The Four Seasons: A Novel of Vivaldi's Venice Read online

  “Will she?” the girl asked.

  “No,” the nurse said. “But some of them need to hope.” She put the letter back in its envelope, wrote the description of the shawl and the broken comb into the book, and gave the pen to the girl to clean. “If you don’t want to help, go find a box to store these things. And while you’re at it, go to the refectory and bring her back some bread and a little cheese.” She looked over at Maddalena. “Are you hungry?”

  By now the small dose of laudanum had begun to wear off.

  Maddalena had pulled herself back up to a sitting position on the crate and was rubbing her eyes, too dazed to reply.

  As soon as the young girl hurried from the room, the nurse got up and pulled the iron rod from the fire. The tip glowed red as she blew ash from it. She picked up one of Maddalena’s feet with a jerk, and the little girl fell onto her back on the crate. Pulling her lips into a thin line, the nurse brought the end of the red-hot poker down onto the bottom of Maddalena’s heel and held it there for a moment.

  The nurse had dropped her foot and was returning the iron to the fire before shock turned to screams of pain and betrayal. “There, there,” she said as she came back with a drop of salve on her finger. “It will heal.”

  As she grabbed Maddalena’s foot again, the little girl squirmed and struggled to get out of her grasp, but the nurse held her ankle in a grip so firm it left white halos around her fingers. She looked for a moment at the blackened rectangle enclosing the letter P before dabbing the ointment on the wound and going to find a bandage. By the time she found one, Maddalena’s screams had quieted to a few gulping sobs, and the girl watched in stunned confusion as the nurse wrapped a clean cloth strip around her foot.

  “We don’t take in anyone but babies,” the nurse said, in a tone neither harsh nor tender but matter-of-fact, as if she were explaining it to the walls as much as to the little girl. “They don’t remember it for more than a minute. It wasn’t as simple for you, I’m afraid, but it couldn’t be helped.”

  She rubbed her hands on her coarse apron as if to wipe away her involvement in the act. “You’ll be gone in a few days, and it’s how we’ll keep track of you.” She removed the branding iron from the fire. “It’s how we’ll get you back.”

  “I don’t want to come back!” Though the pain had undone the last effects of the laudanum, Maddalena’s words were muffled and slurred, as if she were crying out in her sleep. “I want to go home.”

  “You’ll forget.” As the nurse examined the glowing tip of the iron for a second time, Maddalena panted, too frightened to scream, but this time the nurse walked toward the table where Chiaretta had begun to stir. She picked the baby up by the ankle and dangled her upside down next to the table.

  “Don’t!” Maddalena screamed as she tried to scramble down from the crate. The nurse pressed the branding iron onto the baby’s heel, and the room filled again with the shrieks of the two girls and the smell of charred flesh.

  PART ONE: THE MARK OF THE PIETÀ

  1701–1703

  ONE

  The black-and-silver bow of the gondola disappeared into a fog so thick it hissed as it parted around the hull. Around each stroke of the oar, a vague, uncapturable melody swirled and trailed away in the water.

  The gondolier had been moving so slowly he wasn’t quite sure he had reached the mouth of the Grand Canal. The air seemed hemmed in by the facades of the grand homes where the noble families of Venice were finishing their suppers, but in front of him it opened up like a yawn as he entered the broad lagoon.

  He leaned forward and squinted, cocking his head to pick up the calls of other boatmen. A song was traveling across the water from near the basilica of Santa Maria della Salute, and as he listened he could hear it getting louder. Finally he could pick out the words the boatman was singing.

  A group of gentlewomen I did see

  On All Saints’ Day, ’twas just a year ago;

  The fog swallowed up the gondolier’s reply.

  The one in front moved with a special grace,

  And Love at her right side did seem to be.

  The other boat had drawn so close the gondolier could hear a change in the sound of the water before they slid past each other in opposite directions.

