by S. W. Perry
That is where Hella has imaged her sister, Hannie, and her parents have been sitting for the past thirteen years – where they will sit for all eternity. But now she knows differently. They are suffering a never-ending torment, the like of which she has never imagined even in her worst nightmares. And it is all her fault.
From her vantage point she has a good view across the square to the front of the cathedral of St John the Evangelist. She watches the burghers and their families, their faces solemn yet expectant, disappear inside. When she closes her eyes the image of the great Gothic façade remains etched into her mind. So too does the image that she knows lies within.
Why, she wonders, has God not seared the truth of it into the eyes of the congregation, the way He has into hers? How can they go willingly into the cathedral, see what she has seen and come out again as though there is nothing amiss? Why do they not fall to their knees and weep in terror?
She tilts her face towards the sun, thinking she might stare straight into it, so that the image of hell that is so dazzlingly clear to her might be burned away. In the moment before Hella’s eyes fill with blinding sunlight, a dark shadow falls across the doorway in which she crouches. She senses someone standing over her, though all she can make out is a blurred silhouette. And then the silhouette speaks.
Hella recognizes the voice at once. It is a voice from her past, deep and masculine. A voice she had thought she would never hear again. A voice from a time of sorrow.
‘Well, little Hella, I should have thought to find you here, so close to God’s house,’ it says. ‘Do we have time left in which to speak? Or is Judgement Day already at hand?’
10
For three days Nicholas and Bianca lodge with Jan van der Molen, his wife Gretie and their strapping twins Johannes and Willem, who clamour endlessly to be allowed to accompany their father on his next voyage even though they have yet to reach their tenth birthday. The family occupies the lower two floors of a narrow-fronted, five-storeyed house beside the Binnendieze. Its back wall is a cliff of brick descending into the canal. The window of the guest chamber gives only three possible views, all limited: a sliver of sky, a slash of dark water beneath their washed clothes drying on a rope beneath the sill, or the wall of the house opposite. But the hospitality is unstinting. Though not rich, the van der Molens can offer their guests a plentiful supply of eggs and cheeses, tasty meat pies and sweet appeltaerten. Salted herring, it seems, can sustain a man only so far.
On the third day Bianca can no longer disregard the ache that troubles her. It is not an ache of the bones, but of the soul. And it has got worse since the day she first entered Den Bosch.
‘I haven’t prayed before a Catholic altar since I left Padua,’ she tells Nicholas. ‘The last time I made confession was when Cardinal Fiorzi came secretly to London. I need to seek absolution.’
‘Shall I remain here?’ Nicholas enquires.
‘No. Come with me. If you’re going to pass for a recusant, you ought at least to be familiar with the interior of a Catholic church.’
Nicholas knows exactly what Robert Cecil would say about him accompanying her: that he is endangering his immortal soul even by setting foot inside such a place. That the Roman Mass – and all the flummery that attends it – is nothing but the Antichrist’s means of luring foolish folk to their eternal damnation. And that the so-called priests who perform it do so only to line their purses, stealing the hard-earned coin of those too simple to see they’re being gulled.
For his own part, having lost his first wife, Eleanor, and the child she was carrying, he has asked himself too many questions about God’s plan to find an easy way back to Him. He has read a little Lucretius. He knows that he is not the first man in the world to doubt the existence of the Almighty. But there again, why should he not accompany his wife if she has need of spiritual comfort? And she is right about his need of education.
When he asks Jan van der Molen, the Brabantine nods in approval. ‘The burghers will expect it of you both, if you’re not to raise too many eyebrows,’ he says, assuming that the request is part of his guests’ need to pass themselves off as papists. ‘Even more necessary if you plan to make a living here.’ He claps Nicholas on the shoulder. ‘God will know what is truly in your heart. He does not expect us all to be martyrs.’
‘Where should we go?’ Nicholas asks. ‘I saw a lot of spires when we arrived.’
‘Oh, that’s easy to answer,’ the fisher of salted herring says. ‘You should go to the cathedral of St John the Evangelist.’
