by Lauren Kate
With trembling hands she stripped her bedsheet and knotted one end to the curtain rod bolted into the wall. She gave it a tug and found it secure. She closed her eyes, made the sign of the cross, and said a prayer to the Madonna for protection before dropping one foot and then the other outside the window. Holding the ladder, she set herself free.
Every muscle in her body clenched as she slowly lowered herself down the sheet. When the toe of her slipper touched the orphan’s head, a gleeful yelp escaped her lips. She got her balance. She didn’t know which way she’d turn when her feet hit the ground. She couldn’t wait to find out.
She wound the twisted sheet into a coil and, after three attempts, finally managed to toss it back up, through her open window. From the statue, it was only a low crouch and a leap to the street. She thought of all the times she had looked down as she climbed to the roof. Tonight, as she leaped to the cobblestoned Zattere, Violetta looked up at the stars.
Her ankle smarted when she landed, but she wasted no time worrying over it. She settled her clothes, straightened her mask, and ran.
It felt so good to move alone, independent of a tribe of orphans. Tonight the air felt alive with spring and the buildings didn’t make her feel strangled but embraced. Her dress fluttered behind her, and the bauta’s ribbon whipped in the cool wind. She turned a corner, and ran directly into a band of costumed strangers.
“Excuse me,” she said, quick to check her mask.
“There is a price to pay for that offense,” a masked young man said, bowing. “You must join us.”
Violetta laughed. Was he joking?
He traveled in a group of six: four young women, two young men. They passed around a bottle; a young woman tipped her mask up slightly to hold it to her lips. They commenced singing a boisterous song, complete with twirling dance steps, unlike anything Violetta had seen.
One woman’s black cloak was open at the neck. Beneath it glowed an exquisite gown of pink silk, cut low and corseted with ribbons that shone in the rushlight on the calle corner. Violetta felt how chaste and wrong her own dress was. Even the finest clothes she owned didn’t belong outside the Incurables. She felt ashamed of her inside-out cloak, how obviously it traced where she’d come from. Only her mask helped her to blend in.
“Where are you headed all alone?” the young man asked.
“I don’t know,” she said nervously and laughed.
“So come with us,” the young woman in pink said. “We’re going to a fabulous party at a palazzo next door to La Sirena.”
Before Violetta could refuse, the woman linked her arm through Violetta’s, and it was decided. She was going. Did it matter where?
They walked quickly, the woman’s wooden-heeled, jewel-encrusted shoes clacking gaily on the cobblestones. Violetta had to hurry to keep up in her own silent leather slippers. She envied the percussion of her companion’s footsteps. She wanted to make music with her body.
“What’s your name?” the woman asked. She smelled of roses.
Letta was on the tip of Violetta’s tongue. But she couldn’t breathe aloud the name that only Mino called her. She knew she could not say Violetta, of course. She was newly famous for her singing at the Incurables. She’d heard people call her Violetta, voce d’angelo—voice of the angel—in the church, to her great astonishment.
Over the woman’s shoulder, a vine of jasmine caught her eye. They were the same flowers Mino had strewn on the apartment bed that afternoon. Street flowers. Simple flowers. Of all the bouquets Violetta had received from admirers over the past few months, none had smelled so good as Mino’s jasmine.
“Gelsomina,” she said.
It made no difference to the woman, who wrapped painted nails around Violetta’s arm and embarked again on her drunken song. Together they dashed around the corner of the calle. Occasional rushlights illuminated the streets. But in between these lanterns the calli were cast in shadows, and for long stretches Violetta could see almost nothing, not where she was going, not the company she traveled with.
It was thrilling and frightening, and when she suddenly found herself looking up at the Scuola Grandi della Carità, where the lay musicians trained, and where Violetta had gone on a dozen alms walks over the years, she could hardly believe she was still in the same city, minutes away from the Incurables. She wanted to get far away from any place she’d ever been, and at the same time, she wanted to stop and take in every bit of this night.