  Such a pure light did from her visage flee,

  ’Twas sure a spirit radiant and aglow;

  The words faded as the boats pulled away. But in Venice, song was in the breath. The two gondoliers sang out together through the mist until they were too far apart to continue.

  Grown bold to look, I saw then in her face

  The spirit of an angel, truthfully...

  As the gondolier’s voice died away, the curtain of the felce parted, and a stout middle-aged woman wearing a loose, dark cloak and veil peered out from the cabin. “I can barely see you,” she said. “Where are we?”

  “The Broglio. I’m tying up there.”

  “The Broglio?” Her voice turned up with disapproval. “You were supposed to take us to the dock at the Pietà.”

  “Hell of a night,” the gondolier said by way of explanation, clearing his throat and spitting a mouthful of thick phlegm into the lagoon. The boat bumped against the dock, and he muttered a low curse as he jumped off. The bucking motion made the woman lose her balance, and she sat down with a grunt.

  “Look,” the gondolier said, coming back onboard to help her up. “You can walk the five minutes to the Pietà faster than I can take you on the water. I’m finished with this night.”

  The woman growled, as if to say that he would hear more about this in due time, before turning back toward the cabin. In a few minutes she emerged to put a satchel and a covered straw basket on the floor of the gondola.

  She turned her head. “Don’t dawdle now,” she called back into the felce.

  A small, bare hand pulled back the curtain, and a face peered out. A girl who looked to be no older than six stood motionless until she was prodded from behind.

  “Go!” the voice behind her said. Within a few minutes two little girls, the other about nine, were standing on the dock.

  The woman picked up the satchel and basket. “Come along,” she said without looking to see if they were following. She crossed the small piazza so quickly the girls almost lost her in the fog, before stopping at the point where the spiky, red- and cream-brick facade of the Doge’s Palace began to emerge from the mist. Having oriented herself, she turned to the right and resumed her pace. The girls struggled to stay no more than a step or two behind as they passed one column after another of stone so close to the color of the fog they could sense more than see them.

  The woman muttered as she stumbled over a crate left behind by one of the merchants whose stalls spilled out onto the Riva degli Schiavoni during the festival period just before Christmas. Faint odors of wet straw and the contents of baskets in which dried flowers and herbs, clams, sausages made from wild game, and pungent salves and tonics had been laid out for sale wafted up from the detritus of the day.

  A stone bridge loomed in front of them and then another, before the woman turned abruptly in to an alley. She banged the large bronze knocker on one of the doors, and the grate over a peephole slid open.

  “Who’s there?” a woman’s voice asked.

  “Annina. With the two girls.”

  They heard a bolt being thrown and the groan of hinges as the door creaked open. A woman in a white cap, dressed in a cloak just like Annina’s, motioned them in.

  “Hurry. It’s cold,” she said, her voice echoing along the walkway of the courtyard in which the girls found themselves. “You will sleep down here tonight. Annina will stay with you. No point in disturbing the others so late.”

  The room she left them in was bare except for a small wooden prie-dieu and a bed, on which the girls sat stiff and motionless. Outside, the two women lingered, talking in low voices.

  “Chiaretta—the younger one—can sing,” Annina said. “And she’s quite pretty.”

  �
�And the older one?”

  “Maddalena. Hardly speaks. They told me she’s good with her hands, and more obedient than the other one, but I can’t see that there’s much to her.”

  They nodded good night, and Annina turned to go into the room while the other woman disappeared into the mist without another word.

  Chiaretta cried herself to sleep. Her blond hair was matted and tousled on a lumpy makeshift pillow, and her dress and coat served as a coverlet for her bare arms and legs. Next to her on the pallet Annina had arranged for them on the floor, her sister Maddalena lay, startled back from the edge of sleep by every unfamiliar sound.

  Maddalena could hear the rattle in Annina’s breath and make out her form on her cot. She had glimpsed Annina without her heavy cloak and hood for only a moment, and she lay in the dark unable to remember what the woman looked like. Annina was so intimidating that Maddalena had spent most of the last two days looking at her own feet.

