He ran until the San Frediano gate was three streets behind him, and then he stopped running, because his legs stopped.
It happened without warning.
One moment he was in a lane between two dark warehouses with the watch in his fist and the cold air tearing at his throat.
The next moment the lane tilted, slowly, like the deck of a ship, and the wall came up and hit his shoulder.
He slid down it.
He was sitting on frozen mud with his back to the bricks, and he could not feel his right arm at all, and the stars over the lane were going out one by one, from the edges inward.
This is new, he thought, quite calmly.
I’ve never done this before.
Then there was nothing.
He woke because something was licking his face.
It was a dog, a thin yellow street dog with a torn ear, and it was licking the blood off his upper lip with great care.
The sky over the lane was still dark.
He had no idea how long he had been out.
Minutes, or an hour.
His whole body was shaking with cold so hard his teeth clattered, and he was so hungry that it was not like hunger any more.
It was like a pain under his ribs, a hand squeezing.
He pushed the dog away and got to his knees.
The watch was still in his fist.
He had not let go of it.
He found out afterwards, from Leonardo’s measurements, what had happened.
He had used the Hold three times that night, once in the salt store and twice in the run, without thinking, on corners where he thought he heard steps.
On top of that he had Turned a falchion through a hundred years of rust.
He had been cold and hungry before he started.
His body had simply switched itself off, the way a lamp goes out when the oil is gone.
He called it the Drop, because that was what it felt like: falling down a well inside himself.
Leonardo wrote in the red notebook: Too much in one night.
The fire burns to the bottom of the grate and goes out.
Next time it may not light again.
He did not know any of that in the lane.
He only knew that he had to get up, and he did, by stages, with his good hand on the wall, and walked home through Florence in the dark like a drunk, keeping to the shadows, while the yellow dog followed him at a distance as far as the convent.
He got back to the Sala del Papa an hour before dawn, by way of every dark street he could find, and Leonardo was waiting up with a pan of wine on the brazier and a blanket.
John couldn’t hold the cup.
Leonardo held it for him.
His right hand was white to the wrist and the nails were purple, and for a while neither of them was sure he’d keep the fingers.
“The watch,” said Leonardo.
John opened his left hand.
The glass had cracked across, in the struggle, a long diagonal line from the twelve to the seven.
It was still going.
“Leave it,” said Leonardo, when John looked at it.
“Don’t you dare.
Not tonight.”
He left it.
He slept until noon, and woke with his hand aching but pink, and lay on the pallet listening to the watch tick on the floor beside his head with its cracked glass, and thought about the last thing Lupo had shouted.
I know whose wife comes to sit in it.
* * *
The fever came that evening.
It was not the Step-sickness, but it was a cousin of it.
For three days he lay behind the screen and shook, and sweated through two blankets, and ate whenever he was awake.
Leonardo fed him himself: bread soaked in wine, then broth, then on the third day an entire roast chicken that John ate with his hands, bones and all, while the old man watched with an expression of scientific delight.
“Like a wolf in January,” Leonardo said, and wrote it down.
On the fourth day John got up.
On the fifth he could hold the muller.
On the sixth he tried the Hold, very carefully, with Leonardo’s fingers on his pulse, and it came: four counts, the same as before, and the same cold at the end of them.
“Not less,” said Leonardo.
“Good.
“Now promise me you won’t do that again.”
“I can’t.”
“No.
You can’t.” The old man sighed.
“Then promise me you’ll eat before you do it.”
The men in the doorways were gone.
John looked for them every time he went out, and saw only ordinary Florentines.
Lupo had what he wanted now: not the maps, not the watch, but something better, a story about whose wife sat in the painter’s hall.
A man like that would not need to stand in a doorway.
He would wait.
“He’ll go to her husband,” John said one night, by the brazier.
“He may.” Leonardo was cutting a quill.
“Or he may go to her and ask for money.
Or to me, and ask for maps again.
A thing like that is worth most while it’s still unsaid.” He blew the shavings off his knife.
“There is nothing to say, Giovanni.
She sits for a portrait.
Half the women of good family in Florence have sat in this hall at one time or another, with their maids, in daylight.
Lupo has a shout through a door.
That’s all he has.”
“I saw the stair,” said John.
“When I touched her.
A lantern, and men, and that livery.”
“You saw what may grow.” Leonardo looked at him over the quill.
“And I will tell you how branches grow.
