The Ruby Ring, Page 3

  He felt himself breathe more easily as he reached the top of the hill and passed beneath a rich canopy of bristling evergreens. Before him was a sweeping view of the ancient wonders of the city, including the Pantheon, which sat majestically in the distance. Raphael was late already, but for a moment it seemed not to matter as he slowed his pace along the gravel walkway, bordered with delicate purple bluebells and a shimmer of perfume from the wild jasmine bushes. The pope wished to be given a personal accounting of the work going on in his room, with its odd-shaped ceiling, four truncated pie shapes, in which the artwork needed to fit exactly. After that, there was the work at Chigi’s villa to assess—the mythological fresco, a scene of Perseus and Medusa, being added to the fresco there.

  Raphael drew in a heavy breath of the deeply scented surroundings. He lingered for a moment near a lush jacaranda tree. High above the rooftops and domes, above the little classical statues set between the trees, a dark flock of birds crossed the Roman sky. He felt his heart slow. This lush hill, the escape here, was the closest thing he had to a personal bit of life. Of course there were the women, courtesans, other men’s wives, and the ever-present whores who threw themselves boldly at any famed artist. Yet they were nothing but a momentary indulgence—a distraction.

  He thought of Maria Bibbiena again, the woman to whom he was betrothed, and he cringed. With sallow skin, sunken dark eyes, Maria was quiet and consumptive. But she was fascinated by the painter from Urbino. Shortly after arriving in Rome, her uncle, the powerful Cardinal Bibbiena, had offered her to Raphael as a prize. And thus he found himself now in a situation from which there was no escape.

  In a foolish moment, full of more ambition than wisdom, he had accepted the cardinal’s offer. Seeing quickly the repercussions of a moment’s wild decision, he had tried promptly to break the agreement. And he had been trying ever since. But the cardinal was tied as closely to Pope Leo as if they were brothers. Offend one, he quickly saw, and he offended the other. So delay had become his sole defense. An impolite tactic that had, thus far, lasted four years.

  He kept walking as the grand domes and towers of the city became nothing more than gray shadows across the Roman vista behind him. But he liked the rain, the vital sense of nature bearing down upon him. He felt alive beneath its increasingly heavy force. Alive and almost free.

  Raphael passed a marble bust of Socrates, a hand extended upward toward the heavens, the other bearing a heavy book. There were strollers coming down the hill toward him, men in their nether hose, velvet caps, and cloaks, women in full, wide gowns and decorated hoods. As he glanced up, a female figure walking alone behind them drew near. She wore a midnight-blue cloak, hood up over her head, and she was shielding a child she held beneath the weighty reach of fabric.

  The child was a small boy, whose eyes, like hers, were magnificent, a deep and fathomless brown, turned out upon the world, yet wary of it. But it was her gaze that drew him unexpectedly, beneath fabric that framed her face. The face was a perfect oval, her skin as flawless as the child’s. In spite of her youth there was an unexpected gentle grace in her eyes that could only have come from the pressures of a difficult life. His body blocked her path. She stopped. His throat closed. He did not recall ever being made speechless in the sudden presence of a beautiful woman. But the rightness of her made it so.

  “Ges,” he heard himself murmur quite against his will.

  She was still looking at him, the hood of her wet cloak framing her face in the way a veil would. She moved backward a single step, not afraid, but as though she sensed something impending. She fixed a radiant gaze on him with what Raphael found was a painful intensity. Her smooth face, with its enormous, expressive brown eyes and creamy olive skin, stunned him.

  She was, this woman, this stranger, he knew instantly, the Madonna.

  “Perdona,” she said, softly trying to move past, but she spoke in a voice that resonated cool confidence. Her voice was full and slightly husky, belying a hidden sensuality. It was not what he expected, given the extraordinary delicate grace in her eyes, and that alone rocked him.

  He stepped backward, thinking in that instant of absolutely nothing he could say to stop her.

  “Signora, I—”

  The two words across his lips, which came out as a rasp of sound, were a surprise to him. As the rain fell, she lifted her face and looked at him again. In this odd light—gray, yet with a streak of sunlight through the heavy clouds—her face held a unique glow. Hers was an alluring beauty that bore no expectation, as though she had no idea how striking she truly was. In the world in which he now lived, full of privileged and eager women, that such a thing could even be was astonishing.

