The Ruby Ring

by Diane Haeger

  “There is nothing in the world I would not do for you.”

  “Or for Raphael?”

  He stood and took a step toward her, closing the modest gap between them. He placed a hand over hers on the bed, atop Margherita’s silk-and-lace nightdress. She did not turn her head, did not acknowledge the powerful connection she felt between them. “Do you ever think about him that way now?” Giulio asked her with a blistering openness that surprised her.

  “Never. Nor, I imagine, does he.”

  “Then do you yet think of me?”

  Only then did Elena turn her lovely plump face, with her expressive gray eyes, to his. Through them, she saw an open admiration that both startled and frightened her. Yet he was still beyond her reach. The most trusted assistant to the famed Raffaello. A brilliant artist himself. She must not allow herself to believe that there could be the same sort of magical ending for her that there had been for Signora Luti.

  “Do not,” she murmured softly, as he took her hand very tightly in his own and tried again to kiss her. “You deserve better than me.”

  He lifted a hand to touch her hair, then fixed her with a pure and honest gaze. “We, all of us, are scarred in some way by this life, Elena. Different wounds perhaps, but the same effect on the soul.”

  It was painful to look at him. “I have told you, no good man should want me now.”

  “I want you, Elena. I want you very dearly—as my wife.” Leaning forward, Giulio brushed his lips against her soft face. The tenderness she felt from him just then nearly broke her heart. “But I am content to wait until it is what you desire as much as I do.”

  35

  RAPHAEL WAS RELIEVED NOT TO BE PRESSED ANY FURTHER concerning a reconciliation with Pope Leo. Politics and tenuous alliances, which had distracted him through the autumn and then winter, were made worse by what the Holy Father’s aides referred to as “the unfortunate event with Raffaello.” But whatever the cost of what had happened, for Raphael it was higher.

  Quite simply, he could no longer paint.

  Even as the commissions piled up, and the existing works went unfinished, Raphael spent all of his time with Margherita. No matter who bid him, Raphael would not return to the workshop, nor visit the Vatican Palace. Even Giulio was denied a private visit with the mastro during those dark first days, if he meant to discuss painting.

  Months later, in the spring of 1516, Giulio came to the house again to speak about a problem he had found with the frescoed image of King Charlemagne in the pope’s new room. But once again, Raphael insisted he leave if the subject matter did not change. Having announced Giulio to Raphael and Margherita, Elena inclined her head with the greatest respect. Then she withdrew, and closed the large carved doors, leaving them alone again.

  “You must return to work sometime, amore mio,” Margherita observed, poking the long thin needle through the needlepoint hoop on her lap.

  Raphael closed his book with a small snap. “I have sufficient money, and thus I am bound by no such command.”

  “Yet you are.”

  “I have told you, I am finished with painting!”

  She set down her work and came to sit at his feet, her hands on his knees. Gazing up into his troubled face, she gently declared, “I will not allow you to quit.”

  Raphael raked the hair back from his face. “I have lost my passion for it, Margherita! I do not feel it any longer—not down in my bones! It is not there—that urge—the absolute drive that once absolutely moved me to create!”

  “It shall return. It is too much a part of you for it not to.”

  He shook his head and looked away. “You have too much faith in me.”

  “It is what God has put me here to do.”

  It was a weak smile that broke the tension between them then. “Once I could not convince you that I was even trustworthy.”

  “That was a lifetime ago.”

  Then, in a seductive move that surprised them both, Margherita very slowly began to unlace and remove the top of her dress. In their time together, with his guidance, she had learned well the sensual arts, and this now was a slow, seductive dance meant to entice him. She watched his eyes widen and his lips part slightly, but he said nothing as the silken fabric fell away from her breasts, pooling at her waist.

  “Paint me,” she bid him. “Like this . . . paint all of me.”

  He turned away. “I tell you, I cannot.”

  Margherita took his hand and placed it on her bare breast. He looked at her again, and she softly smiled. “You can!”