Before Bianca can make confession, she must first find a priest who can speak English or Italian. She would prefer the latter. Her mother’s tongue has been the language of the confessional all her life, and a Catholic priest in Brabant is as likely to have been ordained in an Italian seminary as a Spanish or a French one.
Gretie van der Molen makes some enquiries amongst her neighbours. An appointment is made.
Four days after arriving in Den Bosch, late in the afternoon, Gretie takes Bianca and Nicholas to the great cathedral in the Markt square. There they are met by two priests wearing the black cassocks and four-cornered birettas of the Church of Rome. The older of the two is a plump, ruddy-faced man of fifty. He has a dour look about him, as though the hearing of other people’s sins serves only to add to his general disappointment with humanity. Bianca thinks: no matter; he’s a man of God. A confession is a confession, whatever the character of the priest who takes it.
‘So you are the husband and wife who have fled the realm of the excommunicated whore Elizabeth,’ he announces uncompromisingly in English, his Dutch accent almost inaudible. ‘I am Father Vermeiren. I studied at the English College at Douai.’
Hearing his queen so described sends a little shiver of alarm through Nicholas. Such words, spoken aloud in England, would have every Privy Council informer for miles queuing up at Whitehall to claim the reward.
‘Mevrouw van der Molen tells me you had to flee England in haste.’
‘We were denounced,’ Nicholas says, enlisting a truth in the service of their cover.
‘It is the duty of every man, woman and child in England to obey the papal Bull Regnans in Excelsis issued by our Holy Father Pius the fifth, and rise against the heretic whore Elizabeth,’ Vermeiren says helpfully. ‘Yet we see that they do not – save for a very few who know their duty to God.’
‘It’s really not that easy,’ Nicholas says defensively.
‘Tyrants are not in the business of making their overthrow easy,’ Vermeiren announces, implying they haven’t tried hard enough. ‘Nevertheless, you are welcome here.’
Gretie van der Molen looks at Bianca apologetically. Clearly she had no idea Father Vermeiren spoke English.
‘I have come to you because I am ready to make my confession, Father,’ Bianca says, though she suspects – given that Father Vermeiren doesn’t appear to have a forgiving bone in his body – that she’ll be saying Hail Marys till Judgement Day.
‘I would receive it myself,’ Vermeiren says with an apologetic frown, ‘but my duties here prevent it. An important visitor is expected at any moment.’ He glances at his companion, a much younger man. ‘Father Albani here studied at Bishop Borromeo’s seminary in Milan. He hails from that city. He will take your confession, Daughter.’ With a curt nod, he leaves them in the care of the younger priest.
Father Albani is a youthful, handsomely made man. He has a studious face, with boyishly smooth skin, mirthful brown eyes and receding hair. Bianca feels a twinge of embarrassment. He’s far too good-looking to hear the secrets in her soul.
‘From Padua, child?’ Albani remarks in a quietly grave manner that speaks of trust and reassurance. ‘A daughter of the Veneto.’
Child. He can’t be more than a half a dozen years older than herself.
‘And, afterwards, does your husband wish me to hear his confession also?’
When Bianca translates, Nicholas gives a grim laugh. ‘Only if he’s not busy. It might
take a while.’
‘Perhaps later,’ Bianca says in Italian. ‘My husband is still getting used to the freedom here. In England, confession is forbidden – unless it’s to confess you are a lamb of the one true faith; in which case, they employ not the confessional but the rack.’
Father Albani shakes his head sadly.
Gretie van der Molen bobs a farewell to the two priests and heads off to the square to browse the market stalls for vegetables. Nicholas settles into a pew while Father Albani leads Bianca to the confessional. Alone, he lets curiosity lead his gaze. It is not the first time he has been inside a papist church, but it is the first one he’s entered that hasn’t been visited by a victorious band of Protestant mercenaries. The pews are intact, not torn up for firewood; the saints still stand serene in their niches; the altar is intact, not desecrated; the great pillars reaching to the vaulted ceiling are a pristine milky-white – not smeared with graffiti or excrement. Even the stone-scented air is clean, untainted by the stink of soldiers’ bodies, stabled horses or spilt blood.