  He was completely disarmed, and she had uttered but a single word.

  “I must paint you,” he said, hearing the declaration pass his lips in a tone of desperation.

  He saw her frown slightly. There was a moment’s consideration. “Pray, excuse me. I am late in returning home.”

  He tried to think, to breathe, but he found himself unable to do either. “I . . . I am Raphael Sanzio,” he blurted, not with the confidence he had intended, but with the sudden abandon of a much younger, and less-experienced, man. “Would you allow me at least to make a sketch of you? I would be willing to pay you quite handsomely for it!”

  She looked up at him again. The silvery sun hit the bit of her hair above her forehead, and he saw that it had the exact color and sheen of sable.

  “Do you mock me, sir?”

  “I mock you not, signora.”

  “Would not the true Raffaello have a grand collection of companions or, at the least, a magnificent horse on which to ride? I doubt the great artist would walk a pathway alone as the common rest of us.”

  Raphael glanced around. He willed himself to slow the delivery of his words, so as not to frighten her away.

  “Perhaps it is so,” he said in a measured tone that he struggled to find. So she was possessed of a natural sort of spirit as well. The astonishment intensified. “And yet the man they call mastro might also take this quicker route alone if he were in need of a moment’s reflection from all the pressures placed upon him.”

  Her smile was a fleeting gesture. “If that is true, signore, then I am a contessa.”

  He moved a step nearer to her, desperate for her to feel the same sweeping power of the inevitability that he felt. “If you told me you were such, I would be obliged to believe you.”

  Someone called out to him then, shattering the moment. As she clutched the wide-eyed boy to her chest, Raphael turned and saw his youngest assistant, Giulio Romano, out of breath and running down the hill toward him.

  “Buon giorno to you—Signor Sanzio,” he heard her say with just the slightest hint of mocking. It was clear that she had not believed a single word. When he turned back to her, she had already stepped away from him and was moving toward a crowd of other strollers heading back down into Rome. Raphael went after her and had nearly caught up with her when he felt a hand clamp down on his shoulder. He spun around angrily, preparing to cast off the youth’s hand as though he were an assailant.

  “Dio!” Giulio panted. “His Holiness is nearly out of patience with you! He has held his schedule all morning! I came to find you before any more damage could be done!”

  Raphael glanced back down the hill but the girl, his Madonna, had disappeared into the growing crowd. For an instant, he thought of going after her, but his priority must be the Holy Father.

  “You must go the other way! I will go to the pope but you must find the young woman with the blue cloak, carrying a child! Find out where she lives! She must not be allowed to get away!”

  The young man smiled, knowing the mastro’s penchant for beautiful women, having seen the many who had crossed the doorstep of the workshop. Giulio Romano nodded to Raphael and dashed down the hill, moving quickly toward the daunting shadows, the walls of weathered stone, and the many magnificent ruins of ancient Rome.

  PRESSING BACK the
odd sensation of the man’s gaze on Il Gianicolo, Margherita walked beneath the swinging sign above the door, and back into the family’s small bakery on the Via Santa Dorotea. She kissed her father’s fat, stubbled cheek as he stood wiping his hands on a soiled apron, tied at his stout middle. Francesco Luti was rough and pagan, a little bullfrog of a man, with wide-set green eyes flecked with brown, a thick neck, and a large mouth. His shirt collar was stained with a brown ring of perspiration and he stood, wide-legged, on a floor covered with a thin patina of flour. He smelled of the familiar fragrance of flour and sweat. It was the only fragrance that had ever been about him, Margherita thought. She drew back the hood of the blue velvet cloak, and gently set Matteo at her feet. The child clung to her leg for a moment, then crawled away.

