The Dead of Winter

by S. J. Parris

  ‘Are you dressed?’ he whispered.

  I opened the door further to show that I was still in my habit.

  ‘Good. Come with me.’

  ‘Where—?’

  He pressed a finger to his lips and motioned for me to follow. I shot a quick glance back at my writing table, to make sure I had not left out any incriminating papers – I knew that they sometimes searched my cell for indications of heresy when I was out. Necessity had forced me to find ingenious hiding places, and my writings were currently tucked away behind a loose board in the rafters. I pulled the door closed behind me. Gennaro raised a hand and paused for a moment, lowering the lantern and allowing his eyes to travel around the landing, in case anyone should be watching. I held my breath, waiting for his signal. When he appeared satisfied that we had not been observed, he nodded and I followed him to the stairs. We were later to learn that he ought to have looked more closely.

  Both the inner and outer cloisters were busy, considering the convent should have been sleeping. But San Domenico was not a typical religious house; the College it housed was the most intellectually prestigious university in the kingdom, and many of the brothers were spare sons of the Neapolitan barons, whose families kept the order’s coffers full, so the friars here enjoyed an unusual degree of liberty. Copies of keys to a side gate in the gardens circulated among the younger men, who slipped out at night to the local taverns to compensate for the privations of religious life. Those with money hosted extravagant suppers in their richly furnished rooms, drinking wine from Venetian glass in the light of gold candelabras. The prior turned a blind eye to these minor infractions of the rules, when it suited him. It was intellectual disobedience that he would not indulge, which meant I had to be careful; I had neither a good name nor family money to smooth my path if I crossed him, and I had already been marked as a troublemaker.

  So I kept my face hidden beneath my cowl as I followed Gennaro through the shadows, fearful that even the licence the infirmarian enjoyed might not be enough to protect me if I were seen and reported. He led me away from the gate used by the night-time revellers, along an overgrown path through the convent’s lemon grove to the stables on the far side of the grounds. Here a boy was waiting with a horse ready saddled; he handed Gennaro the reins without a word and the infirmarian motioned to me to mount behind him. A gate was unlocked and I saw Gennaro lean down and slip the boy a coin as we passed through. ‘Keep your hood up,’ was all he said to me as we set out into the narrow streets.

  ‘Are we visiting a patient?’ I asked, as we wove north-west past Santa Chiara towards the Porta Reale. Torches flamed in wall brackets outside the larger palazzi, and a full moon gave out a pale gleam to light our way. Catches of music and arguments carried from the back streets; Naples was never quiet, even at night.

  ‘That’s what I told the prior,’ he said. I waited for further explanation, but he fell silent again. The air was warm, but without the heavy, torpid heat that hung in shimmering waves over the city during the day. A night breeze stirred my hair under the cowl, carrying scents of citrus and the sea.

  ‘So – we’re not? Seeing a patient, I mean?’ I tried again, leaning around his shoulder to gauge his expression.

  ‘Wait and see,’ he replied, and his mouth quirked in a half-smile that sent a jolt of excitement and fear up my spine. Whatever we were about to see was clearly illegal or forbidden, if he had lied to the prior about it, and for a young man as determined in the pursuit of prohibited knowledge as I, this was encouragement enough. You might question whether someone so rebellious by nature was suited to the religious life at all, and you would be right to wonder; the obvious answer is that I wanted to study, and since my family had no money to send me to the secular university, my only path to learning was as a monk or a friar. The Dominicans had seen my potential and opened their doors to me, in return for my obedience. It had not taken them long to realise that it could not be bought at the expense of my intellect, and so they kept a close eye on me.

  The Porta Reale was locked at that hour, and guarded by soldiers, but I had already discovered that Gennaro was a familiar figure in the night streets of Naples; he dismounted, saluted them, and exchanged greetings in Spanish. I could not hear what was said, but I saw him laugh and clap one of them on the shoulder. Coins changed hands discreetly, and a small door in the main gate opened for us; Gennaro led the horse through and passed me a lantern handed to him by one of the soldiers, before mounting again.

