Secret of Light (15 page)

As the crowd dispersed, Leonardo rolled his eyes at Darrell again. “This is what I get for having an actor for a friend,” he complained good-naturedly.

Giovanni ruffled Delaney's fur. “I do thank you again,
signorina.
He reminds me of a dog who once used to visit my grandfather. Keep by his side. He is a most — helpful beast.”

He stood abruptly and clapped Leonardo on the shoulder. “I am away,
mio amico
, to see to my own business. I wish you well on your journey, and I will come and help you set up your studio in Milan next month, mmm?”

Leonardo nodded and waved as his friend strode off. Delaney jumped to his feet and barked once before returning to his spot beside Darrell.

Darrell swallowed. She had learned much about Leonardo's life from books, but seeing him here, sitting beside her — he was more real than the man she had read about. His notebook proved he was a sculptor, a painter, a mechanic, a physicist, a designer, an architect, and so much more. But what of his “secret project” — the time machine? The notebook was not complete, and Darrell could see several blank pages near the end. “It looks like you still have room for more ideas,” she ventured. “Why do you need to move away?”

“I can't seem to get anything finished here,” he complained. “My mind is so full, there are not hours in the day enough to make the smallest dent in the ideas racing through my brain.” He leapt to his feet and Darrell followed, still clutching the satchel, frantic with worry that he would brush her aside and return to the lodging of the duke.

“I am in constant fear of the competition here. Lesser artists — they will stop at nothing to have a taste of what my mind can provide.” He walked back along the street, the way Darrell had come, rather than toward the duke's lodgings. A sliver of hope glimmering in her chest, she hastened behind, and soon they were walking down the
tree-lined lane leading to his studio and, further along, to Verrocchio's home.

“In
Milano
, I will be better able to accomplish great things. My new patron, Duke Sforza, will have all the war machines he can possibly use, and I will have time to spend on my most exciting project ever.”

Darrell's heart pounded.
The secret project!

He brandished his notebook and grinned. “When this new project comes to light,” he said, his expression suddenly boyish, “people everywhere will say ‘Leonardo' when the word they mean is ‘genius'.”

In spite of her excitement, Darrell rolled her eyes. Leonardo the man seemed so different from the boy, but his ego certainly hadn't diminished over the years. “Don't they believe that already?” she asked, her voice dry.

Leonardo carried on as though she hadn't spoken. “They will see me in the streets of
Milano
and they will say, ‘Now there goes a man who has changed the world.'”

The low stone building soon appeared, and Darrell followed Leonardo around the back, trying to keep her footing on the rough cobblestones and still keep up with his long stride. She was concentrating so hard she only narrowly missed crashing into him when he stopped suddenly in front of her.

“Look at this,” he whispered, and pointed to a muddy ball of twigs and branches tucked into the corner of a tree. The gnarled tree grew near a window of the back wall of the studio.

Leonardo's voice dropped to a gentle croon. He leaned against the wall and slowly stretched out his hand. Darrell held her breath. A tiny bird hopped into
Leonardo's open palm, and he drew his hand close for Darrell to see. The bird shivered but held perfectly still, eyes of brilliant black darting.

“I have spent many months cultivating a friendship with this
uccello
,” Leonardo breathed, his strident voice of a moment before now dropped to the timbre of a whispered breeze. “This small creature has much more to teach me than I could learn in a dozen lifetimes. I have watched her build her nest on this windowsill, carrying mouthfuls of mud for weeks and spitting them into place, cementing the twigs and leaves she has carried in her beak. The architecture!” He smiled. “The design of the place. So compact, so perfect for the upbringing of her
uccellini
.”

He passed his notebook to Darrell with a nod. “You can see in these pages I made many sketches to document her progress in building this work of art she lives in with her small family.” He smiled again at the bird. “And the process of learning to fly! Just as I felt I may be able to do justice to her hard work in a painting, she pushed her
uccellini
from the nest.” He rested one finger on a twig and the tiny bird hopped off his hand and ran up the branch to her nest.

