Light in the Shadows

by Linda Lafferty

  “Well, I have good news, Michele,” said the marchesa. “Marcantonio Doria in Genova wants to commission a portrait of Saint Ursula. Here will be your test.”

  Caravaggio was silent.

  “Come, come! It would be a perfect subject for you, Michele.”

  “I will consider it,” he said slowly. He sipped his tea, gazing over the bay. “My eyesight . . . is not what it should be.”

  “I see you staring off at night across the sea. Here on the terrace, pacing. You truly are a haunted soul. Take on the commission, I beg you, Michele. I know you better than any mother. Your art will cure you.”

  Caravaggio touched the wounds on his face with his fingertips. “If I cannot paint, I would rather die.”

  The Marchesa Colonna was right.

  Caravaggio’s healing began as he started his work on The Martyrdom of Santa Ursula, depicting the noblewoman who led eleven thousand virgins on a disastrous pilgrimage through Germany. All her companions were slaughtered by the Huns, whose leader then killed Ursula when she refused his offer of marriage.

  Caravaggio painted an intimate tableau, with the Hun killing Saint Ursula, sending an arrow into her breast from within arm’s reach. The image of the murder—the rejected bridegroom, the arrow sunk deep into the chest of the virgin—conveyed a feeling of sexual violation. The martyr—colored ashen gray as her spirit fades—inclines her head over the protruding arrow. She looks mildly surprised to see it there.

  There is a small crowd behind her. At her right shoulder is a man’s face that looks up blindly toward the murder as if the commotion has caught his attention, but he cannot see the act. He appears frightened and panicked.

  It is Caravaggio’s likeness.

  “You painted yourself into such a tragic scene,” said the marchesa, regarding the canvas. “Why, Michele?”

  “I am a witness to the ugly nature of men,” said Caravaggio, staring at his image. “Now I am nearly blind, but I know the nature of death, even if I can’t quite make out his face. I know he’s there, standing close.”

  The marchesa noticed the imprecise brushstrokes, the unfinished quality of the work. She had begged the maestro to paint, but she could see the flailing effort.

  He can barely see! Blindness—even partial blindness—is the death of an artist.

  Still, despite the marred execution, the image was haunting. The marchesa knew her niece’s husband would be pleased—especially when he saw Caravaggio’s upturned face, pale and sightless behind the saint.

  A cold shiver seized her spine. She turned away and walked from the room.

  “Michele! You can’t be serious. You are in no condition to travel—” said Fabrizio Colonna.

  “I board a felucca tomorrow,” said Caravaggio. “It is settled. Scipione is arranging it. I will be released from the bando capitale!”

  “Do you have the reversal in writing?” asked Fabrizio. He was still dressed in his salt-stiffened tunic and sailing clothes, having only just arrived home to visit his mother.

  “No, not in writing. But I do have word from Cardinal Borghese that we have struck a deal. I am to deliver three canvases to him and he will see that I am a free man. I have already painted them. Two of Saint John the Baptist . . . and one of Mary Magdalene I painted in the Alban Hills at your estate. For my own reasons, I have never parted with it,” Caravaggio said, looking away in the distance. “But if it can buy my freedom, I will give it to Cardinal Borghese.”

  “That devil,” muttered Fabrizio.

  “He may be,” said Caravaggio. “But only his uncle the pope can grant me my freedom to walk the streets of Roma again.”

  “I don’t like this idea,” said the marchesa. “You are still not well. Your eye is not healed and your wounds still ooze pus. You aren’t steady on your feet yet.”

  Fabrizio and his mother exchanged looks. Their brows were furrowed with concern.

  “Michele,” said Fabrizio. “You haven’t received the pardon yet. Aspetta. Wait a few more days.”

  “Scusi,” said Caravaggio abruptly. “I must see to packing the paintings and preparing my trunks. If you will excuse me.”

  The marchesa nodded. As Caravaggio left the room, she looked up at her son.

