LITMIR.BIZ

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too generous,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘but I shall not hold that against you. Have no fear, I will take you to Palazzo Tolomei, but first, do satisfy my rude curiosity and tell me what happened to this young lady, and why she was laid out for dead in that coffin.’

      Now for the first time, Giulietta spoke. Her voice was as soft and steady as her face was tense with grief. ‘Three days ago,’ she said, ‘the Salimbenis raided my home. They killed everyone by the name of Tolomei—my father, my mother, my brothers—and everyone else who stood in their way, except this man, my dear confessor, Friar Lorenzo. I was in confession in the chapel when the raid took place or I, too, would have been…’ She looked away, struggling against despair.

      ‘We have come here for protection,’ Friar Lorenzo said, taking over, ‘and to tell Messer Tolomei what happened.’

      ‘We have come here for revenge,’ Giulietta corrected him, her eyes wide with hatred and her fists pressed hard against her chest as if to prevent herself from an act of violence, ‘and to gut that monster, Salimbeni, and string him up by his own entrails…’

      ‘Ahem,’ said Friar Lorenzo, ‘we will, of course, exercise Christian forgiveness.’

      Giulietta nodded eagerly, hearing nothing. ‘…While we feed him to his dogs, piece by piece!’

      ‘I grieve for you,’ said Maestro Ambrogio, wishing he could take this beautiful child in his arms and comfort her. ‘You have borne too much.’

      ‘I have borne nothing!’ Her blue eyes pierced the painter’s heart. ‘Do not grieve for me, just be so kind as to take us to my uncle’s house without any further questioning.’ She caught herself, and added quietly, ‘please.’

      

      When he had safely delivered monk and girl to Palazzo Tolomei, Maestro Ambrogio returned to his workshop at something resembling a gallop. He had never felt quite this way before. He was in love, he was in hell…in fact, he was everything all at once as Inspiration flapped its colossal wings inside his skull and clawed painfully at his rib cage, looking for a way out of the prison that is a talented man’s mortal frame.

      Sprawled on the floor, eternally puzzled by mankind, Dante looked on with half a bloodshot eye as Maestro Ambrogio composed his colours and began the application of Giulietta Tolomei’s features onto a painting of a hitherto headless Virgin Mary. He could not help but begin with her eyes. Nowhere else in his workshop was such an intriguing colour to be seen; indeed, not in the entire city was the same shade to be found, for he had only invented it on this very night, almost in a fever frenzy, while the image of the young girl was still fresh on the wall of his mind.

      Encouraged by the immediate result, he began to trace the outline of her remarkable face underneath the flaming rivulets of hair. His movements were still magically swift and assured; had the young woman at this very moment sat before him, poised for eternity, the painter could not have worked with more giddy certainty.

      ‘Yes!’ was the only word escaping him as he eagerly, almost hungrily brought those breathtaking features back to life. Once the picture was complete, he took several steps backwards and finally reached out for the glass of wine he had poured for himself in a previous life, five hours earlier.

      Just then, there was another knock on the door.

      ‘Shh!’ hushed Maestro Ambrogio, wagging a warning finger at the barking dog. ‘You always assume the worst. Maybe it is another angel.’ But as soon as he opened the door to see what demon had been dispatched by fate at this ungodly hour, he saw that Dante had been in the right.

      Outside, in the flickering light of a wall torch, stood Romeo Marescotti, a drunken grin splitting his deceivingly charming face in half. Apart from their encounter only a few hours earlier, Maestro Ambrogio knew the young man only too well from the week before, when the males of the Marescotti family had sat before him, one by one, in order to have their features incorporated into a formidable new mural in Palazzo Marescotti. The paterfamilias, Comandante Marescotti, had insisted on a representation of his clan from past to present, with all credible male ancestors—plus a few incredible ones—in the centre, all employed, somehow, in the famous Battle of Montaperti, while the living hovered in the sky above, cast as the Seven Virtues. Much to everyone’s amusement, Romeo had drawn the lot least suitable for his character, and consequently Maestro Ambrogio had found himself forging the present as well as the past as he expertly applied the features of Siena’s most infamous playboy to the princely form perched on the throne of Chastity.

      Now chastity reborn pushed his kind creator aside and stepped into the workshop to find the coffin still sitting—closed—in the middle of the floor. The young man was clearly itching to open it and peer once more at the body inside, but that would have meant rudely removing the Maestro’s palette and several wet paintbrushes that were now resting on top of the lid. ‘Have you finished the picture yet?’ he asked instead. ‘I want to see it.’

      Maestro Ambrogio closed the door quietly behind them, only too conscious that his visitor had been drinking too much for perfect balance. ‘Why would you wish to see the likeness of a dead girl? There are plenty of live ones out there, I am sure.’

      ‘True,’ agreed Romeo, looking around the room and finally spotting the new addition, ‘but that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?’ He walked right up to the portrait and looked at it with the gaze of an expert; an expert not in art, but in women. After a while he nodded. ‘Not bad. The eyes are remarkable. How did you…’

      ‘I thank you,’ said the Maestro hastily, ‘but the true artistry is God’s. More wine?’

      ‘Many thanks.’ The young man took the cup and sat down on top of the coffin, carefully avoiding the dripping brushes. ‘How about a toast to your friend, God, and all the games he plays with us?’

      ‘It is very late,’ said Maestro Ambrogio, moving the palette and sitting down on the coffin next to Romeo. ‘You must be tired, my friend.’

      As if transfixed by the portrait before him, Romeo could not tear away his gaze long enough to look at the painter. And when he finally spoke, there was a sincerity to his voice that was new, even to himself. ‘I am not as much tired,’ he said, ‘as I am awake. I wonder if I were ever this awake before.’

      ‘That often happens when one is half-asleep. Only then does the inner eye truly open.’

      ‘But I am not asleep, nor do I wish to be. I am never going to sleep again. I think I shall come every night and sit here instead of sleeping.’

      Smiling at the ardent exclamation, a most enviable privilege of youth, Maestro Ambrogio looked up at his masterpiece. ‘You approve of her, then?’

      ‘Approve?’ Romeo nearly choked on the word. ‘I adore her!’

      ‘Could you worship at such a shrine?’

      ‘Am I not a man? Yet as a man, I must also feel great sorrow at the sight of such wasted beauty. If only death could be persuaded to give her back.’

      ‘Then what?’ The Maestro managed to frown appropriately. ‘What would you do if this angel was a living, breathing woman?’

      Romeo took a deep breath, but the words escaped him. ‘I…don’t know. Love her, obviously. I do know how to love a woman. I have loved many.’

      ‘Perhaps it is just as well she is not real, then. For I believe this one would require extra effort. In fact, I imagine that to court a lady like her, one would have to enter through the front door and not skulk beneath her balcony like a thief in the night.’ Seeing that the other had fallen strangely silent, a brush-stroke of ochre trailing across his noble face, the Maestro proceeded with greater confidence. ‘There is lust, you know, and then there is love. They are related, but still very different things. To indulge in one requires little but honeyed speech and a change of clothes; to obtain the other, by contrast, a man must give up his rib. In return, his woman will undo the sin of Eve, and bring him back into Paradise.’

      ‘But how does a man know when to hand over his rib? I have

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