The Ruby Ring (36 page)

Smiling, Margherita shook her head. “You speak too much of death for one so young.”

“Perhaps I shall die prematurely. I have always felt that I would. Even when I was a boy, I believed it.”

“I will not hear that!”

“My father used to tell me the same thing, yet he died young as well. Death is the natural order of things. To live, and to die . . . We cannot avoid it, you know.”

“Well, they would certainly never bury
me
in the Pantheon, no matter what the Holy Father might assure you.”

“They would not
dare
to do otherwise. Remember,
amore mio, I
am Raffaello!”

The suggestion of a smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “And
I
am the woman whose daily task is to try to remind you of your responsibility in that. Not an easy task, reining in a creative soul, I assure you!”

“True enough,” he conceded with a smile. “So the more immediate changes from the Holy Father and the others will be in how they deal with me—and how they treat
you.
In the interim, I believe I have found, at last, that certain something that our private painting of you has been missing.” At last, he held up the ruby ring to her, glittering brilliantly in the candle glow. “The single article that will transform it into a
wedding
portrait.”

Margherita gazed down at the ring shimmering there, but did not move. A moment later, she looked up into Raphael’s eyes and saw the devotion redoubled now after what they had together endured.

“Will you do me the great honor, at last, Signora Luti, of becoming my wife?”

Her expression changed. Her lips parted just slightly, and her eyes began to fill with tears. “But the Holy Father—”

He pressed a single finger, with great tenderness, against her lips. “When you are my wife, nothing shall threaten you ever again.”

Tears glittered in her eyes like the precious jewel he still held up in offer to her. “Are you certain?”

“Before I met you,” he gently corrected her, the love open and telling in his voice, “I had no life. By Maria’s unfortunate death, I am free now from the shame of having broken my betrothal, which tainted the future for us. So there at last is nothing in our way.”

Raphael held her and raked his fingers from the crown of her hair down through the length of it, settling his hand at the small of her back and whispered against her cheek. “I have never wanted anything so much as I want this with you. Margherita, you are my lover, my friend, my muse—and now soon my wife.”

When Margherita turned fully toward him on the bench, Raphael took her hand and slipped the ruby ring—the jewel from another age—onto her slim finger. “This ring I give to you is something extraordinary. From the uncovered palace created by Nero.”

“The one given by the Holy Father to Cardinal Bibbiena.”

“But never meant for his hand. It well could have been worn by Poppaea herself. Its worth is priceless, its connection to your heart symbolic—which is the only sort of ring good enough to be a token of the love I bear for you.”

He kissed her then, more deeply, drawing the thin cotton shift down over the smooth curves of her shoulders and breasts, pooling it at her hips.

“I want to enhance the sketch we began,” he said adoringly, “make it a true portrait.”

“A portrait of me naked?” she gasped, a soft chuckle of disbelief following.

“S,”
he replied. Her beautiful breasts were bare and inviting, only for him. “We began it as a sensual game between ourselves, to help me begin to work again. But along the way, it has become something greater.” His voice quickened. “I intend this painting of you to be my masterpiece!”

“But it would be indecent to anyone who saw it!”

“That is just the point. Come, I will show you,” he directed, holding a flickering candle lamp as he led her into the small room he kept there.

Inside, set up just beside their bedchamber, he led her onto a divan covered over in red velvet, a silvery shaft of moonlight coming in through the stained-glass windowpanes behind it. Margherita gazed up curiously at him as he lit several more lamps, then began to mix paints.

He looked up at her as he worked, his eyes wide, the passion to create entirely returned. “When we began our life together, I could see you only as the Madonna. Pure. Sacred. One-dimensional.”

She bit back a smile. “I was
never
perfect.”

“My artist’s eye found you so.”

Raphael then busied himself with finding props that would define the composition he sought. The same turban to cover her hair as in the sketch, the same slip of gauzy fabric over her navel, and an artistic device he had already included in his design for the painting—an armband, that would later be painted as though etched with gold, words declaring undeniably that this work, and this woman, were forever the possessions of Raphael Urbinas.

“You meant it as a means to get me working again, and I thank you with my life for that. But in these months since, it has come to symbolize so much more than that.” He touched her cheek tenderly. “I mean this to be a wedding portrait, only for the two of us. A gift to you, to be hung in our bedchamber—an image of how my heart sees you, since I speak better with my paintbrush. But down through the ages, once both of us have gone, I wish people to see it and know how desperately a simple painter was changed by love.”

