The Ruby Ring

  “I am honored to be thought of thusly.” He lowered his eyes deferentially for a moment then looked up again, his smile broadened. “And so to what do I owe the pleasure of this memorable visit?”

  “I needed to be back here,” Margherita confessed. “I wished Signor Sanzio to be here in this place, to see and feel that which is special to me in my neighborhood.”

  “Then I am honored by the presence of both of you.” He put the dried candle wax into the burlap bag he held, then said, “I have little to give, but I would be honored to share a humble cup of wine and a bit of Luti bread in my private rooms with the great mastro and the woman who has brought him into our simple little church.”

  Raphael smiled. “The fare you offer would be most welcome indeed, Padre Giacomo,” he replied elegantly.

  They sat together in the small, curtained-off room behind the chapel, with its unadorned whitewashed walls and a small leaded-glass window with iron handle, speaking of art, the church, and Margherita’s perfectly exquisite simplicity as a Madonna. “I remember her as a little girl. It feels like only moments ago,” he said proudly.

  “I wish I had known her then,” Raphael responded with a smile. “What was she like?”

  “Oh, charming indeed! Always that, with those great round eyes of hers, and her husky little laugh. Yet with her unmistakable spark of fire from the very first. There was a time when she was a very little girl that she hid behind my altar table at Mass, simply because she wished to be sure to hear me properly, so devout was she as a child. Margherita, do you recall that?”

  “Of course,” she giggled. “My father scolded me soundly for it!”

  “And now she is a beautiful woman, grown and self-assured, with a fascinating new life before her. And I can only imagine the magnificence of our Margherita here as she has been painted by so great an artist.”

  “Then you shall come to my workshop to see it for yourself.”

  “Such a thing would not be possible!”

  Raphael tipped his head. “You do not wish it then?”

  “Rather, I cannot fathom it. I am a poor cleric, signore, unsuited for leaving the predictability of this little square where I am known and tolerated, I am afraid.”

  Raphael bit back a kind little smile, placing a finger over his lips for a moment, a large gold ring glittering there. “Then how will you ever approve the altarpiece of the Assumption that my assistants and I are going to paint for your altar niche?”

  “But why would you do such a thing?” The cleric’s stubby fingers splayed out across his mouth. “Surely you have other more pressing commissions from patrons who can pay you what your talent is worth!”

  “Because Signorina Luti values this place, and you, padre. It gives me the greatest pleasure to make her happy. And your other little niche over there cries out from above for a small Madonna. I find I am drawn to paint that for you myself.”

  “Neither I nor this little parish church will ever forget this, Signor Sanzio. If you ever have need of anything, either of you,” he declared with the greatest sincerity, “know that you have but to ask.”

  SIX WEEKS LATER, after the coming of the new year, a package was delivered to the church of Santa Dorotea in Trastevere by a well-dressed young courier who had come from the workshop of Mastro Raffaello. Inside the package, Padre Giacomo found a small, circular, painstakingly detailed Madonna. Garbed extravagantly in blue silk with a turban and a rich green silk shawl, she had been painted looking directly at the viewer, her eyes full of confident, serene love for the playful child she held. The model for the Christ child, Padre Giacomo knew instantly, had been Letitia Perazzi’s littlest son, Matteo, and in the background, her next youngest, Aldo, had been painted as a young Saint John. The Madonna was unmistakable . . . beautiful and timeless.

  The face of the Madonna belonged to a simple peasant whose family sold bread. It was Margherita Luti.

  16

  IN THE BLAZE OF A CRIMSON SETTING SUN, ON A cRISPLY cold afternoon, Raphael stood at the corner of the excavation site at the Domus Aurea, once the property of the infamous Roman emperor Nero, now nothing but rubble and ruin. Dozens of workers in loose-fitting muslin shirts belted with leather, buff-colored hose, dusty shoes, and soiled caps filed in and out before him, like a busy parade of ants. They were coming and going with baskets and barrels full of soil, stone, and loose artifacts painstakingly retrieved at what had been called the Golden House.

