Marbury took in a breath to offer his hasty summation of the encounter with the boys in the woods—which seemed more like a dream than an event—before he realized what Timon was doing.
“I had given thought to the notion that you were a victim of the Inquisition,” he said, managing a smile at Timon. “You now confirm that fact, at least to my mind. I realize that you are, in very subtle ways, using Inquisition techniques to obtain information from me. There is no actual reason to bring me to this ice room, standing beside the dead body, except to say that I might be relieved of that circumstance if I would only answer your questions.”
Timon smiled, folding his hands. “I wondered how long I could employ that tool before you realized what I was doing.”
“I no longer trust you, nor the men who gave you to me,” Marbury said plainly. “You have discerned that, perhaps, and thought it best to ferret out information in this manner.”
“And I am a single-minded man. You hired me to find a killer. I will do it. The more facts I have, the sooner that task will be completed. I will stop at nothing.”
“As you have suggested.”
“But I will confess,” Timon said more softly, and with some difficulty, “I may have been excessive in my manner because I find that I admire and respect you. This is unwise for me. It can become an impediment to my work.”
Is this the truth, Marbury wondered to himself, or another ploy? It seems clear that he is not the one who poisoned me at Hampton Court, but how can one be certain with this man?
“I suggest a truce of sorts,” Timon continued. “I will tell you—perhaps tomorrow—the details of everything that has happened here in your absence. I have discovered things which, as I have told you, will roil the waters of the world.”
“I, in turn,” Marbury sighed, “will reveal, after a good night’s sleep, everything about my journey to court, a tale to strain even the most vivid imagination.”
“Then for God’s sake let us leave this dungeon,” Timon responded quickly, heading for the stairs. “I can no longer feel my feet.”
“I fear I might shatter a bone if I do not stop this quaking,” Marbury said, rushing to follow Timon.
Both men ran up the stairs into the Great Hall.
Marbury was reflecting on the strangeness of his day.
Timon, on the other hand, was reliving one of a hundred or more nights when he had been dragged from a torture chamber back to an Inquisition cell, a room the size of a coffin.
27
Without a word of farewell, Marbury was gone. Timon was left to stumble through the enormous darkened hall past vacant desks where only ghosts could study. Timon hastened toward his room, all the while clutching the hilt of his dagger in his right hand as if it were his crucifix.
Black shadows raked past his face as he quickened his steps; a desperation gripped his mind. Pietro Delasander—that close. And the return of Inquisition nightmares. His hands began to quiver and his lips formed soundless words.
The pale moon rowed its silver boat across a darkening sky, its ease mocking Timon’s panic. It offered Timon white ropes, beams of light through tree limbs, an escape from the earth, if he could climb them. But the bare limbs were blood vessels, the veins of the earth bleeding night into the sky. Timon understood that the moon offered false hopes. There was only one true salvation, to be found in the oil of nutmeg.
That was obtained through steam distillation and could be consumed in a variety of ways. Nutmeg was an important item of trade in England. In certain Jewish communities, especially the Yemenites, it was used as a folk medicine and as an ingredient in love potions. It was also useful against vomiting, colds, fever; diseases of the liver, spleen, and skin—all wonderful ancillary benefits to any love potion. Nutmeg had other practical uses, notably as a flavorful culinary ingredient, but also as an aid to abortion. Women employing the latter usage were derisively called nutmeg ladies, whereas those employing the former were generally referred to as cooks.
Timon smoked it in a clay pipe. He had learned of its more peculiar properties from Jews with whom he had been imprisoned. They had told him about the soothing qualities of large portions of the spice, distilled and smoked. Nausea reigned for a while, and the mouth was as dry as sand; the skin flushed, eyes were red and wild. The hours that followed, however, were filled with unearthly delights. Great visions would take him away from his misery and into another world. Timon had depended on the spice to make his time in prison bearable, to increase his perceptions and insights; later to allow him to render his own personal brand of horror on his hapless victims.
He reached the Deaconage, crashed through the outer door and down the hall to his cell. Though the room was cold, Timon was sweating. He had been holding back the cravings, but the events of the day had finally broken his defenses. Every atom in his body was shrieking for the spice.
He stumbled toward his bed and found the wooden box. A vial of oil and a clay pipe rested there. He sat on the bed, threw the box aside, poured the thick brown oil into the pipe. He found the flint he carried in his robe and struck it feverishly. Mad seconds blithered by before the oil ignited and the smoke began to sting his eyes, then his lungs.
In the darkness of his room, the scent of cooking nutmeg was more comforting than any other sensation in the world. He sucked in the needles of smoke as if he were drawing his last breath—over and over.
At last the panic began to subside. He set the pipe on his lap and leaned back against the wall. His stomach churned and he longed for ale to wash the sand from his throat.
Then, without warning, a vision overtook his mind. Timon found himself in another room, a brighter and more terrifying cell in Rome, near the Campo dei Fiori square.
