The Academy of Secrets

by S. J. Parris

I had missed the evening meal, and my absence had been noted. Gennaro came to find me in the cloister before compline, furious.

  ‘The prior was asking for you – I had to tell him I had sent you to our illustrious patient from last night with an emergency remedy,’ he hissed, shaking me by the shoulder. ‘Listen, I don’t care how much time you spend in Vomero, but get yourself back here for the offices so I don’t have to lie for you. The last thing we want is anyone investigating your disappearances. The Academy has placed great trust in you, Bruno, and you need to repay it with discretion, not by drawing attention to yourself.’

  I bowed my head, chastened.

  ‘I’m sorry. Will you excuse me my duties in the infirmary tomorrow afternoon, though?’

  He twisted his mouth in disapproval, but gave a reluctant nod. ‘If you swear you will be back for vespers.’

  I was so grateful I clasped him by the shoulders and kissed him on both cheeks, just as Raffaele passed by on the other side of the cloister, noting us with a wry look. I decided not to tell Gennaro of his threats, in case the infirmarian forbade me from visiting Porta’s villa. All through the service of compline, I was aware of Raffaele’s eyes on me, his smirking and raised eyebrows. He walked close behind me when we left the church, all the way to the dormitory. At the door of my cell, I turned abruptly.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Mind your manners, little soldier. I merely wanted to wish you pleasant dreams. You must be very tired.’

  I looked at him. What was he insinuating? Did he know that I had walked to Vomero and back, or was it a reference to my being out the night before? My best course, as always, was not to rise to it.

  ‘Thank you, Brother. The same to you.’ I slammed the door in his face. Let him sit on the landing all night watching my cell; there would be nothing for him to see.

  I should have been more careful, of course. I should have heeded Gennaro’s warning, or taken Raffaele’s spite seriously. But all I could think about was seeing Fiammetta again. The next day, as soon as the midday meal was over, I made my way to the side gate, meaning to slip out unseen, but I was intercepted by my friend Paolo da Rimini, racing up behind me with his habit hoicked above his knees as he ran.

  ‘Hey!’ His freckled face creased with mock-hurt. ‘Were you going without me?’

  ‘Merda. Sorry.’ I realised, belatedly, that we had a lesson with our Hebrew tutor that afternoon at the Augustinian convent of San Giovanni a Carbonara in the east of the city. Those of us studying for our theology degrees were sent for tuition with the leading experts in different disciplines at other religious houses in the city, to broaden our knowledge. ‘Listen, I have to go somewhere. Can you make an excuse for me? Tell him I’m ill.’

  Paolo frowned. It was not unusual for any of us to skip our lessons now and again, using our licence to leave the convent as a cover for more entertaining pursuits, but I had never played truant without Paolo; he and I had been novices together, looked out for one another, lied our way out of trouble for each other countless times. When I was accused of blasphemy by another novice for mocking his terrible poem about the Virgin, it was Paolo who defended me to the prior with such passionate testimony to my pious devotion that the matter had been dropped. I knew he would do anything for me, and I hated having to lie to him.

  ‘You’ve been elusive these past couple of days,’ he said, trying not to sound wounded. ‘I called for you the other night, but you weren’t in your cell, and you weren’t at the Cerriglio either. And yesterday afternoon you vanished. Is it some business to do with Gennaro?’

  I hesitated. I trusted Paolo implicitly, but the Academy was not my secret to confide, and I could not risk him guessing at anything to do it.

  ‘No. It’s …’ I leaned in closer and whispered. ‘A woman.’

  His eyes lit up and he slapped my arm lightly. ‘You sly dog! You could have told me. A courtesan, is she?’

  I shook my head. ‘I can’t say. You understand.’

  His expression grew solemn. ‘Ah. She’s married.’

  ‘Exactly. Her husband is away this afternoon.’

  ‘Well.’ He tilted his head to one side and grinned. ‘All right for some. I’ll get you out of Hebrew this time if you come for a drink tonight and tell me all the details.’