  From a ceramic cup that held a collection of brushes on the worktable beside them, she drew one out and held it out to him. “You can,” she said again. “I want you to paint me precisely this way . . . the way you have made me feel with you . . . the way you have changed me . . . made me able to be wanton and free.”

  “Amore mio, I—”

  “Allow me to see this part of myself through your eyes—your hand—now. Not a Madonna this time, nor a lady . . . but as your partner, your lover—the woman of your heart.”

  “But I do not want to begin again!” he said with a catch in his voice. “I want to punish them all!”

  “Yet in that, do you not punish yourself most of all? It is who you are! What you are!” She drew up his hand and ran it down the line between her breasts, across her navel, and up her skirts to feel the place where her legs came together. For a moment, she let her head tip back, luxuriating in his touch, her unbound hair falling across her shoulders. He took in the soft scent of roses that clung to her always. Then she looked up at him, open-eyed and committed. “Tell me you cannot see me painted in this way. Sensual . . . free . . . Tell me you cannot paint the woman you created!”

  “The woman I only helped you become,” he corrected her in a rasp that marked his mounting desire.

  She held the brush out to him again, undeterred. “Paint me this way for us, Raphael. Show me myself as you see me—as you experience me.”

  He drew her to himself powerfully then and kissed her, hard and hungrily, pressing himself fully against her bare breasts. “Margherita Luti, you are an extraordinary woman!”

  “A woman in love.”

  He kissed her again, with a rough urgency. “In love with a man who worships you!”

  His hands encircled her then, sensually, as he ran them over the curves and planes of her body, her arms and thighs, as a blind man might, but she pulled away even as a surge of desire coursed through her. “Sketch me first. Begin it!”

  Reaching over onto his table, she drew up a sheet of paper fastened to a hard sketching board and handed it to him. “Do it for us!” she coaxed seductively.

  “I cannot think for want of you!”

  “Use that desire! Channel it into that urge you once knew to create! Seduce the paper!” She ran a finger along his neck. “Caress the chalk between your fingers as though it were a part of my flesh . . . ”

  He rolled his eyes to a close and took the chalk, groaning with impatience, knowing that for all of his life, he would never have enough of her. “You are a cruel vixen!”

  “Draw me . . . ” She kissed his earlobe, taking it gently between her teeth. “Then, afterward . . . ”

  THE FEVER WAS SUDDEN.

  Maria had suffered this malady in the stifling months the summer before, and this summer, only months away, apparently was to be no exception. As mosquitoes up from the stagnant Tiber swirled around the cardinal’s villa on the Via dei Leutari, Signorina Bibbiena’s ladies collected around her wide black oak bed with its twisted posts and canopy. Three papal physicians and Cardinal Bibbiena himself gathered across the room to discuss the seriousness of the matter. Candle lamps flickered and smoked in the grand, drapery-darkened room, casting shadows on the heavy furniture.

  “I don’t understand! She was well two days ago when I left her! What have you to say?” the cardinal barked out at Costanza Giacolo, his niece’s senior most lady.

  “Perhaps it is still her heart, Your Grace
. She was never entirely well. Not really since her meeting with Signor Raphael in the Vatican gardens last winter,” the distinguished woman calmly offered. “We tried to discourage her from going there, as we all knew she would see him at the elephant’s enclosure, but it was when his mistress had gone missing and—”

  “You tried?” he bellowed. “Why did you not succeed?”

  “Signorina Bibbiena said she must see Signor Sanzio to remain hopeful about things, that her future depended upon it. I did not think, Your Grace, to argue that, as she has tried for so long to revive her betrothal.”

  “Raphael Sanzio! Och, how I rue the moment I first heard that name!”

  He shook his head and turned from her, despising excuses almost as much as he despised weakness. Maria watched him passively from her bed, feeling his displeasure with her, at her failing. Yet she saw how he meant to make this, if he could, Raphael’s fault. She had sought to do that herself the day she had come back, wounded and rejected, from the studio. Certainly her battered heart had opened the door. But her own physical weakness, this yearly susceptibility to illness, was only the fault of her own body. She could blame no one else for that.

