The Ruby Ring

  As the days wore on with no answer to the mystery, the consequences of Margherita’s disappearance affected not only Raphael, but the entire group of artists. He was not there to lead them, to teach them—or to bring them work. Without the mastro, there was nothing for them. Over a bottle of wine, they collected, shiftless and uncertain, sitting together on stools, chairs, and painting props, their cups half drained, their hope of a happy ending to all of this dwindling by the day.

  “I suppose some of us misjudged her,” da Udine grumbled awkwardly, breaking the tense silence of another uncertain afternoon.

  Only Penni glanced up from his cup. “We could have been nicer to her when she was here. I, for one, never even tried to speak to her or give her a smile.”

  “It is clear now she was good for the mastro,” one of the young apprentices dared to say, and several of the assistants nodded silently in agreement.

  For the first time, Giulio came across the room to sit among them, since he was as lost as they all were. “She deserved better than she got from the lot of us,” he said, shaking his head.

  Da Udine shot him a defensive glare, and, for a moment, there was another tense silence. “You are not saying, I hope, that you believe it was our fault that she went away!”

  “I am saying it well could be, Giovanni. And if she ever returns to him, I believe we must tell her that.”

  “I am not one to admit such things.” Da Udine shrugged grudgingly. “But perhaps it is so.”

  “Do you suppose she will ever return to him?” Penni asked Giulio, who they all knew to be the closest to Raphael. “Looking back, they really did seem happy.”

  “I suppose that depends on where she has gone—and why. And, for the moment, only the Good Lord knows the answer to that. For the mastro’s sake, I hope he finds out the truth before the mystery of it destroys him, and all the rest of us along with him.”

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, things are not improved?”

  Cardinal Bibbiena bellowed the question with uncharacteristic ferocity, having lost all decorum. He stood at the back of the cold and soaring basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore beside Agostino Chigi as the wave of parishoners filed out past him after Mass.

  “Sadly, it is true. And, for that matter,” Agostino confessed with an impotent shrug, “I would say that things are actually much worse! In truth, Raphael barely works at all. His assistant, Giulio Romano, admitted to me that mastro Raffaello wanders the streets aimlessly, as if searching for her, and rarely sets foot in the studio at all these days. The Holy Father’s stanza and the antiquities projects go unattended. The assistants, Romano, Penni, and da Udine, have tried their best to cover for him, to work around his prolonged absence, but before long it will be an impossible thing to hide. I tell you, Your Grace, it is as if the very spark has gone out of the man.”

  “Over the loss of that peasant girl? Impossible!” he hissed.

  It was not supposed to be this way. This was entirely wrong. All of it. His plan had been so well thought out. So completely flawless. As everything was about his life. He had been a cardinal for many years, and he had grown accustomed to the glory, the wealth, and, in particular, the power. Power to control people and things as he saw fit. And he most certainly did not like feeling stripped of any of that, as he did now.

  “Have you spoken with him? Reasoned with him about his duty to Rome? To the Holy Father?”

  “Regrettably, Your Grace, there is no reasoning with a broken heart.”

  “Foolish words!” he snarled. “Where is his pride? He is Raffaello!”

  “He is first a man who was in love with a woman. One now gone from his life.”

  Bibbiena wrinkled his long face as if smelling something foul, then he shook his head distastefully. “So what do you propose we do now, Agostino?”

  “I fear there is only one thing that can be done, Your Grace.”

  They were looking directly at one another. “You cannot mean—”

  “I mean it entirely.”

  “That is not possible.”

  “Then, in all likelihood, neither is the completion of our projects.”

  “This has been a disaster.” Bibbiena turned away, nervously twisting the ruby ring. “I will not indite myself in this mess, nor shall you.”

  “Then how?”

  He pivoted, his eyes glittering hatefully. “I should imagine you shall have to convince the Holy Father that the two of you need to confess to Raphael what was done—and why.”

  Chigi laughed bitterly. “And then hope with both of our hearts that Raphael chooses to forgive us?”

