The Ruby Ring

by Diane Haeger

  That alone surprised Raphael, and altered his tone. “The elephant is unwell?”

  “His Holiness has come to favor dearly that gentle beast, almost as if he were a lapdog or pet marmoset. Since he was brought to Rome, the Holy Father has visited Hanno each and every day. The visits seemed to bring him a sense of peace through all of the turmoil and talk of war that has plagued him. Now that one last bit of joy is about to be taken from him as well.”

  “Is there nothing that can be done for the creature?”

  “The doctors have tried everything. He has been bled and given every purgative possible, but to no avail. The jungle beast, we are told, shall not survive this. Death is imminent.”

  Raphael thought not of the pope but of Margherita’s affinity for the animal, and how she would feel knowing he would die. “I am sorry for the Holy Father,” he forced himself to say. “But there is certainly nothing I can do about his circumstances.”

  “Pardon me, Raphael, but you could go to the pontiff. Visit with him as the friends you once were. You would help a great deal with the Holy Father’s outlook on all the more important matters. You could use the animal’s unfortunate circumstance as a beginning between you.”

  “I cannot.”

  “That simple?”

  “He tried to take from me the thing most dear in my life!” Raphael said contemptuously, wholly unable to stifle the furious words pressing forth from his heart. “And still he refuses to allow us to marry for no other reason than his own dislike of the woman I have chosen!”

  The cardinal shrugged. He drew in a measured breath. There was a moment of consideration before he replied in a voice full of piety. “His Holiness is not a well man, Raphael. The thing he craves most in the world now, at this difficult juncture in his life, is your forgiveness. He is not beyond paying you any price if it will return you to your former state with each other.”

  “That state can never be. Not exactly as it was.”

  Cardinal de’ Medici arched a brow, and drew a finger to his chin. “But some approximation, perhaps?”

  Raphael wheeled around, hands on his hips, his voice full of contemptuous challenge. “Get me the ruby ring, which His Holiness knew well I desired, yet gave to Cardinal Bibbiena, and guarantee not only Signora Luti’s absolute safety, but her invitation to all events to which I am invited. Tell him that he must sanction our marriage as he sanctioned Agostino Chigi’s. If he will consent to do all of that, I will visit him.”

  Cardinal de’ Medici nodded calmly. “I shall present your terms at once. I shall return to you with a reply by nightfall.”

  “You do that,” Raphael replied, knowing what the response must be. Too much power, greed, and ambition swirled around the pontiff. His Holiness would never take away the ruby ring from one of his dearest friends.

  THE RESPONSE came long before evening fell. Two hours after Raphael left the Vatican Palace, a small leather box was presented to him, carried personally by a somber-faced Swiss guard in his brightly colored uniform and plumed steel helmet. Beside him stood Cardinal de’ Medici. The exquisite ruby ring from the house of Nero glittered up at him from a small bed of blue velvet. Raphael heard himself gasp.

  “His Holiness wishes greatly for there to be an end to the animosity between the two of you,” de’ Medici announced. “He has sent me to say that if this act shall achieve that, he is exceedingly content at the prospect. And, after an appropriate time of mourning for Signorina Bibbiena, so as not to insult His Holiness’s dear friend, Cardinal Bibbiena, he will approve of, and sanction, your marriage to Signora Luti.”

  Raphael took the small ring from the swatch of velvet and held it up. It glittered in the light with the same brilliant intensity it had the first time he had seen it. It truly was breathtaking, perfectly suited for Margherita’s slender finger, with the same rightness about it there had always been. He felt his rage begin to subside. The ring had been meant for her always, and it would be hers at last.

  “I shall consider the matter,” he replied with a caution that he still could not vanquish. He must remain in control of all this until the day he took Margherita as his bride. It was not only for her protection . . . but his own.

  “Excellent.” Cardinal de’ Medici nodded piously. “In addition, the Holy Father would have you consider the question of when you might be willing to return to work on the Stanza dell’Incendio.”

