She sat back on her heels, examining it. It was crude compared to the fine astrolabes Maestro had owned, made of plain brass and bare of chasing or ornamentation. It was also badly tarnished. But it had all its parts, and the disks and pointers still turned, if rather stiffly.
“What’s that?” asked Angela.
“An astrolabe.” Giulia ran her finger around its edge, the familiar feel of it bringing a stab of homesickness. “What a strange thing to find. I wonder how it got here.”
“What’s an astro—astro—”
“Astrolabe. Astrologers use them to cast horoscopes.”
“My father had horoscopes cast for Alberto and me when we were born. Mine says I will be close to God all my life and live to a great old age. Alberto’s says he will be wealthy and have many children.” Angela frowned, setting a wooden box back in its place. “Did your Maestro Bruni teach you astrology too, along with history and geography and Latin?”
“Not exactly.” Giulia had wanted very much to learn. She never quite lost hope that she might remember her birth date—and even if she never did, she wanted to understand how lives could be written in, and read from, the stars. But astrology was the only knowledge Maestro ever refused her. His art could only be passed on to an apprentice—and that, of course, she could never be. “I was often there while he worked, though, and I transcribed hundreds of charts and interpretations for him. And he let me read any of his books I wanted. I learned quite a lot on my own.”
“Like what?”
“Oh…how Creation is shaped, like a great hollow ball, with the stars on the inside and the Earth at the center and the spheres of the planets in between. And I know the powers and aspects of the seven planets, and the meaning of the twelve signs of the zodiac, and the names of the stars and constellations and their place in the night sky. And I can use this astrolabe. Well, not as a real astrologer could, but I’ve done some horary horoscopes. They’re simpler than the others, because all you have to do is answer a question.”
“What kind of question?”
“Any kind you like.”
“Oh, Giulia! Could I ask a question? Could you cast a horoscope for me?”
“Well—”
“We could do it right now!” Angela clapped her hands. “Domenica and the Maestra are away cleaning the paintings in the choir, and Lucida and Perpetua and Benedicta won’t mind. Oh, say you’ll do it, please!”
Giulia hesitated, but only for a moment. From the instant she had seen the astrolabe, she’d known she was going to use it.
She led the way into the midafternoon heat of the courtyard. She raised the astrolabe, letting the heavy disk of it hang from the ring at its top, turning it so it faced her edge on.
“Angela,” she said. “What I find in your chart may not be what you want to hear. Maestro always used to say, before he cast a horary chart, that when you asked the question you had to be ready to receive the answer you least desired.”
Angela nodded, her bright face solemn. “I understand.”
“Then ask.”
Angela drew a deep breath. “When will the Maestra declare me a journeyman?”
Giulia adjusted the rotating bar on the astrolabe’s back—the alidade—so that the sun’s rays passed through the pinhole sights at either end, casting a point of light upon the flagstones of the courtyard. Having determined the altitude of the sun, she held the astrolabe flat on her palm and rotated first the rule—the pointer at the front—and then the rete—the perforated plate beneath—to match the measurement she had just taken. With the imprinted plate at the back—the tympan—the astrolabe now presented an exact picture of the heavens at the moment of Angela’s question.
She led the way from the white-hot sunlight into the cooler shadow of the workshop. Lucida, working on one of her devotional miniatures, glanced up.
“What are you girls doing?”
“Giulia found an astrolabe on the shelves.” Angela said. “It’s a tool astrologers use. She’s making me a horoscope.”
“A horoscope?” Lucida’s face lit up with interest. “I didn’t know you had that skill, Giulia.”
“Only a little skill,” Giulia said. “I learned a bit from my tutor, that’s all.”
“Well, it is a dull day and my hand is tired.” Lucida put down her brush. “I am ready to be diverted.”
“What will the Maestra say?” asked Perpetua anxiously from the drafting table.
“The Maestra isn’t here. Nor, saints be praised, is Domenica.”
