The Ruby Ring

  “Worry not. On my honor, I shall protect your Margherita with my own life.”

  “Swear it, by your oath!”

  “I do swear it.”

  “I shall still worry . . . Peace cannot be mine until I know what will become of her . . . ” He drew in a crackling breath. “Her useless family will never have her back once I am gone, and she has nothing more but trouble and ridicule to bring them.”

  “Another liaison perhaps. Someone to protect her?”

  “You know well that no one with any authority would have her just now,” Raphael strained to say, and in his tone there was heartbreak. If he could not have her, he wanted someone else at least to protect her.

  “There is another choice. For a time anyway. A choice that will surely make her safe, though not an easy one.”

  “Then tell me, Giulio,” Raphael faintly bid him. “Before it is too late . . . I must know of it . . . ”

  RAPHAEL LAY perfectly still, his eyes closed, dreaming, sleeping, and feeling his body go slowly very cold as he was bound by thoughts he knew soon would be his last. So much left to do . . . So many moments to share . . . children. . . . paintings . . . Like any other dying man, he wished he had done things differently. Perhaps if he had lived a different way, this . . . Ah, but then this was exactly the end he was meant to have.

  Pushing away the regret, he saw her face in his mind, sweet, soft, so exquisitely lovely, and he wondered what would become of her, where life would lead her. But he wished more than any other thing that he could go with her, that there could be a place for them, somewhere between this strange mortal world and heaven. Yet Raphael knew even in this hour that his life would live on in her . . . in the paintings they had made together . . . the images she alone had inspired. Margherita Luti was his slip of eternity.

  MARGHERITA had only slept a little more than an hour. But seeing Giulio’s stricken expression and Elena’s eyes flooded with tears when she woke, she knew that her decision to leave Raphael’s side was one that would haunt her for the rest of her life.

  Dashing back into the bedchamber, she saw that the candles had only just been extinguished, their small trails of acrid smoke filling the silent air as the pale first morning light came softly in through the now half-open window shutters. Horrifying to her was the sight of Raphael’s empty bed.

  As Margherita glanced sharply around the room, at the faces, the vacant bed, the smoking candles, everything began to move in slow motion. If no one says it, she thought desperately, then it cannot be true. Yet she knew by the way Giulio held Elena so tightly to him that the unimaginable had actually occurred. She was numb, yet her mind ran in circles. He could not be gone . . . He was meant to recover—they were meant to survive this as they had everything else that life had cast cruelly at them.

  As Giulio moved back from the bed, Margherita went to him.

  “Signora, I must—” Giulio tried to say, his voice breaking.

  “Say nothing! I am not ready for condolences! Nor shall I ever be, because for me he shall never be gone!” Margherita felt them back away from the bed. She saw Elena’s tears, but she could not comfort her. She had nothing left to give to anyone.

  When she heard the door click open, and saw Cardinal Bibbiena come into the room, her own blood went deathly cold. Of all the people in the world—all the clerics—he had the fewest reasons to be here. When she looked to Giulio for an explanation, she saw, to her horror, that his face had changed.

  “Forgive me, Signora Luti,” Giulio began loudly enough to be overheard. “But I was not extending a condolence. Rather, it was an explanation as to where Signor Sanzio was taken while you slept.” She watched him draw in a deep breath, then exhale it. His voice was brittle, changed. This was not the man, the artist, or the friend she knew and trusted. “At the end, the mastro saw things more clearly. He renounced you in those last moments of his life and therefore was removed from this room in order to receive absolution.”

  “No . . . ”

  “He became convinced in his final moments that the fate of his immortal soul rested on that fact, and he did renounce you to me.”

  “He would not have done that! Not ever!”

  “How each of us sees things as we go to meet our Heavenly Father, alas, is known only to us,” Cardinal Bibbiena said quietly from across the room. “Surely you can see that it is better for his immortal soul, and your future, that Raphael disavowed this unholy alliance of yours. Surely you are not still so selfish, signora, that you cannot admit that.”

  Giulio’s words were an echo in her mind. It is protecting you . . .

