The Ruby Ring

  “Word travels that fast within your sphere?”

  “Signorina Luti,” Giulio laughed. “You have no idea!”

  As they parted, and Antonio led her away from the thinning crowd along the Borgo Santo Spirito, she saw his suddenly mirthless smile. “At least tell me, after that little scene, that the great and powerful Raffaello has given you some money for your trouble.”

  “I wouldn’t tell you if he had.”

  “We have always been like family,” he indignantly retorted, drawing up her hand between his and squeezing it so tightly that it hurt. It was the first time in her life he had ever frightened her. It was also the first time she had ever truly disliked him.

  Her body went rigid as she wrenched her hand away and shot him a warning glare. “Never touch me like that again!”

  “Forgive me, but it has been your custom always to tell me everything!”

  “S, once it was, Antonio. But lately, much has changed—it seems for all of us.” Two entirely different worlds had collided boldly for her back there on the Borgo Santo Spirito, and she had accepted, for the first time, her odd new place between them.

  11

  THE MOUNTING NUMBER OF COMMISSIONS DREW RAPHAEL’S attention in the next days. There was the work at Agostino Chigi’s chapel, in Santa Maria del Popolo, and the unfinished portrait of his friend Castiglione to complete and see shipped. As well, there was the initial drawing personally requested by the pope for a formal portrait of his good friend Cardinal Bibbiena, and Bibbiena’s bathing room was still waiting to be decorated. The papal stanza was finally complete after two years, but Raphael had been awarded yet another large papal commission—the pope’s dining room, to ornament intricately in fresco with such grand themes as the Fire in the Borgo, the Battle of Ostia, and the Coronation of Charlemagne.

  As the workshop mastro, he was responsible for all frescoes, paintings, and initial drawings. Raphael did dozens of quick sketches each day, and held meetings with his assistants to communicate how he wished each work positioned, down to the character placement and facial expressions. Then he handed each one over to a member of his entourage to sketch so that he might later critique it. Amid this blur of never-ending commissions and responsibility, Raphael consoled himself with the courtly idea that the genius he offered was in the inception of the idea, not in its execution. But the portrait of the Madonna for the church at San Sisto had become his obsession.

  He still envisioned her standing on a pillow of clouds, feet bare, the clothing simple and elegant—the perfect combination of ethereal, exquisite and yet reality, as Margherita herself was. He wanted a human Madonna. A woman who was flesh and blood, one who could laugh and love and cry, and who would move the viewer by merely seeing her. He felt a powerfully sensual jolt surge up through him again, the one he always felt when he imagined her. His heart began to pound, and Raphael squeezed his eyes, forcing back the image.

  “You called for me, mastro?” Giulio asked, coming into his small, private sitting room, which faced the busy Via dei Coronari.

  It had been a long day of working on the large-scale drawings for the new sequence of the frescoes at Chigi’s villa, and they were both weary. Sun slatted through the half-open shutters and streaked both of their faces.

  “Sit with me, Giulio.”

  The younger artist took a small tufted footstool and drew it near to Raphael’s armchair. As neither of them yet had the energy to wash, both were stained with splashes of cool pastel-colored plaster from the newly finished image of two flying angels in the first new Vatican fresco. Their hands were marked with drawing chalk from other works.

  “We are very busy these days,” Raphael began on a sigh.

  “S, it is so,” Giulio sighed too, exhausted beyond words from the strain and demands of the day.

  “When you first came to my studio four years ago, you showed great promise.”

  “I was very young,” he countered shyly. “But eager beyond measure.”

  “Fourteen was when I began my own apprenticeship. And in your case, the promise you showed has been fulfilled. You are now a brilliant artist in your own right.”

  “You have many years and experience beyond me, mastro.”

  “God delivers His great gifts in His time, Giulio mio, not ours.”

