The Ruby Ring

  He moved to deny it, but the truth was that this was exactly what he had meant. Women had always been without consequence in his life. There was no struggle in obtaining them for what purpose he wished. That was not the case now, very suddenly, in this most unlikely situation. While he barely knew Margherita, she already angered him, confounded him, and entirely bewitched him, all at the same instant.

  When he did not readily respond to her question, she said, “Make no mistake, signore. Because I assumed a great mastro would move with an entourage does not mean I would be swayed by its appearance at my door.”

  Giovanni da Udine, in wine-colored velvet, was tall, broad-shouldered, and exceedingly elegant, with a shock of silvery hair that gave him a distinguished air. Despite that veneer, he stifled a snicker behind his jeweled hand. Raphael heard it and shot him an immediate look of reproach. A dozen retorts vaulted through his mind, but he realized then, in the awkward silence, that she was worthy of none of them.

  It was getting late, and Raphael had the metal point study of an allegorical Mars to heighten with white chalk for the other Chigi chapel, and a few pencil studies to outline so that his assistants would know what he desired them to paint. Then there was the application of the last layer of plaster on the final Vatican fresco to oversee. There was also a problem with the expression on the pope’s face, as he sat in profile astride his horse, in the Repulse of Attila, which he must deal with himself, and it must be accomplished before midday.

  He still very much wanted Signorina Luti, but he could not paint her—he could not capture that essence of a Madonna, if her sitting for him was a chore for her. He reached down and drew from his cloak a pouch of gold florins. Gently, he set it on the empty table between the three of them, the coins making a little clinking sound as they settled in the bag.

  “We must take our leave. But in the meantime, I have left a first installment on what my studio will pay you to allow me to make several pencil sketches, culminating in a full-color panel of you dressed as the Madonna for my commission by the late Pope Julius II that shall hang in the great Chapel at San Sisto in Piacenza.”

  Francesco Luti gave a sound somewhere between a moan and a wail, then made the sign of the cross. “Santissima Maria!”

  “You may pray to the saints, Signor Luti, but as you wait for their reply you would do well to reason strongly with your daughter. This is an existing commission, and I am not at liberty to wait forever.” Raphael nodded courteously. “Buon giorno to you both.”

  “Mastro Sanzio, one question if you please.”

  The throaty alto voice was Margherita’s. Raphael pivoted back.

  In the light of early morning, when Rome was still pink and opalescent, her face looked radiant, and he thought then, for the first time, that he had fooled himself. She was actually remarkably sensual and, s . . . appealing, in a way that now piqued all of his senses, not only the initial creative ones.

  “May I ask why you have chosen me?”

  “Why does anyone make a choice of something, signorina?” he said in a flippant tone that was part style, and part self-defense. “There is an element of instinct, and another of fate. With my painting, one is always tied so tightly with the other that I have learned only to honor it, and not to question why. Once again,” he nodded. “Buon giorno to you.”

  “I DO NOT understand you!” Francesco Luti wailed. He slapped his forehead with the palm of his flour-caked hand, as he cast his eyes dramatically heavenward. “Had I not been here to see it for myself, I would have thought it a cruel jest! Now I know without doubt that you have taken full leave of your senses! Where has this come from? This is not you! Thanks to your mother’s dreams for you, you have put Antonio off, waiting all of your life for something extraordinary like this to happen, and now that it has—”

  Her mother, so beautiful, and so full of dreams, had told her many stories as a child, like that of the famous and married emperor, Nero, and his love for Poppaea, a girl beneath his station. Their romance had brought a cloud of scandal to Rome. There was always great excitement in her mother’s whispered voice, as she told how Poppaea had become Nero’s great love—and finally his wife.

  And so it can happen to any clever, beautiful girl, Marina Luti had whispered to her youngest daughter—the one who listened the most intently—as she tucked her beneath the bedcovers and pressed a kiss onto her forehead. And one wise enough to believe in the beauty of her dreams!

  But her mother was dead now, her dreams gone to dust. And Margherita was here, still living in the real world.

