The Ruby Ring Read Online Free PDF Page B

you ask me!”
    As he looked back and forth between his two grown daughters, the quiet was broken by the smacking sound of the suckling child. Each of his daughters bore elements of their father, and their lost mother as well. Margherita’s features were more delicate, but her coloring was of Luti, shades of olive, and her skin smooth. Letitia was fair as new milk with crow-black hair gathered up and worn tight like a crown at the back of her head. She wore a coarse beige dress, a white apron around her waist, and rough leather shoes in the manner of a baker’s wife. Margherita wore her mother’s clothes. They were finer things, memories of her dreams wrapped in fabric and laces. Their size had been the same exactly. At times, late at night, when he had drunk too much trebbiano wine, Francesco would cry that his daughter tortured him by bringing him visions of the past. But Margherita, a daughter lonely for a mother’s love and dreams, reveled in that small connection left to her.
    “I did not actually believe it was him. Imagine! Well dressed or not, to pass himself off to anyone as the great artist,” Margherita casually explained. “And so I left.”
    “This man was well dressed?” Francesco stroked his short, square chin with two flour-caked fingers “What if it were him?
Per l’amor di Dio!
Did he . . . this man . . . this stranger to you . . . did he perchance offer to pay you for your trouble?”
    “He said he would pay to draw me,
si
”
    His round green eyes bulged with incredulity. “Did you at least tell him where to find you? Perhaps, if we saw some proof that—”
    “When a messenger came for him, I disappeared before he could proposition me further.”
    Beyond the little baking room, a bell tinkled over the door of the shop announcing a customer. Francesco glanced briefly toward the muslin curtain dividing the two spaces, then back at his daughters.
    “And what if it really were the great Raffaello? What on earth did you turn away from?”
    Margherita’s lips parted as she gazed in amazement at her father. Her young life was flour and water, and the predictability of days as a baker’s unmarried daughter. Then marriage, equally as expected, to Donato’s younger brother, Antonio, when she gave up hope of anything else.
    “
Padre mio,
worry not. The man I met, while grandly clothed, was alone. No good could come from my playing his foolish game. What would the great painter who walks among princes, dukes—and even our Holy Father—want with a common baker’s daughter anyway?”

         
    2
    A S HE MADE HIS WAY UP THE WIDE STONE STEPS OF THE Loggia della Benedizione and through the ornate Vatican gate archway, Raphael’s head swam with the image of the mysterious girl he had seen so briefly—especially her extraordinary eyes. They were the eyes of a Madonna.
    A wagon loaded with beef carcasses heading for the papal kitchens trundled past him along the path, then disappeared as two guards closed another gate behind it. Raphael did not notice the movement or the pages, or even the clergy in their starched vestments who passed him as he strode up the first wide flight of stone steps, and then the second, toward the
stanza
in which his assistants had been working, and where he had been told the Holy Father would graciously receive him.
    As the heels of his decorated leather boots clicked on the inlaid mosaic floor, Raphael did his best to chase the girl’s face from his mind. He needed to create a tolerable expression of humility instead of the flushed excitement he was feeling now. Not two days earlier, the pontiff had admonished him personally on the vices of women and their danger to a man with such a powerful gift from God.
    “You waste yourself on lust, Raffaello
mio,
” he had sternly warned, pointing a fat, jeweled finger. “Better to join the priesthood, to keep yourself chaste, if you will not take Bibbiena’s niece as your wife!”
    Raphael thought of the pope with his