  “Your words are too much praise for my heart to hear. I believe I have tried very hard, and yet—”

  Raphael directed his gaze straight on so Giulio would grasp the sincerity, as well as the absolute commitment there. “Yesterday, Gianfrancesco Penni thought your drawings of the women for the Borgo area of the new fresco were my own.”

  “It is not so!”

  “Giulio, I want you to decorate and to oversee the new stanza on my behalf.”

  “For the entire room?” Giulio gulped. He leaned forward, his mouth dropping open like a hinge. For a long moment, he said nothing else. “That commission is from the Holy Father himself, for his private dining room!”

  “I know well what I ask of you, Giulio, and I would not do it now if you were not ready.”

  “It cannot be so. Gianfrancesco and Giovanni are far more experienced than I. Should you not bestow upon one of them the honor of assisting you in this way?”

  “They both have many talents, but it is your help in this I require. It is your technique alone, the delicacy of your figures, that can mirror my intent, and help me be free to move on to conceptualize our many other commissions.”

  “This is an incomparable opportunity for me.”

  “And I would not offer it to you if I did not believe you were prepared for the task.”

  “But how—rather, where do I begin?”

  “I shall help you every step of the way. We shall meet each morning and go over concepts, other figure designs, body positioning, once we are both rested and clear-eyed, and of course I will supervise your progress all the while. He leaned forward in his stiff-backed leather chair. “You can do this, Giulio. I know that you can.”

  “Your belief in me is staggering, mastro.”

  “I only see what is already there before me.” Raphael smiled kindly.

  Raphael took a sip of wine and gazed out at the soothing fire, the golden flames which warmed the grand and vaulted room beyond the doorway.

  “I saw your new sketches for the Madonna today,” Giulio offered, cutting into the contemplative silence that had risen up between them.

  Raphael continued to stare into the fire. “And how did you find them?”

  “Your concept is amazingly innovative.”

  “And would you suppose His Holiness will be pleased?”

  “At least as pleased at the model you have chosen, if not the majesty of the whole of it.”

  Giulio was smiling at him, seeing some of what Raphael felt, in spite of his attempt to hide it. “She is an extraordinary beauty. That comes through even in your rough sketches of her.”

  “That she is. As a model, she is beyond compare.”

  Giulio was still looking at him. “And as something more, mastro?”

  Only then did Raphael turn again to meet Giulio’s gaze. The boy’s open worship of him created an odd place of safety for a man who needed to show caution in all that he did. “I am betrothed to the niece of one of the most powerful men in Rome. That is an honor of which I could not have dreamed as the son of an unheralded court artist in Urbino. As I was recently reminded, no mere artist has ever married so high.”

  “But you do not love Signorina Bibbiena.”

  “I do not. But I have worked very hard to achieve all that I have now. It has been my entire world.”

  Giulio prodded the burning wood with an iron poker so that he was no longer a nuisance by looking directly at the master, who had clearly become uncomfortable with the conversation. The flames flared. “Yet one is your work while the other is your life.”

  “Both have been bound up with one another for so long I am uncertain if I can see one for the other now.”

  “And yet y
ou fancy the baker’s daughter?”

  “It is dangerous right now for me to do so in any meaningful way.” Raphael lay his head back against the chair and closed his eyes. “It would only jeopardize her reputation, as well as my own standing in Rome. And there is so very much at stake for all of us just now.”

  “So you see her as more than a tumble or two?”

  “I do not see her in that way at all, Giulio mio. I never have. And she would never have me that way even if I did. That is the very heart of the problem. She is unwilling, and I am unavailable for more.” He shot to his feet, raking back his shoulder-length hair. “And it is that which is driving me half mad!”

  12

  FRANCESCO LUTI HAD GIVEN HIS DAUGHTER A GREAT deal to consider in the weeks that followed, especially since those weeks did not include another summons to Raphael’s workshop. She had pushed him away, her father said. But there had been no choice. Especially when she had no idea how to battle her fear. It was a fear of what might become of her if she gave in to the power of her wildly growing and erotic feelings for him.

