He leans back to glance at the portrait, but his hands do not leave her face, and now his finger traces her upper lip. “I am sure I have the bow of this lip right,” he says, “but I fear that I have not given enough ripeness to your bottom lip.” He slides the finger along her lower lip now, pressing slightly; the finger catches and tugs on the lip. She is quaking now, and her breath is fast and ragged. He takes the lip between his thumb and forefinger, squeezing and rolling it, and she gasps, then whimpers softly. “Your jawline,” he murmurs, stroking its edge, “I know I did not get that wrong. But these wisps of hair on your neck, I could not see them in the gloom.” Both his hands now float across the loose tendrils of hair; he does not touch the skin of her neck, only the down, and it feels to her as if a spring breeze is caressing her. His hand returns to her mouth, his fingers tugging and teasing the front of her lips, then grazing her teeth, then easing between their edges. “If only the Mass had made you smile,” he whispers, “I could have shown your teeth.” He presses the edge of his hand against them; they part slightly, taking in the meaty flesh and then clamping down, causing him to groan. Her face is flushed, her breath is ragged, and her pupils dilated almost to the outer edge of her irises. He slides his other hand down her arm and lifts it, raising the mirror. “Look in this glass again and tell me now: Is this a woman of stone, or of flesh and blood and fire?” She stares at the image she sees there; her breath catches, her knees buckle, and she sags against him. He lifts her with his paint-stained hands and sinewed arms, carries her to the table, and with exquisite tenderness begins to undress her.
* * *
He makes two small changes in the portrait, painting bare chested as she cleans herself with a damp cloth he has handed her. Near the corner of her mouth, he adds the mole, and on the bodice of her dress, between her breasts, he adds a small tongue of flame. As he finishes the flame, she buttons her dress, smooths the silk, and repins her hair. She inspects herself once more in the mirror, comparing herself with the portrait. This time she smiles as she tucks the glass back into the hidden pocket. They do not speak. She takes the paintbrush from his hand and lays it on the ledge of the easel, then places his hand on her breastbone, exactly where he has portrayed the flame. Pressing his hand tightly against her, she kisses him on the mouth, and then on each cheek, and then she slips out the door and into the street that will carry her from him.
The final, fading notes of the Carmelite choir waft in through the open door, entwining with the dissipating scent of her perfume and their musk. He wanders to the table, picks up the cloth she has used, and presses it to his face, inhaling their scent. It is the scent, he thinks, of forbidden fruit. The fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
The next day he bundles up the portrait and sends it to Petrarch. He puts no note in the package; nothing but the picture. Besides breaking faith with Giovanna, Simone has broken faith with the man who is both his client and his friend. He knows this, and he suspects there will be a price to be paid, a penance to be done. But it must be a private penance, he resolves, one that he must impose on himself; a burden he must carry alone, to spare the feelings of those he has wronged. Inextricably bound to his memory of how she caught fire beneath his touch, Simone will bear the burden of his secret guilt.
Two weeks later, a courier brings him a package from Petrarch. It contains twenty-five florins — the balance of the fee for the portrait — and a poem. Petrarch has actually done it: taken Simone’s jest in earnest and penned a poem praising the portrait. Simone scans the poem’s opening lines, which declare that if all the best painters competed for a thousand years, they could capture only a fraction of Laura’s matchless beauty. The next lines proclaim, “Surely my Simone was in Heaven, the place my gracious lady comes from; there he saw her, and portrayed her on paper, to prove down here — where souls are veiled in bodies — that such a lovely face exists.”
Martini reads it a second time, and then a third. “Where souls are veiled in bodies,” he says aloud, shaking his head and adding, “foolish man.” He crumples the page with the strong, stained hands that gripped her ardent flesh.
