A Name in Blood (8 page)

‘I’m sure you can, Your Ridiculousness. Now shut up.’ Caravaggio laid in a few more strokes with his brush before he realized that it hadn’t been Prospero who had spoken.
He adjusted the angle of his mirror and saw his friend’s face, grimacing for him to be silent. He stepped out from behind his curtain.

Cardinal Scipione stood a few paces away, his chin between his thumb and forefinger. He leaned through the curtain to see the portrait of his uncle. His eyes glittered. ‘You’ve
captured the wariness in his expression, Maestro Caravaggio.’

It was I who was wary, the whole time I stood here with him
, Caravaggio thought. He had felt as though the Holy Father were judging each stroke of his brush with those sharp, umber eyes.
He went down on his knee and kissed Scipione’s hand. ‘Most Reverend Sire,’ he murmured. ‘My apologies. I thought—’

Scipione clicked his tongue. ‘Don’t interrupt me. His lips,’ he went on, ‘they’re pursed, as though his temper drew close to the boil. One gets the impression that
he’ll soon deliver some withering reproach.’

‘Your Illustriousness wishes me to request another sitting with His Holiness? To change the expression?’

‘All my life, twenty-six years, I’ve been trying to understand what was in his face. But you’ve got it in a matter of hours.’

‘I don’t pretend to understand it. I just looked at it.’

Scipione brushed his moustache with his thumb. ‘The papal vestments become you most fittingly, Signore.’

Prospero jolted to his feet. He came towards Scipione, his skirts rustling. He went onto his knee and bowed his head.

Scipione laid his hand on the papal beret and licked his lips. Caravaggio saw that it amused him to have the pope genuflect before him.

The Cardinal-Nephew gestured towards a divan. Caravaggio pushed it over the floor tiles to the place Scipione indicated.

‘Do carry on.’ Scipione reclined on the long chair.

Caravaggio sensed the essence of power in the room. Prospero responded to it too. His face revealed a quiet strain.

‘I’ve come from the Colonna Palace,’ Scipione said. ‘You’re well liked in that household.’

‘The Marchesa of Caravaggio is of the Colonna family, Your Illustriousness. My grandfather was in her service. As I grew up, she was most magnanimous towards me. I’m always in her
debt.’

‘She’s here in Rome now.’

‘Is she, sire?’ Caravaggio felt a cold touch on his cheek. Mention of the Marchesa brought so many memories. Yet he needed his emotions to be clear, so that they wouldn’t
disturb his painting. He breathed deeply and went on. The bristles of his brush shivered rhythmically over the canvas. He worked at the scarlet highlights on the cape swooping across the
pope’s chest.

‘When I entered, you were behind the curtain, Maestro. Now you’ve drawn it back.’ Scipione’s tone was relaxed and confiding.

‘With many of the details, I prefer to employ only my eye, Your Illustriousness.’

‘The curtain is a camera obscura?’

‘I use a curtain and a concave mirror, and sometimes a lens suspended in the gap in the curtain. Nothing more, Your Illustriousness. Some call it a camera obscura. Others call it items kept in any lady’s bedchamber.’

‘People make of it more than it is?’

‘An aid to seeing, that’s all.’ His brush filled the silence once more.

‘In the gallery of this palace,’ Scipione said, ‘you may observe all the previous popes, painted like gods. They might’ve had the power of gods, but they weren’t
immortal. We ought to be able to read the life they led in their faces. But artists always make the pope into a saint. Some of them may have been; others certainly weren’t.’

Scipione closed his eyes and quivered when he uttered the word ‘saint’.
As if he were whispering to a lover
, Caravaggio thought,
some role he wanted to be played to arouse
him.
He loaded his brush with a pinkish white to edge the highlights of the cape. Prospero winked at him.