  The once-breathtaking marvel had taken up vital city space and so, tragically, had been filled with tons of dirt by a subsequent emperor, Trajan, to make way for his own great vision, and what was to become the massive and splendid Colosseum. The only way into the cavernous remains now was to be lowered in a basket, eased down by heavy ropes.

  Overseeing this excavation, and several other ancient preservation sites around the city, was part of Raphael’s duty as commissary of antiquities. As if I needed yet another honor, he thought to himself, weary from the hours last night that he had passed at the Vatican Palace, laying out the next sequences in the fresco series in the pope’s stanza. There were the hours after that which he and Giulio had spent in consultation about other figures and their placement. He had not seen Margherita, or even his own bed at the Via dei Coronari, for two nights. He was weary to the bone, yet his day was far from over.

  At this very moment, Giulio and Gianfrancesco Penni were at work on the stanza, and Giovanni da Udine and a staff of assistants were several corridors away beginning the animal and fruit decorations of Bibbiena’s long-awaited bath, called a stufetta. In style, it was to be a companion to the corridor Raphael had already completed for the powerful cardinal in the ancient theme from the Domus Aurea, which Bibbiena loved. So broad had Raphael’s reputation become that there was a stack of unopened letters from kings, dukes, and princes around the world, pleading with him to paint their official portraits, and more work in Rome every day. And all the while, Michelangelo was in Florence, still scheming for a way to usurp Raphael’s dominance, through his ambitious student, Sebastiano Luciani.

  “Are you ready then, signore?”

  The voice of the beefy-faced, dust-covered workman beside Raphael brought him from his thoughts. “Ready as I ever am to do this,” he replied of the claustrophobic, swaying ride, plunging him into the dark and musty mlange of throat-clotting rubble, sand, and dust. It was down to glimpses of a magnificence long ago destroyed and entombed.

  Raphael clung to the sides as the basket was slowly lowered by four hard-armed, sweaty-faced workmen into a small circular opening into the ground, a single lamp held for light.

  He was fascinated by what treasures and mysteries these depths still held from a long-ago age, but getting there always unnerved Raphael. The close darkness, the dank odor, and the pervasive lack of fresh air made him think too much of a coffin, of death itself, and what it would be like to be entombed. It was this place that reminded him too much of his fear that like his mother and father, he might die young, leaving things in his life unfinished. It had been a frequent fear until he met Margherita, who had revived him in so many ways. Raphael shivered and braced the basket more tightly, feeling the sudden drop in temperature of the Domus Aurea, like the catacombs . . . like a funeral chamber.

  The basket swayed and jerked as it dropped him very slowly into the vast primary space, aptly called the Octagonal Room. Other baskets full of dirt and rocks had been lifted daily from this vaulted expanse for over two years, and yet the true floor still remained buried beneath several more feet, a time capsule of remaining art and artifacts—things not considered important enough to have been pilfered by Trajan’s men.

  He would give Margherita a palace one day, like this had been. He was driven to honor her, and to remind her at every turn, with the most wonderful symbols he could find, her absolute necessity in his life.

  The most costly, the most beautiful—and the most rare.

  Because that was what she was for him.

  As Raphael stepped
from the large basket, workmen in their soiled and sweat-stained shirts moved busily around him, their arms loaded with baskets of earth. Another tried to hold open a set of plans on large sheets of parchment for the excavation as Raphael stood in what was once the magnificent center room.

  The roof had once been a great dome, with a huge oculus to let in light. This had been the very place, it was said, where the infamous emperor spent his last days before committing suicide.

  Advisers had detailed for Raphael the great palace the Domus Aurea once had been. Built by Nero after the great Roman fire, it had been ornamented to bursting with paintings, frescoes, fountains, and elaborate furnishings. Even now, here and in the adjoining rooms newly unearthed, there was evidence of the once-opulent interior. Decorations were of gold leaf, marble, and gems; some ceilings of fretted ivory. The small remembrance of that faraway time, the breathtaking yet heavily damaged ceiling frescoes, were only now being restored under his careful direction. It was those frescoes, in particular, that had inspired the previous pope, Julius II, to begin the work, sending artists down to copy the ancient style, which they then reproduced in places in the Vatican. Raphael had done that for Bibbiena’s corridor, a tribute to the cardinal’s interest in this place and its hidden treasures.

