by Diane Haeger
“I should not have raised my voice to you,” he said more gently, at last turning his gaze to her, and allowing her to see his eyes, bloodshot with frustration and exhaustion. “I ask you to forgive me.”
“Considering the circumstances, it is understandable.”
“Do not show me your pity! I despise pity!” he raged, more to the heavens, which long had known it, than to her.
“Then what do you want?”
“Something other than the life I have!” He raked the hair back from his face with his good hand, and tipped his head back against the wall behind him. “A life other than the one with no family, no love, no reason even to exist, but only to paint and work to the point of exhaustion and blindness! To create only for the desire of others, on and on, day after day, then return home completely alone!”
“You cannot mean that you paint only for others! I have seen you work; it is in your blood!”
He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “Yet I work—not for my own passion now, but for theirs! The clergymen for whom I work are obsessed with finding their bit of immortality! Since they can have no acknowledged children I am there to provide them a legacy—something that will live on once they are gone! It is their absolute obsession! And all the while, I go about Rome, elegant, blithely, seeming to the world as if I have not a care in it! But as just a shell of a man whose entire life seems to have fallen apart with a small injury—as if my only value at all to anyone in this world is that!”
“Signor Sanzio, I—”
“Do you know what it is for a man to actually realize his true value?” He moved forward onto his knees, coming nearer to her, his eyes blazing with emotion. “To keep working, and working, all of the time, as if you have no life at all? The isolation that comes with this existence, the loneliness of being able to love virtually no one, because you have allowed no one to love you? It makes me wish to leave all of this—to go somewhere very far away . . . ”
“But you cannot!” She looked stricken. “You have an enormous gift given to you by God!”
“Or was it a curse cast upon me?”
“How can you speak such self-pitying words when you are so celebrated and admired?”
“It is Rafaello they admire—the women, bankers, cardinals, dukes, sycophants, even the Holy Father, who have come here since I was injured, and all of them wanting to know, most of all, not how I am, but when I will paint again! Certainly they inquire, but not about Raphael—the man—the one who bleeds when he is cut, who weeps, who fears . . . and who lusts for love, as any other man!” The raw timbre of his words—and their sentiment—turned the tide of things between them then. Everything changed in that moment.
“I must go.”
Margherita tried to stand. Raphael caught her wrist with his uninjured hand.
“Per favore . . . I bid you . . . stay.”
It was then that their eyes met again fully. The last bit of daylight through the long wooden window shutters cast slatted shadows on his smooth face. His expression was dark and glittering with something she had never seen before. Vulnerability. It held her entirely captive as the sound of a sudden rain surrounded them. This was not the image or the artist before her, Margherita knew, but Raphael the man.
Her color rose beneath his ardent stare. “If it is your wish.”
“Always the one in control, hmm?” he said very gently, with only a hint of mocking. “Making me think things I have never thought . . . causing me to speak words I swore I never would.”
Her voice was a whisper as she dared to reach out to touch his arm. “I might have said the same of you.”
Margherita’s eyes moved to the door, then back to Raphael. By leaving her here alone with him, Donato was telling her that the family wished her to stay and to console the great artistic mastro in whatever way she chose. But it did not require their sanction. The feeling between them had changed. She saw sincerity now in a man whose mask had been stripped away. She had misjudged him. Behind the cavalier image that Raphael wanted the world to see, there was someone else entirely. He was just a man, like any other. Complex. Vulnerable. Solitary.
For a moment they gazed silently at one another. Raphael closed his arm around her, as if he were protecting her from the rest of the world—as if that were in his power to do. Then, very gently, he covered her mouth with his own. A gasp of desire rushed up from her throat as she felt his thighs against hers, his chest against her breasts. Margherita’s mouth opened to his as their kiss deepened, and her body shivered with a barrage of new sensations.
When he grimaced, she saw that he had moved his hand. Gently, she drew it up to her lips and softly kissed his fingertips beyond the splint. His uninjured hand moved deftly down the length of her back, drawing her tightly to him as they kissed again.
Her heart pounded as he gently removed the kerchief from her head, her warm brown hair cascading forward around her face. Raphael took up a curl and pressed the soft, flowery scent of it, the silky smoothness, against his lightly stubbled jaw, then flinched with the strain of withheld ardor.
“It is this face that controls me! God, but you are already so much in my blood!” he murmured, finding her mouth again and drawing her to him so forcefully that she felt her chaste young body yield. “I am on fire for want of you!”
“Do you desire me only because today you feel alone in the world?”
“I desired you from the first! In that, today will be like every other, before and after! You have known that all along!”
Drawing her onto the pallet, with its array of velvet pillows, Raphael deftly slipped her dress up over her head, then the unadorned linen shift beneath. Margherita felt his own body heat as he stood next to her, and her breathing quickened. She did not resist as his own slippers, hose, and shirt came away from his taut body and fell into a pool of color onto the tiled floor, and she battled a new shiver of pleasure that pulsed through her. Her heart was racing. Her skin was hot.
