The Ruby Ring Read Online Free PDF

crawled away.
    The bakery was cramped and stifling from the blazing bread ovens behind the muslin curtain. Everywhere there were wicker baskets brimming with fresh bread and rolls. Dense sweet nut bread, airy round loaves stuffed with wine-soaked raisins, strips of sweet knotted bread called
sfrappole,
and
pizzelles,
the little light wafers the baker gave out to children who he favored. The walls of the small shop once had been a delicate cerulean blue when it had housed a cobbler’s shop. But that was from another lifetime, before the heat of a bakery, flour, and time had faded it almost beyond recognition, and caused the paint behind the baskets to peel away steadily from the plaster walls. Out beyond a rounded door was a small back garden with a few meager vegetables growing through dirt and weeds, and a line of white laundry moving with the rhythm of a now cool and, once again, rainless breeze.
    “And where have
you
been, my girl with the penchant for wandering?” he gruffly asked his younger daughter. “I expect you to help me with the
baccio
and yet out you go with the child and your sister is here, sick with dread!”
    “
Dio, Padre,
Letitia is always sick with something.” She smiled and drew a warm
pizzelle
from the wooden tabletop. Francesco Luti slapped his daughter’s hand, as if to prevent her from taking it, but it was a playful lifelong gesture, the grand way in which the
famiglia
Luti displayed affection. It was, in fact, the only way. Emotion, Francesco Luti ordained, was a sign of weakness. No good could come of an open heart, he had warned his daughters. What he meant, Margherita knew, was that he had married their mother for love, and he had paid the heavy price of missing that love after her premature death.
    Margherita kissed her father’s cheek again in a whimsical way that always diffused his anger and, touching the boy on top of his head, moved into the back room as she removed the damp cloak. She went behind a muslin curtain to where her sister, Letitia, stood mixing water into a large earthen bowl of flour for their father’s next batch of bread dough.
    “I told him you would return,” Letitia said blandly, without looking up, “yet still he worries.”
    Letitia Perazzi cared little that Margherita had been off with her son. Matteo was her fourth son in a few short years, and a break from the whining, constantly nursing toddler was welcome. For this blissful morning, her three-year-old, Luca, had slept in the baby’s oak cradle near her, and the older two boys, Pietro and Jacopo, today had gone to help their father, Donato, at the Chigi stables.
    Mucking out horse droppings and oiling grand saddles was not a life of nobility, Letitia’s husband said, but an honest living nonetheless, and as close to greatness as he ever would get. He put food on their table and helped Francesco to keep a roof above their home and the bakery. And that, for him, was enough.
    “
Prego,
Margherita! Do you have a reason, better than the last time, why you were out and not here stoking the fire for the afternoon loaves!”
    Margherita traced a casual finger along the rough-hewn table, parting the thin dusting of flour there. “What would you think if I told you I met the great Raffaello today and he wished to paint me?”
    “So you mock your
padre
who still puts clothes on your back, and food in your belly? In spite of the fact that at your age you should be married?” her father snapped.
    Letitia chuckled at that and pulled down the muslin bodice of her dress to reveal the wide pink nipple of a swelling breast, onto which the little cherub in her arms quickly latched with rosebud lips. “Oh really,
Padre mio,
can you not see Margherita’s attempt to put even the slightest hint of a smile on that sour face of yours? Both of you have so little joy in your lives these days.”
    “What has joy to do with life, Letitia, can you tell me that, eh? Only something to betray your soul when you give into it, if