  Looking at the bitter cardinal, in his starched crimson robes, his face tight with hatred, then glancing over at Giulio, she understood why he had changed. Raphael’s dear friend was protecting her from Cardinal Bibbiena now that Raphael could no longer do it himself.

  42

  MARGHERITA WALKED ALONE TOWARD THE GIANT PANTHEON on the wide, cobblestone piazza where it had sat majestically since the first century. With its massive white stone columns and arches, this great architectural marvel of another age still stood, the echo of emperors emanating from its very bricks and mortar. A light rain misted her face and hair as well as the dark cloak and hood that shrouded her in anonymity. She would allow no one to accompany her. She had forced even Donato to remain behind, relegated to the task of supervising the packing of her belongings for charity.

  She had told them in a weakened voice, breaking with anguish, that she must see him one final time, in spite of the risk the crowds would bring. She had not been there with him to hold his hand or comfort him as he slipped quietly into death. For that, she would never forgive herself. Now, by order of the pope, Raphael lay in state in the very center of one of the most grand buildings in Rome. As she approached, his words of long ago were bittersweet in her mind.

  Perhaps I shall have the Holy Father agree to bury me in the Pantheon one day, with you resting beside me, so that no one shall ever forget, unlikely or not, we two are forever lovers.”

  She had smiled when he said it, thinking then that he must surely live forever. His work, after all, was timeless, and therefore he would be as well. The great Raffaello created magic and spun dreams. With him, her own had come true. For a time. Now, like the dust of angels, he was gone forever, and so were her dreams . . .

  She pulled the dark cloak closer around her face and stepped into the crowd. They were waiting to move forward up the wide steps so that they might pay their last respects to a great artist most of them had never seen in life. She mingled among them—the devout, the curious, Rome’s poor and its elite—their grief a balm on her raw anguish. As one of them, she was a nameless, faceless woman hoping to pay homage. Yet she did so to the man rather than the artist.

  Finally she was close enough to see beyond the doors. Upon a bier, draped in black silk, a body lay—her own beloved. So he truly is gone, she thought, seeing a finality in it now she had not allowed herself before. At his head, like a magnificent headstone, was the epic final work, sweepingly painted. It was the Transfiguration, with herself as a model in the foreground. Margherita felt her knees weaken so that she nearly collapsed beneath the weight of what never should have been. The culmination of his artistic life, he had called this work. And something more. The work was his last. Her heart squeezed so painfully that she felt she would faint.

  As Margherita was pushed on a wave of anguished faces and outstretched arms, ever nearer the large carved doors, she caught sight of one she recognized. A face that caused the halting of the very breath in her throat. Anna Perazzi was looking directly at her, and beside her was her husband, Antonio.

  “What is she doing here?” the woman called out in a rough tenor more befitting a man than any sort of comely woman, and loudly enough for others to hear. Instinctively, Margherita lowered her head, but it was too late. She had barely glimpsed Raphael’s body upon its bier, certainly gotten nowhere near enough to ease her broken heart, to gain one last sight of
his beautiful peaceful face, to bid him a restful sleep.

  “It is a horrible sin, her being here!” Antonio’s wife cruelly declared.

  Rather than quieting her, Antonio merely looked away from Margherita, as if they had never known one another at all. The crowd turned angry, charging at her. “Puttana!” they called. “You did this to him! You!” They swept her up into their spiteful midst, as if the power of a wave had taken her over, swallowed her, and now cast her very forcefully down the steps and away from the Pantheon.

  Cast onto the cobbled courtyard like a beggar, she collapsed into a heap on the paving stones. Someone kicked her as they passed, though she did not see who. Then she was spat upon from the same direction. Another blow, and another. But the pain in her heart was beyond anything they could do to her.

  Just as suddenly, Margherita felt sturdy hands draw her up from behind and begin to tug her from the midst of the angry, swelling crowd. It was only when they were out of the piazza and onto the quiet and narrow Via Madalena that she turned and saw Donato.