Darrell turned the pages of the notebook with trembling fingers. It was jammed with words and half-finished drawings, studies of animals and birds. Near the back, a series of designs of some complicated machinery filled several pages. And on one page, three words were written repeatedly in both regular and mirror script, and trapped in a spiderweb of connected lines:
Tempo, Spazio, Luce.

Time. Space. Light.

Darrell suddenly felt wobbly all over. Could this be the answer? Clutching the book tightly, she shook her head to clear it and realized that Leonardo was still speaking about the tiny birds.

He continued as though in a dream, his voice soft. “I was mesmerized. How did she know they were ready? How did they learn? What kept them aloft? I had to know!”

He strode to the studio door and flung it wide.

Darrell followed him inside.
His mind jumps from one topic to the next like quicksilver. No wonder he never gets anything done.
She stepped forward into a large room, the like of which she had never seen before.

It was a total mess. Large lumps of clay sat in one corner, a damp cloth thrown carelessly over top. Another corner held great mounds of broken crockery. The floor was strewn with dust and blotched with vast smears of paint. At least four easels displayed canvasses in various stages of completion, and a strange Rube Goldberg-like contraption made out of soldered iron stood in the centre of the room.

Leonardo strode over to a heavy oak table, the top of which was stacked high with paper and parchment, canvas and cloth. With one large hand, he swept the surface clean and with the other he grabbed the satchel from Darrell. Reaching inside, he pulled out a rolled page and spread it wide on the now-cleared surface.

His face softened. “One
piccolo uccellino
misjudged the branch one day and fell. I ran out to find his wee
body on the ground beneath the window, still shaking, still quivering.”

Darrell was astounded to see Leonardo's eyes redden.

“I picked up the wee babe and it died in my hand. It had failed to learn the lesson nature and its mother had tried to teach. I was determined the death of the bird would not be in vain. I carried the small corpse to this very table and began a complete anatomical study.” He pointed to the page he had pulled from the satchel, depicting several detailed sketches of the anatomy of a small bird.

“You cut it up?” For a moment Darrell forgot about the notebook she held as her heart filled with outrage. “You took the poor dead hatchling and you cut it up?”

Leonardo, his own tenderness of the moment before apparently forgotten, looked annoyed.

“Of course I cut it up, ridiculous girl. I needed to see the way the feathers were attached and how the bones were formed if I wanted to learn how it could fly.”

“But it couldn't fly! That's why it died!” Darrell couldn't believe what she was hearing. “Don't you care that it was once a living creature? You only studied it so you could figure out how to build an airplane.” She clutched the book to her side and glared at him.

Leonardo glared right back at her, his thinning hair bristling around his head in a red halo. He opened his mouth, apparently ready to bellow back at Darrell, and then closed it abruptly with a snap. “Air — plane?” he muttered quietly.

Darrell bit her lip.
Oh-oh.

“Air — plane. A plane — a smooth, angled plane flying through the air.” He looked up, a quizzical expression on his handsome face. “I think you may have given me an idea,
bambina
,” he said softly. Without another word, he dropped into a chair by the table. Pulling over a piece of parchment, he dipped his pen into an open inkwell and began to write from right to left at an astonishing rate.

He lifted his head briefly and met Darrell's eyes with his own. “Leave me. I must finish these notes right away before I ready myself for the journey.” He flapped his arm at Darrell as though she were an annoying insect.

“But sir — the duke?”

Leonardo shook his head impatiently. “The duke may have my soul tomorrow,” he said, dipping his pen and giving Darrell a ferocious grin, “but today, my thoughts and my time are my own. Be gone!”

His head dropped back to his work, and Darrell crept out of the room.

It was not until she reached the back garden that Darrell realized she still clutched Leonardo's notebook.

“Look at this, Delaney,” she said, dropping to sit on a garden bench. Opening the book, she was thrilled to see that while most of it was taken up with sketches, short passages of his recognizable handwriting were scattered throughout. Flipping the pages, she realized that she could read the Italian words, but only painstakingly, as the whole thing was in mirror script. It was going to take a long time to copy down all these notes. It was almost noon, and she was tired and sore and ready to go home.