The interior is in shadow now, the images in the grand stained-glass windows of the sacristy flat and lifeless. The insubstantial forms of worshippers move around him, taking their places quietly in the pews; sitting, heads bowed in prayer; rising unburdened to leave. Two nuns, hooded in pale-brown habits tied at the waist with knotted rope, take turns to light candles with a single glowing taper, their footsteps lost in the echoing cavern of the nave. Nicholas feels an oddly comforting pressure working upon his body, as though the prayers of centuries still linger.
It is curiosity, not impatience, that makes him rise from the pew and wander along the nave’s southern wall. He responds with cautious courtesy to the murmured acknowledgement of a tall man in a dark-blue civic gown and starched ruff who passes him in company with a much younger woman who could be a wife, a daughter or a servant; her impassive face gives him no clue. He returns the watery smile of a rotund burgher of immense dignity whose every step is tapped out with a walking cane as though it were a point of order in a courthouse. He knows he should think of them as heretics, but they seem so ordinary: people going about their lives and hoping to find here the promise of salvation. Eventually he finds himself in the grip of a sensation he can’t quite place. A sense of returning? Surely not. He has helped thwart Catholic plots against his own homeland, served a man as implacable to the heresy of papistry as it is possible to be. And yet Nicholas must admit to himself now – in his own act of confession – that he has always been a reluctant recruit to Robert Cecil’s holy war. And how can a faith be heresy, when the woman he loves more than life itself embraces it?
Pondering these questions, he finds himself standing before a narrow archway set into the cathedral wall. The door is open, held back by a solid iron hook. Inside, candlelight dances to some unfelt draught. Again out of curiosity, Nicholas peers in.
He is looking into what once might have been a side-chapel, a disused shrine whose saint has fallen out of fashion and been removed. The plain stone walls show blank shapes where frescoes might once have stood. There are holes in the floor for railings to keep the devout at a safe distance. A thick stone buttress – part of the bones of the building – cuts it almost in two, leaving part of it in darkness. But it is the thing immediately opposite the door that seizes his attention. For a few moments Nicholas can make no sense of what he’s seeing.
Later, he will say it was curiosity that made him enter the little chapel. But in his heart he will admit it was something darker. Because, when the images writhing before him suddenly fall into place in his understanding, Nicholas realizes that he is looking directly into hell itself.
‘And finally, Father, I confess the sin of lust. I lust after my husband. I enjoy the pleasure he gives me…’
There is silence beyond the little grille of the confessional. It is a silence that demands filling. Bianca feels her face begin to scorch with embarrassment.
‘… frequently.’
There. She’s said it. And to a handsome young priest.
To her surprise, she receives a warm chuckle through the lattice of the screen. This startles her, because if God is speaking to her through this man, then God is chuckling, too.
‘“How much better is thy love than wine? And thy oils better than spices?’” The voice is mellifluous, but surprisingly knowing. ‘The Book of Solomon, child,’ Father Albani explains. ‘It tells us that God weeps at a loveless marriage. There is no sin in what you describe.’
This is not how she had expected the confession to end. Still blushing, Bianca adds, ‘And I confess the sin of impatience, Father.’
‘Even God is sometimes impatient, Daughter. It is a very small sin.’
‘I mean I fret because I have not yet fallen with child.’
It is true, she reminds herself. She is not getting any younger. A woman in her early thirties should, by now, have given her husband a son. Another omission in the long line of faults she thinks she ought to confess to Father Albani.
‘I am sure there is plenty of time left,’ Father Albani tells her.
Time. In her mind, Bianca can see the little clock sitting on the table in Robert Cecil’s study, its mechanism clicking away relentlessly. She can see the printed words of the poem by Master Shakespeare that she had been reading while Nicholas was being dragged to Essex House: Make war against proportion’d course of time…
‘And judging by what you tell me,’ Father Albani is saying, the humour brightening his voice, ‘you seem to be making every… effort… to remedy the situation.’
