The Orphan's Song

by Lauren Kate

  He wore no mask. He was the only person whose full face she had seen tonight, and she found him startlingly handsome. His hair was dark and thick, gathered with a ribbon at the nape of his neck—not like the periwigs so many men wore. His eyes sparkled the palest blue, like icicles hanging off a windowsill at dawn. He was older than Violetta, but she couldn’t tell by how much. There was something magnetic about him, something deeper than his features, commanding frame, or fine clothes, and she couldn’t tell what it was.

  She realized he had been watching her longer than the short moments of her song. A part of her wondered whether he had seen her dance with Carlo, or had even seen her enter the party, get picked up by strangers off the street, even all the way back to the moment she gazed at the moon and felt it wasn’t enough. Maybe he had seen all of that—or maybe he could glimpse it all right now. There was something unknowably perceptive in his gaze.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I was alone.”

  He raised an eyebrow and smiled. “A masquerade is just the place to come for solitude.” When she ducked her head he added, “I’m serious. I think parties are better from a distance, looking in.” He stepped closer, nodding at the window, at the party going on in the palazzo across the canal.

  “Maybe everything is better from a distance,” Violetta said.

  Now he turned to face her, inches away. “Not you. Not your song.” He reached forward gently and tried to lift her mask. “May I be so bold?”

  Violetta jumped away. “No!” She slid around him, her eye on the door to leave. She had taken enough risks for one night. It was time to go.

  He caught her hand, and then, feeling her anxiety, he let go.

  “All right,” he said. “If you don’t want me to see you, how can I hear you again? Where do you sing? Don’t tell me—you’re the new principal at Teatro San Angelo. Everyone is comparing her to—”

  “No,” Violetta said. “I don’t. I’m not . . . that song is just for me.”

  “That ought to be a crime,” the man teased. “A good Venetian would alert the Council of Ten. Lucky for you, I’m not good.”

  She laughed despite herself and he exhaled, seeming to loosen.

  “Excuse my forwardness. But your voice reminds me of someone I used to know.” A smile flickered across his face, but she sensed his lightheartedness was a facade. She wanted to know what lay underneath. For a moment they stood in silence. “Would you consider coming back here sometime, singing for an audience?”

  “Here? Is this your party?” she asked.

  He nodded. “I can’t sing to save my life. I am a patron of the arts by default. I have spent my life trying to glean how the great musicians do it.”

  “I’ve heard it said that all you need for dancing is a feeling. Perhaps the same can be said of all performing.”

  “Is that what you think?” he asked.

  She felt him trying to get closer to her with these words. It excited her to meet a man who patronized musicians outside the Incurables, but he could do nothing for her. She was a coro girl now. For better or worse, she had made her choice. She must steer the conversation away from herself, lest she become tempted to dream of what might have been and give herself away.

  “I think Venetians love being made to feel something intensely,” she said. “We really don’t care what it is.”

  “Maybe that’s the trouble with this party,” he said. She expected him to glance over his shoulder, where the rising revelry could be heard from downstairs, but he only looked at her. “I always want to create something so full of pleasure that there is room for nothing else. But my guests bring their own variety of feelings, their agonies and regrets.”

  As Violetta pondered his words, the clock struck twelve. A cheer rose from the ballroom. The harp music changed to an accelerato and was joined by a trumpet.

  “Time for me to go,” she said, because something about this man compelled her to stay, and that desire, more than anything else tonight, felt dangerous. She longed to experience more of the wildness of the party, but she had already taken her luck too far. Morning would come quickly. She could not risk being bleary or hoarse at rehearsal. She brushed past him, leaving the balcony.

  “Will you stay, just one more moment?” The sorrow in his voice made Violetta pause at the library door. She turned and watched him walk to a desk. He opened a drawer and, after a moment, held up a white velvet pouch. He untied its strings to withdraw a large, round stone hanging from a golden chain.

