The Ruby Ring

by Diane Haeger

  RAPHAEL was late to Chigi’s wedding. He had already missed the ceremony, having gone too late with Giulio to Trastevere to collect Margherita, and whisper to her words of contrition. He had wanted to go himself rather than to send for her after their angry exchange. But when he and Giulio arrived, she was nowhere to be found. Francesco Luti had not seen her, he said, surprised by the painter’s sudden presence there. Nor had Letitia.

  “I assumed she was with you by now,” said Donato cautiously. “That painter, Sebastiano, took her home for me, as she was not feeling well, and he luckily came upon us as we were leaving the Vatican gardens. She had wanted to visit that elephant again.”

  “What happened? Was she taken ill?”

  “She was only weary, and distracted, signore. Not ill.” Donato chose not to reveal that the cruel women on the piazza had been Margherita’s undoing.

  “But why the devil did you let Sebastiano Luciani, of all men, escort her?”

  Donato tipped his head, waited a beat. “Because, signore, he had a swift horse. We were on foot, and I knew not how to deny the offer from a grand man without appearing rude.”

  Raphael’s eyes had filled with a growing panic, glancing back and forth at each of them, as Giulio stood behind him in the doorway. He had pushed his concern away before hearing that. But there could be no doubt that something had gone very wrong.

  Now Raphael burst into Chigi’s palazzo, past the stone-faced guards at the gate, and took the wide marble steps up from the courtyard two at a time, his wine-colored cape flaring out behind him. Giulio was running, out of breath, close at his heels. Raphael’s heart throbbed with dread, unaware of anything or anyone but finding Margherita. Someone here must have seen her or Sebastiano. There had to be an explanation. How did Sebastiano, of all people, come upon Margherita—his love—at just that precise moment?

  The guests were already assembled at the banquet table beneath the newly finished fresco he had designed. The table was piled high with gleaming silver dishes laden with mounds of food and great crystal decanters of wine. He realized only then that he had missed the actual wedding, which would do nothing to ingratiate him to the already irritated Chigi.

  But he could not think of that. Not now. In a wild-eyed panic, Raphael scanned the crowd for the presence of his rival. If Sebastiano was the last to have seen her, then Raphael would force him to reveal where she had gone. This bitter feud had gotten dangerously out of hand.

  As he scanned the faces of wedding guest after guest, amid a crescendo of laughter and happy conversation, none of them yet realized he was even there. Nor did they notice him as he moved around the servants bearing an elegant orgy of food on gleaming silver trays. There were grand dishes piled with steaming lampreys baked in pie, pomegranates, dressed anchovies, fresh green almonds split and served on vine leaves, candied fruit and marzipan, but all of it was a blur. His face as he searched was stricken, his mind darting back to their quarrel four days ago.

  Had there been anything at all in her words, or their inference, he asked himself frantically now, to foreshadow something serious? Had she been more than a little angry with him? He had seen too little of her since to answer the question with certainty.

  “Ah, well!” said Agostino grandly, a golden goblet held in midair at the moment of seeing Raphael standing near the wide doorway arch. “As they say, Raffaello mio, better late than never! Oh, but do sit down, and tell us what brilliant piece of work has kept you from us, as the meal has already begun!”

  “You must tell me, have you seen Sebastiano?” he asked, the words leaping from his mouth like sticky fruit, the panic in them obvious, and his face gone pale with fear.

  “Well, no. Now that it is mentioned, it seems yet another of our great artisans has not had the grace to be prompt to my wedding celebration.” He set the goblet down and kissed his new wife’s cheek. “A bridegroom who was not so deliriously happy as I could take offense at that, you know.”

  Once again, Raphael scanned the faces of the wealthy and powerful guests assembled before him, all of them seeing his panic and reacting with whispers and lifted eyebrows, even as they chewed and drank and laughed.

  “What is it?” Cardinal Bibbiena asked, glancing up from an intense conversation across the table with Cardinal de’ Medici. His elbow propped up the hand from which the brilliant ruby ring glittered. “Has something happened?”

  He tried desperately to keep his tone modulated, but the words left his lips in a staccato tenor. “I cannot find Signora Luti!”

