On his first morning as a member of Leonardo da Vinci’s household, John was given a stone, a muller, and a lump of blue rock the size of a hen’s egg, and told not to waste any of it.
“Lapis,” said Leonardo.
“From the mountains beyond Persia.
It comes by ship to Venice and by mule to here, and that piece cost more than your boots.
When it’s ground fine and washed, it makes the blue for the Virgin’s cloak.
When it’s ground badly, it makes grey mud and I make you pay for it.” He put the muller in John’s good hand.
It was a heavy glass cone with a flat base, like a doorstop.
“Round and round.
Small circles.
Don’t press, let the weight do it.
When you think it’s fine enough, it isn’t.
Do it for another hour.”
The grinding slab stood on a trestle under the window, where the light was best.
John sat on a stool in front of it with his bandaged arm in his lap and the muller in his right hand, and went round and round.
It was a boy’s job.
Leonardo had said so, and it was true.
In any other bottega in Florence it would have been done by an apprentice of twelve who had been sent by his father to learn the trade, and who would spend four years grinding colours and sweeping floors before anyone let him near a brush.
John was twenty-four, he had a degree in natural philosophy from University College London, and he had once rebuilt a field wireless set under shellfire at Messines with a pair of nail scissors and a bootlace.
By the end of the first hour, his blue was the colour of a wet pavement.
“Mud,” said Leonardo, looking over his shoulder.
“But even mud.
That’s a beginning.” He scraped it off into a pot labelled in his backwards hand.
“We’ll use it for the sky behind the horses.
Nobody looks at the sky behind the horses.”
* * *
The household of the Sala del Papa was small, and it ran on rules nobody had written down.
Leonardo rose before light and went to Mass at the convent church, not because he was devout, Salai said, but because the friars gave him bread afterwards.
Then he came back and stood in front of the great cartoon with his arms folded and looked at it, sometimes for an hour, without touching it.
Then, suddenly, he would climb the scaffold and draw for three hours without stopping, while the rest of them crept about below.
There was Tommaso, a broad man of forty with burn scars on both forearms, who called himself Zoroastro and made the metal fittings for Leonardo’s machines in a shed in the cloister.
He was the only one who ever argued with the Maestro, and he did it loudly, about money.
He decided on the first day that John was a spy from Milan, and on the second day, after watching John mend the broken pulley on the scaffold with a length of cord and a bent nail, that he was a useful spy from Milan.
He said almost nothing else to him all week.
And there was Salai.
Salai was twenty-three.
His real name was Gian Giacomo Caprotti, and he had come to Leonardo at the age of ten as a servant and never left.
Leonardo had written in one of his notebooks, John later learned, thief, liar, obstinate, glutton.
He had long gold curls, a face like a choirboy in a fresco, and the habits of a cat.
He did what he liked and he went where he liked, and he did not like the stranger from the north at all.
He was never openly rude.
He was too clever for that.
Instead, things happened.
John’s boots, left by his pallet at night, were found in the morning on the far side of the hall, full of cold water.
John’s bowl of soup at supper had more bread and less soup than anyone else’s.
When John asked for something in his careful Lucchese Italian, Salai answered him in quick Florentine full of slang and then smiled kindly when John didn’t understand.
“He says the Maestro wants the charcoal sticks from the box by the door,” Salai would tell the room, and when John brought them, Leonardo would look up in surprise and say that he had asked for the red chalk.
John’s Italian was the worst of it.
He had learned it in his mother’s kitchen in Camden Town, from a woman who had left Lucca at nineteen and had kept the language of her girlhood like a good dress in a drawer.
It was correct and old-fashioned and, to a Florentine of 1503, hopelessly strange.
He said words that would not exist for two hundred years.
He pronounced the ones that did exist like a peasant from the hills above Lucca.
Twice in the first week, people on the stairs crossed themselves when he spoke to them.
“You sound like my grandmother’s priest,” Salai told him, delighted, “speaking backwards.”
“Then teach me to speak forwards.”
Salai considered that.
“Why would I?”
“Because the Maestro will ask me at supper what I learned today,” said John, “and if the answer is nothing, he’ll ask me who was supposed to teach me.”
Salai looked at him for a long moment with his choirboy face.
Then he laughed, and for about an hour that afternoon, while they swept the hall together, he taught John the Florentine words for bread, debt, a woman of bad reputation and the Prior is a fat goat.
The last one, he said, was the most useful.
* * *
The cold came down on the city in the second week of November.
It was not English cold.
In London the cold was wet and grey and came in under the door.
This cold came down off the hills behind Fiesole, dry and clear, and the sky over the convent went a hard pale blue, and in the morning there was ice on the water butt in the cloister.
The Sala del Papa was impossible to heat.
