The Ruby Ring

by Diane Haeger

  “Ah, if the world could only see the sad limit of real affection for the vaunted Raffaello,” he murmured, smiling ruefully to himself.

  Moonlight came in past the iron grille and through the tall, half-shuttered window beside his desk, and Raphael turned to gaze out. It came to him then as it often did when he was alone: What if he were to die a young man? Now . . . without ever having loved? Without having known the sort of passion and commitment about which he painted every day of his life? It was a fear he could not recall being without. After the death of his mother, the fear had intensified. No matter how famous, how important, or how necessary life seemed to make one, everyone was expendable.

  Pressing the thought away, he once again picked up the sketching chalk and tried to recall the shape of her eyes. What he had before him was not exact. He could not see the girl in the image he had created. He tossed down the nub of chalk and thrust back his chair. Outside, between the tall, narrow buildings, the sound of horses’ hooves echoed on the cobbled stone and broke the night silence.

  Why would she still not allow him to paint her? When royalty was clambering after him to immortalize their images, what on earth did she fear? He had so little time left before the pope thought better of the commission altogether, and she was perfect for the Madonna. He stood then and paced the length of his room, with its broad windows of painted leaded glass, rich paneling overlaid with gold leaf, and heavily carved furniture. He ran a hand behind his neck and poured himself a goblet of Chianti from a jeweled decanter given to him personally by Cardinal Bibbiena. Staring at the decanter, opulent beyond measure, set with rubies and pearls, he wondered for the first time what this vessel that had sat here for nearly two years, silently serving him, was actually worth. He had taken so little time to consider it before because riches meant little. He could only imagine what a girl like Margherita Luti would think of it—or what it might buy for her family.

  Alone with the silence and his thoughts, Raphael glanced down at his desk and a bronze medallion of Hercules given to him in Florence by Leonardo da Vinci. The medallion represented determination, the kind, elderly artist had told him. It would bring him good fortune. Beside it was an unopened letter from the secretary to the noble and beautiful Isabella d’Este, who still sought him to paint her portrait. Since Raphael had come to Rome, it had been all about the work. The process, and his success. Nothing more. And it was the first time he had realized that there was nothing more in his life than that.

  A north wind had blown away the clouds, and the stars in the evening sky were already bright, glimmering beside an iridescent half moon. He drank the heady red wine and poured another. Raphael thought for a moment of actually sending for, and bringing here, one of the women—more out of habit than desire. But he was too taken up with finding a way to get this Trastevere girl to model for him.

  Absently, he glanced at a table beside his desk, littered with old chalk and charcoal sketches, studies of anonymous arms, hands, and torsos he had used for some of his earlier Madonnas. Fanned out atop the rich oak table, he caught sight of one of his favorite studies—the Madonna holding her child in one hand and an open book in the other. But it was her face, the expression there, which he believed he had captured exactly—the pain of knowing, mixed with resolution, and its ultimate sadness. If only Margherita could see these—see this—to understand the sort of pure work he was after.

  And then the idea came to him.

  His face lit, along with his mood. Of course. Why had he not thought of it before?

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, Raphael returned to his workshop on the Piazza Sant’Apollonia. Absently, he cast his cloak of rich aubergine velvet and gold fringe onto the workbench near the door. Moving across the wood plank flooring into the huge, high-ceilinged workshop, Raphael was immediately pulled into the feverish pitch—the rhythm of work already going on around him. Across the room, with its creaking floor, and painted open ceiling beams, were two separate models sitting motionless as two of his assistants sketched them for figures in the next phase of the Vatican fresco. The old man from yesterday, sitting for Giuseppe’s red chalk sketch, then a young boy whose nearly perfect face Giulio Romano was carefully highlighting with white chalk for the character of Perseus in a new fresco Raphael was proposing to Chigi.