“I don’t know, Lucida. It seems very worldly.”
“And did not God make the world? And the stars, which speak His will?” Lucida laughed. “Besides, it will be fun!”
Perpetua’s face spoke her doubt, but she didn’t object as Giulia sat down opposite, placing the astrolabe carefully on the table. Lucida and Angela came to stand at her back, one by each shoulder. Across the room Benedicta painted on, as though she were alone.
On the back of a piece of used paper, Giulia wrote Angela’s question, then scribed a freehand circle. With six quick strokes, she slashed the circle into twelve segments, one for each of the twelve houses, and marked each house with its associated zodiac sign. The others watched as she began to enter the measurements she’d taken. At last she put down her quill.
“What does it say?” Angela breathed.
“Well…” Giulia surveyed the chart. She’d told Lucida the truth: She was a novice, or even less, in the art of interpretation. But the chart seemed free of the ambiguous planetary placements and relationships that often made them difficult to read. “The first house rules the querent, the person asking the question.” She pointed to it as she spoke. “The house that rules the quesited—the question—is always different, depending on what’s being asked. For your question, Angela, I think it would be the fifth house, which rules painting, poetry, and the arts. Um…now, the Sun is in the first house, which usually means that things will happen quickly. In the fifth house is Jupiter, which represents a friend or teacher, someone who can help. And Jupiter and the Sun are in conjunction, which is favorable for the outcome. So I think…I think the answer to your question is ‘Soon.’”
“Oh, Giulia, that’s what I was hoping! Thank you!”
“Now you must do one for me,” said Lucida. “And for Perpetua too. And for Benedicta. We all must have a chart!”
For the next hour, Giulia cast horoscopes. Lucida wanted to know whether her sister Sophronia’s baby would be a boy or a girl (probably a boy). Angela asked how the business venture her brother Alberto was currently involved in would turn out (badly; despite the warning she’d given earlier, Giulia did not want to say so, and told Angela that the chart was too complicated to interpret). Perpetua, giving in at last to Lucida’s urging, asked whether the tooth that was paining her would improve (Giulia, apologetic, had to tell her no, which made the homely nun sigh). Only Benedicta refused to join in.
“Questions are for the young,” she said, not pausing in her work. “At my age, there may not be time enough for answers, and if that’s so, I do not want to know it.”
“What about you, Giulia?” asked Angela. “Don’t you have a question?”
“Yes, but…it’s getting late.”
“Nonsense,” Lucida exclaimed. “You’ve answered our questions. It wouldn’t be fair for you not to ask one of your own.”
Giulia hesitated. Her own question pressed behind her lips. But she how could speak it in front of the others?
“My question is…well, it’s private.”
“A secret question! How mysterious!” Lucida was delighted. “Go on, then. We’ll block our ears.”
Under the iron fist of the sun, Giulia held up the astrolabe and breathed her question to the air, investing it with all the strength of her hope and desire. Returning to the workshop, she felt both anticipation and dread. She could almost hear Maestro’s voice: Be prepared, when you ask the question, to receive the answer you least desire.
She tr
anscribed her measurements, holding her mind away from the symbols’ meaning. Not until the last one had been set down did she allow herself to look at the chart with an astrologer’s eye, or as much of one as she possessed.
“That can’t be right.”
“Oh dear,” said Angela. “Isn’t it the answer you wanted?”
“I think I must have cast it wrong. The measurements don’t make sense.”
“Can you ask again?”
“No.” Giulia crumpled up the paper. “You can’t ask the same question more than once in a single day.”
“Oh, Giulia, what a shame!”
“We’ve been at this long enough, anyway,” Perpetua said. “We should all be getting back to work.”
“Thank you, Giulia.” Lucida smiled her lovely smile. “It has been a most entertaining hour. We’ll do it again, I hope.”
Giulia gathered up the horoscopes and placed them on the brazier, where they quickly caught fire and curled into ash. The astrolabe she returned to its cabinet, pushing it to the back where she had found it, and could find it again.
