“There’s just one final thing,” Serrin said hesitantly. “About the bloodline angle. And the androgyne.”
“Mmmm?”
“I wondered, just wondered, if it might not be a woman, you know. Putting her face on Shroudman. Doing what her great-great-as-many-greats-as-you-can-count great-grandfather did when he painted Mona Lisa. Wouldn’t it fit?”
Most chains of reasoning break down somewhere. Serrin’s just had. But as Geraint toweled himself dry after his shower and mentally checked the list of purchases he wanted to make on the way, and as the others discussed their options, it was a woman, somewhere, who looked down on all this and smiled.
But she was smiling upon someone else, and he was in another city.
21
She’d changed little. There were a few, just a very few white and gray hairs scattered among the thatch of black, but her blue eyes were as liquid bright and ocean deep as ever they had been. Geraint hadn’t thought that eyes so dark blue could be found outside of Tir Na nOg, but he’d been mistaken. And he’d looked into them long enough to be sure, those many years ago.
“It’s been a long time, Geraint,” Cecilia said in her soft voice.
“I needed the time,” he said simply.
Geraint took her hand and led her down the marbled corridor, into the conservatory garden. He knew every inch of the house, and it hadn’t changed much in all this time. Some of the trees had grown more than he might have expected; the freak olive, with its cinnamon-edged leaves, had flourished and stood double his height now. He sat down with her at the bronze-topped iron table and presented her with his gift.
She opened the packaging, pushing back the layers of silky, pearl-colored tissue paper, and took out the dress. It was the simple, classic, small black dress that has always flattered the woman slim and small enough to wear it well. She was about to compliment him on it when her hand found the jewel box underneath it. Her eyes darted a glance at him, then dipped again as she flipped it open and took out the pearls inside. She smiled at him.
“These are truly beautiful,” Cecilia said quietly. “You flatter me.”
“Impossible,” he said, returning her smile. He was indescribably relieved to find that he could gaze steadily at her and not feel as if his heart was about to burst. “Flattery is an untruth. They suit you. Nothing less would have done.”
She put her elbows on the table and cupped her face in her hands. If her eyes had not quite cut him to the quick, the small, upturned nose, at least, gave him a pang that reached back through the years for his heart.
“You always were the perfect gentleman,” she said, the same quiet smile playing about her face. “Ah, it is good to see you. You look well. But a little tired. What have you been up to?”
“Ah, well, Contessa, that is a long story.” He grinned, lighting a cigarette for her.
“And like so many of your long stories, not one I’m going to be told,” she chided him. “You British are always so.”
He looked away with a rueful expression. “I’m not so sure of that, but in this case it’s purely business.”
“You are not married,” she observed.
“You neither,” he replied, wanting to get the ball out his court swiftly.
“I said you were the perfect gentleman,” she told him, “Men here, they want sex, or money, or a name, for reputation and wealth. And if they love me, it is swiftly over. I am no longer of such an age that I can summon that emotion so easily in a man’s heart, nor keep it fixed there.”
“I doubt that,” he replied with feeling. Cecilia de Medici had not changed so very much after all. But he stiffened just a little as she poured a second glass of wine for herself, not more than a few minutes after the first, which had been waiting for her when she arrived. He had only sipped his. That had been the reason why he could not, after her husband Bernardo died in one of Italy’s staggering tally of road accidents, come back to her. It was her fatal weakness, and if her face and body did not show the ravages as yet, it would not be so very long before they did. Not that that had worried him; it had been the effect on her emotions, the terrible black depression that settled on her when she was drunk, then remained with her for days stretching into weeks, further fueled by the endless drinking.
When she was like that, and she had been so very often, she drained emotion and life from all around her. Geraint hadn’t wanted to end up floating down the river, as others had before him. Lovers died because of this woman. She’d told him once, when he’d found the bruises on her and was ready to rip Bernardo apart with his bare hands, that sometimes she deserved them. Geraint had been young then, and uncomprehending but over the coming months had grown older and wiser very swiftly.
But it is bright here, he thought now, looking around at the sun-filled conservatory; and unless I am much mistaken that is Maria, her maid still, and by God she was an oasis of sanity in this household. And there are still the glorious paintings, and the sculptures, and the hoard of Medici papers the family discovered recently in some long-abandoned country house, so I am bound to be shown those I can get through this. There should be enough to keep all the bad memories at bay. The trick will be not to remember the good ones.
“what did he leave unfinished?” Michael said. Serrin was flicking through books, print-outs, and piles of paper, and
Englishman was calling up archival and library material from everywhere he could think to look.
“There isn’t really any single thing. There’s nothing specific when he died,” Serrin said. But I came across something interesting here, from a biography. Listen to this.
“ ‘He had progressively purified the syntax of his work throughout his career, finally reaching one supreme emotion that contains all others-and since some element of his sexuality crept into it, reason cannot always resist the overwhelming impression it conveys. John the Baptist leads to every temptation. I like to think that this was Leonardo’s last work-in some sense his final will and testament. His subject has ceased to be “a voice crying in the wilderness” He has reached the ultimate limits of human knowledge; he smiles and points at the source of evrything, which amazes him but which is unfathomable’.”
“And he has the Mona Lisa smile. The smile of the shroudman Matrix icon.”
“There’s something else too. The writer says that John the Baptist was painted at the same time that Leonardo was drawing terrifying images of an apocalypse. There are some entries from Leonardo’s diaries here about this.
“Ah yes: ‘The submerged fields will display waters carrying tables, beds, boats, and other improvised craft, out of both necessity and fear of death; on them, men, women, and children, huddled together, will be crying and lamenting, terrified by the furious tornado that whips up the waves and with them the corpses of the drowned… The waves strike against them and repeatedly buffet them with the bodies of the drowned, and these impacts destroy those in whom a breath of life still pulses… Oh, how many people you will see stopping their ears with their hands, so as not to hear the mighty noise with which the violence of the winds, mingled with the rain and the thunder, and the cracking of the thunderbolts fills the darkened air! Others, losing their reason, commit suicide, despairing of being able to bear such torture; some hurl themselves from the top of ridges, other strangle themselves with their Own hands, others again seize their children and kill them with a blow. Oh, how many mothers brandish their fists against the heavens and weep for the drowned sons they hold on their knees, howling curses on the wrath of the gods.”
“By the spirits, I had no idea be ever wrote anything like that.” Serrin closed the book; he looked genuinely distressed by what he’d read.