The man in the doorway was called Gianni, and Lisa dealt with him herself.
"You're not to do anything," she told John, the next Tuesday, in the chair, in a voice so low under the lute that Leonardo at the easel could pretend not to hear. "You're not to slow him down or look at his future or whatever it is you do. He's my husband's mother's man. She sent him because she thinks I'm too fond of my sister. I'll go to Monna Alessandra this afternoon and cry about how the Maestro made me sit by lamplight till midnight because he wanted to see my face in the dark, and the Maestro will say it's true."
"I will?" said Leonardo, from the easel.
"You will. You said it yourself in October, you wanted to see me by a candle. Now you have." She turned her head back to the pose. "And then Gianni will be sent to stand in the snow outside someone else's door."
It worked. John never found out exactly what she said to her mother-in-law. Gianni was gone from the corner of the Via della Scala by Thursday.
Vanni Lupo took longer.
He sent a note to the del Giocondo house, unsigned, addressed to Francesco, that Lisa intercepted on the step because she had told the porter, months ago, that all letters for her husband came to her first while he was away, so that business wouldn't wait. She brought it to the bottega folded inside her glove. It said nothing anyone could prove. It said ask your wife where she sleeps on Thursdays.
Leonardo read it, and went out without his cloak, and came back three hours later with snow on his hair and a look John hadn't seen on him before.
"I've been to see a man at the Palazzo," he said. "A secretary of the Ten, Niccolò. Clever, underpaid, wants to be liked. I told him where the Spaniard's men are hiding and that they've been asking about the Romagna maps. He was so happy I thought he'd kiss me." He sat down heavily. "They'll take them tonight. All of them, I hope. And then I'll have done to a man what he wanted to do to me, and I'll go to Mass on Sunday and not be able to say why."
They took Lupo at the salt store two nights later, with two of his friends and a chest of Borgia letters. Florence hanged him from a window of the Bargello in the second week of January. John didn't go to see. Salai did, and came back very quiet, and didn't steal anything for a fortnight.
* * *
The winter went the way winters go when you're happy and know you shouldn't be.
She came on Thursdays, because Francesco went to Pisa on Wednesdays and came back on Fridays all that season, buying for the spring. She came with her hood up by the back stair of the convent and her maid Caterina waiting in the chapel below with a rosary, paid. She never stayed past the bell for Lauds. She would not be talked into staying, and John learned not to try.
They didn't spend all of it in the dark. Most of it, he remembered afterwards, they spent talking, wrapped in blankets on the floor of the Sala del Papa beside the brazier, under the great empty wall where the battle would go, because she wanted to know everything and he wanted to tell somebody.
She wanted the future like other women wanted jewels.
"Do women vote?"
"Some. In England, since two years ago, if they're over thirty and own property."
"Thirty." She was outraged. "Why thirty? So they're too tired to use it?"
"Probably."
"And can they own the property without a husband?"
"Yes."
"And keep the money?"
"Yes."
She was quiet for a while. "Then I was born in the wrong century," she said, "and so were you, and you've done something about it, and I can't." She didn't say it sadly. She said it as a fact she'd checked.
He told her about the films. About the influenza. About the war, a little, though she could tell when to stop asking about the war. In return she told him what Florence was underneath: who owed whom, which of the Medici cousins were writing letters from Rome, how much Francesco had paid for the house on the Via della Stufa and how much he'd told people he'd paid. She told it the way Leonardo drew, quickly, with every line in the right place.
"You'd be a good spy," he said.
"I'm a merchant's wife. It's the same work with worse pay."
One Thursday in February it snowed properly, a real fall, the courtyard of the convent white by midnight. She dragged him out into the cloister in a blanket to see it, barefoot, giggling, and stood between two columns with her head back and snow catching in her hair, and laughed, properly, her whole throat. He put his hand on her arm to pull her back into the dry.
He knew it the moment he did it. The loggia, the snow, the hand with the scar.
I saw this, he thought. In November. I saw this before I knew her name.
It should have frightened him. Standing there with snow on his feet, it didn't. It made him feel, for about a minute, that the world was a thing that kept its promises.
* * *
He started looking at her Branches in March, when the frost broke.
He didn't mean to. He'd decided not to. But you can't not see something when you're touching someone, any more than you can not hear a bell, and in March, when he held her hand, the pictures began to come back. The stair, again and again. The lantern at the bottom. And now, after the stair, new things.
A closed door, and a key turning on the other side of it.
Francesco's face, white, saying something John couldn't hear.
A small boy, the eleven-month baby grown older, being carried away down a passage by a nurse, crying and holding out his arms.
They didn't all come every time. Some nights it was only the snow and the cradle, the good branches. But the bad ones were getting stronger, and they were getting closer, and each time he looked at one it grew a little more solid, the way a path through grass grows more solid with walking.
He didn't tell her for a fortnight. Then she told him.
"You've stopped looking at me when you hold my hand," she said. "You look past my shoulder, at the wall. Like a man reading."
"Yes."
"Is it the stair?"
"Yes."
"How long?"
"I don't know. It doesn't come with dates. Weeks." He made himself go on. "After the stair there's a locked door. And your son, taken away."
She took her hand back, slowly, and put it in her lap.
"Andrea," she said.
"Yes."