She was still smiling as he fixed the turban over her hair, fastening it with a costly pearl brooch, then slid a silver band edged in blue thread up over her wrist, onto her bare upper arm. Unable to resist then, he sank to his knees before her, kissed her neck, his mouth trailing down to her bare breasts.

“And so for this
wedding portrait,
how is it you see me exactly?”

“I see you as a seductress—the only one I
can
see, or will ever see. A womanly vision. The queen of my heart, a whore, a temptress . . . everything. All the elements of you that are precious and private between us.
Dio mio,
what would have become of me—of Raphael the man, if I had never known you?”

“Well.” She softly chuckled. “Put that way, how could I deny you such a portrait
?
”

“The style, the tone, the colors must be entirely new,” he declared, kissing her again. “Yet I know, even before it is complete, that this is the work I will always hold most dear to my heart, because it was the first and only one I painted entirely for
you.
”

37

May 1517

A
YEAR PASSED, AND AS THE SPRING CAME ONCE AGAIN,
Pope Leo was too sequestered and too consumed with his own tribulations to commit to a date upon which he would sanction and perform the marriage between Raphael and Margherita, even though he had already agreed to it. In the short term of his papacy, Pope Leo’s excessive spending on revelry and costly artistic projects had bled the papal coffers dry. The manner in which he sought to replenish the funds had only increased the scandal, and with it, his problems.

Following the revelation of a conspiracy against the pontiff’s very life, perpetrated by a number of his own cardinals, Pope Leo had unwisely chosen to punish them by demanding excessively large sums of money from each of them—money he desperately needed, not only for the building of Saint Peter’s, but for the intricately frescoed rooms at the Vatican Palace. He had also continued the controversial practice of selling indulgences, which raised to a fever pitch the anger throughout Rome and the other dissatisfied Italian city-states. The pope could attend to no other duties, Raphael was continually told by the papal secretaries, until this serious matter was under control. When that might be, he was informed, was anyone’s guess.

In spite of Margherita’s assurance that she would be content to have any priest marry them, Raphael was insistent that it be the Holy Father. Not only had the pope performed Chigi’s marriage to a commoner, thus setting a precedent in Raphael’s mind, but after the kidnapping, it was symbolic. To fully heal old wounds, it must be Pope Leo.

Still, as they waited, with Margherita’s love and constant encouragement, Raphael had gotten back to work, full force, and he was too excessively committed to press the situation when the Holy Father pleaded for his patience. As spring turned to summer, and summer cooled to autumn, Raphael, as always, worked on several commissions at one time.

Two days before Christmas of that year 1517, as a gesture of friendship, trust, and reconciliation, Raphael accepted from Cardinal de’ Medici, the pope’s cousin, his most important commission thus far, marking his full return to work. He was to paint the Transfiguration on a large panel as an altarpiece that would hang in the cathedral of Saint-Juste, in Narbonne, France, part of the cardinal’s archepiscopal see. It would be, Cardinal de’ Medici told him, the crowning glory of not only his art, but of Pope Leo’s papacy. What he did not tell Raphael, at first, was that the Holy Father had agreed to see a second highly prized commission for a companion piece, The Raising of Lazarus, given to Sebastiano Luciani.

When he discovered that, Raphael bounded up the grand stairway of the house on the Via Alessandrina, his face white with rage. With a knotted fist, he rapped at the door of the little art studio beside the bedchamber, where Margherita generally took her afternoon
reposo
with her father and Letitia, for the view of the piazza and the reasonably fresh breeze it offered. This time, however, she was alone. The door crashed against the wall, shaking the house.

“You will not believe what he has done this time!”

Margherita came to her feet, her rich blue silk skirts unfolding around her legs, the hem sweeping the tile floor like gentle waves. “What has upset you,
amore mio?
”

“His Holiness is trying once again to control me! Of all the artists in Rome, his cousin has given a commission for a companion piece to
my
Transfiguration to that bastard Sebastiano!”

“Perhaps he feels it is time to end the grudge between the two of you. After all, it has been such a long time, and are we not stronger together even than before?”

“Yet, from Florence, Michelangelo still stirs the pot between us daily! Bitter old fool! I still cannot trust his lackey, Sebastiano, and I will
not
risk your safety by trusting in the very men who sought to destroy us!”

It was only then that he became aware of something. As he had come into the room, Margherita was standing beside the finished painting of herself, yet unframed, still on his easel, her eyes shining with tears. He had been so angry entering the room that he had forgotten he had left it here, and it was clear she had just seen it, now that it was complete.

