Free The Ruby Ring by Diane Haeger

sometimes believe I have forgotten how, for having to be “Raffaello” . . .
    Only in this act of quiet solitude, with the easy companionship of his well-used paintbrush, did Raphael feel fully the sensation that had possessed him as a boy, as he had watched his own father paint at the Urbino chapel—as he had first held his own brush. It had been a long road from that simple act of glorious communion—the commissions, the power plays, the clothes, the dancing lessons, the fencing lessons, the elocution lessons, the daily need to flatter and ingratiate himself to people. But that was his world now, and most days he was glad of it. Until a moment like this, in the still, dark hours, surrounded and taken up by wet paint and supple brushes. It made him remember the simple boy from the countryside, with only talent and dreams. And he was still that boy beneath all these trappings and pressures of courtly success—a little lost and awed by what he had become, and the unyielding pressure to maintain it.
    Raphael studied the face he had created: Baldassare Castiglione, the great courtier and writer who had befriended him in Florence. He would be pleased. The likeness in oil was uncanny. His face would be as immortal as the elegant words he laid down in his book, which Raphael had been told he meant to call
The Courtier.
    It was that grand scholar, in fact, who had awakened in Raphael his love of learning. Not formally schooled as a child, Raphael had begun by borrowing Homer’s
Iliad
from the sage old man who insisted he be called Baldassare, even by an inexperienced youth. After that literary suggestion had come the more humorous works of Aristophanes and Virgil. Raphael had rapidly devoured those as well, asking questions on the occasions they met, and listening to the wise, kindly elder statesman explain about the other great masterpieces he should come to know: the works of Socrates, Plato’s
Republic,
and particularly Aristotle’s writings concerning the soul. Raphael wanted to understand and to see things the way the brilliant minds did. He wanted that knowledge to move through him and out onto his panels and frescoes. His friendship with Castiglione had awakened something in him that had not been put down since. The evidence of that was his own steadily growing library on the Via dei Coronari. Like his workshop at night, the library of leather-bound volumes was a sanctuary, a place to be surrounded and possessed by something far grander than himself.
    Raphael looked at the old man’s kind face—the dark turban and cloak that drew the viewer to his eyes and small, subtle mouth. Raphael smiled sadly, greatly missing his sage counsel.
If he were here now, he would tell me I have taken on too much,
Raphael thought.
Unlike my father, he would tell me I am too possessed by the things outside myself to hear the things within.
S,
he would say exactly that. And he would be right.
    The fire in the coal brazier beside his easel had gone to glowing embers long ago. It was time to go home, but he could not move. From somewhere he had not been for a long time, the energy surged. It clawed at him. The desire. The need. With it came a flare of that old, relentless ambition.
Create!
it urged.
Paint!
    All through the night, Raphael remained inside the small, private room in his workshop. Now, having brought his easel here, and having bolted the door, he stood alone, dripping with oil paint, hands darkened with chalk, and blinded by an urge not to delegate or discuss, but to work.
    And when the flurry ended near dawn, when he was spent and exhausted, what he saw spread around himself on the floor was a sea of parchment as thick as a layer of new snow, and each sheaf was decorated with hands, eyes, arms. As he glanced around, only then did he realize that the images were all parts of her.
    Why was Margherita Luti so set against him? And, more than that, with so many other pressing commissions to trouble him, why did it matter?
    You have