Free The Ruby Ring by Diane Haeger Page B

anything—and anyone—he wished. She was only a simple girl with a simple future. One day when he was finished with his painting, he would send her back here, to this place and this life. And she would never be the same.
    Margherita wanted more for her life, as her mother had wanted it. But she had, at last, accepted the notion of a future with Antonio because the dreams had begun to fade along with the memory of her mother. For his part, her father had always sanctioned their informal courtship, envisioning no greater fate for his younger child. It had been that way since her mother’s death ten years before after a violent fall from a horse. Margherita had been almost nine. Antonio, nearly eleven, had been more mature in the face of loss, having buried his own father the year before. They had walked down to the Tiber, where the water’s edge met the mossy bank. That was where a little lost girl with feet too small for her hand-me-down shoes had come to rely on a boy who lived only two houses away.
    A stray memory crawled out from the back of her mind then—one that had not come to her in a very long time. She was that child again, sitting in this very bed, Antonio beside her, a tall and worldly ten-year-old, his arm around her heaving shoulder, holding her as she wept.
    “Margherita, you must go to the church!”
    “She cannot be dead! She is my mother! God cannot be so cruel!”
    “She is still here with you,” Antonio had murmured kindly. “She is watching you from heaven. And it would make her awfully sad to see you still crying.”
    She had lifted her tearstained face to him then and sniffled. “But there was no one like her, Antonio! She believed in me, she took care of me! She promised me that my life would be different! Now I have only my father and his bakery! He will be too busy to care for me now.”
    “
I
will always take care of you, Margherita,” he had said earnestly as he took her hand and helped her stand.
    “Do you promise?”
    “For the rest of our lives, we will share everything.
Promesso . . .
” When she managed the faintest smile, he said, “Now will you go to the church to listen to the Mass said for her? The others are already there.”
    Margherita sniffled again. “Will you come with me?”
    “I will come with you . . . and sit beside you . . . and, one day, I will even marry you.”
    The childhood image crawled back into her memory as swiftly as it had emerged, safer there. Protected. It felt to Margherita that she had belonged to Antonio for her whole life. She had kept him as one does a favored childhood blanket, for the comforting predictability of it. Now the wildly famous painter represented something far more magnificent. Something rich, exciting, and unknown. If she did this, saw things beyond Trastevere, there would be no returning for her heart, not back to the ordinary world that now existed around her. It would be like a Pandora’s box, the contents of which, once revealed, could never be put away. And the idea of that frightened her terribly.
    And it drove her back to imagining her future in Trastevere.
    Antonio Perazzi, Donato’s errant younger brother, was a saddle boy and apprentice stirrup-maker, for now. But he was one with the promise of a brighter future. Last year, he had accepted a job assisting his brother at the stables of the Palazzo Chigi. It was only a matter of time, he boasted, until his true talent was discovered. Then he would be promoted to the position of full stableman, one who might actually squire the great and powerful Signor Chigi, or one of his mistresses, between the villa and the Vatican, where they were frequent guests.
    Hearing light footfalls on the patch of roof beside her window, Margherita sprung from beneath her bedcovers. She cast them back, drew open the window shutters fully, and, in a haze of shock, helped Antonio inside her small, sparely furnished bedchamber. Suddenly, as if her thoughts alone had called him, he stood before