In old Venezia, in the days when the secrets of mirror making were still heavily guarded and their disclosure was punishable by death, my father deposited a tiny girl in the wall of the Ospedale della Pietà.
My father was a mirror maker, or so we assumed, an artisan inconsiderate enough to get some poor girl pregnant, but not so unconcerned with the state of his immortal soul that he was willing to abandon her to her fate. So instead I was the one abandoned, in the wall of the Pietà where orphans were frequently left, usually girls, often with some trinket meant to make it possible to identify them later. I was found with a mirror—a hand mirror, as might hang from a lady’s chatelaine, encased in gold with the winged lion of San Marco engraved on the reverse. The silver face was cracked down the middle, a trauma born perhaps of my ignominious surrender.
The Ospedale della Pietà was a music school in addition to an orphanage and a convent, and our all-female musical ensembles were famed world-over. We performed behind a metal grill, which patrons were told was to hide our disfigurement, but in reality hid the fact that most of us were plain and some quite homely. I was one of the few girls the sisters considered beautiful, save for the birthmark that covered half my face, which Sister Anna Maria said was designed by God to cradle a violin.
The fateful first morning of my twentieth year, Sister Anna Maria came to me while the chorus was relaxing in our dressing area, throwing our robes off over our heads and bickering about who had been a touch flat during the Ave Maria. Sister Anna Maria spoke without words, as she did so well, meeting my eyes and nodding, which meant that I was wanted. I followed her to the one room, besides the concert hall, where guests of the Pietà were permitted to enter. The lamp light in the receiving room was low, which the Sisters believed heightened mystery and romance. The room was empty but for a single figure by the fire.
“Lucia della Pietà, signore,” Sister Anna Maria murmured from the doorway as I entered the room. The signore stood by the fireplace, hands clasped behind his back. He was a tall man, and his position in the firelight made him seem still larger than he was. As I approached, he turned, and I saw that he wore a mask, a bauta, painted in a dramatic black-and-gold, with embroidered brocade trailing from the edges over his shoulders.
I swept into a curtsey.
“Virtuosa,” he said, and his voice was like lamplight, warm and flickering. He bowed to me like I was a lady, though he did not offer a name. “You are a singer, yes?”
“A soprano, signore,” I responded. “Though I prefer the violin.”
“Is that so?” I thought he must have smiled, the way his voice changed through the papier-mâché. “And I must say that I prefer a woman who speaks the truth.”
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. “My lord?”
He came closer, his steps measured, as though he approached an animal he did not wish to frighten, until he was near enough that I could see the gleam of his eyes through the mask. “Have you the chatelaine mirror placed with you, when you were left here in the orphanage?”
I was startled, but I produced the mirror nonetheless, which I carried with me always. He stretched out a hand for it, and I placed it therein. If he attempted to take it from me, he would have Sister Anna Maria, who was surely watching from the shadows, to deal with on his exit.
He stared down at the broken trinket, and as he turned it over in his hand it caught the firelight and flashed. “Little you know how valuable this is,” he murmured.
“I don’t understand.”
“You are a lady born. Or ought to have been, in a world where less favor was placed on useless sons over their more talented sisters. In any case, you are a wealthy woman.” He knelt on one knee before me. “And I am your humble servant.”
I was the daughter of a mirror maker—a respectable profession, but not one that could command the sort of wealth that this man—this servant!—represented.
And so I was incredulous. “You’re here on behalf of my father?”
“No indeed.” I heard the smile in his voice again. “Your father was a poor mirror maker’s assistant, who lived in obscurity, and probably died so, though I am told he was a very handsome man, a legacy born out in his daughter.”
Perhaps he could not see my disfigurement in the low light. If the left half of my face were in shadow, I might seem a beauty after all. When I said nothing, he turned away and faced the firelight once again, which illuminated the gold in his mask.
“I am here on behalf of my mistress, who placed this trinket with her daughter when she ordered me to deliver you to the wall.”
My world upended itself in a single moment: my father was dead, and irrelevant, and the man in front of me was the one who had abandoned me in the wall. At the behest of—
“My mother.”
