He was alone in the room. As he looked up from his seat on a pile of cushions on the floor, she caught her breath. In that white light coming through the translucent glass panes, David's grayish eyes took on an opalescence.
The cardinal's cabinet on the top floor was the best-lit chamber in the mansion. When Ugolini was not using the room, David often came here to study, write, and meditate. And when neither David nor Ugolini was there, Sophia sometimes came to draw and paint.
She felt as if David were a magician, and that his eyes had cast a spell on her. In Ugolini's cabinet it was easy to think of magic. She had always associated magic with darkened chambers and cellars, but Ugolini practiced his magic at the top of his mansion, in a room with many windows.
"The long-awaited answer from Simon has come," Sophia said, tossing the opened scroll down before David.
David spread Simon's letter on his lap and read it, while Sophia looked around the room. On a table near a window lay that painted skull Ugolini kept toying with. On one wall were two maps of the heavens. Sophia recognized the constellations in one of them, but the other was utterly strange. One arrangement of stars in the second map seemed to take the form of a Latin cross. She studied with interest the paintings on scrolls nailed to the walls, of plants and animals so odd-looking that she thought they might be an artist's inventions. One was a bird without wings, another a spotted animal that looked like a deer but had an enormously elongated neck. It might be pleasant to try painting such creatures herself.
As David's eyes ran over Simon's letter, his lips curled in a faint smile. Was it a smile of contempt for Simon's passionate outpouring, which she had, in her delight with it, all but memorized?
Lady, I cry you mercy. You know it not, but your gentle eyes are more puissant than a mighty host. From those eyes have flown such bolts as wound but do not kill, and they have pierced my heart. I will bleed forever within my breast where none can see, and all will wonder at my pallor and my weakness that have no outward cause.
The physick for any wound or illness, sages tell us, must be like that which caused the hurt. Thus only you, who have delivered this wound, can cure it. Let me come to you, I beg, under cover of night. Let me but adore you in secrecy for a moment, and my strength will return....
"He is almost as good as an Arab poet," David said mockingly as he handed her back the letter. Did it bother him, she wondered, that Simon wrote words of love to her? David, she saw, was working on a letter of his own on a tiny, thin scrap of vellum on a writing board which he now laid over his knees. As if to show her that Simon's letter was of no moment to him, he added to his own, writing rapidly with a quill dipped in an inkpot—but from right to left.
"You write backwards?" she said, seating herself beside him on the floor to look at his work.