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them, the pain of it ripping in her, how intense that makes their lust. She'll wait. She'll sit here until they have the courage to emerge from the boat into the bright Sardegna morning, the long limbs of the Dutch girl draping Cesare—her sly smile mocking innocence. And then Francesca will stand up so that Cesare can see her, rise above them and ride the back of a gentle breeze.
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    Of the year 1519, Cesare did not know much. It was the year that Leonardo da Vinci died (in France) and the year that Catherine de Medicis was born to the richest non-royal family in Europe. She was the granddaughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent and would become Queen of France and mother-in-law of Mary, queen of Scots. Among her many contributions to the world would be ballet, she its first patron. Ferdinand Magellan began his voyage around the world, sailing from Seville. The facts of a year knit time to make history. A young goldsmith from Florence fled to Città, was taken in by his uncle who brought him to Fiori, a small village in the hills above Lago Maggiore, and there he fell in love with his cousin Valeria. Her name means Strength. She was fifteen years old with a vitality that Benvenuto wanted to sculpt and make his own. In less than a year she would be married to someone else. The someone else stands among the guests, his eyes trained on Valeria, the only figure not oblivious to her ache. But you must look hard to catch this, the artist playing games, reading the future. Is he telling Valeria she will be all right? Or is he telling himself she will be all right? Trying to excise the pain, remove it as you would a thorn? No good way to end love, is there? That summer of 1519, when the pope and his bishops were carrying on trying to defend Catholicism and Catherine was born to so much privilege and da Vinci died, Benvenuto made a record of the pain, painted his fresco showing Valeria trying to both pull back and set free the ascending man too beautiful for mortal life. The pain would travel across time, being studied and watched and ignored by generations of a family, until in 1972 a gentle woman named Elena removed it from the Fiori villa, restored it, and placed it on the wall of the Città villa, where it still hangs today with a dull lamp suspended above it, illuminating it as gently as possible with the goal of immemorial preservation.
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    Now, sitting in a red velvet armchair, the velvet curtains drawn, Cesare studies the fresco. He studies it as he has many times before, pondering the debatable claw, the notion of fate—but tonight he looks at the painting as if for the first time because Beth is dead. He has just learned of Beth's death today in an e-mail sent by her husband. He had watched her death unwittingly and repeatedly on the television, over and over and over and yet again and would be able to do so for years to come. The little light perched above the fresco casts its glow on the anguish of the girl, the exuberance of the rising star, the fleeing artist, driven not by romantic passion or heritage or money, but by a desire to live untethered from the ground. He watches the fleeing artist enviously, watches the girl grab for his leg. Yes, as if to pull him back or be pulled up and taken away by him. "He wanted to be pulled back," Beth would say, standing there. "He wanted her to take a stand. Look at his left hand," she would say. "Just look at it. Look at the left hand." And Cesare did now, the longing curl of it, of the elegant slender fingers, perhaps, indeed, reaching back for hers. Willful American Beth, his beautiful rebellion.
    Cesare is a forty-three-year-old banker in the town of Città. A rich prominent citizen, he lends money—as his father did and as his father's father did and as his father's father's father did, and so on and so forth—to big manufacturers of socks and shoes, who are trying to become bigger by inventing smarter, tighter, slicker, smoother socks and stockings and