  It was the color of the sky just after dark, and flecked inside with an infinity of lighter blue grains that reminded Violetta of stars. The color changed completely if you shifted your angle or looked through candlelight. It took on a deeper color, a more dazzling luster.

  She froze when he stepped close to her and moved to fasten it around her neck. His fingers brushed her skin and heat licked through her, rising in her cheeks.

  “Anytime you change your mind,” he said, “if you wish to sing for an audience of one or one thousand”—his voice was quiet, at her ear—“come and see me. Here or at my casino down the calle. Wear this necklace. No one will ask your name. My staff will know you by the black opal.”

  SIX

  AT MIDNIGHT ON Ascension Day, a beautiful, balmy evening in May, Mino dashed around Piazza San Marco, whisking tables and chairs out from under the patrons on the patio of the Venice Triumphant café. For the rich drinking madeira and flirting under the arches, night never fell in the piazza. But for the proprietors of the cafés, midnight marked the hour when the sbirri started fining establishments whose furniture still sat outside.

  Floriano, the owner of the Venice Triumphant, was cunning in the most Venetian way. He saw a loophole and had hired men like Mino to swap out the wicker furniture with poultry coops and empty vegetable crates left out in a neighboring market. There was no prohibition about poultry coops in the sbirri’s book of laws, and so the party could go on through breakfast.

  Mino had bought new clothes and begun taking rooms at boarding houses with his gold from the gondola ride three months ago. But still, like every employer who had hired Mino for small jobs since then, Floriano shook his head when Mino showed him the painted face of his half token.

  “Nothing?” Mino said, and something in his voice caused the café owner to look at him regretfully. “My mother . . .” he’d tried to explain.

  “You can work here on the condition that you don’t show that to my customers. That painting . . . combined with the look on your face.” Floriano shook his head. “These people come here to have fun.” Then he’d punched Mino lightly on the shoulder. “I hope you find her. Just not here.”

  Floriano paid Mino four soldi for the hour it took him to ease patrons out of their seats, replacing the chairs with various-sized crates. For the ladies, Mino laid a fine linen napkin atop to preserve their skirts, setting them back so subtly they hardly knew they had been displaced.

  Before half past twelve, the party sat lower and smelled faintly of hay, but the conversations became more intimate, revolving around the latest scandals and masquerades, the French fashions that would be sold the following morning in the center of this piazza. For the next two weeks, during the Festa della Sensa, Venice’s upper class would shop in these stalls. They would fill their wardrobes with enough Parisian couture to last until this time next year, when the stalls would come again.

  Most of the women at the Venice Triumphant wanted to flirt with Mino, to stroke his bare cheek, tie their baute around his head to see how he’d look masked, and run long painted fingernails through his hair, but Mino eluded their grasps. This was the best money of all his cobbled-together jobs, and it demanded efficiency. Mino had promised a hundred women he’d meet them later at a party or dark tavern, but he never did, and they never held it against him. Among their class, there was always new titillation to be found around the corner.
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  He found close contact with the aristocracy discomfiting. It wasn’t so long ago that he’d envisioned a simple life with Letta. But now that he was living on the streets, the work he could get required he serve the richest nobles in Venice. They exhausted him with their infinite masks and costumes and charades. Nothing about them seemed real. Each night, after he was paid, he felt a compulsion to roam, to leave behind the collective fantasy these rich customers shared.

  Sometimes he would drop into a cheap tavern for a drink, and those evenings invariably ended in pain as he showed his half token to a stranger who neither understood nor cared. But mostly, he’d walk alone with Sprezz, only dropping into whatever bed he could rent that night when he could walk no farther.

  Sprezz was waiting at the service entrance of the Venice Triumphant. Mino tossed him a half-eaten roasted pheasant wing plucked from a patron’s plate. Sprezz leaped to catch it, snapping the bone up and licking the salt from his chops. They strolled toward the canal. Sprezz was always up for walking, knocking his head tenderly against Mino’s knees when they paused at an intersection.

