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PROLOGUE

VENICE, WINTER 1817

Bianca knew that her arrival in this city out on the lagoon was the culmination of her journey across Europe. What she made of being here must be entirely up to her: no excuses, no second chances. As she approached by boat that chilly February afternoon and saw the famous towers, domes and cupolas appearing for the first time like a fever dream through the mist, she was struck speechless by the sight; a rare event. Was she anywhere near good enough as an artist to capture any part of this splendour? Well, she would soon find out.

One of her most precious possessions, worn around her neck on a ribbon just now to keep it safe, pressed close between her chemise and her bodice, was a miniature by Rosalba Carriera – a tiny, luminous portrait of the artist’s beloved sister. Bianca had bought it in London, but now it was coming home. Most female painters, even now, were trained by their fathers or other male relatives; Carriera was not. She’d chosen the life of an artist for herself with steely resolve, when it was far from being the obvious or the easy path – or so her young admirer liked to believe. The Venetian woman had never married, which must hold some significance. If she could succeed and thrive, a hundred years or more ago, so too could Bianca. Surely.

Miss Constantine had been alone since she’d left Rome, apart from the couriers, coachmen and maidservants she had hired from time to time to accompany her on her travels and give her an air of respectability. She had spent some time in Sienna, Florence, Ravenna, Padua, Verona, looking, sketching, painting furiously, but Venice had always been her ultimate goal, and now that she was here she would pay off the last of these hired companions and set herself free.

She had the name and direction of a woman, Signora Trevisan, who took in lodgers of an artistic bent, and was heading to her house now with the porters who carried her modest luggage, having arranged her stay there by correspondence from a distance. It was a solid recommendation from kind friends in Rome – someone who would accept her money and not enquire too closely into her personal circumstances. And she had ample letters of credit to draw on here, though importantly not under the name of Bianca Constantine; she could pay for all she needed and answer to no one for what she spent – or anything else she did, for that matter.

It was intoxicating, and a little frightening, the sheer liberty of it. Women, least of all young, single women, didn’t live like this; well, just for a space, she would, and consequences be damned. Nobody here knew her. Nobody cared a button what she did. And she need worry herself about nobody’s approval or disapproval anyway. She had a family, God knows – a large, noisy, opinionated family – but they were all of them far, far away. Even her mother.

There was so much art and beauty here, and she knew she had so much to learn from it. Not just art in churches and galleries and people’s homes, not just works by Carriera that she longed to see, but extraordinary sights everywhere she looked, along the canals and in the busy squares. The season was Lent now, and it would soon be Carnival: a time of licence, which exactly suited her mood. She’d just arrived, and she was already intoxicated by the mystery of the place; the sudden vistas opening up as the fog cleared for a tantalising second – a flash of pale yellow winter sunlight, a glimpse of some extraordinary building gleaming white across the water – then the mist swirled in again, thickening, and it was gone as if it had never been. Perhaps such sights weren’t real but some trick of the eyes or the mind – just now, she wasn’t sure it mattered. It fired her imagination, and that was what counted.

There were footsteps in the gloom as she walked, and intriguing cloaked figures vanishing around corners on unguessed-at errands. Perhaps she was one of those intriguing figures herself – it was all a question of perspective, after all. Danger lurked here, but also possibilities that went well beyond painting.

Miss Constantine was aware that she had seen a great deal already, and been lucky enough to travel further than most girls her age, but still her own store of experience, actual experience of living, remained pitifully small. A few kisses in the moonlight in Rome, a boy’s hands shyly, sweetly exploring as far as she would let him, her own hands and mouth tentative and uncertain on his body. What was that to show for almost one and twenty years of life? Not nearly enough.

So many possibilities here, and nothing but time and freedom to explore them. And if she made mistakes, as she expected she would, they would be hers alone.

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LONDON, SPRING 1818 – FIFTEEN MONTHS LATER

Bianca opened her folding easel and set it firmly in position, frowning as she considered how the hazy summer light fell through the trees on the other side of the lawn. She was standing in a private garden square with a bank of bushes just behind her; she hoped that this out-of-the-way corner she’d chosen to work in would mean that she’d be left undisturbed, and wouldn’t interfere with anyone else’s activities either. Nobody could approach her unseen, unless they chose to crawl in a stealthy fashion through the foliage at her back, in which case she’d surely hear them. Later on, when she was fully absorbed in her work, military bands and cavalry troops could pass by without her noticing, as long as they didn’t permanently block her view, but she was not in that precious state of fugue just now.

