Free A Name in Blood by Matt Rees Page B

weapons. And consequences for you too, Michele, if
you get involved.
    He looked into Costanza’s pleading eyes. She had helped him so much in his life, but now that she wished for his aid, her demands could disturb the position he had worked so hard to
establish. He knew she saw his reluctance and that it pained her.
    This isn’t your gaming debt to Ranuccio . This is a woman to whom you owe more than you could ever repay. ‘I’m at your service, my lady. Always.’
    Her fingers reached to Caravaggio’s shoulder. They were tentative. He wondered that in all these years she hadn’t touched him except to allow his kiss on her knuckles. He shuddered.
It seemed as though the force of generations of her family’s nobility, of princes and generals and even a pope, coursed from this tiny hand into his body. It was the power that might demand a
man go to his death, and it numbed him.
    ‘Michele, you’re painting the Pope’s portrait,’ she said.
    They wait years for their moment, these nobles, and then in an instant they see their opportunity , he thought . Loyalty is an elegant word for blackmail.
    Her hand was still, but her touch seemed to circle his neck and travel down his arms and back. He regretted his reluctance. She came to him because she knew what Fabrizio had meant to him. But
he couldn’t suppress his bitterness. If you hadn’t sent me away, perhaps this would never have happened. Fabrizio would be a different man. And so would I. ‘What expression
would you have me paint on the Holy Father’s portrait, my lady?’
    ‘Forgiveness.’
    He recalled the shrewd little eyes on the canvas he had left at the Quirinale. Mercy on that face? That’ll be a work of imagination no less than a ceiling frescoed with the god of the
sea and all his nymphs.
    ‘I can try, my lady. I can try.’

    Prudenza came in the middle of the night. She climbed the stairs and twisted Cecco’s nose to wake him.
    ‘Get yourself below, little fellow,’ she whispered. ‘I need a place to hide tonight.’
    Cecco wrapped himself in his blanket and stumbled down the stairs, grumbling. Prudenza lay on Caravaggio’s bed. She pushed her hand under his sleeping cap. Her fingers moved in his
hair.
    In the darkness, he ran his palm over her face. He was careful to avoid the wound Fillide had cut beside the girl’s mouth, but she flinched when he touched a new bruise around her eye.
‘Fillide threw a stone,’ she said. ‘I can’t go home. You don’t mind, do you?’
    She was playful in the face of an implacable hatred. He had a vision of her dead, dropped into the Tiber with the refuse from the street. He looked across his studio to his easel and the
unfinished Martha and Mary Magdalene . He used to think his work would outlast time, but when he touched Prudenza he knew that anyone could walk up to his canvas and take a dagger to it. Once
it was dry, porters would carry the painting to the Lady Olimpia Aldobrandini’s palace and she would display it in her gallery for the respectable public to view. Everyone would feel
justified in criticizing it, free to mock it. He had heard them do so with his other works. Why shouldn’t one of them decide it ought to be destroyed?
    His work hadn’t immortalized this girl. Canvas was no more resilient to violence than flesh. It rotted more slowly and people gave it a higher value, but it was as fragile as bone and
skin. He found her hand and held it. Soon he felt the warm looseness of sleep in her fingers, and he shivered for her.

    ‘What a jumble of rotten shit.’ Caravaggio went into the side chapel towards the painting. Eight yards high, five yards across, The Resurrection . A lithe
Christ struck an effeminate pose holding a flag at the upper centre of the canvas. Languidly strumming lutes and puffing flutes, the angels surrounded him. Tiny cherubs reclined under the
angels’ buttocks like cushions in a courtesan’s boudoir.
    Prospero followed Caravaggio through the Easter