  A few days before Annina arrived in the village where they lived, the family’s routine had been so disrupted it seemed as if the doge himself would be paying a visit. The chicken pen had to be raked clean of droppings and feathers, and even the dog was washed and groomed. Their foster father did not escape either, getting a haircut that left him looking as forlorn as a shearling lamb.

  Maddalena and Chiaretta had no time to chase the chickens around the yard after collecting their eggs, or talk to the goat as he nuzzled in their apron pockets for food. They were forbidden to leave home in search of butterflies willing to alight on their fingers, or to find ant holes to pour water into and watch the ants scurry out carrying their glistening white sacs of eggs. Instead, they scrubbed the stone floor of the cottage and wiped the cobwebs from the low ceiling with a long pole and a cloth, while an older girl, the daughter of Chiaretta and Maddalena’s foster parents, pounded and scrubbed the spots out of all the girls’ dresses and mended holes in her two brothers’ pants.

  Their foster father and the boys chopped a huge pile of firewood, while the mother kept the fire going for nearly a whole day, preparing not just the usual polenta and beans but honey cakes and roasted meat from a lamb her husband slaughtered out of view of the two little girls.

  Chiaretta and Maddalena had seen nothing like these preparations before, except one or two times a year when everyone in the village was readying for a festival, or when someone was getting married. Chiaretta was beside herself with excitement, thinking the guest must be someone terribly important. Maddalena was almost paralyzed with anxiety. Of the children in the house, only she and Chiaretta had marks on their heels. Only they were not family, did not belong, would not be staying. Someday, she had been told, someone would come for them.

  On the day the guest was to arrive, their foster mother gave Maddalena and Chiaretta a bath, washed their hair, and helped them put on their best clothes. For several hours they sat with their shoes off until the visitor arrived.

  “Are these the girls?” Annina did not wait for an answer. “Have them take off their stockings so I can see.”

  “Show me your heel,” she said to each in turn. Then, satisfied that they were indeed the wards she sought, she had nothing more to say to them.

  The visitor’s attention to them was enough for Chiaretta to decide that all the work had been for a party in her honor. She spent the whole evening pulling the boys to their feet to dance with her while she sang, even though no one else was in a festive mood.

  “It’s not a party,” one of the girls said. “Why don’t you quiet down?”

  “It is too a party.” Chiaretta pouted, dropping her head and drawing an arc on the floor with her foot. “We haven’t had meat in a long time.”

  Her foster mother got up at that and marched over to Chiaretta. “Sit down and be quiet. We eat like this once a week.”

  Chiaretta’s look of astonishment at the lie was enough to earn her a strong twist on her ear and a place on the floor in the corner, where she cried until she saw everyone intended to ignore her, at which point she promptly fell asleep.

  Maddalena had known what Annina’s interest in their heels really meant and had barely been able to swallow a bite. Even after hearing stories about someday going to live in a place where many little girls lived, a place where people were so happy they sang all the time, she wanted to stay where everything was familiar. In the village, she had her own secret name for everyone, from the boys to the geese that waddled along the path leading to the riverbank. She could tell Chiaretta’s blanket from her own by the smell of the wool, and in the orchard she knew each foothold to reach the apples that swung from the upper branches. But the choice of where to live wasn’t hers, and she knew nothing would sway the family to keep the two extra mouths they would no longer be paid to feed.

  And now tonight she was in that place of girls and singing she had been promised. Chiaretta stirred and rolled over, pulling Maddalena’s coat along with her own. Maddalena shivered, and when she couldn’t pull the coat back, she nestled in closer to her sister to keep the cold from seeping in. Burying her face in her sister’s shoulder, she felt her head fill from the inside with the pressure of tears she had held in all day. She shut her eyes, and though her swollen eyelids didn’t fit very comfortably, this time she let them stay closed.

  Maddalena had barely slept when she felt Annina shaking her. “Get up,” the woman said. “Don’t you hear the bell?”