  Hours earlier, as the sun set over the white dome of the basilica of La Salute, the doge had floated down the Grand Canal, waving from the deck of his majestic bucintoro. His ship was four times as wide as the standard gondola, decorated with garlands of flowers. Throngs of Venetians had gathered on the sea-facing promenade of San Marco, and in boats of all sizes on the Grand Canal, to see the doge. Wearing the white cambric hat he apparently never took off, he tossed the ceremonial wedding ring into the murky green water.

  Mino had always found the Festa della Sensa romantic, a time to recommit yourself to what you loved. When he was younger, in the years just before he met Letta, these two weeks had been the time each year when he tended his violin, sneaking out to barter a few eggs for new rosin at the book printer’s shop behind the Incurables. He coated his bow with the small, translucent yellow cake and relished the revived strength and control it gave his playing.

  This was the first year Mino had witnessed the way the rest of Venice celebrated Ascension, had stood in the crowd on the promenade, cheering on the procession of boats. He’d watched the doge sail by, on his way to a waterfront feast near Lido. The doge’s bucintoro was followed by a huge fleet of boats bearing flags and banners. On the decks of each, richly costumed men played fifes and trumpets. Mino wondered what it would be like to stand among them with his violin. The wind in his hair, the rhythm of the boat beneath his feet, his music sailing to these crowds. He missed playing.

  He missed playing with Letta.

  He thought about that golden ring in the water. He had never even taken out the ring he’d found for her. Now it was part of the lagoon. He’d thrown it into the sea the night he left the Incurables. If he’d foreseen how destitute his future was, he might have held on to it. But at the time he couldn’t bear it. He’d had to free himself of the reminder of what a fool he’d been.

  He could have paid a month’s rent with that ring. But no, even as desperate as he was now, Mino knew he would never have pawned it. He only wished he hadn’t thrown it away.

  In five hours he was meant to be at the maranzaria, to unload the morning crates of oranges. Only one soldo, but the work was easy and quiet and Mino always left with breakfast for himself and Sprezz. He knew he should sleep, but the room he’d taken for the week was squalid, and he shared a bed with one and sometimes two Scandinavians who stank of mildew.

  The breeze coming off the canal promised summer, but its fragrance of heady, night-blooming jasmine took Mino back to the apartment and that carnevale afternoon. He stood at the water’s edge and thought of diving in to find the little gold band. He knew he would not succeed, but he dreamed of staying underneath the water, searching until his misery ended.

  When he finally looked across the canal, for an instant he thought he saw a giant curved fishtail, dipping beneath the dark surface, now gone. He rubbed his eyes.

  La Sirena. He hadn’t thought of the casino in months, swept away by the many emotions of that day at the Incurables. Suddenly, it called to him.

  He wanted to be there and couldn’t say why. He wanted to drink in a dark place, in a sestiere far from the gaiety of San Marco. Before he knew it, he and Sprezz were crossing the Rialto Bridge. His eyes avoided its apex; all bridges now reminded him of where he had stood with Letta, where for a moment, all his dreams had seemed possible.

  He wound through the calli, past the fortune-tellers and the pretty flower girls out too late. Twice his path dead-ended and he had to retrace his steps. Then, suddenly, there was the cork tree, whose lowest bough bridged the narrow canal. There was the staircase that spiraled from the street up to a second-story balcony, to a door lit by a blue glass lantern. There was the plaque, the upside-down fishtail as intriguing as it had been the first time Mino saw it. Only the large man at the door dissuaded Mino.

  “Do we know you?” he asked as Mino approached.

  Mino’s lack of mask made him suspicious. He knew everyone wore them inside casinos, no matter the season or the law. He took out his bauta and tied it on, which only made the doorkeeper laugh.

  “Do you know everyone you let in?” Mino asked.

  “I know their money,” the doorkeeper said.

