The Orphan's Song

by Lauren Kate

  “She was gone three days,” a man with a lopsided white wig was saying. Turning to Mino, he explained, “My wife.”

  Mino had overheard stories like this from the customers at the Venice Triumphant.

  “And so?” a second wigged man said, filling his glass with amber wine.

  “In the end,” the first man said, “I employed the inquisitor.”

  The men around the table murmured, shifted. Mino felt himself leaning closer.

  “I was sure he would find her in bed with some fop,” he said. “It’s one thing to take a lover, quite another to leave your home, your family unattended.”

  “Three days is too long,” another man agreed.

  “I was ready to kill her,” the man said, then shrugged with morose indifference. “She was already dead.” He pulled on a long wooden pipe and puffed the smoke out slowly. “She’d fallen into a canal, washed up between the gondolas.”

  “The inquisitor always finds them, dead or alive,” another man said as the bottle made another round of the table.

  Mino swallowed his nerves. “I’m looking for someone.”

  The song pulsed behind him, keeping time with the quick beats of his heart. He knew there was a reason he had come here. He had felt the pull toward La Sirena from the moment he’d first seen it. He felt emboldened by this intuition that being here tonight might change something.

  “My mother.”

  “I saw your mother.” The man beside him popped Mino in the ribs with his elbow. “Last night.”

  “I just left her this morning,” a second added, and everyone around Mino laughed.

  Mino poured himself more of their wine, let their jokes glance off him. “How do I reach this inquisitor, the one who finds women, dead or alive?”

  “You’re an orphan?” asked a man Mino hadn’t heard speak yet. He was the youngest of the group, small, with a friendlier demeanor. “Are you from an ospedale?”

  The word piqued the interest of the others, but before any of them could ask indelicate questions about the orphan girls, he said, “I left a long time ago. I don’t think about it. Only my mother.”

  “Do you have a half token?” the young man asked, curious.

  “What’s a half token?” the lopsidedly wigged man asked.

  Reluctantly, Mino brought it out. He held it fast but flashed it round the table.

  The man with the lopsided wig reached for it, grew annoyed when Mino wouldn’t let go. He looked at it in Mino’s hand, seemed to find it almost as powerful as Mino did.

  “I’ve seen her,” he said, and the others laughed. More jokes.

  “No, really.” He glanced up at Mino and seemed different, earnest. “I swear on my own mother’s honor.” Now the men around the table listened. “There is a woman in Castello who is the spitting image of this painting.” He thought a moment, shook his head. “But she is older, maybe thirty-five or forty.”

  “This painting is at least twelve years old,” Mino said hoarsely. Was it possible?

  The man told him an address on the east side of the city. “Go and see her. If it is your mother, bring her back here for a drink, on me.”

  * * *

  MINO AND SPREZZ slept in a small, quiet campo in Castello, at the northeastern edge of the city, not far from the address he’d been given by the man in the lopsided wig.

  He felt foul when he woke up, sweating in the fierce glow of the rising sun. He knew he looked awful, but he couldn’t spare the money for a stufe to clean himself up. He splashed his face with water from the canal, ran wet fingers through his hair, and as he let the water trickle down his face he wondered: Was today the day? The morning was so hot but he shivered in anticipation. He brushed twigs and leaves from his cloak, spat on his boots to polish them. He combed through Sprezz’s fur to pick out nits, the dog growling his protest.

  “This is as good as we’re going to get,” he said to Sprezz, and the dog followed him around the corner, down the calle, to a tall and narrow building with a snarling brass lioness rapper on its door.

  The woman who opened to Mino’s knock was pretty, pale skinned, and ample, a few years older than Mino. Her shoulder was bare where her loose chemise had abandoned its post. When she smiled, coy and fatigued, Mino knew everything there was to know about the business of this establishment.

  Hope flickered into his mind that he was mistaken—either about the address or his suspicions. He pushed it aside. No sense in deluding himself further. This was a whorehouse, and if his mother was here and a whore, so be it. She would still be his mother. Who was Mino to judge what anyone did to get by?

  “We don’t open until sundown, sweetness,” the woman told him, leaning against the door. She extended her bare foot to stroke Sprezz along his back. The dog loved it, lifting his chin and closing his eyes.

  “I’m not looking for . . . I’m looking for . . .” Mino stammered.

  “Not a fuck but a lady, right?” she said smoothly, teasing him but being sweet about it. “Someone specific?”

  He fumbled for the token in his pocket, expecting to place it before her eyes and have them light with recognition. He hoped to have to say nothing else. His heart raced.

  She leaned forward to gaze at the painted woman’s face. “Come on in.”

  Mino steadied himself against the doorframe. Tears pricked his eyes. He thought about turning and running. How foolish it had been not to take a bath, to buy a razor on credit, make himself appear at least a little dignified.

  The woman ushered him through a shabby yet elegant parlor and into a small kitchen that smelled of coffee and yeast. She put him in a chair before a small wood table, facing a window whose sill was lined with shiny plums. She sat across from him, tugged at her chemise, and returned to peeling boiled eggs into a bowl.

  “Where?” Mino whispered.

