“Like Simon, he went nearly mad with love. Ania became pregnant, and although there was never a possibility that she and Cosimo would marry, he promised to take care of her and their child.
“Ania’s pregnancy was unusually difficult, and Ania’s mother tried everything she knew of midwifery to save her daughter and the baby. When nothing worked, in desperation she experimented on Ania, trying cures she’d seen in dreams. But in the end, Ania died giving birth to her daughter, whom she named Bianca.
“Bianca told me that her grandmother always insisted that it was the medicines she’d given to Ania during her pregnancy that had changed Bianca from a normal child of Eshael’s gifted line into something … different.
“Young Cosimo was devastated by Ania’s death, but his family was ready for him to move into the city and take on his new role as a leader in the de’ Medici family. He kept his word to care for Bianca and brought her with him to Florence, raising her alongside other de’ Medici children. Even when he married Eleanor de Toledo and they had their own children, Bianca was treated as a proper member of the family. Eleanor is said to have loved her as her own. For a while, anyway.”
“What happened to change that?” Caitlyn asked.
“Whatever gifts Bianca inherited from Eshael’s line were magnified by the medicines Ania was given during her pregnancy. Even as a small child, when Bianca was angry she could make objects fly across the room. She knew who was going to die, and how and when, and she told them. She had visions of the future that always came true. And if she tried very hard, she could make a living creature sicken and die just by staring at it.”
“Good God,” Caitlyn whispered.
“Cosimo was the only person she loved enough to want to obey, at least occasionally. Everyone else was frightened of her and let her run wild. And Cosimo eventually lost control of her when she seduced the family priest when she was twelve.”
“You mean
he
seduced
her
.”
Raphael shook his head. “No. She told me he was a challenge she set out to conquer, just to see if she could do it. After that, she was beyond even Cosimo’s control. She ran off with a painter: my father.”
“Your father was an artist!”
“A student of Bronzino’s.”
“The portrait! Bronzino did two portraits of Bianca!”
Raphael nodded. “My father died soon after running off with Bianca, and even though she had almost nothing and was nearly a child herself, she took me under her wing. In time she became a celebrated beauty, and used her de’ Medici name and connections to find herself ever more powerful lovers, until she finally became the mistress of Cardinal Rebiba, Grand Inquisitor of the Roman Inquisition.”
“And signed her own death warrant,” Caitlyn whispered.
Raphael nodded. “She had two daughters before she met Rebiba: Giulia and Elisabeta; each had a different father. Bianca traveled to Paris more than once to visit her distant de’ Medici cousin, Catherine, Queen of France. Bianca hinted that at Catherine’s request she herself had caused Henry II to have the jousting accident that killed him and left Catherine in control of the country.
“When Pope Pius V eventually found out that Bianca was the mistress of his Grand Inquisitor, he was enraged. Cardinal Rebiba was in charge of investigating heretics, and yet he was sleeping with one of international renown.
“Rebiba renounced her,” Raphael said with bitterness. “He did it to save his own skin. He filled Pius’s head with tales of her sorcery, but then he went a step further and said that Giulia and Elisabeta had inherited Bianca’s satanic craft.
“Even Cosimo could not save Bianca from the stake after Cardinal Rebiba’s testimony.”
Caitlyn swore softly. She had a flashback to the nightmare Bianca had given her, of being burned.
“Cosimo might not have been able to save Bianca, but he did arrange to send Giulia and Elisabeta—and me—into the relative protection of Catherine de’ Medici’s care.”
“Did Giulia and Elisabeta inherit Bianca’s talents, like the cardinal said?”
“Yes. That’s why Catherine holds them. France is in crisis, and she needs every means at her disposal to maintain power over it. Giulia and Elisabeta could prove invaluable weapons against Catherine’s enemies. I didn’t realize that at first, though. I was stupid. I trusted that Catherine’s only wish would be to help Giulia and Elisabeta, and in my ignorance I made a terrible mistake.”
“What did you do?”
“I told Catherine that there was a Templar treasure hidden at Château de la Fortune, and that Bianca had asked me to find it and place her heart at its center.” Raphael put his hand to his face, half covering it in shame as he shook his head at his error. “I should
not
have been so naïve!” He dropped his hand and sighed. “Catherine kept the girls in Paris with her, ‘for safekeeping,’ while I came here to find the treasure.”
“So Catherine is holding them hostage, guaranteeing that once you find the treasure you won’t run off with it.”
He nodded. “And now someone is trying to steal Bianca’s heart. I assume it’s someone in Catherine’s employ, as having the heart might increase my sisters’ powers. It might also be someone sent by Pius, though; he would see it as the last trace of Bianca that must be destroyed.”
“
Does
the heart have power, like they think?”
“I think it does.” He paused and met Caitlyn’s eyes. “I think it brought you to me.”
Caitlyn’s skin went cold.
Bianca’s burned heart
was the force that had drawn her to Raphael? She shook her head, unwilling to accept it.
“You saved me from the falling stone,” Raphael insisted. “And you know something about the treasure. I swore to Bianca I would find it, and I
will
. With your help.”
His intensity was almost frightening. She was still reeling from the story he’d told about Eshael, Ania, and Bianca, and from the idea that the Queen of France was holding his adoptive sisters hostage and possibly hoping to get her hands on Bianca’s heart.
