Chapter Ten
After the plates and food are cleared from dinner, I go to Leonardo’s room, but he’s not there.
Although he could be. There is enough mess to hide at least three Leonardos.
The desk is an unspeakable wreck of papers, charcoal, and old paintbrushes, some of them snapped, some of them ruined with dried-on paint.
The bed is a snarl of blankets, pillows, and clothes, the linens stretching halfway up the wall.
The floor is littered with torn bits of paper, crumbs.
I even spot a spider weaving a web that rivals the grandness of the duomo itself.
When I step inside, one of Verrocchio’s garden cats leaps from its hiding place through the open window.
Madonna santa, he lets them sleep here? I grimace and try not to sneeze.
It seemed better to talk to Leonardo here, where no one could see me or hear me, but being in his room feels too intimate, and waiting outside the door feels desperate.
I don’t know why Lupa is so convinced he’ll help me.
Leonardo is many things, but I wouldn’t say helpful is among them.
Sure, yes, he helped me once, but only once.
When it’s time to rinse off the brushes, he’s mysteriously ill.
When someone must sweep the workshop floors, it’s his day off.
He does exactly what he wants to do, and nothing more.
Begging him to make helping me one of the things he wants to do causes my palms to sweat, my heart to crawl along the bottom of my stomach.
What if he says no?
Then I’ll have groveled for nothing, and he’ll lord it over me forever. It would crush me.
I move to wait outside the door and knock into a bookcase I didn’t see behind me. An avalanche of paper flutters to the floor, all of them sketches in various stages of doneness.
I kneel to pick them up.
And freeze when I see what they are.
Figure drawings, dozens and dozens of them. People in piazzas, people in cafés.
People in bed.
Those make my cheeks hot. There is nothing obscene about them, but the attention of each careful line, the delicacy of the details, feels astonishingly intimate, too private for my pillaging eyes.
So he does practice, even though he pretends not to.
Is this what he does when he ditches our morning lessons?
Why not just tell Master Verrocchio, so he’d stop punishing his lateness with chores?
Each sketch is arresting, alive, even the half-finished ones.
Sadness in the slant of the light, a declaration of love in heavy-lidded eyes.
It’s as if he captured part of his subjects’ souls with charcoal and paper.
My insides lurch at the thought of what he would see if he ever turned his artist’s eye on me.
I gather the sketches and return them to the shelf.
But there are piles more, and my brain must be broken, because I can’t stop from rifling through the others.
One shelf is all insects. Another is different fish.
One entire stack is different parts of a rose, rendered so clearly, I could be holding the flower in my hand.
I sift through them all, brow furrowing.
There are enough sketches here to paper the workshop’s walls twice over.
This must be a passion project of Leonardo’s, one done at the expense of his actual, paying job.
Promising myself I’ll be done after this, I lift one stack halfway, just barely glimpsing a familiar-looking face—
“Virgil!”
Leonardo explodes through the open doorway, his face wild.
I leap back from the bookcase like it’s on fire.
Madonna santa, there is no good reason for me to be in his room.
Mortifyingly, it was I who created the rule about not trespassing in other apprentices’ spaces without their consent.
Leonardo thought it was ridiculous when it happened (What if someone’s hoarding all the best brushes, and I want to paint, Virgil?
What then?), so to mark the occasion he scrawled ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE above the door leading to my attic, which was undeniably rude of him, but at the same time, almost thoughtful, given how I felt about having my privacy.
Except now he’s caught me snooping through sketches he doesn’t want anyone else to see, or he would’ve shown them to us forever ago. If he did the same to me, I’d never let him live it down, and we both know it.
My nails dig painfully into my palms.
I’ve found my cause of death. Not a horrible accident or a wasting illness, but the humiliation of Leonardo rightly roasting me every day until I finally walk into the Arno River.
I lick my chapped lips and force my eyes to meet his. “Look. I’m sorry, I can explain—”
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” He talks over me like I’ve said nothing. He stumbles forward, grabbing both my wrists. “I need your help.”
I gasp at the coldness of his fingers. He’s never touched me before, unless he was trying to jostle me out of the way for the best workspace each morning.
Perhaps I didn’t just bump into his bookcase: It fell down and crushed me, and this is the very first level of my own personal hell. “What are you talking about?”
He squeezes my wrists, brow divoting. “I need your help with the Medici wedding portrait. I can’t do it alone.”
I glance at the bookcase to see if it’s still there and not pinning my broken body to the floor and drowning me in an avalanche of Leonardo’s saucy sketches, but no, it’s still standing.
“You want my help?” Because I’m supposed to be asking him for help.
Leonardo nods vigorously, red-blond hair flying.
We stare at each other some more while I wait for what he said to make sense.
“You remember I can’t paint right now, right?” I say. There’s no way I could possibly be useful to him. He’s the one who bailed me out of my last deadline.
The stairs creak behind us. I yank myself from Leonardo’s grip before someone sees us holding hands and making prolonged eye contact.
