The Ruby Ring (19 page)

Giulio de Medici pondered the revelation, finally relenting to take one of the remaining pastries from the quickly dwindling supply set on silver still hovering in the hands of the page behind them. He bit into it, savoring the bite. After a moment Giulio said, “Marinated anchovies are wonderful, too, but how many of
them
can you consume before the thought alone fills your throat with bile?” He pointed his finger in warning. “Mark my word and fear not, my good and holy cousin. Raphael shall tire of this one just as he has all the others.”

“Apparently she is
not
like the others.”

“She is a body given up to an important man’s unholy desires. Why would she not become, in the end, just like all the others?”

“Because this one, good cardinal, he has painted as the Madonna!”

I
N THE SHADOWS
of moonlit darkness, through a small stained-glass window, and beside the pallet they had shared, Margherita watched him when he did not see her. At work again so late at night, in this utter stillness, a different aspect of Raphael had come alive before her. Now again he was obsessed, intense, and absolutely driven, but on something other than his passion for her. Sitting naked beside her, legs crossed, he was entirely focused in this silent moment on the chalk and paper he held and commanded. Raphael’s stare was leveled, his body tensed, the broad shoulders hunched forward, devoted to the activity as he confronted, prodded, and caressed the paper. From it, he powerfully coaxed shapes and figures out of nothing with broad, precise sweeps of his hand.

Again, the memory of Marina Luti moved across her daughter’s heart. Her mother would have liked him. And she knew now with a strange certainty that she would have approved. Raphael would have fascinated her, as he did her daughter. Knowing that gave her a warm and settled feeling of peace.

Margherita was transfixed by the energy swirling wildly around Raphael, and also at the sight of him entirely captivated. This was the private, inner dominion of an artist—the secret moment of creation, an experience as intimate and yet powerful as a sexual communion. Margherita felt herself grow warm as she watched his hand sweeping the length of the large sheet of white paper, the red chalk and his exacting strokes pulling forth the naked, recumbent figure of a woman, one arm behind her head, the other laying lazily between her legs. It was Margherita, her naked body, as she had slept beside him. She saw more fully the importance of it—what he did, how he worked, the absolute compulsion of an artist to create when the moment and the inspiration occurred. This was an understanding she knew she would remember for the rest of her life. There was power and delight in knowing that she now played a small role in that. She had never had power over anything in her life, yet suddenly it seemed she was the muse of a great and important man.

“I really must remember to fall asleep only with my clothes on,” she said softly, and her mouth was curved into a slightly mischievous smile. “Soon everyone in Rome shall speak of the forbidden things we do here in this studio, and we shall become quite notorious.”

Raphael glanced at her and bit back his own smile, then lay the paper onto the floor beside his thigh. He moved onto her and kissed her lips tenderly. “You speak as if that displeases you. But the flush of your face belies something else.”

“Happiness.”

“Yet you are right. There is danger in this for us both. And I must protect you,
amore mio,
for as long as I am able.”

“Why do I require protection?”

“Because a commodity, not only a man, has fallen in love with you—totally and entirely in love with you—and there are those in Rome with other plans for my life.”

“It frightens me to death, loving you.”

“Yet you do?”

“I know not why, yet I do.”

Moved, he said, “Then I am the man of greatest fortune in all the world.”

“You may not believe it is so when the world, and particularly your benefactor, discovers it.”

“I shall never regret a single thing that is between us, Margherita
mia.
You shall never know how you have forever altered my world.”

“Your world is your art.”

“My world, now, is
you.
”

He kissed her deeply, sensually, then, and Margherita kissed him back with an innocent passion that still could rock him to the core. In spite of how many times, and how many ways, they had made love, or how many intimate ways he had possessed her, it surprised Raphael that unlike all other women, he had no sense of tiring of her. Nor had he built up the same walls to his heart as he always had before. Each day, she surprised and delighted him. Moreover, she still touched a part of him that was new, vulnerable, and entirely unreachable before her. Thinking of that, as his eyes roamed the length of her glorious body, Raphael felt himself flushed with desire again.

“If you ever wish to change your mind,” she said with heartfelt sincerity, “I have seen what your art means to you. If it comes to that between us that you must choose, I shall promise to understand.”

