The Ruby Ring (17 page)

“
Grazie,
but no,” he said engagingly as the girl sidled up close beside him, smelling only faintly of musk and sweat. In response, Raphael took her hand and kissed the soft, warm palm sensually. “Not that I am not tempted, mind you. You are a beautiful girl.”

“But there is a problem?”

He laughed in surprise. “With me? No. Nothing like that. It is rather that I am too, shall we say, distracted of late.”

She sank into his lap then with a surprisingly seductive smile, and his assistants around him let out a collective bawdy peal of laughter. Raphael could feel her fingers snaking up along his thigh before he had time to stop it. “If that is all it is, Signor Raphael, I know that I can do whatever—”

Raphael pressed her hand away more forcefully. “There is a woman, you see,” he whispered to her.

“We are very discreet. She need not know.”

“But
I
would know. And for some ungodly reason, known not even to me at the moment, that seems to matter.”

“She is a fortunate girl.”

“Would that
she
realized it,” he quipped with a dramatic little sigh.

“If she does not realize it, then perhaps she does not deserve you,
signore.
”

“This particular girl deserves the moon and stars,” Raphael smiled, seeing Margherita’s face come alive again in his mind as vividly as if he had only just left her. “But even she does not realize
that.
”

“Modesty is that attractive, is it?” she asked with a small, bitten-back smile.

“I am surprised to find it extraordinarily so,” he replied, standing again to break the connection that, were he to allow it even a moment more, might well weaken his curious new resolve.

As the girl finally left him and moved back into the crowd of guests and ladies, Raphael saw the figure of a tall, slim man with intense black eyes and waves of red-gold hair emerge and approach. He had been a friend once when they worked side by side at the villa, but no longer. Sebastiano Luciani was drunk. He swayed toward Raphael from the arms of another girl who clearly recognized trouble in the impending encounter. Wisely, she turned and disappeared with the blue-eyed girl behind a heavy green velvet curtain.

“Well, if it is not the great
mastro
himself come into our humble midst!”

Raphael let a sigh at the predictably envious tone and turned to face him. “Indeed it is I, Sebastiano, and
you,
it seems, are quite drunk.”

“Am I not owed a bit of revelry as reward for my work, Raffaello?” He spoke the name with disdain, the nostrils of his long nose flaring. “Or is that saved only for you who so greedily take up all of the important commissions in Rome?”

Beside Raphael, Penni laughed most raucously, glancing protectively at the other assistants. “Spoken like one whose own art is sorely lacking in design and grace!”

“I accept them because they are offered,” Raphael said smoothly. “And because I can complete them. Which is not the case for all artists once offered work here in the city of the Holy Father.”

“You would be well advised to watch your back, Raffaello. I am coming for you.”

He arched a brow. “Are you threatening me?”

“Only your standing as the single most favored artist in Rome!”

“
Buona fortuna
to you then,” said Raphael with practiced cool.

“Oh, I have more than fortune on my side. What I
have
is Michelangelo Buonarroti’s friendship and support, which, very soon, shall be the death knell for you!”

So that was it. That was what Michelangelo had meant those weeks ago when they had encountered one another at the Vatican Palace. Sebastiano had never forgiven Raphael for the impression he had made on Agostino Chigi after each had done a wall panel in the banker’s opulent villa. The fact that Raphael alone had been given further Chigi commissions, when Chigi had personally brought Sebastiano to Rome, was a powerful source of resentment that a fading Michelangelo intended to use to the fullest.

But tonight he was in no mood to be taunted by an envious competitor who found his courage at the bottom of a bottle. Raphael cast a last appraising glance at Sebastiano, who continued to sway before him. Seeing no impending challenge there, Raphael stood, turned, and began to stride toward the curtains behind which the two girls had gone.

But that had been a miscalculation on his part.

Not just hours, but a full day of drinking had fueled Sebastiano’s rage to an incendiary pitch. Seeing Raphael turn his back to him, Sebastiano picked up a tufted footstool and swung it. The force of the blow, which hit him square across the back, sent Raphael to his knees. Before he could right himself, Sebastiano kicked him sharply in the ribs. Someone across the room screamed as Giulio, Penni, and da Udine rushed forward, diving into the fray. Seizing on the pandemonium, and the tangle of men beginning to brawl, Sebastiano lunged at him again. Raphael countered with a powerful fist. Sebastiano staggered back from the blow, surprise lighting his face amid a tangle of defensive arms and fists from Raphael’s assistants.

“Stop!” Raphael called out to his men, a firm hand raised up as they prepared to pummel Sebastiano. “No good can come of this!”

