The Ruby Ring (27 page)

Elena was genuinely surprised. It was spoken of throughout Rome as the event of the year. “You will attend?”

“I would do anything to get out of it. But I cannot. It is the
mastro
’s wish that I accompany him.”

“Of course we will all see that you look lovely.”

“But eventually I will have to speak! If I cannot dance like the others, I will not succeed, and if I do not do that, Raphael will
know
I can never sustain my place in his life!”

Their relationship, in these first weeks, had been full of such twists and turns, Elena thought, neither of them ever fully in command. And she respected Margherita immensely—for respecting her. “I can teach you what you wish to know.”

“Grazie a Dio!”
Margherita groaned. Unexpectedly, she pulled Elena to her in a sudden, very fond embrace, and began to laugh. “What would I do without you?” Margherita asked, her countenance changed entirely by what Elena imagined was relief.

“Respectfully,
signora,
I am beginning to ask the very same thing about
you.
”

R
APHAEL
and Leonardo da Vinci rode out of Rome together, Raphael on horseback, his aged companion in an elegant curtained litter, pulled by horses and a formally clad horseman. The wind was heavy against them as they neared Monteflavio, where Leonardo intended to look at a large farm that was for sale. In it, he required, he said, the advice of a trusted friend. That was the expressed reason for the journey. But the elder artist also wished to seek advice from the younger on an entirely different matter. Although Raphael had once been an apprentice, and now had eclipsed him in promise and importance, still the friendship, the connection, unlike that with Michelangelo, had never wavered.

At the end of a long dirt trail that melted into a vast open hayfield, they stopped, dismounted, and left the horses to graze for a moment beneath the warm country sun. They stood beneath the shade cast from the last fragments of an ancient chestnut forest. Beyond were jagged purple hills dotted with old stone convents and ruined castles in their craggy niched terraces.

“The truth is that I have had an offer,” Leonardo revealed as they walked across a rock-strewn path leading to the remains of a small Roman bridge. Beside it lay the dignified ruins of a once-proud chimneypiece, along with a stone staircase leading to some rich Roman villa, long ago destroyed.

“A generous one, I hope.”

The cool autumn breeze tossed back the edges of both their riding capes and tousled their hair, one man’s snow white, the other still bearing the rich umber hue of his youth. “The offer is from the new king, Franois I. His Majesty has invited me to come and live in France as artist in residence, accorded all honors and privileges thereto.”

“A very generous offer indeed,” Raphael observed as he leaned casually against the trunk of a tree. “And will you go?”

“I am considering it.”

“You would be greatly missed here.”

“By you, perhaps. But it is the sunset of my artistic years in Florence and Rome, Raphael, and you bask in the full summer sunlight of those days. Little but shadow remains for everyone else.”

“Very poetic, but vastly untrue,” Raphael tried to joke. “There will always be room for the man who taught me technique and portraiture. I still use many of your sketches of posture and attitude when I begin a new portrait of my own.”

“It was the musings of an old man and yet, alas, the sad truth.”

“Then why buy a farm all the way out here if you wish to go to France?”

“An investment for the future if the king should tire of me there.”

“You have, it seems, thought of everything.”

“Age brings with it perspective, if nothing else, Raphael.”

They walked back through the grass a few paces. “So it goes well with your
signorina?
” Leonardo asked, changing the subject as they prepared to continue the journey.

“Better than I have ever had a right to hope.”

“You certainly seem content. But perhaps a bit distracted, might I say, from all of your work.”

“For the first time in my life, my personal happiness exceeds my drive to paint. If only—”

“If only?”

“She is not—” Raphael stopped again, unsure of an expression that would not lessen her dignity. “Margherita is not comfortable in many of the circumstances in which I find myself in need of engaging,” he carefully confessed, not wanting either to belittle her to this man he so respected, or even in his own thoughts.

“She has lived a very different life than you.”

“But that was in the past. We are equal now. She has a fine new home, clothes, and all of the respectability—”

“That you can buy for her?”

“She is my partner in all things.”

Leonardo looked over at him. “In your mind perhaps,” the elder artist sagely observed, his eyes heavily lidded by experience and years. “But you must be patient, for changing the costume changes not the person beneath.”

Raphael thought of the rich white gown that to him had transformed her—its elegance and cost a mask of beauty for the baker’s daughter beneath. “I am invited to attend Agostino Chigi’s wedding in just over a month’s time, but I have put off responding because—”

“Because you must take her with you.”