  “Fabrizio!” she said.

  Salt crystals from the sea still clung to Fabrizio’s beard. He rubbed his sea-weary eyes.

  “I, too, feel a dark foreboding. Caravaggio will be seen by every sailor and cutthroat on the wharfs. And though Grand Master Wignacourt may have forgiven him, I know Fra Roero never will. He is a proud—and dangerous—bastardo. When he learns that the pope has granted a pardon, he will be rabid with fury.”

  Chapter 49

  ROME

  Lucia whirled around, reeling from the explosion. The museum guard was still dozing in his chair. A flock of chattering high school students surged into the room, milling, gossiping, flirting, glancing at the painting, giggling at the mayhem.

  Her back turned to the painting, Lucia fought to regain her equilibrium, fought for calm, fought to clear away the rubble in her mind.

  She waited until the students were gone and the room was silent again, keeping her back to Judith and Holofernes. She wasn’t going to look again. Steady on her feet at last, she walked straight out of the gallery, through half a dozen rooms, down the stairs, and out into the sunshine. She kept walking with no sense of direction. At one point, balancing on the edge of madness, she almost laughed: She was Lot’s wife, fleeing fire and brimstone, facing damnation if she looked back. She wondered how Caravaggio would have painted Lot’s wife, which of his whores he would have turned into a pillar of salt. But she lost that thought in an instant, still battered by her own vision of blood and darkness, explosion and shattering glass, a vision more real than even Michele could have painted.

  And she saw those faces again. The faces in the painting. The faces they had become in the instant before the explosion.

  Faces she’d never seen before. Faces she somehow knew as well as her own. Faces she couldn’t bear to see again. She banished the images, filling her mind with darkness, wandering blindly through the streets of Rome.

  The glories of the past. The flash and squalor of the present. The streams of people and cars and buses and Vespas. She walked for hours, through the day and into the evening. Seeing none of it. Never looking back.

  Sunlight was what Lucia needed. She spent her days outside, walking endlessly through the city, staying on the broad avenues where she could enjoy the increasing warmth of the sun as it strutted into full springtime. She stayed clear of the old twisting byways that she used to prowl, the narrow vicoli, shrouded in shadows. For now they were too close to the darkness that had sent her reeling in the Palazzo Barberini. She didn’t even let herself think of the name of the painting she had been standing in front of. The name might recall the image, and the image the darkness, and . . .

  Rome was a wonderful way to fill her mind.

  She walked for hours. Tired by sunset, she’d have an early dinner with a bottle of wine and sleep until it was light.

  After a week on the Sunlight Cure, she was feeling solid again. Not ready to return to the Barberini, but ready for the comfort of her friends at San Luigi dei Francesi, Santa Maria del Popolo, and Sant’Agostino. One evening, after a long afternoon visit with the Matteos, she stopped back at the apartment to wash her face and hands before going out to dinner.

  She was putting on her jacket to leave when there was a knock at the door.

  In the time she had lived there, no one had ever knocked on that door. She had friends she smiled to in the street, friends she drank with in the bars, but no one who would ever stop by to visit.

  For a moment she hesitated. She thought of men in long black robes. She remembered the foul stench of the one who had crushed her face to his chest as he dragged her through the catacombs. And with a conscious act of will, she cast her vote—and not for the first time—with the carabiniere who had assured her that the Roero Briga
de was gone. Scattered. Destroyed.

  She shrugged, tossed her keys back on the table, and shouted, “Coming!”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Really, my dear Lucy, I have been tracking down the intimate details of the life of a family of Italian aristocrats four centuries ago. Do you really think that finding you would pose an insurmountable obstacle?”

  “I haven’t seen you for months, and I already want to smack you.”

  Professor Richman smiled. “One very helpful clue was the return address on the dissertation you mailed to our professor.”

  “You’ve seen the paper?”

  “A bit of a logical jump there, but, yes, I have. He asked me if it shouldn’t have my name on it too. It did start out as our joint project, as you may recall.”