“The Lady Ilaria de Magrì, who, now that she is mistress of her own lands, is in a position that she might call her daughter, who has reached her maturity, home to herself. Will you meet her?”
“I—” The answer caught in my throat. The answer to the questions that burned. “Yes.”
“Go, collect your things. A gondola will arrive for you this very evening, at the Vespers’ bells. Be ready.” He held the mirror out to me. “And virtuosa,” he said, “do not forget your violin.”
#
I had little to pack, and nothing to pack it in. Sister Anna Maria located an old trunk that would fit my violin and the few clothes I had. I kept my mirror on my person. At Vespers’ bells, one of the boys—we had a few of those as well, orphans like the girls—carried my trunk down to the front, which faced the Rio della Pietà, where the man in the mask waited beside a black gondola. His mask was not the ornate black-and-gold but a simple bone-white, without the large collar, which I supposed posed a hazard on the water.
He took first my trunk and lowered it carefully into the bottom of the gondola, and then took my hand and helped me step aboard. I seated myself on the cushioned seat and turned to look up at the Pietà, where I was sure Sister Anna Maria watched from a window.
One of the younger girls accompanied us, with a silver coin pressed into her palm and instructions to return when I was safely at my mother’s house. The man took up position on the stern with the oar.
“Courage, virtuosa,” he said, and we were off.
We traveled the width of the island in this way, and at the other end we transferred from the gondola to a two-oared boat, operated by a pair of men who stood at the bow. The little girl who had come with us disappeared, fleet-footed and silent into the bustle of the evening streets. It was winter, and the streets were already dark. I sent up a prayer to San Marco for her safe return to the Pietà.
“Where is my mother’s home? Is it not in Venice?”
“No, lady,” the masked man replied, “We go to an island nearby, the entirety of which is her estate. We shall be there before moonrise.”
We took off and rowed out past Murano, towards the out-lying islands. Just as the moon crept over the horizon, we approached a dock, where we met a parade of men carrying torches. I was handed into a carriage with the curtains drawn.
I was alone. I wiped the cold sweat of my palms against my skirts. My trunk sat at my feet. I thought of my violin inside and quelled the familiar longing to feel the strings beneath my fingertips. Soon I would meet my mother.
The coach lurched to a stop and the door swung wide. The man in the mask stood at attention, once again in the dramatic gold brocade. He held out a hand and I took it.
The doors to a grand villa stood wide, and we entered via the main hall. The walls were hung with oils on canvas depicting scenes of ancient Venice—San Marco discovering the spot of his own burial, the founding of the church of Saint Giacomo di Rialto—all in brilliant colors that shone like jewels. A series of tables stood along the walls, dripping with punto in aria lacework and groaning beneath the weight of silver candelabra, brightly lit with expensive beeswax candles and attended by a swarm of page boys who ran from stick to stick.
“My mother is a woman of elegant taste,” I mused aloud as I admired the paintings. My companion did not respond. When I turned, I found him mid-bow.
And there, across the room, was my mother.
Whatever I had expected—a queen perhaps, or a mother superior arraigned all in black—it wasn’t her. Her face was still smooth, though her hair was knotted up beneath a veil in the old fashioned way, and her gown was plain and straight and green.
“Lucia della Pietà, my lady,” the masked man said.
“You are much smaller than I imagined,” she said as she came forward. I lowered my face modestly, but she tucked her fingers beneath my chin and raised it up. “Have you your mirror?”
I held it out, just as I had for the man in the mask. Unlike him, however, she pocketed it. I watched her overdress swallow it up. What need had I of a family heirloom, when my own mother stood before me?
“Bestia,” my mother said. “Leave us.”
The man in the mask obeyed at once, and departed with a brief bow in my direction.
“Lucia della Pietà.” My mother smiled at me, and her smile reminded me of a leopard’s. “Your name ought to have been Caterina de Magrì, if women passed on their family names. But then,” her smile grew wider, “there is no one here to dictate such rules to us.”
“I will use the name you prefer, mother.” Caterina.
