The King's Diamond (15 page)

‘The sea?'

‘Yes! Do you not see it?' A picture was forming before me. I swirled the stones with my fingers. ‘These sapphires: do not cut them. Keep them as they are, clouded and raw. They are the waves, and the flaws in them are the foam. Their faults are their virtues. Above them is tossed a ship of gold, guided by the stars. Use the diamonds for that. A brooch: you understand?'

Cellini was catching my fire. ‘Ingenious. Yes. Yes, the King's love, tormented on a sea of passion, following the stars of hope. By God, it is a sonnet.' He began striding up and down. ‘At the centre there must be a great stone. But which? Which? We shall find out. And there will be enamels, and chiselled decoration on the ship, everything in detail. You will see her falconets, her capstans, her topgallants. She is under full sail, bearing onwards, onwards.'

He snatched up a piece of paper and began to sketch. Then he looked up with a sudden glare. ‘Of course, you have money?'

I tossed down my supply of golden Papal ducats and double ducats, bearing the Coronation of the Virgin on one side, and Pope Clement's Medici coat of arms on the other. ‘Here is my purse.'

Cellini looked up at me with his impish smile. ‘It is time, my friend, to open it.'

Day by day, I watched in impatience as Cellini worked. He began by modelling in wax. I saw him chisel the fine details of the ship, the waves with the sockets left for the sapphires, and the raging clouds where the diamonds would shine through. ‘Nine sapphires,' he told me. ‘There is no room for more. The others you can throw away. No one will ever find another use for stones like those.' I noticed he had also left a space for a stone at the centre of the ship, just where the helmsman stands in the steerage-house with his eye on the lodestone needle of the compass. Cellini tapped the socket with his scalpel. ‘That is for the chrysoprase. Do not worry if it seems dull now. It will shine, it will shine. It stands for fire: light, the lantern in the darkness. The illumination that passion makes in the lover's soul, and which guides him in one direction only. He never loses that; never swerves. He will do anything for her. Anything.' There was a fierce light in the goldsmith's eye. I wondered at that moment what it was that drove him, and gave him his own fire. But to me he was like my Persian emerald: shadowed. I could not see far inside.

First thing every morning we sat together and simply gazed on the stones in that lucid morning light, and turned over ideas. This was
the time when I felt my ignorance concerning the lady most keenly. One day, about two weeks after my arrival in Rome, I received at last a reply from Uncle Bennet. It was addressed from the Palace of Hampton Court; it had been four weeks coming, and had followed me from Venice to Genoa to Rome. I ran with it to Cellini's workshop and left him to gaze on the stones while I unfolded the letter and took out my cipher.

I put the letter down, my mind in a whirl. I was exultant: I had been right, from the very first. The King's love was no chimera. The French marriage: yes, that troubled me. But I hoped it was a mere dynastic match, a union of nations that would leave the King's heart free for his lover. Still, I knew I was guessing in the dark.
There is a web spread against me.
What did that mean? And who was this man in Rome? I took paper and my cipher, and wrote back to Bennet at once, informing him of my arrival in Rome, and promising to do all I could to discover the identity of this mysterious emissary.
In return you must find for me the lady's name
, I went on.
Who she is, what she looks like in every particular. If word of the affair is spreading, surely you can find it out. Go to Cornelius Heyes, who has supplied so many love-trinkets to the King. Offer him money: I will repay you. Be quick: I shall leave Rome as soon as I may.

My hours spent in the workshop drained and exhausted me, and my impatience would not let me sit still when I left it. Sometimes I took Martin away with me and wandered the city. We walked all that district until I knew it backwards: the lanes behind the Banchi, the grand shops, the church of the Florentines and the great buildings of the Papal government. Further down towards the Campo dei Fiori and my inn, the palazzi of the nobles clustered thickly, often with shops beneath. And always, every few yards, it seemed, there was a church or convent with some saint's tomb, pilgrims pressing to get inside, and beggars and sellers of holy relics crowding round them. There were Englishmen among them, but these were no royal envoys. They had travelled for weeks, perhaps, to bring their prayers here where so many saints lay at rest. I could see the need and the hunger in their eyes. They were like me, I felt: souls in quest, urgent and dissatisfied, though I was a pilgrim of a worldlier kind, in search of fame, and beauty wrought in gold.