But she was tugged along at the pace of her new friends, who danced over bridges, forming a slender line to pass other groups almost identical to their own. Might Violetta have taken up with any of them, be headed somewhere else tonight? There was no making sense of her journey. She didn’t want to try.
It was magic outside, the whole lagoon seeming to shiver in anticipation of the night ahead. She picked up the lyrics of the song and had just begun singing with hesitant merriment when the revelers stopped before a tall iron gate.
It was open, and she followed her friends inside to a courtyard garden. It was not large, maybe the size of Violetta’s suite at the Incurables. In Venice, if one wanted an expansive garden, one bought a palazzo on the less densely populated island of Giudecca. But this garden was candlelit and marvelously manicured. Two tall topiary bushes were shaped like cherubs in flight.
“This way,” said the woman who had taken Violetta’s arm. She gestured toward the palazzo across the garden. The house was majestic, four stories of pale pink marble, chandeliers lit in every window.
Two iron torches marked the palazzo’s entrance. A masked servant dressed in black and sporting a voluminous silver periwig stood at the door. At the sight of their group, to Violetta’s amazement, the guard held the door wider and gestured them inside.
A current of maskers pushed her forward into a foyer. The ceilings towered over her and the intricate terrazzo floor was made of pearl and black marble. The other guests seemed to take this party’s splendor for granted, as if it were commonplace. Perhaps it was.
On Violetta’s left, three enormous trunks were opened wide, revealing a wealth of colorful accessories. A painted wooden plaque above them read:
DISGUISES FOR YOUR PLEASURE
Guests fell upon the trunks, rifling through them to embellish their already extravagant costumes. Violetta joined them, rising on her toes at the back of the crowd to see what she might put on.
One whole trunk contained nothing but stacks of the black mask called the moretta, which Violetta had seen the women on the altana model. It had no ribbons, no strap. It appeared a miracle that it stayed in place. But on the mask’s interior, a tiny black button was fixed behind the lips, to be held between the teeth. The moretta rendered its wearer mute. When Violetta was younger, this had seemed alarming, but the women on the altana giggled over it, eroticized it. Now she began to understand. A woman could keep her voice a secret—like her breasts, like the soft inner flesh of her thighs—until she herself chose to reveal it.
Tonight Violetta’s friend in the pink dress chose the moretta, and Violetta was tempted to take one, too, but she feared she’d forget herself, open her mouth, and drop the mask. She couldn’t risk it.
She claimed a black lace fan as big as a lute, a crown woven with violet flowers, and a feathered blue sable cape, illicitly soft. She draped it over her shoulders, tied silk strings around her neck. She batted her fan in front of her mask and felt her exquisite anonymity.
Passing through the foyer, she entered a massive ballroom decorated with great globes of fragrant roses. A crowd of partygoers looked down from a second-story balcony that ringed the room. Persian carpets and candles fatter than bottles of wine gave the party a hushed atmosphere, but if you drew close enough to any group, the room was alive with laughter, booming conversations, and fast hands.
Violetta blinked in amazement. Here were all the stories from the altana come to life. It was the mo
st exciting place she had ever been, better than her childhood fantasies because it was real. She was a part of it. She would never be the same.
A harp played and a soprano sang in the back corner, but Violetta was too far to hear clearly. She wove nearer, staying close to the pastel walls. She paused before a fresco of a masked Fate smiling down on a pair of mortal lovers. She sidestepped piles of guests sprawled atop one another on the furniture, which was pressed back against the wall to make room for dancing.
Women dressed as men moved through the ballroom serving drinks, extending silver trays. Violetta stared at them, wondering what it felt like to wear men’s clothing, to be exciting to both sexes. Laura would have fainted by now, but Violetta wanted to touch the servers’ cheeks, the beards penciled across their jaws.
