Thorn by Fred Saberhagen (books to read romance .txt) 📗

      It was approximately mid-day when I awoke, with my right shoulder gently going numb under the steady pressure of a smallish head covered with brown curls. I needed a moment to identify the head with certainty. The hair looked much different since it had been washed, and there was also a delightful difference in the smell; my slowly awakening senses discovered some essence of the flowers of the Tuscan countryside.

      The girl was still in a deep sleep. She was not clinging to me, exactly, though she lay with one arm across my chest—again I got the impression rather that I was the rocky protuberance upon which she had been cast ashore by the storms of life.

      Gently I eased free my deadening arm, drew open the bed curtains, and looked around the room. Someone had been in while we slept— bedroom privacy was not valued then as much as now, and anyway the curtained bed provided it. Fresh clothing of fine cloth and the latest cut had been laid out for us both, upon a pair of great wooden chests that served both to decorate the room and provide storage.

      Atop a third such chest leaned paneled Magdalen, her back propped against the wall. I considered her presence, and understood from it that all my few possessions must already have been brought here from the Medici house in town. From this in turn I understood that my wife and I would be expected to avoid the city, at least while the affair at the Boccalini house was still fresh. Which seemed to make obvious sense.

      Shortly after being dislodged from my shoulder, Helen had moved voluntarily in her sleep, turning on her back and pulling the cover up close under her chin. She lay with pretty pink lips parted to reveal surprisingly good teeth. Reclining with my head propped up on one hand, I studied her. I found myself turning my gaze from her flesh to the Magdalen’s freshly painted face, and back again. As I have mentioned, the painting was still unfinished, but the work remaining to be done consisted of details of the woman’s dress and of the background. As far as I could see, the modeled face was nothing short of absolute perfection. It was Helen, and yet was not—it seemed rather that the living face beside me had somehow failed to reach its own ideal.

      That I, Vlad Drakulya, now had possession of both breathing flesh and painted image, was a fact; and the more I considered this fact the more momentous it grew, the more pregnant with a significance whose nature I could not grasp at once. Like other men of the fifteenth century, I was usually more than half ready to see omens, hidden meanings, wonders spiritual and supernatural. Even in the warm sunlight of midday.

      Helen, this girl of hardly more than half my size or age, stirred in her sleep beside me. Then she turned on her side away from me, and a moment later snuggled backward till her soft flank touched me under the light cover. I forgot the painting, and moved to accomplish the one thing still necessary to seal our marriage completely in the eyes of God and man. Helen, only half awake at first, resisted me mechanically—but then, as she awoke fully, she relaxed, and even gave some evidence of enjoyment.

      As soon as the first dance was over, I pulled some pillows into better position for both of us, and we lay there side by side, regarding each other and the world from a nest of greater physical comfort than either of us had lately been accustomed to.

      “My bride,” I meditated aloud. There was a grave expression in those dark young eyes now fixed on mine, and I was trying to fathom what might be going on behind them.

      “Yes.” The one-word answer somehow conveyed, I thought, her willingness to accept bride-ship as a starting point and to see where it might lead. And I was cheered by the fact that she did not seem to be a heavy talker. Reticence by day and a lack of snoring by night would count for much.

      A light warm breeze was stirring the fine gauze curtains at our open window. I could hear gardeners at work not far outside. They were digging, snipping branches, scraping at the earth. A good male voice rose lightly in Italian song. We were a floor above ground level, secure against casual observation from outside, but from where we lay much greenery was visible. The grounds at Careggi were quite as impressive as the house. When I sat up fully in our bed and pulled its curtains farther open I could glimpse graveled walks, distant lawns being smoothed by grazing sheep, and beds of massed flowers. There was a fountain, studded with statuary and rimmed by concentric rings of masterly stonework. All shimmered in late summer’s warmth.

      “Ah,” said Helen, in a new tone. I looked and saw that she had just discovered the painting. Next moment, without pretense of modesty, she had slipped out of bed and gone to inspect it at close range.

      “I wish my face was truly so,” she said at last.

      “But I think the artist has accurately caught your beauty.” I was an experienced husband, you will recall.

      “But no, this is really a marvel. I never had the chance to take such a good look at it before—I was always on the other side of it, you know, when I was posing.”

      “I agree, a marvel. Too bad it is unfinished.”

      Without turning, Helen gently waved one hand in my direction, dismissing that objection; and, certainly, the painting was essentially complete. “I think,” she said in Italian, “that boy has been touched by the good God.”

      But my mind was turning elsewhere. The two of us had important matters to talk about, and I judged the time had come. “Helen.”

      A hand on one bare hip like Donatello’s David, she turned her head at the new sound in my voice, and probed