The Painter's Apprentice Read online

  “I have almost finished,” I say.

  “Extinguish the lamps by the door before you leave the studio.” She gestures toward the canal before picking up the pail of ashes and pressing the door with her other hand. “You will need the one on the table to find your way upstairs.” She walks crookedly from the room.

  As soon the swinging door to the kitchen comes to a halt, I feel the song well up in my breast. Quietly, I begin to hum. At first, the lyrics stay inside my head, a story about a man who tries to capture a woman’s heart by luring her with a small, soft dog. The words then begin to fall quietly from my lips in the flickering light. The knots in my shoulders and neck begin to unfurl. My hands seem to move effortlessly now, returning the small pots of pigment to the shelf.

  As I hum, I imagine Antonella in the servants’ quarters tucked high up under the roof of the painter’s tall house. She is trading her worn housedress for a nightshirt and tucking her aching body under the stack of woolen blankets spread across the narrow, straw-stuffed mattress I will share with her. The family—the painter, his wife, their young son and their infant daughter—are asleep in a large room on the piano nobile, a gracious floor overlooking the bricked façades on the other side of the canal.

  The rest of us—the painter’s journeyman, the maid, and now I, too—are lodged in rooms cramped under the eaves of the tile roof. I suppose my father discussed this arrangement with Master Trevisan, for he would not have wanted me in a room by myself on a floor filled with men, especially under the circumstances.

  I share a well-stuffed mattress with Antonella in a small room with a single window overlooking three crooked chimneys. At first, something in her flashing, dark eyes made me crawl under the covers with her only with trepidation. But my unease has lessened, as Antonella has proven an agreeable bedfellow. She rarely tosses in her sleep and only snores a little.

  I wait a few moments to make sure that Antonella is upstairs, then I lift my voice a little higher in song, a tune that I have known since I was a girl. It sounds loud and hollow in the giant candlelit room. The painter’s studio is several times larger than my father’s. A hundred pairs of eyes—those of saints, nobles, satyrs, nymphs—peer out at me from the painted panels hung on the walls and propped on the floor, a still audience for my reticent song.

  It is these colored pigments that I have come to Master Trevisan’s studio to learn. I am to practice how to mix them on a palette, how to apply them with various brushes to the poplar surfaces, to fashion trees and rocks in the background of the great holy figures reserved for Master Trevisan himself to paint.

  But the gold has brought me here, too. That is another story.

  Before the painter and his wife came to fetch me from my father’s workshop, my father reminded me that we have worked together already for years. That is, the picture-maker Master Trevisan and my father, the gilder, have worked together for as long as anyone can remember. My father is a master of gold, while Trevisan the picture-maker is a master of the brightly colored pigments that magically transform into the serene faces of saints, into drapery, into fantastic landscapes. Put together with the carpenter and armature maker, all of us guildsmen make and restore some of the most beautiful altarpieces in Our Most Excellent Republic.

  The timing was perfect, Master Trevisan told my father. He had just been given a commission for an altarpiece in the abbey of Santa Maria delle Vergini, the very convent where my aunt has spent most of her life. The patron asked for a large amount of pure gold leaf. Master Trevisan would need a gilder to work with him on the altarpiece for several months. The notary scrawled a brief contract, and the next day I was handed into the painter’s gondola with my trunk.

  In addition to my meager belongings I have brought a large stash of gold leaf, stored in a dark wooden cabinet in my corner of the painter’s workshop. The nearly weightless sheaves of gold were flattened by the battiloro’s own hands.

  My lover’s hands.

  In my mind, I see him hammering the gold ingots in the courtyard behind my father’s house. I close my eyes and feel a tremor run through my body. It is his hands that I miss the most. I wonder what he is doing right now, if he is thinking of me as I am of him.

  I bring my lantern to the hearth and raise it to get a closer look at the gilded box on the mantel. Though I have never seen one like it, it brings me comfort to see the familiar glistening gold patterning around the raised figures. I run my fingers across the figures. There is a woman in a roundel, a man with a sword, and two elephants in a procession. I try to raise the lid, but it does not budge. I press the small iron protrusion where a key must fit. It is locked.

  My song comes to an end and my heart feels lighter than it did just minutes before.

  From the empty hearth, a cold draft swirls around my ankles. I extinguish the flames by the door and grasp the lamp, heading to the creaking stairs. As I pass the hearth, my single flame makes the gilded box flash for a fleeting moment before disappearing into the shadows. I push the hinged door open into the kitchen then find my way through the dark to the back stairway that leads to the upper floors. I feel my way up three flights of the sagging wooden stairway to the long narrow hallway at the top of the house.

  When I step into the room, Antonella is already snoring, a soft, rhythmic wheeze emitting from her mouth. I blow out the flame in my lantern and creep across the planks so I will not wake her. In the darkness, I feel for the wooden trunk wedged under the window. My fingers lift the lid and run over the two work dresses, the two smocks I wear to protect the dresses from stains, two nightdresses, and a comb that is nearly useless in my tangled mass of curls. I brought along a pile of gold leaf books, enough for the altarpiece that we will make at Santa Maria delle Vergini. That was the agreement with my father. Apart from the small collection of my own gilding supplies now downstairs in the painter’s workshop, this trunk holds everything I own.