“She has always declined to accompany me anywhere publicly. It is the gossip that she says she fears.”

“Insist the first time. If you mean to have a life with her, do what you can to press her to reconsider. Perhaps something less daunting at first. Gossip shall never cease if those with wagging tongues have mystery upon which to build their talk. Take her there proudly,” Leonardo advised. “And in time the tale of the artist and his love shall be an old and familiar one. Only then are they bound to move on to someone new.”

“Wise words, but the reality of that is a difficult thing to wait for.”

“Nothing shall be so difficult for either of you as that first time. They shall grow accustomed to the notion of your mistress as your wife, just as they did with Agostino Chigi’s less-than-noble inamorata.”

“But Agostino is a patron with power over the pope. I am only an artisan indebted to him and his minions.”

“Then you shall need to be twice as clever, and thrice as insistent.”

A quarter of an hour later, they rode together down a long causeway surrounded by olive groves and rows of sentinel junipers, then passed through a vine shaded archway. The property, on a hillside with a sweeping view over the fields and wooded forest beyond, was flanked by richly sculpted marble pillars and two great marble lions.

Raphael chuckled, glancing around. “A
farm,
is it?”

“A rather grand farm,” da Vinci admitted with an endearing little shrug.

Raphael held the reins of his elegant Spanish jennet as it pawed the dirt, then helped da Vinci from his litter once again. The two men stood facing one another in an open courtyard in the shade of vine leaves, the wind shaking them like hundreds of small emerald flags in the afternoon light.

“If the offer to go to France pleases you,” Raphael said sadly, “I hope it is what you wish it to be. But be assured, your presence in Rome shall be sorely missed.” He fondly embraced the old man. “By Raphael Sanzio most especially.”

Weeks later, in the late autumn of 1515, Leonardo da Vinci left Rome for France, to live there as an honored guest of the French king, Franois I. Leonardo was installed at Blois, on the property of the king’s magnificent chteau, in his own grand manor. Raphael received several letters back over the next years detailing life at the French court, full of gossip and intrigue. Leonardo was old but well cared for and respected. His opinion, he wrote, was sought on many matters. Raphael read those first letters with a bittersweet smile. It was, he believed, a fitting finale for a true artistic
mastro.

26

November 1515

“I
THANK YOU FOR THIS,
CARISSIMA
AND YOU LOOK
magnificent,” Raphael declared, gazing in admiration at Margherita. She had come into the music room of their house at last, seeming to float toward him, dressed exquisitely in a new white damask gown—strikingly similar to the one in which he had painted her, smiling her serene Madonna smile.

“Your friend Leonardo told me, before he left for France, that I should try at least to be a part of your world. And so tonight I shall.”

“You have worked greatly for this.”

She wanted to say that he could not begin to imagine how hard she had worked for this first public event—the dancing instruction, the etiquette lessons, and the exhausting drills in polite conversation—nor how nervous she was to attempt to use them all in one night. But that would have ruined this moment for him. Raphael touched her cheek with the whisper of a kiss.

“They must all know, sooner or later, that you are meant to remain in my life.”

“I do not suppose it shall be easy.”

“What in life worth having ever is?” he asked her, and she knew it was true.

“My mother would have been very fond of you.”

“I wish very much that I had known her.”

Margherita pressed a hand to her heart. “She is with me here, every day of my life. And I know she believes I have done the right thing in loving you.”

He extended his arm gallantly to her. “Well, then? Shall we go and set all the tongues of Rome to wagging by our presence together?”

“I suspect you could do little else, appearing anywhere with a Trastevere baker’s daughter!”

“That is certainly not how I see you,
amore mio.
Nor shall it be what the rest of the world thinks.” He led her toward the foyer where a velvet-clad servant held open the front door for them. The cool night air soothed them both as they walked out amid a canopy of stars.

“At the moment,” said Margherita. “I would settle for amusing even one of your very important friends.”

“Y
ET AGAIN,
more
delays?” Agostino Chigi bellowed, his deep voice echoing through the cavernous stone rooms of the Castel Sant’Angelo. “Impossible! It cannot be! This is entirely out of the question!”