  Raphael stood now, amid flaming torchlight, glancing up at the men on scaffolding who, at his direction, worked to save the delicate artistry. Floating above him were images of Ulysses offering a cup of wine to Polyphemus and, at the center, Achilles at Sciro before the Trojan War.

  In the stone wall of the Octagonal Room, as in the room beyond, there was a hole three feet around through which one needed to crawl to access the other rooms. The entire Domus Aurea was a labyrinth of darkness, dirt, and dank odors, all of it accessible only to those willing to move through the pitch-black maze. That was the worst, Raphael thought. Stiflingly close, frightening in its ability to make one feel entombed. He crawled quickly on his hands and knees, balancing a single small brass lamp that swung the small gold shaft of light as he inched forward toward the next room.

  Dropping into this second room, he saw another large group of men, these working by flickering gold lamplight at restoring the plaster in a critical corner of the foundation where it was crumbling. This had been the Nymphaeum. It was an impressive room even in its state of destruction, with a coved roof, barrel vaults, niches for statuary, and the remnants of a large water feature designed to replicate a waterfall, where ladies of ancient Rome might sit and reflect. As Raphael stood brushing the thick layer of dust from his own hose, an unshaven man with tousled black hair, thick dark eyebrows, and a mud-covered shirt approached with a welcoming smile.

  “How goes the work, Nicol?” Raphael asked the supervisor.

  “Very well indeed today, signore,” he replied, pointing to the delicate yellow fresco.

  It must have been, Raphael thought, glancing around, a magnificent room in its day, with walls covered in large sheets of polished marble, all long since removed. But the ceiling frescoes that had survived here as well, albeit in a poor state, were the real value to Pope Leo and Pope Julius before him. The pontiff wished to see the design, called “grotesqueries,” duplicated in his Vatican corridor, which was why he had continued to finance this tedious and massive unearthing of Nero’s buried palace.

  “And strangely enough today, after all of our work, and your direction,” said the man called Nicol, offering forth an article held delicately between his meaty thumb and forefinger, “we found this.”

  Raphael narrowed his eyes and held up his small oil lamp, focusing on a delicate gold ring, set with a perfectly square, bright-red ruby.

  “It was discovered here?” he asked incredulously, looking at the rubble, the dust and the shadowy darkness. The room of Poppaea and Nero . . .

  “Indeed, signore, it was. Inside what was once a small pool.”

  “After Nero, Trajan had these rooms stripped of everything valuable he could find.”

  The supervisor’s smile was wide, his front teeth stained dark beneath a heavily veined bulbous nose and those overpowering eyebrows. “Apparently he did not find this! Nunzio, working over there, found it at the bottom of those baths early this morning. This Nymphaeum was, after all, a place for elegant Roman women to sit and reflect upon their great beauty, was it not?”

  Raphael began to smile incredulously, rolling the small perfect ring around in the palm of his hand, watching it glitter and catch the lamplight. Could there be a greater coincidence, a thing more symbolic in its rightness?

  “It was,” he agreed, a little breathless at the exquisite gem.

  “I suspect Trajan and his men were so worried about all the larger articles that they never thought to sift through the layer of dirt covering the women’s pool.”

  My mother used to read to us about the emperor’s wives . . . particularly Poppaea, wife of Nero . . .

  Raphael felt as excited as a child about this ring, and his thought, most powerfully, all at once, that Margherita would adore it. It would be the most perfect, unexpected gift. Here in this place where he saw eerily, and often felt, his own death, came to him instead a symbol, a sign of the life he was meant to live now—a symbol that had come from the toil of his other world. Was there really any greater sign than this?

  This ring, from this place particularly, was meant for Margherita’s finger. She was the symbol of his new, fuller life, and this ring, from here, was the proof of that. His fear and apprehension of this place gave way to something pure and uplifting, symbolized in a single ring, ironically from the very reign of which they once had spoken.

