The Ruby Ring (31 page)

Instead, he told Signor Chigi. The great banker, and Raphael’s close friend, surely would know better than he what to say. And so Raphael had gone outside with a dour-faced pope and Signor Chigi to hear what would likely be his undoing.
Forgive me,
mastro, Giulio was thinking as he paced.
You mean the world to me. You are everything. Too much for me to be the one to break your heart.

T
HE THREE WALKED
somberly outside onto the ornate balcony, with its carved stone balustrade and small, ordered gardens beyond. A light breeze blew the briny scent of water, and the odor of fish in the stagnant Tiber, up at them. As they stood facing the twisting dark water below, Pope Leo reached out and placed his hand on Raphael’s shoulder. His touch was firm.

“It will be easier on you if I am direct, my son. The girl is gone.”

The effect was immediate, and lethal. Like bile rushing into his mouth, Raphael tasted betrayal on a rancid swell of bitterness—something, he thought strangely then, of what Maria must have felt. And then what followed . . .

It cannot be . . . I must not . . . There is a mistake!

“Gone?” The word came out in a short bark of disbelief. “What do
you
know of it? Gone where? Why?”

“It plagues the heart, my son, to be the one to tell you this, but I have had my staff following your
signora
for several days now. I was advised to expect something like this. And, alas, their warning appears to have been an accurate one.”

The words seemed distorted, unbelievable. As if it were a part of a very poor joke.

“To be blunt, my son, as a clean wound heals most swiftly, I shall tell you that as she left Rome, she was seen on horseback in the company of a man.”

Raphael searched his fear-plagued mind, thoughts and memories racing through it. She was his love. It had been a small disagreement, nothing more. Yet that same betrayal hardened now in his throat, refusing to be ignored. Hot, corrosive. Betrayal he tried powerfully to refuse.

“It is a lie!” His eyes were wide with panic. “Have you checked Hanno’s enclosure? She often goes there when—”

“Raffaello
mio,
” Pope Leo soothed. “
Per favore,
she is not with the beast. Do not make this more difficult upon yourself. She was never worthy of this kind of pain.”

He sank against a carved stone pilaster, his knees buckling beneath him, still unable to breathe. He touched the cold stone very lightly.
Dio . . . Dio!
“She was worth everything to me,” he mouthed very softly in an aching tone.

“You would not be the first to have misjudged a woman’s value, Raphael,” Agostino Chigi carefully interjected. “You are a wealthy man now. Women of her class could be motivated to appear exceedingly accommodating, until they had received a sufficient amount of . . . compensation.”

He still could not breathe. His lungs were still constricting with a hot, heavy force. “She never asked for anything, and she allowed me to give her very little.”

“Yet she was, for a time, companion to the great Raffaello, and perhaps that was enough.”

Raphael looked at Pope Leo through glazed eyes. “Was the man Sebastiano?”

“I’m afraid we do not know the man’s identity for certain, my son. But it is odd that Signor Luciani is not here now when he, too, had accepted an invitation.”

Raphael raked both hands through his loose, long hair and exhaled a first deep, painful breath—one that seemed to scorch his lungs. “Who told you of this?”

Chigi and Pope Leo exchanged a glance. “It was your assistant,” Chigi revealed. “Giulio Romano came to us not long ago, concerned about how you were to be told.”

The wound deepened, tore at his soul.
Not Giulio, as well?

“Was he absolutely certain it was Margherita?”

Murmuring a Latin prayer and raising his fat, ring-dotted hand beneficently toward Raphael, the pope somberly said, “My son. There is no doubt at all about the girl. He says he knows her face well. Let us now pray for your soul, and for deliverance back to the ways of the Lord for the poor misguided girl, wherever she now may be.”

Part Three

Thus does my infinite
passion for her torment me.
Her beauty is blinding
in its splendor.
Unfriendly has become
my hand,
and now I am unable
even to work . . .

From a sonnet
by Raphael Sanzio

30

December 1515

W
ERE THEY DAYS, OR HOURS?

Time was like colors in a fresco, running together. Time had drifted by without marking itself for Raphael. Or perhaps it was he who did not wish to know how long she had been gone.

He had not slept nor even drunk the wine Elena and Giulio continually left out for him, a palliative that might have cauterized this open wound upon his heart. He could not stay at the house on the Via Alessandrina, or even at the one on the Via dei Coronari. There were too many sketches and Madonnas of her at them both.