“Then we shall wait and see, tesoro mio.” She surveyed me critically, and I drank her in like a woman dying of thirst. “They tell me you are an accomplished musician. Tell me what you play.”
“Violin, mother, and I am a soprano in the chorus.”
“And have you brought your instrument?”
“Yes, mother.”
“Excellent. Practice whenever suits your mood. Beauty fades, but a real talent shouldn’t be wasted.”
I curtseyed, and she kissed my cheek.
“You are home, tesoro mio.”
I was shown to my rooms by a silent page-boy with wheat-colored hair that stuck up in odd directions. Black-and-white tiles alternated beneath our feet as we made our way, like two pawns on a determined march across the board.
My rooms were vast, furnished with a four-poster bed laid with silken sheets, upholstered furniture embroidered with scenes from the creation story, and even a water chamber with a pot that swept the dirty water away, though the bronze tub would require someone to fill it. If these were my rooms, then I cowered to think of the luxury in which my mother lived.
I snuffed out each candle but one, which I brought to my bedside, and climbed beneath the silken sheets. I heard the crinkle of paper under my ear and withdrew a slip of parchment from beneath my pillow. Written on it were three words inked in thick black ink, dark enough to make out by the light of the single candle:
Beware the witch.
#
In the morning, la bestia knocked at my door. His mask was purple and green, with a purple brocade collar and three pointed horns rising from the forehead. A jester’s mask.
I followed him back down the chess-board hall and out onto an open corridor. The wind snatched at the brocade collar over his shoulders as we swept along toward the wing that housed my mother’s rooms. My mother sat at the edge of a small sofa, a modest breakfast laid out before her on a low table. La bestia poured coffee, bowed silently, and left.
My mother picked up her cup. “You have not bathed, tesoro mio.”
“No, mother.”
Her eyes were sharp in the daylight. “You need not fear asking anything of the staff,” she said over her cup. “I take all my servants at death’s door. They are each of them loyal to me.”
All but one, I nearly said, thinking of whoever had left me the note last night. I took my own coffee to hide my face.
“Let us take a walk,” my mother said.
We had sung about green pastoral settings in the Pietà, and I had seen such places depicted in art, but never had I beheld anything other than the Venetian pinks and greys and beiges. We passed an orchard, which despite the season was full of plump fruit that shimmered in the sun like real jewels. Just beyond stood a paddock of horses, which frolicked in the long grass. When I approached the fence, one of the smaller ones came up to me, its black muzzle snuffling. I shied back, but my mother stretched out her arm, and the colt delicately ate a sugar lump from the palm of her hand.
Sister Anna Maria had told us bedtime stories about witches, women who consorted with the devil, the kind of story told in the dark to frighten naughty, gleeful children. Those stories had said nothing about jeweled trees or horses who loved sugar.
We came to a red lacquered bridge that spanned a canal just wide enough for a gondola, had there been any of those on my mother’s island. My mother folded her hands against the railing. “I was seventeen when I discovered I was pregnant,” she began. “I begged a servant to bring me abortifacient from the herbalist, but instead she told my father, who locked me in my rooms. He beat me until I told him the name of my lover, a poor mirror maker’s apprentice from Venice. My father accused him of selling the secrets of mirror making, and he was arrested. I was told later he was executed; I don’t know if that’s true.
“When you were born a girl, I was angry, because it meant that my father would ignore you completely. My mother had you sent to a wet nurse in town. Through it all I was engaged to be married, and my betrothed, having no idea of my illegitimate child, married me once I had recovered. My husband was a very old, very kind man, without any children. We lived in Venice, because he preferred the town to his estate here, and it was there that I heard the figlie del coro at the Pietà for the first time. I knew then that was the place I wanted my daughter raised. She will be an accomplished virtuosa, I told myself. I sent la bestia to take you from the wet nurse with instructions to leave you in the wall, along with the chatelaine mirror.”
My mother did not say that she missed me, or that she had wondered about me.
I swallowed. “You call your manservant la bestia.” The beast.
