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Chapter 1
Chapter One: Verdigris and Quicklime
The shop smelled of vinegar and fire. Livia turned the copper plates slowly over the basin until the green bloom formed and fattened like moss over stone. Verdigris. She lifted it with a spatula, grain by grain, into waiting shells. Her hands were stained in a way that would never entirely wash out, no matter how hard she scoured with lemon and salt.
“You are too careful,” her father said, though pride softened his reproach. Matteo’s cough came like a bellows. “A painter is in want of green, not philosophy.”
“A painter wants consistency,” Livia said. “If it corrodes too much, it will devour the plaster.”
“Painters want miracles that don’t cost,” he muttered. He reached beneath the counter and laid out account tablets, soot-black tallies that never came right. Debt had a way of multiplying like mold in damp seasons.
The bell at the door trembled. A man in a dark velvet cap entered without removing his gloves. He looked like winter sunlight: sharp but with no warmth. He placed a purse on the counter, too heavy for paint.
“A commission,” he said. His ring bore an intaglio of a rose with its thorns cunningly carved to catch the light. “A certain master requires a luminous blue for heaven—powder fine and obedient. And a green that will not turn black when the years grow old.”
“Ultramarine is dearer than forgiveness,” Matteo said, catching the purse anyway.
The visitor’s gaze slid to Livia, to the verdigris glistening like a secret. “Florence expects her heavens,” he said. “Deliver by Sunday. And send your girl to Master Guaspare’s bottega with the pigments. I am told she has steady hands.”
He touched the ring against the counter, sealing nothing and everything, and left before the bell had finished ringing.
Livia stared at the impression the ring had left in pine resin. She did not much like the thought of a stranger’s expectation pressed into the grain of her day.