She was quiet for a long time. The brazier ticked.
"Then it's soon," she said. "The feast, probably. Francesco's giving a feast for the house in April. All the family. All the servants with lanterns on the back stair." She looked at him. "That's your stair, Giovanni. It's in my house. I'll be there and so will you, because Francesco has asked the Maestro to bring the portrait to show his brothers, and the Maestro will bring you to carry it."
* * *
The feast for the house on the Via della Stufa was on the thirteenth of April, the Saturday after Easter, and all Florence that mattered came.
Francesco del Giocondo was a broad, shrewd, pleasant man of forty-four with ink on his middle finger who shook John's hand warmly and asked him what silk cost in the north, and listened to the answer. John liked him. That was the worst of it.
The portrait stood on an easel in the new sala, half finished, under a cloth, and at the right moment Leonardo whipped the cloth off, and forty people in good wool stood and looked at Lisa's face, and then at Lisa, and then back. She stood beside her husband in blue silk and smiled the portrait's smile, a little, at the corners.
"It isn't finished," said Leonardo. "It will never be finished. I'm going to keep it until I die, Ser Francesco, and you'll have to sue my heirs."
Everyone laughed. Francesco laughed loudest.
Later, after the eels and the capons and the sugar castle, John went down the back stair with the empty easel because Leonardo had sent him for the cart, and found Lisa on the half-landing in the dark, waiting.
"One minute," she said.
He should have kept walking. He stopped. She put her hand flat on his chest, and he covered it with his, and the Branches came.
The lantern. Gold and blue. Running.
Not might. Now. Close enough to smell the oil.
He heard the voices at the bottom of the stair, men's voices, and the light came yellow round the turn of the wall, and he pushed.
The world thickened. He had his four counts. Not enough to run. Enough to look.
Two servants coming up with a tray of glasses and a lantern between them. One step from the turn. A second more and they'd see her hand on his chest and his on hers in the light, and the Branches would be true from then on, the key, the door, the boy carried down a passage.
Four counts. He took her hand off his chest and put it on the easel, as though she were steadying it. He turned the easel so it was between them. He stepped down one stair, away from her, so there was a decent arm's length of wood and air between them, a man carrying furniture and a lady of the house holding it for him on a dark stair.
It snapped back. Blood on his lip. The lantern came round the turn.
"Monna Lisa," said the servant, surprised.
"Hold the light up, Bartolo, can't you," she said, in a perfectly ordinary irritated voice. "The man can't see the stairs. He'll drop the Maestro's easel and we'll be paying for it till Christmas."
They held the light up. John carried the easel down. He didn't look back.
* * *
He ended it on the Monday, in the bottega, in daylight, because he couldn't do it in the dark.
She'd already known. She'd known on the stair. She listened to him say it with her hands folded the way she held them for the portrait, and when he'd finished, she nodded.
"Yes," she said. "I'd have done it on Thursday if you hadn't." Her voice was quite steady. "You're going, aren't you? Not just from me."
"Yes."
"Where?"
"I don't know. Somewhere loud." He tried to smile. "I'll know it when I hear it."
"A man out of time." She stood up. She looked at him for a moment the way she'd looked at him on the first day, as if she was seeing a great deal. "Your secret is safe with me, Giovanni. All of them. I'd like you to know that I'd never have told. Not if they'd put me on the rack. Not Francesco. Not my confessor." The corners of her mouth went, very slightly. "I'll just have to keep it in my face. The Maestro will be pleased. It'll give him something to paint."
She held out her hand, as she had the first day, to be bowed over.
He took it.
And he did the thing he'd promised himself, all winter, that he would never do to her.
It wasn't the Press he'd used on Hartley. He didn't take anything away. He didn't touch the snow, or the Thursdays, or the questions about votes. He went in only to the end of it, to the hurt, to the part of her that would sit at a window at night with a hand over her mouth, and he took the edge off that. Dulled it, the way you dull a blade on a stone. Made it into the sort of memory a woman could take out once a year and look at and put back.
She swayed. A thin line of blood came from her nose and she put her fingers to it, surprised.
"It's the cold in here," she said. "The Maestro never lights the brazier enough."
"Yes," said John.
The hurt was in him now. He felt it settle, the way Hartley's Clara had settled, a lodger taking a room. A woman's grief, sharp and clean, as if it were his own, for a man who was standing right here.
She went down the stairs. At the turn she looked back, and smiled, and it was the smile in the portrait, the one Leonardo would spend the next fifteen years trying to finish.
* * *
"You did something to her," said Leonardo that night, at the brazier. "At the end. I saw her nose."
"Yes."
"Did she ask you to?"
"No."
Leonardo looked at him for a long time. He didn't say anything else about it, then or ever. He went to the trestle and came back with a bundle in a cloth, and unwrapped it on John's knees. Bread. A cheese. A knife. The little red notebook, the one with John in it.
"Burn this," he said, "or take it. I'd rather you took it. And when you hear your loud place, Giovanni, go before I wake. I don't like doors."
John heard it at the end of May, at night, on the pallet behind the screen. Far off and getting louder, like guns over the horizon on a still evening. Not guns. Steel on wood, thousands of times, the same strokes, and a sea, and a man breathing.
He put the notebook inside his shirt, and the watch on his wrist, and went towards it.