  “Perhaps you do not know me so well as you think,” Margherita declared, remembering the tragic end of the love story of Nero and Poppaea.

  He pivoted away. “Och! It is too much!”

  “And what of your family, Margherita, eh, what of us?” Letitia intervened, preparing to mount a full attack. “Could we not all benefit from the florins Signor Sanzio has promised you? To help Father stop working so hard? Perhaps he would be able to hire an assistant to give his swollen ankles a rest.”

  There had always been a rivalry between the two sisters. Letitia had been the first to marry, but Margherita was the more beautiful. And so, in her way, Letitia had always sought to undermine her sister’s dreams, encouraging her to marry Donato’s younger brother, Antonio, and to strive for no better than what she had. It was a future their father had sanctioned—and to which Margherita had grudgingly agreed.

  “Do not lay it all at my feet, Letitia!” she argued.

  “Is that not precisely where it lies?”

  “My daughter is a fool!” said Francesco gruffly as he shuffled back to his daughters.

  “Perhaps I am, Padre mio. But I will not be taken for granted—not by anyone!”

  “Then you would do well to make your peace with life as a saddle boy’s wife! For that is surely the best fate has to offer Antonio!”

  “You have always wanted me to marry him!”

  “That was before I knew there might be another choice! Oh, I bid you, look beyond your nose, Margherita! There is a whole wide world out there, and none of us has ever had the chance to see any of it beyond the Via Santa Dorotea!”

  “Is it my duty to go as if I were no better than the hound at the great painter’s heels? I know what you and Letitia want, both of you fawning over his grand clothes and his elegant friends. But the price for your ambition, Padre mio, is too high for me to pay!”

  His small eyes narrowed and his face darkened with rage. “Where did a baker’s daughter from Trastevere learn to believe she was so high and mighty that she could walk away from a purse full of gold florins?”

  “From the woman you married, Padre mio.”

  “Is this chance not precisely what she desired for you?”

  “Not with a man of his reputation! My mother married you against the wishes and advice of nearly everyone she knew. She trusted her own mind and her heart. Is that not the story you have always told us? She waited not for opportunity—but love!”

  Francesco Luti shook his head and let a heavy sigh as his eyes filled with sudden tears. “God rest her precious soul, it was the truth. And God help us all . . . you are just like her.”

  NEAR MIDNIGHT, when the workshop was cool and empty, and all of the assistants and apprentices were gone, Raphael stood alone at his easel with a wet portrait panel centered before him. Beside it on the worktable, draped with a paint-splattered sheet, was a large, untouched jug of wine, a wooden bucket full of dirty paint water, and cups stuffed with brushes. Pausing to study the image, he then filled his boar-bristle brush with a mixture of taupe and salmon pink paint, and skillfully applied it, causing a flesh and veined hand to burst forth.

  The massive room was lit by two large oil lamps with smoking flames that cast their dancing shadows onto the wall behind him. Raphael felt a shiver of excitement—a kind of caged energy that coursed through him. Dio, it was good to work like this, he thought, good to connect with the panel, to feel the paint, to take
the acrid smell of it into his lungs, to bring from nothing a representation of that which almighty God had created! As I once did . . . as I sometimes believe I have forgotten how, for having to be “Raffaello” . . .

  Only in this act of quiet solitude, with the easy companionship of his well-used paintbrush, did Raphael feel fully the sensation that had possessed him as a boy, as he had watched his own father paint at the Urbino chapel—as he had first held his own brush. It had been a long road from that simple act of glorious communion—the commissions, the power plays, the clothes, the dancing lessons, the fencing lessons, the elocution lessons, the daily need to flatter and ingratiate himself to people. But that was his world now, and most days he was glad of it. Until a moment like this, in the still, dark hours, surrounded and taken up by wet paint and supple brushes. It made him remember the simple boy from the countryside, with only talent and dreams. And he was still that boy beneath all these trappings and pressures of courtly success—a little lost and awed by what he had become, and the unyielding pressure to maintain it.

