The Dead of Winter

by S. J. Parris

  I hesitated, then reached inside my habit and brought out the twist of paper I had wrapped it in. ‘I came to bring you this.’

  She tore it open and stared at the locket, her face tight with grief. ‘There is blood on it.’

  ‘Mine. I cut my finger on the clasp.’ I held it up as proof.

  She raised the locket slowly to her lips and closed her eyes, as if in silent prayer. A tear rolled down her cheek. ‘Did he take it from her? How did you get it?’

  ‘I found it on the ground.’

  ‘Where?’

  Again, I hesitated just a breath too long. ‘In the street, outside the gate. She must have dropped it there.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘That cannot be true. I have searched the streets around the walls of your convent for the past two days for any sign of what happened to her. I would have seen it. And the chain is broken, as if it was torn from her.’ When she saw that I was not going to respond, she rubbed at the tears with the back of her hand and drew herself upright. ‘Well. I should not expect truth from a Dominican. But at least I know now that my sister is dead. She would never have willingly let this out of her sight.’

  ‘Very wise. It is a beautiful piece of work. Your father must be a highly skilled craftsman, to have made something so complex.’

  She looked at me with a hunted expression as she tried to discern my meaning. ‘Did you open it?’

  The question was barely a whisper. She knew the answer. She clenched her hands to stop them trembling and her face was tight with fear – the same fear I had felt only a moment before at her mention of Fontanelle. The naked terror of being found out.

  ‘Yes. Is it your mother?’

  She nodded, a tense little jerk of her head, her eyes still boring into me.

  ‘She must have been beautiful,’ I said. ‘But something as valuable as that should be carefully guarded. Others might not be so understanding of your desire to honour your family memory.’

  She gave a gulping sob and wrapped both hands over the locket. ‘Thank you.’ She swallowed. ‘Did you show it to anyone? What is inside, I mean?’ She glanced over her shoulder, as if I might have brought an army of Inquisitors to hide around the corner.

  ‘No one but me. And I will say nothing.’

  ‘Why?’ That sharpness again; the muscles twitching in her jaw. ‘Why should I trust you?’

  ‘Because …’ Because my own secret is far worse, I thought, and it is the very least I owe you for the fact that you will never truly know what happened to your sister. I could not say that. But the answer I gave her was also true. ‘Because I believe God is bigger than the rules we impose on one another. I think He does not mind if we find different paths to Him.’

  ‘That is heresy,’ she whispered.

  ‘So is that.’ I nodded to the locket in her hand.

  ‘You are a good man, Bruno,’ she said. Unexpectedly, she leaned forward and placed a soft kiss on my cheek, at the edge of my mouth. She stood back and almost smiled. ‘For a Dominican.’ I could not look her in the eye.

  ‘Wait,’ she called, as I began to walk away. ‘That man. The friar. Donato, is that his name? Where can he be found?’

  ‘At San Domenico. Or at the Cerriglio, where you found him last night.’

  ‘But he is always surrounded by people. I want to speak to him alone.’

  ‘He would never allow it. Not after your last encounter.’

  She shrugged. ‘Still, I have to try. For my sister’s sake. I just want to know.’

  I considered this. ‘He is rarely alone, except in his cell. Or perhaps when he takes one of the upstairs rooms at the tavern, to meet a woman.’

  She nodded, tucking the information away. ‘The cruellest part,’ she said, with some difficulty, pausing to master her emotions, ‘is that he has stolen from us even the chance to bury and mourn her properly. Whatever he has done with her, I can never forgive him for that.’ I watched her teeth clench. She took a deep breath. ‘Thank you,’ she said, her voice harder this time, determined. ‘For what you have done for my family. Perhaps we will meet again.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ I bowed and turned away. She would never know my part in what happened to her sister, but I would carry the weight of that knowledge with me always.