  The sound of the gate locking behind us shifted my nervous excitement towards fear. We were in lawless terrain here, outside the city walls; the road sloped steeply up into the hills and the dark pressed in closer. I breathed the scent of night blossoms and listened hard for any hint of danger, either from wolves or bandits, but heard only the hunting cries of owls. To our left, I could make out the fortifications of the Castel Sant’Elmo, black against the sky. We followed the road north towards Vomero; here and there, pinpricks of light glimmered on the hillside showing the few villas built by the nobility to enjoy the view over the bay, away from the stink and heat of the city. I held the lantern awkwardly, but Gennaro seemed to know where he was going without the need for light. I noticed that he had pulled his cloak back to reveal a dagger belted around his waist.

  ‘Will I be back in time for matins?’ I asked, after a while, when he had still not said a word about the purpose of our trip. The watch brothers came around with a bell to wake us for the office of matins at two o’clock, and any friar asleep in his cell – or, worse, not in his cell at all – would face discipline. Even the dedicated revellers knew to be back in time, lest they test the prior’s patience too far and face a tightening of the rules. Better to turn up and chant the responses half-drunk and smelling of quim than not turn up at all.

  ‘You’re excused matins,’ Gennaro said, over his shoulder. ‘I told the prior I needed you tonight. I assured him that, thanks to my attentive training, you have attained a level of skill that makes you a valuable assistant during difficult operations, which can only enhance the reputation of San Domenico. He seemed reluctantly convinced.’

  ‘And did you mean it?’ My pleasure at the flattery was undermined by the suggestion that my mentor had used it as a ruse.

  ‘In a sense.’ He was enjoying being enigmatic.

  ‘Damn it, Gennaro – can’t you just tell me why you’ve dragged me out here?’

  He laughed. ‘All in good time, my eager young friend. Tell me – that memory trick of yours, where you recite a psalm in Hebrew and then recite it backwards – can you do it on demand?’

  ‘Psalm eighty-six. Yes.’

  ‘And you can explain how you do it?’

  ‘Of course. I have been studying the ancient memory systems of the Roman orators, together with the writings of the Spanish mystic Ramon Lull, and I have syncretised them with ideas of my own to form—’

  ‘All right, save your breath. As long as you can articulate your process, if you should be called upon.’

  ‘Who wants to know about my memory system?’ I asked, with another flash of alarm. The art of memory had become my passion since my earliest studies of the Roman orators; I was convinced that I could improve on their methods and so learn to carry an entire library of books in my head, but I was well aware that, to the Inquisition, some memory systems danced perilously close to occult knowledge. For that reason, although many of my brothers at San Domenico admired and envied my talent for memorising swathes of scripture or commentary, I had been cautious about who I trusted with my ideas. Why would one of Gennaro’s nocturnal patients need to hear me explain how I taught myself to recite the psalms backwards in Hebrew?

  The infirmarian didn’t answer; instead he pointed ahead. The road wound upwards and narrowed through rocky cliffs of tufa stone, and I could see torchlight in front where a series of terraces had been built into the slopes of the hill. The bulk of an impressive villa was silhouetted against the sky in the distance as we passed high walls and
gates.

  ‘Here we are,’ Gennaro said, slowing the horse as we rounded the next bend. ‘Hold up the light.’ He pulled to a stop and dismounted, taking the lantern from me to illuminate a plain wooden door set into the rockface. He knocked twice with the side of his fist; when the door opened an inch, he muttered a word in a low voice and it swung back, though I could not see whose hand had opened it. Gennaro glanced over his shoulder. ‘Well, don’t hang about there all night,’ he said, and entered the doorway.

  ‘What about the horse?’ I slid down from the saddle, casting around for somewhere I could tether the animal. Suddenly, a shadow stirred at my side, making me whip around and curse in surprise. A thin, pale man with one hunched shoulder had appeared as if conjured from the air; I could not see if he had come from the doorway or the shadows beneath the cliff, but he merely nodded to me as if our business were agreed, and held his hand out for the reins. I hesitated, then passed them over; there was nothing I could do now but trust Gennaro.