28
In his vision, Timon was once more in captivity, by the hand of an employer—his betrayer—in January of 1600. Zuane Mocenigo, a wealthy, lazy young man, desired to be taught the art of memory. That was a talent for which Timon—though he was not yet called by that name—was widely known. Timon had been hoping for the vacant mathematics chair at Padua, but that exalted post went instead to Galileo Galilei. Timon served instead, with no small measure of disappointment, as tutor to Mocenigo.
Mocenigo was, in turn, greatly disappointed to learn that Timon’s system of mnemonics required diligent work and earnest concentration. Mocenigo had expected easily acquired magic. He believed that Timon’s prodigious ability to remember the infinite was an effect of sorcery. No matter how many times Timon explained it was mere science—a plodding, exhausting game of making one small fact link to another, a chain that could hold the enormous weight of facts—Mocenigo did not believe him. At first despondent, Mocenigo grew more angry with each passing lesson. Where was the magic?
When he’d had enough of the tedious schoolboy study, he thought absolutely nothing of denouncing Timon to the Inquisition.
Timon’s trial had been overseen by the famous inquisitor Robert Bellarmine. He was a stern interpreter of his task, and his assistant was Cardinal Enrico Venitelli. Timon was quickly condemned as a demon and given over to secular authorities. He was to be burned at the stake in Rome, Campo dei Fiori square. He waited in his cell there, hearing the common noise of the people strolling by, vendors calling out how fresh the salt mussels were, how white the turnips. And, at last, listening to the construction of his own dry funeral pyre, heavy, rough-hewn logs planking and scratching together.
Every waking moment had been spent either in prayer or in killing the thousands of spiders that were his cell mates. Some of them bit and raised red welts that burned and itched. Timon had endured hundreds of such wounds. They had not bothered him at first, but as their number increased, and the constant pain and itching grew, he thought he might go mad before his execution. The tickle of a spider’s legs across his skin—real or imagined—prevented all but the most fitful moments of sleep. His sanity came and went, a kind visitor from another country.
As he knelt in that cell, praying on hi
s last day, an uncommonly warm February morning, he wondered at the approaching footsteps.
This early? he thought. The sun has barely risen. There will only be a small crowd in the square at this hour.
This was puzzling because the primary objective of burning a man at the stake, aside, of course, from serving as popular entertainment, was to warn would-be sinners. An early execution defeated both aims.
He opened his eyes.
The cell was scarcely larger than he was: room enough to lie down only if he curled like a child, room enough to stand only if he stooped like an old man. The walls were green with moss. The odor of the uncleaned corner that served as his chamber pot was nearly overwhelming. He had been blessed with a small, high window. It faced the east so that he could meditate on the changing of the hours. Sometimes he sat for days watching a square of morning light chase shadows slowly up the wall; watching a silver ghost of moonlight do the same in the long spider-hours of the night.
He heard the door groan as it opened. He did not rise from his knees or even turn around to face it. A doomed man is free of such manners.
“My son,” the gentle voice whispered in crisp, formal Latin.
My confessor, he assumed. “Father.” Timon closed his eyes again.
“Please rise,” the voice urged.
Timon sighed, held out a hand to the wall, managed his way to his feet, head brushing the ceiling.
When he turned around, he was presented with an image that branded the forefront of his brain.
His Holiness Pope Clement VIII stood framed just outside the doorway of the death cell looking like a dagger held straight up: gleaming in white robes, his miter coming to a knife point above his head.
Timon was too stunned to move.
“Giordano,” the Pope said, the kindest pronunciation of his real name that Timon had ever heard.
“Your Eminence,” Timon managed, still foolishly standing.
Holy Father turned slightly and dismissed whoever stood behind him with vague gesture. The departing attendant left a stool upon which His Holiness sat in the hall outside the cell.
“This is a terrible day for Mother Church,” Clement began without looking at Timon. “We despise your sins but we disagree that you, yourself, are a demon.”
“I understand, Your Grace,” Timon mumbled, though he did not.
“The most serious charge against you—”
“I have discovered an interior structure to the world of ideas.”
Timon held his gaze steady until the Pope looked at him, looked him in the eye. “I can, therefore, remember anything. It is true.”
“In your eagerness to speak,” the Pope responded, a slight smile twitching at the corner of his mouth, “you have degenerated into Italian.”
Timon smiled, realizing that he had, indeed, reverted to his mother tongue. “Cold Latin will not contain my fervor, and I have become an Italian instead of a Dominican.”
“A man becomes himself on the morning of his death,” Clement agreed softly. “Bellarmine and Venitelli were right to condemn you, with your science of memory.” The Pope shifted uncomfortably on his stool. “And yet it is precisely this science of memory that prompts Us to visit your cell. As of this moment We lay aside your execution. Your death is not a thing We would have upon Our soul. We have therefore made other arrangements. You are to go into hiding and do as We bid you.”
Timon felt as if the stones from the wall had collapsed on him. He could not find his tongue nor unsnarl the knot of his brain. “You are laying aside my execution?”
“We know this stupid Mocenigo,” the Pope said with a wave of his hand, “the man who denounced you and condemned you to your fate here. We understand he was angry that you did not instruct him in some magical arts, but rather attempted to teach him your tricks of science. We know you are not an alchemist. You are a scientist. The very thing that condemned you now saves you. Ironic, is it not?”
