by S. W. Perry
‘That I can see a little of what is in your heart?’ he replies contemptuously. ‘Did you really believe that killing my wife would help me to see more?’
‘She was in the way, Nicholas. She has been in the way since we met. Discard her.’
‘Discard her – for you?’
‘This close to Judgement Day we have to make brave choices.’
Nicholas jumps back down from the rail. ‘Ruben, go to the doorway. Take the steps on the right; I’ll go left. Be careful. I think her mind is so disordered she might strike at either of us without even realizing she’s doing it.’ He turns to the mathematician. ‘Professor, you go to the Piazza del Santo. Tell the first of the Podestà’s night-watch you come across that we need help here. Tell him I fear the doge’s Master of the Spheres is in danger. Hurry!’
Perplexed, Galileo shakes his head. He seems to have sobered up rapidly. ‘Don’t you want me to stay and help? The maid knows me. Perhaps I may reason with her.’
‘There has been nothing resembling reason in that poor maid’s mind for a long while, Professor. And speaking of what is reasonable, getting yourself stabbed as a way of avoiding paying your sister’s dowry is not it.’
With a harsh laugh, the mathematician heads for the doorway, his body silhouetted there by the light of the brazier burning in the mist beyond.
Nicholas takes up the torch from where he planted it and follows him, taking the left-hand flight of wooden steps. Ruben takes the right.
Hemmed into the narrow space between the wall of the auditorium and the outside masonry, Nicholas begins the steep climb into the blackness. Shoulders hunched, he thrusts the torch out ahead of him, moving within its dancing sphere of light into an otherwise impenetrable cosmos.
He climbs the first flight and reaches a curved landing barely wide enough to allow him passage. To his left is an open space to enable the audience of students to spill out and fill the observation tier; to his right, the brickwork of the building’s shell. He hears movement on the tier above, the clatter of footsteps on timber. From the far side of the auditorium comes the sound of Ruben pleading with his sister to stay where she is.
Moving forward, he stumbles upon the next flight of stairs. He begins to climb once more. Again he hears movement above him, a desperate and doomed slithering of shoe leather on freshly planed timber. A crossbeam support left in place by the carpenters springs out of the darkness and almost brains him. And then, out of the wall to his left, Hella emerges.
‘Come with me, Nicholas,’ she says in a pleading voice, holding out her hand, staring at him in the torchlight. ‘Come with me and we will find our rest together, before the last day.’
Turning her back on him, she hurries ahead. He catches a shadowy glimpse of her climbing the next flight of steps. Then he loses her again in the pitch-black confinement of this seemingly never-ending prison.
He does not count the tiers they climb together in this strange pursuit. But then suddenly there are no more steps, just an opening to his left. He turns to face it and steps forward.
By the light of the torch, Nicholas sees he is standing on the very top tier, looking out into space. There is no wooden balustrade here, only an elliptical, uncompleted walkway of planking held up by scaffolding. Two steps forward and he would go over the edge. He feels the unsecured planks move under his feet. Looking down, he sees glimpses of the tiers of the auditorium set out beneath him, as though he were peering over the edge of an elliptical stairwell, forty or more feet down into the darkness. A faint, single wash of yellow from the brazier in the courtyard falls on the now-empty dissection table. He feels his knees weaken, his stomach lurch. His free hand clutches at the wall in a bid to stop the reeling of his senses.
From his right he hears the rasp of planks raking against each other. Turning his head, he catches a glimpse of Hella lunging towards him, her arms outstretched to carry them both over the edge. She moves so quickly, so suddenly, that he doesn’t even think of stepping back out of the way. He closes his eyes and waits to feel the brief moment of fatal freedom as he falls.
The night rings to the sharp crack and clatter of un-nailed planks sprung out of place by the impact of careless feet. A scream. A sickening glissando of impacts as Hella’s body strikes the rails of the lower tiers as it plunges. A final crack – mercifully brief – of a human skull striking the unyielding edge of the dissection table.