In the wedding portrait, he had painted Margherita as voluptuously as anything she had ever seen: a beautiful smile highlighting her face, a turban on her head, her breasts bare. But it was the newly added details that moved her. On the finger believed to lead to her heart, he had painted the exquisite ruby ring. The band painted so seductively onto her arm now bore words:
Raphael Urbinas,
the brand of the great master—his signature, his sign of possession to all the world.

“You’ve
signed
it?” she asked through her tears, unable to break her gaze from the signature band he had painted onto her arm in such shades of bright blue and gold that it could not be missed by the viewer.

“One of the few I ever have. It rarely felt right to do so until now. It was never something with which I wished to ornament my work as other artists do. But as you can see,” he smiled, and his face was full of adoration, “in style, tone, and subject matter, this is like nothing I have ever painted before.” He kissed her deeply. “You have inspired that change, Margherita
mi
a
—you!”

“No one who sees it shall ever believe it is a true Raphael painting, you know. In it, you have broken all of your own artistic rules.”

“Just as I have broken all of the other rules, it seems, by falling so desperately in love with you. This is meant to be our symbol of that fact.” He took her in his arms. “This painting is a proclamation that I adore you more than life itself.” He shook his head, then looked back at her, his eyes bright with devotion. “
Dio,
the things I have done for love of you—things I never believed I could. I have reached new heights of daring in my work—your Madonnas . . . the concept for the Transfiguration . . . all of it, I owe to your encouragement.”

Margherita wrapped her hands around his neck, and he encircled her waist. For a moment, her expression grew serious, as Raphael whispered, “By God’s grace, and your patience, I am yours now completely.”

They shared a kiss, and in it she felt the full promise of the future they would have together at last. Even so, Margherita had learned enough of this complex world of Raphael’s to know that anything could happen between now and the day they married. She must be wary of that. In the meantime, another token of reconciliation was presented to Raphael the very next day by Margherita herself, along with her dear friend Francesca Chigi.

“W
HAT IS
he
doing here?” Raphael’s face swiftly grew red and his expression angry.

When he returned from the workshop that evening, there were guests in his drawing room, and they were the last two people in the world he expected to be there. Agostino and Francesca Chigi sat together in tapestry-draped chairs set at an angle near the fire. Seeing them, Raphael paused in the doorway as Margherita moved near, her expression one of openness and love.

“Will you not hear him out, at least? He is, after all, one of your dearest friends in Rome.”

“He is nothing but a traitor to me!” Raphael raged, pivoting back toward the staircase before Margherita stopped him with a gentle hand.

“There will be no end to it,
amore mio,
until
you
say it is so. You have the power now.”

“They took that power away from me when they imprisoned
you!
”

“It is in the past, Raphael! Francesca is my friend, and I am hers. It is a torment to us both that we cannot say the same of the men we love.”

Raphael was still white with rage, his body coiled in anger. “He has yet to show a single bit of remorse for what he did!”

“Forgive me—I bid you. I was horribly wrong.”

The voice belonged to Agostino Chigi. When Raphael turned back slowly, he saw the elegant banker standing, hands extended in pleading, his expression one of sincere regret. Raphael had not expected that.

“Was the kidnapping a plan of your design?”

“I am as guilty, surely, as if it were, since I chose not to object to it.” Agostino moved a step nearer, then stopped, seeming to think better of pushing too hard and too swiftly. “I cannot change that I agreed to the action, Raphael. But I was just as wrong for not speaking out against the plan, and for that I can only plead guilty.”

“Bibbiena planned it, did he not?”

“
Per favore,
it is not for me to indict others, Raphael. Only to make amends for my own actions. I do despise myself for what I did. Truly!”

“If you are wanting full forgiveness right now, this moment, I warn you I cannot give it.”

“I would settle for an open door between us, and the time to see where it may lead.”

Francesca and Margherita exchanged a glance in the uncertain silence. The fire cracked and popped. Shadows danced on the high painted walls.

“Signora Luti has forgiven you?” Raphael cautiously asked.

“She says that she has.”

“You all misjudged her greatly.”

“We did indeed.”

“If Signora Luti wishes to spend time with your wife, then I shall not object.”

“And perhaps one day you will begin to accompany her again to my home?”

“We shall see, Agostino. I will not close the door, but the most I can say for the two of us is that we shall see.”