  September rolled into October, apples ripened in the orchard and mists drifted in from the bay, though without a repeat of the previous year’s fever epidemic. Fra Gennaro relaxed around me as he realised that I appeared to have suppressed my qualms and was not going to endanger him with a sudden eruption of conscience; he requested my assistance more frequently in the dispensary, and on occasion confided in me his notes and drawings from previous experiments, as if to demonstrate his trust. He promised to introduce me to a friend of his in the city, an aristocrat and a man of considerable influence as a patron of the sciences. As the weeks passed, I even managed to sleep through the night untroubled by dreams of the dead girl, though not every night.

  But in other ways, my fortunes took a turn for the worse. It became clear that I had put myself on the wrong side of Donato, and that was a dangerous place to be. Perhaps he thought I knew too much, or perhaps he just wanted to remind me of his threat. I was summoned before the prior, charged with a series of minor infractions of the rules that he could not have known about unless someone was spying on me. I was given penance and a stern warning not to repeat the offences, as there would be no leniency in future. I lost the small freedoms taken for granted by the wealthier young friars, and found myself reduced to a life of prayer, worship and study – which was, I supposed, no more or less than the life I had signed up to in the first place, but it still chafed. The watch brothers were told to confirm that I was in my cell every night between Compline and Matins. My reading material and my correspondence were subject to unannounced inspections. Everywhere I felt his eyes on me – in the refectory, in chapel, in chapter meetings – and I could do nothing but watch and wait for him to strike. All this petty needling, I felt, was just a prelude. Donato was afraid of what he thought I knew, and he had something planned for me. The worst was not knowing what or when, so that I was permanently on my guard.

  Over a month had passed since the night of the girl’s death. The season was growing colder; at night, when we trooped reluctantly to Matins as the bells struck two, the air was tinged with woodsmoke and our breath plumed around our faces. I shuffled to my place in the chapel one night in October, stifling a yawn (there was a penance for that, if you did it too often), when I glanced across the choir and noticed the empty seats. Donato, Agostino, Paolo and at least two of the other younger friars had not returned in time for the service. This in itself was unusual; for all his swagger, Donato was careful to make an outward show of obedience. He reasoned that, as long as he was present at each appointed office, no one would question what he did in between. I could see that the prior, too, had noted the absences, though he made no mention of it.

  Ten minutes into the service, I heard a disturbance at the back and turned to see Agostino rush in, his face blanched and stricken, the door clanging behind him. With no regard for propriety, he pushed through to Fra Gennaro and whispered in his ear; Gennaro immediately snatched up his candle and followed Agostino out of the chapel. The prior was furious at the interruption, his face slowly turning the colour of ripe grapes, but he mastered himself, exchanged a few words with the sub-prior, and disappeared after the troublemakers. The younger novices were almost bursting with excitement at the unknown drama and the sub-prior had to call us back to order several times. It was a small miracle that we managed to complete the office as if nothing was amiss.

  Paolo was waiting for me in the cloister when I returned from Matins. I had never seen him look so shaken.

  ‘Did you hear? Donato is dead.’

  ‘What?’ I stared at him. ‘When?’

  ‘An hour ago. At the Cerriglio.’

  Heedless now of the watch brothers, I followed him to his cell and made him tell me every
thing.

  Donato had taken a room upstairs at the tavern and engaged the services of one of the girls. After she left, he had called for hot water and towels to wash himself before returning to the convent. When the servant took the basin of water up to him there was no answer from the room. She knocked louder and then opened the door, to find him lying on the bed naked with his throat cut. You could have heard her screams at the top of Vesuvius, Paolo said. No one had noticed any disturbance from Donato’s room earlier, though one of the other customers thought he had seen a new serving girl, one he did not recognise, loitering on the stairs by the back door shortly before the body was found. But Signora Rosaria had not hired any new serving girls recently, and this man was quite far gone in his cups, so his word was not worth much.

  ‘They brought in the whore Donato was with, of course,’ Paolo said, his voice still uncertain, ‘though she swears blind he was alive and well when she left him a half-hour earlier. What’s more, she didn’t have a speck of blood on her, and you couldn’t cut a man’s throat like that without being drenched in it. I suppose that will not count for much, if they decide to accuse her.’