“A man who commits mortal sins at the behest of a woman,” she said, and she smiled her leopard’s smile. “A woman needs anonymity to exercise power. Better for him, and for me, that he have no name. No one has contested my right to remain on these lands, but the law maintains that a woman cannot inherit from her husband. I have hired genealogists to determine the identity of my late husband’s nearest living male relation. As it happens, he has an unmarried great-grand-nephew, which is a great convenience to us.”
She withdrew my mirror from her pocket, and it spun on its chain, catching the sunlight. She held it higher, and I closed my eyes against the glare. I felt my face blushing furiously, as though someone were holding a hot compress to my skin. And then the sensation was gone, and when I opened my eyes again, my mother was smiling at me, still holding the mirror.
“My own invention,” she said. “And now the world can see that you are beautiful indeed. As my heir, your habits here must be different here than in the convent. Call for a bath tonight, tesoro mio.”
When I had made my way back to my room, I looked in my mirror. The glass had been seamlessly mended.
And my birthmark was gone.
#
While I waited for my bath, I played my violin. Pages hauled jugs of hot water to my rooms and emptied them into the bath, one by one. Around the tub they set up a folding screen, intricate carved latticework of scented wood. The steam poured over the top, curling into the air like incense, like a Vespers’ prayer.
And then la bestia entered the room, silent as the stars that had risen outside my window. He bowed. “Your mother bade me assist you.”
At the Pietà, I had lived life exclusively among women, save the few errand boys we kept and the priests who wandered through. I drew myself up to my full height. “I do not require assistance.”
“Very well.” He folded the towel and arranged it over the hot pan, then opened the satchel he had brought with him and withdrew a square of bianco di Venezia and a sea sponge. These he bent to place on a low stool near the bath, but he stopped as he caught sight of me. “Your face,” he exhaled.
I brought a hand to the place were the birthmark had been. I ought to have been grateful, that the single impediment to my beauty had been removed. But each time I looked in my mirror, it was like staring at a stranger. “My mother wants me to marry. To preserve the estate.”
“Do you wish to marry?”
I shrugged, a habit of which Sister Anna Maria had never managed to disabuse me. “Most girls of the Pietà live out their lives there.”
“Do none ever leave?”
“A few make advantageous matches.” Though we had sung of grand romances, I had never longed for such things. What romance could there be between an orphan girl and a rich man who paid for attention? “I liked it there. I liked playing the violin. I do not know if my husband will allow me to continue.”
“He would be a fool.”
“Perhaps he is.”
“Your mother is a great patroness of the arts,” he said. “I doubt she would suffer a son-in-law so lacking.”
The assurance with which he spoke moved me. “You trust her deeply.”
“I owe her my life.”
His voice contained neither invitation nor encouragement. But like Pandora, I couldn’t help prying. “In what way?”
“I stood on the gallows in St. Mark’s square, condemned for theft, the rope already around my neck. I could see the clock tower, which showed the hour of my death at hand.”
“And then?” My voice was no more substantial than the steam rising into the air.
“I do not remember. I must have fainted. My first memory after waking is of your mother’s face. She fed me, clothed me, and brought me to her townhouse in Venice. I was thirteen.”
I take in all my servants at death’s door. My mother plundered prisons, seeking out those sentenced to death as her servants.
He left a little bottle of perfumed oil, which he explained could be used to work the tangles from my hair. Then he bowed and was gone again, leaving a trail of roses in his wake.
#
No one stopped me as I slipped down the corridor and out the front entrance. My hair was loose and uncovered, and the breeze took it up as I walked. I crossed the red lacquered bridge and made my way down the path that led to the horses’ paddock. The young one came right up to me when she saw my lantern light, and this time I held out my hand, prepared with a sugar lump. I laughed at the feel of her velvet nose, and her ears flew forward at the sound.
After a second sugar lump, I withdrew the chatelaine mirror and let it spin, flashing the lantern flame like a lighthouse. The colt whickered softly as the mirror magicked white streaks across her golden cheeks. A grown horse joined us, who I assumed was her mother. She inspected her colt’s marked cheeks with bemusement and, I thought, critique. I reached out to stroke her muzzle, and a cold hand clamped around my mouth.