It was forty paces long and the windows did not close properly, and the single brazier at one end made a circle of warmth about three paces wide.
Everybody worked inside the circle when they could.
Leonardo drew on the scaffold in two coats and fingerless gloves.
John’s fingers were always cold now.
That was the Hold, and it was also the hall.
He couldn’t always tell which.
He used the Hold every day that week, but only when Leonardo asked, and only for the measuring.
The old man had begun on the second morning with nothing more than a candle and his own pulse: John would push, Leonardo would count his heartbeats with two fingers on his wrist, and they would compare.
Four of John’s counts were less than one of Leonardo’s heartbeats.
Every day it cost John the same: white fingertips, a wet lip, a hunger that came on like a fist.
Leonardo wrote it all down.
On the fourth day Zoroastro took him to buy copper.
They went down through the city to the Por Santa Maria and over the Ponte Vecchio, which John had seen on postcards lined with jewellers’ shops.
In 1503 it was lined with butchers.
The shops hung out over the river on wooden brackets, and the butchers threw the offal straight down into the Arno through holes in their floors, and the whole bridge smelled of blood and wet sawdust.
Zoroastro walked through it without noticing.
John breathed through his mouth.
The coppersmith was on the far side, in the Oltrarno, in a street of metalworkers where the noise of hammers never stopped.
Zoroastro argued with him for a quarter of an hour about the price of a sheet the size of a tray, in a Florentine so fast John caught only the numbers.
Then he turned to John and held out his hand.
“Money,” he said.
John gave him what Leonardo had given him that morning: a handful of small coins, black silver and copper, quattrini and soldi, worn smooth by a hundred years of fingers.
Zoroastro counted them into the smith’s palm one at a time, slowly, watching the man’s face, and stopped two coins short.
The smith sighed and took them.
On the way back, on the bridge, Zoroastro said the only long thing he said to John all week.
“He’s never had anyone like you,” he said, not looking at him.
“The Maestro.
He’s had boys, and pupils, and patrons.
He’s had Salai.
He’s never had anyone who knows things he doesn’t.” He spat over the rail into the river.
“Don’t make him a fool, Milanese.
He’s easy to make a fool of.
He believes everything that’s interesting.”
“I’m not from Milan.”
“No,” said Zoroastro.
“You’re from somewhere much worse.” And he walked on.
Only once did John use it without being asked.
On the sixth morning Salai came up the stair with a jar of linseed oil in one hand and a pot of the good lapis, Leonardo’s, the washed and finished blue, in the other, and caught his toe on the top step.
John was at the grinding slab, three paces away.
He saw it a second before it happened, the faint grey ghost of the pot leaving Salai’s fingers and turning over in the air, the ghost of the blue spreading over the tiles.
He pushed.
The real pot left Salai’s fingers and hung.
John stood up.
In four counts, with his body moving at its ordinary speed, he could take two steps and reach out one hand.
He did that.
He took two steps and reached out, and put his palm under the pot about a foot from the floor, where the ghost had told him it would be.
The world came back.
The pot dropped into his hand.
Not one grain of blue spilled.
Salai stared at him.
The oil jar had broken on the stair behind him, and he was standing in a spreading pool of linseed, with his mouth open.
John set the pot of lapis down on the trestle.
His nose had begun to bleed, and he wiped it on his sleeve, too late.
“You were over there,” Salai said slowly.
“By the window.”
“You were slow,” said John.
“Nobody’s that fast.”
“I’m not fast.
You tripped.
I saw it coming.”
Salai looked at the blood on John’s sleeve, and then at the pot, and then at John’s face, and for the first time all week he did not smile.
He had the expression of a man in a market who has just seen another man take a purse off a belt without touching it and wants very much to know how.
Leonardo came in from Mass a few minutes later and found Salai on his knees mopping up oil and John at the grinding slab with a rag pressed to his nose, and looked from one to the other, and asked no questions at all.
That night, for the first time, John’s boots were where he had left them, dry.
He should have been pleased.
Instead he lay awake behind his screen and listened to the hall settle, and knew that something had changed.
Salai was no longer trying to drive him out.
Salai was watching him.
In the morning John found him by the window, turning John’s wristwatch over in his fingers.
John had left it on the slab while he washed.
Salai held it up to the light and listened to it tick, with his head on one side.
“What’s it for?” he asked.
“It tells the time.”
“The bells tell the time.” Salai put it down gently, exactly where it had been.
“This only tells you.”
Then Leonardo called from the scaffold that he wanted a water clock built by the end of the day, a proper one, with a copper bowl and a hole the size of a millet seed, and that if anyone in the hall knew how to drill a hole the size of a millet seed in copper, he should stand up now.
John stood up.