  “And you told him . . . ?”

  “I told him it was an excellent piece of scholarly work and that you deserved exclusive credit.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Though maybe you might find room for me in a footnote? Perhaps dealing with the recovery of the journals of the common thief and shockingly bad poet Signor Mario Fenelli.”

  “I think we might arrange that,” she said and laughed for what felt like the first time in months.

  “Now why don’t you put on your jacket and let me buy you a nice dinner.”

  “And just like that, I go from wanting to smack you to being really glad I opened the door when you knocked.”

  The restaurant was tucked in a dark corner of a small piazza, up a narrow winding street, in the old Jewish ghetto. As Professor Richman paid for the taxi, Lucia took a step away from the car and spun around, letting the force of her spin pull her arms away from her body. Suddenly, the dark didn’t bother her. The professor was glowing with energy and good cheer that kept the blackness at bay.

  As they walked inside, the manager rushed up.

  “Buonasera, Professore. Che piacere rivederla.” What a pleasure to see you again.

  Beaming with apparent pleasure, he escorted them past a waiting crowd to a perfect table in as quiet a corner as there could be in the bustling restaurant.

  “I’m seeing a new side of you,” Lucia said once they were settled into their chairs and the manager had presented the menus with a flourish.

  “Well, my research has required a few quick trips to Rome—and a man must eat, after all.”

  “And eat well.” Lucia smiled at him over the top of the menu.

  He leaned closer. “You must try the carciofi alla Giuda and the agnolotti. After that, pesce or carne, you’re on your own.”

  And then—over the next two hours, four courses, and two excellent bottles of wine—the professor told her everything that had been happening with the Kiss, il bacio. Il nostro bacio. Our kiss.

  “Your Italian has certainly improved.”

  “Yes, well. Practice.”

  “Research?”

  “Of course.”

  But he didn’t talk about his research. He talked about the now-official project to evaluate the painting.

  Everything was looking good. The X-rays revealed different faces hidden below the too-perfect faces that clearly hadn’t been painted by Michele. A thread plucked from the canvas checked out: the right age, the right material, the right weave. The pigments had been traced to formulas and processes appropriate to the time and place—and Caravaggio. There were some tests that were waiting for the relining.

  “Relining?”

  “They believe that Fenelli—that’s Fenelli the monk, the painter—was concerned about the well-being of the painting. So he stuck it to a heavier canvas—a damask tablecloth, if you can believe that. I don’t know where a monk would get a damask tablecloth.”

  “Your usual cognac, Professore?” The waiter took advantage of a moment of silence.

  “Certainly.”

  “Signora?”

  “Lo stesso.” The same.

  The waiter glided away and the professor continued.

  “There are some anomalies in the texture that they can’t figure out without taking the painting off that tablecloth.”

  Two snifters of cognac appeared on the table.

  “And the X-rays show what appears to be something written on the back of the original canvas.”

  They raised their glasses to science and art and drank—well, sipped, it was very good cognac.

  “Why do you think Fenelli was so concerned about preserving the painting?”

  “He knew what his drunken poet brother had stolen. He was an artist of some skill. Michele was the most famous painter in all of Italy. The monk knew what he had. So he lined it with sturdy backing and disguised it by painting over the faces. I like to think he did his very best work on those faces—and knew that no one would ever mistake them for Michele’s. And then he sent it away.”

  Lucia raised a questioning eyebrow and took another sip of cognac.

  “In my younger days, I would have considered a look like that to be flirting,” the professor said.

  Lucia gave him a thoroughly happy smile. “Forget it.”

  “Forgotten.” A smile back. “He knew the painting couldn’t stay there. That’s the heart of Roero country.”