  Annina prodded Chiaretta in the back. She wriggled away, saying “Don’t!” in a tone somewhere between a snarl and a sigh, before she bolted upright. She looked around the small room, trying to remember where she was. Maddalena was sitting up also, rubbing her eyes.

  “Get dressed!” Annina said. She went to the prie-dieu, knelt, and crossed herself, speaking under her breath with her eyes closed. “Aperi, Domine, os meum,” they heard her say, her voice dropping lower until only her lips moved.

  The girls watched as Annina continued. Then she crossed herself again and stood up.

  “Don’t you pray?” she asked, and when Maddalena nodded her head, she added, “Well, do it then! Pater noster...”

  Maddalena crossed herself, and Chiaretta followed suit. “Qui es in caelis,” they continued, “sanctificetur nomen tuum.” They murmured their way through the rest of the Lord’s Prayer and a Hail Mary before Annina told them to get to their feet.

  “You’ll have to learn how we do things here,” she said.

  “Didn’t we do it right?” Chiaretta asked. She and Maddalena had been rattling their way through those prayers for as long as she could remember.

  “You didn’t do it fast enough to be in the chapel on time for Lauds,” Annina said. “Leave your dress unlaced and put on your cloak.”

  When they had finished pulling on their shoes, still damp from the night before, Annina looked the two girls over. Maddalena was much taller than Chiaretta, more than the three years’ difference in their age could account for. Her hair was brown, with undertones of red and gold, like autumn leaves. Her solemn hazel eyes were round, and her chin was pointed, making her face resemble a heart. It was a face free from noticeable defects, but one that did not quite coalesce.

  Chiaretta’s hair was the light straw color of the white wines of the Veneto. Her curls formed a halo around cheeks still chapped from the cold of the journey the day before. Even in the candlelight her eyes, fringed with thick lashes, were the sparkling blue of lapis lazuli. But at the moment, the overall impression was of total dishevelment. Her hair was a tangle that could not be dealt with in time for chapel by any other means than anchoring it behind her ears, and her dress had gotten soiled by something she had spilled on it at mealtime the day before.

  “Stand still,” Maddalena said as she reached up to pick the sleep crumbs from the corners of Chiaretta’s eyes. Her little sister froze her face and pushed her chin forward in obedience, revealing a row of small teeth as perfect as a string of pearls framed between the petals of her lips.

  When Annina opened the door an
d motioned them into the corridor, they found themselves in the midst of girls and women passing through in one great wave, several hundred in all, wearing dresses that looked like the color of mud in the dim light as they moved without speaking through the courtyard.

  Light had just begun to filter through the milky white glass over the main entrance to the chapel, but on the sides obstructed by other buildings, the windows were still dark. The dresses of the women lighting candles to illuminate the altar had taken on a rich crimson hue, under aprons and hoods the color of fresh cream.

  When Maddalena and Chiaretta got inside the chapel, Annina guided them toward a marble pillar. “Stand up against this,” she said. Holding hands, the two girls watched as the church filled. By the time the last people were inside, their backs were pressed against the pillar and they could see nothing except the dresses of the women crowded around them.

  “Domine, labia mea aperies,” a woman called out in plainsong, exhorting the Lord to open her lips for prayer.

  Around the two girls, the congregation sang their response. “Et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam.” Chiaretta tried to lift her back up against the pillar to see who was singing in such a clear and radiant voice a few feet away, and Annina elbowed her to be still.

  “Who is that?” Chiaretta whispered.

  Annina scowled and put a finger to her lips. “A figlia di coro.”

  A daughter of the choir? Chiaretta could not ask what she meant—not then at least—so she turned her head away from Annina, feeling the cool of the marble against her face while the air around her grew warm and thick from the press of bodies. When people began singing again, instead of trying to see the woman, Chiaretta looked at the air in front of the voice, trying to understand how something invisible could be so beautiful.

  Several large pots of water were simmering on a grate in a huge fireplace, next to a metal washtub. A young woman tied on a wide work apron and began pouring the warm water into the tub.