The Ruby Ring (37 page)

Part Four

To lose time
is the most
displeasing
to he who|
knows most.

Dante

38

July 1519

B
Y THE SUMMER OF 1519, MORE THAN THREE YEARS AFTER
Margherita’s kidnapping, the massive scale and intricacy of the Transfiguration had become Raphael’s new obsession. Knowing that he was now openly competing with Sebastiano, whose work on the companion, the Raising of Lazarus, was progressing more quickly, he began to consider ways to stall the unveiling of his competitor’s painting before his own. It was a move Margherita wholly opposed. Desperation, she said, was beneath him. He was, after all, she reminded him, the great Raffaello, and Michelangelo Buonarroti was still out of favor and living in Florence.

Hoping to bring him a more full sense of peace to balance his ambition, Margherita reminded him daily of the richness of his life. He was now an integral part of a new family, and there was healing in that. Not only did Francesco Luti and Donato pose often for male studies at the workshop, but they all dined together regularly as a family at Margherita’s house. Crowded around her table, they broke bread, drank wine, argued, and laughed like any family for hours on end. Raphael particularly reveled in spoiling Matteo Perazzi, knowing he was still Margherita’s favorite nephew.

In addition to family life, the broken bond of friendship with Raphael and Agostino had begun to mend. At the instigation of Chigi’s wife, Francesca, Margherita was made a frequent guest at the villa, and spent many happy hours in the company of Francesca’s three children, who considered her an aunt. But something always weighed on her—the fact that in all of the passion and all of the years, Margherita had never been able to give Raphael his own child.

“Are you sorry we have not been blessed in the way Francesca and Agostino have?” she finally asked one night as they lay together in her bed, gazing past the open shutters and up at the full moon in a black night sky.

Raphael smiled at her. “We still might be one day.”

“My courses were never regular, even when I was younger. And then, all of this time with you and I . . . I have just never believed I was meant to bear a child of my own.”

Raphael was silent for a moment. “You would make a splendid mother. I’ve seen you with Matteo enough to know that absolutely.”

“Letitia was so taken up in those early days with the other three boys, I suppose I always thought of him as my own.”

“It showed.” He smiled. “And he does adore you.”

“As I adore him.”

“Will he be enough for you, do you think?”

Margherita touched his cheek and then smiled. “You are all I have ever truly needed, or ever will,” she devotedly said.

But by spring of the following year, the pope’s counselors had once again informed Raphael that the Holy Father would need to delay the performing of Raphael’s wedding. The postponement was due now, they said, to the pope’s all-consuming political maneuvering to secure an essential treaty between himself and King Franois I against the powerful and dangerous Emperor Charles V. After the battle for Milan, Pope Leo understood the power of the French king, and felt he could take no chances. Politics and scandal had worn down the beleaguered pontiff, who had spent the past two years struggling to expand the states of the Church, and Raphael was strongly advised not to press personal matters.

As he worked at an intensely frenetic pace in the busy workshop that had sprung back wildly to life, Raphael saw nothing, felt nothing, breathed nothing but the powerful images of the risen Christ and the compassionate apostles around a boy possessed for the Transfiguration. He ignored the strange chill that he could not shake, along with strange alternating bouts of sweating and fatigue.

There was no time for illness, he told himself.

Not now when everything had finally fallen into place.

Giulio Romano filled in the details unfolding on his huge panel. The concepts, however, were from the mind of Raphael. He had used Donato Perazzi as the model for the figure of Christ himself; his tall commanding body and the gentle lines of his face were just right for the feel of the piece he wished to achieve. Francesco Luti was forever immortalized now as the balding and tired-faced Saint Andrew. And beneath the Christ figure, amid the apostles and the chaos of the healing of the demonic boy, a strong female figure was painted from behind.

Early on, in preparation sketch after preparation sketch, Margherita herself had posed for this character. When the actual panel was begun, Raphael painted her first, like the axis of the piece, so that artistically everything else would flow from her. Of this great altar panel, like his life, she was the center force.

On a day late in March 1520, now that the work was nearly complete, Raphael stood, his arms crossed over his chest, studying the work. He was feeling oddly dizzy, and not a little disoriented. He had forgotten to eat today, that must surely be it, he was thinking, as the shapes before his eyes began to change, to darken, to cloud over.

Raphael! Come and help me lift this panel! And the brushes! I want only boar brushes, you know that!

He turned with a start, feeling his skin go very cold. It was the voice of his father.
His father!
Raphael saw a figure behind him but the image, the face, was distorted, as if through rain-washed glass. He blinked hard, feeling as cold, suddenly, as ice. Still, the sensation was strong and unmistakable. In his mind, he was a boy of twelve again, with his father in the studio at the ducal court of Urbino, where his own artistic life had begun. The ache for a figure long gone from his life was powerful, overwhelming. And everything grew darker still. The cold sensation was taking him over, yet he could see now it was not his father, and not Urbino, but it was Giulio Romano behind him.

“Are you all right,
mastro?
”

Raphael lost his balance and sank for a moment onto his knees, breathing heavily. “Fine, Giulio, I am fine. A bit tired, perhaps.”