  The strangest thing, he added, was that Donato’s purse had been sitting there on top of his habit on a chair by the bed, in full view, and had not been touched. He shuddered. ‘Think of it, Bruno. Naked and defenceless. Throat cut right across. It could have been any one of us.’

  ‘Donato went out of his way to make enemies,’ I said, carefully. ‘I don’t think you need to worry.’

  ‘All the same,’ he said, rubbing his neck with feeling, ‘I think I might give the Cerriglio a miss for a while. Wouldn’t hurt me to stay in and pray more often. I could learn from your example.’

  ‘I would be glad of the company,’ I said, forcing a smile.

  The furore took a long time to die down. Fra Donato’s father, Don Giacomo, was almost felled by grief; Naples had not seen such an extravagant and public display of mourning in decades. In return for hushing up the ignominious circumstances of Donato’s death, the prior of San Domenico received a handsome donation, for which he was grateful, particularly since he knew it would be the last. Don Giacomo had intended his money to ensure his son’s smooth ascent to election as prior one day; now there was no longer any purpose to his bequests. The whore Donato had been with before he died was arrested and quietly spirited away. Some days after the murder, they had found the bloodstained dress of a serving girl stuffed into a well a few streets from the inn, which was considered good enough evidence against the word of a whore. I never learned what became of her; I suppose she was hanged. No one else was ever found guilty of the crime.

  The following spring, not long after the Feast of Candelora, as I was crossing Strada del Seggio di Nilo I saw a young woman moving towards me through the mass of people and for a moment my breath stopped in my throat. She carried a leather satchel across her body; a fall of glossy dark hair rippled around her shoulders, burnished in the sun, and she walked gracefully, with an air of self-possession. I withdrew into my hood and turned my face aside as she approached; I did not want to be recognised. If she saw me, she gave no sign of it, but as she passed, a splinter of sunlight caught the golden crucifix locket she wore around her neck, blinding me with a flash of brilliance. When I looked up again, she had vanished into the dust and crowds of Naples.

  THE ACADEMY OF SECRETS

  Despite what they say about Fra Giordano Bruno in Naples, and the many supposed crimes and heresies that have attached to my name, I would like it known that I was nowhere near Capodimonte that autumn night of 1568 when my brother in Christ met his mysterious death there, and I certainly had no dealings with witchcraft. Of that charge, at least, I am innocent.

  I feel the need to say this bluntly because the business touched some of the most powerful men in the city, and the involvement of friars from San Domenico Maggiore in rumours of secret societies, black magic and murder could be catastrophic in more ways than one, if the Inquisition were to catch wind of the rumours.

  But I run ahead of my story. Naples is a madhouse, though you’ll know that already, my unknown reader, if you have ever set foot here. In case you are a stranger to the city, you need to understand this: Naples is a place of fierce beauty and fiercer tempers. Under the white glare of the sun, two hundred and fifty thousand souls cram together inside the ancient walls, in streets built to hold a tenth of that number. Wherever you walk in Naples, someone and his brother will be always in your face, trying to rob you or start a fight. Arguing keeps us feeling vital, whether it’s a fist fight in the market over the price of olive oil, or a disputation about the relative authority of Plato versus Aristotle in the great basilica of San Domenico; the latter has stricter rules, but not necessarily less emotion or violence. Perhaps it’s the consequence of living in the shadow of a volcano that could drown us all in fire at any moment. The threat of obliteration means people here live one day at a time, but as insurance they also make great public show of their devotion to the saints whose intercession is all that stands between the city and God’s wrath.