  I followed him under the low entrance into a passageway carved through the rock. The door slammed after us with alarming finality, making the lantern’s flame shiver in the draught; I glanced back, and hurried after Gennaro. The passage was tall enough to stand upright, wide enough that I could not touch the walls with my arms outstretched; ahead it was illuminated by torches fixed at intervals. As we progressed, the rough-hewn walls of rock gave way to plaster, engraved to give the appearance of opus reticulatum, the diamond-shaped brickwork used by the ancient Romans. Niches had been built into the walls at head height, such as you might find in a chapel; they contained statues, though the figures represented were certainly not saints or virgins, but had the appearance of characters from antiquity, from the myths of the Greeks or the Egyptians. After about thirty feet, the tunnel ended in another door. Gennaro knocked, the same sequence; a voice muttered from the other side, he repeated a word in a language I did not recognise, and the door swung open. We found ourselves in an antechamber with a higher ceiling. The wall facing us held another closed door, but that was not its most striking aspect; above this portal, two openings had been cut into the wall, evenly spaced to give the effect of eye sockets, with the doorway as the mouth. From where we stood, I had the impression of looking at a giant skull. Memento mori, I thought. Was this some kind of mausoleum? I could hear the sound of running water somewhere. Gennaro gestured to the far wall and I saw an alcove where a spring bubbled up, apparently from the rock itself, then trickled into a marble basin. Beside the fountain, a servant stood looking impassively ahead, white linen cloths folded over his arm.

  Gennaro leaned into the alcove and splashed water over his face and hands, washing off the dust of the road; the silent servant handed him a towel, and he motioned for me to copy him.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked, pushing wet hands through my hair. ‘Those statues – they’re pagan, aren’t they? Is this – licit?’ He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Since when did you worry about what’s licit, Bruno? Come.’ He moved towards the door.

  ‘Is the patient through there?’ I had concluded by now that we were in a network of passages and chambers beneath some nobleman’s summer villa, and that we must be there to perform an operation that demanded utmost secrecy. Gennaro had achieved a degree of skill in assisting women with difficult childbirth, though there were still those who felt that midwifery was women’s work and that it was improper for a man to attend a birth, or to interfere if God chose to take the child back before it had even lived. Such niceties would be of no concern to a baron at risk of losing his heir or his lady, but even so, appearances must be preserved. I supposed this to be the reason for our surreptitious arrival.

  The servant unlocked the door in the skull’s mouth, and I heard the low murmur of conversation from beyond.

  ‘Prepare to have your eyes opened,’ Gennaro said. ‘And try not to be flippant.’

  Before I could ask what he meant, he stepped through, and I followed.

  My first impression of the room beyond was of the chapter house of a wealthy monastery. It was heptagonal in shape, with a high domed ceiling; columns had been built around the walls, and these were carved with inscriptions of numbers and symbols, as if from a book of alchemical formulae. The floor in the centre was made of mosaic tiles, in the design of a great labyrinth. Banks of expensive beeswax candles illuminated the frescoes on the walls, which depicted curious figures I half-recognised from the little I had read of the religions of ancient Egypt and Babylon. But I had no time to take in the paintings, because as soon as the door closed behind us I found eleven pairs of eyes fixed on me.

  The chamber was occupied solely by men, seated in a circle on stone benches built into the walls, as if for a meeting. I was the youngest there by at least a decade; most were in their forties or fifties, at a guess, and three were considerably older, to judge by their white hair and beards.

  ‘Are you bringing children to us now, Gennaro?’ One of the grey-beards spoke, holding out a hand in my direction. ‘What next – a woman?’ A burst of laughter rippled around the group. The tone was good-natured, teasing, but still I bristled; though I did not know yet who these men were, I resented being dismissed for my youth, when I was two years ahead in my studies and could grow a full beard if I chose.