  “I knew I should have come with you,” he murmured as she sank limply against the protective depth of his broad shoulder. Trembling and weeping, she stood with him in a narrow shadowy street that smelled of urine and despair, so close to the place where Raphael lay in state with as much solemn dignity as any king. Raphael had been loved by Pope Leo. She had not.

  Margherita Luti had come from nothing, and now she was nothing again.

  In the end, as she had declared she would, even Francesca Chigi had abandoned her. She could not risk her standing, she said, or her husband’s. Although she had expected it, the loss of that friendship, to Margherita, was devastating.

  Donato held fast to her as they slowly made their way along the Via Madalena back toward the house on the Via Alessandrina for what she knew would be the final time. She could not remain there. The place held too much of Raphael for her not to have seen his face, heard his voice, around every corner.

  “Take me to Giulio,” she said flatly. “I am ready to go wherever he has arranged.”

  Donato’s voice was reed thin, his expression grave. “You have Raphael’s riches, do you not, to buy yourself a new home? Begin a new life, without doing something so drastic?”

  Margherita lowered her eyes, shook her head, and wrapped her arms tightly around herself, pain, loss, and despair moving through her, seizing her so forcefully that she almost could not breathe. “I took nothing like that from him.”

  “You are not serious.”

  She did not tell them that Raphael had drawn up a new will several months ago, leaving everything to her. Nor did she tell them that she had destroyed it, returning the original will, with Giulio Romano as principal beneficiary, to its rightful place among his papers. She would have no use for his money where fate was taking her, anyway.

  “His final will was made before our meeting,” she lied. “When he fell ill, for their hatred of me, no one would amend it for him. So it is true. I have only the clothes on my back, my wedding portrait—grand irony there to torment me—and this ring.”

  Margherita glanced down at the ruby ring glittering on her finger, a painful reminder of a time that was now as buried from the light as the ring itself so long had been. “I want to die with him,” she achingly whispered.

  “You do not mean that.” He tightened the arm around her shoulder. “We shall work something out.”

  “It does not matter now. The part of me that was worth anything Raphael created. That person is dead along with him. It is the end, and I wish it to be so. Simply that, nothing more.”

  Epilogue

  THERE WAS NO RECOURSE. IT WAS OVER.

  Giulio had told Margherita that he would take her wedding portrait for safekeeping until she chose to leave the convent. But she would never leave this place. She knew that, as he did. They had spoken in tender, hopeful terms as he bid her a farewell at the imposing convent gates, and both of them, for an instant, had tried to smile. Yet neither of them had managed to fool the other. They had each loved Raphael too much.

  And she understood fully why, in the end, he had helped Raphael forsake her. Although he asked for her forgiveness, Margherita assured him there was nothing to forgive. Giulio had done it to protect her from those powerful forces who would want to blame her for the past, and now for the mastro’s death. Chigi. The Pope. Cardinal Bibbiena. Danger could come from many directions. She would be safer as the vanquished, not the victor. Both of them knew that.

  The warmth of Giulio’s embrace lingered on her shoulders even now that he was gone, back into the tangle of streets, back to his own art, to his own life—hopefully to a future with Elena. They were meant to be together. That much was as clear as it had been for her and Raphael.

  The sound of his name on her heart, in her memory, as he first had spoken it to her, brought a fresh stab of pain. I will always treasure you . . . always love you . . . Wait for me . . . I will come to you soon . . . soon . . .

  She walked alone then back across the ancient stone floor of the convent of Sant’Appolonia and into the abbess’s chamber. The old nun sat at her desk, unmoving. Unable to look at the ring a final time, Margherita slipped it from her finger, feeling its cool, reassuring band move across her knuckles and then, one last time, touch her fingertip. It had not been off her hand since Raphael had put it there. Now the ring would be gone from her life forever, as he was. Fitting, she decided then, for this ring could only ever remind her of what she had lost.

  Margherita reached across the desk and lay the ring before the stone-faced abbess. Her face betrayed none of the anguish, none of the loss, only resignation. It had been like a sweet, beautiful dream. Now it was over.