  Raphael studied the face he had created: Baldassare Castiglione, the great courtier and writer who had befriended him in Florence. He would be pleased. The likeness in oil was uncanny. His face would be as immortal as the elegant words he laid down in his book, which Raphael had been told he meant to call The Courtier.

  It was that grand scholar, in fact, who had awakened in Raphael his love of learning. Not formally schooled as a child, Raphael had begun by borrowing Homer’s Iliad from the sage old man who insisted he be called Baldassare, even by an inexperienced youth. After that literary suggestion had come the more humorous works of Aristophanes and Virgil. Raphael had rapidly devoured those as well, asking questions on the occasions they met, and listening to the wise, kindly elder statesman explain about the other great masterpieces he should come to know: the works of Socrates, Plato’s Republic, and particularly Aristotle’s writings concerning the soul. Raphael wanted to understand and to see things the way the brilliant minds did. He wanted that knowledge to move through him and out onto his panels and frescoes. His friendship with Castiglione had awakened something in him that had not been put down since. The evidence of that was his own steadily growing library on the Via dei Coronari. Like his workshop at night, the library of leather-bound volumes was a sanctuary, a place to be surrounded and possessed by something far grander than himself.

  Raphael looked at the old man’s kind face—the dark turban and cloak that drew the viewer to his eyes and small, subtle mouth. Raphael smiled sadly, greatly missing his sage counsel. If he were here now, he would tell me I have taken on too much, Raphael thought. Unlike my father, he would tell me I am too possessed by the things outside myself to hear the things within. S, he would say exactly that. And he would be right.

  The fire in the coal brazier beside his easel had gone to glowing embers long ago. It was time to go home, but he could not move. From somewhere he had not been for a long time, the energy surged. It clawed at him. The desire. The need. With it came a flare of that old, relentless ambition. Create! it urged. Paint!

  All through the night, Raphael remained inside the small, private room in his workshop. Now, having brought his easel here, and having bolted the door, he stood alone, dripping with oil paint, hands darkened with chalk, and blinded by an urge not to delegate or discuss, but to work.

  And when the flurry ended near dawn, when he was spent and exhausted, what he saw spread around himself on the floor was a sea of parchment as thick as a layer of new snow, and each sheaf was decorated with hands, eyes, arms. As he glanced around, only then did he realize that the images were all parts of her.

  Why was Margherita Luti so set against him? And, more than that, with so many other pressing commissions to trouble him, why did it matter?

  You have never cared this much about obtaining a model before, he heard the echo of Giovanni da Udine’s declaration before he had gone home earlier. And Giovanni was right. The young Florentine woman he had used for the many earlier Madonnas, so blond and serene, had let him sketch her face, study her eyes, nose, and lips, been paid for the trouble, then left his life compliantly.

  Was it merely Margherita’s refusal that had confounded him? Surely not. In spite of a measured attraction to her, he now grudgingly reminded himself, Margherita still was nothing like the lusty Roman women whom he seduced with impressive regularity. Why then was he absolutely compelled to convince her to enter his world? Certainly she was the Madonna. That face, the delicacy of her bones, the luminescence of her skin, her haunting eyes, and the unmistakable pride born by the mother of Christ.

  But she had refused him. Twice.

  In a rage of fatigue and frustration, as a pale pink dawn filtered in through the leaded-glass windows, Raphael began to shred the parchment into small bits. He was destroying what he had only just been driven to spend the night creating.

  4

  MARGHERITA SAT ALONE ON HER OAK-FRAMED BED IN A small, spartan room above the bakery. Beneath the coarse, gray blanket, knees curled to her chest, she gazed beyond the window at the starry night sky. The room would be stifling, even in autumn, were the shutters beside her bed not partially opened to draw in the breeze. On the other side of the wall, Letitia and Donato’s bedchamber was shared with their two smallest sons. The older boys slept in the attic loft of the odd-shaped little house. Living so near a couple long married, Margherita had learned much about the private world of a husband and wife. Those sounds, with their primal rhythms, had ignited the fears she now had of a life with Donato’s brother, Antonio.

