The Orphan's Song

by Lauren Kate

  But Violetta wouldn’t be nervous. Every day for almost a year, she’d sung before larger, soberer, and more discerning audiences. She had sung before the doge at Easter and had received a card and bounty of white roses with his compliments. She still had the note at her bedside. She had sung before Federico.

  She blushed thinking of that first night when he’d found her on his balcony. She’d never asked about his reaction the day he heard her sing at the Incurables, and she still didn’t understand it. She would never get used to making people cry with her music, but at least in the church, she could guess why they were moved. They wanted to feel closer to God, and the coro helped bring them there. With Federico, she suspected it was something different.

  Now the anteroom door opened and there he was, in a suit made of marvelous golden thread. He smelled of ambergris. He came to stand behind her, admiring her through the mirror. She wasn’t sure if she should rise to greet him or not; there was something exciting about just watching each other in the mirror. He put his hand on her shoulder. She liked the way it looked in the reflection, and she liked the way it felt through her dress. Now she rose and came to him. She wanted to be closer. They leaned in for the greeting kisses. His lips brushed her mask, and she wished hers could reach his skin. Did he shiver as she did when they touched? He took her hands and held her at a distance to look at her.

  “My Sirena.” His soft tone made her dizzy. “Are you ready?”

  “Let’s go.”

  As they left the anteroom, walking from the hall into the loud casino, Federico’s hand slipped from hers. Violetta shivered as if a draft had blown between them, but then he flashed her a smile, and she smiled back. He climbed the stairs to introduce her onstage.

  From here, the casino looked different. She had never practiced in this room, for she could never make it to La Sirena before it was filled with guests. The stage was small but high. There was barely room next to the harp for her to stand. She looked out over a dozen tables drawn close, and a dozen more booths beyond. There might have been a hundred people in the casino, far fewer than she usually sang to, but she’d never performed alone before, and she’d never sung from behind a mask. She knew to amplify her voice, but she didn’t know how this crowd would receive her music. It was easy for the coro girls to be the brightest part of a church service, but at the casino, Violetta’s song would be competing with darker pleasures: drink and money and sex.

  Perhaps she was nervous. She tried to steady her breath. She turned to Federico for comfort. She liked how he looked up there, his dark hair silhouetted, candlelit.

  “Gentlemen, I suggest you lash yourself to the mast of your ship,” he announced grandly, “for there is no resisting . . . La Sirena!”

  Half the crowd applauded tepidly. The other half were occupied in conversations or with their drinks. As Violetta took the stage she reminded herself that Federico believed in her. She stood above her audience, each of them masked and many in shadow. She was ready to sing, to wake them from drunken dreams, and draw them to her.

  Then, on the inhale before her first note, she thought of Mino.

  She had known from the day he left the Incurables that he would not return, that he would never hear her sing, never know what became of her. She had driven him away. But every time she stepped outside those walls, part of her wondered whether Mino was walking the same street as she. She was always masked, and he would be, too. They would never know if the other was passing.

  What if fate had brought him here tonight?

  All this passed through Violetta’s mind in the time it took to fill her lungs. So when she opened her mouth to sing, the words and the melody that came out were not Handel’s Piangerò. It was Mino’s song.

  I am yours, you are mine . . .

  She hadn’t meant to, but now, all she could do was go on. She heard the harpist pull back, slowing and simplifying his plucking after the unexpected change. She felt the shift in the audience, their attention drawn from games and wine to her. She held them with her voice note after note, minute after minute. She held them as she reached the crescendo. By then she had become the music.

  But at the song’s end, what Violetta felt was not relief that she had done it, that Federico would be happy. She felt devastated. Mino was not in the room. She would have felt him if he was.

  The crowd begged for more, but her face was wet with tears.