“Scream, and I shall slit your throat.”
I felt the chill of a knife at my neck, and I froze obediently. The lantern had fallen from my hand and rolled away, but I had not let go of my mirror, the chain twisted through my fingers.
“Look,” the speaker panted. He twisted me around so that I could see that path that led down to the dock. A pair of lanterns were making their way down. “The witch goes.”
“You left the note.”
“Yes. And you ought to have left when I warned you.”
“What do you want?”
“To be free of the witch. We’ll take a rowboat to Venice. I will escort you down to the pier, and you will call off the beast when he comes.”
“What makes you think he’ll listen to me?”
He laughed, a soft, manic sound, and twisted his grip so that the point of the knife now pricked between my shoulder blades. “Walk.”
But we had only taken a step when the horses let out a great scream, and my would-be kidnapper was hurled aside. There was a brief tussle, and then la bestia had the man pinned, a knee on his chest and a knife at his throat. I recognized him as the page who had first escorted me within the Villa, the one with the wheat-colored hair.
I scrambled for the fallen lantern. “My mother is gone,” I said to la bestia.
“I know it.” He held the knife steady at the page’s neck.
“Where?”
“She is a witch,” the page spat at me from the ground. “She goes to consort with the devil under cover of darkness and make her evil bargains. Or do you not know what la bestia is?”
He flinched as I raised the lantern. It occurred to me that he thought I might be a witch, too, and that perhaps I ought not to disabuse him of the notion.
“Explain.”
“She sold her soul to the devil for the power to reanimate the dead. She bought me from the gallows, but she hasn’t taken my soul yet! I’ll die before.”
La bestia pressed his knee into the boy’s chest. “Very well,” he said, and raised the knife.
“No!” I cried.
La bestia looked at me. “You show mercy, my lady. I fear your mother will not.”
His face, always unreadable, blended with the shadows. And yet I knew he would do as I said. I stepped forward, and held out the mirror and the lantern.
The boy yelled his protest, and la bestia clamped a hand over his mouth to silence him. Beneath the broad hand, the boy’s flesh stretched and contorted as the bones of the cheek flared sharply outward, and the brow and nasal bones puckered and hardened. Then la bestia released him, and I caught sight of the ugly, angled planes of his face-that-was-not-a-face, bone-white and stern in the lantern light.
The boy groaned and rolled onto all fours like an animal, and la bestia hauled him to his feet. “Go. Run. And remember to whom you owe your pathetic life.”
“A mask…” I whispered after him as he scampered off, swallowed up by darkness. “I meant to give him a mask.”
The knife at la bestia’s side glinted in the moonlight. “You may well have saved his life,” he said, and his voice was a hummed psalm in the night. “His own bitterness was reflected back on him tenfold.”
I wrapped my arms around myself. “Where does my mother go at night?”
“To Venice, to meet with her solicitors and associates.”
“But why does she go by night?”
“At night, with a mask, she can move with a man’s freedom.”
“Or the page was right,” I said, and my voice cracked. “And she consorts with the devil.”
He sighed. His mask tonight was all-black, the better to stalk about in the darkness, I supposed, and the collar was a black velveteen. “I see you are determined to be prejudiced against her.”
“She abandoned me.”
“She left you in the greatest of possible care.”
“Because she had aspirations of my being a great musician!” I nearly stomped my foot. “I am not a virtuosa, I am merely the one they trotted out to meet with the patrons. I am a passable musician at best, previously with no future and now condemned to live my mother’s life over.”
“What do you want?”
In the darkness, I could not see even the gleam of his eyes, and I was jealous, because he still had a mask and I no longer did. “Not to be treated like something to be bought and sold.”
“But what do you want, for you, yourself?” His voice took on a new, sharper tone. He might almost have been scolding me. “You have been given the opportunity to be a great musician, and now a great lady with much power, and both you disown.”