* * *
A few days after receiving Petrarch’s poem and money, Simone receives a new commission, for a project he hopes will distract him from his longing and guilt: frescoes in the papal palace — in the pope’s own bedroom! The room is high in the Tower of Angels, the massive stone fortification that Pope Benedict’s army of workers has created during the past year. Just fourteen months ago they notched the massive foundation blocks into bedrock; now, the masons are capping the tower with crenellated battlements. Curious, Martini thinks. Siena’s cathedral, dedicated to God, took fifty years to complete, but this immense structure dedicated to the pope — papal palace, fortress, and strongbox — has sprung up overnight.
Simone identifies himself to a guard at the tower’s entry portal. The guard inspects him, clearly finding him lacking or distasteful in some way — perhaps it’s the odor of turpentine, or perhaps it’s the scent of foreigner that the French guard detects. Nevertheless, the guard waves him in, pointing to the back of the room. “Go see Monsieur Poisson. Architect and master of the works.” Poisson is hunched over a mountain of drawings, invoices, receipts, and notes. He looks up, weary and bleary, as Simone bows and announces himself in French. “Simone Martini, painter of Siena, at your service.”
“Martini? Ah, yes, Martini — you’re here to help the French painters in the pope’s chamber.”
Simone shrugs. “I prefer to think that the French painters are helping me,” he jokes, but Poisson doesn’t notice.
He leads Martini up two stories via a spiral staircase built into one corner of the tower. The pope’s chamber, the fourth floor of the square tower, measures some thirty feet square, with walls twenty feet high: room for buckets and buckets of paint. Martini counts two dozen workers — a third of them masons and plasterers, a third of them painters, and a third of them spectators or bosses, he can’t tell which. Scaffolds scale every wall, from floor to ceiling. At floor level, painters weave in and out of the legs of the scaffolds, covering a blue background with loops and swirls of golden vines, their branches populated by legions of birds. A level higher, a troop of plasterers has just finished applying a fresh coat of smooth plaster, and painters elbow them out of the way, eager to apply the blue background paint. They must work swiftly, applying not just the background but also the vines and birds, before the damp plaster dries. On the third and highest platforms, masons are applying the base coat of rough plaster to the top courses of bare stone. It is this level, the last five feet of wall below the ceiling, that Martini has been hired to paint — this, plus the deep recesses where windows have been notched into the massive walls.
Simone can’t help feeling disappointment. The best part of the room — the largest, lowest portion — has been given over to the French painters, and clearly it’s being wasted on them, these daubers with their simple swirls of gold on blue. Child’s play! Simone could paint vines and birds left-handed — with his eyes closed!
He clambers up the ladder to the top level of scaffolding — his level — and surveys the bustling room from there. He has not yet settled on the theme for his frescoes, but he knows it will be something far more challenging, far more impressive. Something with depth, detail, and drama; something that will move the pope to point to the scenes and say, “Bring us the painter who has done these, that we may reward him and exalt him above all other artists!”
His reverie is interrupted by a shout from below. “Martini!” He looks down; the chief of the contingent of French painters, Jean d’Albon, is waving to catch his eye. “We need to mix more tempera,” d’Albon says. “Can you bring us more eggs? Twenty eggs?” Simone glances at the clay pots in which the powdered pigments of red, blue, green, and gold have been stirred with egg yolk to moisten them and glue the paint to the plaster; indeed, the pots are nearly empty. Simone considers refusing — is d’Albon assigning him this
menial errand simply to establish the pecking order? — but, in fact, all the French painters appear to be busy, and d’Albon puts his hands together in prayer posture, bows slightly, and adds, “Soon, when you are hurrying to finish your magnificent frescoes, I will bring eggs to you.” Simone can’t resist smiling — d’Albon will almost certainly never play the errand boy; he has apprentices for that — but the good-humored offer acknowledges that Simone is d’Albon’s equal, and the other painters cannot fail to have noticed the gesture.
Simone clambers down the ladder, calling, “And where will I find these twenty eggs, laid by twenty pious hens to glorify God, His Holiness Pope Benedict, and French fresco painters?”