  I half-ran the whole way uphill to Vomero. Ercole let me in with barely a word and led me to the library. She was waiting for me in the secret reading room, dressed in a white linen gown with a loose, jewelled girdle, her hair tied back with a blue ribbon. She greeted me with a warm smile, and nodded towards the entrance. ‘I’ve told Ercole I will call him if we need anything,’ she said, with a meaningful look. ‘He understands that we would prefer to study undisturbed.’

  ‘What are you reading?’ I gestured to the book open on the table.

  ‘This is my uncle’s encyclopaedia – have you not seen it?’ She offered the volume; I opened it to the frontispiece and read the title: Magia Naturalis. Beneath the author’s name was a drawing of a lynx. That explained why he had thought I was trying to flatter him.

  ‘We are not allowed such things,’ I said, turning the pages in wonder. ‘But – he said he was working on an encyclopaedia of natural magic – I didn’t realise he had already written one.’

  ‘He published this ten years ago, when he was not yet twenty-five,’ she said, her pride evident in her voice. ‘There are editions in five different countries. Now he means to expand it from four volumes to twenty. But he was questioned by the Inquisition about some of the contents – he will have to be more careful this time.’

  It was hard to tear myself away from Porta’s book; I would have given much to spend an afternoon immersed in it, not least to discover what the Inquisition had found to object to; the thought that Porta had already attracted their attention troubled me. But Fiammetta had her bright, mischievous eyes fixed on me, a secret smile playing around her lips, and the look she gave me suggested that reading was not her first priority that day.

  We did not talk of medicine and natural magic. I put my hands to her face again, guessed a falcon, a dolphin, a doe – any animal I hoped might possess sufficient grace and beauty not to insult her. It was all prelude to the inevitable. Laughing, she shook her head at each suggestion, and then she kissed me. Her skin smelled of rosewater and her mouth tasted faintly of salt. She wrapped her fingers in my hair and arched her head back to let me kiss her throat, and I wondered if she had done this before, with other protégés of her uncle, or if some quality in me had proven irresistible.

  She let me unlace her bodice and kiss her small breasts, but she could not let me take her virginity, she explained candidly, since that was all she had to barter with over her future. Without it, she would be worth considerably less to the nuns or to a prospective husband, but there were other things we might do to bring each other pleasure. I did not ask how she knew of such matters. Instead, I let her show me, and I learned much in that hot, windowless library as the lamps burned low. It was not my first time with a woman, but my previous attempts had been rushed, clumsy affairs by comparison. Fiammetta taught me to take my time, as well as introducing me to new aspects of the female anatomy that I could not have learned from any textbook. If I felt a twinge of guilt, it was only over the books Porta had set out for me, abandoned on the table as I explored other avenues of forbidden knowledge.

  ‘I must not miss vespers this evening,’ I whispered afterwards, as we lay on the Turkish carpet, breathing hard, sweat slick on our skin in the lamplight. ‘There’s enough suspicion of me already – I can’t lead the Dominicans to your uncle.’

  ‘Go, then,’ she said, leaning forward to gently bite my lower lip. ‘But come back tomorrow.’

  I promised I would, though that evening I scrambled into vespers a minute after the prayers had started; my late arrival occasioned a stern glare from the prior over the rim of his lectern, a furious scowl from Gennaro and a narrowed, knowing look from Raffaele. But the next day, giddy an
d reckless with desire, I returned to Vomero. Fiammetta met me herself at the door in the cliff, and led me through the underground tunnels to a different exit, through a grotto in the gardens.

  ‘I thought it might be pleasant to be outside,’ she said, slipping her arm through mine as she led me along a path through a grove of orange trees, away from the villa. I darted an anxious glance over my shoulder.

  ‘Where is Ercole?’

  ‘Indoors, I expect. He won’t bother us.’

  ‘You’re sure he won’t say anything to your uncle?’ I had the impression that, beneath his veneer of spotless civility, Ercole disapproved of me, and I could not help but worry that my place in the Academy might be at risk if Porta thought I had taken advantage of his generosity to despoil his niece. I did not want to have to choose between them.

  Fiammetta laughed, but there was a note of melancholy in it. ‘I told you, my uncle would not interfere in my business unless he thought I was in danger. This’ – she stretched out her hand to encompass the villa and its extensive grounds – ‘is the only place I am really free. No one expects anything of me. My uncle treats me as a person, not an ornament to be traded, or an inconvenience to be dealt with. But, alas, he returns tomorrow.’