The houses here, including her sister’s home, were large and impressive, some of London’s finest, but most of them didn’t have their own gardens; instead, they shared this one, and the inhabitants – the rich ones, at least, the lords and ladies – had keys, so that they could use the green space for relaxation and taking the air. Children played here, too, all kinds of lively games, and so it was not an entirely peaceful haven. But this was London, after all, and even here the rumble of carriage wheels, the cries of hawkers, and all the unceasing noise and bustle of the streets were a constant backdrop to daily life.

She didn’t mind any of that, being accustomed to dwelling in cities. If she’d wanted peace, she’d have stayed in Suffolk, in the quiet old house by the sea that she owned with her sisters Beatrice and Cecilia. Or she could have visited Viola’s estate on the wild coast of Yorkshire, which was remote enough for anybody, or Allegra’s in Kent, which had its own subtle beauty. Miss Constantine was well provided with sisters, and she also had choices, lots of them. But she’d chosen to be here, for now. She was too restless for the countryside. There was no peace to be found in the remotest location, she had learned, if you brought your own disturbance with you. Though perhaps disturbance was too strong a word. She was bound to be unsettled, in the circumstances.

Miss Bianca Constantine, who was now two and twenty, had been out of England for the best part of three years, and coming back could only be an adjustment for her. She’d spent much of the latter part of her time abroad alone, except for the companions she’d paid to keep her safe when she was travelling. They hadn’t known her intimately, though, and they’d been temporary employees, and therefore set at a distance, which had had its advantages and disadvantages.

But now she was staying with Sabrina, her oldest sister and the one she knew least, in a house full of people and a city crammed with relatives, picking up the many threads of her life here again. This was her family in England: five sisters, four brothers-in-law, Beatrice’s female companion, and more than a dozen nephews and nieces, from boys almost grown down to tiny infants. They were all strong personalities, even the smallest ones, and expressed their views openly, without fear of censure. She’d occasionally missed this – even missed the raised voices, the unending Constantine family arguments – but it would take some time, she thought, to get used to it all again, to having her choices questioned by people she cared about who felt entitled to do so.

But nobody debated her right to be an artist – a proper artist, not a mere ladylike dabbler. This made her situation highly unusual, she knew, for a woman of any rank. Her gentle father was long dead, and wouldn’t have tried to stop her anyway; her mother, far more combative, was now residing permanently in Italy and didn’t much care what she did as long as she preserved her financial independence. Two of her brothers-in-law were trustees for her substantial fortune, inherited from an elderly aunt, but they weren’t the sort of men who’d dream of exerting any sort of authority over her – neither her spending nor her behaviour was judged or regulated by them. It was true, there were cousins on her father’s side who probably disapproved thoroughly of the somewhat conspicuous Constantine sisters, but she never saw them and they had no power over her. She had as much freedom as a young lady in this year of 1818 could possibly have. But she was alone now, and appeared likely to remain so.

And yet her sisters did not press marriage upon her. Since her return to England, not one of them had let slip a single word to make her believe that they wished she would look about her for a husband now. They did not introduce her to eligible gentlemen, smiling hopefully as they did so. They did not sigh in a significant manner, when she held and kissed one of their babies, brushing their sweet downy heads against her cheek, or when she played riotous games with the bigger children, all of whom idolised her. Nobody had said, ‘Oh, Bianca, it does seem a pity that…’ and then checked herself and apologised. But she could feel them thinking it. Sisters, it seemed, could read each other’s minds on occasion. Life would be much easier if they could not.

It wasn’t that any of them believed a woman needed a ring on her finger or a man in her bed to make her life whole. Far from it. Viola had been a widow with young sons for some years before her second marriage, and nobody had spoken a word of criticism; on the contrary, they’d asked her if she was quite sure she wanted to marry again and give up her freedom for an uncertain chance of happiness. And Beatrice lived with a woman who was most definitely much more than a friend; nobody in the family had ever thought to question that, as long as she was content.

