A Name in Blood (9 page)

A groan and a cheer from the crowd. He turned to the ring. A wrestler had dropped his opponent onto the canvas and now grappled with the wriggling man beneath him. The two fighters were thickly
muscled, broad across the back, peasants bred for labour and combat. The pinned man hammered the floor with his hand. A herald wearing a scarlet surcoat with the golden column of the
Colonnas’ crest lifted the arm of the victor.

The winner doused his shoulders in water from a ringside pail to cool himself for the next bout. It was a pleasant May evening, but the exertion and the torches in each corner of the ring made
the fighters hot. The wrestler took a wineskin and slung his head back to drink. He wore his hair long. His beard was thick and black. He held the wineskin at a half-arm’s length from his
mouth as he poured so that it wouldn’t touch his lips, like one accustomed to drinking from a shared vessel.

‘Look at the size of his arms,’ Prospero said. ‘If that was the jawbone of an ass instead of a wineskin, we’d be looking at Samson himself.’

The torchlight caught the wine, so that the man seemed to be sucking fire. When he lowered the wineskin, the wrestler shook his head and his sweat sprayed into the crowd. His next opponent
climbed into the ring and flexed his chest, swinging his arms and loosening his neck. Wagers circulated in the crowd.

‘I’ll put my money on the new fellow. He’s fresh,’ Prospero said.

A short man in a green doublet took him by the hand. ‘You’re crazy. You’d bet against that monster there?’

‘Who the hell is he, anyway?’

‘He works in the stables of Cardinal Odoardo Farnese. The new fighter’s a Colonna water-carrier. Two
scudi
on the Farnese man.’

Prospero still had the man’s hand, though his enthusiasm appeared to have diminished now that he knew the families for which the men fought. ‘We have a bet.’

The fighters circled each other.

‘Why can’t people just have a good old scrap?’ Prospero muttered. ‘Why does this have to be Colonna against Farnese?’

‘Better this than a real war,’ Caravaggio said.

‘The loser will start a war on the streets tonight. If the Farnese man wins, right here in front of the Colonna palace, your friends up on that balcony will have to strike back.
There’ll be pride and politics at stake. It isn’t just two sweaty bruisers in that ring.’

Caravaggio watched the nobles above them. ‘They’re not my friends.’

Costanza’s glance caught him. Shame seemed to overcome an attempt at shrewdness in her face, like a wealthy market shopper forced to haggle over a few
baiocchi
. He felt an unease he
had known before. She had looked at him that way long ago. When he was fourteen, he had been watching artisans repair a fresco in her hall. The foreman had shown him how to trace over the cartoon,
pushing pinholes into the wet plaster to make a stencil. Michele had coloured a leaf with such pleasure that Costanza had asked him if he would like to be apprenticed to a painter. When he went to
study in Milan, her expression had displayed a motherly sorrow at his departure. But he had also detected the calculation of a woman whose plan was accomplished.
She wanted me gone
.
For
the sake of peace in her house.

The Farnese man found a hold on his opponent’s waistband and lifted him. He dropped the flailing fighter on his back and drove his shoulder into his ribs. The Colonna man retched. The
crowd sucked in a breath, as though it felt the impact of that blow, then all set to calling for their favourite once more.

The Colonna man’s body was dark and hairless. He reached for the other’s beard, gripped it, held it secure as a target. With a powerful contraction of his stomach muscles, he butted
the Farnese fighter on the nose. Blood sprayed into the crowd as the Farnese groom shook his beard free. There was rage in his eyes. He flattened his palm over the Colonna man’s face.

‘He’s gouging him,’ Prospero shouted. ‘Stop him.’

‘It’s no holds barred,
cazzo.
’ The man who had bet against him laughed.

The Colonna fighter squirmed. He might have conceded, but his hands were pinned; he could make no signal. When his eyeball came free, he screamed, and the herald grabbed at his tormentor to end
the bout. The winner raised his fist. Blood ran down his forearm, tracking the protruding veins as though his lust for the fight had opened him up and laid bare the inner workings of his murderous
physique. The herald knelt beside the losing Colonna man. He covered his mouth with his hand. His face turned a pale green. Even the torches glowed less richly, as though blanching in horror. The
winner faced the Colonnas on their balcony and bellowed over the roar of the crowd. ‘Farnese, Farnese.’

The faces of the aristocrats on the balcony soured in fury that a brutish groom should exult in his victory on behalf of an enemy as eternal as the stones across the way in the Imperial Forum.
They hurried inside, until Costanza was the only one left.

The tips of her fingers tapped the balustrade as she waited for Caravaggio’s eye. She jerked her neck, signalling to him to join her in the palace.

Prospero disputed the legality of the Farnese victory with the man in green, refusing to make good his wager. Caravaggio laid his hand on the winning better’s face and lightly shoved at
his eyes with his fingertips. So soon after witnessing a blinding, the man forgot his bet. In a panic, he dropped onto his backside, groping for a way to rise amid the press of the crowd. Prospero
punched Caravaggio’s arm and made his escape.

A groom led Caravaggio across the courtyard of the Colonna Palace and into the summer apartments. The ground-floor rooms faced the mandarin grove in the secret garden. A
fountain shot pale blue splashes of moonlight through the fruit trees.

