“You did something to her,” said Leonardo that night, at the brazier.
“At the end.
I saw her nose.”
“Yes.”
“Did she ask you to?”
“No.”
Leonardo looked at him for a long time.
He didn’t say anything else about it, then or ever.
He went to the trestle and came back with a bundle in a cloth, and unwrapped it on John’s knees.
Bread.
A cheese.
A knife.
The little red notebook, the one with John in it.
“Burn this,” he said, “or take it.
I’d rather you took it.
And when you hear your loud place, Giovanni, go before I wake.
I don’t like doors.”
* * *
He did not go at once.
He found he couldn’t.
He had told Lisa he would know his loud place when he heard it, and for six weeks he heard nothing at all, and he stayed.
He worked.
That was the only thing that helped.
Leonardo had begun to prepare the wall of the great council hall in the Palazzo for the battle, and there was a great deal to do that was not painting.
John built him a scaffold that moved: a wooden tower on wheels that could be raised and lowered by a crank, so the Maestro could reach any part of the wall without climbing.
He worked out the gearing on a slate and Zoroastro forged the iron.
When it was finished, Leonardo rode it up and down six times like a child on a swing, and then stood at the top with his arms folded and said, “Now I have no excuse at all.”
The wall itself was another matter.
Leonardo did not want to paint it in fresco, the old way, in wet plaster, a patch a day, because fresco was fast and he was slow.
He wanted to paint in oil, on a dry wall, so he could take as long as he liked.
For that he needed a new ground, something that would hold oil on plaster without the oil sinking in, and for three weeks he and John and Zoroastro tried recipes on tiles laid out along the floor of the Sala del Papa: chalk and glue, pitch and wax, linseed boiled with resin.
John did the chemistry.
He was good at it, and he knew, in a vague way, how the story ended.
He had seen the empty wall in a photograph of the Palazzo Vecchio and read the footnote: the experiment failed; the paint ran.
He did not say so.
He made the best ground he could, wrote down every proportion in his own hand in the back of the red notebook, and told Leonardo plainly which tiles cracked in the cold and which ran when the brazier was lit too close.
“This one,” said Leonardo, holding up a tile that had stayed whole.
“This one is good.”
“It’s good in this room.
In the great hall, with a hundred people breathing and braziers going for the council, I don’t know.”
“Then we’ll find out.” Leonardo put the tile on the windowsill like a trophy.
“That’s what walls are for.”
Zoroastro, who had burned his thumb on the pitch recipe, said that walls were for keeping the rain out, and went to find some lard.
John stayed late that night with the tiles, scraping and labelling, because it was work that needed his hands and not his head.
When he finished he looked at the long row of them on the floor, thirty little squares of failure and two of success, and found that for an hour he had not thought about Lisa once.
It was the first hour since the feast.
He wrote the date on the last tile in chalk, small, in English, and put it with the others.
John slept badly.
The lodger kept him awake.
That was what it was like.
He had expected guilt, and the guilt was there, but it was his own and he knew what to do with it.
The lodger was different.
It was her hurt, not his: the hurt she would have carried, sitting at a window at night.
Now he carried it instead.
It came at odd moments, on the scaffold, in the street, a sudden grief so sharp it stopped his breath, for a man he was not able to see, because the man was himself.
He would stand still and wait for it to pass, and it would pass, and he would go on with what he was doing.
Clara’s laugh came sometimes too, from the pier at Brighton.
The two of them lived in him now, side by side, a woman he had never met and a woman he had wronged.
Two, and I’ve been here five months.
Be careful how many more you take.
He saw Lisa once more.
It was in the street, in May, outside Orsanmichele.
She was with her sister and the maid and the boy Andrea, walking, and she saw him across the street and smiled, a pleasant, friendly smile, the smile for a man who had once helped carry an easel at a feast.
Then she bent to say something to the child.
He had done that.
He had wanted it.
It was much worse than he had expected.
* * *
On an evening late in May, Leonardo took the red notebook back from him.
“I want to read it once more,” he said.
“Before you go.
Indulge an old man.”
They sat by the brazier.
It was warm now, and the brazier was not lit, but they sat by it anyway, out of habit.
Leonardo turned the pages slowly, right to left.
John watched him read six months of himself in mirror writing: the counts, the drops of the water clock, the colour of his fingernails, how much food he ate after the Hold, the horse, the copper bowl, the hare.
A drawing of John’s hand, very exact, with the scar.
A drawing of the falchion in three pieces.
Near the end Leonardo stopped, and took his little knife, and cut one page out along the stitching, neatly, close to the spine.
