Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel) Read Online Free PDF

visitor waiting for you in the parlor.”
    Giulia felt all the blood drain from her face.
The Maestra’s father. It has to be.
    “It’s a mistake,” she said through dry lips. “I know no one in Padua. Tell whoever it is to go away.”
    “Nonsense,” Domenica said from across the room. “I will not tolerate discourtesy in my workshop—you will go, Giulia. At once.”
    I should have seemed eager,
Giulia thought miserably, untying her apron.
Then she would have forbidden me to stop working.
    She was dizzy as she left the workshop, her heart racing as if she were running instead of walking as slowly as she could, putting off the moment when she must see him. She knew it had been foolish to hope he had forgotten her; but she’d allowed herself to hope anyway, and now she felt that she might faint with dread.
    The visitors’ parlor was a huge chamber, with whitewashed walls and a flagstone floor. An iron grille ran down its center, dividing it in half. On the far side, a door stood open to the street, admitting the brightness of the sunny September morning. Here, in one of the few locations where the outside world was allowed to touch the sacred precincts of the convent, nuns and their visitors could exchange news, share food and drink, even clasp hands—though always with the grille between them, so they would never forget that they inhabited separate worlds.
    He stood beyond the grille, among the other visitors: Matteo Moretti, famed painter, chief of the Paduan artists’ guild, man of wealth and influence. Betrayer and thief: Humilità’s father.
    Giulia froze. With every part of herself, she wanted to turn and flee. But Matteo’s eyes had already found her. She knew that if she ran away, he would only come again.
    She forced herself to approach, halting a safe distance from the grille. It was impossible to breach those iron bars. Even so, she did not want to be within his reach.
    “So.” He looked her up and down, with his dark eyes that were so much like Humilità’s. She remembered him as a huge man, but he seemed even bigger now, as tall and broad as a bear in his velvet mantle and tunic of rich brocade. A cap trimmed with feathers rested on his mane of gray curls. “Here you are, the girl who stole my daughter from me.”
    “I?”
    “Except for you, she would never have known the truth. But you told her everything, did you not?”
    “Yes, I told her.” Anger at his hypocrisy overcame Giulia’s fear. “I told her how you paid Ormanno Trovatelli to beguile me and steal her book of secrets. I told her how he abducted me when I discovered his intent and brought me with him when he went to you to collect his pay. I told her how you imprisoned me in your attic when you saw the formula for Passion blue was ciphered, even though I swore I didn’t know the key.”
    “And how you managed to escape? And stole the book from under my very hand as I lay sleeping?”
    “
Rescued
it,” Giulia said. “She would have guessed. Whether I told her or not, she would have guessed it all.”
    “Say you so?” The words were icy cold. “Well, it hardly matters now, for she is dead. Do you know how many letters I’ve sent over the past year? How many times I tried to see her, only to be turned away? Even on her deathbed,
even then
, she would not relent. My only sight of her the whole of this long year past was in her coffin.”
    Giulia was silent.
    “Tell me, since I have no choice but to ask what a father should know of his own experience. Did she have a gentle death?”
    “No,” Giulia said, wanting to be cruel. “She suffered.”
    His jaw clenched. He turned away, fixing his eyes on the family group nearby, laughing and chatting through the grille with the elderly nun they had come to visit. Giulia remembered, suddenly, glimpsing him at Humilità’s funeral, surrounded by his sons and their wives and children. She’d thought she had seen tears on his cheeks.
    “Perhaps you think I did not love my