  The bakery was cramped and stifling from the blazing bread ovens behind the muslin curtain. Everywhere there were wicker baskets brimming with fresh bread and rolls. Dense sweet nut bread, airy round loaves stuffed with wine-soaked raisins, strips of sweet knotted bread called sfrappole, and pizzelles, the little light wafers the baker gave out to children who he favored. The walls of the small shop once had been a delicate cerulean blue when it had housed a cobbler’s shop. But that was from another lifetime, before the heat of a bakery, flour, and time had faded it almost beyond recognition, and caused the paint behind the baskets to peel away steadily from the plaster walls. Out beyond a rounded door was a small back garden with a few meager vegetables growing through dirt and weeds, and a line of white laundry moving with the rhythm of a now cool and, once again, rainless breeze.

  “And where have you been, my girl with the penchant for wandering?” he gruffly asked his younger daughter. “I expect you to help me with the baccio and yet out you go with the child and your sister is here, sick with dread!”

  “Dio, Padre, Letitia is always sick with something.” She smiled and drew a warm pizzelle from the wooden tabletop. Francesco Luti slapped his daughter’s hand, as if to prevent her from taking it, but it was a playful lifelong gesture, the grand way in which the famiglia Luti displayed affection. It was, in fact, the only way. Emotion, Francesco Luti ordained, was a sign of weakness. No good could come of an open heart, he had warned his daughters. What he meant, Margherita knew, was that he had married their mother for love, and he had paid the heavy price of missing that love after her premature death.

  Margherita kissed her father’s cheek again in a whimsical way that always diffused his anger and, touching the boy on top of his head, moved into the back room as she removed the damp cloak. She went behind a muslin curtain to where her sister, Letitia, stood mixing water into a large earthen bowl of flour for their father’s next batch of bread dough.

  “I told him you would return,” Letitia said blandly, without looking up, “yet still he worries.”

  Letitia Perazzi cared little that Margherita had been off with her son. Matteo was her fourth son in a few short years, and a break from the whining, constantly nursing toddler was welcome. For this blissful morning, her three-year-old, Luca, had slept in the baby’s oak cradle near her, and the older two boys, Pietro and Jacopo, today had gone to help their father, Donato, at the Chigi stables.

  Mucking out horse droppings and oiling grand saddles was not a life of nobility, Letitia’s husband said, but an honest living nonetheless, and as close to greatness as he ever would get. He put food on their table and helped Francesco to keep a roof above their home and the bakery. And that, for him, was enough.

  “Prego, Margherita! Do you have a reason, better than the last time, why you were out and not here stoking the fire for the afternoon loaves!”

  Margherita traced a casual finger along the rough-hewn table, parting the thin dusting of flour there. “What would you think if I told you I met the great Raffaello today and he wished to paint me?”

  “So you mock your padre who still puts clothes on your back, and food in your belly? In spite of the fact that at your age you should be married?” her father snapped.

  Letitia chuckled at that and pulled down the muslin bodice of her dress to reveal the wide pink nipple of a swelling breast, onto which the little cherub in her arms quickly latched with rosebud lips. “Oh really, Padre mio, can you not see Margherita’s attempt to put even the slightest hint of a smile on that sour face of yours? Both of you have so little joy in your lives these days.”

  “What has joy to do with life, Letitia, can you tell me that, eh? Only something to betray your soul when you give into it, if you ask me!”

  As he looked back and forth between his two grown daughters, the quiet was broken by the smacking sound of the suckling child. Each of his daughters bore elements of their father, and their lost mother as well. Margherita’s features were more delicate, but her coloring was of Luti, shades of olive, and her skin smooth. Letitia was fair as new milk with crow-black hair gathered up and worn tight like a crown at the back of her head. She wore a coarse beige dress, a white apron around her waist, and rough leather shoes in the manner of a baker’s wife. Margherita wore her mother’s clothes. They were finer things, memories of her dreams wrapped in fabric and laces. Their size had been the same exactly. At times, late at night, when he had drunk too much trebbiano wine, Francesco would cry that his daughter tortured him by bringing him visions of the past. But Margherita, a daughter lonely for a mother’s love and dreams, reveled in that small connection left to her.

  “I did not actually believe it was him. Imagine! Well dressed or not, to pass himself off to anyone as the great artist,” Margherita casually explained. “And so I left.”