Cardinal Bibbiena stood with the imposing, black-bearded banker, who was dressed in finery of olive-green velvet edged in silver. They were the first guests to arrive for Chigi’s weekly midday dinner, this one given across from the Vatican Palace at the ancient papal fortress. They stood together, draped in white silk, in the library hall, with its soaring ceiling, massive windows, and large banquet table, while the pope’s favorite buffoon, Niccol, entertained in the corner.

Bibbiena’s hands were clasped piously, and the expression on his face was one of rigid contradiction. He was biting back a victorious smile. “Alas, it is so, I fear,” he said patiently. “That is the news I was given, and I come to you with it only in friendly warning. Signor Sanzio has told His Holiness that he needs more time with everything. He says it is due to the slow progress on the architectural drawings for Saint Peter’s, and his work with the antiquities, about which I do not mind confessing to you,
caro,
I believe him to be far in over his head. And yet it is also my belief that the excuse is merely a tactic to mask . . .
other
things.”

“But my wedding is in four days’ time, and you tell me that the fresco in the very room where we will banquet shall not be complete, when Raphael himself assured me that it would be?”

“I fear it may well be so.”

So mired in angry disbelief was Chigi that he saw no ulterior motive in Bibbiena’s patient explanation. “This cannot stand! I am a man of great power, and this fresco is my legacy, my story! He will have his assistant—that Romano fellow, someone—see it to completion or there will be hell to pay!”

“Perhaps you shall effectuate that. And yet does it not mask a greater problem?”

Chigi looked imperiously at him. “That girl!”

“
S.
Still that girl. For a common tart with no family of note, she has managed for some time to entirely disrupt his life, his work,
and
his reputation. What, one might be given to ponder, will that do to the value of his work?” He sighed for effect, paused, then said, “Would that my poor niece had managed to marry him before that girl came along. But alas—”

“This is an abomination, that a Trastevere peasant could supersede someone so important as myself!” blustered Chigi. “And I had an agreement about his work for me long before he discovered
her!
”

“Sentiments I assure you that I share with you, Agostino
mio.
You could certainly take this up with him at dinner today,” Bibbiena offered.

“The great Raphael is going to grace us, at last, with his presence when he has been so taken up with his whore?” Chigi asked sarcastically, still fuming with indignation.

Then, unexpectedly, Margherita herself entered the room on Raphael’s arm.

Everything fell to a sudden, bitter hush. Bibbiena saw Margherita go very pale as all eyes in the grand villa were, at once, turned upon her. Then low murmuring voices began to fill the marked silence. Soft snickering behind raised palms followed, chins lifted loftily in judgment. Bibbiena thought for a moment she meant to turn and run. Or perhaps that was merely wishful thinking. Alas, she was still moving forward on Raphael’s arm, looking nothing at all like his niece. She was undeniably exquisite in a rich white damask gown, ornamented in beadwork and gold thread, and her face . . . breathtaking.

Puttana!

“Apparently he means to bring the objectionable girl along as an accent to one of these dinners of revelry and comedic entertainment!” the cardinal cautiously replied behind a raised hand.

He quirked a smile. If his informants were correct, there was a presentation about to be made at this gathering, and the cardinal decided now, with that in mind, that the Luti girl’s introduction into their world could not be more well timed.

As the hour wore on, he watched them seated together, amid the first trays piled with almonds, figs, and chunks of rich yellow cheese. He was sickened by the current that pulsed between them, the low whispers and the smiles they exchanged, as they repeatedly glanced at one another and then giggled like children.

Bibbiena was still tormented by the fact that Raphael had not paid a price for breaking his niece’s heart. Yet anything he did—any public reprisal he might set in motion—would come back too boldly on him, and reflect poorly on his own eventual papal bid. No, his actions would need to be surreptitious. Careful. As in everything he did—as it was with the favors he had called in with Cardinal de’ Rossi, encouraging him to speak glowingly to Pope Leo of Bibbiena’s work so that he might stand out just now from the other cardinals.

It was Maria’s place beside Raphael. His niece should be here. Not this girl. The pope’s buffoon, dressed in a brightly colored costume, with hair dyed the color of fresh carrots, entertained them near the fireplace hearth, but Bibbiena could enjoy none of it.

Before the meal, as most of the guests sat staring at Raphael’s mistress among them for the first time, the pope raised a hand to speak. By the gesture, his guests were immediately silenced. The buffoon bowed and left the room. The music and the clink of glasses faded softly away.