  “I bid Your Grace not to press me. I shall inform the Holy Father when I will return to work.”

  Raphael knew he was certainly pushing his luck, but he also knew he was the one who held all of the cards. The great and powerful Pope Leo, and all of his cardinals and henchmen, he had decided, should know it as well before he gave them what they wished.

  NOW THAT Margherita was finally alone, with Raphael having gone to the Vatican, the entire group of them went to the Via Alessandrina and stood together on her doorstep, an unlikely lot. Potbellied Gianfrancesco Penni, with his unruly mass of red-gold curls and ruddy face, stood beside Giovanni da Udine, who appeared tall and awkward here, his silver hair smoothed away from his face. He especially was chafing. Behind them were all of the other artists and apprentices from Raphael’s workshop.

  “While it is long overdue, we mean to apologize for our treatment of her. But will she see us?” Penni asked Elena, who held the front doorjamb and gazed in surprise at the great collection of men in their painter’s loose white shirts, hose, leather belts, and boots. “Knowing that the mastro has gone to the Vatican, hopefully to reconcile with the Holy Father, we saw an opportunity at last. We are here to plead for a fresh start with Signora Luti.”

  “I would blame her not at all if she declined,” Elena replied. Giulio had told her how coolly they had all treated Margherita in the early days of her courtship with Raphael. “It has been months you have waited for this! And some debts as they mount are simply too high to be paid!”

  “And some are better off simply forgiven.” The words had come from Margherita herself, stepping off her staircase, the hem of her dress clinging to the last stone stair. Elena turned to look at her, just as the men did. “Show them in, Elena,” she calmly directed, elegance defining her now, richly gowned as she was in amethyst-and-ivory brocade. “And see them to the library, per favore.”

  The men, largely out of work since the kidnapping plot was revealed, shuffled across the glossy marble floor and the richly woven Turkish carpet. They stood bunched up beside the fireplace hearth, above which hung one of the small tondo paintings of Margherita as the Madonna. It was a silent reminder of her power, not only over Raphael, but over all of them.

  “We would have come before now, and we should have. But we thought an apology for our behavior toward you would be precious little and far too late, especially after what happened,” said Penni, the designated spokesman. “But now, with things changing all over, and perhaps a new era beginning for us all, we needed to try,” he added as he stood a step forward, away from the others. “You deserved better than how we treated you, signora.”

  In spite of the surprise, Margherita felt a smile tug at her lips. He was using the designation signora now, not in ridicule but rather in deference to her. Margherita took it as a show of respect.

  “We will all simply go on from here.”

  “Grazie, signora,” da Udine nodded, surprising Margherita—and himself.

  “Raphael has good men who care for his welfare. I did not fault any of you for that.”

  “We should have shown courtesy to the lady whom the mastro loved.” Penni pressed the apology. “He certainly has been selfless enough with all of us to have expected that from us in return.”

  “Well.” Margherita clasped her hands and searched each of their faces with a smile of her own. “We have all of the time in the world to change our course with one another now, do we not?” she asked, a gentle smile lighting her eyes.

  Each of them nodded their agreement, and reached out in turn to take her hand.

  MA
RGHERITA was sitting at her dressing table when he came into her bedchamber very late that night. He saw her face reflected in the lamplight. It was freshly scrubbed, her hair parted in the center hanging long and soft around her face and across her shoulders. Raphael drew near and rested a hand upon her shoulder.

  Seeing his reflection behind her, Margherita reached up to her shoulder and took his hand.

  “Did it go well today?”

  “Better than I expected. There is something we must speak of. But first, I must tell you of Hanno.” Raphael despised having to tell her the truth of this.

  Seeing his expression, she dropped her gaze. Silence passed between them for a moment. “He has died.”

  “Si, amore mio. It is so.”

  “Grazie a Dio.”

  He watched her exhale deeply, as if a great burden had been released from her heart. “At last his spirit is free.”

