of course, signora. I am most grateful for it.”
The painter’s wife nods. “Well. I am pleased that you are improved.” She leans on the doorknob, and with this small gesture, I feel that I have been dismissed. I turn for the stairs.
“Maria.”
I pause.
“In the future, if you are taken to your bed, Antonella can recommend a medico amongst her kinsmen. We have had him tend to our servants before.”
I feel the skin on the back of my neck prickle. “Thank you,” I manage to say.
“You may rely upon her support. I trust her with my own children.” Signora Trevisan gives me a final nod, then presses the door and latches it behind her.
The stairwell is cast into darkness and although my eyes are wide open, I see nothing but black.
I have waited until there is no more sound from the upper floors to pull out my books of gold leaf. One by one, I count the thin packs of gold leaf stored beneath my worktable in the painter’s studio. The gold feels reassuring and familiar in my hands, the nearly weightless sheaves that flash and reflect in the candlelight as I turn over the vellum dividers with my thumb.
The last thing I want to do is bribe the painter’s servants, but I feel that I have no choice. How else to keep that boatman’s mouth closed until I can divine my path? When the painter and his wife discover my situation, surely they will expel me from the house, but where am I to go? I cannot return home with the streets closed for contagion. I do not want word getting back to my father and my house before I can reach them; certainly not before I can get to the battiloro myself.
I need time to reach them, time to figure out a solution. Until then, those servants must remain silent.
In my mind’s eye, I see Cristiano on the day he first arrived in my father’s workshop, the old goldbeater’s assistant now grown into a man. His face was agitated. He told my father that old Master Zuan had fallen ill, barely clinging to life. Of all the people in the world the old man had called my father to his bedside. My father dropped the brushes he was using to gild a small panel of Saint George, and followed the young man down the path to the old goldbeater’s studio.
My father was gone for a full day while my cousin and I continued our work. He returned late that night after the flames of the lanterns in the campo had been extinguished. I called out to my father from my bed. He lit a candle and whispered that the old man had passed to the World to Come. I pushed myself under my woolen blanket and crossed myself, saying a prayer for the old goldbeater’s soul.
The next morning I awoke to find the goldbeater’s assistant in our house. His broad shoulders filled our doorframe, and his head nearly reached the rough beams over our table. My father engaged two young guild apprentices from our neighbor’s larger workshop to help transport the wooden stump, hammers, and other supplies from the goldbeating studio. Paolo, not being able to lift heavy loads, scuttled back and forth excitedly as the men transformed the courtyard behind our house into a goldbeating studio over the course of a day.
The battiloro set up his supplies on the wooden table in the small courtyard garden. I washed out copper pots in the canal behind the house more slowly than I had ever done before, curious to watch the Saracen goldbeater organize his tools. He gave me a wide smile when I asked if he needed anything, and when I expressed my sorrow over the loss of old Master Zuan.
My father mounted the ladder leading to the old wooden loft above our hearth, cleaning out years of clutter. I was tasked with dusting the cobwebs and creating space for the rough-hewn wooden bed and straw-stuffed mattress dragged from the old goldbeater’s studio. By nightfall, we had a new member of our household. By the next day, we also had a new way of working that changed everything.
From the far reaches of the shelf under my worktable in the painter’s studio, I gather the sheaves of gold leaf and calculate how many I will need for Master Trevisan’s altarpiece commission. How many can I spare to pay the boatman? I pry a few sheets from one of the books and place them inside a small bag with a drawstring. How many could I afford to pry away before it becomes clear that something is missing?
“Still awake?”
I stifle a scream. Antonella. I thought she had already retired to our bedchamber, but she is standing at the door, leaning on a mop handle, a small metal bucket in the other hand. My heart races in my chest.
“You startled me.” I whisk the rest of the gold leaf books to the shelf under the table, but not before she has seen me counting them, I think.
“Accounting for your work?”