Then silence, save for the sound of his own breathing and the faintest rat-a-tat-tat of drums, like the sound of a victorious army leaving the battlefield to the defeated and the dead.
43
Adisturbance at the Palazzo Bo – even one involving a fatality – is just another irritant in a busy night for the Podestà and his staff. The night-watch has had its hands full ensuring that the Feast of the Holy Rosary passes off without the great and the good of Padua having their purses lifted by the larcenous, or the honour of their wives and daughters insulted by the impertinent. Thus it is daylight before Bruno Barrani’s body is found in the chamber below the dissection table of Professor Fabrici’s almost-completed anatomy theatre.
Found in the new black silk doublet he wears – purchased specifically for the procession, but now stained with dried blood from a single knife-thrust to the back – is a letter claiming to be from the rector of the university. In it, Bruno is asked to meet him in the seclusion of the anatomy theatre, the more privately to discuss the prospect of Signor Barrani taking a leading position on the university’s Studium, in reward for his tireless work on behalf of the city’s reputation. When the letter is shown to the rector, he barely reads beyond the first line before pronouncing it a forgery. ‘It’s not even in my hand,’ he says, before adding dismissively, ‘Anyway, why would Padua want a chancer like Signor Barrani for an exemplar?’
Bianca is almost inconsolable, and for a while Nicholas is racked by the fear that she will lose the child. He realizes that if she does, it will prove the power of Hella Maas’s curse, and he blames himself for not seeing through Hella’s deceit from the very start.
‘You saw what you thought was another human soul in distress,’ Bianca tells him. ‘You’re a physician. What choice did you have?’
Madonna Antonella allows the Podestà three days’ grace before she seeks an audience. He receives her in his palazzo with all the grace due to her piety. But as she tells him why she has come, his podgy face clouds over.
‘Heresy – here in our city? How did you learn of this, Madonna?’
‘A young Beguine, Sister Carlotta, who knows her duty to our Lord, has come to me,’ Antonella tells him from a kneeling position, adopted because, in his red gown, the Podestà looks to her very much like a cardinal, and she thinks it better to be safe than sorry. ‘She heard, apparently from our poor sister who had that dreadful accident in the Palazzo Bo, that this blasphemous device is able to predict events that God – and our Holy Mother Church – would wish impressionable minds not to know of.’
‘What manner of events, Madonna?’
‘The precise date, for instance, of the day of our final judgement.’
The Podestà manages a weak smile through the grinding of his jaw. When he regains control of his face, he reaches out to raise her to her feet. ‘You are right to have come to me, Madonna,’ he says generously. ‘But you need have no fear. None whatsoever. The device is not heretical, merely scientific.’ And with a benign smile he sends her on her way. He is a practical man; 4 per cent of the money His Serene Highness in Venice has set aside for the late Signor Barrani’s scheme cannot be endangered by the concerns of one unworldly woman, however pious.
But the Podestà has judged Madonna Antonella unwisely. She has contacts. She uses them. Ten days later he receives a visit from Cardinal Lorenzo Priuli, the Patriarch of Venice, who carries with him not only the doge’s authority, but that of God Himself.
‘If what Madonna Antonella tells me is true, this engine is heretical,’ he tells the Podestà, having failed to offer him
one single smile since he walked through the door. ‘What is more, if the common people were to get hold of it, understand its workings, use it to determine matters the Almighty desires to remain unknown, then no prince in all Christendom would be safe from insult and overthrow.’ Then Priuli reminds him that while the Serene Republic likes to consider itself open to the new learning, it has its limits. Was not the heretic prior, Giordano Bruno, arrested in Venice only two years ago, after spreading his vile theories on the universe – and man’s place in it – throughout Europe? He will surely burn before long. And Podestàs, the cardinal observes ominously, are no more immune from God’s wrath than are heretic friars.