  The woman put an egg on a plate and slid it to him. “Eat,” she said, then poured some coffee. “Drink.”

  He was so hungry he could make no overtures to refuse. He ate three eggs, offered Sprezz the yolk of a fourth, and drank two strong cups of coffee. It only made him hungrier. “Thank you.”

  “You’re an orphan,” the woman said, biting into the final egg herself and chewing in a spellbindingly loud manner.

  Mino nodded. She knew from his half token. But why was she still sitting here? Why not go up and fetch whoever resembled his painting and was the reason Mino had been let in?

  “Real fresh out of the ospedale?” the woman said.

  “Not so fresh,” he said. Did her eyes not see how grizzled he was, how much more haggard than any orphan boy?

  “Fresh, though,” she said and frowned at him. “For god’s sake, you’re not even in on the joke.”

  “What joke?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mino,” he said. “What joke?”

  “Let me guess, Mino. You were drunk last night and you showed your token to some other drunk who sent you here?”

  Mino swallowed. “He swore—”

  “On his own mother’s honor?” She sighed, waved her hand. “Every bastard in this city tells every orphan he can that his mother is a whore, just waiting for him to go and save her. Odds are, the bastards are right about the whore part. Only not the waiting-to-be-saved part.” She cracked her knuckles. “Every woman I know has babies in some ospedale. That painting isn’t your mother, Mino. Any more than your mother is waiting for you upstairs. Whoever told you that was gulling you.”

  Her tone was at odds with her words. She was trying to be kind. Mino hung his head, disgusted with himself. Sprezz brought his chin to Mino’s thigh and sighed.

  “I want you to finish your coffee,” the woman said, rising from the table and brushing eggshells from her skirt. “Then leave here before anyone else comes down those stairs.” She moved to the window, her back to him. �
��You can’t trust people, Mino. Promise you won’t do it again.”

  He drank his coffee wordlessly. Before he rose, a cacophony of wooden-platformed footsteps clamored down the stairs. Suddenly there were two more women before him, filling the kitchen with wide red skirts, smelling of ambergris, the earthy, almost mossy, highly sought-after cologne from the east. Mino wanted to leave but he couldn’t take his eyes off the three of them. He was so tired that it crossed his mind just to stay and ask for a bed, to spend the rest of his money until they kicked him out.

  One of the newcomers sat in his lap, whispering to ask if she could have a sip of his coffee. “We don’t open until sundown, but for you . . .”

  “He’s not looking for a fuck,” the first woman said. “He’s an orphan.”

  “In my experience,” the whore on his lap said, “the two are not mutually exclusive.”

  Now Sprezz barked and snarled, and Mino looked down at him. Time to go.

  “Goodbye, Mino,” said the woman who’d given him the eggs. “Don’t look back anymore; look ahead. Make your own family. You’ll be happier.”

  Her words felt impossible and true. Mino rose reluctantly, squeezing himself out from under the woman on his lap, apologizing. Eventually he made his way out the door onto a street that felt blindingly bright and warm.

  “What now?” he asked Sprezz. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and stopped short. He had been emptied of his last coins.

  Four soldi was all he’d had, and that whore had taken it from him. He turned back to the building, banged on the door. No one answered.

  Mino punched the stone frame of the brothel’s entrance, then cried out in pain. He gave up.

  At the entrance to a narrow calle, Sprezz nudged Mino toward a café. Mino sighed and felt worse as the dog pulled his charming beggar act and returned with a hefty portion of fish bones. They sat down at the water’s edge together. Mino ate in shame.

  Robbed. Humiliated. Back on the streets.

  Letta would never have allowed anything like this happen to her. You only had to look at where she was now to know it. She was a star of the coro. He was just another angry fool in a city full of them.

  * * *

  HE WENT TO see her again that night. He couldn’t help himself. She may never love him back, but he could at least still have her voice. But by the time he staggered to the Incurables, vespers was over, the church emptying.

  He stood before his old home in his mask, his cloak tied tight over his orphanage clothes despite the heat. He stared up at the roof and looked for her.

  She wasn’t that girl anymore. She would be in her private parlor, being waited on. Or she would be in a musical discussion with Porpora. She wouldn’t have time for the horizon anymore.

  Did she ever miss it?

  He stood there until darkness settled over the building. Sprezz was sleeping at his feet, scampering after a dream.

  “Is that you? Mino? Sprezz?”

  Mino looked toward the voice and saw Carlo, the gondolier whose boat he had once borrowed, parked again at the Zaterre. The young man grinned and waved. “You look terrible.”

  “I am down on my luck,” Mino admitted.

  “Worse than before?” Carlo cracked a smile. He squeezed Mino’s shoulder. “Last time you were down on your luck you stole my boat.”

  “If you can believe it, I am even worse off. Keep tight hold of your oar.”

  “Come on,” Carlo said and stepped onto his gondola, waving Mino closer. “Hop in. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  These were welcome words. “Anywhere but La Sirena.”

  “Friend,” Carlo said and laughed, “where else is there to go?”