  “I believe that as well. I am relieved you are not upset.”

  “Hanno has been imprisoned too long for that.” She shook her head and waited for a moment. “And the Holy Father, how is he about it?”

  Raphael shrugged. “He is distraught, of course. I believe Hanno’s death, on the heels of his brother’s untimely passing, has softened him greatly. At least it appears so.”

  “And how is that?” she asked him as he sank onto the bench beside her. Gently, he touched a long tendril of her hair and brushed it behind her shoulder, then he kissed the bare skin that had been covered beneath it.

  “Cardinal de’ Medici came to see me today.”

  “The pope’s cousin?”

  “Through his visit, I believe I have at last found a way to forgive them.”

  “If it is your desire finally,” she softly smiled, “then I am well glad of it.”

  “There will be changes, however,” Raphael said, reaching into a pocket of his doublet, his lips curving into a slow smile. “And he shall agree to them.”

  “Such as?”

  “Perhaps I shall have the Holy Father agree to bury me in the Pantheon one day, with you resting beside me, so that no one shall ever forget. Unlikely or not, we two are, forever, lovers,” he said wistfully.

  Smiling, Margherita shook her head. “You speak too much of death for one so young.”

  “Perhaps I shall die prematurely. I have always felt that I would. Even when I was a boy, I believed it.”

  “I will not hear that!”

  “My father used to tell me the same thing, yet he died young as well. Death is the natural order of things. To live, and to die . . . We cannot avoid it, you know.”

  “Well, they would certainly never bury me in the Pantheon, no matter what the Holy Father might assure you.”

  “They would not dare to do otherwise. Remember, amore mio, I am Raffaello!”

  The suggestion of a smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “And I am the woman whose daily task is to try to remind you of your responsibility in that. Not an easy task, reining in a creative soul, I assure you!”

  “True enough,” he conceded with a smile. “So the more immediate changes from the Holy Father and the others will be in how they deal with me—and how they treat you. In the interim, I believe I have found, at last, that certain something that our private painting of you has been missing.” At last, he held up the ruby ring to her, glittering brilliantly in the candle glow. “The single article that will transform it into a wedding portrait.”

  Margherita gazed down at the ring shimmering there, but did not move. A moment later, she looked up into Raphael’s eyes and saw the devotion redoubled now after what they had together endured.

  “Will you do me the great honor, at last, Signora Luti, of becoming my wife?”

  Her expression changed. Her lips parted just slightly, and her eyes began to fill with tears. “But the Holy Father—”

  He pressed a single finger, with great tenderness, against her lips. “When you are my wife, nothing shall threaten you ever again.”

  Tears glittered in her eyes like the precious jewel he still held up in offer to her. “Are you certain?”

  “Before I met you,” he gently corrected her, the love open and telling in his voice, “I had no life. By Maria’s unfortunate death, I am free now from the shame of having broken my betrothal, which tainted the future for us. So there at last is nothing in our way.”

  Raphael held her and raked his fingers from the crown of her hair down through the length of it, settling his hand at the small of her back and whispered against her cheek. “I have never wanted anything so much as I want this with you. Margherita, you are my lover, my friend, my muse—and now soon my wife.”

  When Margherita turned fully toward him on the bench, Raphael took her hand and slipped the ruby ring—the jewel from another age—onto her slim finger. “This ring I give to you is something extraordinary. From the uncovered palace created by Nero.”

  “The one given by the Holy Father to Cardinal Bibbiena.”

  “But never meant for his hand. It well could have been worn by Poppaea herself. Its worth is priceless, its connection to your heart symbolic—which is the only sort of ring good enough to be a token of the love I bear for you.”

  He kissed her then, more deeply, drawing the thin cotton shift down over the smooth curves of her shoulders and breasts, pooling it at her hips.

  “I want to enhance the sketch we began,” he said adoringly, “make it a true portrait.”

  “A portrait of me naked?” she gasped, a soft chuckle of disbelief following.