  “This man was well dressed?” Francesco stroked his short, square chin with two flour-caked fingers “What if it were him? Per l’amor di Dio! Did he . . . this man . . . this stranger to you . . . did he perchance offer to pay you for your trouble?”

  “He said he would pay to draw me, si”

  His round green eyes bulged with incredulity. “Did you at least tell him where to find you? Perhaps, if we saw some proof that—”

  “When a messenger came for him, I disappeared before he could proposition me further.”

  Beyond the little baking room, a bell tinkled over the door of the shop announcing a customer. Francesco glanced briefly toward the muslin curtain dividing the two spaces, then back at his daughters.

  “And what if it really were the great Raffaello? What on earth did you turn away from?”

  Margherita’s lips parted as she gazed in amazement at her father. Her young life was flour and water, and the predictability of days as a baker’s unmarried daughter. Then marriage, equally as expected, to Donato’s younger brother, Antonio, when she gave up hope of anything else.

  “Padre mio, worry not. The man I met, while grandly clothed, was alone. No good could come from my playing his foolish game. What would the great painter who walks among princes, dukes—and even our Holy Father—want with a common baker’s daughter anyway?”

  2

  AS HE MADE HIS WAY UP THE WIDE STONE STEPS OF THE Loggia della Benedizione and through the ornate Vatican gate archway, Raphael’s head swam with the image of the mysterious girl he had seen so briefly—especially her extraordinary eyes. They were the eyes of a Madonna.

  A wagon loaded with beef carcasses heading for the papal kitchens trundled past him along the path, then disappeared as two guards closed another gate behind it. Raphael did not notice the movement or the pages, or even the clergy in their starched vestments who passed him as he strode up the first wide flight of stone steps, and then the second, toward the stanza in which his assistants had been working, and where he had been told the Holy Father would graciously receive him.

  As the heels of his decorated leather boots clicked on the inlaid mosaic floor, Raphael did his best to chase the girl’s face from his mind. He needed to create a tolerable expression of humility instead of the flushed excitement he was feeling now. Not two days earlier, the pontiff had admonished him personally on the vices of women and their danger to a man with such
a powerful gift from God.

  “You waste yourself on lust, Raffaello mio,” he had sternly warned, pointing a fat, jeweled finger. “Better to join the priesthood, to keep yourself chaste, if you will not take Bibbiena’s niece as your wife!”

  Raphael thought of the pope with his own sin—gluttony—and pressed back a smile. Neither the pontiff, nor his cardinals, cared anything for Raphael, the man. Each cared only for the projects that would reflect their own greatness—and they were willing to see them to completion by any means.

  He was so deep in thought that when he came to the last corridor he did not notice at first that his way was coldly barred. Two stone-faced papal guards now stood before him in puffed crimson-and-gold striped uniforms, and steel helmets with red plumes. Today their halberds were raised to bar him when generally he was given free passage in the vast papal wing, the decoration of which had been largely his doing.

  “What is this? I am expected,” he said with a sharp note of indignation, his voice echoing through the ornate vastness.

  “You are late. In your absence, His Holiness agreed to receive another,” said the guard whom he knew best. The tone had been low and revealing. Raphael knew it was a warning of something he would not like. “Now you are to be made to wait.”

  “Who it is, Bernardo?”

  The guard leaned forward slightly, the plume waving on his steel helmet. “Signor Buonarroti.”

  “Michelangelo has returned to Rome? I thought he had stormed off to Florence months ago when our new Holy Father refused him a commission!”

  “Apparently he has returned.”

  It had taken very little time, in the previous papal reign, for the two great artists with very different temperaments to become rivals. Secretly, Raphael, younger by over twenty-eight years, regretted that turn of events. Michelangelo Buonarroti was a true genius. The first time he had seen the artist’s sculpture of the piet it had brought him to tears, as it did nearly everyone who saw it. Nothing finer, Raphael believed, had ever been wrought on this earth by human hands. And, in fact, they had worked together, a corridor away from one another—Raphael on the pope’s stanza, and Michelangelo on his Sistine ceiling. But it was not long before others, who wished to fuel the flames of their budding rivalry, began accusing Raphael of copying the style and color of Michelangelo’s characters, and any sense of camaraderie was lost to them forever.