The Heretic's Mark

by S. W. Perry

  ‘By the cartload. But it will be the fame and renown attached to the device itself that will make the doge’s Master of the Spheres his fortune. The name of Barrani will be known throughout the civilized world. Even in England they will know of me.’ He grins at Nicholas. ‘Perhaps your heretic queen will invite me to construct one in her palace. The English must have need of a machine to tell them where the constellations will be at any given time – as the skies are always cloudy.’

  ‘But what exactly is it for?’ Bianca asks.

  Bruno contrives a scholarly look. ‘Well, it turns… and the wheels and the ellipses and the meridians all move within it – to show when the solstices and the planets…’ He wrangles his hands together, the fingers like entwining snakes, to describe what his vocabulary cannot.

  ‘You don’t really know, do you?’ Bianca says with a sigh for the litany of Cousin Bruno’s doomed commercial enterprises.

  ‘It’s an armillary sphere,’ Nicholas says. ‘I’ve seen small ones, when I was at Cambridge. Robert Cecil has one. They show how the heavens move with time. They’re much used in the sciences of astronomy and astrology. But I’ve never heard of one as large or as complex as this one by Master Santucci.’

  Bruno snorts an explosive sneer. ‘Santucci is a dunderhead! He’s a Florentine. I wouldn’t trust him to make me a climbing frame for my fagioli.’

  ‘But how are you building it, Bruno? You’re a man of commerce, not of science,’ Bianca points out.

  If Bruno is hurt by the implication behind her question, he doesn’t show it. ‘A great admiral does not climb the mast to set the sail, does he, Cousin?’ he says haughtily. ‘I have gathered the best men in Padua to assist. My friend, Signor Galileo, is the professor of mathematics at the Palazzo Bo. His student, young Matteo, is making the calculations under his wise and guiding hand. As for the construction, the Arte dei Astronomi is already at work. I will show you, tomorrow.’

  ‘But how did you get the plans?’ Nicholas asks.

  Bruno shrugs and adopts an air of total innocence. ‘Let us say they blew off the back of a cart – with the help of a little wind fanned by a few of His Serenity’s ducats.’

  ‘But if it’s for the doge, why build it in Padua?’ Bianca asks.

  ‘Because Signor Galileo is in Padua,’ Bruno says, as if even a child would know the answer to her question. ‘When it is complete and working, and he is satisfied that it is performing its calculations as it should, we will dismantle it, take it to Venice and reassemble it in the Sala dello Scrutinio. His Serene Highness will then be able to gather his ministers and the citizens about his Serene personage in St Mark’s Square, hoist his golden mantle around his Serene waist, bend over and expose his Serene arse in the general direction of Florence and Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici. And your cousin Bruno will be there to enjoy the spectacle and watch the ducats flow in.’

  ‘Can he do it? Is it truly possible?’ Bianca asks Nicholas that night as they lie abed, bathed in sweat from the oppressive heat, a wash of stars glittering in the ink-black sky above.

  ‘We have never doubted that Cousin Bruno is a man of great determination. And there is no question that Venice would have her reputation much enhanced by the possession of such a machine.’

  ‘But is it even possible to make a device that mirrors the motion of the cosmos?’

  ‘The Florentine seems to have achieved it. And if this professor of mathematics at Padua University is even half as good as the professor of anatomy – Fabricius – then he’ll be a man of rare ability. Fabricius is known even amongst medical men in England. I hope to meet them both. I could learn a lot while we’re here.’

  In the darkness, Bianca frowns. ‘I’m worried Bruno has let his flights of fancy run wild. Padua may like to show herself as a city open to new learning, but the Inquisition still exercises much power in the Republic. Free thought is tolerated only so far. Look what happened to my father: he died in a cell here for his ideas and his writings. Do you not recall what my cousin wrote in his last letter to me?’

  ‘About the friar, Giordano Bruno?’

  ‘Arrested when he went to Venice, to speak upon his revolutionary theories. He thought he was safe in the Veneto. But he wasn’t. Now he’s in Rome, on trial for heresy. I don’t want that to happen to my Bruno.’

  ‘The sphere itself is not heretical – not if it conforms to the Church’s teachings on the movement of the cosmos,’ Nicholas says. ‘But judging from the way your cities are fortified against each other, I’d be more worried about Florence sending some rogues here to threaten Bruno or smash the engine to pieces.’