“I want nothing that causes men to fear me so.” I indicated the direction the page had fled. My voice had risen, and I discovered that I was angry, but I wasn’t angry at la bestia, or even at my mother.
My words dissipated. La bestia watched between us, as though he could watch them fall to the ground like so much dust. “There are worse things in the world than being feared, my lady.”
“Take me back to my rooms now, please.”
He nodded unhappily and escorted me back to the Villa, where he left me at the entrance to my rooms with a bow and a small sachet of herbs. “A pinch for sleep, virtuosa.”
It wasn’t until later, after I had dropped the recommended pinch onto my tongue and crawled into bed, after the dread that clenched around my heart began to loosen and sleep began its steady march, that I thought again about what the page had said:
Don’t you know what la bestia is?
#
I tossed in my sleep. My mother’s face and la bestia’s mask floated in and out of my consciousness like reflections in a mirror. At midnight I woke slick with sweat and threw off the silk sheets. I thought of la bestia asking in the darkness, What do you want?
At that moment, what I wanted more than anything was my violin. I unwrapped my instrument and tucked it lovingly under my chin. As I drew the bow over the strings, the sound was dissonant in the dark: it had gone out of tune. I began to fuss with the pegs, but my fingers were too hasty, and the E string snapped.
I lay the violin down on my knees and wept.
#
My mother sent a dress of black velvet to my rooms. With the dress came a supper of bread and hearty stew, and the instructions to eat well. Tonight I would learn the identity of my husband.
Each minute passed in excruciating agony. I was a woman on the gallows of St. Mark’s, powerless to do anything but watch the clock tick nearer the hour of my doom. At last, la bestia came to retrieve me. He wore the same dramatic black-and-gold bauta he had worn when we first met.
At the jeweled orchard, la bestia took handfuls of fruit and dropped them in a satchel, where they clinked musically. The horses whickered in their sleep as we slipped past their paddock and down to the docks, where we met my mother and boarded the boat that came in from the city.
At the port in Venice, la bestia hired a gondolier, who took us through the city canals. Above our heads, people spilled into the streets and high bridges. Their voices were merry, and they waved their arms as they walked, teetering dangerously over the water. And every one of them was masked: half masks, full masks, masks with jewels and masks with paint, masks that trailed long ribbons and masks that sported full cloaks to protect the wearer from the chill of the February night.
La bestia answered my unspoken question. “It is Carnevale, my lady.”
It was nearly midnight, and yet music still rose over the streets, redolent and lush. We passed a trio of masked musicians, the violinist in a modest half-mask that allowed him to hold his instrument unobstructed. My fingers itched.
At a small dock we were met by a man in a mask topped with peacock feathers that towered over him like an absurd crown. La bestia put an arm around his shoulders and leaned in to whisper something in his ear. My mother slipped a simple black half-mask over my face and hers.
The peacock man escorted us through the streets, and we moved in anonymity. We came to a large square of townhouses, from which people crowded precariously onto balconies on the upper stories, sloshing wine and other liquors down onto the streets below. A blown eggshell caught my shoulder and splattered my dress with some kind of perfume. I lifted my sleeve to my nose and inhaled. Rose water.
At the entrance to a dark house, we stopped. No revelers poured from the balconies here. The peacock man presented a key with a flourish and opened the door.
“Thank you, signore,” my mother said, and we left the men on the other side of the door.
A winding staircase led to an upper floor of connected bedrooms, the grandest of which looked out over the square. My mother pulled a silk cord, and a ladder descended from the ceiling, which she began to climb. After a moment, I followed.
When I had hauled myself through the trap door, I saw that we were in an attic room outfitted with old cots and dusty highboys laden with unidentifiable silver instruments.
“What is this place?”
“My late husband’s townhouse,” she said. “Which will be inherited by your future husband; which is to say, your house.”
I averted my eyes from the strange cabinetry. “I do not wish to marry.”
“I do not control the law in Venice, child. All of this—the Villa I maintain, the orchards I created, all of my work—matters not one wit should it be contested in the courts.”
“And so you will seek out your enemy and give it to him?”
