Scozzone's Colors

"You must hate him a little," said the wine merchant's daughter, watching Ascanio cross the workshop yard with the particular grace that made every apprentice before him look clumsy by comparison. "The way the master dotes on him now."

Scozzone didn't look up from the sketch she was pinning to the wall, one of Cellini's, a study for the nymph's hand, the fingers not quite right yet and both of them knew it. "Why would I hate him?"

"Everyone assumes you must. You, of all people, watching another face take up so much of Cellini's attention."

"Everyone assumes a great many things about what I feel, based on almost nothing they've actually bothered to ask me." She smoothed the pin flat. "Come here. Tell me what's wrong with this hand."

The girl squinted at it. "I don't know anything about drawing."

"Neither did I, six years ago. Look at the third finger. Does it bend the way a real finger bends, or the way Benvenuto wanted it to bend because the composition needed the angle?"

She had learned to see workshop drawings the hard way: by holding a hundred poses across a hundred sessions and watching, from the inside of each one, exactly where the artist's eye lingered and where it lied to itself for the sake of the picture. Nobody in the household had thought to ask her opinion of Cellini's actual working process in longer than she could remember, which struck her as a real waste, given that she probably understood the mechanics of it better than half the apprentices currently drawing wages for it.

"I don't hate Ascanio," she said again, when the girl didn't leave. "I think he's better than Benvenuto at some things already, and I think Benvenuto half-knows it, which is why he shouts at him twice as often as he shouts at anyone else. That's not jealousy. That's just watching closely enough to see what's actually happening in this house."

"Then what do you feel, if not jealousy?"

Scozzone considered this honestly, since the girl had at least asked properly rather than assuming. "Something closer to worry. He's good enough that people at court will eventually want something from him, and he's young enough that he won't see it coming the way Benvenuto would." She glanced toward the yard again, where Ascanio was laughing at something with one of the stone-carvers. "I'd rather he learned that from me, gently, than from someone with worse intentions."

What she did want, what she'd wanted for longer than she'd ever said aloud to anyone in the household, was simpler than jealousy and harder to ask for. She wanted Benvenuto to notice, just once, that the hand he was correcting on that wall had spent six hours holding still so he could study exactly how it fell when a body finally gave out from fatigue. She wanted someone besides herself to know how much of his celebrated eye had been trained on her own, unpaid, uncredited patience.

She didn't ask for it. Models didn't, in this house or any other she'd heard of, and she'd long since stopped expecting the arrangement to change on her account. She fixed the drawing back in place, straightened the pin, and went to find out what new pose Benvenuto wanted from her that afternoon, knowing more about how his genius worked than anyone else in the building, and knowing, too, that the knowing would stay exactly where it currently lived: inside her, unspoken, and entirely her own.