Read Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel) for Free Online Page B

beneath her gown and teased it open. Reaching past the recipe for Passion blue, she drew out the other paper inside and unrolled it on the windowsill, using the very tips of her fingers, for it was as old as she was and brittle with the years. She hadn’t looked at it in a long time—not since just after she’d brought Humilità’s book of secrets back to Santa Marta. The starlight was too dim to make out the writing on it, but that did not matter, for she knew it by heart:
    . . . major affliction by Saturn, and the Moon and Sun in barren signs, there is thus no testimony of marriage, or of children. She shall not take a husband’s name, nor shall she bear her own at the end of life, but shall . . .
    The words were part of her natal horoscope, commissioned for her by her mother just after she was born: a prediction of the entire course of her life, written in the stars by the hand of God at the moment of her birth. It was one of the few gifts her mother had ever been able to give her, intended to protect her against misfortune by warning her of what was to come. But her bullying foster brother, Piero, had destroyed it soon after her mother died. This fragment was all Giulia had managed to save.
    She hadn’t learned to read until long after the horoscope was gone. She’d never known the horoscope’s full prediction—just this small part of it. The lonely life the broken sentences seemed to promise terrified her. Never to have the love of a man . . . never to bear children . . . to lose even her name. Whatcould it mean but that she would live and die alone, like a beggar in the street?
    Yet from Maestro Bruni, who had taught her so much, she had learned that the stars could be defied, through God’s own gift of free will. With determination, she might be able to change her fate, find a way to seize for herself the love and comfort her stars wanted to deny her.
    For most of her life she had been fighting to do just that. When her father died and she was sent to Santa Marta, she was certain the stars had won, for to become a nun was surely the most perfect possible fulfillment of the fragment’s desolate promise. Purchasing the talisman, with the little spirit Anasurymboriel sealed inside it, had been a final, desperate effort to escape. But then Humilità had taken her into the workshop. And in that extraordinary place she had seen the possibility of a future that turned the horoscope’s prediction on its head: a life without the love of a man, yet not without passion. A life without children, yet not without creation. A life without her true name—yet the religious name she would receive when she took her final vows would live on through her art.
    If Domenica banished her from the workshop, the prediction would turn again. She’d be face-to-face once more with the destiny she feared. Her final vows would seal her to it forever: to the loveless, barren, nameless life of an ordinary nun, who would never hold a brush again.
    Oh, Maestra. How could you not know that this would happen?
Anger turned in Giulia, bitter and unreasonable.
Why did you never see Domenica for what she is?
    “I wish . . .” she whispered, then stopped.
I wish you’d never given me Passion blue.
But in spite of everything, that was not true.
    She thought of Gianfranco Ferraldi and his workshop in Venice. How easy it would be if she were a boy. She could pack up her brushes and her sketches, make her way to Venice, and apprentice herself to Ferraldi—and if he wouldn’t have her, she could search out another artist, and another, until she found someone who would agree to take her on.
    Of course, if I were a boy, I wouldn’t be in this situation. I’d have apprenticed myself to a master long ago. I might even be a journeyman by now.
    A journeyman.
    A boy.
    A mad idea unfolded in Giulia’s mind, a flash of inspiration like a star exploding in the night. For an instant she stood dazzled. For an instant it made perfect sense.
    Then