Felix took cover under the blanket while Maisie snored lightly beside him.
Before long, another bolt of lightning lit the sky outside. Felix remembered that if he counted the time between the lightning and thunder, he would know how far away the storm was.
One, he began.
Two.
“Felix!” someone called. “Felix, where are you?”
“Under here,” Felix said softly.
The blanket got torn from him, revealing his painter friend looking down at him with excitement.
“This is no time for sleep,” he said.
“I wasn’t exactly sleeping,” Felix said.
More thunder crashed around them.
Felix ducked under the blanket again as the boy clapped his hands in delight.
“What are you doing here?” Maisie grumbled sleepily.
“Did you hear that?” the boy asked her.
“The thunder?”
“When I throw a pebble in a pond, I noticed that waves form in a circle around it,” he continued, “expanding steadily outward from it.”
“Okay,” Maisie said. “Sure.”
She yawned again. “What time is it, anyway?”
“From this observation,” the boy went on, “I deduced that sound and light must also travel in waves. But through the air.”
“Sound waves,” Maisie said. “Right.”
A bolt of lightning seemed to land right outside the house, and for a split second everything was illuminated: Maisie’s sleepy face and golden hair frizzy with static electricity, Felix peeking out from beneath the blanket, and the boy grinning.
“Wait!” the boy practically shouted. “I always see lightning before I hear thunder. Yes?”
“I . . . I don’t know,” Maisie said. “I guess so.”
“Therefore light waves must travel faster than sound waves!”
As if on cue, more thunder sounded, causing the boy to laugh with delight.
“Why is this so exciting, anyway?” Maisie said.
He looked at her, surprised.
“Discovery is the most exciting thing of all,” he said.
“Are you a scientist?” she asked, frowning up at him. “I thought you were a painter.”
He shrugged. “I love nature,” he said, as if that explained everything. “I learned this from my uncle Francesco. He ran my grandfather’s farm about twenty miles from here, where I lived as a boy. There, we had vineyards and olive trees, and we grew wheat. My uncle would take me outdoors with him, from the time I was five or so, and I grew to love watching the birds in flight, the flowers, all of nature. From this, we learn, yes?”
Rain began to fall, hard, outside.
“But how did you learn to paint?” Felix asked, feeling safer now that the rain had come.
“I always loved to draw,” the boy said. “And I was always very good at it.”
Felix wondered why, if Sandro Botticelli had said that very thing, he would have sounded boastful, but this boy did not.
“One day, a local peasant made a round shield and asked my father to get it painted for him. My father immediately thought of me for the job, because he knew I could draw. Immediately I imagined painting Medusa on the shield.”
“Medusa?” Maisie asked through a yawn.
“The creature with snakes in its hair, right?” Felix asked eagerly.
The boy nodded. “Exactly. I had seen many interpretations of Medusa, always looking so serene and pleasant. But I thought Medusa should be grotesque. I mean, a head full of snakes is grotesque, isn’t it?”
He didn’t wait for a reply. The memory had made him grow excited, and he paced as he described what he did next.
“I wanted these snakes to be realistic, not interpretive. To draw my Medusa, I needed models, so I went outdoors to collect specimens. Not just snakes, but lizards, too. What does a reptile’s scale really look like? How do I capture it realistically? I positioned my models around the room where I was painting the shield, and lost myself there for many days. I’m not sure if my father screamed at the sight of Medusa, or at the smell of those dead reptiles. But when he came in, he screamed!”
Maisie wrinkled her nose at the thought of decomposing animals, but Felix grinned as he imagined such a Medusa.
“Did the man like what you painted?” Felix asked.
The boy laughed.
“My father thought it was so good that he sold it to an art dealer, and the art dealer sold it to the duke of Milan, and now here I am! In a famous artist’s studio!”
“Wow,” Felix said in admiration.
The sound of footsteps nearing made the three of them look in that direction.
A short, pudgy, stern-looking man appeared in the doorway.
“Aren’t you working on the angel?” he said to the boy.
“I am, yes. But I noticed something important.”