“Your Holiness.” Timon heard the relief in his own voice.
“These tricks that help you remember,” Clement continued impatiently, “this scientific device or some apparatus of the mind, We must have you continue to perfect it. You must grow in your abilities so that you will have the power to accomplish great work which We will require of you one day soon.”
“Power?”
“The power of language,” Clement said simply, “and the power of memory. You will be taken to a place of safety where you will learn several difficult languages as quickly as you are able, and you must come to know them better than any man on earth. You will also be given a knot of codes and instructions which no mortal man could possibly untangle. And you will be given further instruction in certain . . . other skills, which we know you once possessed—before you became a monk. We choose you, a man who will die and come back to life, for great work, my son.”
An alien smile touched the lips of His Grace.
Before Timon could form his next thousand questions, a shuffling came down the black hall outside his cell. He cringed, still expecting to be dragged to the stake.
“But here are your protectors,” the Pope said, rising.
“I do not understand,” Timon rasped. “I am to leave with these men? I am not to be executed today?”
“You must bring your remarkable brain back to life, Giordano,” the Pope snapped impatiently. “Preparations have been made.”
“But,” Timon said hastily as the Pope turned to leave, “my father, my earthly father—he will be here to collect my body.”
Holy Father sighed. “We have selected another man,” Clement said, eyes watching the men who approached him. “You must leave immediately.”
With that, the Pope was gone. Vanished as if he had not been in that horrible place at all.
Three men appeared out of the darkness. Timon could not see their faces. They pulled off his tattered brown robe and replaced it with another like their own: black as night, clean.
“But my poor father,” Timon mumbled helplessly to one of the strangers, “my real father, will know I am not the man at the stake.”
“Everything has been arranged,” one said in Italian.
A second, kinder voice whispered, “The man selected to take your place has had his tongue nailed to his jaw so that he cannot speak. And he will have a sack of gunpowder around his neck, which will obscure his face.”
“What?” Timon stammered.
“It is often done as an act of kindness on the part of clerical authorities, so that a man may die more quickly and not suffer burning. It—explodes.”
“And after it does,” the third man said coldly, “no one will recognize the face at all, eh?”
After that moment, the newly christened Brother Timon dropped blissfully into unconsciousness, where he remained for several long days.
29
The vision of these events continued to roll over Brother Timon as he lay in his bed in Cambridge, more than five years after they had happened. He leaned back against the wall behind him, turning his head so that the bare stones could cool his burning cheek. His breathing was labored. His eyes flushed constantly, and all the white in them was gone, replaced by red fire. He replaced the pipe and vial in its coffin. He hid the box once more and lay down across his bed.
Before long, another, more dreaded memory overtook him. He recalled the reason that the name Padget, which Lively had spoken just before he died, so burned the brain.
He closed his eyes, feeling the memory begin to roll over him. He clutched the bedsheets, helpless to prevent the vivid images from appearing in his mind’s eye. At first he only saw transparent strings of rain, dangling in the night. Then, more clearly, he felt himself walking the Southwark street where a certain old man was living. The street had materialized out of the insubstantial air, and Timon was there, walking down that dark corridor. As far as he could tell, the street had no name.
Timon came to a pocked, brown door, half-eaten by worms. Before he knocked, a woman came to the do
or. She was wearing an apron the color of the rain outside. Her face was lined and sooty, and her eyes were slits. A crumpled bonnet hung on the top of her head. Her hands were red and raw, and she winced when she saw Timon, as if his presence caused her pain.
“What?” she demanded.
“I have come to see Robert Padget, please,” Timon said politely.
He had learned that courtesy often startled the London populace. He could turn that shock to his advantage.
“No use,” the woman said, utterly impervious to manners. “If he gets any money at all, it goes to me, see? He owes me three months’ rent now.”
She swung the door toward Timon, shooing him away.
“I do not want his money. I have some questions, only.”
“He doesn’t have any money,” she insisted.
“Then you may find it a good thing I am not here for it.”
She stood in the doorway, sulking for a moment. Greasy hair dribbled from her stained cap. One eye looked slightly more westerly than the other.
“I suppose you can come in,” she grudged, stepping back. “Top of the stairs, first door you see.”
“Thank you.” Timon nodded and squeezed past her as quickly as he could. Her breath was like the remains of a bird ten days dead in the hot sun.
“You can’t stay long, mind,” she called. “He needs his rest so’s he can work. To get my money!”
Timon shot up the black stairs.
“I will not keep him long,” he assured her, hand on Padget’s door.
If he had known what that room was going to be like, he might not have gone farther.
The door croaked open.
Padget’s room was dark; no candle lit it. The lack of light made those four walls a crypt.
The odor of the room mangled the senses, shoved Timon backward like a fist in the chest. The air reeked of sickbed sheets, old ale, cheap tobacco, unemptied chamber pots, and a palpable, heart-stopping fear. Without thinking of how it might offend, Timon put a hand across his face, covering his mouth and nose.
The King James Conspiracy Page 14