“It will not happen,” he declared in response, with the passion of a sacred oath. He was holding her hands together between the two of them in a prayerful shape. “You have made my art come alive in a new way, do you understand that? You have given me a new motivation where I had been fading. It is said,
amore mio,
that a writer has his muse. If that is so, then I have my own artistic inspiration—and that evermore shall be you.”

He left her suddenly then, driven to use the power of his passion not to have her, but to capture her like this exactly. He moved across the room to his sketchbook as she lay naked before the fire, then drew up another stub of red chalk and began to outline her body on a fresh slip of paper, as she reclined so sensually before him.

“Have you not done enough of these studies?” She smiled up at him, her body relaxed and open, her smile slim and sensual.

“Such a thing is not possible.” He smiled rakishly back at her, showing her as he did how to position her arm lazily between parted legs, one knee slightly lifted, and her eyes leveled wide and unapologetically at him. “
Dio,
but that is wonderful! So erotic . . . ”

“So illegal!” she softly giggled. “You cannot simply go around painting the bodies of naked women!”

“But you are not just any naked woman. You are the artist’s inspiration! If I am ever asked to explain it, this is the classical representation of . . . of . . . ” He paused to think of the perfect classical deity. “I know, of Diana, the goddess of love! Naked women in classical form are perfectly acceptable as artistic subject matter in Rome, you know!”

“No,” she chuckled. “I knew that not.”

Raphael tossed down his sheaf of paper and chalk and traveled slowly up the length of her body once again, and as he did, kissing the inside of her thighs, and the little triangle of downy hair where her legs ended. Margherita’s head lolled back and her eyes closed as she gave in to the sweet sensation of his tongue on her skin.

As he tasted her, she caught a glimpse of writing scrawled beneath an earlier sketched image, sloping words at the bottom of the page. She reached for it and drew it back to them.

“What have you done to my picture?”

“I have written you a sonnet.”

She was genuinely surprised. “Will you read it to me?”

“Should you not read it yourself?”

“I want to hear it from your lips as I look at the art you created above it.
Per favore,
Raphael. Read it for me.”

As tentatively as a child about to recite lessons, Raphael took the sketch back and settled it on his lap. He glanced at her once more, then gazed down at the words he had written for love of her.

The way my heart sees you, your beauty is clear.

But my very faithful paintbrush cannot compare it.

My love for you weakens all else . . .

Tears glittered in her eyes. “That is beautiful.”

“It is only the first stanza. I wrote it to you when my longing for you was—unrequited.”

“No one shall ever give me a greater gift.”

“I certainly plan to try.”

“Nothing you could ever buy for me could compare to what comes from the depth of your heart.”

He had never known a woman who could say that and make him believe she meant it.

“Come home with me tonight,” he said suddenly.

“To your house?”

“
S.
Be there with me. Talk with me, eat with me. I will read to you from the classics, to teach you. Then wake in my arms without the need to rush away before the studio opens. It is far more comfortable than here, to be sure. I have plenty of rooms for Donato there as well, and only one servant who lives with me upstairs.”

“But your assistant . . . Signor Romano . . . does he not still reside with you there?”

For the moment Raphael had forgotten that, and remembering it now came with a cold jolt of other things. Another woman. In his passion to greedily possess every moment he could find with Margherita, he had forgotten Elena, and the powerful regret he bore for what had once occurred between them, there at his home.

“Perhaps you are right.” He washed a hand across his face. “Giulio is as devoted a young man as you shall ever see, and his rooms are upstairs with my valet. But if it would bring you discomfort, we must think of something else so that I can see you like this every night.”

Margherita rolled onto her elbows, balanced her chin on her palms, and looked with a little frown at his eyes for what felt to him like a lifetime. “This is what you wish of me every night?”

“This is what I wish for
us
for the rest of our lives.”

“Without benefit of marriage?”

Raphael felt his heart squeeze. He closed his eyes and thought desperately of what to tell her—how to explain it so that she would understand. That there was still the issue of Maria and the tremendous amount of work left for Cardinal Bibbiena. Not to mention the powerful influence he could exert in ruining him—and the assistants who depended upon him if Raphael openly rejected Maria. But the overwhelming love he now felt for Margherita made all of that seem trivial even to him. That it would begin an unraveling of his commissions that could easily spiral out of control did not matter at this moment because Margherita would not understand that. He was insulting her even to try, belittling her by asking her to leave her home and come to his house every night as nothing better or more committed than a concubine.