  ‘So this is the young prodigy.’ One man rose from his seat and crossed the room. He spoke with a quiet authority, and I could see his clothes were expensive. The laughter died away as he approached me. ‘Come here, boy – let me get a better look at you.’

  He motioned me to the centre, where a glass lamp hung by a chain from the highest point of the ceiling. In the light he reached up both hands and placed them gently either side of my face. Immediately I knocked his arms away and leapt back, fists raised to defend myself. This caused further mirth among those watching. Let them laugh, I thought; if you are a halfway pretty teenage boy who enters a religious community of men forbidden to touch women, you learn quickly how to fend off the attentions of any older friar who tries to corner you in the bathhouse.

  ‘Peace, boy,’ the man said, holding up his hands to show he meant no harm. ‘I wish only to read you. Are you not familiar with the science of physiognomy?’

  I glanced at Gennaro; he nodded his approval. Against my instincts, I stood beneath the light and let the stranger put his hands to my face again. He closed his eyes as if he were a blind man forming a picture by touch, and I observed him as he pressed his thumbs slowly along my cheekbones, my jaw and the ridge of my brow. His use of ‘boy’ needled me, since he could not have been above fifteen years my senior, though his hair was prematurely receding and he had shaved the rest close so that his high forehead gleamed in the glow of the candles. He stood a couple of inches taller than me, and had the slim, athletic build and graceful movements of one well-practised in the art of fencing. His face was handsome, in an austere way, with a long, straight nose, deep-set eyes and thin lips barely visible through his neat beard. The rest of the gathering appeared to be holding their breath while they awaited his verdict.

  Eventually he opened his eyes.

  ‘A wolf,’ he said. ‘No, not a wolf – a wolfhound. That’s what you are.’

  ‘Pardon?’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘Physiognomonics. Cartography of the human body, if you will. The science of reading character – indeed, predicting it – from the outward physical traits. The universe is made up of signs, as you must know, and the human face is likewise a cipher. Men such as you, for example – dark, lean, with a resemblance to a dangerous animal – are likely to end up in prison, did you know that?’

  ‘For what – punching people who insult us?’ I said.

  The bald man flashed a grin at Gennaro, as if delighted by a new toy. ‘So he’s a wit too,’ he remarked, to his audience, before turning a serious gaze back to me. ‘I thought at first a wolf, but you are more of a tracker than a predator. You put me in mind of a dog that will not give up on its quarry, once he has the scen
t in his nostrils. What animal would you say I resemble?’ He took a step back to let me look at him.

  I was tempted to make some smart comment, but I remembered Gennaro’s warning, and in any case, I was intrigued by his proposition. I considered his face carefully. His eyes were a very light brown, almost tawny; they gave him a feline quality.

  ‘A lynx,’ I said. It was the first thing that came into my head. There was a sharp intake of breath around the benches.

  His eyes widened further, as if I had said something marvellous.

  ‘Why do you say so?’

  ‘Because of your eyes. I have the impression that you see what others miss. And the lynx is supposed to be the most sharp-eyed of creatures. Plutarch says it can see through rock. But I don’t believe any of it.’

  He gave an indulgent smile. ‘You don’t believe a lynx can see through rock, or that I am sharp-eyed?’

  ‘I don’t believe that there is any art to read a man’s soul in his face.’

  He lifted a brow.

  ‘Interesting. You don’t agree that a fair appearance denotes nobility of character, and that deformity is a sign of corruption?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Based on what evidence?’

  ‘My father is a soldier.’ I heard my voice grow heated. ‘His dearest friend, Tommaso, is hideously scarred. Children cry at the sight of him. By your logic, he should be a monstrous, degenerate person. You know how he came by those scars? His garrison was set alight during a campaign, and he dragged his comrades to safety. He went back four times, saving four lives, including my father’s, before he was burned so badly he could no longer stand. It was a miracle he lived at all. So – here is a man so ugly that women cross themselves in the street, who owns more virtue than you or I could ever aspire to.’