  The whispers rose to a sedate crescendo as the pope stood, with the aide of his two ever-present secretaries, one on each side of him. Raphael could not breathe for the spasm of fear that shot through his lungs, then raced back up toward his heart. She would not do this . . . she would not simply disappear . . .

  If you believe that, Raphael, then you do not know me at all . . .

  The pope’s expression was grave. “Come, my son.” It was not a request, but a command. “And Agostino as well. Be good enough to join us.”

  GIULIO ROMANO paced the corridor outside the loggia where the banquet was going on. Tiny beads of sweat formed on his brow and he wiped them away with the back of his hand. Laughter and the clink of silver and glasses spilled out from the loggia before him, but Giulio did not feel like revelry. He had withheld what he had seen from the mastro, and so he had betrayed him, the man who had given him everything.

  All afternoon Giulio had silently prayed that there had been some mistake. That when they arrived in Trastevere, Signora Luti would be there, but not with Sebastiano, and all between the two of them would be forgiven. He had wanted to tell Raphael when they heard that she had not returned home or to the bakery. He knew he should have told him, but what could he possibly say? Could he be the one to tell the mastro that the love of his life had gone off with his greatest rival?

  It was a revelation Giulio simply did not feel his heart was strong enough to make.

  Instead, he told Signor Chigi. The great banker, and Raphael’s close friend, surely would know better than he what to say. And so Raphael had gone outside with a dour-faced pope and Signor Chigi to hear what would likely be his undoing. Forgive me, mastro, Giulio was thinking as he paced. You mean the world to me. You are everything. Too much for me to be the one to break your heart.

  THE THREE WALKED somberly outside onto the ornate balcony, with its carved stone balustrade and small, ordered gardens beyond. A light breeze blew the briny scent of water, and the odor of fish in the stagnant Tiber, up at them. As they stood facing the twisting dark water below, Pope Leo reached out and placed his hand on Raphael’s shoulder. His touch was firm.

  “It will be easier on you if I am direct, my son. The girl is gone.”

  The effect was immediate, and lethal. Like bile rushing into his mouth, Raphael tasted betrayal on a rancid swell of bitterness—something, he thought strangely then, of what Maria must have felt. And then what followed . . .

  It cannot be . . . I must not . . . There is a mistake!

  “Gone?” The word came out in a short bark of disbelief. “What do you know of it? Gone where? Why?”

  “It plagues the heart, my son, to be the one to tell you this, but I have had my staff following your signora for several days now. I was advised to expect something like this. And, alas, their warning appears to have been an accurate one.”

  The words seemed distorted, unbelievable. As if it were a part of a very poor joke.

  “To be blunt, my son, as a clean wound heals most swiftly, I shall tell you that as she left Rome, she was seen on horseback in the company of a man.”

  Raphael searched his fear-plagued mind, thoughts and memories racing through it. She was his love. It had been a small disagreement, nothing more. Yet that same betrayal hardened now in his throat, refusing to be ignored. Hot, corrosive. Betrayal he tried powerfully to refuse.

  “It is a lie!” His eyes were wide with panic. “Have you checked Hanno’s enclosure? She ofte
n goes there when—”

  “Raffaello mio,” Pope Leo soothed. “Per favore, she is not with the beast. Do not make this more difficult upon yourself. She was never worthy of this kind of pain.”

  He sank against a carved stone pilaster, his knees buckling beneath him, still unable to breathe. He touched the cold stone very lightly. Dio . . . Dio! “She was worth everything to me,” he mouthed very softly in an aching tone.

  “You would not be the first to have misjudged a woman’s value, Raphael,” Agostino Chigi carefully interjected. “You are a wealthy man now. Women of her class could be motivated to appear exceedingly accommodating, until they had received a sufficient amount of . . . compensation.”

  He still could not breathe. His lungs were still constricting with a hot, heavy force. “She never asked for anything, and she allowed me to give her very little.”

  “Yet she was, for a time, companion to the great Raffaello, and perhaps that was enough.”