Unlike the good God-fearing masses, no one in Master Verrocchio’s workshop cares who fornicates with whom, but I’d rather die than have anyone think I might care for him that way.
“It’s best if you don’t pick up a brush or charcoal or anything. I haven’t forgotten the millipede dog,” Leonardo says.
“All right?” His explanation isn’t making anything clearer.
He collapses against the wall, rubbing his temples. “I just need you there while I do it, really. Maybe offer some thoughts here and there.”
“That doesn’t really sound like me helping.”
“No, it is,” he says. “ ’Tis odd, but… I do my best work when another person is around. Trying to work on that portrait while the competition stares over my shoulder—” He blows out a breath and drags a hand through his hair. “I get all in my head about it and can’t do anything.”
This almost makes sense, except… “I’m the person who makes you relax enough to work?”
Unless I’m very much mistaken, our entire relationship is based on mutual dislike and a begrudging respect for the other’s talents.
I can’t imagine a world where I’m the person Leonardo wants at his side, unless we’re both being kidnapped by Venetian pirates, and he plans to use me as a convenient distraction to escape.
“Verrocchio also told me if I don’t finish this painting, he might have to kick me out,” Leonardo adds sheepishly. “I haven’t finished any of my work yet this year.”
Ah, so here’s the real reason he wants me around. I snort, thinking of how many mornings I saw the love marks on his neck and his kiss-bruised lips. “Surely someone would take you in.”
He crosses his arms and frowns. “If you’re going to be a monster about it, don’t bother.” His eyes drag to mine. They’re a deep umber, and the room is too dark for me to see what he’s really feeling. “Will you come with me tomorrow or not?”
I tap my chin, pretending to consider the offer, then nod.
I don’t want to seem too eager to work with him, even though inside, I’m soaring.
I didn’t have to ask Leonardo for help—he begged me to help him.
I sidestepped the whole being-honest nonsense and got what I wanted.
About time some good fortune fell into my lap!
Someone coughs delicately.
Lupa stands behind Leonardo in the corridor, a grumpy tortoiseshell-colored cat in her arms. She must’ve been the person who came up the stairs, and she was clearly listening to our conversation.
She catches my eye and lifts her brows meaningfully.
She nods at the cat in her arms, and then toward the stairs to my attic.
The threat is clear: If I’m not honest with Leonardo, she really will piss on my bed like a cat. Sod it all to hell.
Sighing, I drag my hands down my face. “I wanted to ask you for a favor too.”
Leonardo’s entire presence shifts into a higher key. “Oh, really now?”
Even with Lupa’s threat, it’s hard to force the words out. “I know I don’t share much about myself—”
He snorts. “A grave understatement. You’re a strongbox someone’s chained shut and buried—”
“But do you remember when my brother disappeared two years ago?”
He sobers at once. “Of course I do. That was awful.”
An heir’s disappearance from a wealthy merchant’s family was sensational news.
Vanished, without a note or a record of where he’d gone!
His poor mamma and siblings! Could you believe it?
Verrocchio gave me the space I needed afterward, but the other apprentices hadn’t.
They were filled with questions, as if my brother’s disappearance was a story they were eager to read, and not my actual life.
I endured as much as I could before snarling that if anyone ever brought up Niccolo again, I’d snap their smallest finger.
I immediately felt like a monster, but no one bothered me afterward.
Come to think of it, I feel like I remember Leonardo shepherding more zealous boys away from me when they inched closer.
The memory makes me feel awkward now—like I shouldn’t have forgotten it.
“Right. Well, since then, I’ve been supporting my mother and sisters financially.
If we won this wedding commission—assuming you’re fine with splitting the prize money—it would help.
” Fifty florins isn’t enough to buy Casa delle Volpi outright, but it would be enough for a substantial payment on the outstanding balance.
“I think… I think if you’re struggling to paint, and I’m struggling to paint, we could do better work together than we could apart.
” My throat tightens. I barely manage to get the truth out before I choke on it.
“I needed this commission so badly, and I was too scared to even try to get it.”
Leonardo doesn’t need to know that my brother might be alive on top of this. This is quite enough soul-baring for today.
Leonardo’s voice sounds far away, even though he’s right before me. “Obviously we’d split the prize money, Virgil. I’m not interested in hoarding wealth like your merchant family is.” The joke is gentle, just the amount of levity the situation needs to not be weird anymore.
I cross my arms with a huff. “You try telling your mamma to wear muslin instead of velvet.”
His grin unspools like honey. “I wouldn’t dare. A woman’s will is not to be trifled with.” He sticks out a freckled hand. “Seems like we got a bargain, then.”
The word hits me strangely, the new context a shape the familiar doesn’t quite fit into.
It’s hard to imagine a bargain made without blood, without me giving something up in return.
I clasp Leonardo’s hand and finally meet his eyes.
“And we’ll both get what we want from it.
” Ideally before this time next year, when I’ll be too dead to enjoy our successes.
The corner of his mouth lifts. When he pulls away, his thumb brushes the skin on the back of my hand. “I certainly hope so.”