They didn’t spend all of it in the dark.
Most of it, he remembered afterwards, they spent talking, wrapped in blankets on the floor of the Sala del Papa beside the brazier, under the great empty wall where the battle would go, because she wanted to know everything and he wanted to tell somebody.
She wanted the future like other women wanted jewels.
“Do women vote?”
“Some.
In England, since two years ago, if they’re over thirty and own property.”
“Thirty.” She was outraged.
“Why thirty?
So they’re too tired to use it?”
“Probably.”
“And can they own the property without a husband?”
“Yes.”
“And keep the money?”
“Yes.”
She was quiet for a while.
“Then I was born in the wrong century,” she said, “and so were you, and you’ve done something about it, and I can’t.” She didn’t say it sadly.
She said it as a fact she’d checked.
He told her about the films.
About the influenza.
About the war, a little, though she could tell when to stop asking about the war.
In return she told him what Florence was underneath: who owed whom, which of the Medici cousins were writing letters from Rome, how much Francesco had paid for the house on the Via della Stufa and how much he’d told people he’d paid.
She told it the way Leonardo drew, quickly, with every line in the right place.
“You’d be a good spy,” he said.
“I’m a merchant’s wife.
It’s the same work with worse pay.”
* * *
“Show me,” she said one night.
“The thing you do.
The Hold.”
He had told her its name, and how it worked, and what it cost.
She had listened with her chin on her knees.
Now she sat up in the blanket and looked at him with the expression she wore when she was pricing cloth.
“It isn’t much to see.
The world goes slow, and I don’t.
From outside, you wouldn’t notice anything.”
“Then do it while I’m watching something, and tell me what you saw.”
So he did.
She picked up a walnut from the bowl by the brazier and tossed it up, not high, and he pushed.
The walnut hung above her hand.
The flames of the brazier stood still like painted flames.
Her face was turned up towards the nut, and in the red light he could see every lash, and a tiny white scar at the edge of her lip he had never noticed, and the pulse in her throat, not moving.
He counted four, slowly.
He looked at her for all four.
The walnut fell into her palm.
“Well?” she said.
“You have a scar.
Here.” He touched the corner of her mouth.
“Small.
White.”
She went still.
“I fell on the steps of San Lorenzo when I was seven.
My mother said nobody would ever see it.” She looked at the blood on his lip, and took the edge of the blanket and wiped it off, carefully.
“Could you do it for longer?
A whole night?
Make Thursday last a week?”
“No.
Four counts is all there is.
If I do it many times I fall down, and then I’m ill for three days.”
“Then don’t.” She said it at once, without any regret in it at all.
“I won’t spend you on that.
I’d rather have the night the ordinary length and you in it.” She lay back down.
And you used them to look at my mouth.”
“It seemed like the best thing in the room.”
She laughed in the dark, quietly, the laugh she never used in the chair.
* * *
In the middle of February, Leonardo sent John to the del Giocondo warehouse for money.
“Francesco owes me for the panel and the first half of the work,” he said.
“He’s an honest man and he’ll pay, but he’s a merchant, and merchants pay faster when someone is standing in front of them.
You’ll stand in front of him.
Don’t talk.
Look patient.
You look very patient when you’re not talking.”
“Why me?
Send Salai.”
“If I send Salai, I’ll get half of it.” Leonardo looked at him over the top of the easel.
“And you’ve never seen the man.
It’s time you had.”
The warehouse was in the Por Santa Maria, the street of the silk guild, a long dim building on the ground floor of a tall house, with bales stacked to the ceiling and a smell of dye and dust.
Men were unloading a cart in the street.
Inside, at a high desk under a window, two clerks were writing in ledgers, and a third was weighing skeins of raw silk on a brass balance, calling out the weights.
John waited by the door with his cap in his hands.
Francesco del Giocondo came in from the yard behind with a sheaf of papers, talking to a man with a Genoese accent about a ship.
He was broad and short-necked, with a heavy, clever face and grey at his temples, and ink on the middle finger of his right hand.
He did not look at John.
He looked at the balance, and at the ledger, and stopped the clerk with a hand on his shoulder and pointed at a figure.
“That’s wrong,” he said mildly.
“Do it again.” Then, to the Genoese: “Tell your captain if the bales are wet again I’ll pay for them wet.
By the pound of water.”
The Genoese laughed.
Francesco didn’t.
The senior clerk came over to John and asked his business, and when John said the Maestro Leonardo’s name, the clerk sighed and went to the desk, and Francesco glanced across the room.
