The Ruby Ring (8 page)

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

M
ARGHERITA 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 courtship, 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.

And it drove her back to imagining her future in Trastevere.

Antonio Perazzi, Donato’s errant younger brother, was a saddle boy and apprentice stirrup-maker, for now. But he was one with the promise of a brighter future. Last year, he had accepted a job assisting his brother at the stables of the Palazzo Chigi. It was only a matter of time, he boasted, until his true talent was discovered. Then he would be promoted to the position of full stableman, one who might actually squire the great and powerful Signor Chigi, or one of his mistresses, between the villa and the Vatican, where they were frequent guests.

Hearing light footfalls on the patch of roof beside her window, Margherita sprung from beneath her bedcovers. She cast them back, drew open the window shutters fully, and, in a haze of shock, helped Antonio inside her small, sparely furnished bedchamber. Suddenly, as if her thoughts alone had called him, he stood before her in the shadows, wearing a forest green tunic with leather at the hem, buff-colored wool hose, slashed leather boots with cuffs, and a small leather hat, his hands placed pointedly on slim hips. The unmistakable gritty odor of horseflesh swirled around his smooth, beardless face and tousled, honey-colored hair.

“This is madness! What are you doing here?” she asked on an incredulous whisper. “You’ll be discovered!”

“I made certain I was not seen. But I must know! How did the great Raphael of Urbino not only meet you, but find
you
suitable enough to pose for one of his paintings?”

“Donato told you.”

“Of course. My brother tells me all.”

“We met on Il Gianicolo yesterday,” she said with hesitation, as if revealing something private. “Naturally, at first, I did not believe him. But when he had his apprentice follow me home, his hands stained with chalk dust, his hose spotted with paint—”

Antonio stopped. His steel-blue eyes widened. Suddenly he slapped a palm against his forehead. Then he took her shoulders in his hands bracingly. “You must do it!”

“Do what?”

“You
must
pose for the
mastro!
”

She looked away. “I don’t know what I will do.”

“You must consider only your good fortune,
cara.
Fortune smiles only on those willing to seize it boldly!”

Disregarding the platitude, and an odd sense of warning that began to snake its way up inside of her, she said instead, “Did you not tell me my greatest fortune was in finding
you
?”

Seizing her shoulders with commanding fingertips now, Antonio drew her against him as he first had when they were much younger, found her lips, and began to kiss her with a wild hunger that entirely disarmed her defenses. “Do this for us,
cara,
” he murmured. “To help our beginning.
Per favore!
Say you will at least reconsider his proposal.”

Margherita felt the insistent pressure of his taut body and felt herself yielding to the power of it. “I will consider it.”

“Va bene.”
He moved his lips to kiss her cheek, then smiled. A moment later, he was poised once again beside the open window, and turned around, as if with an afterthought. A cool breeze blew the thin muslin curtains in around him. “The gold florins that the great Raffaello left with you,” he said, and his eyes were twinkling mischievously. “It would be most helpful to give one to my mother, if you have one to share.” His steel-blue eyes were made a deeper blue shining in the moonlight. “I cannot be certain, of course, but I should think it would go a long way to convincing her that you are committed totally, at last, to seeing her as your mother-in-law.”

“I cannot possibly go downstairs now. My father would hear me!”

“Then bring it tomorrow to the stables on your way to the
mastro
’s studio? You know you must see him again. To apologize.”

“Since you asked me, I shall consider it.”

Antonio’s eyes glittered. “Consider nothing but that, and you shall please me greatly.”

I
N THE SHADOW
of his passionate kiss, the sweet taste of his mouth, and the turmoil of adolescence remembered that had been rekindled within her there came a soft rapping on her closed bedroom door. Before Margherita could respond, the handle was turned and Donato, Letitia’s husband, stood in the doorway. “Are you asleep?” he asked. “I thought I heard something in here.”

“I am awake,” she called in reply.

Donato was the brother she had never had. They had grown up together, all four of them, in the narrow streets and alleyways of Trastevere, a short walk just beyond the ancient Porta Settimiana to Agostino Chigi’s opulent waterside palace.

Donato sank onto the edge of the bed beside her. The familiar odor of leather and horse sweat was comforting. She smiled looking at him as they sat in the circle of light cast from her flickering lamp. Tall and lean, with sleek, dark hair to his shoulders, a flat, Tuscan nose, and ruddy skin, he was so good, she thought—steady and firm. It seemed to her that he was kindness itself. And he was one of the reasons she cared for Antonio.

“Letitia told me what happened today,” Donato said gently. “Are you all right?”

“It is all so unbelievable.” She cast a glance back at the unshuttered window where, only a moment before, Antonio had stood, taking her back to a time better forgotten.

“And yet you have refused the chance to discover whether it might not actually be real?”

“What could someone like that possibly want with someone like me, Donato?” She leaned forward, drew up her knees again beneath the blanket, and wrapped her arms around them.

“You are a lovely girl,
cara.
Is it so impossible to believe that a great
mastro
might not see that in you?”

“He paints kings and princes, and the works in the Vatican, home of the Holy Father himself! We sell bread, Donato! How could the great Raffaello possibly see beyond that? And if he does, and I allow it, what shall become of me afterward?”

“Then the whole world shall be before you. Your life shall become the stuff of legends!”

“And your brother? What shall become of
him?
We have always had something of an agreement.”

“Antonio shall be just fine,
cara mia.
Don’t worry about that.” Seeing the hesitation on her soft face, he took her hand gently. “Poor Margherita
mia.
I wish you could see yourself as others do.