  “I do not suppose he shall do much of that, in this case.” Bibbiena leveled his eyes and clasped his hands. He nodded to the nameless worshippers filing past him as he spoke beneath his breath. “Rather, if there is hope of salvaging the work, I think, we had all better begin very intensely to pray for forgiveness from the Almighty—and particularly, from Raphael.”

  ELENA AND GIULIO waited late into the night at the house on the Via dei Coronari for Raphael to return. The veal and onions she had cooked for him had gone cold, and the grand house was a silent tomb, crackling with anticipation. In nearly twenty days, there had been not a single word at all from Margherita Luti. When they glanced at one another now, Elena looked quickly away. There was still something between them. They both felt that. Adversity had only intensified it. But there was danger in it for Elena. He was another artist. Another potential mistake. She had risked her family’s welfare once that way. She would not do so again.

  As they sat alone with only the occasional comment and the sound of the crackling fire between them, a forceful knock sounded at the door. Giovanni da Udine stood in the gold lamplight cast before the door, his ruddy face showing that there was news.

  “Enter!” Giulio hurriedly bid him, pulling him inside. “What is it? What has happened?”

  “It is not Sebastiano who has gone away with her! At least he is not with her now!”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Gianfrancesco saw him with his own eyes just now down on the Piazza Navona. And he was very much alone.”

  Giulio washed a hand across his face, then looked over at Elena, who stood back near the shadowy stairwell. The thought came to them both at the same time, but it was Giulio who spoke the words.

  “Then, if Sebastiano is not with her, what has become of poor Margherita?”

  31

  January 1516

  “OH, BERNARDO, THIS IS TOO MUCH! NOW IF WE ARE TO confess involvement, you and I, Raphael will surely be more unwilling to work than before!” wailed the rotund pontiff. “It is his art that was making me immortal! His hand alone that was meant to give me a legacy! I must have my legacy!”

  His plump face was covered in a sheen of perspiration, and his small lips were pursed in frustration. As he sat on his crimson-draped papal throne in the bedchamber at the Castel Sant’Angelo, a sandy morning light filtered in through the single oval window behind Bibbiena.

  Cardinal Bibbiena had been blunt about the plan’s swift unraveling. Bluntness lessened the blame, he long ago had discovered, and for Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, self-protection had always been one of his primary goals. Self-advancement was the other. Without them, he was simply another of the ambitious cardinals who vied for scraps of attention from an often distracted pontiff.

  “It is certainly a tragedy, Your Holiness,” he said with the greatest caution.

  “We have made an error in it! I was too taken up with everything else to have seen it, and now of course I must apologize, and appear contrite, when I care nothing for his common little tart! Or else he may never paint for any of us again!”

  The once jovial pope had been weakened by the problems that had engulfed his papacy of late. On one hand, a new and ambitious young king was on the French throne, and thus Milan was threatened with war. King Franois I promised to take the city, so now Pope Leo needed to strengthen his alliances with King Ferdinand of Spain and Emperor Maximilian.
On the other hand, the pope had reluctantly made an Englishman, Thomas Wolsey, a cardinal, hoping to persuade Henry VIII to join an alliance against ambitious France. But the worst blow to the pope was not a political one. Suddenly, he had lost his beloved brother, Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, to fever—one of the people upon whom he had greatly depended for advice and support. That had weakened the pontiff emotionally in a way that nothing else could.

  “We must tell Raphael the truth, mustn’t we?”

  Bibbiena struggled to find his own tone of contrition with the pope when what he still desired greatly was to gloat. Now, finally, Raphael was as miserable as he had made Maria, and he wished that to continue for as long as possible. But, as always, there was his self-advancement to consider, and that must come first.

  “I fear you are correct. He must be told, Your Holiness.”

  “Then we must pray to God Almighty for a sincere appearance when we do, or he may never create anything for any of us ever again!”

  THE MOMENT came later that same afternoon.