  TWELVE

  MINO MOVED IN ACROSS FROM ANA, her mother, her sisters, a precocious five-year-old niece, and a large birdcage of turtledoves. Their apartments were on the third floor of a building wedged into a corner of the Campo San Apostoli in Cannaregio. It was a neighborhood of merchants, close to the merceria. The long main street that stretched between Rialto and San Marco bustled with the most famous markets in Venice, among them Ana’s family’s sausage shop.

  It was as far from the Incurables as one could get and still reside in Venice. Mino had slept in that room across the hall since the night Ana brought him home the month before. When she’d made the bed the next morning, Mino had helped her draw up the soft blue coverlet.

  “What do your boarders pay?” he asked.

  She laughed. “I can’t rent to you.”

  “Why not?” he asked, flushing, remembering how she had paid the bill the night before.

  “Mamma would . . .” Ana trailed off. Now her face was red. “She senses things. She’s a traditional woman. We work early in the morning. We’re not maskers, Mino.”

  “I will work for you,” he said. “Tell me how to address your mother.”

  “What about your place?” she asked.

  “I’d rather be here,” he said and took her hands. “Near you.”

  Ana took a moment. How pretty she was when thinking.

  At last, she smiled. “Mamma is Siora Costanzo.”

  He grinned and kissed her hands.

  “Be comfortable,” she said. “After Mamma is asleep, I will come to you.”

  Mino put his arms around her waist. He could not believe his change of fortune. He held Ana close, kissed the top of her dark head, and vowed to make himself valuable to her.

  “Has anyone ever told you that you are like the butterfly, floating between the boughs of a lemon tree?” he said. “Farfalla.” Butterfly.

  She laughed, but before Mino could feel embarrassed, she looked up and let him in on her amusement. “I’m no butterfly. More a bee. I protect my hive. But I get more than one sting before I die.”

  She reached for a pillow and set it on the floor at the foot of Mino’s bed. She patted it for Sprezz, who eyed it with suspicion.

  “You’re used to sleeping with him, aren’t you?” she asked the dog.

  Mino knew she must be imagining an apartment, at the very least a rented room, and without question, a bed, where man and dog might sleep together. Ana wasn’t thinking of alcoves on dark street corners where, if you had something warm to lean into, you held it fast and did not let it go.

  “Yes,” he answered for the dog.

  “From now on, Sprezz, you’ll sleep here.” Ana patted the pillow. “Agreed?” She held out her hand. Mino was enchanted to see Sprezz raise his paw to meet hers. They shook. “We’ll be friends, but your breath smells of fish, and this bed’s too small for three.”

  Sprezz lay down in total comfort, and Mino knew then Ana’s gift: she could settle matters in a way that pleased everyone.

  * * *

  HE DID NOT miss nights at the casino with Carlo. He threw himself into work at the sausage shop, and within a week he was fully ensconced in its world. He lightened the family’s load by hauling crates to their black-awninged shop in the merceria. He cleaved cold meat off bones. At first, Ana’s mother made no attempt to hide her skepticism, but Mino learned too quickly for her annoyance to keep up. Soon she was confiding in him about the price of Adriatic salt from the latest ship, about
which important customers preferred what ratio of fat to meat. He took home no pay beyond his meals, board, and Ana’s arms, and he was rich.

  Every morning, he woke to the wonderful scent of frying sausage down the hall, to turtledoves cooing, and the chorus of women arguing over chairs and which of them had chipped the butter dish. He would roll over and smile, then join Ana and her sisters at breakfast. Later on, he would barter a rope of sausage for a vial of resin at the bookbinders to fix the broken butter dish.

  He liked doing things like this for Ana. He longed for the look in her eyes when he surprised her with some cleverness. He knew how much he owed her, and it was far more than the fact that after two weeks he could no longer feel Sprezz’s ribs through his skin, no longer see his own ribs in his reflection. It was more than the blissfully quiet sleep he now took for granted. Even more than the nights in Ana’s arms. She had answered the question he had worried over all his life: Was he worthy of love?

