Niccolò Machiavelli received them in a small room off the Second Chancery, with one window and a table so covered in letters that there was no wood showing.
He was thirty-four, thin, with short dark hair and a narrow face that seemed always about to smile and seldom did.
He wore the plain black gown of a Florentine official, a little shiny at the elbows.
He got up when Leonardo came in and embraced him, and then he looked at John for a long moment, the way a man looks at a horse someone else is trying to sell him.
“The northerner,” he said.
“From Lucca.”
“Giovanni,” said John.
“Sit, both of you.
There’s wine, it’s bad.” Machiavelli sat on the edge of the table.
“I’ll be quick, Maestro, because the Pisans are breaking our dykes again and the Gonfaloniere wants me to make the Arno flow somewhere else, and I suspect he’ll want you for it too.
Your Spaniard Lupo talked before he was hanged.
They all talk, with the rope.
Most of it was about money, which was useful.
Some of it was about you.”
“About me,” said Leonardo.
“About this one.” Machiavelli nodded at John.
“He said the northerner was a devil.
That he moved before a man had decided to move.
That his nose bled when he did it, and that it could be counted.
Three, four, Ave Maria.” He watched John’s face.
“The notary who wrote it down thought he was raving.
So did the Ten.
A condemned man will say anything.”
John said nothing.
He kept his hands still on his knees.
“He said one other thing,” said Machiavelli.
“About a lady of good family who sits for her portrait in your hall.
He named her husband.”
The room was very quiet.
Outside the window a cart went by in the square.
“And?” said Leonardo.
“And I took that page out of the record myself, before it went to the Ten, and I put it in the fire.” Machiavelli spread his hands.
“Francesco del Giocondo lends money to the Republic.
His brothers sit on the councils.
We are at war with Pisa and short of everything.
The Republic doesn’t need the del Giocondo family quarrelling in public over a dead Spaniard’s gossip.
That isn’t kindness, Maestro.
I’m not a kind man.
It’s housekeeping.”
“Then I thank you for your housekeeping.”
“Don’t.
One day I’ll ask you to divert a river.” He looked at John again.
“And you, Giovanni from Lucca.
I have no interest in devils.
But I am very interested in men who can see a knife before it moves.
If you ever want work in the Republic’s service, come and see me.
We pay badly, but we pay.”
“I’m a painter’s assistant,” said John.
“Of course you are.” Machiavelli smiled, at last.
“And I’m a clerk.”
On the stair, going down, Leonardo said quietly: “That man will be remembered.”
“Yes,” said John.
“He will.”
Leonardo glanced at him sideways, and did not ask.
* * *
He started looking at her Branches in March, when the frost broke.
He didn’t mean to.
He’d decided not to.
But you can’t not see something when you’re touching someone, any more than you can not hear a bell, and in March, when he held her hand, the pictures began to come back.
The stair, again and again.
The lantern at the bottom.
And now, after the stair, new things.
Francesco’s face, white, saying something John couldn’t hear.
A small boy, the eleven-month baby grown older, being carried away down a passage by a nurse, crying and holding out his arms.
They didn’t all come every time.
Some nights it was only the snow and the cradle, the good branches.
But the bad ones were getting stronger, and they were getting closer, and each time he looked at one it grew a little more solid, the way a path through grass grows more solid with walking.
He didn’t tell her for a fortnight.
Then she told him.
“You’ve stopped looking at me when you hold my hand,” she said.
“You look past my shoulder, at the wall.
Like a man reading.”
“Yes.”
“Is it the stair?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.
It doesn’t come with dates.
Weeks.” He made himself go on.
“After the stair there’s a locked door.
And your son, taken away.”
She took her hand back, slowly, and put it in her lap.
“Andrea,” she said.
“Yes.”
She was quiet for a long time.
The brazier ticked.
“Then it’s soon,” she said.
“The feast, probably.
Francesco’s giving a feast for the house in April.
All the family.
All the servants with lanterns on the back stair.” She looked at him.
“That’s your stair, Giovanni.
It’s in my house.
I’ll be there and so will you, because Francesco has asked the Maestro to bring the portrait to show his brothers, and the Maestro will bring you to carry it.”