“That one I’ll keep,” he said.
“What’s on it?”
Leonardo folded the page twice and put it inside his tunic.
“A list of questions I couldn’t answer.
Why your fire burns so fast.
Why your body doesn’t keep up with your head.
Whether it ever could.” He closed the notebook and gave it back.
“I’ll think about them when you’re gone.
I’m going to have a great many years to think, and very little to do in them but paint walls that fall down.”
“They won’t all fall down.”
“No?
Good.” He looked at the empty brazier.
“Giovanni.
Somewhere there’s a man who can teach your body what your head already knows.
A fencing master, a soldier, a dancer, I don’t know.
Not in Florence.
I’ve looked at every fencing master in Florence this winter for you, and they’re all fat.
When you hear your loud place, go towards the sound of men fighting with skill.
Not with numbers.
With skill.”
“How will I know it?”
“You won’t.
Not at first.
You’ll know it because it frightens you.” Leonardo stood up, and his knees cracked, and he put a hand on John’s shoulder for a moment, heavily, and went home to the Via Ghibellina.
* * *
Salai knew before anyone told him.
Salai always did.
He found John the next morning on the cloister wall, in the sun, with the red notebook on his knees, and sat down beside him without asking, and took out an apple, and cut it in half with a little knife, and gave John one half.
“You’re going,” he said.
“What makes you think so?”
“You’ve been giving things away.
You gave Tommaso your good knife yesterday.
You gave the cook the copper bowl back, the one you mended.
You gave me your cap.” Salai took a bite of apple.
“Men who give things away are either dying or going.
You eat too much.”
John didn’t answer.
Salai chewed.
“I’m sorry about the watch,” he said eventually, to the cloister.
“I wouldn’t have taken it if I’d known what it was.”
“What did you think it was?”
“Something you loved more than you should.
You held it every night.” Salai shrugged.
“I take things like that.
I don’t know why.
The Maestro says it’s because nobody gave me anything when I was small, and he’s probably right, he usually is, it’s very tiresome.” He threw the apple core into the well.
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Then take something of mine, so you don’t forget us.” He held out the little knife he had cut the apple with.
It was a cheap thing, iron, with a bone handle, worn smooth.
“I stole it from a butcher in Milan when I was eleven.
It’s the first thing I ever stole.
It’s very lucky.”
John took it.
It was warm from Salai’s hand.
And for a second, without meaning to, he saw a branch: Salai, older, heavier, in a fine coat, in a house of his own with a vineyard outside the window, laughing at something.
It was faint and far and almost certainly not something he should be able to see, so far out.
“You’ll do well,” he said.
“Of course I will.
I’m beautiful.” Salai stood up and brushed off his hose.
“Don’t come back as a ghost, Giovanni.
The friars would be very boring about it.”
* * *
He spent his last evening alone in the Sala del Papa.
Leonardo had moved most of his things to the Palazzo by then, for the great wall, and the hall was emptier than John had ever seen it.
The cartoon of the battle had been taken down and rolled and carried away on a cart by eight men.
Without it the end wall was only a wall, whitewashed, with nail holes.
The trestles were bare.
The grinding slab was clean.
The water clock stood on the window ledge, empty, its little hole the size of a millet seed.
Only the portrait was still there, on its easel by the north window, under a cloth.
He lifted the cloth, which he had never done without permission.
The face was nearly finished now.
In the last weeks Leonardo had begun at last to paint it, slowly, in glazes so thin he said he could breathe them on.
The hands were finished.
The landscape was finished, the blue road and the bridge and the strange rocks.
And the face looked out of the panel at him in the evening light, not quite smiling, the corners of the mouth just lifted, as if the whole room were a joke she had decided to be polite about.
At the corner of the lip, so small that nobody who did not know would ever see it, there was a fleck of paler paint.
John put the cloth back.
He took Hartley’s astrolabe out of his bag and unwrapped it from its rag.
It had brought him here, and it was the only thing that could bring him here again.
He turned it over in his hands, the green in its grooves, the letters on the rim.
Made in Florence, 1503.
Then he set it down on Leonardo’s trestle, in the middle, where the old man would find it first thing in the morning.
If I keep it, one day I’ll use it.
And she’ll be at a window again.
He went back behind the screen, and lay down on the pallet for the last time, and listened.
* * *
He heard it that night, near midnight, on the pallet behind the screen.
Far off and getting louder, like guns over the horizon on a still evening.
Not guns.
Steel on wood, thousands of times, the same strokes, and a sea, and a man breathing.
He put the notebook inside his shirt, and the watch on his wrist, and went towards it.