himself. If Bandinelli had had the nerve to fling such an accusation at him anywhere but the Duke de’Medici’s office, he’d have knocked his head off. His heart was pounding so hard that he could feel the cold metal of La Medusa, on its thick silver chain, bobbing under his shirt.
“Benvenuto. Are you feeling all right?”
He glanced up and saw the jeweler, Landi, no doubt heading to the Medici palace to sew up the sale of the pearl necklace.
“Yes, yes, I’m fine,” Cellini replied.
“Do you happen to know if her ladyship is receiving?”
“She is.”
Landi narrowed his eyes and smiled. “And is she in a buying mood?”
“When isn’t she?”
Landi laughed, said “God bless her for that,” and swaggered on. Cellini hoped that the duchess would keep his appraisal of the pearls to herself. He hardly needed to make another enemy in Florence.
It was dusk already, and the monumental sculptures in the square threw long shadows on the stones. Donatello’s Judith stood, sword raised above the head of the Assyrian general, Holofernes. Michelangelo Buonarotti’s David, armed with slingshot, gazed confidently across the courtyard. And Cellini, already an acknowledged master in so many arts, longed to make his own contribution to their august company. What the piazza needed, and what he knew he could provide, was a bronze more perfectly modeled and chased and refined than any such statue ever done.
Its subject?
The hero Perseus… in the winged sandals given to him by Hermes, and holding the sword-forged by Hephaestus himself, to defeat the Gorgon-bestowed on him by Athena.
What could be more fitting, more dramatic, and more likely to make Bandinelli hang himself in envy?
With that happy thought in mind, he headed off to the Ponte Vecchio, so that he could stop at the artisans’ shops that lined both sides of the bridge and pick up some much-needed supplies. He thought it also might be nice to buy some little gift for Caterina, perhaps a bit of lace, or maybe an amber comb. She was undoubtedly attending to her hair, and he was confident that as it grew out, it would return to its lustrous black.
But as for Caterina herself… that was another question completely. When would she realize the full import of what had happened? When would she discover the full effect of the moonlight striking the glass? A year? Five years? When would she know?
Or when should he tell her?
He had been a fool to have left the schematics for the iron box out on his worktable… but she was more ingenious than he’d suspected, first finding the casket and then figuring out how to open the lock. And it was that very cunning, he had to admit, which gave her such a powerful hold over him. She was not only the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, but the most clever. He had first spotted her on the arm of an aristocrat at Fontainebleau, when he had gone there to design a fountain for the King of France, and he had known from that very first moment that he had to have her… as model, as muse, as lover.
After picking up some odds and ends-wire and wax for his armatures-he found a perfect small sapphire at a jeweler’s shop, poorly set in a pendant necklace. The foil behind it, meant to bring out its brilliance, was instead dulling it, and he thought that, with a little work, he could reset it. The jeweler, another friend of his, gave him a good price, but as he stepped out of the shop, thinking about his dinner, he caught a whiff of smoke in the air. Several other people had smelled it, too, and they were all looking toward the southern side of the Arno, from which the wind was blowing.
Cellini’s step quickened as he crossed the rest of the bridge, and quickened even more as he entered the Borgo San Jacopo. The smell of smoke was stronger here, and it was blowing from the west, the direction of his studio. A gypsy boy was sprinting past, and Cellini snagged him by his arm. “Where’s the fire?” he asked and the boy, yanking his arm loose, said, “Santo Spirito.”
Cellini broke into a run, the smell getting stronger all the time, and passing people who were also heading in the direction of the fire. By the time he rounded the corner, and saw the fire wagon outside his workshop, with Ascanio and a dozen other men throwing buckets of water at the blaze, he had dropped all but the necklace.
He pushed his way through the onlookers and rushed to Ascanio’s side. “Is everyone safe? Is Caterina safe?”
Ascanio, his face smeared with soot, shouted “Yes!” over the crackling of the flames. “We threw what we could out the windows!” Indeed, some loose books and sketches and even a few medallions still littered the street. “I’ve got the jewels in my pockets!”
“And the rest?” Cellini said, knowing that Ascanio would take his meaning.
“They are safe.”
Cellini was so relieved that his most prized treasures had been saved, and Caterina spared, that the loss of everything else hardly mattered. He grabbed an empty bucket, filled it from the barrel on the wagon, and hurled the water through a burning window frame. But he could see, through the billowing smoke, that nothing would stop the fire. The residents of the neighboring houses were already emptying out their own homes, for fear the conflagration would spread, and in all the confusion, a man with a sword at his side suddenly slapped a firm hand on his shoulder and said, “Benvenuto Cellini?”
Before he could even answer, someone else had slipped a black sack over his head and jerked a leather cord to tighten it around his neck.
He heard Ascanio holler, and the sounds of a street brawl, and he swung the bucket at whoever was holding him. It hit something brittle, he heard a groan, then the cord was yanked tighter. He couldn’t breathe, and he was knocked off his feet by what might have been the hilt of a sword. Still kicking, he was dragged into an alleyway, then manhandled into a waiting carriage. He heard the crack of a whip and felt the wheels begin to roll. As he struggled to get up again, a knee was pressed to his chest, and a voice close to his ear hissed, “Call on your demons now.”
Chapter 7
David was poring over the lab reports when he suddenly became aware that he was being watched.
The moment the analyses had arrived by special courier, he had raced into the Newberry’s book silo-a large research space containing the Newberry’s precious collections of codices, maps, and manuscripts-to comb through them. Microscopic samples of the ink and paper had been sent off to Arlington, Virginia, where the FBI submitted its own materials, and from what he had ascertained so far, everything about the documents given to him by Mrs. Van Owen checked out. In terms of age and provenance, they were completely authentic. And he’d have been delighted to bring her that news himself if she had not already been standing on the steel catwalk above him, studying him like a bug in a jar.
He had not heard her come in, nor did he know how long she had been silently observing, but the hairs on the back of his neck prickled nonetheless.
“What are you reading?” she asked, her voice muffled and absorbed by the thousands of volumes stored in the cylindrical shelves that rose all around them.
“Ink and paper analyses from the sketch of La Medusa,” he said, waving one hand over the cluttered desktop.
“I told you there was no need to waste time on that.”
With one gloved hand on the railing, she descended the stairs. She was dressed all in black, as appeared to be her custom, and as she left the gloom of the stacks and entered the pool of light in which David was working, several pieces of diamond jewelry sparkled at her throat and ears. The heady scent of her perfume filled the air as she drew out a chair and sat down, crossing her legs, enhanced by a pair of sheer black stockings and sharply pointed heels.
David doubted that the book silo had ever seen anyone quite like her.
“So tell me what you’ve learned.”
For a moment, David could think of almost nothing other than her dark, but oddly forbidding, beauty.