  She thought so much of her mother in these complex days, and craved even more something she could never have again—a mother’s wise and tender counsel. What would she have advised about this? she wondered. Marina Luti certainly had grand dreams for her daughters, but would this have been among them? Might she have urged caution or encouraged her to move forward with her whole heart?

  I miss you now more than ever, Madre mia . . . was the aching refrain Margherita could not chase from her mind. What would you think? What would you have me do?

  On a cold and gray afternoon in early December, with rain clouds darkening Rome, Margherita stood beside her sister in the small, stifling kitchen of the family bakery. Her hair was pulled tightly away from her face, knotted with a limp piece of brown cloth. The body already immortalized magnificently in sketches as the Madonna was clothed now in a simple work dress of gray cotton, covered over with a white apron. As the bread oven blazed beside her, filled with new fragrant loaves of sweet bread, she and Letitia shaped more of the risen dough in two large earthen bowls for the batch to come next.

  Beside them, wet with perspiration, Francesco Luti pushed the long wooden peel into the fire to retrieve the loaves that were fully baked. They were a team of quiet efficiency, each knowing their roles. But the pounding, mixing, and straining that went on daily to produce bread for this neighborhood of Rome still left them all exhausted.

  Margherita leaned forward over the bowl, her face flushed with the strain and from the heat, her mind free to move around thoughts and memories of moments. She thought of Antonio, then of Raphael. There was no comparison to how she felt when she was with Raphael. The raw energy she felt when he looked at her—the way he looked at her, his eyes studying her with a strangely devoted intensity, and her own body reacting in the deepest places to it.

  But her weakness was simply her awe of him. It must be. Raphael was not a man, not a real one whom she could ever understand. He was handsome, cultured, and intimidatingly well educated—a myth and a legend in Rome. They could never speak of the same things, never live the same sort of experiences. Still, for some reason, she had been allowed to stand in the glow of that greatness, and dare to imagine being swept away by the vitality and fire that was Raffaello.

  Margherita stood straight, let out a sigh, and brushed her glistening brow with the back of her hand. Francesco shot her a glowering look of disapproval. “Attention, cara! Mind the dough! You know well enough what will happen to the bread if you knead it too roughly!”

  “Forgive me, Padre mio.”

  Letitia’s two older boys were playing in the stairwell beyond the kitchen and the small, stifling room was shaking with the activity. Margherita thought about her existence—the certainty and predictability of it, feeling trapped by the cold, gray day beyond the thin, peeling walls. As tears welled in her eyes, she lifted her chin defiantly and forced them away. Never before had she permitted herself the sin of self-pity, and she was not about to begin today.

  As she turned to fetch the dish of salt for the next batch that Letitia had begun, she saw her sister and father standing, mouths agape, at the sudden presence of an elegantly clad gentleman standing before them. He had a thick swath of silvery hair and a dignified air, and was clad in a black velvet cape and hat with a padded brim, and a heavy gold chain around his neck.

  “Forgive my intrusion. I called at your door but there was no answer,” he said in a richly schooled tone thick with condescension. “I am Giovanni da Udine, assistant to Raffaello, and I have come with a message for Signorina Luti.”

  Margherita dried her hands on a heavy towel laying beside the bowl, exchanged a glance with her sister and father, then moved forward tentatively. “I am Signorina Luti.”

  “S, I see that you are,” he said appraisingly, clearly having seen her likeness on Raphael’s worktable. He, however, was not so taken with her as Giulio Romano had been. His gaze told her that. “I have come to say that the mastro bids you to return with your chaperone to our studio at your earliest convenience.”

  “He has finished the Madonna? It has been but a fortnight.”

  “Alas, no, signorina, the work is yet incomplete. But there is enough there for the mastro to begin adding your skin tones.”