  “S,” he replied. Her beautiful breasts were bare and inviting, only for him. “We began it as a sensual game between ourselves, to help me begin to work again. But along the way, it has become something greater.” His voice quickened. “I intend this painting of you to be my masterpiece!”

  “But it would be indecent to anyone who saw it!”

  “That is just the point. Come, I will show you,” he directed, holding a flickering candle lamp as he led her into the small room he kept there.

  Inside, set up just beside their bedchamber, he led her onto a divan covered over in red velvet, a silvery shaft of moonlight coming in through the stained-glass windowpanes behind it. Margherita gazed up curiously at him as he lit several more lamps, then began to mix paints.

  He looked up at her as he worked, his eyes wide, the passion to create entirely returned. “When we began our life together, I could see you only as the Madonna. Pure. Sacred. One-dimensional.”

  She bit back a smile. “I was never perfect.”

  “My artist’s eye found you so.”

  Raphael then busied himself with finding props that would define the composition he sought. The same turban to cover her hair as in the sketch, the same slip of gauzy fabric over her navel, and an artistic device he had already included in his design for the painting—an armband, that would later be painted as though etched with gold, words declaring undeniably that this work, and this woman, were forever the possessions of Raphael Urbinas.

  “You meant it as a means to get me working again, and I thank you with my life for that. But in these months since, it has come to symbolize so much more than that.” He touched her cheek tenderly. “I mean this to be a wedding portrait, only for the two of us. A gift to you, to be hung in our bedchamber—an image of how my heart sees you, since I speak better with my paintbrush. But down through the ages, once both of us have gone, I wish people to see it and know how desperately a simple painter was changed by love.”

  She was still smiling as he fixed the turban over her hair, fastening it with a costly pearl brooch, then slid a silver band edged in blue thread up over her wrist, onto her bare upper arm. Unable to resist then, he sank to his knees before her, kissed her neck, his mouth trailing down to her bare breasts.

  “And so for this wedding portrait, how is it you see me exactly?”

  “I see you as a seductress—the only one I can see, or will ever see. A womanly vision. The queen of my heart, a whore, a temptress . .
. everything. All the elements of you that are precious and private between us. Dio mio, what would have become of me—of Raphael the man, if I had never known you?”

  “Well.” She softly chuckled. “Put that way, how could I deny you such a portrait?”

  “The style, the tone, the colors must be entirely new,” he declared, kissing her again. “Yet I know, even before it is complete, that this is the work I will always hold most dear to my heart, because it was the first and only one I painted entirely for you.”

  37

  May 1517

  A YEAR PASSED, AND AS THE SPRING CAME ONCE AGAIN, Pope Leo was too sequestered and too consumed with his own tribulations to commit to a date upon which he would sanction and perform the marriage between Raphael and Margherita, even though he had already agreed to it. In the short term of his papacy, Pope Leo’s excessive spending on revelry and costly artistic projects had bled the papal coffers dry. The manner in which he sought to replenish the funds had only increased the scandal, and with it, his problems.

  Following the revelation of a conspiracy against the pontiff’s very life, perpetrated by a number of his own cardinals, Pope Leo had unwisely chosen to punish them by demanding excessively large sums of money from each of them—money he desperately needed, not only for the building of Saint Peter’s, but for the intricately frescoed rooms at the Vatican Palace. He had also continued the controversial practice of selling indulgences, which raised to a fever pitch the anger throughout Rome and the other dissatisfied Italian city-states. The pope could attend to no other duties, Raphael was continually told by the papal secretaries, until this serious matter was under control. When that might be, he was informed, was anyone’s guess.

  In spite of Margherita’s assurance that she would be content to have any priest marry them, Raphael was insistent that it be the Holy Father. Not only had the pope performed Chigi’s marriage to a commoner, thus setting a precedent in Raphael’s mind, but after the kidnapping, it was symbolic. To fully heal old wounds, it must be Pope Leo.