Caitlyn took a breath and gathered her wits, then she told Raphael the little she knew about Gerard, the last of Simon’s family, and according to legend the last to know the location of the treasure that Simon had hidden somewhere in the castle. “Shortly before he died,” Caitlyn said, “Gerard wrote a letter to a friend saying, ‘Only the light of God can guide you to the true treasure,’ meaning salvation, supposedly.” Almost as an afterthought Caitlyn added, “And Gerard made an unusual sundial.”
Raphael’s eyes went wide.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.
“‘The light of God.’ ”
“What is that, anyway? I mean, specifically.”
“It can be many things. Truth. Christ. God’s word. Righteousness.” Raphael started to smile. “It can even mean … the sun.”
Caitlyn’s lips parted. “The sundial,” she breathed.
He nodded, the firelight dancing in his eyes. “Only the
sun
can guide us to the true treasure.”
Caitlyn’s heart thumped, and she jumped to her feet. “There must be some trace of the sundial still here!”
He laughed. “It won’t be pointing us anywhere right now: it’s night.”
“So? We can still look for it.”
“We don’t need to.”
“Why not?”
He grinned. “I already know where it is.”
CHAPTER
Eighteen
“Show me!” Caitlyn demanded.
“You can’t wait until morning?”
“No!”
“Neither can I,” he confessed with a grin. Candle in hand, he unbolted the door and led her out into the hall, checking first to see that no one else was about.
They went up one of the spiral staircases and down another corridor before reaching their destination: a large room at the end of one wing of the castle. Windows let in just enough moonlight to show the room’s few features: a fireplace big enough to walk into; a few wooden chairs; an assortment of swords and axes mounted on the walls; some padding and shields on a rack; and a battered table on which Raphael set the candle.
“It’s where the others practice fighting in bad weather,” Raphael explained.
“Not you?”
“Me, too. Just not with the same enthusiasm.”
“You don’t like it?”
“It’s good exercise for keeping strong, and it is a skill I need to have, but no, I don’t enjoy it like the others do. I would rather spend my energies elsewhere.”
Caitlyn went to a window and looked through a small pane of leaded glass at the valley far below, the Dordogne River a silver necklace laid in a velvet bed of trees and fields. Even in the moonlight she could tell that it was summer, not winter. “I love this view,” she said.
He came to stand beside her at the window, so close that if she leaned slightly toward him their arms would touch. “I would like it better if there were a city in it,” he said.
“You don’t like the countryside?”
“I’m not fond of being alone.”
She gazed up at him, hearing an echo of loneliness in his voice. “Are you alone, even with your adoptive cousins and your tutor here with you?”
“I was,” he said, meeting her eyes.
Her breath caught in her throat. “You have no one special to you, in Rome? No girl?”
He shook his head. “I was too busy in Beneto’s workshop to meet anyone. I was never one for drinking and carousing; I felt most at home in the quiet of the art studio.”
“Do you mean that Beneto is an
art
teacher?”
“Of course. He was fortunate enough, as a very young man, to have been a student of Raffaello Sanzio—I’m named after him, by the way. Beneto was never able to make a name for himself with his art, but through his workshop he’s created many young artists in Rome. Bianca was a great patroness to him, and he was devoted to her. He closed his workshop to come with me here, with her heart.”
“So
you’re
an artist, like your father was before you?”
He shook his head, clearly embarrassed. “I don’t dare call myself one, yet; I’ve only had a few minor commissions. Someday, I’d like to have my own studio, though. Someday, when my sisters are safe.”
“And what will you paint in your studio, someday?”
He looked partly away, then slanted his gaze back at her. “Perhaps I’ll paint you.”
Made self-conscious by the flattery, Caitlyn put the back of her wrist to her forehead and all her weight to one hip in a melodramatic pose.
“No, I wouldn’t paint you like that,” Raphael said softly. “I’d make you a spirit of the air, treading the clouds. A goddess.”
Caitlyn dropped her wrist, embarrassed. “No one’s ever compared me to a goddess before.”
“Shouldn’t all women be treated as such?”
She gave him a sideways, suspicious look. “It’s a good thing you didn’t get out of the workshop much. The girls of Rome would have been in trouble!”
He grinned and waggled his brows. “Do you think so?”
She pushed his shoulder. “Naughty boy.”
“I could be much naughtier.”
Caitlyn sucked in a breath, alarmed and thrilled by the dangerous look in his eyes. She clasped her hands primly in front of her. “So where’s the sundial?” she squeaked.
Raphael gave her a knowing, mischievous look, then went to the middle of the room and gestured for her to join him. “Look around and tell me what you see.”
She joined him in the middle of the room and only then, as she looked around, saw that one of the windows had an inset of a sun shining down on water. “The library!” she said.
“No,” Raphael said, shaking his head in obvious puzzlement.
“Yes, it’s … ,” she trailed off, her mind flipping back and forth between dream and reality.
It’s never been a library, as far as he knows
, she thought. She walked slowly toward the sun window, stopping in front of it. The familiar polished square of metal was set in the stone sill, reflecting moonlight. She shuddered.
“You found it,” Raphael said.
She turned to him. “Found what?”
“The sundial.”
She shook her head, not understanding.
“The sun comes through the window and hits the silver mirror,” he said, pointing to the metal plate, “then the reflection hits the ceiling. There are time lines painted across the plaster above us, and the reflected light from the mirror will point to what time it is, using those lines.”
Surprised, Caitlyn tilted her head back, looking up at the ceiling that, unlike most in the castle, had its beams hidden under a smooth, plastered surface. It was not white, though: its entirety was covered in painted designs that she could not make out in the candlelight. “The clue to the treasure is in those designs somewhere?”
“It must be,” he said, excitement in his voice.