Bitter Greens

by Kate Forsyth

  He jerked his face away. ‘There are plenty of beautiful women in Venice.’

  ‘Yes, but you know and I know that you cannot paint just anyone. You need to see inside their souls, Tiziano. You need to know every curve of their body, every desire in their hearts, before you can truly bring them to life on the canvas. You need to make love to them, don’t you, Tiziano? Yet you are such a prude you cannot make love unless you’re in love.’

  He looked away from me, despair and grief and anger all there on his face for me to see. I knew him so well, you see.

  ‘You know where to find me. When you are ready to paint something truly great.’ Then I kissed him full on the mouth. He wrenched his mouth away, but not before I felt his lips quiver in involuntary response. I smiled, gestured to Magli to let him go and went on my way through the deluge, feeling such a fizz and sparkle of excitement in my belly I could have opened my legs to Tiziano then and there, despite my soreness and tiredness. Tiziano stayed kneeling, his face bent down into his hands, rain sweeping over him.

  Yet he did not come to me, as I had expected. Tiziano kept away from Venice altogether, travelling about, painting dukes and emperors, cardinals and popes, princes and baby princesses. Sometimes, my rage threatened to overcome me, and I’d roll in my bed, biting my pillows, swearing I’d curse him come morning. But I never did.

  Every month, at the full of the moon, I went down to my cellar and took my nine drops from Abundantia’s wrist. She no longer tried to escape but spent her days and nights sitting apathetically in her mound of dirty straw. She never permitted Magli to change her straw but cuddled it to her thin chest, growling at us through her teeth if we tried to take it away. She feared the light and screamed if we brought a lantern near her. So we approached her with a shielded candle and gentle words, and she would weep as Magli cut her arm and caught the blood flow in a little bowl. I would then bend to suck at the incision, and she moaned as if I had torn at her arm with fangs instead of licking her most delicately.

  One day, as I came out of the cellar with my shielded candle, Abundantia whimpering behind me, I heard a quick frightened gasp of breath and then, almost soundless, the pad of bare feet running away. I hurried to the steps and saw a flash of white at the top as someone fled. Magli locked the cellar securely behind me, then waited for his orders, his face impassive.

  ‘Quick, find out who that was. Check Filomena’s room first. I’ve noticed her peeping and prying as she worked. My guess is it was her.’

  Even as we hurried up the stairs, I heard the front door bang shut. ‘Too late, she’s gone,’ I said. We checked her room anyway, and, sure enough, her bed was empty. Her cloak was missing from its peg, though her shoes were still set neatly under her chair. I bit my lip, thinking. Filomena was a new housemaid, brought in to help Old Sperenza, who was finding the work keeping my palazzo in perfect order and cleanliness too hard for her now. Filomena had been with us for three months and had outwardly been very meek and demure. Her curiosity had evidently been too much for her, though.

  ‘She will either run home to her mother and tell all she has seen and suspected, or she will keep her mouth shut but post an anonymous letter to the lion’s mouth,’ I said. ‘Either way, we must be ready for a visit from the Inquisition.’

  The banging on the door came only three hours later. Magli opened it and bowed deeply, letting in the three inquisitors in their stinking dark robes.

  ‘I will wake Signorina Leonelli,’ he squeaked, making the inquisitors smirk with malicious amusement.

  I swept into the portego in a white silken robe, tied loosely over my nightgown so they had a perfect opportunity to ogle the cleft between my breasts. ‘Gentlemen, what an unexpected pleasure. You must know I do not receive guests in my home, but for you, of course, I shall make an exception. Do you wish to take me all at once, or one at a time?’

  ‘We are not here for pleasure, but for business,’ the Grand Inquisitor said, though rather regretfully. ‘Certain accusations have been made.’

  ‘Indeed? Let me guess. Someone has said I bathe in the blood of virgins in order to keep my beauty.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Or is it something more original? Let me guess. It’s that spiteful little cat, Guistina. She’s jealous that I have more clients than her.’

  ‘We cannot reveal the sources of our information,’ the Grand Inquisitor said.