When I felt more oppressed than usual I led Martin up the Via Giulia and crossed the river by the Bridge of Sant' Angelo. On the opposite bank was the Castle of Sant' Angelo, the forbidding citadel
of the popes with its vast drum-shaped tower, built of rose-coloured stone. It was here the Pope kept his treasury, his arsenals, and his dungeons of heretics and those with whom he had become displeased. To the west stretched the Borgo of Saint Peter, the walled suburb around the Pope's palace. I was headed for Saint Peter's church: the very centre of the Christian world. Surely, I thought, if I could find peace from my racing thoughts anywhere, then it would be here. The first time I walked up from the river and stood before the labyrinthine mass of buildings that made up the greatest church in Christendom, I stopped and gazed in astonishment. What lay before me was really a trinity of churches. In front was the truncated shell of Old Saint Peter's, roofless and half demolished, the nave broken off short, arches left stranded in mid-air, with the centuries-old bell-tower still standing before it. Beyond the old church, soaring high above it, was the incomplete vaulting that might, one day, support the dome of the new building. It was to be immense, and eclipse all other buildings ever conceived. But for the moment, weeds and trees grew from half-built walls that had stood untouched for twenty years after work on it was abandoned. Everyone knew that Pope Clement VII would do nothing towards completing it. His money, what there was of it, was spent on war and on luxury. Yet a third building, a plain barn-like affair of grey stone, rose over the roofless sanctuary of the old church, keeping the rain off the high altar and the tomb of the Apostle Peter himself and the crowds of pilgrims flocking round it. To me, that first time I saw it, the effect was of one church caught in the act of devouring another, a monstrous instant frozen in time.

Here I pressed along with thousands of others to hear Pope Clement say Mass. His Holiness stood at the altar behind the four giant twisted porphyry columns, and raised the host above his head. I gazed at him, this man who was Christ's own Vicar, and who had stirred up a war that had brought all of northern Italy to blood and desolation. He was about fifty, young for a pope, clean-shaven with
elegant features and heavily lidded eyes. He glanced around with an expression of noble disdain. I thought of all the things that were said of him, his fabled deviousness, his pride, his malice and cowardice that together made his intentions as unreadable as if they were written in cipher. When Mass was finished I stopped to light a candle at the chapel of Saint Petronilla, patroness of friendly relations between emperor and pope, and prayed that the war would keep its distance until I was many miles on the road for home.

As I was hurrying away down the steps, a voice hailed me from behind. I turned and saw the Fieschi brothers coming towards me. They looked tired.

‘Still chasing our Indulgence,' Piero explained. ‘And it is a difficult run, I can tell you.'

‘Fifty ducats we've paid to the Datary,' put in Federico, ‘another hundred to the clerk to the Apostolic Camerlengho, an audience promised with His Holiness yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, but none forthcoming.'

‘They say the Pope can decide nothing, with the war to think about. But we have not given up.'

‘
Sempre la speranza
,' I said, punning on the name of their ship. Always hope. They smiled wanly. True enough, the Pope had no interest in small morsels like the Fieschi brothers. They would be picked over by the lesser officials, and if they could find no patron to help them to an audience they would go away empty-handed. That could so easily be my own fate too, once I got home to England. It was a problem that weighed heavily on me, my insignificance, and my lack of a patron at Court. When I had raised the question with Bennet once he had whistled and shaken his head.

‘My dear Richard,' he had said, ‘finding your brother a place at the college is one thing: there are a hundred places to fill, after all, and he is a good scholar. But to bring the likes of you before the King? That is a different matter entirely.' Before long, this was just what I would be forced to confront. I bowed to the brothers and led Martin
back down the hill to the bridge, and the little studio on the Vicolo di Calabraga. I did not like to be away from my gold and my stones for long.