“I shall take our enemy into our fold, and make him my son.” The corners of her mouth softened. “You need not fear a husband, child, for yours is a loyal man.”
“What have you heard of him?”
“A good man, of utmost faithfulness. I have known him a long time. Since he was a boy, in fact.”
“You know him?”
“I do. And so do you—his name is Niccolò D’Auria, my husband’s second cousin from his father’s family. You know him as la bestia.”
A silence fell between us like the depths of a cavern, like the heights of a cathedral. The smell of roses was overwhelming. “How can you be so sure he will obey you? Once you tell him that he is your heir, why should he marry me?”
“I have no intention of telling him anything. He will accept your betrothal gratefully, happy to become a son to the patroness who saved his life.” She smiled. “My child, his loyalty is assured. Did he not already save you once?”
“Yes—from your servant who would have murdered me, for fear of you.”
“You were in no danger. I asked la bestia to keep an eye on him.”
It was an orchestration. And with that realization, the entire picture became clear, and I knew what my mother had done. “You knew Niccolò was your husband’s heir,” I said. “So you cried thief and sent him to the gallows, just like your father did to mine.” Her eyes met my own, and she didn’t deny it. “What did you accuse him of stealing?”
“The chatelaine mirror was found on his person, and he was condemned for crimes against Venice.” She turned away, and her mask melded with the darkness. “It was my own invention, the mirror. A clever tool to disguise a man, that he might slip by unnoticed. Exactly the sort of thing a thief might covet.”
“And—at the gallows.” The smell of roses was overwhelming. I couldn’t breathe. “They cut him down—”
“I requested his body for burial on my own lands. An act of mercy by a Christian woman.”
“Then you are a witch.”
“My late husband was a nobleman. He didn’t have a trade; he served Venice. But he had a scientific interest in the human body. He was fascinated by the writings of da Vinci, Fallopio, Santorio. He had an arrangement with the executioner, whom he paid for the bodies of the condemned. He was going to write his own medical treatise, but his hands shook and he could no longer do the delicate work required. He trained me to be his assistant. I found I—enjoyed it. I was good at it.” Her eyes shone with a gleam in the dark. “In time, we made advances that my husband could not have dreamt of alone. We were people of science. There was nothing of the occult about it.”
My mother cradled my face with her hand, and beneath her gentle touch, my skin began to burn. “People think of death as a single thing, one event. But life is but a function of many processes. Some of which can be revived.”
“Could you not simply have asked for mercy for the child you had accused?”
She hesitated then, and it was only a slight pull of the chin, not so much doubt as distaste, that gave her away. “It was necessary to ensure his loyalty that he see the face of death.”
My cheek burned. “You used him.”
“I provided him with a better life. I did the best I could, as a woman with no power.”
“You murdered him to create the perfect servant! Surely there was an honorable way to live life as a woman.”
The pain in my face flared all at once, as though it would combust. My mother withdrew her hand in disgust, and I nearly stumbled. “How long have you been a woman in Venice? You have lived in a false world of women, cloistered behind the walls of the Pietà. I have lived in the world of men. Yes, Niccolò died, and he shall be reborn as my son, the husband of my beloved daughter. I will not regret the choices I have made.”
“Nor will I regret mine.” My face no longer burned, and my lips felt cold.
My mother looked at me a long moment from behind the mask. “Leave, then,” she said. “But, tesoro mio, I will await your obedient return.”
#
I flew from the house like a madwoman. Even so, on the streets of Venice, mid-Carnevale, I moved in relative obscurity. People barely parted for me as I threw myself in a direction that my feet told me was away.
I shoved past drunken revelers and more musical triads. On a narrow pedestrian bridge I knocked into someone. Cold wine spilled down my back, soaking my bodice and chasing away the last of the scent of roses. I followed the little canal until I came to a dark alley, too narrow to pass two-abreast. There was a couple taking shelter here, a pair of baute pressed tightly against one another. They paid me no mind. I stopped to catch my breath, my forehead against the cold stone.