But he was flushed and his eyes were bloodshot, the pupils mere pinpricks. His father’s image and the memories around it dissolved like rain.

“Allow me to see you home.
Signora
will have my head if I do not!”

“Where is she?” He could not seem to remember that, either.

“On her way to the Chigi villa for the afternoon, at Signora Chigi’s invitation. You are to join her there.”

“Perhaps you should have her sent for, Giulio,” Raphael grimaced. “I find I am feeling a bit worse than at first I thought.”

A
NTONIO
had changed. It was the first thought Margherita had sitting astride her horse, looking down at him standing in the gravel courtyard of the Chigi Villa. She took the hand he extended to her, then descended elegantly from her saddle.

He stood before her in his stableman’s livery, a little paunch now straining over the leather belt, and his eyes less steely blue. Her second thought, seeing him again now for the first time in over a year, was that the ambition had gone from those wild eyes. It must be the result of his yearlong marriage to the daughter of the fishmonger from the Portico Octavia—one of the many girls with whom he had betrayed Margherita.

Now it was Antonio, of all the Chigi servants in the world, who took the reins of her sleek bay horse, caparisoned in a blanket of azure velvet, and topped with a fine Portuguese leather saddle studded in silver. Elena and Donato, Margherita’s constant companions, had already dismounted. They stood waiting, watching the rare exchange between two strangers who once, long ago, had been the closest of friends.

Margherita lingered a moment in the sun, wearing a gown of rich topaz satin with gold embroidery. Her shining hair was held back by a matching cap, and her hands were ornamented with jewels. Looking at Antonio now, she felt none of the fondness she once had. Nor did she feel any longer like the naive girl from Trastevere who he had so avariciously pushed toward this new life. This brief encounter was a heady moment of triumph for all that their inequality implied.

“Signora,”
he said, at last releasing her finely gloved hand from his own. He was forced, by protocol, to defer to her with a formal bow. Her horse stamped at the graveled ground.

“Signor Perazzi.” She nodded coolly in return, betraying nothing.

Though they did not speak beyond the greeting, her eyes, in that single instant of connection, said to him,
You did not think I would succeed. You wanted me to fail because you have failed. But I have survived, with Raphael’s love and guidance to protect me . . .

Margherita felt a sudden chill course very powerfully down her spine then.
But have you truly?
a small, strange voice inside her asked.
Are you yet his wife? Will you ever be? Are you truly safe until the day that you are? Take great care with how you hold your memories,
the small voice taunted.
They may well deceive you as much as your enemies ever would.

Margherita looked up keenly at Antonio as Elena took her silk shawl and then properly straightened the skirts of her dress. Antonio had been so handsome once, and had seemed to her so full of promise. Now he was a stranger—one she could add to the very long list of those in Rome she did not, and could not, trust.

Margherita moved away swiftly then, away from a life that had abandoned her long before she had left it. Without looking back, she walked through a shaft of sunlight, across the courtyard, toward the front doors of the magnificent stone villa—an entrance through which Antonio would never be allowed to pass.

She would think no more of Antonio, she decided as she walked. All she would consider now was joining her love, and the other noble guests, for Francesca Chigi’s afternoon concert—a world away from the little bakery that lay just a few steps, through the Porta Settimiana, in humble Trastevere.

S
TANDING
in front of Raphael’s enormous and impressive
Galatea,
Francesca Chigi warmly greeted Margherita with a genuine embrace. The two women had become close friends these past years since her marriage to Agostino. Francesca understood Margherita in a way no other could—the challenges she had faced, the ridicule and the determination it took to hold her head up in society, had bonded them. Her husband’s involvement in Margherita’s kidnapping was only ever referred to as “that former unpleasantness between our men.”

It was the way both friends wished it.

Francesca Chigi was a beautiful woman—tall, very slender, with thick wheat-colored hair, which she wore braided and clipped above wide-set, cornflower-blue eyes. Agostino had met her in Venice, and their scandalous affair, before they married, had produced three children. In spite of her humble origins, she was, he declared, the love of his life. Not only had he built this villa for love of her, but he had fought to marry her, the same way Raphael now fought with the greatest determination for Margherita.

“I am so pleased you could be here,” Francesca smiled as minstrels dressed in elegant costumes played airy music on a raised dais behind them. “And do let me have a look once again at that ring about which all of Rome is buzzing! It is truly all the talk, you know, after what Raphael has dared to do!”

Margherita felt her stomach seize up. All eyes in the room seemed suddenly upon her.

“What do you mean?” she hedged, her body on guard, even with a friend. Such had become her life among the powerful of Rome.

“Oh, come now. We have all heard that Raffaello has painted you wearing it—and, for that matter, precious little else! A bold move indeed to think of the emperor’s ring on a finger like yours or mine for all eternity!”

How did she know such a thing? Raphael would never have revealed it, and he had painted the wedding portrait in his private studio at home . . .

The hair on her neck stood on end at the prospect. Margherita’s mind wound over thoughts and connections, ways this might have happened, as she stood reluctantly holding out her hand and doing her best to appear casual. The ancient gem glittered before all of them.

It came to her then with a cruelly hard blow.
Antonio!