The Ruby Ring Read Free

startled her and she glanced to see a green-and-gold liveried guard, glinting sword drawn, glowering at her. “Move along! You’ve no business here!”
    Margherita swallowed hard, feeling a sudden odd spark of haughty indignation flare up through the initial burst of panic at the authority in his tone. It was an unexpected sensation, and she tipped up her chin.
    “I believe you do not know that,
signor guardia.
”
    The guard, in formal puffed trunk hose, vest, and puffed toque, looked at her appraisingly. A moment later, he began cruelly to chuckle. “Indeed I do know it,
signora,
” he condescendingly declared. “If not by your garments, then certainly by the expression of pure inferiority on your pretty, young face.”
    Well-dressed passersby gaped at her, some of them whispering behind raised hands, one man even chuckling to himself.
    Angry at the sleight, something suddenly caused her to reply. “
Allora,
is this not a public street,
signor guardia,
where I may look at whatever I wish?”
    “The street is public, the residence you ogle is private.”
    “I stand only on the street, bothering no one.”
    “Like a bug landing on a sweet cake.”
    “Are you always so charming?”
    His response was a snarl. “True spirit,
signora,
falls flat in one without the means to sustain it. It takes no more than a glance to see that this neighborhood is well beyond the likes of you, and that there is no good reason on earth for you to loiter here, and so I tell you again to pass!”
    “You know nothing of me. You yourself are but a servant to those beyond
your
scope. And, by the way, brute force,” she haughtily countered, “falls just as flat as spirit—in one without the
mind
to see it through!”
    “I shall not ask again,” he growled. “Move along, I say, back to whatever rabbit warren you come from!”
    Someone behind her laughed mockingly then and Margherita felt the heat of embarrassment redden her cheeks. The moment was over, but spirit, for Margherita Luti, the baker’s daughter, was a harder thing to press away forever.
             
    R APHAEL STOOD FIRMLY, arms crossed over his chest, in a velvet doublet of deep scarlet, with full gold sleeves. His face, beneath umber-colored, neatly tamed waves of shoulder-length hair, was tight with frustration. It was not a classically handsome face, but sensually intense. His cheekbones were high, his chin was small, and his eyes were like clear black glass. Through the long, unshuttered window of the richly paneled workshop, his
studio,
with its soaring ceiling and heavy beams, a stream of buttery sunlight crossed the woman. She sat perfectly still on a stone pedestal before the master and his assistant.
“Per l’amor di Dio,”
he groaned, then turned from her.
    Beside him, still occupied with his own task, a young apprentice in a dark-blue working robe, belted with frayed rope, stood at a long plank table grinding colors into a wooden bowl. Another stood, tying miniver paintbrushes, while still another sharpened drawing pencils. Swirling throughout the workshop was the pungent odor of oil paint and linseed oil, and all around was the relentless hum of ceaseless activity. Worktables were littered with pallets, empty pewter tankards, half-eaten plates of food, and unlit candles in puddles of dry wax from the evening before—the unruly environment of a group of men focused only on excesses of work.
    Raphael nodded to the tall, ruddy-faced bear of a man, with a distinguished shock of gray hair, punctuating his order with an absent wave of the hand. It was a silent directive to pay the girl for her trouble and see her home. It was the second time this week alone that he had dismissed a model. Giovanni da Udine, the assistant who had been with him the longest, let an audible sigh as his heavy lidded eyes rolled to a close. The search would go on.
    Raphael ran a hand over his face. He had known instantly she was not right. To Giovanni, an artist far more literal