  “Perhaps it belonged to Nero’s wife,” the man speculated, seeing Raphael still examining the exquisitely delicate ruby ring. “That would be something, would it not? A piece of Rome’s history tucked away here, forgotten for the grander things that were sought by greedy men. Thus, perhaps the fates intend it for another very special hand.”

  “Perhaps they do,” Raphael agreed, unable to take his eyes from the ring.

  “The connection to Emperor Nero is certainly possible, but likely only through his conniving mistress, Poppaea, with whom he built this place.”

  The cool, calculated voice behind them filled the air, and at once the room felt chilly and tense. Raphael and the others turned to find Cardinal Bibbiena standing behind them, hands steepled piously, as if in prayer, his lips turned up into the slightest hint of a calculated smile. Raphael had been so taken up by the ring that he had heard nothing, and had not seen him approach. Bibbiena had clearly been down here first.

  “She was later made Nero’s wife,” Raphael reminded him.

  “Indeed, after he had broken the heart of his true wife,” Bibbiena continued in the patient tone of one speaking with young children. “In his chronicles of the infamous emperor, Suetonius writes of a ring given by Nero to Poppaea, the scheming harlot who stole the emperor from his good and loyal mate, Octavia. That would make the ring nothing more than a pagan bauble.”

  “Perhaps the emperor was not well matched with his first wife, Your Grace. And perhaps Poppaea was his true love—which would instead make the ring a symbol of great importance.”

  “Yet a man who does not honor his commitments is no man of any real honor.” Still smiling shrewdly, his owlish eyes glittering in the bright torchlight, he glanced up at Raphael’s shocked expression. “As Poppaea favored power, not the riches and perfection that drove her husband, the ring was said to be a single ruby set in a simple band of solid gold. Perhaps it was tossed into the Nymphaeum pool by a servant loyal to poor Octavia, where she believed it would never be found.”

  “Your Grace spins an impressively creative tale,” dared Raphael.

  “Yet a plausible one, nonetheless.” He held out his own heavily jeweled hand. “May I?”

  With a furtive glance toward Raphael for approval, the stout workman surrendered the ring to the cardinal. Bibbiena’s thin-lipped smile broadened as he took it into the palm of his han
d, turning it over until it caught the lamplight.

  “Exquisite. This would be quite a valuable little relic,” he murmured, forgetting his reserve.

  Raphael felt his chest tighten, and an odd sense of dread begin to seize him. What could a man like Bibbiena want with yet another piece of jewelry?

  “The Nero connection seems highly unlikely after all of this time,” Raphael said with a feigned indifference that he fought to maintain, knowing instinctively how fate had led him to the ring, intending it for Margherita’s hand. “So many other emperors here since then, so many other years.”

  “It was well buried, signore, perfectly preserved by pure chance,” Nicol reminded, unaware of the growing hostility between the two men.

  The cardinal lifted a single eyebrow. “And stranger things have happened.”

  “Perhaps. But, in either case, the Holy Father should be allowed to determine its authenticity and value for himself.” Raphael now held out his hand.

  “I shall see it to the Holy Father, Raphael, when I dine privately with him this evening.”

  “Your Grace’s offer is a gracious one, but I am the Holy Father’s commissary of antiquities. It is my responsibility to supervise its transport.”

  Bibbiena lowered his eyes, setting his gaze on Raphael. “Do you not trust me, Raphael?”

  “It is not a matter of trust, Your Grace, rather one of responsibility.”

  “An odd stand to take, considering your stand on your other responsibilities.”

  Raphael gritted his teeth. Bibbiena had meant his relationship with Maria, and the disquieting silence between them was charged heavily with animosity. “Still, Your Grace, I really must insist.” He held out his hand, his eyes leveled on the gaunt, harsh face, so like Maria’s.

  There was a hint of malice in Bibbiena’s eyes that grew to something very strong. “Tell me, Raffaello, were it yours to give, would this be something you would intend for my niece? She is, after all, still your officially betrothed.”