The Ruby Ring (7 page)

“Tell me, Signor Sanzio.” Margherita took a step forward, hands clasped behind her back, her chin lifted, not with rudeness, but rather an unexpected confidence. “Was it your expectation that merely by your coming here yourself, cloaked in velvet and silver, and surrounded with your equally finely dressed minions, that I would be more easily convinced to change my mind?”

The way she had phrased it, the circumstance seemed instantly tawdry.

“I would not have guessed that a girl—” He stopped himself in midsentence. That tactic was not going to help things with her. But it was too late.

“What was it,
signore
? You would not have guessed that a simple girl from Trastevere could keep pace with someone so grand and worldly as you?”

He moved to deny it, but the truth was that this was exactly what he had meant. Women had always been without consequence in his life. There was no struggle in obtaining them for what purpose he wished. That was not the case now, very suddenly, in this most unlikely situation. While he barely knew Margherita, she already angered him, confounded him, and entirely bewitched him, all at the same instant.

When he did not readily respond to her question, she said, “Make no mistake,
signore.
Because I assumed a great
mastro
would move with an entourage does not mean I would be swayed by its appearance at my door.”

Giovanni da Udine, in wine-colored velvet, was tall, broad-shouldered, and exceedingly elegant, with a shock of silvery hair that gave him a distinguished air. Despite that veneer, he stifled a snicker behind his jeweled hand. Raphael heard it and shot him an immediate look of reproach. A dozen retorts vaulted through his mind, but he realized then, in the awkward silence, that she was worthy of none of them.

It was getting late, and Raphael had the metal point study of an allegorical Mars to heighten with white chalk for the other Chigi chapel, and a few pencil studies to outline so that his assistants would know what he desired them to paint. Then there was the application of the last layer of plaster on the final Vatican fresco to oversee. There was also a problem with the expression on the pope’s face, as he sat in profile astride his horse, in the
Repulse of Attila,
which he must deal with himself, and it must be accomplished before midday.

He still very much wanted Signorina Luti, but he could not paint her—he could not capture that essence of a Madonna, if her sitting for him was a chore for her. He reached down and drew from his cloak a pouch of gold florins. Gently, he set it on the empty table between the three of them, the coins making a little clinking sound as they settled in the bag.

“We must take our leave. But in the meantime, I have left a first installment on what my studio will pay you to allow me to make several pencil sketches, culminating in a full-color panel of you dressed as the Madonna for my commission by the late Pope Julius II that shall hang in the great Chapel at San Sisto in Piacenza.”

Francesco Luti gave a sound somewhere between a moan and a wail, then made the sign of the cross.
“Santissima Maria!”

“You may pray to the saints, Signor Luti, but as you wait for their reply you would do well to reason strongly with your daughter. This is an existing commission, and I am
not
at liberty to wait forever.” Raphael nodded courteously. “
Buon giorno
to you both.”

“
Mastro
Sanzio, one question if you please.”

The throaty alto voice was Margherita’s. Raphael pivoted back.

In the light of early morning, when Rome was still pink and opalescent, her face looked radiant, and he thought then, for the first time, that he had fooled himself. She was actually remarkably sensual and,
s
. . . appealing, in a way that now piqued all of his senses, not only the initial creative ones.

“May I ask why you have chosen me?”

“Why does anyone make a choice of something,
signorina
?” he said in a flippant tone that was part style, and part self-defense. “There is an element of instinct, and another of fate. With my painting, one is always tied so tightly with the other that I have learned only to honor it, and not to question why. Once again,” he nodded. “
Buon giorno
to you.”