  ‘Well, gentlemen, feel free to search my house. I can promise you there are no virgins here.’ I smiled at the youngest of the inquisitors, who flushed to his ears and tried to tear his eyes away from my cleavage.

  They went at once to the cellar, only to find my pet lynx lying curled asleep on a bed of straw, chained to a ring in the wall. She snarled at the sight of the strange men and lunged at them, and the inquisitors backed out of the cellar rapidly.

  ‘You know my lynx, don’t you?’ I said. ‘She can be rather noisy, so we keep her down here at night so I don’t disturb my neighbours.’

  The Grand Inquisitor frowned but nodded his head. The three Dominicans then made an extremely thorough search, but there was nothing to find. My stone chest was once again buried under the compost heap, all my poisons and spells and books of lore safely locked away inside. Though the youngest inquisitor prodded the compost heap with a pitchfork, Magli had buried the stone chest deep and he did not find it.

  Six hours later, they left, though only after I had let the Grand Inquisitor torture me a little, for his own amusement. When I was sure they were gone, I hurried to my gondola, rocking gently at its berth inside the water-gate. Abundantia was hidden under the felze, tightly gagged and bound. I unravelled her gag with fingers that shook with fear as much as pain. I had given her opium to keep her quiet, but she had been left alone for a very long time.

  I was too late, though. Abundantia was dead.

  I wept like a new mother with a murdered child, rocking Abundantia in my arms. I carried her to my bedroom, laid her in my bath and washed her bony limbs and her long fiery hair. It was so beautiful, all the life force that was gone from her pallid face and limp body concentrated there, in the flowing red river of her hair. With my witch’s knife, I cut it from her head, shaving as close to the scalp as I could get, and I bound it with a ribbon and climbed into bed, cuddling it under my cheek, tears overwhelming me once again.

  I did not sleep at all that night, the pain in my heart far worse than the pain of my burnt arms and breast.

  When birds began to tweet and the cuckoo gave its sly cry, I went to my maid Filomena’s rooms, wrenched out a handful of hair from her brush and cast the swiftest cruellest curse I knew. No one could be permitted to betray me and get away with it. The next day, her foot slipped while getting off the barge to the mainland, where she no doubt hoped to escape my influence. She was crushed between the barge and the jetty. It took her days to die. It did not assuage my rage, however. So I cursed the Grand Inquisitor as well, and both his henchmen, and took pleasure in watching their slow decline.

  Then I found myself another little red-headed girl – named Concetta, bless her. I wanted to take her away from Venice but found I could not leave it for more than a few days at a time. Sibillia had bound me to its stony labyrinth. So I travelled as far as I was able, searching for somewhere safe to hide Concetta.

  I found the perfect place. An old watchtower built on a high rock near the tiny village of Manerba, on the shores of Lake Garda. It was infested with bandits, but Magli and I soon drove them away with spectral sightings, wailings and a few eerie accidents. Concetta was as different as could be from Abundantia. She was glad to be released from the Pietà’s dreary round of prayer and domestic chores. She loved food and pretty things, and was happy enough to offer up her arm for me to cut in return for toys and playthings. Her hair was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, as full of changing colour as a fire of pine cones. She loved me to wash it and stroke it, and we spent many a happy hour combing and braiding each other’s hair. Each time I visited her, she would fall asleep snugg
ling in my arms, the soft touch of her lips on my cheek making me happier than any man’s thrusting tongue.

  I came closer to loving that little girl than anyone since my mother had died.

  Yet she too died. I came one day and found her lying cold in her bed. She must have been dead more than a week, for the room stank of her decay. Weeping, I laid her out in the lowest level of the tower and then I had Magli bury the door behind rocks. I sobbed all the way back to Venice, the first time I had allowed myself to weep since Abundantia had died. I did not go back to my empty immaculate palazzo. I did not go to Angela’s and drown my grief in drugged wine. Hardly knowing what I did, I went to Tiziano’s studio. He had got the house he wanted, a grand palazzo looking north towards the mountains. One of his apprentices let me in and I walked like a somnambulist towards his studio. Tiziano looked up as I stumbled in. He took one look at my red eyes, my tear-stained face, my disarrayed clothing and jumped up and guided me to a chair. He gave me wine and gently stroked back the hair from my forehead as I wept convulsively. When I was a little calmer, he took up his brush and began to paint me. Exhausted by then, I was content to sit as the daylight hours faded into twilight.