“Champagne, madam?” One server bowed before her, approximating a man’s deep voice. Flustered, Violetta lifted a glass and quickly took a sip. She startled as a tingle spread through her mouth. She’d never felt such a sensation. It was wonderful, the taste only a distant neighbor to the watery red wine the coro girls drank at dinner. This had the essence of a lemon blossom with a hint of sweetness.
Since she’d moved up to the coro, Violetta felt stifled by her newfound attention. At this party, she felt free. She could be foolish and drunk. No one would notice. No one would care.
She no longer saw anyone she’d come in with. They had all transformed into something else when they stepped inside.
She passed a young man in a tightly curled white wig, who sat on a tufted blue pillow on the floor, weeping with his face in his hands.
A woman leaned in to him and raised his face in her palm. She held her glass of champagne for him to sip, murmuring something. He raised his drooping bauta an inch and gulped the champagne like water. Then he returned to his sobbing.
“Is he all right?” Violetta asked as the woman lifted her glass to a waiter, signaling more champagne.
She smirked at Violetta. Her mask was small, concealing only her eyes, and highlighting the beauty mark painted on the dimple of her left cheek. Her lips were red with rouge, forbidden on the streets of Venice. They were mesmerizing as she opened her mouth. “He gambled away his lover tonight in a game of faro.”
Violetta wondered at this—was his lover a courtesan? Did he own the woman? She knew she must keep her questions to herself.
Now she realized why La Sirena had sounded familiar. She had heard rumors of Dorsoduro’s most exclusive casino, where money and reputations were made and lost and where trysts began behind velvet curtains. Its dark rooms eschewed the republic’s strict laws forbidding jewelry and makeup and games of chance. This party must be the overflow after a night of gambling. She remembered the altana women saying:
“One can lose almost anything at La Sirena,” Violetta said.
“Indeed,” the woman said, leaning closer, speaking intimately. “But one can win almost anything, too. Last carnevale, my lover won two African giraffes from a sultan. He keeps them in a horse stall on the sandbars of Lido. Their flanks are so soft you can hardly stand it.”
“I could have saved her in another hand,” the weeping man chimed in from his pillow.
The woman leaned closer to Violetta, shook her head, and whispered, “He’s really crying over the fact that it was her idea to put herself on the betting table when he ran out of money. And how quickly she went to the victor. Carlo didn’t even have time to ask for my purse to raise his bet. Carina was already gone.” Patting the man’s shoulder, she said, “Give her an hour, Carlo. She’ll come back to you, and better than ever. That Senator Gritti is nothing special. I should know.” The woman clucked her tongue, hoisting him up under the arms. “Remember, our host reveres the lucky, not the losers. So get up and dance, or go and find yourself a tavern in which to cry.”
The man straightened, lifted his mask to dry his tears. His face was young and lovely—tan skin, good teeth—but his eyes were red and miserable. He seemed to notice Violetta for the first time. He bowed extravagantly until his periwig touched the mosaic tiles of the terrazzo.
“Dance the furlana with me, stranger?”
Violetta wanted to focus on the music, to close her eyes and take it apart in her mind, but she felt that a man in Carlo’s state should not be further disappointed, even if she was anxious about how little she knew of the dance.
“I don’t know the steps,” she warned him, placing her hand in his.
“Forget steps. Simply choose an emotion and hold it like a lover.” He put his arms around her waist and led her to the dance floor. “Mine is agony. Ever since I fell in love with Carina, I am always the best dancer at the ball.”
Violetta squeezed his hand. He looked at her, and through two masks, they understood each other.
He swept her up so that her feet barely touched the ground. Watching couples in the campo, dancing had always seemed to her a partnership, requiring two knowledgeable parties. But now there was no question what Violetta should do with her arms or legs or hips. Carlo moved with so much certainty, his arms tuning her as if she were an instrument. She thought of herself twirling before her window earlier that evening, and felt like a child no more.