  Bianca throws back the single sheet and rolls over, spreading her gleaming limbs in an effort to cool herself. She glances out of the window at the pale rooftops of Padua, then back at her husband.

  ‘Enough of this disagreeable talk. I am more interested in the movement of my own cosmos,’ she says.

  ‘It’s very hot,’ he replies.

  ‘Perhaps. But being an academic man, are you not inclined upon some interesting discovery of your own? You never know what you might find.’

  Nicholas props himself on one elbow. He feels a cold rivulet of sweat run down his upper arm and pool in the fold of his elbow. With a husky catch in his voice, he replies, ‘Mistress Merton, in the quest for the new learning there is no avenue a man intent on diligent study should be reluctant to explore.’

  26

  Rose Monkton feels her stomach heave. The smell assaults her nostrils and makes her plump, happy face contort in disgust. She stops in her tracks at the foot of the steps and clutches at her black ringlets, pushing them over her nose and mouth even as she hears the gaoler laugh behind her.

  Though Bianca Merton might call her ‘Mistress Moonbeam’, and newcomers to the Jackdaw – before it burned down – think her not entirely anchored to the practical, and though she might look as if she’s just come in from milking cows or gathering fruit in some idyllic pastoral setting, Rose has endured a hard schooling. She grew up in a stew behind the Mutton Lane shambles. The sound she most recalls from her childhood is not the singing of the lark, but the scream of cattle having their throats cut. It takes a lot to make her knees go weak. But the common durance – the public dungeon – of the Marshalsea prison tests her fortitude to the limit.

  It is almost too dark to see, which in itself is a mercy, even though it isn’t noon yet. The stone stairs she’s descended were not reached by a door, but by an iron grille set into the floor. What light there is down here shows a vaulted ceiling too low for a man of moderate height to stand with his head straight, and Ned – she is already casting her gaze around to spot him – is a head taller than most.

  Her nose twitches as it objects to the pervading stink of piss-soaked straw, human excrement, sweat and despair. A rat the size of a large hedgehog scurries past her feet, leaving Rose to think she would almost certainly swear on her Bible that it looked up at her and thumbed its nose as it went by. Summoning all her willpower, she steps out into the cellar.

  As she skirts the brick pillars holding up the ceiling she expects a cacophony of ribald comments from the men lying or sitting in the straw, but they all seem too weary, too downcast, even to turn their heads. Rose is not used to being invisible amongst male company. She worries that when she finds Ned, he will stare through her as if she wasn’t there, as if she was a ghost.

  To her immense relief, it doesn’t take her long to locate him. She spots what she imagines to be a bear surrounded by its cubs, and realizes the smaller, weaker prisoners have gathered themselves around Ned for protection from the habitual predators of this awful realm.

  He tries to get up, but the ankle-irons he is wearing make it difficult. Rose finds the courage to look at where they encircle his limbs, praying the metal hasn’t bitten into the flesh too deeply; in the short time it has taken to reach him she’s seen ankles bloodied and brimming with pus. To her relief, his skin is unbroken.

  ‘How now, Wife?’ he
says cheerfully. ‘Close your eyes, an’ it smells no worse than the Tabard or the Turk’s Head after the Midsummer Fair.’

  But Rose cannot laugh with him. She would sooner cry for his bravery.

  ‘This is beyond all enduring, ’Usband,’ she says. ‘I’m going straightway to see the warden.’

  He frowns. ‘I’ll not ’ave you giving of yourself to another, just so as I can ’ave a mattress to sleep upon. Think of the baby…’

  Rose puts her hands firmly on the hips of her farthingale. ‘I mean to offer him coin, you great clod-pate – not my body! To get you a better cell.’

  ‘Oh. Well, that’s alright,’ he says. A troubling afterthought shadows its way across his face. ‘’Cept we don’t ’ave coin to spare. I’ll not ’ave Rose Monkton go without. I’ve slept in worse places than this, I can tell you.’

  She presumes he means the years he spent working in the mortuary crypt at St Tom’s.

  ‘That’s as maybe,’ she tells him sternly. ‘But no husband of mine is going to walk into the lodgings Mistress Bianca loaned us as a free man, if he’s smelling like he’s been stood under a window while someone emptied a full piss-pot over his ’ead.’

