The man in the doorway was called Gianni, and Lisa dealt with him herself.
“You’re not to do anything,” she told John, the next Tuesday, in the chair, in a voice so low under the lute that Leonardo at the easel could pretend not to hear.
“You’re not to slow him down or look at his future or whatever it is you do.
He’s my husband’s mother’s man.
She sent him because she thinks I’m too fond of my sister.
I’ll go to Monna Alessandra this afternoon and cry about how the Maestro made me sit by lamplight till midnight because he wanted to see my face in the dark, and the Maestro will say it’s true.”
“I will?” said Leonardo, from the easel.
“You will.
You said it yourself in October, you wanted to see me by a candle.
Now you have.” She turned her head back to the pose.
“And then Gianni will be sent to stand in the snow outside someone else’s door.”
It worked.
John never found out exactly what she said to her mother-in-law.
Gianni was gone from the corner of the Via della Scala by Thursday.
Vanni Lupo took longer.
He sent a note to the del Giocondo house, unsigned, addressed to Francesco, that Lisa intercepted on the step because she had told the porter, months ago, that all letters for her husband came to her first while he was away, so that business wouldn’t wait.
She brought it to the bottega folded inside her glove.
It said nothing anyone could prove.
It said ask your wife where she sleeps on Thursdays.
John read it standing by the window, and for a moment he did not feel cold at all.
He knew where the salt store was.
He knew where Lupo slept, near enough: the inns by San Frediano, where Vespucci said the Spaniards bought drinks with ducats.
He had a knife now, Lupo’s own, wrapped in a rag under his pallet.
If he went tonight, rested and fed, and waited in a dark doorway the way Lupo’s men had waited in theirs, four counts would be enough.
One man coming home drunk, alone, down a lane.
It would be over before the man knew he was in it.
He thought about it all the way through, honestly, the way he had thought about the man in the red scarf.
And it came out the same each time.
A Spaniard knifed in a lane two weeks after he had shouted Lisa’s name through a door was not the end of the story.
It was the start of a better one.
Lupo’s friends would tell it to the Otto di Guardia.
The Otto would ask who had quarrelled with him.
Somebody would remember the salt store, and the northerner, and whose wife sat for the painter on Thursdays.
It would come out in a courtroom in front of half of Florence, and Francesco would hear it there.
Killing him is the one thing that makes the note true.
“Don’t,” said Lisa quietly.
She was watching his face.
“Whatever you’re thinking.
Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were.
I watched you decide not to.” She took the note back and put it in her glove.
“Good.
Let the Maestro do it his way.”
Leonardo read it, and went out without his cloak, and came back three hours later with snow on his hair and a look John hadn’t seen on him before.
“I’ve been to see a man at the Palazzo,” he said.
“Niccolò, the secretary of the Ten, Vespucci’s friend.
He’s back from Rome.
Clever, underpaid, wants to be liked.
I told him where the Spaniard’s men are hiding and that they’ve been asking about the Romagna maps.
He was so happy I thought he’d kiss me.” He sat down heavily.
“They’ll take them tonight.
All of them, I hope.
And then I’ll have done to a man what he wanted to do to me, and I’ll go to Mass on Sunday and not be able to say why.”
Florence hanged him from a window of the Bargello in the second week of January.
John didn’t go to see.
Salai did, and came back very quiet, and didn’t steal anything for a fortnight.
* * *
The winter went the way winters go when you’re happy and know you shouldn’t be.
She came on Thursdays, because Francesco went to Pisa on Wednesdays and came back on Fridays all that season, buying for the spring.
She came with her hood up by the back stair of the convent and her maid Caterina waiting in the chapel below with a rosary, paid.
She never stayed past the bell for Lauds.
She would not be talked into staying, and John learned not to try.
* * *
On the other days, she sat.
The sittings did not change.
That was the strange thing, and the thing John was most grateful for afterwards.
Twice a week Lisa came up the front stair in daylight with her maid and sometimes her sister, and took off her cloak, and sat in the chair by the north window with her hands folded one over the other, and Leonardo stood at the easel and looked at her.
John learned how a portrait was made, that winter, by watching one not get made.
Leonardo had prepared the board himself the summer before: poplar, from the hills, cut and dried and glued and planed, then covered in layer after layer of white gesso until it was as smooth as an eggshell.
On it he had drawn her in charcoal and then gone over the drawing in thin brown paint.
The shape was all there: the chair, the folded hands, the shoulders, the line of the veil.
The face was there too, as a pale oval with the features barely suggested, like a face seen through a steamed window.
