“If I want to paint a miracle powerful enough to help your father, then I need to study Michelangelo.” I smoothed down my tattered vest and breeches. “I need to copy him, bend these drawings away from death and toward life.”

Her eyes narrowed. “And once you finish copying them, you’ll destroy them?”

People will believe anything they want to hear, won’t they? I closed the flap of my satchel over that stack of sketches. “Once I turn the world in your father’s direction, I’ll destroy every one of these drawings. I swear it.”

She nodded—satisfied, I suppose, or perhaps also anxious with wasting time—and pressed her ring of keys into my hands. “Keep these. If I make it back, the guards will no doubt let me into the Vatican. You might not be so lucky.” And then—you’ll never guess—Felice della Rovere, wife of an Orsini, daughter of the pope, raised up on her toes and kissed me.

Dai, I was more surprised than you. Even retelling this story today, I haven’t been able to find a single moment to embellish to build to this event properly . . . not that I would’ve hinted at it because I wanted you to experience the same shock as I. If women knew how impossible it is for us to read them, they would be plainer in their desires, wouldn’t they? Apparently, wanting to kill me and kiss me looks very much the same. Looking back, I suppose she was afraid, heading out into riots—fires, lootings, smoke, violence, dying father and all—so perhaps she was having a last-night-of-the-world-kind-of-a-feeling, but at the time, it felt very incongruous. Not so incongruous that I backed away, sì certo.

When she released me, she said, “Wish me in bocca al lupo?”

That old expression of wishing luck—into the mouth of the wolf—made my stomach coil, but still, as we both crept out of that studio and into the riots, I responded in kind: “Crepi il lupo.” May the wolf die. And I meant it.

Chapter XLIV

Chapter XLIV