“You know what our problem is?” she said. “We make it look too easy. I do all my saving of my father under a veil of darkness, and you don’t even add any rough patches to your paintings so we can see how difficult the perfect parts must be. And instead of cursing a few times an hour while you paint, you always look so blessedly happy. You should act more frustrated. Show a little anger.”

“Would you rather I take a page from Michelangelo’s sketchbook and throw a plank or two at your father’s head?”

“You wouldn’t dare.” She extended her hand and bit the side of her finger, in a playful gesture threatening violence, but she was smiling.

I smiled, too, but then . . . “I should go home. Or maybe not home because of the duke and all, but back to Florence or Città di Castello. They like me in Città di Castello.” I sighed. “I really am too nice for Rome, aren’t I?” I asked, repeating the criticism she’d leveled at me the first day we met in the papal apartments.

She nudged me and repeated my own words back from that day: “How can you be too nice for Rome? Rome is a city of saints.”

And I repeated her own words back to her: “How boring that would be.”

She linked her arm through mine. “Men are made in Rome, Raphael. You can’t leave. My father would be too disappointed for me to allow it.”

“But why should I spend another year on a new room if it’s only going to be destroyed?”

“For a man who claims to be an expert on people, you’re awfully dense sometimes.”

“Michelangelo will cut down my paintings when he wins.”

“That I don’t doubt. It’s my father you’re misreading. Saving your work is simple.”

I sat up straight, took out my father’s old paintbrush, and began twirling. If anyone could give me the key to impressing her father, it was Felice. “Tell me what to do. I’ll do anything.”

“Win.”

I sank back down. “Considering your father’s understandable anger with everyone hailing from Urbino, I think that would take a miracle, my lady.”

She shrugged. “So? Deliver a miracle.”

“There’s a problem with that plan, signora Orsini.”

“What’s that?”

“How can I deliver something that I don’t believe exists?”

Chapter XLI

Chapter XLI