 

Three weeks had passed since my arrival in Rome, and Cellini had moved on to the next stage of his work. Paulino took down a pair of large earthenware jars and removed the stoppers. Both contained fine, white powders. ‘Gesso in one,' Cellini explained, ‘and in the other the dust of old clay that has been fired once before.' He took equal scoops from both jars and mixed them in a third, adding water until he had a smooth liquid. Next he took out a small flask and poured a greenish stream from it over the wax mould of the ship. Then he wiped it into all the crevices using a fine ermine-hair brush. ‘Olive oil,' he murmured. ‘Not too much.' He straightened up and looked at me with a devilish smile. ‘So much for the cookery. Now for the work in earnest.' He took some stiff clay from a nearby tub and made a rim around the mould. Then he poured the white gesso mixture on to the wax. I watched in excitement as Cellini smoothed it out over the surface with a brush that was slightly larger than the first.

‘And when the plaster is set?' I prompted. ‘We are ready for the gold?'

‘Not so fast,' Cellini growled. ‘Do you want a quick, botched job, or a work of mastery? First I trim and smooth the plaster cast with a knife, and bring it to perfection. Then we shall use this model to make the last mould of all, which will be of bronze. Only then shall we begin to play with gold.'

Every evening, when the light began to fail, he put down his tools and damped the fire. Then we set out together to see, as Cellini called it, the real life of Rome. The Carnival was just beginning. In a couple of weeks it would be Martedì Grasso, Shrove Tuesday, and Benvenuto promised me a night of madness such as I would never forget. Even now, crowds poured out into the streets with the setting
sun, gentlemen and nobles, ladies in litters, their masked faces peering from behind the curtains, and pageboys carrying lighted torches before them. There were even cardinals riding their Spanish mules that cost more than a good horse, all decked in scarlet velvet and gold, with Moorish slaves holding silken umbrellas over their heads and their dozens of attendants and guards. They were bound perhaps on some pilgrimage to a nobleman who owned a particular statue of a saint, where there would be music, and dancing, and even some singing boys and a courtesan or two. Darting in between were groups of musicians, acrobats, zanies or dwarfs, all fantastically dressed as Saracens or particoloured fools, who stopped suddenly to perform ribald plays and interludes. The crowds gathered to watch and laugh, and then moved on. In the dark back alleys, the brothels were in full swing. Outside them in little wooden booths were the petty clerks and moneylenders who had bought the rights to sell indulgences where they were most needed. As we passed we heard their hoarse cries, ‘Sodomy, twenty ducats!' ‘Adultery, fifteen!' ‘All sins, past and future, only three hundred ducats!' The money from these indulgences, most of it, went back to the Pope's treasury; but of course the vast organisation who marketed these documents also took its share. Who else? The Fuggers.

Every night Cellini led me into a fresh kind of madness. There were visits to the sumptuous houses of the courtesans that were scattered freely throughout our quarter; there were wild supper parties at the houses of his friends. Here I met Francesco Berni, the poet who could turn you a satire or a sonnet on any subject you threw at him. And there was Michelagnolo the Sienese sculptor, and three or four of the foremost painters of Rome. These were employed on the Pope's various villas, or on the frescos in the Apostolic Palace; they had all been pupils of the great Raphael. There were noblemen there too, young blades, mostly, but older men as well sometimes, patrons of the various artists, who fancied a taste of their free-spirited world. Each one had a woman on his arm: courtesans, plainly, some of
whom gathered together in little knots to discuss in giggling whispers ‘How I first went wrong'.

After a few hours' sleep we were back in the workshop: myself bleared and half-asleep, but Cellini burning with his usual fire, his hand rock-steady at his scalpel. I looked again at the plaster model of the ship under full sail, which he had broken free of the wax. Every line of it, the clouds, the stars, the waves, breathed with life. I sensed that without those riotous nights, none of this would exist.

The bronze, when he cast it, searing hot from his furnace in a brilliant stream as bright as the sun, was better yet. Word was spreading that Benvenuto was engaged on a work worth seeing. Most days there were three or four nobles in the shop, sitting over wine and watching. I had thought Cellini would fly into one of his rages at these distractions, but instead he found their presence flattering. He was young, not yet thirty, but he was the maestro, and he was executing a work worthy of the greatest.