  The abbess folded the ring into a dry, bloodless hand, and Margherita heard it land with a small clink in the bottom of a drawer, now a meaningless ruby and chunk of gold. A moment later, the old woman, her face dry and pale as straw, stood and held out her hand. Glittering there in the pale afternoon sunlight was an unadorned gold band, the ring that would mark her new life and make her now, like all of the others here, a bride of Christ.

  Margherita hesitated for a moment, glancing at the band, seeing the stark reality of its meaning before her.

  “It is our custom for there to be a ceremony,” the old woman announced matter-of-factly. “But the others here do not know you yet, and, because of your notoriety, we may well keep it so. Under the circumstances, your time here may be made easier by that. We shall simply say you have come to us a postulant from another convent.”

  Margherita did not respond, but her answer lay in her own outstretched hand as she reached up to take the other ring she now would wear. I want you to be my wife, Margherita Luti. I want that more than anything in this world. She squeezed her eyes, determined to force away the sound of his voice, determined not to think anymore of the past, or of what might have been. Wait for me . . . Per favore, amore, she thought instead as she slowly slipped the gold ring onto the same finger where the ruby ring had been, pushing it down with the same determination with which she once had vowed to love Raphael Sanzio forever.

  Eternity with him . . . it really was not all that very far away.

  FOR THE LONGEST WHILE, Giulio stood frozen, the wedding portrait before him, still on its easel, as if the mastro might at any moment return to add a finishing touch to the beautiful innovative image of Margherita. The style was so new and daring, so full of Raphael’s sense of creativity. Giulio felt his eyes well with tears as he thought of the life in this portrait—life Raphael no longer possessed. Suddenly, he slammed his fist very hard onto the mastro’s worktable, sending several paintbrushes skittering to the floor.

  It was not supposed to end this way, the mastro so in his prime, with so much yet for them to do. No one had ever been better to Giulio, nor believed in him, more than Raphael Sanzio. He owed his very life to the man who saw talent in him before he saw it in himself.

  Giulio shook his head. No one understood the
complexity of an artist’s life—the brotherhood Raphael had created within his studio, the safety to paint, to create . . . to realize a bit of immortality at the end of a paintbrush.

  He glanced up at the painting again just as the afternoon sunlight filtered warm and golden across the vaulted studio and, like tender fingers, moved across the painting itself. A caress from heaven, thought Giulio with an infinite sadness. One last good-bye to his beloved . . . a final message delivered to Giulio as the sun on the painting moved down like a pointing finger, casting a shimmering highlight upon the painted image of the small, perfect ruby ring. And in seeing it, he knew what he must do. For Raphael—for the woman Raphael had loved. To protect her now that Raphael no longer could.

  Drawing in one deep breath and then another to give himself courage, Giulio looked with steady determination for the right shade of paints among the mastro’s colors to begin mixing a flesh tone. Her flesh tone . . . I will do this for you, mastro . . . I promised you I would protect her, and I shall . . . Pushing himself to do something that felt, on the surface, like an invasion, a corruption, Giulio then took a slim, boar-bristle brush from Raphael’s worktable and dipped it carefully into a cup of freshly mixed paint. The silence was deafening in the old house where the echo of Margherita’s rich, warm laughter still clung to the walls, and had so recently warmed the place.

  How cruel a thing was fate, he thought, pressing small neat daubs of flesh-colored paint onto the canvas with precision and care. Onto the image of her finger. Her ring. As he gently daubed and worked the brush, it began to disappear as if moving back into the canvas just as quickly as Raphael had left this earth. As though it never had been. As though his fervent commitment to her had never been, either.

  Now the serene, smiling face began to change in his mind. By his actions, it was no longer a wedding portrait. Now she was only a girl, scantily clothed, sensually posed. A model. An ideal. The ring was gone. This painting could not harm her any longer. The same could not be said for the other factions in Rome who still wished to do her harm. He had been right to propose to the mastro what he had. It had brought Raphael peace in those final moments. The convent of Sant’Apollonia was the only way left to protect her.