“I have never loved a woman,” he murmured. “Never truly loved a woman.”
“And now?”
“Can you not see that I am entirely besotted by you? I want every part of you! And I want—Dio, yes desperately—I want to love you!”
She let him kiss her again, knowing what would come next, and wanting that. Wanting him as he came fully down upon her then. She felt the shock of a sudden sharp pain, but then the pain became pleasure—became exquisite. And like that, so simply, yet profoundly, she had given herself over to him, to the man behind the image. Her body, her heart, and her soul.
AFTERWARD, lifting himself onto an elbow, he searched her face, waited a beat before he kissed her again. Raphael was not certain what was happening to him. Yes, he had boldly begun this with her, but he had not been prepared for what had just happened. The way she had so tenderly stroked his face, her fingers feather-light upon his skin as he entered her. Her eyes wide and adoring upon him as he had moved inside her. Oh, the indescribable pleasure of it! She was so beautiful, so desirable . . . and he found he wanted to bring her pleasure, along with his own. To actually feel something emotionally when he took a woman was entirely foreign to him. Her gentleness and her innocence, the simple, sweet smell of her untouched flesh, had quite literally rocked him to the core.
“You are so different,” he whispered, their bodies still joined—his own slick with perspiration. “So totally human . . . you are everything, and like nothing I have ever known, or touched, or craved. I want to paint you . . . to create you . . . to bed with you, over and over again! Dio mio, to possess your whole body and heart—yes, that most of all!”
“You speak now as if that were impossible.”
He let a pained and heavy sigh. “It is complicated.”
Outside, past the wall of windows, the sky, now darkened to pewter, emptied a stronger rain onto Rome as Raphael rose reluctantly and moved away from her. He could not lie with her when he told her the truth. And she deserved the truth. Only when he had dres
sed did he come back to her on the pallet to sit beside her, wrapped as she was in one of the model’s draperies that had covered them both only moments before.
He pressed another tender kiss onto her cheek, craving the assurance of her skin beneath his lips. “You must understand, this has nothing to do with my heart. But power is everything here in Rome.”
“Do you not have enough of that as most favored artist of the Holy Father?”
Raphael hedged for a moment, uncertain of how to say it to make it more palatable to hear. It had been such a long time since he had cared at all what anyone else thought or felt. Suddenly, he could not look at her. There was too much trust in her eyes. “I made a choice—a poor one, before I knew better.” The breath he exhaled then was painful. He had made so many poor choices regarding women. But this had been the worst of them.
“There is a cardinal. He is the dearest friend of the pope. Cardinal Bibbiena has a niece . . . ”
Margherita sat up slowly. “And so?”
“Her name is Maria.” He drew in another painful breath and let it out very quickly. “We are betrothed.”
Her voice was strident with the sudden shock. As the meaning slowly became clear her lower lip began to tremble. “You waited to tell me of this until I, until after we—”
Raphael closed his eyes, burned by the pained expression on the exquisite face that mattered to him immensely now. “I have never . . . Not with her, Margherita. It is a powerful match made by powerful men, not having anything to do with lust or love.”
She cast back the heavy modeling drapery and shot to her feet, scrambling for her shift and her dress, which lay in a heap beneath the window. “Why should it when you have poor models from Trastevere for that sort of thing?”
“Before now work has ever been my only real love!” He pleaded. “The match with Maria is one I have regretted from the very first! It is a betrothal I have sought to break even before I met you! That I do swear!”
Stunned, Margherita moved toward the door, but he blocked her path. “You are well schooled and well experienced with women! Everyone in Rome knows of your reputation. I don’t believe you!”
He caught her wrist and was gripping it with his good hand. “That was before I knew you!”
“How many have there been before me, Raphael, who heard the same protestations?”
“How many before you, I know not.” He brushed the hair back from his face in frustration. “S, I told you, there have been many women. I confess I have known too many even to count! But I have never spoken of the things with another woman I have spoken of with you, nor felt what I feel with you!”
She spun away from him in the other direction, but he held her tightly. “Let me go!”
“It would be easier to cut out my very heart!”
“As you wish! You haven’t a heart worth having anyway!”
“You don’t mean that!”
Her face flushed scarlet with anger. “I mean it entirely!” Margherita’s rich brown eyes glittered angrily at him, even as he held her tightly and very close to his own tall, ramrod-straight body.
“We sealed that together just now, you and I!”
“We rutted like animals! That was all!”
The flare of her spirit only bewitched him the more.“You are mine, as I am yours!” he murmured in a voice mixed with sincerity and sudden renewed lust. “And, by God, I’ll not give you up!”
Unable to control the tears that her anger had nearly hidden, Margherita tried to twist away from him, but he only held her more powerfully, kissing the tears away, tasting them seductively with his lips and tongue. “I loathe you!” she cried in a small, choking voice as his powerful arms encircled her once again.