  She could not help but think of the two of them like that, softly laughing, murmuring, pleasuring one another, in a private, unhurried way that did not involve inconvenient barriers. Antonio had shown her something else, a world of secretive cloaks, and the pungent smell of horse stalls where he had, twice before, stolen her away for a sensual kiss. Since they were children, Donato’s younger brother had vowed he would marry her. And there was safety in that life. Safety and an end to dreams.

  Until today.

  So, her family truly wished for her to pose for the great Raffaello? And there would be more gold coins to come. If she would only leave Trastevere, risk the unknown, and sit for his painting. A baker’s income was meager. A stableman’s even less. But there was something unseemly about a woman earning the money a family required. Would not the wives of the neighborhood whisper about her? And would they not be right to believe that the family had lowered themselves by allowing her to sit before the probing eyes of another man in exchange for money? “What has she done for the great mastro?” they would doubtless titter. What liberties had he taken? As Signor Sanzio stood downstairs, so elegantly clad in velvet and satin, jewels on his fingers, rich embroidery on his doublet, with half the neighborhood peering in through the windows, she had imagined how it would be, and she had despised him.

  But mixed with those thoughts was the memory of his hands. He had such elegant hands, with long, tapered fingers, she had thought, through which magic flowed.

  Hands that could make her immortal.

  The thought had only confused her more.

  The great Raphael Sanzio wishing to paint me! . . . And what more does he wish in return, giving such an honor? A small voice inside her posed the question with jarring clarity. And therein lay the real dilemma. What did the famous and powerful Raffaello truly want with a baker’s daughter from Trastevere? His wild reputation with women was nearly as well known as his work. He was a master. An icon. He could have anything—and anyone—he wished. She was only a simple girl with a simple future. One day when he was finished with his painting, he would send her back here, to this place and this life. And she would never be the same.

  Margherita wanted more for her life, as her mother had wanted it. But she had, at last, accepted the notion of a future with Antonio because the dreams had begun to fade along with the memory of her mother. For his part, her father had always sanctioned their informal co
urtship, envisioning no greater fate for his younger child. It had been that way since her mother’s death ten years before after a violent fall from a horse. Margherita had been almost nine. Antonio, nearly eleven, had been more mature in the face of loss, having buried his own father the year before. They had walked down to the Tiber, where the water’s edge met the mossy bank. That was where a little lost girl with feet too small for her hand-me-down shoes had come to rely on a boy who lived only two houses away.

  A stray memory crawled out from the back of her mind then—one that had not come to her in a very long time. She was that child again, sitting in this very bed, Antonio beside her, a tall and worldly ten-year-old, his arm around her heaving shoulder, holding her as she wept.

  “Margherita, you must go to the church!”

  “She cannot be dead! She is my mother! God cannot be so cruel!”

  “She is still here with you,” Antonio had murmured kindly. “She is watching you from heaven. And it would make her awfully sad to see you still crying.”

  She had lifted her tearstained face to him then and sniffled. “But there was no one like her, Antonio! She believed in me, she took care of me! She promised me that my life would be different! Now I have only my father and his bakery! He will be too busy to care for me now.”

  “I will always take care of you, Margherita,” he had said earnestly as he took her hand and helped her stand.

  “Do you promise?”

  “For the rest of our lives, we will share everything. Promesso . . . ” When she managed the faintest smile, he said, “Now will you go to the church to listen to the Mass said for her? The others are already there.”

  Margherita sniffled again. “Will you come with me?”

  “I will come with you . . . and sit beside you . . . and, one day, I will even marry you.”

  The childhood image crawled back into her memory as swiftly as it had emerged, safer there. Protected. It felt to Margherita that she had belonged to Antonio for her whole life. She had kept him as one does a favored childhood blanket, for the comforting predictability of it. Now the wildly famous painter represented something far more magnificent. Something rich, exciting, and unknown. If she did this, saw things beyond Trastevere, there would be no returning for her heart, not back to the ordinary world that now existed around her. It would be like a Pandora’s box, the contents of which, once revealed, could never be put away. And the idea of that frightened her terribly.