  When it became too dark to see, he laid me down on his bed and made exquisite slow love to me. He was no longer a young man. His hair was silvered, he had a soft paunch instead of the hard muscled belly I remembered, and deep lines surrounded his eyes, but he still smelt of earth and pigments, and his broad rough hands still had the power to arouse me.

  That painting became his first Mary Magdalene Penitent. It showed me half-naked, my breast peeping through the disorder of my long hair, my tear-wet eyes turned up to heaven. I hated it, hated being shown in all my weakness, but Tiziano loved it. He sold it for a great many ducats and wanted at once to paint another. But I would not let him. ‘Paint me looking as beautiful as you can,’ I begged. ‘Please.’

  For I had found a strand of grey in my fiery hair, a faint line scoring between my brows. Without being able to bathe in the blood of a virgin every full moon, my beauty would soon wither. I wanted him to capture me, once and for all, in the full glory of my loveliness.

  So he painted me naked except for my tumbling red-gold hair, my hand cupping my pudenda as if about to pleasure myself, my eyes staring straight at the observer, my pupils dilated with desire. A small white dog frolicked at my feet. Behind me, two servant women began to lay out my gown for the evening. I do not think any more beautiful painting had ever been created.

  A few months later, I spied a gorgeous red-headed girl skipping along beside her mother, her lustrous hair shining in the sun like a gilded banner. I had to have her. I sent Magli to steal her from her bed. We opened up the tower again and locked her away in the highest room, concealing the trapdoor beneath a rug. I wove Abundantia’s and Concetta’s hair into hers, so that I would have my dear ones close to me still. Each month, Magli tied a rope to the tail of an arrow and shot it up to the window with a longbow I had bought for him. Bonifacia – for that was her name – tied the rope to the hook so I could climb up to her. Each step I took up the high wall of that tower was made with a fast-beating heart, afraid the knot would slip and I would fall to my death. I began to think of a better way.

  Bonifacia gave me many hours of joy, but in the end she too died, and so – weeping – I gave Tiziano another Mary Magdalene Penitent to paint.

  When the preaching of the heretical Martin Luther spread like wildfire through Europe, Tiziano’s paintings of Mary Magdalene Penitent became his studio’s most popular production, as Catholics everywhere found their faith renewed in face of the Protestant uprisings.

  Each time a little red-haired girl died in my tower, I would go heartbroken and inconsolable to Tiziano. Seven red-haired girls. Seven paintings of Mary Magdalene.

  Let me remember my little loves.

  Abundantia, whose body I kept enshrined in my cellar for years, before transferring her to the tower.

  Concetta, who seemed to have died by choking on her own hair. When she rotted away, I found a great hank of it in the pit below her ribs, shaped like a gourd. She must, I thought, have been eating her own hair till it clogged her digestive system and killed her.

  Bonifacia, my most beloved, whose gentle hands and mouth brought me such peace and comfort. She stopped eating, and no amount of delicacies would tempt her. She died in my arms, and the lines of sorrow carved on my face stayed for months, as I could not bear to replace her.

  But then I stole Giovanna, who jumped to her death from the tower height.

  Theresa lived the longest, content to spend her days sewing me religious samplers in the hope of saving my soul. I came to dread my visits to her and almost strangled her out of sheer boredom a few times, but her hair was the most magnificent golden colour, so I forgave her stupidity. She eventually died of what had been no more than a little sniffle to me.

  Alessandra hanged herself from her bedhead, her first month in the tower.

  Vita choked on a piece of apple.

  Yoconda died of the plague. Which I took to her from Tiziano, all unknowing. For, in 1576, at the astoundingly old age of eighty-eight, Tiziano died of the plague that chewed through Venice like a pack of rabid rats. He was a bent old skeleton by the end, his sparse hair silver, his teeth all gone, yet still I loved him. One of the very last paintings he ever did was a portrait of us both, me as fresh and young as ever, Tiziano looking like something an owl would spit out. Called ‘Tiziano and His Mistress’, it was burnt by his son, Orazio, who had always hated me. Only an engraving made by the Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck survived. He had visited Venice just before Tiziano’s death and had been so struck by the contrast between the besotted old man and the voluptuous young mistress that he had made a copy.