  A younger apprentice was mixing a precise shade of umber to add to the skin tone on a portrait on Gianfrancesco Penni’s grand oak easel. Around them were large paint-splattered cloths, wooden buckets full of murky water and paintbrushes, jugs of wine, and trowels for spreading the colored fresco plaster. There were piles of used, and reused, sketching paper spread throughout the workshop amid tubs of various colored drawing chalk.

  The assistants to the mastro wore loose white muslin shirts, belted in worn leather, the sleeves pushed up over their elbows. Giovanni da Udine wore a dark leather apron over his muslin shirt, as did Giulio Romano. Everything around them was coated in daubs and splatters of paint, or great, dark smudges of chalk.

  Amid the constant movement and low hum of activity, Raphael moved to his own worktable beside the window with a sweeping view of the rooftops of Rome, and its many cupolas. He also had a small private room near the door where he dealt with his accounts and correspondence, but when he worked, he preferred to be among his men. He opened his folio and riffled through to the chalk drawing he had begun to make of Margherita while her image was still fresh in his mind. The eyes met him first—piercing, determined, yet achingly fragile in what lay beneath. He ran his fingertips over the eyes he had drawn. Perfect, he thought. But the mouth was wrong. It was too full, the lower lip out of proportion enough to change the essence of her. He rubbed a slightly moist cloth over the lower area of the face and began the mouth again, his mind swirling with images of their tense, fruitless second meeting. She was the Madonna. She had to be. It was as fated, he knew, as his destiny as an artist.

  He raked his hands back through his hair and gazed down at the image. He had offered her all that he could. But something was holding her back. Something over which even the great Raphael of Urbino had no control. It was, lately, a theme of his life, he chuckled ruefully to himself. The more things he tried to harness, the more they slipped from his reach. The work was like that, a blinding and varied host of commissions with which even he, and a collection of vibrant, powerful assistants and apprentices, could barely keep pace because, at the heart of it, he would always compare himself with his great mentor, Leonardo da Vinci.

  And even with his great rival, Michelangelo—for whom work was life.

  He glanced down again at the red chalk drawing and felt an unexpected shiver. It was beyond him, and for now, so was she.

  Raphael closed the folio, stepped back, and glanced around his workshop until his eyes rested upon Giulio, who, at eighteen, was his youngest senior assistant. So full of raw, natural talent, he thought, yet plagued by a hesitation he had not yet been allowed to understand. Raphael went to his table and stood over Giulio’s shoulder as he sketched the flawlessly featured boy whose light curls were like soft locks of gold curled softly near his face. Raphael wondered where Giulio had found so perfect a youth, one whose bare chest was hairless, sculptured and smooth as alabaster. The master watched his assistant work, filling in the contours of the cheek with a perfectly blended bowl of flesh-toned paint one of the young students had mixed for him.

  Raphael looked back and forth from the model to the sketch, and noticed it then—the bright red slash across Giulio’s smooth, beardless cheek. The area was raised and gone purple, and the small place where the flesh had been broken was at its center.

  “Caro? What happened?” Raphael said softly as he worked on.

  Giulio did not answer at first but continued to work intensely, daubing at the image with the tip of his charcoal pencil stub. “It is only a scratch,” he finally acknowledged, still not turning away from the sketch. “Do not be concerned. It is nowhere near the eyes I need to work.”

  The comment, and the s
entiment behind it, were jarring to Raphael. These were men with whom he worked and worried—with whom he broke bread and drank wine. They became a family. Giulio Romano was no exception.

  “Leave this,” he instructed, taking the chalk from Giulio’s hand and laying it gently on the cluttered table between them. “You may rest,” Raphael called to the model, who very swiftly rose from the hard stool, covered his own tautly muscular body with a muslin drape, and walked barefoot to the fire across the room to warm himself.

  “What has happened? Who has done this to you?” he asked gently. “Was it your father again?”

  “It is truly nothing, mastro mio. Only a scratch. You must not concern yourself with such trifles.”

  “You are my friend, Giulio, my good friend. You concern me. And your mind and hand are every bit as gifted as mine. I have only had more practice and time.”