Forget writing this out.
She felt warm in the reflected sun and that made her sleepy again. “He'll never miss it — he has dozens. I'm going to take it with me,” she whispered to the dog as they got to their feet. “Come on, Delaney. Let's go home.”

The route back to Verrocchio's house was easily retraced, and Darrell limped up to the small stable a short
time later. It was lunchtime, and her empty stomach rumbled. The doors to the house were closed, though the window shutters had been thrown open to let in the warmth of the fall day. She lifted the beam barring the stable door, every bone and muscle in her body aching with weariness. Delaney led the way into the darkened stable, and Darrell could hear the pony shift in his stall and blow softly.

Leaving the door ajar for the light, she followed Delaney inside. Darrell tucked the notebook into her pocket and closed her fingers around the few mints remaining from her journey of the day before. She realized the ache she felt in her stomach might have something to do with the fact she hadn't eaten anything since her meal at the wedding party, which now seemed like an eternity ago. She popped in a mint and then, stepping carefully, held out her hand to let the pony nuzzle another. “Thanks for letting me use your stable,” she said, as he crunched up the candy and blew gently in her hand for more.

Delaney trotted up the steps, neatly hopping the broken riser and spun in a circle at the edge of the tiny loft. “You sure don't look very tired,” Darrell whispered as she started up the stairs, holding the edge of the beam above for balance. She paused and gazed thoughtfully at the broken stair before stepping over it, her eyes on Delaney. As she swung her foot onto the floor of the loft, Delaney pushed his head under her hand and they were swept into the torrent.

The thin sun of an early winter afternoon beamed in through the glass of the lantern room as Darrell awoke. Her head hurt a little, but the mint she had tucked in her cheek before the whirlwind drew her in worked its usual magic on her nausea. There was no sign of Delaney, and she sat up suddenly, remembering the prize in her pocket. She grabbed the windowsill and hauled herself up slowly, every muscle sore. But what about the small notebook? After a moment's search she found it, nestled in the back pocket of her jeans.

Darrell pulled it out of her pocket and turned it over gingerly. It looked so old! The cover was cracked and brittle, and the pages inside seemed as thin as onion skin. Still, each page was covered with words and pictures in spidery ink gone sepia with age. She felt a twinge of guilt at stealing the book that Giovanni had gone to such great pains to rescue. Still — she pushed the guilt resolutely aside. Fragile or not, she knew this notebook contained Leonardo's secret project, and perhaps it also held the answers she had sought for so long. Darrell slipped the notebook back into her pocket for safekeeping and hurried to make her way down the stairs.

In the distance, she heard the sound of an engine starting up, and she peeked out the door of the lighthouse with caution. A worker was driving his small Caterpillar towards the lighthouse again, the last roll of fencing in the bucket. Behind him a number of other workers straggled down the cliff path, carrying various pieces of smaller equipment.

Darrell decided to make her way around the back of the lighthouse and behind the rocks to the protection
of the cliffs. She could hear Delaney whine but didn't want to call him until she was safely away from the lighthouse and out of sight of the workers. She slipped out the door and around the far side of the lighthouse and caught a glimpse of the dog's head.

“What are you doing there, Delaney?” she whispered.

“Good question,” said Conrad Kennedy, stepping out from behind the rock.

Conrad let go of Delaney's collar, and the dog came bounding over to Darrell as though shot from a gun. He shivered a little and nuzzled Darrell's hand.

“Did you hurt my dog?” she snarled.

“You call that a dog?” Conrad curled his lip. “Anyway, I didn't hurt him. I just held him by the collar for a minute.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “I saw somebody up in the lighthouse, and when I saw the stupid dog running around I knew it had to be you.”

Darrell clambered down the rocks. Now she'd been caught, there was no use hiding from the construction workers, and they might prove some protection from Conrad. “Just stay away from me,” she said through her teeth. “And leave my dog alone.”