  Tiziano was buried in the Friari church, a great honour for a mere painter. Yoconda was laid out in the crypt of the tower with the other small skeletons, her hair chopped off at the roots and woven into the long braid that I had made from the hair of all my other little loves. And the hair of my father, that pathetic little lock that my mother had died clutching, that was the hair I used to bind all the others.

  After Tiziano’s death, I stayed in my palazzo for months, staring at myself in the mirror, smelling the whiff of decay in my own mouth, stretching the skin at my eyes, trying to hold back the inexorable sag and crease. I did not weep. My grief made me feel as if a hole had been torn in the fabric of the universe, a hole that could never be mended. All day and night, I heard the tolling of the bells, ringing out the changes in the hour, and there was nothing I could do to hold time back.

  My coffers began to empty, so I numbly took up my work again. Many of the men I had once serviced were dead, and it was their sons and even their grandsons who came flocking to the salons of my new procuress, Cecilia. I drank too much, I ate too much and I smoked far too much opium. It was the only thing that seemed to loosen time. Sometimes, in my dreams, I’d be a little girl again, sitting in the bath while my mother washed my hair. Or I’d be in Tiziano’s studio, binding him to me with bonds of love instead of black magic. I wondered what life would have been like if we’d aged together and died together. But I had sworn once to never feel regret, so I pushed such weak longings away from me.

  One day, I saw a young girl crouching in the street outside my garden. She wore a tangled wreath of meadow weeds upon her glorious red-gold hair. She was hungry and desperate, but, I’m afraid, no virgin. Still, in all my long life, I had seen that red hair and blue eyes were often passed like heirlooms through the generations. I began to imagine what it would be like to have a girl of my own again, to wash my hair and kiss my cheek, to offer up her delicate blue-veined wrist to me to cut. I looked in my mirror and saw a face I wished not to have. I looked at the painting Tiziano had given me, sixty-four years earlier. I wanted that face again. So I opened my gate and let that red-haired girl in, already plotting how to trap her into giving me her daughter.

  For a daughter she woul
d have, if I had to use all my black arts to make it happen.

  How was I to know her daughter would be my nemesis?

  The one to destroy me and the one to save me.

  NOCTURNE

  The twelfth prince climbed the tower

  on golden tresses he knew were here.

  When he penetrated her window,

  she turned away to light the fire.

  His eyes blinded by hair that mirrored

  the leap of flames she stoked,

  the prince failed to see the woodpile

  of chewed bones at the corner of the hearth.

  ‘Rapunzel’

  Arlene Ang

  COUNTERFEITING DEATH

  The Abbey of Gercy-en-Brie, France – April 1697

  Love can take many strange shapes, I knew all too well.

  As I filed into church with the other novices, my thoughts were full of the story that Sœur Seraphina had told me. For once, I did not dwell on my own unhappiness but wondered instead about that poor child locked away in the tower, and the witch who was afraid of time. That was a fear I understood. At the abbey, every hour of every day was accounted for by the ringing of the great bell. We knelt and rose and ate and slept by its toll, each stroke taking us closer to our deaths.

  I looked down the line of novices, their heads bowed. Framed by their white wimples, their faces were so young and smooth and innocent. Sœur Olivia was not yet eighteen, her face as perfect as a cameo. Her beauty made my heart ache. She would never feel a man’s mouth on hers, or feel her skin naked against another’s, or watch the clock hands creep forward to the time when she could be in his arms again. Did she feel regret for her lack? Was her young body prey to longings and desires, like mine had been at her age?

  I slowly became aware that Sœur Emmanuelle was also gazing at the young woman. There was such naked yearning on the novice mistress’s face that I had to drop my eyes, in fear she would feel my gaze and know that I had observed her. In that moment, I felt a stir of sympathy for Sœur Emmanuelle that I never would have expected. I, at least, had loved and been loved, even if in the end I had lost it all.