“I know not how or why, or what made it happen so completely, but I worship you!” he volleyed, pressing her back toward the window seat as the salty taste of the tears on her cheeks became urgent kisses, his mouth parting her lips, his tongue driving a rhythm into her mouth, and the overwhelming passion rising swiftly within him again.
After all the years, a lifetime, of meaningless coupling, of the terrible things he had done with nameless women in places too seamy and dark even to recall, Raphael was desperate that this woman know she was different in his life—and that he was made wholly different by her.
“Margherita . . . pearl . . . luminescent . . . rare.” He whispered huskily the meaning of her name into her hair as he moved back with her onto the pallet, then arched over her again, trapping her beneath him. “My life begins with you, this I swear . . . I do swear it!”
As he touched her with his lips, his warm breath on her skin, he could feel her falter in her resolve against him.
“This cannot endure!” she softly cried.
“It well might.”
“There is everything against it! You yourself said that work was your only true love!”
He pulled her onto her side, then slid his arm around her, moving sensually down to the small of her back, and pulling her against him, wanting her to feel how aroused by her he was already again.
“I did?” he asked, suppressing a smile.
“You did.”
He tightened his hold around her and felt her suppress a little moan of pleasure. “But, alas, that was in a world before you.”
“She is a cardinal’s niece, your betrothed—a great prize. And I am a poor baker’s daughter.”
“You are a queen in my eyes. My paintbrush has not lied.”
He touched the planes of her face, the tip of her nose, then kissed her again, shocked by the tenderness he felt for her, along with the driving lust.
“And what shall happen when you come upon your next Madonna?”
“You shall be the last Madonna in my paintings, carissima. The most remarkable, the most unique—the one the world remembers . . . and absolutely, I do swear, you shall be my only, my last love,” he declared as he sheltered her once again in his powerful embrace.
LATE THAT NIGHT, in a wooden bath set in the kitchen beside the warmth of the bread ovens, in water heated over flames by Letitia, Margherita sat alone and wept silently into her hands. Her mind spun from all that had happened—how her life had been changed forever in the space of a single afternoon. And she forced herself to accept the truth. She dare not love Raphael because he belonged to Signorina Bibbiena, not to her. She could not—would not—do battle against the niece of a powerful cardinal. And when he came to his senses, when he had known enough of her, Raphael would not allow her to do it.
In the end, she had done what she had sworn not to. She had given herself to a man, and to an overpowering love that was impossible. Still, she had desired that which had happened between them, as if it had meant life itself to a simple girl whose existence had taken this sudden and dramatic turn. And even now, after she had bathed, and sat alone back in her room, in the little house with the sloping roof, and the bakery beneath, she could think of nothing so much as the touch of his hands, the weight of his body above hers, the taste of his lips, and wonder, without ceasing, when they might be together like that again.
Part Two
Overcoming me with
the light of a smile,
she said to me:
“Turn and listen,
for not only
in my eyes is
Paradise.”
Dante,
La vita nuova
14
December 1514
AS WINTER CAME IN ON A FREEZING WIND FROM THE north, and Rome was blanketed with a heavy winter cold, the papal court was plunged into preparations for the Christmas festivities, and in celebration of a new peace with France. Giant banners proclaimed news of a great pageant that was to be held throughout the city streets.
As soon as his hand healed sufficiently, Raphael went back to work on more of the preparation sketches, using black pencil heightened with white lead, for the pope’s new stanza, which Giulio was overseeing on the mastro’s behalf. The hand that had been so injured in his
fight with Sebastiano’s thug healed quickly with a combination of help from the pope’s physicians and an ancient remedy Margherita had made for him.
For the next three days and nights after they had first been together, Raphael never left his workshop, so pressing was the amount of work. At night, when the others had gone home, Donato brought Margherita there, returning each morning long before the other artists arrived or before she was required to help with the new loaves of bread that needed to be baked. And so the grand house with its many levels on the Via dei Coronari sat alone but for Giulio Romano, who watched over it for Raphael, and Elena, who cleaned and organized and kept order in case he should suddenly desire to return.
“May I get you anything?”
Giulio glanced up from his place in Raphael’s study, wreathed in flickering gold lamplight, where he had been trying for the past quarter hour to understand one of the deeply meaningful sonnets in La vita nuova, by the poet Dante. He had thus far read it three times and was glad for a reason to look away from it for even a moment.
“Thank you, no,” he said to Elena, who stood before him.
She moved a step nearer and he closed the book, settling its thick red leather binding on his lap. She was warmly pretty in this light, he surprised himself by thinking. Not angles and striking features, like models with whom he was familiar, but all warm curves and gentle shapes. Her eyes were big and clear and gray, with dark lashes, and she had fully defined lips, perfect for the skill of a painter’s brush. The desire to sketch her face for one of the characters in the marriage of Cupid and Psyche at the Chigi Villa came unexpectedly.
“You can read Dante?” she asked, vanquishing the moment, and the notion behind it.
“Apparently not very well.” He smiled. “Certainly not as well as Raffaello. You are familiar with Dante’s work?”