On the eleventh day, the Signora came.
John heard her before he saw her: a woman’s voice on the stair, low, amused, saying something to a maid about the cold, and then the maid’s laugh.
Leonardo straightened up from the cartoon and wiped his hands on his tunic, which made them dirtier, and said, “Ah.
Now you’ll see something.”
The woman who came in was about twenty-four, in a dark green dress with the sleeves laced on, and a thin black veil over her hair that was almost not there.
She wasn’t a great beauty.
That was the first thing John thought, and it surprised him.
Her face was broad and calm, and her eyebrows were so fair they hardly showed, and she had the look of a woman who ran a house with eleven people in it and could tell you the price of everything in the kitchen.
Then she looked round the hall, at the paper, at the scaffold, at the horses with their mouths open, and something moved at the corners of her mouth, as if the whole room was a joke she’d decided to be polite about.
“Maestro,” she said.
“You’ve had a battle.”
“I’m drawing one, Monna Lisa.”
“No, you’ve had one.” She looked at the red chalk stain on the tiles, still there after ten days of Salai not washing it.
Then at John’s bandaged arm.
“And who is this?”
“Giovanni.
A guest.
From Lucca, and then from very far north.”
“How far north?”
“Very,” said John.
She looked at him for a moment longer than was polite.
“Lisa del Giocondo,” she said, and gave him her hand, and John took it and bowed over it the way his mother had once shown him in their kitchen in Camden Town, laughing, this is how they do it in Lucca, Johnny, if you ever meet a lady.
Her hand was warm.
And the hall came apart.
* * *
It wasn’t a push.
It came by itself, the way the doubled pictures had come in the basement, but stronger, and closer, and all at once.
A narrow stair, dark, and men’s voices at the bottom, and a lantern, and a badge on a servant’s sleeve, gold and blue.
Running.
Lisa at a window at night with her hand over her mouth, crying without a sound.
A loggia, cold, with snow coming down past the columns into a courtyard, and Lisa laughing, really laughing, her head back, and somebody’s hand on her arm.
His hand.
He knew it from the scar.
A cradle.
A baby’s fist round a finger.
Then other faces, none of them hers, coming too fast to hold.
A young woman with black kohl to her temples, sitting on a throne that was too big for her, laughing at him with her chin up.
A girl with fair hair blowing across her face on a wall of rough stone, above a plain gone gold with dry grass, looking down at men in bronze.
A hall bigger than a cathedral, black, full of thousands of people holding up little lights.
Coloured beams swinging through smoke.
A woman on a sheet of white ice in the middle of it all, platinum hair cropped short as a boy’s, singing so high the sound went through his teeth.
A poster on a wet brick wall, letters a yard tall in an alphabet he could read: MIRA SOLENNE.
Another poster beside it, peeling at the corner.
A woman with a shaved head and a gap in her front teeth, a twelve-string guitar across her body, mid-laugh.
ROZ FERREIRA.
One night only.
And in every one of them, at the edge, the same scarred hand.
Snow.
“…Signore?”
He was still bowing.
He’d been bowing too long.
He straightened up and let go of her hand, and the hall came back, the paper and the scaffold and the cold light from the windows, and Lisa del Giocondo looking at him with her fair eyebrows raised.
“It’s going to snow,” he said.
He heard himself say it.
It came out of his mouth before he could stop it, because the snow had been so clear that for a moment he’d thought it was already falling.
She glanced at the window.
Grey November sky.
Rain, perhaps.
Not snow.
“In Florence?” she said.
“In November?” The corners of her mouth went again.
“You are from very far north.”
“Forgive me.
I’ve been ill.”
“So I see.” She was still looking at him, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that she was seeing rather a lot.
Then she turned to Leonardo.
“Where do you want me, Maestro?
The same chair?
* * *
She sat in a chair by the far window, in the north light, with her hands folded one over the other on the arm of the chair, and Leonardo didn’t paint.
He’d told John about this on the second day.
The portrait was for her husband, Francesco, a silk merchant with a new house on the Via della Stufa, for the house and for the son.
Leonardo had been working on it for months and had hardly touched the face.
He wasn’t painting her.
He was watching her.
He’d hired a lute player who came on Tuesdays, and a boy who told jokes, and today, he announced, Giovanni from the north would tell stories.
“About what?” said Lisa.
“About the north,” said Leonardo.
“Where it snows in November.”
So John told her about London.
He told her about the Underground, carefully, as a dream he’d once had.
Trains in tunnels under the city, lit by lamps, so full at eight in the morning that men read their newspapers folded into strips.
He told her about a pier on the sea where people walked for pleasure, in the wind, in summer, for a penny, and lost their hats.
“Why would anyone walk on the sea for a penny?” said Lisa.
“To lose their hats,” said John.
“It’s very popular.”
She laughed.
Not the polite laugh.
Short and surprised, through her nose.
Leonardo, at the easel, dipped his brush for the first time all morning.