He did not paint it.
He looked at it.
“The face is the last thing,” he told John, the first time John asked.
“You don’t paint a face.
You paint the air in front of it.
The light comes from that window and falls on her cheek and goes round the curve and is lost in the shadow under the jaw, and if I paint the edge of the cheek, it’s a line, and there are no lines in nature.
Only light going away.” He held up his hand to the window and turned it slowly.
“Look.
Where does your hand end?”
John looked.
He could not say.
“Exactly.
So I wait until I can see where her face ends.
It takes a long time.”
What he painted instead, that winter, was everything else.
He painted the landscape behind her, which John had thought was a real view and was not: a road winding into blue hills, a bridge, water, rocks that looked like no rocks in Tuscany.
He painted it in glazes so thin that each layer was almost nothing, a breath of colour in oil, and then let it dry for a week before the next.
He painted the folds of her sleeve.
He painted her hands.
The hands took most of January.
Leonardo would make her take them off the arm of the chair and put them back twenty times in a morning, until they fell naturally, the right hand resting over the left wrist.
Then he would paint for ten minutes and scrape it off.
“They’re too still,” he said once.
“You’re holding them still for me.
Don’t.
Think about something else.”
“What should I think about, Maestro?”
“Whatever you think about when you’re not being looked at.”
Lisa’s eyes went, for about half a second, to John at the grinding slab.
Then they went back to the window.
Her hands on the arm of the chair settled, the fingers of the right one curling very slightly over the left.
“There,” said Leonardo softly. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
“Don’t move.” And painted for an hour.
* * *
On the bad days, when the light was poor and the sitting dragged, Leonardo made John talk.
“Tell her about the fog,” he said one morning in early January, with rain on the windows and the hall as dark as a cellar.
“The one you told me about.
The yellow one.”
So John told Lisa about a London fog.
He told it plainly, because he had learned by then that she liked things plain.
In November the coal smoke of a million chimneys came down into the streets and mixed with the river mist, and it turned yellow, the colour of pea soup, and so thick that a man could not see his own feet.
The trams stopped.
Men walked in front of the buses with flaming torches.
People got lost in streets they had lived in for thirty years, and walked into the river, and were found in the morning.
“Why do they burn so much coal?” said Lisa.
“To keep warm.
To make the machines go.
Everything goes by coal.”
“Then it’s a city that’s poisoning itself to stay warm.” She thought about it.
“That’s very like a marriage.”
Her sister, who had come that day and was sitting by the brazier with her embroidery, laughed out loud and then pretended to cough.
Leonardo did not look up from the sleeve he was painting.
John went back to the slab and ground verdigris very hard for some time.
“Go on,” said Lisa, after a while, in the chair, with her hands folded.
“What happens to the ones who walk into the river?”
“The police drag for them with hooks.”
“And do they find them?”
“Usually.”
“Good,” she said.
“I’d hate to be lost and nobody looking.” She said it lightly, to the window, and the lute player played on, and only John, at the slab, saw that her hands had closed one over the other on the arm of the chair and stayed that way until the bell rang for noon.
When she had gone, Leonardo came down from the easel and stood by the slab, wiping his brush on a rag, and looked at the verdigris John had ground.
It was far too fine.
It had gone pale.
He said nothing about it.
He scraped it into a pot, labelled it in his backwards hand, and put it on the shelf with the others.
* * *
He knew.
John never doubted it.
He knew from the first Thursday, perhaps from before it, from the night he had gone home to the Via Ghibellina because the hall was cold for an old man.
He never said a word.
He did not change.
He was neither warmer nor cooler to John than before.
He went on measuring the Hold every morning with the water clock, and on making John grind colours, and on telling him at supper that his Florentine was improving from a goatherd’s to a mule driver’s.
The only thing that changed was that on Wednesday nights, without fail, he went home to sleep.
Once only he came close.
It was late in January, at the slab, while Lisa was sitting.
Leonardo had come down from the easel to look at the blue John was grinding, which was good now, fine and bright, and he rubbed a little between his finger and thumb.
“When you make a colour,” he said, conversationally, “you grind it until it’s fine enough to use.
If you grind it too long, it loses its colour.
It goes pale.
It’s ruined.” He wiped his finger on his tunic.
“The trick is knowing when to stop.
Most apprentices never learn it.
They’re too fond of the grinding.”
He went back to the easel.
Lisa, in the chair, had not moved at all, but the corners of her mouth had gone up very slightly, and Leonardo looked at them and picked up his finest brush.