It was the deliberately chosen solitude they could not understand. The self-sufficiency. They all of them lived in a constant state of chaos, surrounded by crowds of others, in houses that were only quiet, briefly, when everyone was asleep. Well, perhaps Bea’s life was not quite like that, but at any rate, she was not alone, and that was what mattered. Constantines, Bianca could hear them all thinking, were simply not made for constant solitude. She knew – because they’d said so, in tones not of criticism but of honest wonder – that none of them would have enjoyed travelling as she had: quitting a beautiful city on a whim and journeying to another, making a temporary home there for a week or a month or longer, then moving on again. Seeking out artists to learn from, and art to feed her soul and spark her invention. Improving her Italian, and wrestling with new languages too.

And, of course – though her sisters did not know this, and she prayed they never would – taking a lover in Venice and then leaving him, for no particular reason other than that she felt strongly that she must.

Perhaps her sisters’ desire to be deeply and securely rooted in the world was understandable, and she was the odd one out. They’d had a family home once, but lost it when their father died and the entail passed it and most of its contents to their cousin. They’d been poorly situated, when they were young, and Viola in particular had been obliged to make hard choices, to marry a man who hadn’t loved her or treated her well. She had been deeply miserable, though she was a duchess living in one of England’s grandest country houses with every worldly advantage. So home was a loaded word for all of them, and not something they took for granted. Home wasn’t necessarily simply a place, they knew that, but for all of them it did mean people. They argued, the Constantines, but they needed each other deeply, and Bianca knew she’d hurt and puzzled them by not seeming to feel the same, by putting herself out of proper contact for so long. Because of course one could write letters, send every piece of news, however slight – they all did, endlessly – but it was not the same as being in the same country, in the same city. Not when you’d shared a room and daily confidences, as she had with Cecilia and Bea, for so long.

Bianca had seized the opportunity that the sudden acquisition of a fortune three years ago had given her, and seized it with both hands. But she’d done it cunningly. In the summer of 1815, after Waterloo, she’d headed for the Continent with her mother and her formidable old governess, Miss Euphemia Macintyre. This had been a perfectly ordinary, respectable expedition, at the start; like thousands of other British travellers, they had diligently visited sites of interest, and stood in sombre silence on the battlefields of the late wars, contemplating the destruction Bonaparte’s ambition had wrought. Perhaps the expedition had been slightly unusual in the absence of male relatives – but after all, Miss Constantine had no father or brothers to call on, and her brothers-in-law all had business, political affairs or estates to keep them at home.

Her mama had been in ignorance of her long-term plans at that point, but Euphemia, her co-conspirator, had not. She supported any bids for freedom and self-expression made by the young women who had been her pupils. She was a highly educated woman of radical sympathies, and above all she had a deep passion for art and artists, which by slow degrees she had managed to instil in Bianca. As a flighty sixteen- and seventeen-year-old, Miss Constantine had been too impatient to learn from what she characterised as a great quantity of dull brown paintings by dull dead people; by nineteen, she was beginning to change her views. Once she had been frustrated by her inability to produce on paper and canvas the effects she wanted, and prone to give up; but later she began to realise that only practice, observation and hard work could help her improve. While travelling, Miss Macintyre did not neglect to say that she had frequently told her so, but Bianca only smiled a little wryly at the time she’d lost and said that she must be a late bloomer, and her time was now.

Fortunately, looking at art and copying it was a perfectly respectable pastime for lady tourists. Sketchpad in hand, she’d passed sedately with the two older ladies through Belgium, France, Germany, and Switzerland. They’d crossed the mighty Alps together, carried by porters and bundled up in so many layers they could barely move – that was a hair-raising adventure she would not soon forget – and entered the Italian peninsula. There she had parted from her mother in Piacenza, the city of Leontina’s birth, but that made no matter, because she still had a respectable chaperon, the redoubtable and well-travelled Miss Macintyre, who accompanied her to Genoa, and thence direct to Naples by sea.

From there they made their way overland to Rome, where Miss Constantine had some useful lessons in technique from an impoverished old painter, and learned some other things too in a less conventional manner. Euphemia had remained there with old friends, and Bianca, alone at last as she’d intended all along, had gone boldly on without her to Tuscany and Venice, drinking in everything she saw, paying for help when she needed it. She’d had further adventures, just as she’d hoped, but hadn’t stayed; her restless, enquiring spirit had driven her further onwards.

And now she was back in England at last, asking herself: what did she really want? Could she find a way to live here – and if so, where? – or should she take up her travels again, go further east, see more, risk more, and accept that occasional loneliness and uncertainty were a price that she must be prepared to pay for this rare freedom?

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