* * *
She left at one, with the maid, and her cloak, and a look back at John from the door that he spent the rest of the afternoon pretending to Leonardo he hadn’t noticed.
“The stair,” said Leonardo, when she’d gone.
He hadn’t looked up from the brush.
“You saw something.
When you took her hand.
I saw your face.”
“I saw a stair.
Men.
A badge on a sleeve.
Gold and blue.”
Leonardo stopped painting.
“Del Giocondo,” he said.
“That’s Francesco’s livery.
His servants wear it.” He put down the brush, very carefully, the way he’d held the knife wound closed.
“Giovanni.
That woman has a husband who is not stupid, a son of eleven months, and a house that cost him more than I’ll earn in three years.
Whatever you saw on that stair, it isn’t going to happen.
Is it?”
“I don’t know,” said John.
“I don’t know what I saw.
I think it’s what might happen.”
“Then make sure it mightn’t.”
* * *
He spent the afternoon finding out what it was.
He did it the way he would have done it at the Fenwick.
One variable at a time, and write it down.
He had no pocketbook now, so he borrowed a sheet of Leonardo’s cheapest paper and a stub of red chalk, and sat on his pallet behind the screen with the sheet on his knee.
Touch: Lisa del G.
Saw: (1) a stair, lantern, servant’s livery, gold and blue.
(2) Her crying at a window.
(3) Snow, loggia, her laughing, my hand.
(4) Cradle.
Then (5) to (9): other women.
Not her.
Not here.
The first four had felt close.
They had the solid, near feeling of the faint Hartleys in the basement, only further out: not a second ahead, but days, perhaps weeks.
The others had been different.
They were fainter and further, like stations on a wireless set at the very end of the dial, and in every one of them there had been the same hand at the edge of the picture.
His hand.
He knew it by the new scar on the forearm, from the knife.
So I can’t see my own future.
But I can see it in other people’s, if I’m in it.
He needed a second sample.
He found Salai in the cloister, sitting on the well head in the thin sunshine and eating an apple he had certainly not paid for.
Salai looked at him suspiciously.
“Why?”
“I’m told in Lucca they read palms.
I want to see if it works on Florentines.”
Salai shrugged and held out his free hand, palm up, sticky with apple.
John took it.
This time he was ready, and it came more slowly, like a picture coming up in a developing tray.
Salai in the Mercato Vecchio, laughing, in a pair of red shoes with long pointed toes, showing them to a girl.
Salai asleep in the Sala with his mouth open.
Salai running on a wet street at night.
And one more, very faint: a narrow counter, a small man in a black cap, and Salai’s hand putting something down on the wood.
John couldn’t see what it was.
The picture was gone before he could look.
He let go.
“Well?” said Salai.
“You’re going to buy shoes,” said John.
“Red ones.”
Salai’s face lit up like a boy’s.
“Am I?
When?”
“Soon.
I can’t tell when.”
“Then I’m going to be rich.” He bit the apple again, and grinned.
“Your Lucca is a wonderful place, Giovanni.
Tell me more about the shoes.”
* * *
Leonardo’s hand was the third sample.
John asked him for it that evening, honestly, and the old man gave it to him without a word and closed his eyes.
What came was small and ordinary.
Leonardo on the scaffold, drawing a horse’s head for the tenth time.
Leonardo shouting at Zoroastro about money in the cloister, in the rain.
Leonardo sitting by the brazier alone, very late, writing.
“Nothing,” said John.
“Weeks of work.
An argument with Tommaso.
Rain.”
“Good.
That’s the future I wanted.” Leonardo opened his eyes.
“And with Monna Lisa?”
“More.
Stronger.
And stranger.”
“Stronger because you’ll be in it,” said Leonardo.
It was not a question.
He had worked it out at the easel while John was still bowing.
“You told me that the pictures in the basement were where the Professor was about to be.
One second.
These are the same, only further.
Not what will happen.
What may.
Like a tree.
One trunk, which is now, and many branches.”
Branches.
John wrote it at the top of his sheet in red chalk.
The Branches.
It was a better name than any he had.
“Then some branches grow,” he said, “and some don’t.”
“And a gardener can cut them.” Leonardo held his gaze.
“I’ve told you once.
I’ll tell you every day if I have to.
Make sure the stair doesn’t grow.”
That night he couldn’t sleep.
His arm itched under the bandage.
When he shut his eyes he saw snow in a loggia, and then the queen with the kohl, and the girl on the wall, and the two women on the posters, who had names on walls and wore clothes he’d never seen.
He hadn’t told Leonardo about them.
He wasn’t sure what he’d have said.
I touched a woman’s hand and saw five women.
Leonardo would have written it down.
He lay awake until the bells of Santa Maria Novella rang for Matins.
Then he slept, and dreamed of snow falling into a courtyard, and of a woman laughing with her head back, and woke before dawn with his heart going hard and the absolute certainty, which he had no way to test, that he had been dreaming of something that had not happened yet.