“I
DO NOT
understand you!” Francesco Luti wailed. He slapped his forehead with the palm of his flour-caked hand, as he cast his eyes dramatically heavenward. “Had I not been here to see it for myself, I would have thought it a cruel jest! Now I
know
without doubt that you have taken full leave of your senses! Where has this come from? This is not you! Thanks to your mother’s dreams for you, you have put Antonio off, waiting all of your life for something extraordinary like this to happen, and now that it has—”

Her mother, so beautiful, and so full of dreams, had told her many stories as a child, like that of the famous and married emperor, Nero, and his love for Poppaea, a girl beneath his station. Their romance had brought a cloud of scandal to Rome. There was always great excitement in her mother’s whispered voice, as she told how Poppaea had become Nero’s great love—and finally his wife.

And so it can happen to any clever, beautiful girl,
Marina Luti had whispered to her youngest daughter—the one who listened the most intently—as she tucked her beneath the bedcovers and pressed a kiss onto her forehead.
And one wise enough to believe in the beauty of her dreams!

But her mother was dead now, her dreams gone to dust. And Margherita was here, still living in the real world.

“Perhaps you do not know me so well as you think,” Margherita declared, remembering the tragic end of the love story of Nero and Poppaea.

He pivoted away. “Och! It is too much!”

“And what of your family, Margherita, eh, what of us?” Letitia intervened, preparing to mount a full attack. “Could we not all benefit from the florins Signor Sanzio has promised you? To help Father stop working so hard? Perhaps he would be able to hire an assistant to give his swollen ankles a rest.”

There had always been a rivalry between the two sisters. Letitia had been the first to marry, but Margherita was the more beautiful. And so, in her way, Letitia had always sought to undermine her sister’s dreams, encouraging her to marry Donato’s younger brother, Antonio, and to strive for no better than what she had. It was a future their father had sanctioned—and to which Margherita had grudgingly agreed.

“Do not lay it all at my feet, Letitia!” she argued.

“Is that not precisely where it lies?”

“My daughter is a fool!” said Francesco gruffly as he shuffled back to his daughters.

“Perhaps I am,
Padre mio.
But I will not be taken for granted—not by anyone!”

“Then you would do well to make your peace with life as a saddle boy’s wife! For that is surely the best fate has to offer Antonio!”

“You have always wanted me to marry him!”

“That was
before
I knew there might be another choice! Oh, I bid you, look beyond your nose, Margherita! There is a whole wide world out there, and none of us has ever had the chance to see any of it beyond the Via Santa Dorotea!”

“Is it my duty to go as if I were no better than the hound at the great painter’s heels? I know what you and Letitia want, both of you fawning over his grand clothes and his elegant friends. But the price for your ambition,
Padre mio,
is too high for me to pay!”

His small eyes narrowed and his face darkened with rage. “Where did a baker’s daughter from Trastevere learn to believe she was so high and mighty that she could walk away from a purse full of gold florins?”

“From the woman
you
married,
Padre mio.
”

“Is this chance not precisely what she desired for you?”

“Not with a man of his reputation! My mother married you against the wishes and advice of nearly everyone she knew. She trusted her own mind
and
her heart. Is that not the story you have always told us? She waited not for opportunity—but love!”

Francesco Luti shook his head and let a heavy sigh as his eyes filled with sudden tears. “God rest her precious soul, it was the truth. And God help us all . . . you are just like her.”

N
EAR MIDNIGHT,
when the workshop was cool and empty, and all of the assistants and apprentices were gone, Raphael stood alone at his easel with a wet portrait panel centered before him. Beside it on the worktable, draped with a paint-splattered sheet, was a large, untouched jug of wine, a wooden bucket full of dirty paint water, and cups stuffed with brushes. Pausing to study the image, he then filled his boar-bristle brush with a mixture of taupe and salmon pink paint, and skillfully applied it, causing a flesh and veined hand to burst forth.

The massive room was lit by two large oil lamps with smoking flames that cast their dancing shadows onto the wall behind him. Raphael felt a shiver of excitement—a kind of caged energy that coursed through him.
Dio,
it was good to work like this, he thought, good to connect with the panel, to feel the paint, to take the acrid smell of it into his lungs, to bring from nothing a representation of that which almighty God had created!
As I once did . . . as I sometimes believe I have forgotten how, for having to be “Raffaello” . . .