“Attacking a man from behind is a great show of cowardice!” Penni boldly declared. He and a swiftly growing contingent of men were blocking Sebastiano from Raphael. “And he deserves a coward’s punishment,
mastro!
”

“Ah, the great courtier, better than the rest of us!” Sebastiano jeered, breathing heavily.

“A self-perception of greatness is not a courtly attribute, Sebastiano,” Giovanni da Udine countered on Raphael’s behalf. “Surely Michelangelo has taught you that much, if not how to paint!”

Raphael rubbed his aching hand. His fingers had begun very swiftly to swell.

“Does the great
mastro
have an independent thought, one well could wonder,” Sebastiano taunted, glancing around for a show of support in his envy.

“Looking at you, I think a great many of my own thoughts,” Raphael said, masking the pain in his hand with a smoothly delivered sleight. “None of which are worth more than a moment’s consideration.”

“You have dishonored the greatest
mastro,
Signor Michelangelo Buonarroti, and I shall not allow it!” he called out baitingly as Raphael turned from him once again and was braced on both sides by his concerned assistants, another of whom had Sebastiano by the scruff of the neck.

“If Michelangelo is angry with me, I am certain he can fight his own battles!” Raphael called out.

“I am honored to do his bidding when he is not in Rome, Sanzio!”

“What you cannot do for yourself, you must champion in another!” Penni baited him, drunk enough and clearly itching to begin brawling again.

“Insult me at your own risk, Gianfrancesco! For I do swear, it is I who shall have the final laugh!”

“Is it Raphael’s fault that your work is entirely lacking in design, color, and style?” he taunted. “A thing not even so great an artist as Michelangelo can teach you!”

“He does speak the truth!” da Udine seconded with a mischievous smile.

“Raphael is a thief!” Sebastiano pressed, an angry vein pulsing in his neck. “He openly co-opted the
mastro
’s Sistine sibyls and prophets for his own work at the Chigi chapel! I have seen it myself, seen the theft!”

“You know very well artists study one another’s works,” da Udine boldly defended. “Raphael has done nothing you yourself have not done!”

“Giulio, see to my horse, would you?” Raphael said as he held his throbbing wrist. “I have had enough revelry for one evening.”

Outside, amid the brisk night air and daunting shadows, Raphael stood alone, wrapped in his cloak, angry that he had allowed himself to be baited—angry that of all things it was his painting hand with which he had struck. Sebastiano was more dangerous than he had considered. But now at least he had been warned. That was his thought as two men came toward him from the shadows. They were both huge men, dressed in coarse, peasant clothing the shades of textures that blended into the dull, chipped paint of the shadowy building from which they had emerged. By the dirt on their knees and hands, they were farmers, possibly workers from a vineyard.

In the light from a full moon, Raphael could see the rough features of their faces. One had pocked skin and a small mouth, his lips fat and wet. Beneath a sloping brow were deep-set eyes, red and unfocused. The whole of him was glossy with sweat in spite of the evening chill. Clearly, he was not an admirer of art. Raphael’s tensed, sensing what lay ahead.

“We have no quarrel with one another,” he said angrily, his injured hand throbbing. “Allow me to wait alone for my horse.”

“As you might suppose, that is not going to happen,” said the other man, equally repulsive in his personal filth and rotting teeth. “You have insulted Signor Luciani and, with him, the great Michelangelo Buonarroti!”

“You know nothing of art, only what an artist’s money can tell you to say!”

The men glanced at one another and both laughed evilly, one drooling a stream of saliva. A sudden hand seized Raphael’s collar. The blow that came after that was swift. By instinct, Raphael blocked the assault with his injured hand, his painting hand, which met an even stronger gnarled fist. Raphael felt something crack near his wrist, and the force of it brought him to his knees. A searing pain followed at the very moment the entire collection of assistants came dashing out into the night through a cone of lamplight cast from the open bordello door.

“
Mastro!
Oh,
Madre di Maria!
” Giulio called out. “They mean to kill him!” But Raphael had already faltered and collapsed onto the wet cobbled stones.

13

F
EARING THE EXTENT OF HIS CONDITION, GIULIO AND
the others did not take Raphael home to the Via dei Coronari, which lay farther across town. Rather, together they carried him themselves, and Giovanni led his horse, through the dark streets back to the workshop. Gently, they laid him on a pallet there, then Gianfrancesco Penni went quickly to gather a collection of models’ velvet draperies and downy soft pillows used in their work to lie beneath the
mastro
’s head. Giulio brought a glass of strong wine to his lips because Raphael could not hold the cup himself, then helped him to lie back, and allowed Penni to dot his brow with a cool cloth.