That very afternoon the Holy Office of the Faith descends upon the storehouse by the Porta Portello. By sunset it is empty. The timbers are burned, the iron carried away to be melted down for more practical usage, and the brass and gilt handed to the Church to be turned into something less troublesome. Nothing of Bruno Barrani’s great sphere remains. By order of the Council, the Arte dei Astronomi is struck from the roll of city guilds.
When the Patriarch departs for Venice, he leaves the Podestà with a written order from the doge’s treasury: return all monies as yet unspent.
Throughout the following weeks Nicholas keeps a careful eye on his wife. Slowly her grief subsides. Together, they take long walks along the banks of the Bacchiglione. The leaves lie scattered around the trees like fragments of discarded memories. But he is pleased to see that the dark, underlying mood that had preceded the events of the night of the Feast of the Holy Rosary seems to have lifted from her. He puts it down to the death of Hella Maas.
At the end of October, Ruben takes his leave of them. He has it in mind to join the Protestant community at Montreux. Bianca wishes him well, and keeps the conversation she had with his sister there to herself.
In November Nicholas is approached at the Palazzo Bo by a young student of law, an Englishman, though his dress is distinctly Paduan. He hands Nicholas a letter. ‘Don’t open it here,’ he says. ‘Should a reply be needed, seek me out.’ He doesn’t stay to give his name.
Upon opening it, in the privacy of Bruno’s study at the house in the Borgo dei Argentieri, Nicholas is confronted with a meaningless jumble of letters written in a neat, professional hand, the sort of hand a clerk at Cecil House might favour. Bianca watches as he sets to work decoding the cipher. She resists the desire to look over his shoulder to see what manner of future his quill is revealing. Don’t interrupt him, she tells herself sternly. Give him time. Thoughts of returning to England have begun to fade from her mind of late, but for Nicholas’s sake she would rather see him exonerated.
Eventually he begins to smile. He lays down the pen. ‘Mistress Merton, you’ll be relieved to know that you’re no longer married to an accused regicide,’ he tells her, the smile on his dependable jaw in severe danger of becoming a grin. ‘Apparently it was Fulke Vaesy who denounced me. He’s written a confession, admitting it was all a lie. We are free to go home.’
‘With a child well on the way?’ she says. ‘Shall we pack her in a crate like a set of pewter?’
‘I didn’t mean now, of course. Not at this very moment.’ He holds up the paper on which he has deciphered the letter. ‘Sir Robert says he could do with a second set of eyes and ears in Padua. More importantly, in Venice – England has no ambassador there.’
‘A second?’
‘The English law student who gave this to me—’
‘And Cecil is suggesting you?’
‘Not officially.’
‘Does he intend to pay you?’
‘Not officially.’
They decide to put off a decision, at least until the child is old enough to travel safely.
In December Bianca’s old family house unexpectedly comes up for rent. They move out of the Borgo dei Argentieri, taking Luca and Alonso with them. Nicholas can afford servants now: there are enough well-heeled foreign students at the Palazzo Bo for an English physician to take on as clients. And thanks to Professors Galileo and Fabrici putting the word about that there is a competent young man of physic new to the city who might be just the fellow to consult for your current troublesome malady, he has Paduan patients, too.
In the new year, Girolamo Fabrici’s revolutionary anatomy theatre opens to great acclaim. Nicholas attends a lecture there. Watching the cadaver being dissected by the great man, he cannot help but think back to the night of the Feast of the Holy Rosary. Wherever she is now, he hopes Hella Maas is at peace. Given the hurt and pain she has both suffered and inflicted, he thinks she will need a little rest – before she faces her Last Judgement.
In the courtyard of her parents’ old house, Bianca writes her will. Made on this, the first day of June, in the year of our Lord 1595, and being possessed in all respects of sound reason and health… She does not plan to die, but when childbirth is imminent one has to take precautions. Nicholas finds it hard not to weep at her bravery.
A little before sunrise on the fifth day of the month, with a soft wash of light gilding the domes of the Basilica of St Anthony, Nicholas and Galileo wait outside the lying-in chamber in the house where Simon Merton and his wife, Maria Caporetti, once lived. Nicholas has spent several hours in a state of unrest. But not once has Eleanor called to him through the haze of anxiety in his head. And whenever his thoughts have wandered briefly in her direction, she has somehow never quite materialized into any identifiable form.