D’Albon laughs and moves his index finger in a downward spiral. “All the way down, at the bottom of the tower, where it’s nice and cool. Soon it will become the subtreasury, filled with gold, silver, and jewels. But for now, it’s the egg cellar. Eggs and plaster and rags.”
Simone ducks through the doorway into the spiral staircase and starts down, but then — on impulse — he stops and looks overhead. The stairs continue upward, apparently to the roof, and Simone decides to take a quick detour before fetching the eggs. He jogs up the first spiral, walks briskly up the second, and lumbers up the third, huffing by the time he steps onto the rooftop.
The view from the roof is dizzying and dazzling. To the west, the arches of Saint Bénézet’s Bridge cascade across the Rhône to Villeneuve. At their far end is another square tower, this one built by the king of France to collect bridge tolls…and to remind the sometimes arrogant residents of Avignon who holds the real reins of power in this part of God’s world. From below, d’Albon’s voice wafts upward; an apprentice is getting a scolding for his clumsy plasterwork, and Simone turns from the view and scurries for the cellar.
Spiraling down turn after turn, he feels his head begin to spin, and he stops near the bottom and leans on the wall to steady himself. It’s cool and dark down here — there are no windows in the tower’s lower levels, only narrow slits that provide stingy hints of light and air. In the chamber just below him, he hears a gritty, sliding sound, punctuated by grunts of exertion. Curious now, he descends the final few stairs and peeks into the chamber — the egg cellar that will soon brim with treasure. By the golden glow of a flickering lamp, he sees a portly workman shoving a heavy chest into a deep niche in the wall, then wedging a flat stone over the opening and slathering mortar around the edges. The man’s troweling technique appears oddly awkward, and his work looks shoddy. Simone’s puzzlement only increases when the man finishes sealing the stone in place; when he stands, Simone sees that the pale garment he’d taken for a workman’s smock is instead a floor-length white robe. A Cistercian monk’s robe. The kind of robe favored, as everyone knows, by Pope Benedict himself: the White Cardinal who has become the White Pope.
Suddenly Simone senses the vulnerability of his position: lurking in the stairwell spying on some furtive secret of the pope’s. Edging back up the stairs one level, Simone ducks into a dark, vacant room and waits until he hears footsteps. From his hiding place, he sees the white-robed figure pass by like some stout, panting ghost. Once the footfalls and panting have faded, Simone hurries back to the cellar. He should collect the eggs and hurry upstairs with them — the French painters will be running out of tempera any minute now, if they haven’t already — but his curiosity triumphs over his sense of responsibility. Crossing to the far wall, he squats beside the mortar bucket and studies the crude handiwork, as if close inspection of the wall’s surface might reveal what’s hidden inside. Hidden by the pope himself! But why? Why hide a treasure chest inside the wall, when the entire room, floor to ceiling, is meant to be heaped with riches? In any case, why not order a real mason to do the work?
Astonished by his own sudden boldness, Simone picks up the trowel and uses the tip to scrape out the line of mortar holding the flat stone in position. Then he pries the panel free, leans it against the wall, and tugs the chest from its niche. The chest, a stone box, is wired shut, and the wires are crimped together with lead seals — the seals of Benedict XII! — to protect the contents. Rubies and emeralds? Gold florins? Perhaps even the Holy Grail?
Throwing aside any last vestiges of caution or respect for authority, Simone cuts the wires with the edge of the trowel and pries the close-fitting lid loose. Even before he lifts it off and sets it aside, the smell of death wafts out, so he’s not completely unprepared to see bones inside. Simone’s not squeamish — given that so many artists’ models are beggars and whores, a painter can’t afford to be squeamish — so it’s natural for him to take a closer look at the bones.