“I
want
to marry you, Margherita.”

“Marry me?”

“By my oath, I
will
make you my wife one day.”

“One day.”

He rolled away from her and let a heavy sigh. It was the first time in days that the euphoria of his overwhelming passion for her had been tempered in the slightest, and he felt sick to his stomach by her look of disappointment. Even closing his own eyes could not chase it away. “Tell me what I can do. I know not how to convince you—” He turned his gaze on her again as she remained there, waiting for him to explain. “I wish to end the betrothal with Maria Bibbiena, and I will. It is my vow. But there are so many artists here in my studio. Giulio, Gianfrancesco, and Giovanni are but a few who have given up their whole lives to believe in me, to follow me, to work for me . . . and if I make a stand against his niece with a cardinal as influential as Bibbiena now, when there is so much riding—”

“Your assistants—your
friend
s
—will all be without work. And it will be because of you.”

He raked the hair back from his forehead and let a heavy sigh. “It is entirely possible for Cardinal Bibbiena to turn Chigi and the Holy Father against me as well. Michelangelo Buonarroti would be only too happy to return from Florence and take my outstanding commissions, and I will be back in Urbino searching for portraits to paint.”

Margherita reached out and ran her hand across the plane of his cheek, then placed a small, gentle kiss there. “Poor Raphael. So many people wanting you for their purposes, not your own.”

“I warned you that I was only a commodity to them.”

“It is, as I feared, an impossible circumstance.”

But it came to him then, and his eyes glistened with delight. Raphael laughed, unable to believe that he had not had the most obvious of thoughts before.

“What is it?” Margherita asked, seeing the change in his expression.

Raphael sat up and began hurriedly to dress. “I cannot tell you,” he laughed happily. “Not yet. It may take some time to accomplish, but I
will
make this better!”

He helped her to dress then, and to put on her worn slippers with the little leather ties to keep them on her feet. He must attend to that as well, he thought. Her wardrobe. There were dresses, headdresses, and undergarments to be bought, and jewelry to find. Margherita Luti deserved the best that he could give her. And he wanted to give her everything.

Raphael took her chin and held it tightly between his thumb and forefinger, settling his gaze on her. “I shall send for you as soon as it is arranged. But what I have in mind may take a bit of time to organize. Can you be patient?”

She waited a moment looking at him, tipped her head, then said very softly, “You know, I find that I could actually wait forever for you.”

“Grazie a Dio,”
he murmured deeply, taking her one last time into his arms.

15

A
NTONIO WAS WAITING FOR MARGHERITA WHEN
s
HE
returned to the bakery shortly before dawn that next morning. She was stunned by his pallor and the grave expression on his unshaven face—a face that had always reflected his hauteur and self-importance. Something had actually shaken the more unshakable Perazzi brother.

Margherita drew off her cloak warily and opened the bakery door. Purposely, she had chosen not to enter the small plain door beside it, the entrance to the living quarters, so as not to draw attention to the hour of her arrival. Of course her father, Donato, and Letitia knew where she spent her nights now, but Margherita had too much pride to draw attention to that fact or to find herself in need of explanations.

It appeared that now she would be made to do so anyway.

“
Allora,
it is true! You
are
bedding with him,” Antonio said flatly as he followed her into the kitchen, which was still gray in the early morning light; no loaves of bread were yet baking. She lit a single candle lamp on the table herself and took her white cloth apron from a peg beside the just lit bread oven.

“That’s none of your affair,” she replied, tying the apron around her waist and beginning to set out the several bowls required for mixing—trying to find something that would keep her from having to meet Antonio’s judgmental gaze. “Besides, was it not you who told me to
allow
him to pursue me?”

“I thought you might lead him on for a while, get a few florins, some jewels perhaps, to help us in our start.”

She stopped with a wooden spoon suspended in her hand and looked up at him, seeing the difference so clearly there between him and Raphael. “Then you did not know me very well.”

“I have known you since we were children! We have always had an understanding of what we wanted in life! What would be best for our beginning!”

“You had given me the impression that we were now only to be friends.”

“Oh, I say a great many things,” he shrugged. “You know that.”