‘It’s only right that my uncle’s portrait ought to promote a different view of the Pope.’ Scipione spread his fingers wide and examined his nails. ‘We Borghese
aren’t like the old Roman families who usually take the Throne of St Peter. Look at the Colonna. Their line runs from Julius Caesar, they say, which means they claim descent from the goddess
Venus herself, as Caesar did. My uncle, the Holy Father, is the son of a clerk from Siena. Does that make him a less appropriate choice to wield the holiness of his office?’

‘Heaven forbid.’

‘Or its power?’ Scipione dropped his voice. He got up and went towards the door. He was in shadow when he turned again. ‘Maestro Raphael would’ve painted the face and had
one of his assistants complete the robes.’

‘He would, Your Illustriousness.’

‘Raphael is treated as a god – infallible, perfect.’

‘So he is.’

‘But you’re no god. You’re a painter. So you do all the work yourself.’

‘A piece of cloth or a bowl of fruit takes just as much skill as a face, Most Reverend Lord.’

‘Do you see why I chose you to paint the son of the Sienese clerk?’ The Cardinal-Nephew didn’t wait for a reply. Silhouetted in the light from the corridor, he withdrew from
the chamber.

The door swung shut. Caravaggio dropped his palette onto his pigment trolley. It was exciting to hear from Scipione’s lips why he had favoured him.
But I’ve never had a compliment
that left me feeling so manhandled
, he thought.
I’m shaking like a girl who knows that fine words about her figure are the prelude to a rape.
‘Divest yourself, Your
Holiness,’ he said to Prospero. ‘I can’t work any more.’

Prospero removed his scarlet beret and the crucifix from around his neck. He gestured towards the door by which Scipione had left. ‘Princes always fill me with fear. But there’s
something even more terrifying about that one.’

‘It’s because he told you he’s not a saint, and you know exactly how people behave when they forget the holiness in them.’

‘I do. For one thing there’s wrestling this evening. We won’t find any saints there, but it’ll be fun. I’m in the mood for a good fight.’

‘Where?’

‘The piazza in front of the Colonna Palace.’

The Colonna. Caravaggio shivered as if at the touch of a forgotten dream. He picked up the papal crucifix and kissed it. ‘Let’s go. Surely tonight I’ll pick the
winner.’

Costanza Colonna pulled at the red lace cuff of her black dress and bit her lip. As she entered the reception room, her body was tight and her breath short. She always felt
this constriction when she returned to Rome, to the palace where she had grown up and to the company of her relatives. They were descended from Aeneas, the Trojan who founded this Eternal City, and
they still seemed essential to its power as they circulated with their jewelled goblets and their marten furs. In Milan, Florence or Naples, she was a respected woman of fifty-five, widow of a
Sforza, inheritor of great estates, mother of six noble boys, Marchesa of the town of Caravaggio. Before the cold faces of these masterful Colonnas, she was once more a thirteen-year-old flouncing
through the corridors because her father was sending her to marry a surly youth in a distant, misty province.

Her brother, Cardinal Ascanio, clapped his hands and the Colonnas made for the balcony. He beckoned for Costanza to join him. She took his arm and went out above the Piazza of the Sainted
Apostles.

The square was packed with men who had come to see the wrestling. In the first darkness, the torches around the ring glimmered over the jostling crowd like the lanterns of a ship at anchor
illuminating the lapping tide. Costanza scanned the heads below.
Perhaps Michele will come
, she thought.

Ascanio’s fingers were firm in the crook of her elbow. She recognized the same calm and calculation in him that she had known in her father. She experienced a spasm of resentment, as if
this had been the man who had arranged her marriage without consulting her, and a tremor of love and loss for the great prince now almost thirty years dead. She moved closer to her brother.

‘Your painter has a new commission,’ Ascanio said. ‘He’s doing a portrait of the Holy Father.’

The crowd cheered the arrival of the fighters. The men lifted their arms. Oiled muscles flashed in the lantern light.

‘His commission could be important for us.’ Ascanio pursed his lips in disdain. ‘For the sake of Fabrizio.’