Costanza entered the chamber. To Caravaggio, it was as though a familiar portrait had come to life. She stepped out of his memories. Her hair remained so black that it took her skin beyond white
into a realm of pallor that Caravaggio thought he might not be able to mix on his palette. Perhaps if he ground up pearls and dove’s feathers, he could match it, though that seemed more
appropriate to a sorcerer than a painter. The texture of her skin was the work of a magician too, barely lined. When she came towards him across the terracotta floor, her eyes were a purple brown
in the light of the double-branched candelabra.

‘Michele.’ She reached her hands towards him. They were scented with jasmine and he lingered over them as he kissed them. He had grown accustomed to women whose fingers savoured of
filth and toil.

‘My lady, I’m delighted to see you back in Rome. It’s been a long while.’

‘My visit was not planned.’ Her voice was uneasy. ‘Since my last time here, I see that you’re no longer Signor Merisi. They have started to call you after your home
town.’

‘I’m known as Caravaggio now, it’s true. Though that title really belongs to you.’

‘It does me honour, as Marchesa of Caravaggio, that your art should place the name of my town on the lips of everyone in Rome.’

You mightn’t think so, if you heard what they said about me
, he thought. ‘Your estates prosper?’

‘They do. And your sister Caterina has another child, a girl. Named Lucia, after your mother, God rest her soul.’

‘You were more of a mother to me.’

She cleared her throat, like someone trying to cover another’s faux pas. Her breath shivered and the flames on the candelabra stuttered, as if her indecision sucked the oxygen from the
room. ‘When you were a child, you were like my child. Now you’re a man, I love you still.’

He squeezed her hand and rubbed the pad of his thumb on her knuckle. ‘I think of your generosity whenever Rome gets – oh, I don’t know – too wild.’

She lowered her eyes. ‘I need your help.’ The candles glimmered on the gauze that covered her breast.

‘At your command, my lady.’

‘Fabrizio’s in trouble, Michele.’

Caravaggio’s tension seemed to reach into his throat and cut off his air. He croaked out his words, ‘Is he in Rome?’

‘He is.’

‘What happened?’

‘A fight.’

‘Don’t you have people to take care of these things? A purse for the injured man. A bribe for the arresting officer.’ Even as he spoke, he understood.
This is too serious
for the usual remedies. There’s a great danger here. But for whom?

‘It’s a Farnese,’ she whispered.

Fabrizio, what have you done?
He made a quick calculation of his connections, of men who might help Costanza’s son. Her urgency communicated itself to him; he felt it pulse in his
neck.

The two wrestlers in the piazza had represented the battle between these great families, each with their monumental palaces on either side of Rome and their armies of retainers ready to take up
cudgels and daggers and to shed their blood. He thought of Fabrizio and some hot-headed young Farnese duke. The same violence, but with nobler weapons.
And consequences for you too, Michele, if
you get involved.

He looked into Costanza’s pleading eyes. She had helped him so much in his life, but now that she wished for his aid, her demands could disturb the position he had worked so hard to
establish. He knew she saw his reluctance and that it pained her.

This isn’t your gaming debt to Ranuccio
.
This is a woman to whom you owe more than you could ever repay.
‘I’m at your service, my lady. Always.’

Her fingers reached to Caravaggio’s shoulder. They were tentative. He wondered that in all these years she hadn’t touched him except to allow his kiss on her knuckles. He shuddered.
It seemed as though the force of generations of her family’s nobility, of princes and generals and even a pope, coursed from this tiny hand into his body. It was the power that might demand a
man go to his death, and it numbed him.

‘Michele, you’re painting the Pope’s portrait,’ she said.

They wait years for their moment, these nobles, and then in an instant they see their opportunity
, he thought
. Loyalty is an elegant word for blackmail.

Her hand was still, but her touch seemed to circle his neck and travel down his arms and back. He regretted his reluctance. She came to him because she knew what Fabrizio had meant to him. But
he couldn’t suppress his bitterness.
If you hadn’t sent me away, perhaps this would never have happened. Fabrizio would be a different man. And so would I.
‘What expression
would you have me paint on the Holy Father’s portrait, my lady?’

‘Forgiveness.’

He recalled the shrewd little eyes on the canvas he had left at the Quirinale. Mercy on that face?
That’ll be a work of imagination no less than a ceiling frescoed with the god of the
sea and all his nymphs.

‘I can try, my lady. I can try.’

Prudenza came in the middle of the night. She climbed the stairs and twisted Cecco’s nose to wake him.

‘Get yourself below, little fellow,’ she whispered. ‘I need a place to hide tonight.’

Cecco wrapped himself in his blanket and stumbled down the stairs, grumbling. Prudenza lay on Caravaggio’s bed. She pushed her hand under his sleeping cap. Her fingers moved in his
hair.

In the darkness, he ran his palm over her face. He was careful to avoid the wound Fillide had cut beside the girl’s mouth, but she flinched when he touched a new bruise around her eye.
‘Fillide threw a stone,’ she said. ‘I can’t go home. You don’t mind, do you?’

She was playful in the face of an implacable hatred. He had a vision of her dead, dropped into the Tiber with the refuse from the street. He looked across his studio to his easel and the
unfinished
Martha and Mary Magdalene
. He used to think his work would outlast time, but when he touched Prudenza he knew that anyone could walk up to his canvas and take a dagger to it. Once
it was dry, porters would carry the painting to the Lady Olimpia Aldobrandini’s palace and she would display it in her gallery for the respectable public to view. Everyone would feel
justified in criticizing it, free to mock it. He had heard them do so with his other works. Why shouldn’t one of them decide it ought to be destroyed?