  In the soaring frescoed stanza, Pope Leo hoped to remind Raphael what was at stake. Several of his cardinals pleaded with him to let them take the fall by manipulating the truth. The Holy Father was, after all, to be protected at all cost. There was much debate about the point, but at last Pope Leo convinced them to accept his own scheme. Coming directly from him, with a calculated, albeit feigned, show of remorse, it might just soften the heavy blow. And the less damaged Raphael was by the wound, the more likely he was, in time, to forgive.

  Maintaining their creative workhorse was really all that mattered, and Pope Leo would do anything—say anything—to achieve that.

  Raphael’s face was ghostly pale, his expression grave, and his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep as he was shown into the papal audience chamber. He had not changed his clothes for several days, and the rich burgundian fabric hung on him now, rumpled and soiled. His usually neat chestnut-colored hair was tousled and uncombed, his beard ragged.

  When the pope motioned to him, he sank onto the edge of a golden chair fringed in crimson velvet tassels that had been brought before the throne. “It concerns Signora Luti, my son. Her whereabouts, and why she has gone.”

  A sudden spasm of pain crossed Raphael’s face. Dio mio . . . Let it not be . . . He shot to his feet, his body a ramrod of tension. He glanced over to Agostino Chigi, then to Cardinal de’ Medici, the pope’s cousin, both of whom bore the gravest expressions. These men he had known and trusted—they were involved?

  “What do you know of it?”

  Pope Leo flinched then shifted uncomfortably. As it was unseasonably warm, the hair at the nape of his neck was wet with perspiration, as was the small dent beneath his nose. “We—I wished you to work, you see, and you were not working. Not enough, and—”

  “Per l’amor di Dio! No!” His heart was slamming against his ribs. “I am a man, Your Holiness! Not just a servant to answer to your pleasure!”

  “The decision was unwise with regard to you.”

  Raphael felt himself begin to unravel as he stood in stunned disbelief. These men for whom he had toiled and sacrificed, men he had respected and admired. Raphael’s tone when he spoke again was flat and very cold. “Where is she?”

  “But will you understand what we have done, Raphael mio? First, tell me, if she is returned to you with our most sincere apologies, might we go on as if it were but an error in judgment?”

  “Tell me where she is, by God Almighty, or I—!” he shouted fiercely, forgetting everything. This man before him he saw not as the Holy Father. This place, the Vatican, was not sacred, but a prison of lies and deceit that had trapped him and horribly punished his beloved.

  “First, you must know that she has been well cared for!”

  “She has been your prisoner!”

  “We did it for your own good, Raphael. We only meant to keep her until this obsession of yours had passed and then, of course—”

  “I bid you, Raphael, do not let your anger keep you from hearing what the Holy Father has to say!” Chigi tried to intercede on the pope’s behalf, his hands held out in a pleading gesture.

  “Speak no more! I shall listen to none of your lies! I was a fool for both of you! My heart, my soul, went into my creations for you here, and yet you sought to pluck out that very soul that painted for you, worked for you! Believed in you!”

  “Raphael!” Chigi gasped at his impropriety before the Holy Father.

  “Where is she, damn you?” he demanded again furiously. “Say only that and not a word more! The confession of the details is too vile for even our good Lord above us to hear! Tell me, by God, or you shall never see me or any of my work again!”

  “She is held at La Magliana.”

  Raphael staggered back. “Your hunting lodge?”

  “She has not been harmed!” the pope himself repeated. “You will find her well there, I promise you!”

  With a final angry stare of sheer disbelief, Raphael turned away from them and went out the door, his cape flying as he neglected the deferential bow to the Holy Father.

  32

  SHE HAD NOT LEFT HIM. THERE WAS NO OTHER MAN. This was a most foul dream. A nightmare. Impossible to comprehend. Looking into the face of a friend, he saw now an enemy, and the betrayal from so unlikely a source was like poison in his veins.