“You know so many things, Giulia,” Angela said, as they returned to tidying the shelves.
“Not so many, really. Not compared with someone like Maestro.”
“More than me. More than most of the nuns here. And you’ve had such an exciting life, living in a big house with all those people, reading books and making drawings, learning astrology, going about on your own like a boy. I never met anyone like you before.”
Giulia was silent, astonished by this description of herself. She’d known her life was unusual, but it had never occurred to her to think of it as exciting. She’d only seen it as something to escape.
Angela set the glass vessel she had just finished cleaning carefully inside a cabinet. “You must think I’m awfully dull.”
“No, Angela! Of course I don’t.”
“But I’ve never done anything interesting.”
“Angela, you’re the kindest girl I’ve ever known. You grew up in a home of your own. You have a family, a mother and father and brother who love you. I always wanted those things. I always wondered what it was like to have a place…a place where I belonged.”
“But you do belong, Giulia. Here at Santa Marta.” Angela’s soft mouth curved in a smile. “We are your family now, we painters. We are your sisters.”
Giulia looked quickly down at the piece of crockery she was polishing.
As she went about her tasks that afternoon, she was aware that for almost the entire time she’d been casting horoscopes, she had not once thought of escaping Santa Marta. She’d forgotten she was a prisoner.
That night Giulia dreamed of the small blue flame that had visited her just after she became Humilità’s apprentice. She had dreamed it now a dozen times or more, always the same way: fleeing before her, never allowing her to catch it or even to draw close. She’d begun to believe it was Anasurymboriel—though whether the spirit was actually touching her sleep, or she was just dreaming that it was, she didn’t know.
As always, the dream woke her. She lay on her back, her eyes open on the dimness of the ceiling, the other girls stirring and breathing around her. She thought of the chart she had cast for herself that afternoon. She’d tried to be meticulous—yet somehow she had made a mistake. It was the only possible explanation.
She had asked: When will I receive my heart’s desire?
And the chart had replied, or seemed to: It is already yours.
That made no sense. It had to be an error, though she could not remember anything in the casting or the transcription she might have gotten wrong.
It didn’t matter. She knew where the astrolabe was. She’d find a way to ask again.
She closed her hand around the talisman and shut her eyes, willing herself to dream of Anasurymboriel. But when she fell asleep, her jumbled dreams contained no blue at all.
CHAPTER 12
Plautilla and Alessandro
Maestro had had another saying: The art of the horary chart lies not just in the making, but in the questioning. It was not enough simply to ask—one must find the right questions, the ones that would unlock the most illuminating answers.
Giulia decided that her mistake had been to ask a question that was too vague.
A week later, on a morning when the choir nuns were called to a meeting in the chapter room and Humilità was still away cleaning the choir paintings, Giulia dug out the astrolabe and brought it into the court again. This time she was explicit: When will I meet the man who will be my husband? The result was a chart that seemed to show a long span of time and a great deal of opposition. Another error—it had to be, for the only alternative was that the talisman would fail, and that was impossible.
Unwilling to give up, she returned to the courtyard and asked a different question: When will I escape from Santa Marta? This time, the answer was clear: Before winter.
She caught her breath. She’d steeled herself for a much worse answer, or for no answer at all.
“That’s enough now, Giulia.” From across the drafting table, Perpetua gave vent at last to her disapproval. “Perhaps there’s no harm in such games, but you have more important things to do.”
“Yes, Perpetua.”
Giulia burned the charts, as she had the others, and went back to sweeping. Before winter, she thought as her broom whisked the tiles, stirring up little clouds of dust. Four months, or maybe five, and I’ll be gone.
When she’d first come to the workshop, that would have seemed an impossible amount of time to endure. Now it seemed hardly any time at all. She could almost imagine she was sorry it wasn’t a little longer—for the sake of the learning, and for Angela.