  As Raphael spoke gently, Giulio seemed to soften. “It was a street fight only. Truly it was. After I had drunk far too much good trebbiano last night, I was unwise with my words, and this ugly plum on my face will remind me of that for a good while to come.”

  Raphael wanted to believe him. The panel and its oil paints, the communion of the hand and brush, created a unique kind of brotherhood into which few were admitted. But there was something else that had bound them like family. A conversation, a confidence shared on a different occasion, months ago, when Giulio had seemed more trusting. My father, he sometimes takes out the strains of his day, the disappointments of his life, on me. He hates that I wish to be an artist. He believes I should desire a future more certain for myself. He wishes a life for me . . . things, I have never wished for myself.”

  Words spoken between them months ago surfaced now and swam circles in his mind like the fish in the pools at Santa Croce. This had been more than a street fight, he knew without doubt. It was more than something minor to be passed off.

  When the golden-haired boy returned to model once again for Giulio, Raphael left them, but he did so with a heart that was suddenly heavy, because of the things Giulio would not say. And as much a friend as Giulio Romano had in Raphael Sanzio, there was a door between them. One that remained, at least for now, unopened.

  5

  “MARGHERITA!” LETITIA WAILED FROM INSIDE THE BAKERY, her high, grating voice rolling out into the small back garden. “Something has arrived for you!”

  In the late afternoon, Margherita stood outside drawing in dried clothing from a rope. The pieces gently fluttered, like colored waves in the breeze, rippling against a stone wall that was draped in vines heavy with fat purple grapes. The sky was bright and cloudless, and on the wall dividing their garden from the next, a ring of doves perched, fat and white, cooing as Margherita pulled the last bit of clothing from the line. She wiped her hands on the apron at her waist and came inside.

  “What is it?”

  Letitia and Francesco Luti sat together at the kitchen table, just beyond the weathered green garden door. Each of them had a full cup of dark wine before them, and the baby once again lay at Letitia’s uncovered breast. On the table they used for mixing the bread dough, covered still with a thin layer of flour, was a sheaf of paper, wound and then tied with a thick scarlet ribbon. Margherita studied it warily as it lay beside the rust-red clay jug of wine.

  “It came from Mastro Raphael’s studio. His young apprentice, the one from the other day, just delivered it himself,” Francesco explained. He sat slumped in the scarred wood chair, legs spread, a large hand surrounding the old wooden wine cup. His voice was rasping and heavy.

  “Well? Are you not going to open it?”

  She backed away from it. “You do it, Padre mio.”

  “A Dio, Margherita! I doubt it is anything dangerous! He is, after all, trying to win you over.” Letitia took a long swallow of the wine as a cool evening breeze blew in through the door and surrounded them.

  “That is just what I am afraid of.”

  “Not win you that way, heaven portend!” Their father scoffed. “He wishes to win your cooperation as a model! A girl like you would not likely interest so grand a man in a personal sense!”

  “Well, if you do not open it, I shall have to!” Letitia demanded, reaching across and slipping the ribbon off the end of the parchment.

  The paper unfolded before the three of them, revealing a sketch of a Madonna and child, done in black chalk with silverpoint and traces of white heightening in the eyes. The Madonna’s gaze was cast away from the viewer contemplatively as the Christ child played with a small ball she held for him, and her other hand rested gently upon a small open book. Letitia’s small gasp was the only sound as they looked at the crosshatch lines of her gown, the gently tapered fingers, and the expression on her slim, lovely face, whoever she was.

  “It is breathtaking,” Letitia finally murmured, fingers splayed across her lips.

  “If he is trying to impress you, it should have worked,” Francesco declared.

  “I think it is more that he is trying to show me I need not fear him.”

  “I suspect there is little to fear in being represented as the greatest of all virgins,” Letitia quipped, running her fingertips gently over the image of the baby as she held her own in her arms. “Especially since she always has her clothes on!”

  “Perhaps I have misjudged Signor Sanzio,” Margherita admitted.