Piercing shards of memory, jagged as glass, tore at him as he moved through the city, head down, wearing a wide brim hat, not seeing people, or the tall shadow-making buildings on the endless tangle of city streets in which he wanted to lose himself. He needed to be far away from all of the things that might remind him of her. A new rush of anguish shook him. The thoughts crept into his mind, day and night. Relentlessly. Excruciatingly. It was, all of it, wrong. This could not be, his heart repeated over and over in a heavy, painful drumbeat. Yet still, catlike, the thoughts crept in. Had she truly been so restless for marriage, and he too hopeful for “some day” to have seen her displeasure? Had someone else offered more, or offered it more swiftly? Where was Sebastiano? It had been days since anyone in Rome had seen him. Could she really have been blind to his motives? The imaginings behind Raphael’s eyes, when he could not push them away, showed him fearsome things. Disappointment in her gentle expression when she last gazed at him. Hurt in her tone at the papal pronouncement about her.

At the end of yet another street, he turned and went up a set of wide stone steps, passing a stout street vendor in shabby clothes hawking ripe lemons with a loud, pagan call. A few steps on, a dirty-faced, shoeless boy stood with his eyes wide and his hand out. Walking along a Roman road of stone blocks laid by Julius Caesar’s men, Raphael pushed away the tormenting thoughts of regret. Yet even as he did, they always returned, redoubled in force.
I should not have listened to the doubts she raised. I should have taken her to Urbino and married her there. I should never have given her a chance to question us!
That drumbeat stayed in his mind, until he could not think, eat, sleep, or paint. He felt now like the beggars crowding the filthy, shadow-darkened Borgo near the papal palace through which he roamed. Shiftless, purposeless. Empty.

He was not certain how he had gotten there or why, but many days, Raphael found himself inside the Vatican gardens, standing outside the large enclosure that housed Hanno, the pope’s great exotic beast. His mind wound back to the times Margherita had insisted they visit the creature. He remembered her gentleness with him, and the animal’s response, the way he pressed his trunk against her shoulder in a show of affection. She had been gentle with him. She had shown him respect, as she did with everyone she met.

“Do you miss her, too, I wonder?” he quietly asked. “We’re not all that different, you and I. Possessions of the Holy Father. Here at his will, brought to do his bidding . . . caged, controlled. Trapped. She saw that in you. Where they saw your novelty, she saw your sadness.”

Swathed in heavy fur against the early winter chill, a woman approached him then, moving quietly along the path. He had not heard her until she was very near, which caused him to turn with a start. It was Maria Bibbiena, gowned in blue velvet with wide fur cuffs and a matching patterned velvet cloak. Her hair was dressed in a fine gold net. A ring of servants stood nearby; one of them, a tall, commanding guard Raphael remembered, held the reins of her horse.

“Have you followed me?” he growled, gazing at her through red-veined eyes.

“Forgive me, but I felt I must speak with you,” she said, her pale mouth trembling at the sight of him. “I wanted to tell you how truly sorry I am. Sorry I mean, about the baker’s daughter abandoning you.”

“She has not abandoned me!” he barked, his body going rigid in defense as the cold winter wind whispered through them both.

“Then where is she?”

“I don’t know! But I will
never
believe—” He stopped himself, knowing it could not be right to reveal any part of his heartbreak to her.

“
Per favore,
” she bid him in a thin voice. “Come home with me, Raffaello
mio
. I will see you warmed by a cup of spiced wine and we shall sit beside the fire and talk, as we once did. All will be forgiven. Our betrothal revived.”

“Nothing can ever be between us as it once was, Maria!”

“You sound so certain of that.”

“I am.”

“But she has gone!”

“Not from my heart,” he said achingly. “No matter what has happened to her, she will never be gone from my heart!”

He saw that her gaunt cheeks were red and chapped and that she was shivering. Raphael felt a deep pang of regret looking at her like this. Regret that he had hurt her. Regret that he had been so foolish long ago and toyed with her heart—a heart he had broken without meaning to. In the end, she had been betrayed, as he now was.

“I thank you for your concern,” he said somberly, taking up her gloved hands between the two of them, and squeezing them with a memory of the small affection he once had felt for her. “But I must be alone now, I bid you. Leave me to my sorrow. Find another life for yourself.”

“My life is with you.
I
was your betrothed, Raphael. Not her.”

“Set me free, Maria,” he urged her achingly. “I beg you, set me free of your heart! It is the only thing I have ever asked of you!”

“And the only thing I cannot give.”

“
Per favore . . .
do not make me hurt you anymore!”

She reached up to touch his cheek. There were tears in her pale blue-gray eyes. “It would not be possible, Raffaello
mio,
for you to hurt me more.”

M
ORE DAYS . . .
more hours . . . Walking . . . searching . . . No rest. No work. No answers. Only memories and questions to his companions, of what had driven her away. The wind gusted and the rain surged through his clothes, pelting his face, wetting his eyes so that he could not tell the rain from his tears.