He starts with the skull. Cupping it carefully in both hands, he lifts it from its nest of ribs and raises it to eye level. The face is long and narrow, the cheekbones high and prominent, the forehead slightly lower than he would have expected. He rotates the skull in his hands, looking to see if there is damage — marks of a violent death — but there is none. As the skull comes full circle in his hands, Simone’s visual memory tells him there is something familiar about its shape and proportions. He frowns, trying to place it, and suddenly lays the skull aside and roots in the box until he finds what he’s looking for: the bones of a forearm, which are — as he knew they would be — slightly splintered at their lower ends, just above where they once joined the wrist. Just where a spike would have passed through them on its way into the wood of a cross.
He rummages in the box for the other arm, and then for the feet. All four extremities bear the ragged, splintery evidence of piercings. Martini lays the limbs on the shelf alongside the skull and stares at them, the bones that were within the flesh he studied and sketched so attentively.
His mind ranges back to that odd night seven years ago, when he spent hours drawing by flickering lamplight, capturing every detail of the fresh corpse laid out on the floor of the cell. He remembers the parting words of the jailer: “I do believe he was a holy man…. His only sin was his holiness.”
He fits the lid back onto the box. Then, acting on an impulse he could not have put into words, he reaches for a pair of tools lying on the floor — a chisel and a hammer — and swiftly incises a broad cross on the stone lid of the box. Then, beneath the cross, using the pointed corner of the chisel’s blade, he gouges the outline of a lamb. Working swiftly — for the mortar in the bucket will harden soon, and he is surely risking his life to tamper with the pope’s sealed secret — he replaces the box in its niche, wedges the slab back into place, and trowels mortar into the joints, taking care to mimic the Holy Father’s sloppy workmanship.
As he slathers the final bit of mortar into the gap between the stones, Simone wonders why God has put this dead man — this blameless man, if the jailer’s report was true — in Simone’s path not once, but twice now.
He rises, and starts up the steps. Only then does he remember and turn back. God might require penance of him soon, but d’Albon’s painters needed twenty eggs half an hour ago.
CHAPTER 33
Avignon
The Present
Elisabeth surveyed the leftover fruit and pastries with surprise when she came to collect the breakfast tray, then peered at the untouched cup of espresso. “What,” she asked in astonishment, “no Monsieur l’Inspecteur?” She cast a glance at the cornflower-blue sky. “Did the sun fail to rise today? Is the world coming to the end?”
“I’m as amazed as you are.”
Instead of taking away the tray, she sat down in Descartes’s usual chair beside the fountain. “I am glad he is not here,” she said.
“I don’t blame you. He’s been eating berries and croissants by the truckload.” I didn’t mention the takeaway treats he always tucked in his pockets.
Her brow furrowed for a moment, then she beamed. “Ah, non. I do not mean for that reason. I am glad because I wish to talk to you. I have something news to tell you. I think you will be happy to hear it.”
“Have you been playing detective again,
Elisabeth?” The last time she’d looked this excited was when she’d shared her theory about our “zhondo”: that the unknown skeleton from the palace might be that of Meister Eckhart.
She clapped her hands with delight. “Oui! Remember what you told me?” She leaned closer and spoke in a low, conspiratorial voice. “That the man had a unique shape? Legs that came almost up to the neck?”
I laughed. “Maybe not quite that long. But yes, very long legs for a man his size. As long as mine, and I’m much taller than he was.”
“Yes. So. Last week I got in touch with my cousin — I told you he is a Dominican, yes?” I nodded. “I do not tell him why I ask, so don’t worry, I keep the secret. But I ask him, ‘What do the Dominicans know about the appearance of Eckhart — his size, his shape?’ Mon Dieu, my cousin thinks I am crazy, but he says, ‘Okay, I will do some research.’ And this morning, I have an e-mail from him. No one painted a picture of Eckhart until hundreds of years after he died, so we don’t know what his face looked like. But. Sometimes, behind the back, the other friars called him Ciconia Dei.” She leaned back, looking pleased with herself.
“Why did they call him that?”