Giovanni da Udine had gone to retrieve one of the papal physicians, but in the meantime they had stabilized Raphael’s wounded and still swelling hand on a flat board, then bound it with cloths. They were powerless to do more. The concern in the room was a palpable thing, each artist gathered around him knowing well what was at stake in the potential damage of the
mastro
’s hand.

As Giulio sat beside him, he knew all the
mastro
would be thinking was of the hand that was so essential to his craft, and what would be at stake if there were any permanent damage to the man who meant prosperity to many more than just himself.

“Can you move your fingers?”

“Per favore!”
he swatted at Penni, who loomed over him, his face blanched with concern. “You make too much of this!”

“But your hand,
mastro!
”

“I am well aware of what is at stake! As was Sebastiano!”

“His henchman was holding something shiny and brass-colored in his grasp. I saw it myself,” Giulio said. “Try to move your fingers.”

“It is painful,” he revealed, grimacing even as he tried to make a fist. Raphael closed his eyes and let a heavy sigh.

“I should like to break both of his arms so that he could never paint again!”

“He is desperate, and desperation can all too easily cloud the mind of wisdom.”

Giulio shook his head, still bound by his anger. “You are too good for him,
Mastro
Raffaello.”

Raphael let a weak smile turn his mouth. “Not so good,
caro.
I am just a man like any other. The only difference is I have been one who has pleased two pontiffs. It is from that alone that my blessings have so generously come.”

“And this envy has come from it, as well! But he shall never get to you again, by holy God! I shall kill him myself before I let that happen!” vowed Giulio Romano.

R
APHAEL WOKE
from a dream-soaked sleep unaware of the time or place. It was a moment more before he moved and felt the searing pain in his hand. There was a bone broken, he could feel it. Glancing around the small workshop anteroom then, he remembered. It had been two days, but it felt as if months had passed. The papal physicians had seen him, set the hand between two of their own more precisely cut boards, then bound it with finer cloth to keep it stationary—and to keep him from painting. They had bled him, and then left a tincture to be taken upon the hour to restore his strength.

At least with his other hand, Raphael remembered, he was free to drink.

In physical pain from the beating, and mired in the heavy grip of frustration over the future of so many things—with so many depending upon him—Raphael drank great volumes of wine within the protective walls of the small room. Unwilling to return to his house, he nevertheless avoided the men who waited outside for his direction. He also avoided the papal emissaries who came to inquire every hour of his progress. Margherita and Donato were unaware of this turn of events as they came to the workshop at the prearranged time—an appointment entirely forgotten by Raphael.

The vast room was quiet, eerily so, and the door was left ajar as they came through the arched doorway. Cool, melon-pink light was streaming in across the room from the long, partially shuttered windows, and the empty studio was wreathed in shadows of the late afternoon. In the small room, beneath a window embrasure, Raphael sat contemplatively on a pallet constructed by his men, gazing out across the river and the ancient Palatine Hill beyond.

“Where is everyone?” Margherita asked tentatively, exchanging a little glance with Donato.

“I have sent them all home.”

“But what of all your commissions?”

“I am not working today,” he growled, not looking up at them.

“Nor yesterday or tomorrow by the look of you.”

“Foolish girl!” Raphael flared. “What could you know of my life or the demands placed on it?”

“Perdone, signore . . . ”
Donato interjected in a more tentative and respectful tone. “It is the time to which we agreed. We are here for the painting—your Madonna.”

And then she saw it. The splint. The bandages. “
Ges!
You have been hurt!”

“To be precise, I am unable to paint—it is that distinction alone that matters here in Rome!”

“Surely with rest and care your hand will mend.”

“And in the meantime? What will become of my commissions—
and
my men? That, of course, was precisely what Sebastiano and Michelangelo desired!”

“Would you rather we return at another time, Signor Sanzio?” Donato asked, filling the tense silence that had swiftly engulfed Raphael and Margherita.

“I believe that would be best.”

The protective response had come not from the
mastro,
but from Giulio Romano, who had quietly and protectively appeared. He alone had remained to tend to Raphael’s needs even after all of the other assistants had been sent home.

“Leave us, Giulio.”

“But
mastr
o
—”

“
Per favore
go, and take Signor Perazzi with you.”

Donato and Giulio glanced at one another. Giulio’s face marked his concern, and yet still there was a silent understanding as they went together through the door and closed it after themselves.

“I cannot finish the work—the Madonna,” Raphael finally announced in a toneless voice once he and Margherita were alone.

Still he would not look at her. He would not look at her winter dress, her mother’s beautiful cinnamon-colored cloth, adorned only by a pale blue sash. He could not allow himself to see her smooth, sable-brown hair, held back by a small pale-blue kerchief that made her eyes seem all the larger and more expressive as she gazed at him, and at his heavily bandaged hand resting limply in his lap. Without thinking of propriety, or her reserve, for the first time since their meeting, Margherita went to him and knelt beside the pallet.