  Raphael looked at Pope Leo through glazed eyes. “Was the man Sebastiano?”

  “I’m afraid we do not know the man’s identity for certain, my son. But it is odd that Signor Luciani is not here now when he, too, had accepted an invitation.”

  Raphael raked both hands through his loose, long hair and exhaled a first deep, painful breath—one that seemed to scorch his lungs. “Who told you of this?”

  Chigi and Pope Leo exchanged a glance. “It was your assistant,” Chigi revealed. “Giulio Romano came to us not long ago, concerned about how you were to be told.”

  The wound deepened, tore at his soul. Not Giulio, as well?

  “Was he absolutely certain it was Margherita?”

  Murmuring a Latin prayer and raising his fat, ring-dotted hand beneficently toward Raphael, the pope somberly said, “My son. There is no doubt at all about the girl. He says he knows her face well. Let us now pray for your soul, and for deliverance back to the ways of the Lord for the poor misguided girl, wherever she now may be.”

  Part Three

  Thus does my infinite

  passion for her torment me.

  Her beauty is blinding

  in its splendor.

  Unfriendly has become

  my hand,

  and now I am unable

  even to work . . .

  From a sonnet

  by Raphael Sanzio

  30

  December 1515

  WERE THEY DAYS, OR HOURS?

  Time was like colors in a fresco, running together. Time had drifted by without marking itself for Raphael. Or perhaps it was he who did not wish to know how long she had been gone.

  He had not slept nor even drunk the wine Elena and Giulio continually left out for him, a palliative that might have cauterized this open wound upon his heart. He could not stay at the house on the Via Alessandrina, or even at the one on the Via dei Coronari. There were too many sketches and Madonnas of her at them both.

  Piercing shards of memory, jagged as glass, tore at him as he moved through the city, head down, wearing a wide brim hat, not seeing people, or the tall shadow-making buildings on the endless tangle of city streets in which he wanted to lose himself. He needed to be far away from all of the things that might remind him of her. A new rush of anguish shook him. The thoughts crept into his mind, day and night. Relentlessly. Excruciatingly. It was, all of it, wrong. This could not be, his heart repeated over and over in a heavy, painful drumbeat. Yet still, catlike, the thoughts crept in. Had she truly been so restless for marriage, and he too hopeful for “some day” to have seen her displeasure? Had someone else offered more, or offered it more swiftly? Where was Sebastiano? It had been days since anyone in Rome had seen him. Could she really have been blind to his motives? The imaginings behind Raphael’s eyes, when he could not push them away, showed him fearsome things. Disappointment in her gentle expression when she last gazed at him. Hurt in her tone at the papal pronouncement about her.

  At the end of yet another street, he turned and went up a set of wide stone steps, passing a stout street vendor in shabby clothes hawking ripe lemons with a loud, pagan call. A few steps on, a dirty-faced, shoeless boy stood with his eyes wide and his hand out. Walking along a Roman road of stone blocks laid by Julius Caesar’s men, Raphael pushed away the tormenting thoughts of regret. Yet even as he did, they always returned, redoubled in force. I should not have listened to the doubts she raised. I should have taken her to Urbino and married her there. I should never have given her a chance to question us! That drumbeat stayed in his mind, until he could not think, eat, sleep, or paint. He felt now like the beggars crowding the filthy, shadow-darkened Borgo near the papal palace through which he roamed. Shiftless, purposeless. Empty.

  He was not certain how he had gotten there or why, but many days, Raphael found himself inside the Vatican gardens, standing outside the large enclosure that housed Hanno, the pope’s great exotic beast. His mind wound back to the times Margherita had insisted they visit the creature. He remembered her gentleness with him, and the animal’s response, the way he pressed his trunk against her shoulder in a show of affection. She had been gentle with him. She had shown him respect, as she did with everyone she met.

  “Do you miss her, too, I wonder?” he quietly asked. “We’re not all that different, you and I. Possessions of the Holy Father. Here at his will, brought to do his bidding . . . caged, controlled. Trapped. She saw that in you. Where they saw your novelty, she saw your sadness.”