“It… it is for our panels,” I say. “I brought some things from my father’s workshop.”
Antonella nods, then smirks. “Well. While you are here just make sure you get paid yourself.” She has understood that it is gold leaf.
“What do you mean?”
“Let us say that the painter has not always been reliable. Boatman,” she says, lowering her voice to a whisper and gesturing toward the door that leads to the stairs of the boat slip, “has only returned to the house recently. He left because he was so poorly treated. That painter... They had a row. Boatman was even put into the stocks for a few days because of him.”
“Is that how he got the…?” I touch my cheek just below my eye.
“No,” she says. “That happened long before he came here. A hateful old woman accused him of stealing and it was her word against his. He was too young for the branding iron but there was no one to defend him. An injustice,” she says, shaking her head. “Anyway, boatman does not trust that painter. Now he has agreed to come back, but Master Trevisan has yet to pay him what he’s owed. He is holding back some of the money to try to keep him here.” She puts her hand on her hip and places her dark eyes on me. “That’s why you must be careful.”
“I am being paid with instruction, not with money,” I say, immediately regretting sharing this information. In fact, I wish I could close my ears and not hear this woman’s poisonous words. I have said too much. Servants have a reputation for inciting trouble but I have little experience knowing how to navigate their schemes. We never had servants of our own.
“Count yourself lucky,” Antonella says. “Those of us who are paid with money must chase it.”
“I am sure that is not for me to know,” I say, closing the drape over the shelves under the table and starting for the door.
Antonella’s face comes close to mine as she leans on her mop handle for support. Her voice lowers. “I am telling you because you must use caution and be smart with him,” she says, gesturing toward the door where the painter has disappeared to the upper floors. “And do not get me started on the wife,” she says, rolling her eyes. “She can hardly stop herself from talking, but watch your back. She only cares about herself and her status with her husband’s patrons, trying to push her husband up in the guild ranks. He would not have the courage to do it himself.”
She twists the mop over a metal bucket, releasing dirty grey water into it, then drags the damp rags over the uneven surface of the tiles. The not-unpleasant aroma of vinegar fills the room.
“She has been kind to me,” I say, wondering if Antonella has overheard my strained conversation with the painter’s wife in the stairwell.
Antonella pauses her mopping. “She is full of sweet talk with you right now,” she whispers, “but be careful. She would have had boatman sent to the Doge’s prisons in the batting of a cat’s eye.” She makes a flicking gesture with her hand. “But the painter has a kinder heart. Plus, he is weak.”
We hear footsteps on the ceiling above us. Antonella’s voice lowers to a barely audible whisper.
“I am telling you this as your friend. Trust me. Watch yourself with those two,” she says. “Especially the wife.” She picks up her bucket. I watch her press her palm to her lower back and hobble out of the room.
Even though I no longer expect to find my Cristiano in the monks’ garden behind San Giovanni Elemosinario, I still go there every Friday evening, just to be sure.
For a while, I sit on the stone bench and look up into barren branches of the birch tree that once sheltered our stolen kisses. I cast messages to him into the vast grey sky, hoping that somehow my words may travel over the narrow calli and canals, that somehow he can hear my silent pleas to keep the pestilence at bay, the cry that together, we have created life, a fact that wants to burst from me with a force beyond my reckoning.
In the markets, all has gone to grey. Normally, the end of Carnival heralds the beginning of spring. But this year, the last burst of Carnival festivities ended with a stammer, and now everything seems returned to winter, to silence, to grey.
I have also written a letter. My Cristiano does not read, not having had the benefit of the education my father and my cousin thought fit to indulge me in as a child. I finger the parchment pages that I have folded into the pocket of my felted cape. I have written down everything I can think to say to my father and my cousin—details of our work in the painter’s studio, descriptions of my visits to my aunt and her convent, news of the painter’s pregnant wife. What I want to say most is what is missing, what is still held only inside my heart.