  But would he?

  Maria looked at her uncle, his ambition a brittle mantle upon his bony shoulders. He had been driven for so long to succeed that to the world, he had become a sharp-eyed, vastly unkind man. To her, however, he was simply Uncle Bernardo, the man who had cared for her, who played games with her as a child, who calmed her fears, and the one person who cradled her when she cried. No one but Maria had ever seen that tender side of him—the side he fought against. The side that frightened him because it threatened his heart—nor would they, now.

  Maria had seen his wrath meted out upon others before when his goals were not achieved. Someone would pay the price for this new illness she now endured. Either poor Costanza or Raphael—or both of them. Maria regretted that. But then, there really was no way to stop Uncle Bernardo when he directed his mind to something. Dedicated absolutely to his love of her, he would nevertheless be an angry bull charging an enemy.

  She watched him leave the room without returning to her bedside. She was ashamed that the next sensation she felt was one of relief. She no longer despised Raphael. That all seemed long ago, and somehow insignificant now, compared to the need to confront her own mortality.

  As she watched the cardinal go Maria noticed Alessandro standing just outside the door, her strong and quiet guard. His presence there made her smile, and she whispered to Costanza to have him brought forward to her bedside.

  It was odd how handsome Maria now thought him. He had been in her household for so long, and she had rarely taken the time to notice his many kindnesses. “Come and sit with me,” she weakly bid him as he neared.

  “Oh, signorina, it would be unseemly.”

  “To the devil with what seems to be proper! Per favore, Alessandro. Sit with me.”

  Glancing at her waiting women, he sank reluctantly into the hard chair, fashioned with nail studs around leather, that had been placed beside her bed. “Allora. Speak to me of things as you did today, honestly. I find it most pleasing amid all of this boredom.”

  “But Signorina Bibbiena, you are ill.”

  “Oh, Alessandro, I have been ill for half of my life, and for most of that time people have been afraid to speak truths to me. Perhaps that is why I was, for a time, allowed to believe I could make a man like Raphael Sanzio love me.”

  “Surely you know how an artist like that is. That is not your fault.”

  “S, I know it. And, sadly, I know now that he truly loves her, and that no one shall separate them.”

  “Forgive me, signorina, but His Grace, your uncle, does not seem to know it at all.”

  “The cardinal sees what he wishes, Alessandro. I believe he has suffered from knowing only ambition from the time he was very young. It has led him to see nothing else.”

  “He has become a very rich and powerful cleric.”

  “But what of the man? Is there not a life of pleasure and happiness one must try to find as well?”

  “Apparently power is a comely enough bedtime companion.”

  Maria laughed softly, then the laughter faded as she settled her eyes upon him. “I find it would have been pleasing to have known you earlier in my life, Alessandro,” she said. “I only wish I had opened my eyes to really see you there all of these months. In that, I believe, I am not so much better than my uncle.”

  “Speak no more of these thoughts,” he bid her, knowing how many waiting women might hear their words.

  “Perhaps I should not say such things, but my illness gives me a certain confidence that nothing I speak now shall have the power to come back to haunt me.”

  “That is a thought I cannot bear.”

  Maria reached out to put her slim, veined hand over his as it rested on his own knee. “We are worlds apart, you and I.”

  “I serve you, signorina. Our worlds could only ever be joined by my devoted service to you.”

  “I should have liked to know what it might have been to serve you, as a man desires. I find now, looking at you, that I regret I never came to know that particular earthly pleasure.”

  He glanced across the room at the curious ladies who stood close enough to have heard the words they spoke. “Signorina,” he said, urging caution in his tone.

  “I have had much time to reflect these past days. And I see now that I did not experience that same curiosity, alas, regarding Signor Sanzio—in spite of believing absolutely that I loved him.”

  He leaned very close to her. “These are dangerous words, Signorina Bibbiena, for a servant to hear from so noble a lady.”