  ‘You seem sad. You are not looking forward to seeing him?’

  She sighed. We had reached a bower of tangled vines that formed a shady arch with a stone bench beneath; she motioned me to sit.

  ‘I am, of course. I miss his company. But the day before he left, a letter arrived from my father. I have been in Naples three weeks – my father says he has indulged my games long enough, and I must return home or he will come to fetch me. Uncle Giambattista said he would reply when he came back from Capodimonte.’ She made a face. ‘He will not throw me out, but he doesn’t want to antagonise his brother. I have known all this week that I must face my choice about whether to join a convent or marry a disgusting old man.’ She reached for my hand and twined her fingers with mine. ‘And then you appeared.’

  I did not know how to take this. ‘So I am, what? A rebellion? A test, to see if you would miss the temptations of the flesh?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, neither. Or perhaps both. I saw you come in with Ercole that first day. I liked the look of you, so I followed you to the library. I suppose I was feeling angry, and reckless – I thought if I must become a prisoner of one kind or another, I might at least enjoy my last days of liberty. Does that shock you?’

  ‘No …’ If I sounded uncertain, it was because I had never heard a woman talk of desire as something she might own and act on. The girls at the Cerriglio were loud and brash and full of lewd jokes, but it was all commerce to them. As a youth, the wisdom I had gleaned from my father was that men desired and women resisted; if you wanted something from them, you would have to learn to cajole and persuade to get past their natural aversion to the act. Later, when I joined the Dominicans, I was told that women were the instruments of Satan, inflamed with lust and determined to lure men away from reason and into sin. It had never occurred to me that a young woman might see a man and want him, purely for her own pleasure. ‘But you are saying I could have been any one of your uncle’s associates who happened to cross your path?’

  She smiled. ‘Not at all. Have you seen most of my uncle’s associates?’ She laid her head on my shoulder. ‘I wish we could go on like this for ever. Sometimes I think all I ask from life is to carry on living here, working as my uncle’s assistant. That would be enough to make me happy – as long as you came to visit.’ She squeezed my hand. ‘I know Giambattista would agree to it – he likes the company. But my father would never countenance such a thing.’

  ‘Your uncle has no wife or family?’ I had noted on all my visits how quiet the villa seemed, for such a large place, with few servants to be seen apart from the faithful Ercole. Fiammetta gave me a sidelong look.

  ‘I don’t think finding a wife has ever been of much interest to my uncle.’

  ‘Ah.’ I nodded, taking her meaning.

  ‘My father urges him to, for convention’s sake. There is enough malicious talk about Giambattista as it is.’

  ‘Why, what is said of him?’

  ‘You must know? That he is a magician, that he dabbles in witchcraft and conjures spirits, that he is hostile to the Spanish. None of that does my father’s position any good. But Giambattista says he will not make some poor woman’s life a misery to spare his brother from gossip. People will say what they want, regardless. The great good fortune of being the second son, he says, is that he is not obliged to fill the world with more della Portas.’ She laughed, and settled comfortably against me.

  ‘You are fond of him,’ I murmured into her hair, smiling.

  ‘He is the best of men.’ She twisted her head to kiss my neck. ‘And you are the best of men outside my own family. Let’s pretend we can go on like this indefinitely.’ She guided my hand beneath her skirts and tipped her head back as I began to move my fingers. An instant later she snapped upright, her eyes open, casting wildly around.

  ‘What was that?’

  I had heard nothing, but her fear made me tense and strain to listen.

  ‘There was a noise, from the trees over there.’ She pointed. ‘Go and look.’

  Obediently, I stood and surveyed what I could see of the terrace. I caught a faint rustling from the undergrowth along the boundary wall, but could see nothing amiss.

  ‘A bird in the bushes, probably. Nothing to worry about.’ I sat beside her and attempted to resume, but the disturbance had made her skittish.

  ‘You’re sure no one followed you here?’