  Ned looks downcast. ‘Is it that bad?’

  She avoids a direct answer. ‘I shall take just a little of the purse she left us for the work on the Jackdaw. Not much, mind – only what’s needed to get you out of here. Mistress Bianca wouldn’t begrudge it for a moment, I know she wouldn’t.’

  ‘I wonder where they are,’ Ned says, looking around the durance as though he expects to find them hiding behind one of the brick columns.

  Again Rose does not answer him. But she dearly wishes Nicholas and Bianca were both back here in Southwark, because frankly the thought of having to face what is approaching her husband fills her with a dread worse than anything the Marshalsea can conjure up, no matter how innocent she knows him to be.

  The ranks of the Arte dei Astronomi have swelled by two. Nicholas is now the guild’s honorary physician. He will be called upon, should any member accidentally trap a finger in his pliers, skewer himself with his burin or inadvertently hammer his knuckles flat on an anvil. Bianca is the padrona di rimedi, in charge of mixing what Nicholas prescribes. Hers is a wholly invented position, as a woman is not customarily permitted to hold office in a city guild. Nor, Bruno explains in his most apologetic manner, will she be allowed to march with the Arte through the city streets on the Feast of the Holy Rosary in October.

  ‘I had the same trouble with the Grocers’ Guild in London,’ she sighs, ‘when I told them I wanted to practise as an apothecary.’

  Nicholas asks to borrow paper, quill, ink and a pounce-pot. He writes a brief note to Robert Cecil, encoding it with the cipher the two men employ for Nicholas’s work as Cecil’s intelligencer. In it, he informs Lord Burghley’s son that he is in Padua and can be reached at the home of Signor Bruno Barrani, merchant of that city. Then he entrusts the letter to Bruno and the network of merchants and go-betweens he used for his correspondence with Bianca when she was living on Bankside. Nicholas knows it will take weeks – if not months – for the letter to arrive in London. When he might expect a reply, and whether it will tell him it is safe to come home, is anyone’s guess.

  On a cloyingly hot Monday afternoon in the first week in September, he and Bianca are introduced to the other luminaries in Bruno Barrani’s bright new cosmos. In a little shop near the Torlonga tower they meet the angular Mirandola, whose spindly limbs seem almost an extension of the rods and bars that make up the skeletal frames of his clock mechanisms. He is supervising an assistant at the little furnace in the back of the shop when they walk in. With a pair of tongs, he proudly holds up what looks like a still-glowing crown with saw-teeth along one rim. ‘A better balance wheel than this you’ll not find in all Italy,’ he tells Bruno as he hands the tongs back to his apprentice. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any sign of His Serenity’s coin yet? You still have not paid me for the three foliot balances I made.’

  ‘All in good time, Master Mirandola,’ Bruno says engagingly. ‘There’ll be ducats and glory soon enough. Now, meet my cousin Bianca and the brave Englishman who has consented to be her husband.’

  From Mirandola’s shop they move on to visit Pasolini the carpenter. He is a sullen chap of forty with only one eye. ‘Have you brought me any of the doge’s gold yet?’ he asks Bruno.

  ‘Patience, I beg you, Signor Pasolini,’ Bruno says. ‘Meanwhile, we’d ask you kindly to put curves in only where they are signified in young Matteo’s drawings.’

  Next on Bruno’s list are the Corio brothers, whose foundry lies in the Borgo Socco. They are friendly enough, but Bianca comes away with her ears singing from the noise of hammers ringing on anvils and the roaring of bellows – and the older Corio brother’s voice shouting above the din, ‘Where’s our money, Signor Barrani?’

  At the premises of Bondoni the goldsmith they meet a jovial old fellow in bright-yellow Venetian hose, his plump arms defiantly white despite the Veneto sun, and his face speckled with gilt dust as though he were a satyr in a masque. ‘Are we going to get paid before the Feast of the Holy Rosary, Signor Barrani?’ he asks with almost indecent haste, once the introductions have been made.

  ‘When are we to see the sphere itself?’ Nicholas asks when they leave.

  ‘Soon enough,’ says Bruno. ‘We’ve only the lower part of the cradle constructed as yet. And even then, we have to keep sending back Signor Pasolini’s work for his apprentice to put the correct bend in it.’