  “And in that, perhaps, I know a little of how Signor Sanzio feels about his love, after all.” Maria smiled up at his strong, kind face, etched with concern for her in a way she had never seen on any other. It seemed incomprehensible that this man, this guard, for whom she was unreachable, still could actually somehow have come to care for her, or she for him.

  “I am weary now, Alessandro, and in need of rest,” she said, unable to spend another moment on so peculiar and unexpected an emotion. “But would you stay with me, here, like this, and speak softly to me until I fall asleep?”

  “If it is your wish.”

  “It is one of them at least, my good friend,” Maria said.

  TWO DAYS LATER, Maria Bibbiena, the cardinal’s niece, and the woman once officially betrothed to the eminent papal artist Raphael Sanzio, was dead. Her premature death was a blow to her family, but most especially to her uncle. Cardinal Bibbiena blamed only one man, and thus sought to bar Raphael from the dignified and stately funeral he had arranged.

  Raphael attended in spite of the directive against him.

  Once the intimate Vatican chapel was packed to capacity, before an elegantly carved coffin, high on a velvet-draped bier, Raphael slipped inside through a carved side door and up into the balcony. Alone and attired in black, he had considered it his duty to be here amid the cold stone, the echoed whispers from the mourners, and the dark elegy sung from the choir stalls beside him.

  He had not loved Maria, but he had always respected her. She deserved that respect now. Standing silent and still as the Holy Father began the funeral Mass, Raphael looked down, searching the faces in the front of the chapel. Shaken and pale, Cardinal Bibbiena stood beside Cardinal de’ Medici, cousin of the pope. Twice Bibbiena seemed to falter, and de’ Medici had reached out to steady him. The powerful cardinal had never seemed quite capable of tender emotion, Raphael had always thought. Looking at him now, with a tug from his own feelings, he knew that he had been wrong.

  Maria had been loved deeply by someone after all.

  After the funeral Mass, a throng of Roman nobility walked in solemn procession from the chapel to the shaded and lovely burial site within the highly private Vatican grounds. Amid them, a tall and dignified servant, unknown and unregarded by most of the mourners, stood well behind them. But
Raphael recognized him immediately, for they had met at his studio once, when Maria had run off weeping. The man’s head was lowered, and his hands were clasped so that no one of importance would see the tears for Maria shining in his eyes. But Raphael saw them, and understood. Watching him now, it seemed to Raphael that in the end, Maria Bibbiena had actually come to know the great love of not one, but two devoted men.

  36

  April 1516

  RAPHAEL WAS WORKING EXCLUSIVELY ON THE NUDE PORtrait of Margherita when he was summoned by guards to the Vatican Palace, to a meeting with the pope’s cousin, Cardinal de’ Medici. It had not been an invitation this time, but a command.

  The cardinal’s spacious Vatican apartments were grand, vaulted rooms, scented with incense. The walls, decorated with religious portraits, were hung in heavy gold frames. Raphael made a necessarily deep yet perfunctory bow to the cardinal. Seated in a tall, leather-covered chair, studded in silver, the Medici response was direct and without flourish.

  “It is the Holy Father, Raffaello.”

  “This is not another plea for a reconciliation between us, I hope.”

  “That is not why I have summoned you here.”

  “When he stops his excuse making and agrees to a date to perform my marriage to Signora Luti, then I shall begin to entertain the concept at least of a reconciliation. But before that—”

  “Raphael . . . ”

  “His Holiness is not ill, I trust?” Raphael asked indifferently.

  Even though it had been several months since Margherita’s kidnapping, he simply could not find it in his heart to reconcile with his former patron.

  “It is his heart. Some say it is beyond repair over all that has happened, primarily with you. Following your estrangement, things began to go very badly for the Holy Father. There was the sudden passing of his brother and then the loss of his key alliance with Spain—and the threat which now poses following the death of King Ferdinand. He feels he is meant to lose everything dear to him as payment for what occurred. Now even his favorite Hanno has suddenly become ill.”