“It was by your behavior, not your words, that circumstances changed between us.” She braced herself on the table with both hands and he knew that she meant the other women. He wisely chose not to deny that. “There is not going to be a beginning for us, Antonio.”

His stare became angry. “I never would have thought you would do this to me!”

“And
I
never thought you would be willing to share me for a bit of money, or seduce Chigi servant girls to advance yourself!”

“I used what we had, Margherita!” His smooth, handsome face was suddenly mottled red and twisted with anger. “And at the time, our best commodity was you. We come from the same place. We
are
the same. You cannot possibly begrudge me that!”

“Perhaps not, but neither can I respect you any longer.”

“You speak of respect when you have given a total stranger your chastity, your dignity?”

“I have given him my heart along with it, Antonio.”

“He will break it in two, mark my words. You were a challenge, the novelty of stout fruit bread when one has eaten too many cream-filled tarts!”

“Thank you very much for that!” she replied, sharply wounded now by his ongoing assault.

“You were always meant to be
my
wife!”

“Then you should not have pushed me toward another man!”

He slammed his fist angrily onto the table. “You owe me something for this, Margherita—at least for the shame, the jests and sneers, you have brought upon me, and which, for your lustful ways, I shall now be forced to endure with our neighbors and friends for a good many months!”

She spun around, her eyes ablaze with disbelief. “You want
money?
”

“I believe I am owed something!”

She had known Antonio all of her life, and only now did she realize fully that this man before her, so handsome and carefree, up until now the epitome of self-assurance, was a complete stranger to her.

“You are nothing like your brother.”

“I have always considered that an attribute,” he said nastily. “Donato allows that sister of yours to drag him around by the nose, and he is not the better for it. He shall never do more than muck out stables the rest of his life!”

“Get out, Antonio!”

The brittle, angry tenor came from Donato. He stood at the bottom of the staircase with Francesco and Letitia, all dressed to begin the day’s batches of bread. All three of them had heard the cruel exchange.

“Not until I get what I came for!”

“The only thing you shall receive here is a thrashing!” Donato promised as he charged at his younger brother, taking him up by the collar.

“I agonized for a long time whether I was doing the right thing,” Margherita said. “I am glad you came here today, Antonio.”

“You shall not get away with shaming me, Margherita Luti!” he warned as Donato thrust him toward the door. “That, I promise all of you!”

T
HAT EVENING,
Cardinal Bibbiena stood before his niece and rolled his eyes, impatiently watching her weep into her bony hands. Tender feelings were largely foreign to him, yet he felt them for her. Maria had been with him here in Rome since the age of nine. His brother and sister-in-law, who remained at the family seat, the grand Palazzo Dovizi, in Bibbiena, believed a better match could be made for their homely daughter nearer to the base of power.

At first, a ward had been a family obligation Bernardo had taken on grudgingly. But somewhere along the way, although now he remembered not where, Maria had become like a daughter to him. The child of his heart. The one he would never have.

To her, he became the caring guide she could not find in her own father.

Through the years, Maria rarely saw her parents. She depended upon her uncle for all things. Within his tender feelings was a wild need to protect her, along with his own strong desire for her success. Initially, he had wanted the marriage with Raphael for the prestige it would bring him. But Maria’s infatuation with Raphael had made a love match into a fatherly desire.

Its unraveling now pricked him because it wounded her.

As she wept before him, he glanced up at the painting,
Saint Jerome in Meditation,
that he had given to her for her suite of rooms at his villa on the elegant Via dei Leutari. He folded his arms across his chest.

“If you are quite finished,
cara,
you must dry your eyes and decide what we are to do about all of it.”

The cardinal had left the Vatican and, accompanied by papal guards, rode his own great chestnut stallion, with the ecclesiastical blanket beneath his jeweled saddle. A biting winter wind cut through his cape and cassock as he crossed the Tiber to the family villa where Maria lived in appropriate splendor.

He had found her in this grand room, dotted with niches full of priceless urns, the walls ornamented with religious paintings. It was the anteroom to her bedchamber. Maria sat on a hassock, covered in midnight-blue silk, before a raging fire in the grand stone hearth. She was as limp as an abandoned rag doll, and he was losing patience. Her woebegone sobbing, at this point, was grating on his nerves. Even worse, it was tugging at his heart.