  My trunk is a failed marriage chest, a fitting container, I think. My father, and his father and grandfather before him, were applying gilded decoration to these marriage chests long before I was born. This one was abandoned in my father’s studio years ago, left behind after an engagement did not proceed for a reason that was never fully explained to me. When I had asked, my father, a man of few words, had only shrugged. My father never felt that it was his best work, but as a girl I loved to run my hands over the glittering repetitive designs that decorated the sides.

  For my entire life this trunk has sat in the room of our house that serves as my father’s workshop as well as our dining, cooking, and gathering space. Until the day I left, it held the meager table linens made for my mother’s dowry. As a child I loved to pull out the lace-trimmed cloth and careful needlework to examine them. We never used them for they were my only connection to the mother I barely remembered and could no longer visualize in my head. It seemed the most sensible thing to put my own things in the trunk, so my father and I had emptied its contents onto a shelf and repacked the chest for my transfer to the painter’s house.

  I run my fingers across the bottom of the trunk to feel for one of the nightdresses, an old linen shift that I have worn ever since the summer when I grew taller than my cousin. In the darkness I pull my smock and work dress over my head and push my arms through the nightdress. Then I slide into bed alongside the housemaid.

  Above the sound of Antonella’s breath moving in and out, I can hear my own heartbeat. I close my eyes and immediately I see his broad face, feel his hands on my hips, inhale his musky smell. It has been less than a fortnight since he pressed my forearms in his palms and said, “I will wait for you.” It feels like years.

  Tomorrow. Friday. It feels like it will never come.

  In frantic whispers, we promised to meet every Friday night when the marangona bell rings. “There is a small garden behind the church of San Giovanni Elemosinario,” he had whispered quickly. “The one with the tower near Rialto marke
t. I used to live near there with my mother before I was apprenticed. Halfway between here and San Marco,” he said. “The monks never use the garden. Open the back gate on the market side.”

  Then my father entered the room and both of us cast our eyes back to the worktable littered with tools and shreds of gold leaf.

  The moment I arrived in Master Trevisan’s house I looked for an excuse to leave the house on Friday evening. With some finesse, I convinced the painter’s wife that a certain baker on the edge of the Rialto market made the best yeast rolls, but only on Fridays. The painter’s wife raised her eyebrows and nodded. “Antonella will go with you,” she said. “Much safer than walking alone. Besides, you should make a friend of Antonella. She is capable and will help you in many ways. I trust her with my own children, after all.”

  “Thank you, signora,” I said, and I was left to consider how I would break away from the maid in order to meet Cristiano in the garden behind the church.

  If only my father knew.

  My father. God help him. I press my palms to my face and the back of my head to the pillow. How are the men managing without me? It is during the winter months that my father’s ailment strikes with a terrible fury, when his breath comes raw and ragged, and he wakes us in the night coughing and gasping for air. I am the one who rises to boil water in the hearth, to mix the concoction of honey and thistle. I am the one who rubs his back and sings him back from the panic that fills his eyes when he struggles for breath. My cousin Paolo means well, but what can he do, with his lame leg and his weakness? How will he take my place?

  My father tried to assure me that they would get on fine without me.

  “Maria,” he said, grasping my shoulders, “I see now that I have been selfish in keeping you here for longer than I should have. When you return to us I will have secured a proper betrothal for you.”

  I feel my heart sink now, just as it did when he spoke those words.

  “Go,” he had said. “Learn all you can about the colored pigments, my daughter, for ultimately if our trade is to have any future it is in your hands, not mine.”

  Mercifully, I begin to drift into sleep, but an image of a man with oozing black boils all over his legs suddenly appears in my mind. Fear grips me, and I sit up with a start, my heart racing in my chest. Antonella’s snoring stops.

  “Stai bene, cara?” she asks in a slurred voice.

  “Yes, I am all right. I am sorry,” I say. I press my head back on the straw-stuffed mattress. Antonella turns over, and the soft wheezing resumes. Inside my head, the pounding of my heartbeat is deafening. I feel perspiration form on the back of my neck even in the cool night air.

  I know that every measure is being taken to combat the contagion, and that I am safe here in the painter’s house. But no amount of reason can calm my fear.

  I want to see them, to see for myself that they are all right. More than anything, I want to go home.

  Chapter 3

  Under a birch tree in the quiet garden behind San Giovanni Elemosinario, I find a few stolen moments of bliss.

  “I have only a minute,” I whisper into his ear as he presses my body to him. His strong hands are laced behind the small of my back. I turn my head toward the gate. “The painter’s servant woman. I left her at the fruit seller’s table. I invented an excuse but she will be looking for me soon enough.” My lips sting from his ardent kiss, a kiss that has brought me back to life from the brink of despair.

  “All that matters is that you are here,” Cristiano says, and I press my flushed face into his chest, inhaling his scent as if to imbibe him to the core of my soul, as if the very smell of him might sustain me for seven days. I fill my nose with musk, leather, and dust from my father’s workshop.