* * *
The feast for the house on the Via della Stufa was on the thirteenth of April, the Saturday after Easter, and all Florence that mattered came.
Francesco del Giocondo was a broad, shrewd, pleasant man of forty-four with ink on his middle finger who shook John’s hand warmly and asked him what silk cost in the north, and listened to the answer.
John liked him.
That was the worst of it.
The portrait stood on an easel in the new sala, half finished, under a cloth, and at the right moment Leonardo whipped the cloth off, and forty people in good wool stood and looked at Lisa’s face, and then at Lisa, and then back.
She stood beside her husband in blue silk and smiled the portrait’s smile, a little, at the corners.
“It isn’t finished,” said Leonardo.
“It will never be finished.
I’m going to keep it until I die, Ser Francesco, and you’ll have to sue my heirs.”
Everyone laughed.
Francesco laughed loudest.
Later, after the eels and the capons and the sugar castle, John went down the back stair with the empty easel because Leonardo had sent him for the cart, and found Lisa on the half-landing in the dark, waiting.
“One minute,” she said.
He should have kept walking.
He stopped.
She put her hand flat on his chest, and he covered it with his, and the Branches came.
The lantern.
Gold and blue.
Running.
Not might.
Now.
Close enough to smell the oil.
He heard the voices at the bottom of the stair, men’s voices, and the light came yellow round the turn of the wall, and he pushed.
The world thickened.
He had his four counts.
Enough to look.
Two servants coming up with a tray of glasses and a lantern between them.
One step from the turn.
A second more and they’d see her hand on his chest and his on hers in the light, and the Branches would be true from then on, the key, the door, the boy carried down a passage.
Four counts.
He took her hand off his chest and put it on the easel, as though she were steadying it.
He turned the easel so it was between them.
He stepped down one stair, away from her, so there was a decent arm’s length of wood and air between them, a man carrying furniture and a lady of the house holding it for him on a dark stair.
It snapped back.
Blood on his lip.
The lantern came round the turn.
“Monna Lisa,” said the servant, surprised.
“Hold the light up, Bartolo, can’t you,” she said, in a perfectly ordinary irritated voice.
“The man can’t see the stairs.
He’ll drop the Maestro’s easel and we’ll be paying for it till Christmas.”
They held the light up.
John carried the easel down.
He didn’t look back.
* * *
He ended it on the Monday, in the bottega, in daylight, because he couldn’t do it in the dark.
She’d already known.
She’d known on the stair.
She listened to him say it with her hands folded the way she held them for the portrait, and when he’d finished, she nodded.
“Yes,” she said.
“I’d have done it on Thursday if you hadn’t.” Her voice was quite steady.
“You’re going, aren’t you?
Not just from me.”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.
Somewhere loud.” He tried to smile.
“I’ll know it when I hear it.”
“A man out of time.” She stood up.
She looked at him for a moment the way she’d looked at him on the first day, as if she was seeing a great deal.
“Your secret is safe with me, Giovanni.
All of them.
I’d like you to know that I’d never have told.
Not if they’d put me on the rack.
Not Francesco.
Not my confessor.” The corners of her mouth went, very slightly.
“I’ll just have to keep it in my face.
The Maestro will be pleased.
It’ll give him something to paint.”
She held out her hand, as she had the first day, to be bowed over.
He took it.
And he did the thing he’d promised himself, all winter, that he would never do to her.
It wasn’t the Press he’d used on Hartley.
He didn’t take anything away.
He didn’t touch the snow, or the Thursdays, or the questions about votes.
He went in only to the end of it, to the hurt, to the part of her that would sit at a window at night with a hand over her mouth, and he took the edge off that.
Dulled it, the way you dull a blade on a stone.
Made it into the sort of memory a woman could take out once a year and look at and put back.
She swayed.
A thin line of blood came from her nose and she put her fingers to it, surprised.
“It’s the cold in here,” she said.
“The Maestro never lights the brazier enough.”
“Yes,” said John.
The hurt was in him now.
He felt it settle, the way Hartley’s Clara had settled, a lodger taking a room.
A woman’s grief, sharp and clean, as if it were his own, for a man who was standing right here.
She went down the stairs.
At the turn she looked back, and smiled, and it was the smile in the portrait, the one Leonardo would spend the next fifteen years trying to finish.