  ‘Where are we going next?’ Bianca asks as they cross an elegant Roman bridge over the hide-coloured waters of the Piovego canal.

  ‘I have saved the best until last,’ Bruno says proudly, ‘for your husband’s sake.’

  The house in the Borgo dei Vignali is much like any other in the street: a four-storey façade of stucco, the entrance set back a little within a pillared arcade. When Bruno raps on the door, the answering shout comes not from inside but from above. This requires him to retreat into the lane, to where Nicholas and Bianca are waiting. He cranes his neck towards one of the windows on the third floor.

  Leaning out in search of the source of the disturbance are two figures, a man and a woman. Both appear to be naked. The male has a stocky, hirsute torso, topped with the bearded face of a country taverner.

  ‘What do you want, Signor Purse?’ the man shouts.

  ‘Busy, Master Compass?’ says Bruno doubtfully.

  ‘University business. I’m instructing Signorina Storzzi in the acceleration of an object on an inclined plane. Can you come back in… let’s say... October?’

  ‘Isn’t he going to ask you for money?’ Bianca whispers into her cousin’s ear.

  ‘Don’t worry. He will,’ Bruno replies.

  ‘Who’s the pretty maid with you?’ Professor Galileo Galilei calls down from the window.

  ‘My cousin, Bianca Merton.’

  ‘I don’t suppose she’s interested in mathematics lessons?’

  ‘She’s married – to this fine gentleman here. He’s an English physician.’

  Nicholas is looking up at a heavy-featured man about his own age, with dark, receding hair and dissolute brown eyes. He wears an expression of put-upon good humour. ‘Surely that’s not him – the professor of mathematics?’ he asks Bianca out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘It would seem so,’ she says, trying to maintain a straight face. ‘He’s not at all what I expected. I hope Bruno knows what he’s about.’

  ‘I thought for a moment we were back on Bankside.’

  ‘Don’t be foolish, Nicholas,’ Bianca says. ‘On Bankside a maid would likely get frostbite leaning out of a window unclothed like that.’

  The man and woman vanish back into the room. A short while later the street door opens and the mathematician reappears. He is barefoot, dressed in woollen hose and a shirt that has been hurriedly laced, judging by the apparently random criss-crossing of its points. He is alone.


  ‘Come in, Signor Purse. And bring your friends with you. I don’t suppose you’ve brought—’

  Bianca cuts him off with an amused shake of her head.

  Inside, the shady courtyard is set around with mulberry bushes in huge earthen pots. The far wall is similar to the street aspect: four rows of windows, only these have narrow little balconies. Stretched across the lowest is a line of sheets, shirts and under-shifts drying in the heat. A manservant brings a jug of wine. The mathematician toasts his visitors’ health.

  ‘So, a physician – from England,’ Galileo says to Nicholas. ‘Would you rather we spoke Latin?’

  ‘I can manage in Italian. If I have trouble, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘I too studied medicine, at Pisa,’ the mathematician tells him. ‘It was my father’s wish. Almost sent me mad with boredom. I gave it up and turned to mathematics. Best thing I ever did. Numbers don’t get sick and stink, they don’t leak pus and they don’t complain of bellyache. I can’t think of a worse life than spending your days sniffing boils and old men’s piss.’ His satyr’s eyes dart to Bianca and then back to Nicholas. ‘And this is your wife?’

  ‘Yes. We were married last summer.’

  ‘How are you with a sword?’

  Nicholas looks puzzled. He wonders if this is some coarse Paduan euphemism. ‘Dangerous, but not in a competent way. Why?’

  With a broad grin, Galileo thrusts a full wine cup at him. ‘I make it a strict rule never to launch a sally against another fellow’s woman if he can tell one end of a sword from the other.’

  Nicholas decides he rather likes the brash young professor of mathematics from Padua University.

  When enough wine has been taken to toast the arrival of England’s foremost man of medicine and his bride – whom Galileo generously forgives for depriving Padua of her exceptional beauty, to live in godless England – he puts two chubby fingers between his lips and lets loose a whistle that echoes around the courtyard. He shouts, ‘Matteo, take your hand off your privy sausage and get out here this moment, and bring the sketches with you. Master Purse is here and he’s brought company.’