"Again," said Leonardo.
"I'll faint."
"Then faint. I'll catch you. I've caught heavier things." He was standing on a stool by the scaffold with a lead plumb weight on a cord in one hand and a stick of chalk in the other. "Ready? When I let go, you do your trick, and you watch the weight, and you tell me where it was when the world came back. Not where you think. Where it was."
It was the ninth day. John's arm had scabbed under the linen. He'd slept every night on a pallet in the corner of the Sala del Papa behind a screen of drawings, and eaten Salai's bread and Leonardo's soup, and told the old man everything he could think of in exchange: wireless, motor cars, the shape of the earth, aeroplanes. Leonardo had listened to the aeroplanes with his eyes shut and then gone very quiet and drawn a bird's wing for an hour.
They'd started measuring on the second day.
"Now," said Leonardo, and let go.
The weight swung away from his hand. John pushed. The hall went thick and slow. The weight hung at the bottom of its swing, a dull grey drop at the end of a taut line, moving the way the hour hand moved: not at all, and then somewhere else. Leonardo's hand was still open where it had let go. A fly had stopped in the air by the window with its wings blurred.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Cold in his fingertips. Warm on his lip.
It snapped back. The weight swept on up its arc.
"There," said John, pointing at the board behind the cord, where Leonardo had chalked a fan of lines. "Third mark from the bottom. Left of centre."
Leonardo chalked it. Then he looked at the water clock on the trestle, a copper bowl with a hole in the bottom dripping into a cup, and counted the drops in the cup with the tip of a brush.
"One drop," he said. "Not even. In your head, four counts. On the drip, less than one. And on the weight..." He measured with his fingers on the board. "A twentieth of its swing." He climbed down, very pleased. "You are a small, slow god, Giovanni. For as long as it takes to say Ave."
"Thank you."
"I mean it kindly. It's a beginning. You don't walk the day you're born." He took John's hands and turned them over. The fingertips were white again, and the nails had gone a faint blue. "Cold. Each time colder. And the nose." He handed him a rag. "And you eat like a horse after. So it costs heat and blood and food. Like a fire. A fire in you, and it burns faster when you do it." He tapped his own head. "Mm. What burns, can burn out."
"I know."
"Do you? I wonder." He wrote in his little red notebook, right to left, in the backwards hand John had seen in facsimile at the British Museum and never expected to see wet. "Again tomorrow. Today you'll do the other thing. The clay."
* * *
The other thing was the one John didn't have a name for yet. Leonardo called it the turning.
On the trestle by the window stood a horse the size of a cat, in grey clay, rearing, its mouth open. Leonardo had made it on the first day as a study for the battle, and made it badly on purpose, he said, so he could watch John fix it.
John put his hands on it and pushed a different way. Not to slow the room. Into the horse.
The clay changed under his palms. He felt it go, wet to dry, the way clay went in a week by a window, all in a breath. The colour paled. A crack opened along the neck, fine as a hair, then wider. He pushed further, and the crack crept down the leg, and grains of clay began to crumble from the hoof onto the trestle.
He pushed back the other way.
That was harder. That was like pushing a cart uphill. The crack closed. The colour darkened. The clay went cool and damp again under his fingers, and the crumbs on the trestle stayed crumbs, because they weren't part of it any more, and the horse stood there exactly as Leonardo had made it, badly, with its mouth open, a little shorter in one hoof.
John took his hands away. They were blue to the wrist, and he couldn't feel them.
"Dio," said Leonardo softly. He came and took John's hands and shoved them, without ceremony, into his own armpits, inside his tunic, and held them there. "Like a shepherd with a lamb. Don't argue. You'll lose your fingers." He looked at the horse over John's shoulder. "Backwards and forwards. But only what's still part of it."
"Only what's still part of it," John agreed, through his teeth.
"And alive?"
"I don't know."
Leonardo let go of his hands. He went to the window ledge, where Salai's dead hare from the market still hung on a nail by its back legs, two days older, and brought it to the trestle and laid it there with great gentleness, and looked at John.
John put one thawed hand on its fur.
Nothing. He pushed, and the hare lay under his hand and stayed exactly as dead as it had been. It was like pushing at the wall in the basement, but soft. As if the hare simply wasn't something time would let him into.
"No," he said.
Leonardo nodded slowly, as if he'd expected it and was a little sorry.
"Good," he said. "Then you won't be tempted." He hung the hare back on its nail. "Tempted men are dull."
* * *
On the eleventh day, the Signora came.
John heard her before he saw her: a woman's voice on the stair, low, amused, saying something to a maid about the cold, and then the maid's laugh. Leonardo straightened up from the cartoon and wiped his hands on his tunic, which made them dirtier, and said, "Ah. Now you'll see something."
The woman who came in was about twenty-four, in a dark green dress with the sleeves laced on, and a thin black veil over her hair that was almost not there. She wasn't a great beauty. That was the first thing John thought, and it surprised him. Her face was broad and calm, and her eyebrows were so fair they hardly showed, and she had the look of a woman who ran a house with eleven people in it and could tell you the price of everything in the kitchen. Then she looked round the hall, at the paper, at the scaffold, at the horses with their mouths open, and something moved at the corners of her mouth, as if the whole room was a joke she'd decided to be polite about.
"Maestro," she said. "You've had a battle."
"I'm drawing one, Monna Lisa."
"No, you've had one." She looked at the red chalk stain on the tiles, still there after ten days of Salai not washing it. Then at John's bandaged arm. "And who is this?"
"Giovanni. A guest. From Lucca, and then from very far north."