  SEVEN

  FOR A WEEK after Ascension Day, Violetta would awaken with the black opal in her palm. The nights were warm, and the mornings were warmer, thick with humidity. In her sleep she would kick off her coverlet, strip bare of her nightclothes, but she wouldn’t let go of the necklace. Her fingers traced the iridescent stone. Proof that night had really happened.

  That music, those costumes, sipping champagne and dancing the furlana with a handsome stranger. Standing on that balcony with the promise of summer in the air and a view of the Grand Canal. Most of all, the man she’d met at the end. The man who wished to banish sorrow, who had given her the stone as a key to enter his world again.

  She remembered his fastening the chain around her neck, how his hands on her skin had thrilled her. She touched the stone and closed her eyes, transporting herself back. But when she tried to recall his face, for some reason she saw Mino, his deep blue eyes watching her as he played and she sang on the roof. She saw his hair blow across his forehead; he never seemed to notice. She saw his hopeful, ready smile.

  She held the stone and thought of how she used to disdain Mino’s half token. She’d been so young the night she’d pulled him from the wheel, but already it had bothered her to see his hands cradling it. She’d wanted him to forget it. She knew his mother would not be back. Yet he remained attached to the token. Now she knew his attachment had been a pledge to make real his dream of finding her.

  Had he done it? Violetta prayed he had. If anyone could do it, it was Mino. He was the only person she had ever met who was good at everything he turned to. He might have unearthed cousins, aunts, and uncles, a grandmother in another sestiere with an apartment overlooking a pretty square and garlic drying on strings in the kitchen where she’d teach Mino to cook. Violetta imagined him at a table alive with love, and saw the empty place beside him where she might have sat.

  His dream, she reminded herself when she became breathless with regret. Not hers. Her dream changed all the time; its only constant was its remaining out of reach. She always seemed to want too much. She wanted the coro and she wanted the masquerades. She wanted Mino back and she wanted the man who’d given her the stone.

  That night hadn’t filled the hole inside her, only expanded it. Was this the curse of her abandonment? Would she never stop wanting more? Her true dream had to be out there somewhere. She couldn’t see it yet, but when she clutched that black opal in her palm, she could almost feel it.

  * * *

  BY THE SULTRY peak of summer, Violetta had dared to climb down from her window three more times. Each time she wore her mask and her best dress, and the opal glittering at her throat.

  The second time she sneaked out, she had tugged too hard and ripped the bedsheet, plummeting toward the ground. She’d caught herself, barely, her foot gripping the ledge of the orphan’s head. She’d made it to the ground eventually, but was so shaken she didn’t wander far.

  The next time, she wandered too far and got so lost in the dark, winding calli of Dorsoduro so long that it was nearly dawn before she made it home. She’d been sure she would never make it back before morning, that it would be the end of the coro and the beginning of a monastic prison sentence in a nunnery. The end of music.

  She told herself to stop this nighttime wandering.

  But the lure of the streets, of life, was too strong. Another sweltering week went by and she had to try again. She had to see the man from the party. There was something about him she wanted to be closer to, with her body and her heart. And so she set out with La Sirena in her mind, carefully retracing her steps from that first night. But somewhere along the maze of calli, she lost her nerve. She felt embarrassed by her simple dress, her old shoes and bare head. She found it easier to stay anonymous, to enter the current of another band of revelers and flow wherever they went.

  When she got home, she lay in bed awhile, her head spinning pleasantly from the wine she’d drunk, the necklace still fastened at her throat. By day it stayed tucked inside her bauta, alongside her money at the back of her armoire, but by night, she wanted it with her. She wondered about its hold on her and why the stranger had given it to her. She wondered how much it was worth. She had passed pawnshops in
Dorsoduro on alms walks, and sometimes she wondered how much she might get for this stone. What she would spend it on. Not acqaioli or a gondola ride.

  How much did real freedom cost? What did it look like? A place where no one remembered her as an orphan? She held the stone and thought on this a long time. If she sold it, would she have enough to leave the Incurables, to start fresh in a new city, one where she could sing and live as she chose? Where she could outrun the memory of Mino? Were there such cities? She didn’t know.

  But she knew someone who might. The man who’d given her the opal necklace.

  Tomorrow night, she’d try again. She’d don her mask and the opal. She would lose neither her courage nor her way. She would make it to La Sirena.

  * * *

  IN THE MORNING, she felt ill before she ate breakfast. She asked for a double portion, which she’d never done before, but her stomach was churning and needed settling. She returned to her suite to warm up her voice with scales before mass. She knew she sounded cloudy as Helena brushed her hair and gossiped about the music school girls. There was a rumor another coro singer, Vania, would retire soon, and that Reine would take her place in the coro.

  “Are you cross?” Helena asked. “You don’t like each other.”

  Violetta rolled her eyes, returning to her scales. The French girl was the least of her worries. She had to be more careful about her drinking the next time she went out.

  Laura had a cough, so she was made to keep her distance from Violetta. Violetta felt guiltily grateful for this; Laura was too good at reading her thoughts. She had known about the attic, about Mino, but Violetta’s nighttime escapes were far more forbidden than anything she’d done before. She didn’t want to put Laura in the position of having to cover for her—or report her.