  When I first arrived in Naples at the age of fifteen, in the Year of Our Lord 1563, I truly thought as I walked under the Porta San Gennaro that I had entered the gates of hell. For a boy from the sleepy town of Nola on the other side of Mount Vesuvius, the heat, dust, crowds, noise, smells and riot were overwhelming; I almost turned and fled back to my father’s house, convinced I would never be able to keep a thought in my head in that Babel. But I stayed; I studied; I took my vows as a friar of the Dominican order in the great convent of San Domenico Maggiore, the city’s most influential religious house, and by the age of twenty, I couldn’t imagine feeling at home anywhere else. Naples gets under your skin; you mould yourself to it. You learn to dissemble, to fight with knives and fists, to haggle, to win at cards by any means, to sing at the top of your lungs on a tavern table, and to jump from a first-floor window when you hear a husband’s key in the door – yes, even if you’re a Dominican friar. Especially if you’re a Dominican friar. Because – let’s be honest, for once – we are also a city of hypocrites. The law forbids a man and woman to kiss in the street, but courtesans ply their trade openly in the churches. Blasphemy is punished in public, but child beggars are left to die in doorways. We are all pretending, in Naples. Above all, we pretend to be free, but we are far from it. The Kingdom of Naples is a Spanish vice-realm, and we live under occupation; everywhere you look, there are bands of Spanish troops patrolling the streets, and the viceroy’s agents lurk in every tavern, ready to report murmurs of dissent or disrespect among the Neapolitans towards our Spanish overlords.

  So being a native of Naples has always meant learning to keep your eyes open, and hide your secrets. I had become skilled at this in my five years at San Domenico, which is why Fra Gennaro trusted me with the Academy.

  Fra Gennaro Ferrante was the infirmarian of San Domenico, and his skills were acknowledged far beyond the walls of the convent. He was in his early forties when I first knew him, but as a young man he had studied at the famous school of medicine in Salerno, and would surely have become a renowned professor of anatomy if a decline in his family’s fortunes had not obliged him to enter the religious life. But Gennaro was not one to let the strictures of the Church’s teachings dampen his quest for knowledge; that was one of the reasons I admired him. He used his position at San Domenico to continue his investigations into the workings of the body, sometimes with the prior’s blessing and sometimes – as I had learned first-hand – without. But the prior did not like to question too closely how Gennaro’s talents were honed, because they brought money and prestige to the convent; no doctor of physick in Naples had his reputation for the ability to remove a tumour, sew a wound, set a bone so the limb was saved, or draw a breech child from the womb without loss of the mother’s life. Several times a week, a frantic servant would arrive from one of the city’s noble households, begging for Gennaro to attend his master or mistress; if the result w
as favourable, as it usually was, extravagant bequests and gifts would follow, to show the family’s gratitude to God. If there was tension between the Church’s teachings on how far medicine might be permitted to intervene in a soul’s journey from cradle to grave, the prior trusted Gennaro to act according to his conscience, and did not ask too many questions for fear the income would dry up.

  I had been assigned to work as Gennaro’s assistant three years previously, as a novice; perhaps the novice master saw in me some glimmer of talent for the natural sciences, though it is likely that he hoped the practical tasks of tending to ailing brothers would concentrate my mind away from the difficult theological questions I was prone to ask. He was mistaken in that regard; working with Fra Gennaro only exacerbated my instinctive sense that there was more to be read in the great book of Nature than the Church was willing to allow. This sounded a lot like heresy, and I was lucky that Fra Gennaro was of the same mind; the Inquisition already had a note of my name, and anyone else would have reported me on the instant for the questions I asked in his infirmary.

  Gennaro and I guarded each other’s secrets with honour. Two years earlier, I had assisted him in anatomising a corpse that needed to disappear in order to protect the convent’s reputation. If that event ever came to light, we would both find ourselves facing public execution; since that night, we had shared an unspoken bond and, on occasion, when we found ourselves alone in the dispensary, he had taken me further into his confidence with details of his medical research into the forbidden secrets of the body’s workings. Even so, I was not prepared for what happened on 5th September 1568, when he knocked on the door of my cell half an hour before midnight.

  I cracked the door, expecting to find my friend Paolo suggesting an outing to the Cerriglio, the tavern by Santa Maria la Nova where the younger friars gathered at night if they could slip out while the watch brothers were looking the other way. I was ready to turn him down; I had been studying late and, in any case, I had lost my appetite for the Cerriglio after one of our brothers had had his throat cut in its upstairs brothel two years earlier. But instead I saw Gennaro’s stern face lit from below by a lantern, his eyes bright beneath heavy brows.