“Bernardo,” Pope Leo intoned in his high, thin voice. “We are told many good things, of late, about your work. Finding the tone of our official position in the letter to Emperor Maximilian is extremely important, yet you keep such successes so nobly to yourself. Your selflessness is pleasing.”

Pure brilliance! He would owe Cardinal de’ Rossi for this. Bibbiena made a mental note of it as he smiled politely. “My thanks for the high compliment from Your Holiness. But the work is its own reward,” he smoothly replied.

“And yet it is still my wish for you to have something, Bernardo. A token of my gratitude and pleasure with you and your exceedingly important work.”

He lay a meaty jeweled finger to the side of his chin, enjoying his magnanimity. “You know I am much interested in the excavation at the Domus Aurea, the endless examples of ancient art left there, in spite of the cruel destruction.”

“I have seen the exquisite frescoes there myself,” Bibbiena concurred, a sweetly toned dig forming on his lips. “As you know, those ancient works have driven my desire for similar decorations by our own, very busy, Raffaello.”

“Occasionally there have been gifts smaller than frescoes that history has offered up to us—other glimpses back to the exquisite grandeur and beauty of ancient Rome left for us to behold.” As he made the slow pronouncement, Pope Leo withdrew from the small, plump finger of his own left hand a delicate, square-cut ruby set in a band gold. “This was found at the Domus Aurea of Nero in excavations which our good Raffaello has ably overseen for us. Spoken of in the writings of Suetonius, as the favored piece of jewelry for Nero’s wife, if it is
that
ruby ring, it would be, as you might imagine, priceless.” He leveled his protruding, bloodshot eyes on Bibbiena. “As
you
have made yourself to this papal court.”

Smiling, Bibbiena took the ring as the pope extended it to him, and held it up to the light. Not exquisite, but lovely enough. Nevertheless, by the look on Raphael’s face just now, it was priceless and would suit his purposes well indeed.

In a social strata where everything was said and done for the effect of gain, Bibbiena was pleased that this presentation of something from the pontiff’s own person had been made in the very presence of the scoundrel and his peasant mistress themselves. He felt a spark of victory in that, and more than a hint of pleasure.

Bibbiena bowed deeply, causing more guests at the table to turn from their private conversations, as he held the ring up to the light in a dramatic gesture.

“It is exquisite. And so difficult to believe that down there, amid all of that rubble, so delicate and beautiful a thing—” He broke off with appropriate awe. “And yet I cannot help but think Your Holiness is the only one who should wear such a fine and rare jewel.”

“Perhaps it is so,” Pope Leo conceded, his fleshy cheeks swiftly bulging as his expression became merry. “Were it not for my great affection toward you, and a strong desire to reward your loyalty.”

“With benevolence and grace, Your Holiness leads us in all things,” said Bibbiena as he slipped the ring onto his own finger and then lifted his goblet of wine with the same hand so that the gem might glitter a little more brightly in the candlelight.

R
APHAEL SAT SILENTLY
on the other side of the pope, watching the scene play out, his anger and shock breeding in him a curious detachment from the scene. It was the ring meant for Margherita’s hand, the one he had tried for weeks to obtain. He had personally petitioned the pope—a thing to which His Holiness had, at first, easily agreed, simply because his favorite artist desired it. A bold statement indeed that this—the only thing he had ever asked of a pontiff who asked much of him—should be so publicly presented to someone else. In particular, to the uncle of a woman he had spurned.

Raphael touched his chin where a small, neat brown beard now grew beneath a trimmed mustache. He studied the pontiff, seated across from him. Something very odd, an undercurrent of danger, was beginning to swirl around this particular collection of people. Instinct told him to be cautious until he was absolutely certain who he should fear, as he saw Bibbiena lean across to speak with Margherita.

As great silver serving dishes of sugar biscuits, marzipan, pine nuts, quail, and sweetmeats were laid across the surface of the vast, linen-draped table, they saw bread that had been gilded set beside shining silver saltcellars and vases of fresh flowers. There was a velvet-clad boy playing something melodic on a lute across the room near the fire. Raphael reached beneath the damask table cover and found Margherita’s small hand, which he squeezed reassuringly. Both of them saw the cardinal prop the palms of his hands conspicuously on the surface of the table so that his rings, especially the ruby ring, would glitter in the candlelight.