Almost.
On July twenty-ninth, Santa Marta celebrated the feast of its patron saint. All work was suspended. A special Mass was held, and even the conversae and the novices were allowed to take Communion and to confess.
Giulia had dreaded confession—she could not possibly reveal the sorcerer and the talisman, the sin she had no intention of renouncing. When her turn came to kneel before the grille set into the wall that divided the nuns’ chapel from the public part of the church, she whispered to the priest on the other side everything except that. He made no comment as she confessed her anger at the Countess, her reluctance to become a nun, her loathing of Alessia; she had the sense, even through the heavy lattice of the grille, that he was not really listening. When she was done, he mumbled a penance and an absolution, the words running together so she could hardly understand them, and sent her on her way.
She knelt before the chapel’s crucifix with the other penitents, her hands clasped together, but did not pray. She salved her conscience by promising herself that she would say the penance later, when she had gained her heart’s desire and no longer wore the talisman around her neck. She would make a full confession then too. Until that time, she had no choice but to live with the burden of her sin—even if it were an additional sin to do so.
Afterward, in the beautifully decorated refectory, there was a magnificent meal—especially appropriate for this feast day, since Santa Marta was the patron saint of cooks. When the eating was done, the tables and benches were pushed back and a group of nuns presented a play about Santa Marta’s life, written by one of the sisters. It was reverent but also very funny, with nuns in costumes (some of which Giulia recognized from the workshop) impersonating men as well as women. Sitting at the back of the room with the novices, Giulia was able to escape her dark mood for a while, and laugh along with the others.
The next day, work began in earnest on the San Giustina commission. Giulia and Angela had finished gessoing and burnishing the three huge panels the previous week; now, with Humilità, Perpetua, Lucida, and Domenica, they wrestled the panels onto the wooden support structures that Domenica, who was as handy with hammer and nails as any man, had built to hold them, facing the light of the workshop’s open wall. It was a nerve-racking job, for the panels were very heavy, ma
de of joined planks that might split if dropped. The painters got them into place without mishap, finishing just as the bell rang for Sext.
Returning from the midday meal, Giulia found Angela already at work on the long list of colors Humilità and the other painters would need in the coming days—except of course for Passion blue, which Humilità, as always, prepared in secret. Perpetua and Lucida sat together at the drafting table. Lucida was in the midst of a story.
“. . . and Nicolosia’s father shut her up in her room as punishment for her defiance. And the next morning, what do you think? Nicolosia was gone! Her family was terrified she’d been abducted by some villain, but when they questioned her maid—oh, Perpetua—” Lucida broke off, pushing a little basket toward the older nun. “Do take another almond ball.”
“Lucida, you are such a tease!” Perpetua exclaimed. “I don’t want an almond ball—I want the rest of the story!”
Lucida laughed. “Giulia, have some almond balls! They’re from Signorelli—the best in Padua.”
Giulia finished tying on her apron, then went to take a handful of the little sweets, which she brought over to the preparation table to share with Angela. The candies were wonderful, filling her mouth with the richness of sugar and the crunch of almonds. Lucida’s sisters always brought a delicacy of some sort on their weekly visits to Santa Marta. They also brought gossip, and Lucida carried both back with her to the workshop, entertaining her fellow artists with tales of the Paduan nobility. Giulia marveled, sometimes, that she’d ever thought that nuns knew nothing of the world beyond their walls. Santa Marta’s brick and mortar might close off physical passage, but to news and information, they were as permeable as water.
“At first the maid pretended she knew nothing,” Lucida went on with her story. “But in the end she confessed—Nicolosia had eloped! With Deodato Mantegna! He came in the middle of the night and put a ladder to her window.”
“No!” Perpetua leaned back in astonishment.
“By the time they were found, they were already married. Now Deodato’s family is insisting that Nicolosia’s family pay a dowry, and Nicolosia’s family is seeking to have the marriage annulled.”
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