  “Professor?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry. I am showing off a little.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “The monastery was right on the edge of the original home estates of the Roero family. That region was dominated by the Roeros for several centuries. And after what happened in Malta, the whole family was determined to kill Michele. He had, after all, badly wounded their Cavaliere Giovanni, the Conte della Vezza. And even then, there were rumors that Michele had some kind of secret, something that would seriously damage the family’s reputation. A blot on the old escutcheon.” The professor held up a finger, a lecturer’s gesture. “They were deadly serious. Remember, our romantic poet Fenelli barely made it out alive. He didn’t live very long after he got to Siena.”

  “Is this all from your research, Professor?”

  “And a certain amount of intuition.”

  He caught the waiter’s eye. “The wine bottle?” Apparently, they had already discussed this, because the waiter had the empty bottle ready and showed it to Lucia, as if presenting a full bottle to the table.

  “This is what we’ve been drinking,” said the professor.

  The label said, in big letters: “Roero.”

  And below that:

  Azienda Agricola

  Parussa Giuseppe

  “One of the best,” said the professor.

  “More of your extensive research?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Did you learn anything about the Roero Brigade?”

  “Indeed I did. But it wasn’t easy. It took a while to get anyone to talk about it. There’s a certain amount of fear—they all know what’s been happening. But once they trusted me, they made their feelings very clear. I believe ‘loathing’ would be the proper word. They say it all started with a lunatic who claimed to be part of the Roero family. No one seems to know where he came from, but he made quite a spectacle. Ranting about the family and its sacred mission. The known descendants of the Roeros—the ‘official’ family—rejected him completely. Scornfully. But some others think his claims of Roero descent were pretty solid. In any case, rejected by the family, he declared his own holy war on Islam to prove he was worthy of the name. And attracted followers, the way people like that always seem to. And he expanded his personal jihad to include anyone who threatened the glorious name of Roero. He was fixated on Caravaggio—maybe trying to bolster his position by stirring up the old feud. And then we came along.”

  “You have become quite the expert.”

  “Thank you, my dear. In fact, I am going to give a little talk on what I have learned as part of a small symposium next month.”

  “A symposium?”

  He nodded gravely. “On the painting—which I cannot help but consider ‘our’ painting.” He leaned closer a
nd lowered his voice. “They are close to declaring it a fully authenticated”—he couldn’t help glancing around—“Caravaggio. We experts will discuss what we have learned.”

  Lucia felt a mix of glee and bitter disappointment. The disappointment won out.

  “I wish they had taken the trouble to invite me too. It’s not as if I—”

  The professor cut her off, producing a thick envelope from his jacket pocket with a flourish. “I wanted to deliver this myself.”

  Lucia’s face lit up. Before he handed over the envelope, the professor added, “But bear in mind, your presentation is scheduled right before mine. So make certain you are prepared to stay within the time limits outlined in the cover letter.”

  “My pre—”

  “—sentation. Of course. Certainly you don’t think they could have a symposium without you.”

  It was a gift that for a moment almost made up for all the bitterly unhappy Christmases on Long Island with her nonna. Lucia resisted the Christmas impulse to tear the envelope open on the spot. Instead, she smiled and tucked it away.

  The professor grinned as if he had something else in store.

  “You haven’t asked me where the symposium is being held,” he said.

  “Should I?”

  “Please do.”

  “All right. Professor Richman, could you tell me where this symposium is being held?”

  “Indeed I can.” Pause. “La Posta Vecchia Hotel.” Another pause. Lucia looked puzzled. “In Palo.”

  Now Lucia did indeed have the smile of a child at Christmas.

  “Palo! That’s perfect.”

  Palo was the last place that anyone had almost certainly seen Caravaggio alive. After that, it was all conjecture, mystery, dispute. And Palo was the place where Mario Fenelli had snatched up one of the four paintings Michele had left on the felucca and tucked it in among his own belongings in preparation for racing north once he disembarked in Porto Ercole.

  “Palo.” She said it again.

  “Perfect,” Professor Richman agreed.

  They walked through the narrow streets of the old ghetto in search of a taxi.