  “My father…” I say, raising my eyes to meet his. “And Paolo?”

  “They are well,” Cristiano says.

  I search his face to see if he is telling the truth. “You are not just trying to console me?”

  He pauses, then sets his eyes on me. “Your father… He had one of those breathing fits,” he says.

  I feel my throat clench.

  “I made a tea of honey and garlic,” he says. “He recovered quickly.”

  “How did you know to do that?”

  “You think I have not been watching your every move for months now?” He laughs.

  I feel my face flush. I do not admit that I have also been studying him more closely than I have ever studied anything in my life.

  “Anyway, it worked. Maria, they are fine,” he says again. “I swear it.” His teeth flash, and I feel myself exhale for the first time in days.

  “I brought something for you,” he says. I feel him pull away and reach into the pocket of the leather apron he always wears. He pulls out a small hammered gold ingot strung onto a black velvet cord, and presses it into my palm. “I made it,” he says.

  I turn the golden rock over in my hand, watching it glow in the evening light. “Beautiful,” I say. He takes it from me and runs his hands along either side of my neck. I watch his jet-black eyes flicker before he presses his lips behind my ear and fixes the clasp.

  “I will never take it off.” I press the golden ingot down into my dress where no one will see it, then kiss him again, a long, lingering, tender exchange that I wish would never end. “I want to stay here with you forever,” I say, running my palm along his forearm. “My only consolation is that I will see you in two days’ time. We will have to pretend as usual around my father’s table, but it will do for now.”

  Cristiano pulls me to a crumbling stone bench under the tree. He kneels to the ground and takes my hands in his. A shadow passes his face. “Maria. I did not know how to tell you. It was nearly impossible for me to get here, and I do not know if I will be able to come again,” he says.

  My heart drops like a stone, to the depths of the canal beside us.

  “What?”

  “The contagion… It is spreading. I don’t want you to worry, but they are taking precautions. I will try my best to come again next Friday but we have seen the signori di notte patrolling the square.” He fixes me with a soft smile. Comforting, apologetic. I feel his fingers at the nape of my neck. “People are saying that they will close the streets.”

  “Ragazza! Where have you gone?”

  Antonella. Her raspy voice echoes from the other side of the monastery wall. She is looking for me.

  A hundred questions race through my head, but my breath feels caught in my chest and I cannot seem to say anything at all.

  Chapter 4

  The shrill clang of bells in the tower of San Giovanni Battista in Bragora gives me a start. Sunday. Midday.

  I should be clearing dishes from my father’s table, rinsing pots in the canal behind our house while the men speak of gold and the storm clouds over Murano. Instead, I am practicing trees with a small horsehair brush in the painter’s studio, trying not to think of my father, my cousin, and my Cristiano huddled around the table without me on the Lord’s Day.

  The news of the street closings has spread beyond Cannaregio. Better that I not see the barricades myself, the painter’s wife has said, and perhaps she is right.

  The painter says nothing, and instead expresses his sympathy by painting by my side. For several hours, we work in companionable silence. While he works, I steal a closer look at Trevisan. His long, elegant hands might be those of a nobleman except for the small smudges of color staining the nails. He is toward the end of his fourth decade, I think, nearly twice my age. He is a handsome man, with thick chestnut hair swept away from his brow, and a neatly cropped beard as is the fashion. His lashes and eyebrows are lush, and his curved lips might be those of a woman. His body is lean yet solid, cloaked under a dingy canvas smock.

  The painter is focused on his work to the point where he seems to inhabit a different world. His breeches are streaked with pigment
but he does not seem to notice. He is a quiet man of few words, a more contemplative soul to complement his wife’s nervous temperament. She is loud and unable to keep her opinions to herself, he hardly inclined to let us know what he is thinking at all.

  Before him on the table lies a small panel of Our Lady. For days I have watched him layer the shadowed contours of her serene face, the deep blue drapery folds of her cloak, the downward cast of her eyes. He sits for hours, for days with endless patience, working on small details as if an act of quiet devotion. I wonder if I will ever be able to accomplish such a feat. I dare not disturb him.

  But then, he looks up at me as if he can feel my eyes on him. I blush and turn my face to the window, but I feel I must say something to account for my looking.

  “Master Trevisan,” I say, “that box on your mantelpiece. I have never seen one like it.”

  He suspends his brush in the air and raises his eyebrows, then glances at the gilded box on the hearth. “It came here to me along with my wife,” he says, and I see the corner of his mouth rise. “You may know that the signora is, like you, the daughter of a gilder.”

  “I did not know,” I say.

  “Master Gardesano.”

  “Gardesano. I have heard my father speak of him,” I say.

  “Signora Trevisan had five older brothers, and so, unlike you, she did not receive the benefit of her father’s attention or training in the gilding arts.”

  I nod, and for a moment I hesitate to say what is in my heart, but I have never been good at keeping such things to myself. “I may have received the benefit of my father’s tutelage, but perhaps it was all for nothing,” I say.

  “Why do you say that?” The painter’s eyebrows rise again.