‘We are, Father. Every effort.’
‘Then you must not wish to hurry. He has set time upon a straight path, child. The mile markers on that path come to us at a rate only of His choosing. All in life will arrive at its appointed hour.’ The priest’s voice takes on a tone of solemn warning. ‘So it is from the moment of our birth… until the Day of Judgement.’
Judgement Day. That, Nicholas realizes, is what he is looking at – a triptych, a three-panelled painting for an altar, at least the height of a man, propped against the far wall, its panels open, as though waiting for someone to come and collect it. But it is no ordinary work of religious devotion. It is a searing representation of the torments facing the sinner on the day of God’s final reckoning. And it seems impossible that a human mind is responsible for its creation. It looks to Nicholas as though the Devil himself has instructed the artist what to paint, guiding his hand as he conjures in brilliant colours – made all the more vivid by the flickering light of a stand of candles – a cast of the most monstrous characters. Approaching the painting, he wonders if he has not fallen into some terrifying dream.
The left-hand panel shows a scene from the Garden of Eden. But even here something is not right. There are storm clouds gathering in the pastel blue sky. And instead of falling rain and hail, angels are tumbling down towards the earth. Some are pure, their arms outstretched, buoyed on gossamer wings. But others are dark and demon-like. Beneath them, Adam and Eve are already fleeing paradise.
But it is the central and right-hand panels that truly shock him. Where he might expect an inspiring image of the Resurrection, here there is something entirely at odds with heavenly mercy. In a dark, fiery landscape, naked sinners are undergoing an extraordinary series of torments. Demons in the form of lizards, birds, fish and creatures too fantastical to name – though all with something frighteningly human about them – visit horrors upon the little naked sinners that sear into his mind. A green lizard standing on its hind legs drowns a drunkard in a wine cask. A beetle the size of a man rides a sinner’s bare back. A demon in the shape of a hunter in a blue coat, his head that of a long-billed bird, carries a naked human trussed to a pole – the prey turned predator. In the centre of the main panel, a machine like a huge pepper grinder is crushing living bodies to make oil for the frying of fellow sinners. And on the right-hand panel: more suffering, more torment, all in an even darker landscape that is unmistakeab
ly hell itself.
Nicholas is not a superstitious man. He is a physician, a man of the new science. He is a rational man, not some Suffolk peasant who sees the Devil’s hand at work when the crops wither or the milk sours in the pail. He has little time for tales of witches and demons. But this is so finely executed, so overwhelmingly real, that he can feel the terror already turning his stomach to ice. He can only imagine what nightmares this work must give the good burghers of Den Bosch. Transfixed, he stares at the triptych, scarcely able to comprehend from what fevered imagination the images painted upon it have sprung.
And then he hears muted voices from just outside the chapel.
What makes him slip quietly into the darkness behind the buttress will be easy for him to explain to Bianca, when later she asks him why he hid. He will tell her that for all his pretence at being a recusant, he is still a heretic in this land, an enemy of its faith. To some, his mere presence in this cathedral is a mortal offence. And given that there has been hardly an hour since that night at Essex House when he has not expected the sound of a fist hammering on a door, or a rough hand seizing his arm, he has long been in the grip of a certain anxiety. A small part of him will say that he was so absorbed in the images before him that, upon hearing the approaching footsteps, he had half-expected the Devil himself to step through the little stone archway. Whatever the true reason, he will later agree with Bianca that his instinctive decision to dart behind the thick column and into the darkness very probably saved his life.
Leaning back against the stonework, he tries to steady his breathing.
By the voices he hears, he knows that two men have entered the chamber. They are speaking Latin, a language Nicholas is well versed in from his days at petty school and his medical studies at Cambridge. It is the common language of lawyers, physicians and the clergy. Are they priests then? Certainly one of them is Father Vermeiren, because Nicholas can make out those solemn tones. The other man has a slight sibilance in his voice that could almost be Spanish. He must be the important visitor Vermeiren had spoken of earlier, the reason why the priest couldn’t spare the time to hear Bianca’s confession.