Or when should he tell her?
He had been a fool to have left the schematics for the iron box out on his worktable … but she was more ingenious than he’d suspected, first finding the casket and then figuring out how to open the lock. And it was that very cunning, he had to admit, which gave her such a powerful hold over him. She was not only the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, but the most clever. He had first spotted her on the arm of an aristocrat at Fontainebleau, when he had gone there to design a fountain for the King of France, and he had known from that very first moment that he had to have her … as model, as muse, as lover.
After picking up some odds and ends—wire and wax for his armatures—he found a perfect small sapphire at a jeweler’s shop, poorly set in a pendant necklace. The foil behind it, meant to bring out its brilliance, was instead dulling it, and he thought that, with a little work, he could reset it. The jeweler, another friend of his, gave him a good price, but as he stepped out of the shop, thinking about his dinner, he caught a whiff of smoke in the air. Several other people had smelled it, too, and they were all looking toward the southern side of the Arno, from which the wind was blowing.
Cellini’s step quickened as he crossed the rest of the bridge, and quickened even more as he entered the Borgo San Jacopo. The smell of smoke was stronger here, and it was blowing from the west, the direction of his studio. A gypsy boy was sprinting past, and Cellini snagged him by his arm. “Where’s the fire?” he asked and the boy, yanking his arm loose, said, “Santo Spirito.”
Cellini broke into a run, the smell getting stronger all the time, and passing people who were also heading in the direction of the fire. By the time he rounded the corner, and saw the fire wagon outside his workshop, with Ascanio and a dozen other men throwing buckets of water at the blaze, he had dropped all but the necklace.
He pushed his way through the onlookers and rushed to Ascanio’s side. “Is everyone safe? Is Caterina safe?”
Ascanio, his face smeared with soot, shouted “Yes!” over the crackling of the flames. “We threw what we could out the windows!” Indeed, some loose books and sketches and even a few medallions still littered the street. “I’ve got the jewels in my pockets!”
“And the rest?” Cellini said, knowing that Ascanio would take his meaning.
“They are safe.”
Cellini was so relieved that his most prized treasures had been saved, and Caterina spared, that the loss of everything else hardly mattered. He grabbed an empty bucket, filled it from the barrel on the wagon, and hurled the water through a burning window frame. But he could see, through the billowing smoke, that nothing would stop the fire. The residents of the neighboring houses were already emptying out their own homes, for fear the conflagration would spread, and in all the confusion, a man with a sword at his side suddenly slapped a firm hand on his shoulder and said, “Benvenuto Cellini?”
Before he could even answer, someone else had slipped a black sack over his head and jerked a leather cord to tighten it around his neck.
He heard Ascanio holler, and the sounds of a street brawl, and he swung the bucket at whoever was holding him. It hit something brittle, he heard a groan, then the cord was yanked tighter. He couldn’t breathe, and he was knocked off his feet by what might have been the hilt of a sword. Still kicking, he was dragged into an alleyway, then manhandled into a waiting carriage. He heard the crack of a whip and felt the wheels begin to roll. As he struggled to get up again, a knee was pressed to his chest, and a voice close to his ear hissed, “Call on your demons now.”
Chapter 7
David was poring over the lab reports when he suddenly became aware that he was being watched.
The moment the analyses had arrived by special courier, he had raced into the Newberry’s book silo—a large research space containing the Newberry’s precious collections of codices, maps, and manuscripts—to comb through them. Microscopic samples of the ink and paper had been sent off to Arlington, Virginia, where the FBI submitted its own materials, and from what he had ascertained so far, everything about the documents given to him by Mrs. Van Owen checked out. In terms of age and provenance, they were completely authentic. And he’d have been delighted to bring her that news himself if she had not already been standing on the steel catwalk above him, studying him like a bug in a jar.
He had not heard her come in, nor did he know how long she had been silently observing, but the hairs on the back of his neck prickled nonetheless.
“What are you reading?” she asked, her voice muffled and absorbed by the thousands of volumes stored in the cylindrical shelves that rose all around them.
“Ink and paper analyses from the sketch of La Medusa,” he said, waving one hand over the cluttered desktop.