At the harpist’s side, a female singer stood tall, dressed elaborately with a red wig and a white mask. She sang not with the soft slur of the Veneto, but with an accent Violetta had never heard.
Imported, Violetta realized. Austrian or Neapolitan. The best musicians in Venice were all cloistered in the ospedali. To sing in an opera house or at a private party like this one, you had to come from far away.
By the middle of the song, Violetta had fallen into the rhythm, thrilled to find the dance within her. When the music ended, she felt different, more like a woman than she had before.
“That was wonderful,” she said, catching her breath.
Carlo smiled sadly, still holding her in his arms. “So, what’s his name?”
Violetta blinked. What had he felt through her dancing? She looked away, not wanting to think about anything but tonight.
A pair of hands covered Carlo’s eyes, and he turned to face a tiny young woman with the bearing of a sparrow, dyed white-blond hair, and a black mask painted with gold.
“See how you flourish without me?” she asked teasingly, with a nod at Violetta. Laughter made the woman’s mask vibrate.
“Carina,” Carlo said, showering the woman’s neck with kisses. “You destroy me. I can’t live without you.”
Carina cooed over him as he laid his head upon her breast. She smiled at Violetta.
“Does your lover collapse when you dance with another?”
The memory of Mino kissing Reine flashed before Violetta. She forced it away, but could not find the words to respond.
Carlo raised his head, as if remembering Violetta. He bowed again, kissed her palms, both cheeks of her mask.
“I shall look for you every time I hear a harp,” he said.
“I’ll dance with your agony anytime,” Violetta said, leaving him to Carina.
But after the couple twirled away, she felt intensely alone. She drew to the side of the room, slipping under an archway to find some air. She reached a marble staircase lit with candles.
One flight up, she stood before an empty library with a glass-doored balcony. A fire glowed in the hearth. She glanced around, making sure no one could see her as she moved across the room. She turned the golden handle and stepped outside. The air was a little cooler there. She smelled the brine of the water, felt it on her skin.
Below her spread the Grand Canal. She’d never seen it so close. The only other time she’d gotten near had been standing on that bridge with Mino, and even then she’d only glimpsed a fraction of it in the distance. Now it swept below this balcony. Right beneath her feet. She looked down to the left at the curving rows of palazzi on either side of the water. She looked to the right, w
here the current swept out toward the lagoon. How fast and smooth the water was here. She listened to the slap of it against the mossy steps of the palazzo’s dock.
Three gondolas bobbed below her, tied to posts by leather straps. She wondered who rode them, and where. The water here was as lovely as the water of the Giudecca Canal, but here, the fine homes on the other bank were close enough that Violetta could see inside their windows. Directly across was another vast ballroom with another twinkling chandelier and other masked dancers underneath it.
Were all parties as grand as the one she’d fallen into? Was it the start of the Festa della Sensa that called for them to be so extravagant, or was it the taste and purse of the host? Would she ever know the answer to these questions? Or would she leave here and return to the Incurables and never slip away again? It couldn’t be. A girl couldn’t taste champagne but a single time in her life. Tonight had to be a beginning.
Her thoughts went to Mino. Did he now live nights like this? Did he stand in rooms this fine, with views this spectacular? Did he ever think of her?
She hadn’t come out tonight hoping to find him in the vast maze of Venice. She wasn’t that foolish. But the chance of it had flickered through her mind.
Say she did find him. Say they recognized each other through their masks. What then?
I am yours, you are mine . . .
She sang to the Venetian night.
“You’re putting that Neapolitan soprano downstairs to shame,” a man said behind her. Violetta spun around, unaware she’d been heard. The man in the doorway was tall, dressed in a black robe lined with squirrel fur. Violetta noted his sleeves, which signified a man’s importance. The proper greeting for a nobleman was to kiss his sleeve; the wider the sleeve, the lower to the ground the greeter had to bow. Were she to greet this man properly, her chin might touch the floor.