Day after endless day, he walked aimlessly through Rome, up Il Gianicolo, hoping to see her there, where they had met. But she was never there, nor were the answers to why she had gone, or where. On a day like all of the others, one that felt like decades, Raphael stood alone at the top of the hill, wind whipping through his cape and doublet, shaking his fists at the God above him who had allowed this to happen.

“Have I not done all that you have asked of me,
dio mio?
Have I not served You . . . Honored You . . . painted You!” He wailed aloud like a man gone mad. “If you have had enough of me this is surely a sign! My art . . . my painting . . . All of it is gone with her!”

Strollers came upon him and were staring, but he could change nothing—feel nothing, but the desolation. From how great a height had he fallen. Now there was nothing left of his work, his life, his heart, but fragments, like pieces of shattered glass. It was finished, all of it. And so was he.

A
N ODD SILENCE
that had descended across the vast workshop. The assistants and apprentices still showed up for work every morning, yet after a few days, their direction lost, they simply collected, gossiped, cleaned brushes, murmured their regret, and waited for news, as if the fate of Margherita Luti, a woman they had disregarded, somehow mattered to them after all.

Everyone knew what had happened, yet no one dared to speak of it, for how they had all looked askance at her. The baker’s daughter was just another of the
mastro
’s trifles, they all had believed, and they had behaved accordingly. Particularly the disdainful Giovanni da Udine, who had placed bets on the tables in the bordello as to how long she would last in Raphael’s life. Beautiful, mindless, inconsequential, he had said—and he could not have been more wrong.

As the days wore on with no answer to the mystery, the consequences of Margherita’s disappearance affected not only Raphael, but the entire group of artists. He was not there to lead them, to teach them—or to bring them work. Without the
mastro,
there was nothing for them. Over a bottle of wine, they collected, shiftless and uncertain, sitting together on stools, chairs, and painting props, their cups half drained, their hope of a happy ending to all of this dwindling by the day.

“I suppose some of us misjudged her,” da Udine grumbled awkwardly, breaking the tense silence of another uncertain afternoon.

Only Penni glanced up from his cup. “We could have been nicer to her when she was here. I, for one, never even tried to speak to her or give her a smile.”

“It is clear now she was good for the
mastro,
” one of the young apprentices dared to say, and several of the assistants nodded silently in agreement.

For the first time, Giulio came across the room to sit among them, since he was as lost as they all were. “She deserved better than she got from the lot of us,” he said, shaking his head.

Da Udine shot him a defensive glare, and, for a moment, there was another tense silence. “You are not saying, I hope, that you believe it was our fault that she went away!”

“I am saying it well could be, Giovanni. And if she ever returns to him, I believe we must tell her that.”

“I am not one to admit such things.” Da Udine shrugged grudgingly. “But perhaps it is so.”

“Do you suppose she will ever return to him?” Penni asked Giulio, who they all knew to be the closest to Raphael. “Looking back, they really did seem happy.”

“I suppose that depends on where she has gone—and why. And, for the moment, only the Good Lord knows the answer to that. For the
mastro
’s sake, I hope he finds out the truth before the mystery of it destroys him, and all the rest of us along with him.”

“W
HAT DO YOU MEAN,
things are not improved?”

Cardinal Bibbiena bellowed the question with uncharacteristic ferocity, having lost all decorum. He stood at the back of the cold and soaring basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore beside Agostino Chigi as the wave of parishoners filed out past him after Mass.

“Sadly, it is true. And, for that matter,” Agostino confessed with an impotent shrug, “I would say that things are actually much worse! In truth, Raphael barely works at all. His assistant, Giulio Romano, admitted to me that
mastro
Raffaello wanders the streets aimlessly, as if searching for her, and rarely sets foot in the studio at all these days. The Holy Father’s
stanza
and the antiquities projects go unattended. The assistants, Romano, Penni, and da Udine, have tried their best to cover for him, to work around his prolonged absence, but before long it will be an impossible thing to hide. I tell you, Your Grace, it is as if the very spark has gone out of the man.”

“Over the loss of that
peasant girl? Impossible!
” he hissed.

It was not supposed to be this way. This was entirely wrong. All of it. His plan had been so well thought out. So completely flawless. As everything was about his life. He had been a cardinal for many years, and he had grown accustomed to the glory, the wealth, and, in particular, the power. Power to control people and things as he saw fit. And he most certainly did not like feeling stripped of any of that, as he did now.

“Have you spoken with him? Reasoned with him about his duty to Rome? To the Holy Father?”

“Regrettably, Your Grace, there is no reasoning with a broken heart.”

“Foolish words!” he snarled. “Where is his pride? He is Raffaello!”

“He is first a man who was in love with a woman. One now gone from his life.”

Bibbiena wrinkled his long face as if smelling something foul, then he shook his head distastefully. “So what do you propose we do now, Agostino?”

“I fear there is only one thing that
can
be done, Your Grace.”