  “Will you marry her?” Siora Costanzo asked, one month into his stay. Mino sat in her parlor by the light of a candle, brushing pine resin along the butter dish’s crack.

  In his shock, Mino nearly dropped the dish, and all the women, even five-year-old Genevieve, laughed.

  He wanted for nothing in Ana’s company. He yearned all day for the moment she would come to his room in the night and he could hold her. But marriage had not crossed his mind. She seemed a delicacy someone had handed him on a silver platter. He feared the moment it became clear he couldn’t pay.

  “Mamma, please.” Ana’s sister Vittoria groaned as she tugged tangles from Genevieve’s hair. “It’s been too long since she had a man around to torture,” she apologized to Mino.

  “Poor Angelo couldn’t take it.” Siora Costanzo sniffed.

  “My husband,” Vittoria muttered to Mino. “Mino is not a drunk like Angelo was. He is not cruel like Papa.”

  “What does any of us have if we can’t keep men on their toes?” Siora said. “When I was a girl, we knew how to keep a man guessing.” She pointed at Mino. “Look at him, Ana. Do you see him guessing?”

  Ana smiled and floated over to Mino, taking the repaired dish from his hands and setting it on the windowsill to dry. She put her arms around him. “I see him fixing everything in sight.” Then she leaned close, until she was the only thing in Mino’s sight. Was she broken? He couldn’t tell and he worried over whether he was the man to fix her.

  She kissed him in front of the others, which she had never done before.

  “Would you like to be married?” he whispered. His heart was racing. He had not thought the words before he spoke them, and now he heard his own fear. What if she said yes?

  “Don’t worry, Mino,” she said. “You’ll know what to do.”

  * * *

  STELLA CAME TO the apartment in October, on the cold first night of carnevale, to borrow one of Vittoria’s dresses. She appeared in the kitchen, so much taller and fairer than the rest of the family. She looked more like Mino than her own sisters.

  “He’s still here?” She laughed, tossing bits of bread into the turtledoves’ cage.

  “You promised,” Ana warned her sister.

  “Fine,” Stella said, stepping toward Mino with a yellow dress draped over her arm. “Let me see your painting.”

  “Your half token, Mino,” Ana said. “I told Stella about your mother.”

  Mino rummaged for his half token, embarrassed that his search had languished since he’d been with Ana. How long had it been since he’d taken the painting from his pocket?

  He held it out. Stella looked at it a long time. He’d stopped expecting the thoughtful gazes to lead to anything. It was just a beautiful face.

  “Does it mean anything to you?” Ana asked Stella, coming to stand beside her sister. Mino saw now how alike they looked. Their bodies and coloring were different, but their heart-shaped faces and the set of their mouths were the same.

  “No,” Stella said, sounding sorrier than Mino expected. “Though we could ask my friend Elizabeth. She knows every musician in Venice. She’s British, but don’t let that deter you. Her husband runs the most important opera house in London. I could bring the painting to her tomorrow—”

  “No.” Mino returned it to his pocket. He couldn’t part with it, even for an hour.

  “Let us come with you?” Ana asked. “Where are you meeting Elizabeth? Not that casino, I hope?”

  “La Sirena?” Mino realized he hadn’t been there, hadn’t even had a drink since he’d met Ana, and something inside him soared. He hadn’t missed the casino until Ana mentioned it. But now he wondered if Carlo was worried about him, and he wondered what new ideas were circulating among the Rosicrucians. Would they see how he was changed, how he was golden now because of Ana?

  Ana’s expression tightened. “That casino is no place for a man trying to make something of himself.”

  These were words they’d never discussed, a plan for Mino’s life he didn’t know about. What was the something he was trying to make of himself?

  “Ana, you’re too rigid,” Vittoria called from her bedroom.

  “You’re not rigid enough,” Ana called back sharply, and Mino remembered Ana telling him of the strain Vittoria’s husband’s drinking had been on the family. She had little patience for debauchery now.