Only in this act of quiet solitude, with the easy companionship of his well-used paintbrush, did Raphael feel fully the sensation that had possessed him as a boy, as he had watched his own father paint at the Urbino chapel—as he had first held his own brush. It had been a long road from that simple act of glorious communion—the commissions, the power plays, the clothes, the dancing lessons, the fencing lessons, the elocution lessons, the daily need to flatter and ingratiate himself to people. But that was his world now, and most days he was glad of it. Until a moment like this, in the still, dark hours, surrounded and taken up by wet paint and supple brushes. It made him remember the simple boy from the countryside, with only talent and dreams. And he was still that boy beneath all these trappings and pressures of courtly success—a little lost and awed by what he had become, and the unyielding pressure to maintain it.

Raphael studied the face he had created: Baldassare Castiglione, the great courtier and writer who had befriended him in Florence. He would be pleased. The likeness in oil was uncanny. His face would be as immortal as the elegant words he laid down in his book, which Raphael had been told he meant to call
The Courtier.

It was that grand scholar, in fact, who had awakened in Raphael his love of learning. Not formally schooled as a child, Raphael had begun by borrowing Homer’s
Iliad
from the sage old man who insisted he be called Baldassare, even by an inexperienced youth. After that literary suggestion had come the more humorous works of Aristophanes and Virgil. Raphael had rapidly devoured those as well, asking questions on the occasions they met, and listening to the wise, kindly elder statesman explain about the other great masterpieces he should come to know: the works of Socrates, Plato’s
Republic,
and particularly Aristotle’s writings concerning the soul. Raphael wanted to understand and to see things the way the brilliant minds did. He wanted that knowledge to move through him and out onto his panels and frescoes. His friendship with Castiglione had awakened something in him that had not been put down since. The evidence of that was his own steadily growing library on the Via dei Coronari. Like his workshop at night, the library of leather-bound volumes was a sanctuary, a place to be surrounded and possessed by something far grander than himself.

Raphael looked at the old man’s kind face—the dark turban and cloak that drew the viewer to his eyes and small, subtle mouth. Raphael smiled sadly, greatly missing his sage counsel.
If he were here now, he would tell me I have taken on too much,
Raphael thought.
Unlike my father, he would tell me I am too possessed by the things outside myself to hear the things within.
S,
he would say exactly that. And he would be right.

The fire in the coal brazier beside his easel had gone to glowing embers long ago. It was time to go home, but he could not move. From somewhere he had not been for a long time, the energy surged. It clawed at him. The desire. The need. With it came a flare of that old, relentless ambition.
Create!
it urged.
Paint!

All through the night, Raphael remained inside the small, private room in his workshop. Now, having brought his easel here, and having bolted the door, he stood alone, dripping with oil paint, hands darkened with chalk, and blinded by an urge not to delegate or discuss, but to work.

And when the flurry ended near dawn, when he was spent and exhausted, what he saw spread around himself on the floor was a sea of parchment as thick as a layer of new snow, and each sheaf was decorated with hands, eyes, arms. As he glanced around, only then did he realize that the images were all parts of her.

Why was Margherita Luti so set against him? And, more than that, with so many other pressing commissions to trouble him, why did it matter?

You have never cared this much about obtaining a model before,
he heard the echo of Giovanni da Udine’s declaration before he had gone home earlier. And Giovanni was right. The young Florentine woman he had used for the many earlier Madonnas, so blond and serene, had let him sketch her face, study her eyes, nose, and lips, been paid for the trouble, then left his life compliantly.

Was it merely Margherita’s refusal that had confounded him? Surely not. In spite of a measured attraction to her, he now grudgingly reminded himself, Margherita still was nothing like the lusty Roman women whom he seduced with impressive regularity. Why then was he absolutely compelled to convince her to enter his world? Certainly she was the Madonna. That face, the delicacy of her bones, the luminescence of her skin, her haunting eyes, and the unmistakable pride born by the mother of Christ.