1635_ Cannon Law - Eric Flint [89]
There had been some change, and she was probably about to find out what. "Your Eminence need not worry," she said, uncomfortable at how stilted she sounded in the more formal Italian they used hereabouts. "The doctors have been most kind, and I in turn have learned far more about their own fields of expertise than I have been pleased to help with from my own small knowledge."
Of course, that brought a round of flowery protests from the doctors—why, their own arts were nearly medieval—the new learning far outstripped their own—the dottoressa was a legend, and deservedly so. Polite fictions, all of it, and Sharon realized there was a huge difference between the way in which polite society functioned and the cut-and-thrust of scientific debate. The conversation she'd had had up to now had been far more colloquial and informal, more near to what she'd been used to back home. Earlier, they had, to their credit, been challenging what she'd said and taken notes when she'd described high-school lab experiments they could do to verify some of it. Not that they needed scientific method explained, though. That was familiar to all of these good Lyncaeans, in its practical terms if not as a formal methodology.
The flowery protests ran down, and Barberini beamed. "Nevertheless, doctors, I shall claim the privilege of rank and steal the dottoressa away from you for a time. Doubtless you will seek to recapture her later, but for the time being let me show her that this symposium is not of natural philosophers alone?"
Well, Sharon thought, it's his party. And, truth to tell, she was dying of curiosity as well. She got to her feet. "Thank you, Your Eminence. I should like that very much, if only to repay your generosity as host in some small way."
Barberini offered her his arm. "Let me show you around some of the things we have here, Dottoressa. Doubtless you have heard the stories of Barberini peculation?" Not waiting for her to acknowledge the reference to the principal charge against his family's tenure in the papacy, he added, with a sly smile, "I should like to show you what it has bought."
"I should like that very much indeed, Your Eminence," she said, and that was the plain truth. The place had more art about the place than any museum she'd been in back in the up-time U.S., although her experience in that line hadn't been much. She wasn't a great connoisseur of art, really, but she'd tried not to be a complete philistine. And Cardinal Mazzare had told her that the collection that this man had assembled was, in the twentieth-century Rome that Mazzare had worked in as a young priest, the nucleus of the Italian state's national art collection, in a museum housed in this very palazzo. So she was getting a tour of one of Europe's better art collections conducted by one of Europe's leading patrons of the arts who was also, despite being only three or four years older than Sharon herself, recognized as one of the leading experts in the field as well.
Indeed, it soon became apparent the man was encyclopedic on just about everything in the place, and there were dozens of rooms packed with beautiful things. The rest of the salon was taking place in the huge hall on the ground floor that still looked a little bare. Apparently Cortona was due to begin work on it soon, although Sharon hadn't a clue who he might be. But the Palazzo Barberini was a huge building with a dozen or more rooms on each floor and even the parts that were still under construction were breathtaking.
At length, she could resist no longer. "Your Eminence," she said, "I love what you've done with the place."
He creased up at that. "Yes, it is a little overwhelming all in one go, isn't it? I confess, I am a thieving magpie."
He was looking at her expectantly, and she realized there was a reference she wasn't getting here. And there was no guarantee it was even one she could ask about. From what she'd heard,