It is May and I am in the Amboise garden, soaking up the noon sun, courtiers milling about on the many paths; yet I am alone, with my sketchbook, to write, to think. And I am thinking about Francesco, how he arrived at my studio in the pouring rain. Drenched. He had ridden from Vaprio. I don’t forget that rain, that stormy Florentine afternoon, that eager, wet face of his, his mud-spattered horse, his servants’ horses, how they looked in the street, as Francesco spoke to me. Cold, very cold, even for April. Tiled roofs were choked with rain. Drowned cobbles. Leaves and mud.

But there he was at my door, bowing, smiling.

“Maestro da Vinci...I want to be your pupil.”

That was seventeen years ago. Was he only fifteen? It doesn’t seem possible he was so young. He was my favorite from the start. I love Salai as a son, but this young man, this gracious young man, is friend and ardent disciple. Painter! When I have been his guest at Vaprio, I am honored. Francesco’s father and mother make their villa a place of rest. I know. I have fled there, from the condottieri. I am always protected by the Melzis.

His illness upset the studio.

“Melzi’s sick! Francesco’s sick!”

Fever day after day, hands like ice, coma. Shivering though his apartment was sunny. I thought he might have malaria. The plague. I called in the best doctors; I sent for Francesco’s father. His uncle came instead. Other doctors came. And in his delirium, Francesco painted a large canvas, with a flock of white birds in the sky, carrying a blue tree. October, November—bad months for sickness. But by December he was up, skinny, hungry, forever hungry.

And there was his father’s gratitude to me, his uncle’s gratitude, as if I had been the physician. That summer, as Francesco convalesced at Vaprio, I vaca­tioned there. The family purchased my portrait of A Boy. That rolling land, the swift Adda, those canals, the villa gardens with their Roman statues and roses...roses...the women in the gardens, picking roses. But I have written about this before? ...I am getting forgetful.

We sketched and painted.

I remember a puppy lying in my lap as I dozed in one of the gardens, the one with the apple trees. Good food, good wine, summer, that was Villa Vaprio. I learned about summer there—what summer really means.