  “Perhaps?” her father rasped with incredulity. “He is declaring to you in this that you need not fear him!”

  “His work is startling,” Letitia murmured. “It looks as if this girl might actually come right off the page!”

  “More than that, she makes me want to weep,” Margherita said with uncharacteristic emotion quaking in her voice. “She knows what the future holds for her child. You can see it in her gaze, the sadness . . . She wishes to keep him for as long as she possibly can.” Margherita looked up. There were tears in her sister’s eyes. Their father, too, was stunned.

  “If what Donato showed you this morning did not sway you, this certainly must,” Francesco determined. “It is a chance at immortality through Mastro Raffaello’s paintbrush. God Almighty put you in his path, and you must not turn from that. You must go to him, you must tell him, Margherita, that you have changed your mind!”

  “S. Of course you are right.”

  “Take Donato if you like,” Letitia offered as she laid the now dozing toddler into the wooden cradle beside the table. “It would be wise to have a chaperone in any case. A girl alone going to an artist’s studio, no matter what the reason, will not help your reputation. Everyone there must see you as a serious portrait model, not one of those girls who models for artists without their clothing.”

  “Then we are in agreement,” Francesco announced after another long swallow of the wine, which dribbled down onto his stubbled chin. An ambitious glitter lit his tired eyes. “As soon as Donato returns from his work at the stables he will accompany you to see Mastro Raphael. You will thank him for showing you the sketch, return it, and then you will tell him that you have changed your mind.”

  SHE STOOD before him at the opened, heavy workshop door, holding out the rolled sketch, her arms draped in the sleeves of an unadorned pale-blue dress, once her mother’s best dress, with its slight touch of faded elegance—her feet beneath covered in scuffed strap shoes. Her hair was parted in the center, and the smooth length of it was held by a small blue cap, her mother’s also, ornamented with just a few simple beads. Donato stood beside her in modest attire—burgundy hose, tunic, painted leather belt, and white shirt beneath. This was his finest attire as well.

  “Signor Sanzio,” Donato bowed deeply. “It is indeed the greatest of honors. I am Donato Perazzi, husband of Margherita’s sister.”

  “A pleasure,” said Raphael with a nod, but his eyes were instantly upon Margherita as the artists behind him fell into a sudden hush.

  “I have come to return this,” she said evenly, her deep brown eyes flecked with gold, wide and honest. She was dressed plainly, h
e saw, but Raphael, who had been called over by one of the apprentices as she stood at the workshop door, saw the dignity in the utter simplicity of what she wore.

  “The drawing was for you.”

  “But your work, the perfection of it, is something you must not—”

  “It was only a study for an earlier Madonna. It was my hope to show you what caliber of painting I hoped you would sit for.”

  “That was my thought upon seeing it. The caliber of your work.” The smallest tinge of a smile edged up the corners of her mouth.

  “Signorina, I have waited nearly two years to fulfill this commission. I have painted many Madonnas before, so many for churches and chapels that now I can scarcely remember them all. But with this one, something has stopped me. I could not commit to an image, a face for her—that is, until the day I met you.” He lowered his gaze. “Signorina Luti, honestly, I would have done anything to convince you.”

  “I believe you have done that.”

  “Thanks be to God,” Donato quietly murmured, glancing heavenward.

  But Raphael was silent, seeing only her—her direct manner and her simplicity.

  “As long as you have come all this way,” he said suddenly, conscious of his manners.“Would you and Signor Perazzi like to have a look around?”

  He knew it would be obvious that he was trying to impress her with a tour of his grand workshop, with its draperies, male models, easels, and drying portraits painted on large wooden panels. But if it helped to keep her here with him awhile longer, he was pleased to do it. All of the hand flourishes, the clever quips, and the show of wit that so amused the wealthy and powerful of Rome would not work with Margherita Luti.

  Silently, Margherita followed him around to the various artist tables, shadowed by her sister’s silent, awestruck husband. She saw all of the various works in progress, and dozens of studies for earlier Madonnas.