A Name in Blood by Matt Rees Read Free Book Online Page B

curtain, anyway? How long is this going to take?’
    ‘A while. You’re accustomed to business that’s concluded in about ten minutes?’ He repositioned her, feeling her shoulders through her thin white shift.
    ‘Don’t be cheeky, Michele. I know how to make them finish in less than two minutes.’ She crooked and poked her finger. The whore’s trick of jabbing into the rectum to
hasten a client’s ejaculation.
    He laughed as he arranged the earth-brown cloth across her back, folding it over her extended arm and spreading it across the table. ‘Now, see here? Where my hand is, focus
there.’
    She held her neck still, angled upwards. He went through the curtain, tying it behind him to leave only a small, round gap at head height.
    Through that space, the bright light falling on Prudenza showed clearly in the mirror set behind Caravaggio. The mirror projected an image of the girl onto the canvas, a technique he had learned
from the men of science at del Monte’s palace. He marked in the key points of her features quickly, tracing them from the projection, so that he could set her precisely in place at the next
sitting. He turned his brush around, holding it with the bristles towards him, and carved through the underpaint with the end of the handle. In single strokes, he cut into the ground layer the
outline of her ear, her forehead, her jaw and her hands. He would fill in the details later, knowing that the shape and the perspective would be natural, just as seen in a looking glass.
    ‘Why do you need a mirror in there?’ she called.
    ‘It makes my job simpler. It allows me to concentrate on what’s really important.’
    The mirror couldn’t account for the genius with which he animated a face in pain or devotion, but it set those emotions on a replica of reality so exact that viewers marvelled at his
virtuosity. Few asked how he did it – except for del Monte’s scientists, who already knew. Others assumed it was pure mystery, like a Virgin standing on a cloud at the top of an
altarpiece.
    Prudenza opened her mouth to ask another question, but he hissed for her to be quiet. The mirror was a secret he didn’t wish to share, and not only because he wanted to preserve his
technical advantage over other artists. He was wary of the Inquisition. Projecting images was heretical magic.
    The bark of a dog came from the loggia.
    ‘Cecco,’ he called. ‘I want the lamp higher.’
    His assistant came in from the loggia and hauled at a rope. The pulley squealed and the lamp rose towards the broken boards of the ceiling. The contrast between shadow and highlight sharpened on
Prudenza’s face.
    ‘Just there,’ Caravaggio said.
    ‘All right, Maestro?’ The boy was twelve years old, but he gave Prudenza a saucy smile and winked at her. ‘ Ciao, amore .’
    She puffed out her cheeks and giggled. Both of them, only children , Caravaggio thought. He felt a moment of goodhumoured condescension towards them, then he found he had to suppress a
sob. He wondered at this strange vulnerability in him. Children, yes, but they don’t live as children.
    ‘You want anything else, Maestro? If not, I’d like to play with Crow. I took him to the inn yesterday and had him walk on his hind legs. Everyone asked me how you taught him to do
it.’
    ‘What’d you say?’
    ‘That you’re a master of illusion who can make a poodle dance, just as you can make the Lord Jesus Christ himself appear before you on the canvas.’
    ‘You’ll get me burned at the stake. Find us some lunch.’
    Cecco went down the stairs for bread and cheese.
    Caravaggio mixed ochre, white and a little crimson on his palette to match Prudenza’s skin tone. He loaded the bristles of a medium brush and stroked the rounds of her ear onto the
canvas.
    Though she kept her head still, the girl’s eyes took in the room beyond the immediate radiance of the lamp. ‘You haven’t got much stuff here, have you, Michele?’
    ‘I told you to look ahead, as