"How far north?"
"Very," said John.
She looked at him for a moment longer than was polite. "Lisa del Giocondo," she said, and gave him her hand, and John took it and bowed over it the way his mother had once shown him in their kitchen in Camden Town, laughing, this is how they do it in Lucca, Johnny, if you ever meet a lady.
Her hand was warm. And the hall came apart.
* * *
It wasn't a push. It came by itself, the way the doubled pictures had come in the basement, but stronger, and closer, and all at once.
A narrow stair, dark, and men's voices at the bottom, and a lantern, and a badge on a servant's sleeve, gold and blue. Running.
Lisa at a window at night with her hand over her mouth, crying without a sound.
A loggia, cold, with snow coming down past the columns into a courtyard, and Lisa laughing, really laughing, her head back, and somebody's hand on her arm. His hand. He knew it from the scar.
A cradle. A baby's fist round a finger.
Then other faces, none of them hers, coming too fast to hold.
A young woman with black kohl to her temples, sitting on a throne that was too big for her, laughing at him with her chin up.
A girl with fair hair blowing across her face on a wall of rough stone, above a plain gone gold with dry grass, looking down at men in bronze.
A hall bigger than a cathedral, black, full of thousands of people holding up little lights. Coloured beams swinging through smoke. A woman on a sheet of white ice in the middle of it all, platinum hair cropped short as a boy's, singing so high the sound went through his teeth. A poster on a wet brick wall, letters a yard tall in an alphabet he could read: MIRA SOLENNE.
Another poster beside it, peeling at the corner. A woman with a shaved head and a gap in her front teeth, a twelve-string guitar across her body, mid-laugh. ROZ FERREIRA. One night only.
And in every one of them, at the edge, the same scarred hand.
Snow.
"...Signore?"
He was still bowing. He'd been bowing too long. He straightened up and let go of her hand, and the hall came back, the paper and the scaffold and the cold light from the windows, and Lisa del Giocondo looking at him with her fair eyebrows raised.
"It's going to snow," he said.
He heard himself say it. It came out of his mouth before he could stop it, because the snow had been so clear that for a moment he'd thought it was already falling.
She glanced at the window. Grey November sky. Rain, perhaps. Not snow.
"In Florence?" she said. "In November?" The corners of her mouth went again. "You are from very far north."
"Forgive me. I've been ill."
"So I see." She was still looking at him, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that she was seeing rather a lot. Then she turned to Leonardo. "Where do you want me, Maestro? The same chair? My son was up all night with his teeth and so was I, so if I fall asleep, paint me asleep."
* * *
She sat in a chair by the far window, in the north light, with her hands folded one over the other on the arm of the chair, and Leonardo didn't paint.
He'd told John about this on the second day. The portrait was for her husband, Francesco, a silk merchant with a new house on the Via della Stufa, for the house and for the son. Leonardo had been working on it for months and had hardly touched the face. He wasn't painting her. He was watching her. He'd hired a lute player who came on Tuesdays, and a boy who told jokes, and today, he announced, Giovanni from the north would tell stories.
"About what?" said Lisa.
"About the north," said Leonardo. "Where it snows in November."
So John told her about London. He told her about the Underground, carefully, as a dream he'd once had. Trains in tunnels under the city, lit by lamps, so full at eight in the morning that men read their newspapers folded into strips. He told her about a pier on the sea where people walked for pleasure, in the wind, in summer, for a penny, and lost their hats.
"Why would anyone walk on the sea for a penny?" said Lisa.
"To lose their hats," said John. "It's very popular."
She laughed. Not the polite laugh. Short and surprised, through her nose.
Leonardo, at the easel, dipped his brush for the first time all morning.
* * *
She left at one, with the maid, and her cloak, and a look back at John from the door that he spent the rest of the afternoon pretending to Leonardo he hadn't noticed.
"The stair," said Leonardo, when she'd gone. He hadn't looked up from the brush. "You saw something. When you took her hand. I saw your face."
"I saw a stair. Men. A badge on a sleeve. Gold and blue."
Leonardo stopped painting.
"Del Giocondo," he said. "That's Francesco's livery. His servants wear it." He put down the brush, very carefully, the way he'd held the knife wound closed. "Giovanni. That woman has a husband who is not stupid, a son of eleven months, and a house that cost him more than I'll earn in three years. Whatever you saw on that stair, it isn't going to happen. Is it?"
"I don't know," said John. "I don't know what I saw. I think it's what might happen."
"Then make sure it mightn't."
* * *
That night he couldn't sleep. His arm itched under the bandage. When he shut his eyes he saw snow in a loggia, and then the queen with the kohl, and the girl on the wall, and the two women on the posters, who had names on walls and wore clothes he'd never seen. He hadn't told Leonardo about them. He wasn't sure what he'd have said. I touched a woman's hand and saw five women. Leonardo would have written it down.
He got up and went to his coat on its nail behind the screen for the wallet, and Tom's letter, the way he did on bad nights.
The wallet was there. The letter was there.
His wristwatch was not.
He'd taken it off before sleeping and put it in the coat pocket, as he did every night, because the strap rubbed. A Swiss watch, nickel case, white enamel face, a present from his mother on his twenty-first. He felt in every pocket. He felt in the lining. He felt on the floor.
Across the hall, by the light of the banked brazier, Salai was asleep on his own pallet with his curls on his arm and his mouth open, looking like a painted angel. Beside the pallet, neatly together, stood a pair of shoes John had never seen before. Red leather, soft, with long pointed toes. The kind young men bought in the Mercato Vecchio when they'd come into money.