When he hears the laughter of the midwives, followed almost immediately by a robust, high-pitched howling, he finds it almost impossible not to weep.
‘That’s a lusty boy, or Galileo Galilei can’t count,’ his friend says, clapping him on the shoulder. ‘By what name will he be christened?’
‘Bianca wants to name him Bruno. That’s good enough for me.’
The mathematician purses his lips in approval. ‘You should thank the saints for your good fortune. If you need any help spending the money you’ve saved on a dowry, I’ll be your man.’
Nicholas would laugh – were it not for the fact that he is too busy giving thanks that curses have power only over those who believe themselves cursed.
A cold wind is blowing off the River Thames, stirring the leaves on the trees in St Saviour’s churchyard. Towering over his wife, Ned Monkton draws her to him, placing himself between her and the small wooden cross. They have been coming here every week after Sunday sermon since early April. Ned holds her until he feels her sobbing ease a little.
‘We wasn’t cursed, Rose. It was God’s will,’ he says softly. ‘We cannot know what is in His holy plan. Perhaps He has more need of her than we do.’
‘But couldn’t He ’ave given her a minute or two of life?’ Rose asks, red-eyed. ‘Enough for us to bid her welcome, and tell her she was loved?’
‘There will be another child, Wife,’ Ned says gently. ‘An’ more than just another.’
He tries hard to sound as though he believes it. Having spent so many years amongst the dead, he has often thought he would be inured to the pain of loss. But the murder of his young brother, Jacob, five years ago had shown him that familiarity is no protection. He holds Rose even closer, to draw some of her own strength into him, then releases her because he knows she needs it even more than he does.
‘We must pray that will be so,’ she says, stepping back and wiping her eyes on her sleeve. ‘And I know I should not be angry with God. More than once I pleaded with him to spare you, even at the cost of our unborn child. Was that wrong of me, Ned?’
‘Nay, Wife. I would ’ave made the same bargain, had it been you on your way to Tyburn.’
Rose takes his hand in hers. The weight of it surprises her, as it always does. She marvels at how something so hard and powerful can caress her so gently. Yes, she thinks, surely there will be others.
Lifting his branded thumb towards her mouth, she bestows a kiss upon the recently healed scar tissue, sensing the puckered M against her lips. Then she lets it fall.
Historical Note
The extraordinary triptych The Last Judgement, painted by Hieronymus Bosch, went missing from his home town and was only catalogued, some sixty-five years after this story is set, when it appeared in the private collection of the Archduke of Austria. It is now on public display in Vienna. A congregation in the sixteenth century must have found its phantasmagorical images – intriguing and compelling even today – terrifying.
Pilgrims have been walking the Via Francigena to Rome for more than a thousand years. Archbishop Sigeric made the journey from Canterbury around eighty years before the Battle of Hastings. The story of his journey is told in a splendid audiovisual presentation in the Entry Point Museum in the beautiful Italian town of Lucca.
Girolamo Fabrici – or, to give him his Latinized name, Fabricius ab Acquapendente (I have used his Italian name throughout for ease) – held the chair of anatomy and surgery at Padua for fifty years. He is responsible for the construction of Europe’s first custom-built anatomical theatre, which can still be visited today at the Palazzo Bo. Dissections were performed there until the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
It was only about fifty years earlier than that when Ned Monkton’s ruse to escape the gallows was removed from English law. The actor and playwright Ben Johnson relied upon Benefit of Clergy to avoid being hanged for the manslaughter of a fellow actor, though he didn’t need his wife to coach him in his lines.
In 1597 Galileo Galilei, professor of mathematics at Padua, perfected his military compass. It was a bestseller. It enabled him, amongst other things, to pay back the two hundred ducats he had borrowed to settle the issue of his sister’s dowry. His subsequent career needs no further exposition here.