  Margherita tried very hard not to show, in the presence of this tall, self-assured artist, her pleasure at the request. While Raphael had told her he would send for her, as the days had worn on, and her life had returned to the normal, predictable pace of a Trastevere baker’s daughter, she had begun to think of it all as a very fanciful dream.

  “I am uncertain when that might be,” she forced herself to lie. His expression was arrogant, his tone expectant. She was simply another girl, another model. “This is a very busy time for my father’s bakery here, with the seasonal fruit bread now expected by our patrons.” Knowing the expression she would find on his face, Margherita refused to look at her father.

  “I am quite certain we could part with you for a few short hours, sister,” Letitia coolly offered.

  “And what of Donato?”

  “My good husband told me only this morning of the stable master’s pleasure at his invitation to the studio of so great an artist as Raffaello. I do believe another visit would only strengthen his standing there.”

  So it was decided. Margherita hesitated only a moment longer. “Will the mastro find Friday agreeable, perhaps in the afternoon after the last loaves of bread have been seen to?”

  His nod was a courtly gesture, his costly gold chain glistening in the firelight cast from the open bread oven. “I was given leave to accept any circumstance, and occasion, you might be inclined to propose.”

  “Any?” She arched a brow.

  “Such is the value Raffaello places upon the completion of your portrait, signorina.”

  This man was smooth, experienced, scholarly, she thought, with his silver hair and high manner. He was certainly cautious of her—and she was wary of him as she walked him politely to the door. “I take it you are not in agreement with his opinion, Signor da Udine,” she said, opening the door for him then standing beside it, with her hand on the heavy iron handle.

  “It is not my place to agree or disagree with the mastro’s choices, Signorina Luti, only to see them to fruition in any way that I am able.”

  His indifference was almost palpable. “Tell him, if you please, that my escort and I shall arrive at the hour of four on the morrow, and that I understand this to be the final time he shall have need of me.”

  “As you wish.” He nodded again. “I shall tell him exactly that,” said Giovanni da Udine. And the way in which he said it made it quite clear to Margherita that he thought her a silly girl, a model of modest value, and that he cared not in the slightest whether she even returned to the workshop at all.

  AS THE MOON GLOWED above the cobbled stone streets, wet with fog and rain, Raphael made a smiling and grand entrance into the
crowded rooms of a thriving bordello in the Quartiere dell’ Ortaccio. But even as he gave his cloak to a door guard, and stepped smilingly down the smooth stone steps, his calloused drawing hand throbbed. As he and his men entered the richly appointed foyer, with its tapestry-lined walls and glittering wall braziers, his lower back ached from bending over the large sheets of paper glued together to make the cartoon. The full-scale drawing of the next sequence in the new papal room, this one for the Battle of Ostia, with its dozens of detailed figures and boats, various costumes, and the placement of the pope, had been difficult.

  Before that, he had done six sheets of studies for the concept of the statuary in Chigi’s chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, and met with Gianfrancesco Penni for hours about it. He had then gone to an excavation site and met with his new advisers on the antiquities projects. Then, before returning to the workshop, he had spent the remainder of the afternoon on a scaffold in the pope’s stanza, wetting and redoing one of the female faces in the Fire in the Borgo sequence that had not turned out precisely as he wished.

  It was grueling work, he warned his staff of artists, knowing that he would not be the only one who was weary and pained. Toil well for me and I shall reward you with all the women and drink you desire, he had told his men. And now it was time to do just that. Rome and Florence were full of rival artisans angry at what they saw as the increasing power and influence of one man. And so, keeping a contented staff of artists became almost as important to Raphael as completing the work itself.

  Earlier in the day, Giulio had a run-in with Sebastiano Luciani, whose anger was rising over the commissions he believed were owed to his own benefactor, Michelangelo Buonarroti. They were commissions Raphael’s workshop had won instead. Young and still unsure, Giulio had been shaken by the confrontation, which likely accounted for the mistakes in the frescoed figure of the woman that Raphael himself had been called to correct.