They grow when someone waters them.
If you go to her and tell her she’s in danger, she’ll be frightened, and a frightened woman does foolish things, and then there will be something to say.” He went back to his knife.
“Leave her alone.
Paint the sky behind the horses.
Let Lupo shout.”
John did as he was told.
It was the right advice, and he knew it, and it made no difference.
He found that he was listening for her on the stair on the days she did not come.
He found himself counting the days between Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Once, grinding verdigris at the slab, he realised he had stopped and was standing at the window looking down into the street at a woman in a dark green cloak who was not her, and that Salai was watching him do it with his chin on his fist.
“In Lucca,” said Salai, very innocently, “do they read their own palms?”
John went back to the slab.
Lisa came to sit twice in those weeks.
Both times the lute player was there and the maid was there, and Leonardo painted, and she told stories about her children and her sister and the price of wax, and she did not once look at John for longer than was polite.
He told himself he was glad.
She came on the Thursday, and it snowed.
Not much.
A few flakes past the tall windows of the Sala del Papa, at the end of the morning, drifting down slow and grey and melting on the sills.
Leonardo was at the easel.
The lute player was playing.
Lisa del Giocondo sat in her chair in the north light, and turned her head, and watched it fall.
Then she looked at John.
She didn’t say anything.
She didn’t need to.
It’s going to snow, he’d said, the first day, in November, in Florence, and she’d laughed at him.
She looked at him now without laughing at all, and the lute went on, and Leonardo’s brush went on, and John looked back at her and understood that she’d been thinking about it for three weeks.
He had to look away first.
He looked at Leonardo, and Leonardo was painting her mouth.
* * *
She came back that night.
Leonardo had gone to sleep at his own house in the Via Ghibellina because, he’d said at supper, looking at no one, the hall was cold for an old man.
Salai was out spending what he had left.
The brazier was low.
She stood in the doorway in a dark cloak with the hood up and snow melting on it, and no maid.
“You’ll tell me,” she said, “how you knew.”
“It’s dangerous for you to be here.”
“I know exactly how dangerous it is for me to be here, Giovanni.
I worked it out on the way.
It’s a great deal more dangerous for me than for you.” She pushed back the hood.
Her face was pink with the cold and very steady.
“My husband is in Pisa until Saturday buying silk.
My maid thinks I’m at my sister’s.
My sister thinks I’m at home.
I have three children living and one in the ground, and I have sat in that chair in front of that old man for six months while he looks at me like a cloud, and I am twenty-four years old, and I’ve never once in my life been told anything I didn’t already know.” She came in and shut the door behind her.
“So.
You’ll tell me how you knew it would snow.
And then I’ll decide what to do.”
He told her.
Not all of it.
The basement, the light, the four hundred years, the Hold.
Not Tom.
Not the queen in kohl or the girl on the wall.
He told it badly, because his hand still hurt, and because she listened the way Leonardo listened, without blinking, and asked short questions that went straight to the joints of it.
When he’d finished she was quiet for a while.
“A man out of time,” she said.
“I suppose so.”
“No, not suppose.
It’s what you are.” She reached out and turned his hurt hand over in hers, the way Leonardo had, and looked at the fingers.
“And you saw something when you first touched me.
Didn’t you?
Not just the snow.”
“Yes.”
“Was it bad?”
He thought of the stair, the lantern, the gold and blue on the servant’s sleeve.
Lisa at a window with her hand over her mouth.
Lisa in the snow, laughing, with his hand on her arm.
“Some of it,” he said.
“And some of it wasn’t.” She didn’t let go of his hand.
“Then you’d better show me which was which.”
The brazier ticked.
Outside, the snow had stopped, and the city was very quiet.
* * *
Leonardo came back at first light with bread, and stamped the snow off his boots on the stair, loudly, for some time before he came in.
Lisa had gone an hour before, by the back way, with her hood up.
John was dressed and sitting on the bench with the watch in his hands, not looking at anything.
Leonardo put the bread on the trestle.
He didn’t ask.
He went to his easel and looked at the portrait for a while in the grey light, and then he said, without turning round, “Salai came in late.
Drunk, but not blind.”
“And?”
“He says there was a man at the corner of the Via della Scala all night.
Standing in a doorway in the snow.
Watching our door.” Leonardo picked up a brush and put it down again.
“A servant, Salai thought.
By the sleeve.
Gold and blue.”