“What is there to do but concede?”

“Concede?” he bellowed, his reedy voice echoing through the cavernous room. “To a baker’s daughter?
Dio mio,
child! Those are not the words of a Bibbiena! Can you not for a moment reflect upon
that?
”

“How can I do anything
but
reflect? Reflect on my future—the one without Raphael in it!”

He knelt before her, clamped his hands on her shuddering upper arms, and gently shook her in the shadows cast from the fire. He hated loving her this much, and the weakened state to which it brought him. He did not wish to be vulnerable to anyone.

Consciously, he worked to control the volume of his voice, and the anger it bore. “You
must
save this betrothal, Maria. Your reputation is at stake. The family name is at stake. Your honor will be lost if someone so well known as Raphael withdraws his petition, and then it would be virtually impossible to find you another important match!”

Helpless tears cascaded down her colorless cheeks. “Can you not go to the Holy Father? Plead my case before him?”

“Even the Holy Father cannot make a man wish to marry you if he does not, Maria. Besides, they had words about you last autumn, and His Holiness noted great resistance from Raphael on the subject of moving forward with the marriage.”

“Then I am lost!” She began openly to sob again, a shallow, mouselike squeaking. “And I do so love him!”

“That, my girl, is your first mistake,” the cardinal coldly declared, standing fully, once again, over her. “Marriages for our kind have nothing to do with love.
If
you manage to change his mind by outlasting this newest infatuation of his, you would do well to learn that Raphael has an artist’s temperament. He is wildly driven, incredibly self-absorbed, and absolutely bound by virtually insatiable carnal passions.”

“Uncle!” Maria gasped, fingers splayed across her mouth, and tears running over her bony knuckles.

“It is time you grew up,
cara mia.
While it is those qualities that create some of the world’s most incredible art, it is those same qualities that shall require a wife to tolerate and understand many things.”

“Such as mistresses.”

“Many of them, in all likelihood.”

Her owlish, tear-filled eyes widened. “Do you believe he will never find me comely enough to love? That I can never be enough for him, even once we are wed?”

In a fit of frustration, he pummeled the leather-covered arm of the chair beside her hassock with his bound fist. “Maria, wake up, I bid you! He may well yet, by some intervening miracle, marry you! If we are patient, careful, and very wise he may even, if the Lord smiles upon your union, get you with a child! But Raphael Sanzio will never be faithful to you! He is simply not capable of that sort of devotion to anyone’s desires but his own! If you go along much further with the childish notion that things can be any different than that, you will, I believe, chase him as far from you as he can get, and swiftly!”

He paced the room for a moment, his words resonating between them. “So, it is for you to decide. Is it the naive storybook version of a husband you desire, or is it Rome’s greatest prize, the lauded artist—the
mastr
o
—upon whom you shall keep your sights absolutely set upon winning?”

She wiped her nose on a lace-edged handkerchief, then blew into it until her nose was red. “I still wish him as my husband, Uncle.”

“Even as he is.”

“
S.
Even as he is.”

“Very well. Then let us do as it requires.
All
that it may require, shall we?” he calmly declared.

T
HEY WALKED
together unnoticed through the narrow, busy streets of Trastevere, Raphael’s olive-green velvet hat tipped down over his brow, and his head kept low as they arrived at the little cobblestone piazza and the small parish church of Santa Dorotea.

“Come,” Margherita smiled, motioning him inside.

“The two of us in a church?” he chuckled. “After what we have only this morning done with one another?”

“I would like you to meet someone,” she said as they climbed the wide stone steps to the carved and weathered doors with large brass handles.

Entering the sanctuary was soothing to Margherita. This warm, candlelit cocoon of silence and peace was where she had worshipped, confessed, and paid homage to her dead mother for the final time. It was reassuring to be back here, even for a few moments, when so much about her life now was changing.

Margherita moved down the center of the church toward the nave, between two banks of old wooden chairs. She walked toward a heavily jowled man, a priest, in a long black cassock, who was removing the melted candles and puddles of hardened wax from brass holders beside the altar. He never changed, Margherita thought. Padre Giacomo was the picture of calm kindness, with his compact body, balding head, and heavy gray temples above the dominant jowls. She felt her own smile broaden as she neared him, and as he looked up with soft, silvery blue eyes, recognizing her.