  ‘Of course not. I would have noticed.’ But her words planted a seed of anxiety. Would I have noticed? I had been in such a rush to see her – perhaps I had not watched as carefully as I should when I left San Domenico, or on the road out of the city. Still, I could not believe I had been so oblivious that anyone could have followed me all the way to Vomero without my being aware of it.

  She seemed to accept my protestations and returned to my arms, but we both remained a little distracted, alert to any unexpected sound and not quite so abandoned to our pleasures as we had been the day before. I found myself wishing we had stayed in the privacy of the secret library, especially since this might be our last afternoon together. When the time came to leave, I felt oddly melancholic, conscious that I had not been the liveliest company. Fiammetta showed me out of a gate in the garden wall that opened on to the road.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she said, as if reading my thoughts. ‘My mind was elsewhere today, it was not your fault. I was jumping at shadows – I even started to fear that my father had sent someone to spy on me and report back to him – isn’t that absurd? I’m sorry. Will you come again tomorrow?’

  ‘Won’t your uncle be back?’

  ‘If you come a little earlier, to this gate, we might steal an hour together to say goodbye before he arrives. If he sees you, he will want to tell you all about his caves and we would never get a moment of privacy. Say you will?’

  How could I refuse her? I covered her face with kisses and slipped out of the garden into the shining heat of late afternoon. Several times on the road back to the city, I stopped, reaching for my knife, convinced I had heard footsteps behind me, but each time it was only a labourer or a trader leading a donkey; I sheathed the knife quickly and muttered a blessing as they passed. I congratulated myself on arriving in good time for vespers, though my relief was short-lived; Raffaele came into the church immediately after me and seated himself on the opposite side of the nave, so that he could stare at me throughout the service. His look was one of such undisguised triumph, like a fox in a henhouse, that I began to fear he had found out my secret.

  But he said nothing, and by the next day I had persuaded myself that I had been worrying unduly; Raffaele simply enjoyed tormenting me. I decided to skip the midday meal; I asked Paolo to tell the prior I was taking an extra Hebrew tutorial across town. This would be my last visit to Po
rta’s villa, I told myself, at least for Fiammetta’s sake; after today, I could leave it a while until any suspicion about my absences had been forgotten, but I was determined not to disappoint her. It was a day of fierce heat; I had asked for a skin of fresh water from the kitchen, which I slung by a leather strap around my chest, and I had almost reached the side gate in the gardens when the prior stepped out from among the trees and greeted me with a forbidding smile, his hands folded into the sleeves of his robe. Behind him stood two of the convent servants, tall, strong young men who worked in the grounds. I knew then that I was discovered.

  ‘You are heading the wrong way for the refectory, Fra Giordano,’ the prior said, pleasantly.

  ‘I have been obliged to move my lesson at San Giovanni to an earlier hour, Most Reverend Prior. I had arranged to send my apologies.’ I bowed.

  ‘You know that you are obliged to seek permission in advance if you wish to miss mealtimes or services,’ he said, in the same light tone. ‘You are making quite a habit of failing to do so.’ He nodded to the water-carrier. ‘You seem prepared for a longer journey.’

  ‘It’s a hot day, Most Reverend Prior. I did not want to arrive with my throat parched and unable to speak.’

  ‘Hmm. Walk with me, Fra Giordano.’

  It was an order, not a request. He set off back towards the cloisters, and I had no choice but to fall into step beside him. The two burly servants followed.

  ‘As you know, since you are one of our most promising scholars, I have been pleased to encourage your theological studies with the best masters in the city, in the belief that your achievements will bring greater glory to San Domenico. But it has been brought to my attention that you have been abusing the liberty we give you.’

  I did not reply. He meant that someone had informed him of my absences, and that could only have been Raffaele. I wondered how much either of them thought they knew. The prior placed a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘As Dominicans, we do not believe that men of God should be shut off from society, and for this reason I do not keep a closed order. But we need to cultivate a strong will to be in the world, yet not of it. I understand how easy it is for a young man to be dazzled by the distractions of a city such as Naples. And so I feel that, to keep you on the correct path, a period of silent prayer and penitence is in order. After that, I will consider whether your devotion is strong enough to allow you to leave the convent.’