For a moment his eyes rested on John: a young man in a brown cloak with a painter’s stains on his hands.
Nothing in his face changed.
He nodded to the clerk, the clerk counted out coins into a cloth bag, and Francesco turned back to his ship.
That was all.
He never knew John had been there.
On the way out, in the doorway to the house stair, John stood aside for a nurse coming down with a child in her arms.
It was a boy of a little over a year, fat and solemn, in a cap with a blue ribbon, holding a wooden spoon.
He looked at John over the nurse’s shoulder with great seriousness and held out the spoon.
John took it, because it seemed rude not to.
And for a moment, with his fingers on the spoon that the child’s fingers were also holding, he saw the boy.
Not much.
A nursery.
A woman’s hands lifting him.
The same woman’s hands, and her face above them, laughing.
“Andrea,” said the nurse sharply.
“Give it back.
Say sorry to the gentleman.”
The child did not say sorry.
He took the spoon back and put it in his mouth.
John walked back to the Sala del Papa with Leonardo’s money in a bag under his cloak, and he did not see the city at all.
He had liked Francesco del Giocondo.
That was what he had not expected.
He had come ready to find a dull, old, jealous man, and he had found a man who was good at his work and fair to his clerks and who would pay for wet silk by the pound of water.
And upstairs in that house, a boy who had looked at him as if he were someone worth giving a spoon to.
You don’t get to like him, he told himself.
You gave that up on the first Thursday.
* * *
Leonardo counted the money twice when he got back and found it correct, and seemed almost disappointed.
“He paid it all,” he said.
“Without a word.
“You saw him?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“He found a mistake in his clerk’s ledger from across the room,” said John.
“He’s going to charge a Genoese captain for the water in his silk.
He looked at me for about as long as it takes to look at a door.”
“Then you were lucky.” Leonardo sat down at the easel and looked at the portrait for a while, at the pale oval of the face and the finished hands.
“Lisa is his third wife.
Did you know?
The first two died young.
He kept a small portrait of the second, and he looks at it, Lisa says, once a year, on the day she died.” He picked up a brush.
“He’s not a man who forgets things, Giovanni.
Remember that, if you ever need to.”
* * *
He told Lisa, that Thursday.
He had not decided to.
It came out, in the dark, by the brazier.
She was quiet for a while.
“He is a good man,” she said at last.
“I’ve never said otherwise.
He married me when I was fifteen and he was thirty-five and he’s never once struck me, and he talks to me about the business as if I had a brain, which most of them don’t.
I’m not unhappy with Francesco, Giovanni.
I’m unhappy with being twenty-four and knowing the whole rest of my life to the day.
Which saint’s feast I’ll be pregnant at.
Which cousin I’ll marry my daughter to.” She turned her head on the blanket and looked at him.
“And then you fell out of the river.”
“I didn’t fall.”
“A man out of time doesn’t fall.
He arrives.” She smiled slightly.
“You’re the only thing in my life I didn’t see coming.
Don’t take it from me by being sorry.”
He didn’t answer.
After a while she put her hand on his chest, and he covered it with his, and he did not look at her Branches.
He had learned by then not to, most nights.
It was like learning not to listen to a clock.
One Thursday in February it snowed properly, a real fall, the courtyard of the convent white by midnight.
She dragged him out into the cloister in a blanket to see it, barefoot, giggling, and stood between two columns with her head back and snow catching in her hair, and laughed, properly, her whole throat.
He put his hand on her arm to pull her back into the dry.
He knew it the moment he did it.
The loggia, the snow, the hand with the scar.
I saw this, he thought.
In November.
I saw this before I knew her name.
It should have frightened him.
Standing there with snow on his feet, it didn’t.
It made him feel, for about a minute, that the world was a thing that kept its promises.
* * *
Leonardo was waiting for him when he came in out of the snow, which he never was on Thursdays.
He sat by the brazier in his cloak with the red notebook closed on his knee, and he did not ask where John had been.
He said, “Niccolò sent word from the Palazzo.
The last of Michelotto’s men in the city were taken at an inn by San Frediano last night.
The Ten have them in the Bargello and they’re asking questions with ropes.” He turned the notebook over in his hands.
“Lupo was one of his.
Before they hanged him, Lupo talked a great deal.
Vespucci says some of it was about this hall.”
John stood there with snow melting on his shoulders.
“What did he say?”
“That’s what I’m going to find out tomorrow.” Leonardo stood up.
“Go to bed, Giovanni.
And put your feet by the fire.
You’ve been standing in snow.”