“I should not have raised my voice to you,” he said more gently, at last turning his gaze to her, and allowing her to see his eyes, bloodshot with frustration and exhaustion. “I ask you to forgive me.”

“Considering the circumstances, it is understandable.”

“Do not show me your pity! I despise pity!” he raged, more to the heavens, which long had known it, than to her.

“Then what
do
you want?”

“Something other than the life I have!” He raked the hair back from his face with his good hand, and tipped his head back against the wall behind him. “A life other than the one with no family, no love, no reason even to exist, but only to paint and work to the point of exhaustion and blindness! To create only for the desire of others, on and on, day after day, then return home completely alone!”

“You cannot mean that you paint only for others! I have seen you work; it is in your blood!”

He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “Yet I work—not for my own passion now, but for theirs! The clergymen for whom I work are obsessed with finding their bit of immortality! Since they can have no acknowledged children I am there to provide them a legacy—something that will live on once they are gone! It is their absolute obsession! And all the while, I go about Rome, elegant, blithely, seeming to the world as if I have not a care in it! But as just a shell of a man whose entire life seems to have fallen apart with a small injury—as if my only value at all to anyone in this world is that!”

“Signor Sanzio, I—”

“Do you know what it is for a man to actually realize his true value?” He moved forward onto his knees, coming nearer to her, his eyes blazing with emotion. “To keep working, and working, all of the time, as if you have no life at all? The isolation that comes with this existence, the loneliness of being able to love virtually no one, because you have allowed no one to love
you?
It makes me wish to leave all of this—to go somewhere very far away . . . ”

“But you cannot!” She looked stricken. “You have an enormous gift given to you by God!”

“Or was it a curse cast upon me?”

“How can you speak such self-pitying words when you are so celebrated and admired?”

“It is
Rafaello
they admire—the women, bankers, cardinals, dukes, sycophants, even the Holy Father, who have come here since I was injured, and all of them wanting to know, most of all, not how I am, but when I will paint again! Certainly they inquire, but not about Raphael—the man—the one who bleeds when he is cut, who weeps, who fears . . . and who lusts for love, as any other man!” The raw timbre of his words—and their sentiment—turned the tide of things between them then. Everything changed in that moment.

“I must go.”

Margherita tried to stand. Raphael caught her wrist with his uninjured hand.

“
Per favore . . .
I bid you . . . stay.”

It was then that their eyes met again fully. The last bit of daylight through the long wooden window shutters cast slatted shadows on his smooth face. His expression was dark and glittering with something she had never seen before. Vulnerability. It held her entirely captive as the sound of a sudden rain surrounded them. This was not the image or the artist before her, Margherita knew, but Raphael the man.

Her color rose beneath his ardent stare. “If it is your wish.”

“Always the one in control, hmm?” he said very gently, with only a hint of mocking. “Making me think things I have never thought . . . causing me to speak words I swore I never would.”

Her voice was a whisper as she dared to reach out to touch his arm. “I might have said the same of you.”

Margherita’s eyes moved to the door, then back to Raphael. By leaving her here alone with him, Donato was telling her that the family wished her to stay and to console the great artistic
mastro
in whatever way she chose. But it did not require their sanction. The feeling between them had changed. She saw sincerity now in a man whose mask had been stripped away. She had misjudged him. Behind the cavalier image that Raphael wanted the world to see, there was someone else entirely. He was just a man, like any other. Complex. Vulnerable. Solitary.

For a moment they gazed silently at one another. Raphael closed his arm around her, as if he were protecting her from the rest of the world—as if that were in his power to do. Then, very gently, he covered her mouth with his own. A gasp of desire rushed up from her throat as she felt his thighs against hers, his chest against her breasts. Margherita’s mouth opened to his as their kiss deepened, and her body shivered with a barrage of new sensations.

When he grimaced, she saw that he had moved his hand. Gently, she drew it up to her lips and softly kissed his fingertips beyond the splint. His uninjured hand moved deftly down the length of her back, drawing her tightly to him as they kissed again.

Her heart pounded as he gently removed the kerchief from her head, her warm brown hair cascading forward around her face. Raphael took up a curl and pressed the soft, flowery scent of it, the silky smoothness, against his lightly stubbled jaw, then flinched with the strain of withheld ardor.

“It is this face that controls me! God, but you are already so much in my blood!” he murmured, finding her mouth again and drawing her to him so forcefully that she felt her chaste young body yield. “I am on fire for want of you!”

“Do you desire me only because today you feel alone in the world?”