‘Fabrizio.’ Costanza whispered the name of her youngest son, though it seemed to her that she screamed it, so much tension did it awaken in her now. Her husband had shown little
interest in his family once he had an heir. But her children had grown more special for Costanza with each birth and with her passing years. She had been a girl when most of her babies were born.
By the time Fabrizio came, she had outgrown her childish tantrums, the longing for her birthplace, the frustration with her boorish husband. Though she had been still only nineteen, she had seen
herself as a woman. Fabrizio’s delivery didn’t terrify her with new responsibility as her other births had done. Finally she had ceased to be a child; she had become a mother. It was as
a companion for Fabrizio that she had brought Michele Merisi into the household.

The cardinal’s hand pressed harder on her arm. She blinked, puzzled. He sighed, as if her inability to grasp the significance of what he told her was all that could be expected of a
woman.

‘Your painter will be in proximity to the Holy Father himself,’ he hissed, ‘and to the Cardinal-Nephew.’

‘Yes.’ She shook her head. ‘Yes?’

‘Surely you see it? Your painter may beg the things that would be beneath our dignity to request. He may petition the Holy Father to compensate the Farnese with gold and land, instead of a
life. He may ask for clemency – for Fabrizio.’

Costanza took in a sharp breath. Michele might help free Fabrizio from jail.
He’ll be sure to do it
, she thought.
Even after so many years apart, their childhood forged a bond
Michele wouldn’t forget.

Her older boys had been preoccupied with courting the favour of their father while he attended on dignitaries in Milan. Abandoned, like her, to the quiet, provincial life of Caravaggio, Fabrizio
and Michele had grown close and conspiratorial, but they had allowed her to enter their play. They came to her chamber every morning and clambered inside the curtains of her bed, blowing
raspberries on her neck to wake her. She had joined in eagerly, as if to recover the childhood cut short by her father’s order of marriage. The peace she had felt with them was disturbed only
by her other sons. They teased Michele, called him an orphan, though he was not, and a commoner, which, because it was true, provoked him to attack them.

‘See to it, Costanza,’ Ascanio said. ‘Our family can’t afford a quarrel with the Farnese.’

‘Of course.’

‘The Farnese will demand revenge for what Fabrizio did to one of their number.’

Costanza’s tongue bristled with bitterness. She couldn’t bear to consider the actions of her son.
It doesn’t seem possible that he . . .

‘If you can’t get your painter to secure Fabrizio’s release,’ Ascanio said, ‘we shan’t be able to help him. To do so would mean a war with the Farnese, a
Roman civil war. We need the Holy Father to call off the Farnese.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you? Because if your painter can’t help, we must let them have Fabrizio.’

One of the wrestlers dumped his opponent onto the floor of the ring. Costanza squealed in shock at the sound of his bulk hammering onto the canvas. She watched the pinned man struggle.

Caravaggio came down the hill from the Pope’s palace and pushed to the front of the crowd in the Piazza of the Sainted Apostles. Prospero bought wine from a stall and
guzzled a long draught. He wiped his beard on his sleeve, hitched up the thin belt which drew his doublet in below his heavy belly, and handed the flagon to Caravaggio.

The wrestling ring was on a platform set at head height before the Colonna Palace. Craning his neck to watch the bout, Caravaggio saw her on the balcony of the palace with the family grandees.
Costanza Colonna inclined her head to him. Some constraint froze her features. He bowed to her. When he looked up her eyes were elsewhere, but he sensed she was thinking about him. Not about his
work or the life he lived now.
She’ll be thinking about the old days
, he thought.
When I was her boy.
His distraught mother had collapsed after his father had died of the
plague. Costanza had brought the poor woman’s eldest child to her house out of love for his grandfather, who had served her as a surveyor. Michele had grown up chasing through the palace in
Caravaggio with Fabrizio.
Until she sent me away.