  Swathed in heavy fur against the early winter chill, a woman approached him then, moving quietly along the path. He had not heard her until she was very near, which caused him to turn with a start. It was Maria Bibbiena, gowned in blue velvet with wide fur cuffs and a matching patterned velvet cloak. Her hair was dressed in a fine gold net. A ring of servants stood nearby; one of them, a tall, commanding guard Raphael remembered, held the reins of her horse.

  “Have you followed me?” he growled, gazing at her through red-veined eyes.

  “Forgive me, but I felt I must speak with you,” she said, her pale mouth trembling at the sight of him. “I wanted to tell you how truly sorry I am. Sorry I mean, about the baker’s daughter abandoning you.”

  “She has not abandoned me!” he barked, his body going rigid in defense as the cold winter wind whispered through them both.

  “Then where is she?”

  “I don’t know! But I will never believe—” He stopped himself, knowing it could not be right to reveal any part of his heartbreak to her.

  “Per favore,” she bid him in a thin voice. “Come home with me, Raffaello mio. I will see you warmed by a cup of spiced wine and we shall sit beside the fire and talk, as we once did. All will be forgiven. Our betrothal revived.”

  “Nothing can ever be between us as it once was, Maria!”

  “You sound so certain of that.”

  “I am.”

  “But she has gone!”

  “Not from my heart,” he said achingly. “No matter what has happened to her, she will never be gone from my heart!”

  He saw that her gaunt cheeks were red and chapped and that she was shivering. Raphael felt a deep pang of regret looking at her like this. Regret that he had hurt her. Regret that he had been so foolish long ago and toyed with her heart—a heart he had broken without meaning to. In the end, she had been betrayed, as he now was.

  “I thank you for your concern,” he said somberly, taking up her gloved hands between the two of them, and squeezing them with a memory of the small affection he once had felt for her. “But I must be alone now, I bid you. Leave me to my sorrow. Find another life for yourself.”

  “My life is with you. I was your betrothed, Raphael. Not her.”

  “Set me free, Maria,” he urged her achingly. “I beg you, set me free of your heart! It is the only thing I have ever asked of you!”

  “And the only thing I cannot give.”

  “Per favore . . . do not make me hurt you anymore!”

  She reached up to touch his cheek.
There were tears in her pale blue-gray eyes. “It would not be possible, Raffaello mio, for you to hurt me more.”

  MORE DAYS . . . more hours . . . Walking . . . searching . . . No rest. No work. No answers. Only memories and questions to his companions, of what had driven her away. The wind gusted and the rain surged through his clothes, pelting his face, wetting his eyes so that he could not tell the rain from his tears.

  Day after endless day, he walked aimlessly through Rome, up Il Gianicolo, hoping to see her there, where they had met. But she was never there, nor were the answers to why she had gone, or where. On a day like all of the others, one that felt like decades, Raphael stood alone at the top of the hill, wind whipping through his cape and doublet, shaking his fists at the God above him who had allowed this to happen.

  “Have I not done all that you have asked of me, dio mio? Have I not served You . . . Honored You . . . painted You!” He wailed aloud like a man gone mad. “If you have had enough of me this is surely a sign! My art . . . my painting . . . All of it is gone with her!”

  Strollers came upon him and were staring, but he could change nothing—feel nothing, but the desolation. From how great a height had he fallen. Now there was nothing left of his work, his life, his heart, but fragments, like pieces of shattered glass. It was finished, all of it. And so was he.

  AN ODD SILENCE that had descended across the vast workshop. The assistants and apprentices still showed up for work every morning, yet after a few days, their direction lost, they simply collected, gossiped, cleaned brushes, murmured their regret, and waited for news, as if the fate of Margherita Luti, a woman they had disregarded, somehow mattered to them after all.

  Everyone knew what had happened, yet no one dared to speak of it, for how they had all looked askance at her. The baker’s daughter was just another of the mastro’s trifles, they all had believed, and they had behaved accordingly. Particularly the disdainful Giovanni da Udine, who had placed bets on the tables in the bordello as to how long she would last in Raphael’s life. Beautiful, mindless, inconsequential, he had said—and he could not have been more wrong.