  “Don’t worry, Ana,” Stella said. “I have a proper job at last, at a little teatro. Elizabeth is a busy woman, but I’ll ask if she would meet you.”

  “Please,” Ana said.

  “Did you get your violin fixed?” Mino asked, noticing the case resting on the console near the door.

  Stella sighed. “Someday I’ll get the money to buy a new one. There’s a luthier called Guarneri in Cremona, Elizabeth knows him—”

  “What if I fixed it for you?”

  Stella shrugged as she moved toward the door. As she left for the party on the streets of Cannaregio, she called over her shoulder, “If you mess it up, I will kill you.”

  * * *

  ALL NIGHT, MINO worked on the violin. Carnevale exploded on the streets below, and Genevieve begged him to join the rest of the family at the parade downstairs, but Mino declined. He saw nothing but the violin, heard nothing but the music it might make when he was through.

  Ana declined to go out, too. She made Mino dinner, then tea; she sat beside him. She seemed drawn to his diligence, doting on him while they had the apartment to themselves for once.

  “I don’t want to keep you from carnevale,” he said.

  “There’s months of carnevale,” she said. “If you want to stay in every night of it and work like this, I’ll stay with you. I prefer watching you work to any party.”

  “Can you play it?” he asked her, holding out the bow, the violin. “I need to feel around the strings while someone plays so I can find the problem.”

  “No.” She waved her hands, more sheepish than Mino had seen her, and for an instant, he wished it were Letta at his side. “I’m no musician.”

  “Pluck it then,” he said, “forget the bow.” With his fingers, he showed her a simple pizzicato. “Nothing to it.”

  She accepted the instrument, used her narrow middle finger to pluck a few strings. Mino leaned in, his ear close. He pressed his ring finger down on one string at a time as she plucked, satisfied when he heard the buzzing stop.

  “It is as I suspected. Her D and G strings need new windings.” His mind worked over what spare metal he might use to wrap her strings.

  Ana raised her eyebrows as Mino detached the chain from the top of his half token and laid it flat upon the table. Its links were wire thin, pliable. He used to wish they were sturdier, but now he knew just what to do. If only—

  Ana rose from the table. “I’ll be right back,” she said and returned a moment later with a small metal box. Inside were a pair of pliers, a hammer.

  �
�Perfect,” Mino said. If he could flatten the links of his broken chain and coil them tight enough with the pliers, he might have enough length to use them as new metal windings at the base of the strings. Stella’s violin would sing like a mezzo-soprano.

  “Are you sure?” Ana asked.

  “Never surer,” Mino said as he completely loosened the two lower strings and tightened the fine tuner peg.

  When he was finished hours later, when his half token’s chain lived in Stella’s violin, Mino felt a kind of ecstasy he remembered from his earliest days playing. He looked up, remembering Ana, and the sight of her annoyed him, for she was surely impatient to go to bed. And Mino couldn’t go to bed, because he wasn’t there in that apartment. He was on the roof of the Incurables, playing as Letta sang.

  “I see your mother in your eyes,” Ana said.

  “What?” Mino asked, brought back to the room.

  “All night, you’ve been so joyful,” she said. “The moment you finish working, I see the pain return to your eyes.”

  It was longing for Letta she had seen, and Mino was ashamed. Ana had been so open with him, but there was much about his past he wished never to tell her. He didn’t want to lie.

  “What if I never find her, Ana?” he said.

  She took his hand. “Maybe you already have.”

  Mino stared at her, afraid of what she might say next. “I mean,” Ana said, “maybe it is not your mother in the flesh that you will find, Mino, but a sign, a guiding hand to shape your life the way a mother’s love might do. Tonight you put a piece of her inside this violin. I believe she would have wanted a bright future for you.”

  “I don’t understand,” Mino said.

  “My family is happy for your help at the shop, but there’s more for you, Mino.” She held up the instrument. “You have a gift.”

  He shook his head. “I fixed one violin. I’m not a luthier.”