  For once Mino had six whole soldi in his pockets. Five were meant to go to Zanata, the deaf landlady, for tomorrow’s rent, but it didn’t matter. Mino could have a hundred soldi in his pockets, and it wouldn’t impress this man, not at the door of a gambling house. Mino wished he still had the snakeskin purse from the gambler he’d brought to this door months ago. He should never have offered it to Carlo as a peacemaking gesture when he returned the gondolier’s boat. He could have waved it now. A purse like that, you didn’t even need to see the gold inside.

  “This is not a place for skulduggery,” the doorkeeper said, and Mino understood that, of course, it was just the place for skulduggery. Everywhere in this city was for skulduggery, just as it was for feasting and philosophizing, for making music and making love. This was Venice, after all.

  The doorkeeper’s warning told him that there was money to be earned inside, and not just at the gambling tables. There were better-paying jobs than hauling oranges and chicken coops, and why shouldn’t Mino find them?

  “I only want a drink,” he claimed, and the doorkeeper shook his head.

  At that moment, two drunken men barged out the door in a roiling brawl. They cursed each other, and each other’s mothers and descendants, as they fumbled past Mino and up against the railing of the bridge. More men followed, piling on, and the doorkeeper sprang into action, his immense hands seizing the back of each brawling man’s neck. Threats were shouted, punches thrown, bottles smashed—a storm as violent as it was indiscriminate, and sour with fortified wine.

  Mino and Sprezz, suddenly invisible, slipped inside the casino door.

  La Sirena was dark, the air smoky with the singe of tobacco. The walls were tiled, the ceilings low. There was a large room filled with tables for gambling, and a raised stage at the rear with a thick black curtain behind it. The bar spanned the wall to the left of the entrance and shone with the splendor of a hundred bottles. Behind the bar, an arched doorway led into a second room with velvet seating for dining and other pleasures. Before him, only a few candles were still lit on the tables and on the bar. On the stage at the back, a woman sang something slow and melancholy, accompanied by a violinist who kept his eyes on her even as she gazed into the distance.

  He made his way to the back wall to listen. The sight of them made Mino’s chest ache with all he’d lost. His home. His violin. His job. And Letta. All because he’d thought they could be happy playing music together.

  Nothing to do now but forget about old dreams. He would never make it in this city if his heart broke every time he heard a woman sing against a violin.

  He crossed the casino, Sprez
z at his heels, past a few booths of bleary men playing cards. He reached the bar. He was used to borrower’s wine, a poor brew he could get on credit at the derelict magazzens near the Rialto. They didn’t pour anything like that here. These were new bottles of Tokaj and Recioto. Whatever he ordered he would have to pay for. He met the eyes of the barmaid through her mask. She was young, and the way she held her body, the quickness of her pouring, told Mino she was scrappy. He tapped a brown bottle that looked like it would do the trick, then put the single coin he had to spare upon the bar. He hoped it would be enough.

  The barmaid looked at him, and he sensed if he’d been there hours earlier she might have been gentle on him, but she was tired now and had been pushed around all night. She poured Mino a swallow and pocketed the coin.

  Reluctantly, he pulled another coin from his pocket, placed it in her waiting palm. Now she topped him off.

  “If you don’t have enough money to play,” she said, reaching over the bar to scratch Sprezz’s ears, “sit near the musicians. Avoid these men.” She nodded toward the only lively booth left in the casino, where five men played a loud and brutal game of cards. “Only the mongrels are still here this time of night. Everyone else has gone to Federico’s party.”

  He didn’t know who Federico was. He was interested only in his wine, which he finished too quickly. He wanted more. He was about to sit alone before the singer when one of the men in the booth called him.

  “Boy—”

  Mino looked up. They had finished their card game. They were too drunk to open the next bottle of wine.

  “Join us. Help us.” He waved a corkscrew at Mino, who crossed the bar. Six months out of the Incurables, Mino had become deft with the little metal instrument. He wanted more to drink and was lonely enough not to mind the company of mongrels. He avoided the barmaid’s eyes as he sat among the men. Sprezz lay down at his feet.