  “I shall ride with you!” Giulio called as they stood outside the Vatican Gates, where two grooms held Raphael’s saddled horse. The winter wind tossed their hair and the edges of the cloaks they wore. “I bid you, mastro. I must make amends to you—and to Signora Luti for not revealing sooner what I knew.”

  “Allow me to go as well. I owe her my life for the chance she has given to mine,” Elena said. She seemed to have come out of nowhere but she must have been with Giulio, he realized. Raphael shot her a surprised glance, and was prepared to deny her when she added, “If she has been injured or violated in any way, signore, anything of a”—she struggled with a phrase that would not upset Raphael more—“of a womanly nature, she may feel more comfortable if—”

  “But you have no horse!”

  “Elena can ride with me,” Giulio declared. “My horse is tied to the ring just over there.”

  “But of course,” Raphael amended, grateful for her caring. “Thank you, both.”

  As a show of solidarity and support, the other artists joined them then, and they rode with fearsome speed. The cold wind lashed at their faces and tossed their hair, but Raphael felt none of it. His breaths were shallow, and even that scorched his lungs. She was alive, praise God Almighty in His heaven! And she had not left him!

  Raphael’s heart crashed over and over against his ribs, beating a rhythm of fury, relief, and anticipation of what he would find at La Magliana. His only hope now was that she had not been harmed and that she would not blame him for what she had endured because of his connections, rivalries, and commitments to powerful men.

  La Magliana was an estate on the edge of a vast wooded hillock outside of Rome. The broad expanse of sky above was heavily gray, threatening an ominous winter rain. Raphael brought his horse to a hard gallop, churning the dirt and dust into a great cloud down the long causeway behind him. They knew him here. They had hosted him as the pope’s guest many times. That the friars here, those pious men of God, had knowingly kept a woman—his woman, against her will, tormenting him, likely frightening her, and nearly destroying his soul. All of this ran through his mind as he leaped from his mount and stormed through the gates of the grand stucco-covered facade of La Magliana.

  THE ROOMS accorded her were not entirely objectionable. There was a large canopy bed covered in tapestry fabric, a warming fireplace inscribed with the name of Pope Innocent VIII, a game table for solitaire, and a sweeping, desolate view over the woodlands. And yet this place still was her prison. Margherita sat on the window embrasure, clutching her rosary, arms around her knees, as she had for hours, days, now weeks, trying to find anything in that flat, unending
vista before her that might tell her where she had been taken. But, as always, it was fruitless.

  She remembered little about her actual abduction beyond the sack placed over her head, and the strong, acrid smell of old wool. There was the draft of damp air, and the chill held in by the heavy building stones, a building she longed to escape, but she was reminded daily that she could not.

  Everything from that point on was a gray sort of nightmare. And all of it had happened so fast. So disjointedly. A shadowy barrage of images and sounds came at her now when she tried to make sense of it. She remembered Sebastiano offering her a ride on the back of his horse. Then the brief struggle later, the heart-thumping fear of the unknown, and then total darkness. When she woke, it was with a piercing headache, nausea, and vision that did not entirely clear for several days. She had been drugged somehow, and the only possible way involved either Donato or Sebastiano, the two men who had been her companions that day. Knowing in her heart that Donato could have had nothing to do with this, only one unthinkable choice remained.

  “. . .And in the meantime, with all of the men of Rome, like Sebastiano Luciani, who sees you as fair game . . . ”

  She squeezed her eyes, trying to push back the always looming sense of stupidity that pelted her cruelly about it. Why had she not believed Raphael? Trusted his opinion of his rival, at least? There was still so much about his world that she did not understand. She had been a fool to push him—and his fear—away.

  Margherita moved from the window and began to pace across the wide wood-plank floor that echoed her every step. Most days, most long hours, it was the only sound she heard. Food came to her twice a day, brought by a plump-faced friar, his head and face cleanly shaven and his stout body garbed in drab brown robes, with a heavy crucifix suspended to the middle of his belly. His thin lips always moved in silent prayer as he set down her tray, steepled his hands, and left the room.