They took their seats in the sala grande, a bright room that overlooked an inner courtyard where Cecilia was trying in vain to grow an olive tree like the ones in Siena. So far, she had only managed to grow it up to a spindly, weak-looking branch. While the artist began to unwrap the blue paper that protected her portrait, Cecilia studied his face. He seemed to have aged years since the last time she saw him. Fine lines stretched across his pale forehead and alongside his eyes. Wiry, gray hairs had sprouted around his once-youthful face. And the color seemed drained from him.
“Are you well, my friend?” she asked, her demeanor turning concerned.
“Yes. Just . . . occupied, more than usual,” he said with a thin smile. “If I am honest, signorina, since your departure from the house, His Excellency has turned . . . restless. Irritable. He loses his temper. He changes his mind. I have begun and scrapped at least a dozen different projects.” He shrugged. “Mostly drawing canals, fortifications, bridges, even new looms for his many silk factories.” He swiped his hand as if swatting a fly.
“You are also painting for him?”
“Yes. Another portrait.” He hesitated, studying her gaze. An uncomfortable silence stretched between them
“Lucrezia Crivelli.” Cecilia whispered her name.
But Leonardo did not answer. He didn’t have to. “I see,” Cecilia said, despairing for a moment that Ludovico had taken another mistress so quickly. Her own dressmaid and would-be companion.
What a naïve girl I have been, Cecilia reproved herself.
The artist sighed, then quickly changed the subject. “Ludovico first enlarged the gardens around the palace. Then he changed course again, back to fortifications along the eastern edge of the city. We have revisited the idea of a bronze equestrian statue to immortalize his father; I had as much as proposed the idea to him years ago and even made a life-sized clay model. You know yourself that there are many white walls in the palace that might be painted. And the duke himself has promised me work at Santa Maria della Grazie. I suppose that I should be gratified. I did work my way into His Lordship’s graces with my offer to support his military efforts. But it has become an unwieldy burden, in the end. I would only admit that to you, since you would understand what I mean about His Lordship’s changes of heart.”
“And Bernardo?”
Leonardo’s brows arched. “If you want to know the truth, he is not himself. Spends his days in the library, reading and writing poetry. He has attempted to make friends with Beatrice. She is learned and lively, I’ll admit, but it is not the same. Bernardo misses you. We both do. And His Lordship has mostly left him to his own projects in the library, which I suspect suits him fine,” Leonardo said with a half smile. “Ludovico has turned his focus away from supporting the artistic life of his palace. Instead, he is obsessed with making alliances with the French throne and the Holy Roman Emperor. He is imagining threats from every corner. He has had me drawing and redrawing military plans until late in the night. I fear that he might be sharing my work with them, and I do not know how they will be used. And Beatrice, well, she seems unable to distract him.”
“Please,” Cecilia said, raising her hand. “I can no longer afford to fill my mind with such concerns. It is enough for me to evaluate my own circumstances.”
“I have burdened you,” Leonardo said. “That was not my intention. Tell me about you, my beauty.”
At that moment, the nursemaid brought Cesare into the room, his black hair damp and his fat cheeks red from his afternoon slumber.
“Amore!” Cecilia jumped up from her chair and took the boy in her arms, covering his face with kisses.
“Young man!” Leonardo exclaimed, tugging gently on the baby’s dressing gown. “I see that they have been feeding you well here.” Cecilia was certain that Leonardo saw the spitting image of Duke Ludovico il Moro in her baby, but he had the diplomacy not to say so. “And I have brought you a gift,” he said to the baby, smiling. “A likeness of your mother. Perhaps years from now, when I am gone, you will look upon it with a fondness for the man who painted it.”
“I wish I could say that I could not accept it,” Cecilia said, hardly able to contain her excitement. “But yes! Of course we will take it. We will find the perfect place to hang it. Thank you,” she said, kissing the painter on the cheek. “Now come. Some air will do us all good.”
Leonardo followed Cecilia, baby in her arms, into the shade of the courtyard. They walked past crumbling stone and roses tangled on the gray arches, and Cecilia’s sad olive tree.
“You are settled here?” he asked, looking up at the coffered ceilings in the archways above their heads. They glimpsed one of the young kitchen maids, who quickly disappeared into the maze of corridors that fed from the courtyard.
The Verme Palace was smaller and not filled with the things that her castle had been, but it would be suitable for Cecilia and Cesare to live well. She had brought with her fine clothes, jewelry, and a few decorative boxes and vases that she was used to seeing in her chambers. To her astonishment, she had even found a trunk for Cesare waiting for them, full of everything a baby could need. As she unpacked her life and Cesare’s, Cecilia wasn’t sure what was worse—to be loved and unable to be kept, or to never have been loved at all.
Ludovico had also sent a nursemaid, a widow who had brought up five boys, to help her raise Cesare. Everything he had promised her she had been given. A fine place to live, lands held in her own name, horses, and a maid to help her raise their son, who would have his father’s protection as he grew into a man. Ludovico il Moro had never promised his own heart to her; she had to admit it. Perhaps, deep inside, she had known from the beginning that she would never have him himself; her own mother and brother had told her so.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s not the ducal palace, but in many ways, it is better.” She gestured for Master da Vinci to sit on a bench alongside an old herb garden now choked by weeds. “I have everything I need. A chambermaid. A wet nurse. A cook. And books! More than I could read in a lifetime.”
“And there is no dogaressa under the same roof.”
“Yes! That is what I like best of all,” she said, laughing. “I do not know how long this will last, but I shall enjoy it as long as it does.” She did not like to admit that the days were long and lonely, that she did not know where she would go when Ludovico decided that her time here was up.
The artist seemed to read her mind. “You know where you will go next, Signorina Cecilia?”
Posed with the question of whether to go to the convent or stay in the castle, she had easily chosen a tenuous life with Ludovico il Moro. But this time, things weren’t so simple. Cecilia was no longer a naïve girl. She knew more now, she had become a woman, and she understood that her decisions had long-reaching consequences. Her decision to stay in the castle against her mother’s will had been the decision of the girl who thought she was a woman, but she now had a child to think of, not just herself.
“My brother has encouraged me to take my vows at the Monastero Maggiore. That is what brought me to Milan originally.”
Leonardo nodded. “A logical solution. The Monastero Maggiore is full of highborn, educated women. You would find others there who share the same interests and talents.”