From behind me, I heard the couple leaving, going off to join the rest of the revelers. A pair who knew where they belonged, even if they had been caught up in the transgression of the moment. And I? Where did I belong?
I was the daughter of a witch, a violinist without an instrument. I was an instrument, a girl with a beautiful face. A mask.
I pulled out my mirror. The moonlight above me danced on the glass, and when it stilled I saw: a girl with a birthmark designed to cradle a violin.
A hand caught my sleeve, and I whirled:
Niccolò.
“Where are you going, virtuosa?”
I thought of pleading, but my mouth was dry, my tongue heavy with dread.
“Come with me.” He released my sleeve and stepped back out into the thronging streets.
The crowds parted easily for him, his tricorn hat the tallest in a sea of hundreds. I supposed he must have been given instructions to lead me back to my mother, but something told me that he would not betray my wishes. Whatever my mother thought she controlled, Niccolò had never made me do a thing I didn’t want to do.
We twisted and turned through the streets. I was born in Venice, but the night and my escape had turned me all around, and Niccolò kept to the least-traveled paths. It wasn’t until he pulled us out of a narrow alley that I realized we were nearly upon the Rialto. He led me down a set of dark steps near the edge of the Canal Grande. The light from the crowded bridge poured over us such that we were in shadow up against the stone wall. Had we been seen at all, we would have just seemed two more masked revelers, perhaps lovers engaging in one last tryst before the next morning’s ashes and confessions.
Niccolò looked down at me. “Your mother will be looking for you.”
I inhaled bravery. “I know.”
His eyes caught the light of passing boat lanterns and glowed like a cat’s. I saw a flicker of uncertainty there, the familiar way his gaze hesitated over the left side of my face. “Where will you go?”
“Home.”
“The Villa is your home. You will inherit, someday.”
“Perhaps.” Or perhaps my mother would be so angry with me that she would leave the estate to Niccolò outright after all. “Perhaps then I will return.”
“And now?”
“I know where I belong.”
He lifted his face and looked at the brightly lit bridge. “The fastest way is over the Rialto. You could join up with a musical ensemble, slip through unobserved.”
I shook my head. “I left my violin on the island.” Another thing I would miss.
He reached beneath his cloak and pulled out the satchel that had held the jeweled fruit. He loosened the strings, and in his hands was a violin.
I took it with shaking fingers. The dark wood gleamed beneath the light of the bridge above. The maker’s mark was evident inside the drum, and there was a card affixed to the neck with the street address of a shop in Venice. This was a fine instrument, far finer than anything I had before held in my hands.
“Where did this come from?”
“Imported,” he said. “From Cremona. There is a shop here in Venice that specializes.”
“But why?”
“Yours was broken.”
“It was only a snapped string.” I laughed shakily, aware of the tears that slipped past my mask. “A new string is far less dear than a new instrument.”
He was quiet a moment. “I thought,” he said finally, “that it might encourage you to play.”
My fingers tightened on the violin. “Come with me. The Pietà—can always use more hands.” In fact, I had no idea what the sisters would make of Niccolò, but I had never seen them turn away a man in need.
“Lucia—”
“I know what my mother did,” I said abruptly. I pulled the chatelaine mirror from my pocket and held it up.
He contemplated it, the instrument of both our fates, as it swung on its chain. “She did what she had to do. For you.”
“Shall I throw it into the river?”
“Keep it. Pawn it if you need to pay your way—wherever your way may take you. And if you ever need—” He cut himself off and indicated the violin with his chin. “The shop in Venice will know how to get a message to the Villa. Or to me.”
“I will see you again,” I said, and hoped that it was a promise I could keep. “Stay well, my friend.”
I left him standing in the shadows. All my life safety had lain in shadows, behind screens and masks and walls and the patronage of the powerful. As I stepped into the bright light of the Rialto, I took up my violin brazenly, and in full view. I crossed with my fellow masked musicians, those of us who tonight were the loudest and the most hidden of all.
Em Liu (she/her) is a queer writer based in Northern Virginia and a full member of SFWA. Her fiction has previously appeared in The Drabblecast, Uncharted, Fireside, and others.