Koppernigk poured wine into his beaker with niggardly care. ‘I’m a canon at Frauenberg Cathedral, it’s true, but I haven’t been there since I was installed. My mission is temporal, not spiritual. You call me Doctor—Doctor Copernicus, if you don’t mind. My Latin is as good as anyone’s, and that’s the name that is known in all the countries of the world.’
‘It’s because of your renown that I came, signor,’ Pasquale assured him.
Koppernigk was suddenly suspicious again. ‘Who sent you? Why did you come to me? I do not advertise my goods like a merchant, no one does who has any pretensions at greatness in the scientific arts. In any case, too many have made too much from my ideas.’
It was as Piero had said; Doctor Koppernigk, having been forced to loose the truths he had uncovered upon the world, had lost control of them, which was an affront to his soul. His caution was the caution of a miser asked to part with some trifling fraction of his fortune. He would hoard his truths, if he could, for otherwise his rivals might gain from them at his expense. He had divined the disposition of the architecture of the universe, but was not clever enough to profit from his discovery, or indeed to defend it except by evolving complicated epicycles to explain what drove the motions of the planets about the sun. His discovery that the Earth and the other planets revolved around the sun had revolutionized the notion of the place of man in the universe, and yet with his epicycles and equants and epicycles upon epicycles he had sought not to topple the old order, but to reconcile it with his findings through a receding infinity of adjustments. He knew well enough that he could not demonstrate those mechanisms, for in truth they did not exist except in the minds of men, and so, although he had shifted the centre of the universe, he was frightened that his discovery would be taken from him. He trusted no one, not even himself.
Pasquale explained again that he was here only because of the good canon’s reputation, and the advice of Piero di Cosimo.
Koppernigk glared at Pasquale and said, ‘You say you know me already? I don’t think so. Have you been following me?’
‘Oh no. Not at all.’
‘I won’t have people following me about the city.’
‘Quite right. I understand exactly.’
‘I called the militia on one fellow only last year. He denied it of course, and the militia wouldn’t believe me, but it was quite true. Charlatans would dearly love to use my name to further their schemes. Astrologers and the like. I am plagued,’ Koppernigk said, and drained his beaker, ‘by astrologers and so-called natural scientists, under which disguise so many magicians trade these days. No, if that’s what you’re after, then you may go now, or I will call the guard.’
‘Doctor, I am an artist, not an astrologer. I understand from Piero di Cosimo that you have appreciated some of my depictions of the amorous arts. Please, do take more wine. There’s plenty more where that came from.’ The wine wasn’t too bad, Pasquale thought, or at least, it was by no means as bad as he had expected, and if it left a coppery taste in the mouth, the heat it generated was genuine enough. He freely poured wine for both of them, and drank deep to show goodwill.
Koppernigk drank in rapid sips, his veiny hands wrapped around the beaker as if he were afraid that someone would take it from him. He said, ‘If you’re an artist I don’t suppose you have come to hear about my theory of the aether and the propagation of light. I must ask you again why you are here, signor. Bear in mind my time is limited. You say I have appreciated your work? What was your name again? Firenze? You are named for the city?’
‘No, Doctor. My name is Pasquale de Cione Fiesole. The small town, you know, no more than an hour’s ride away.’
‘I know Fiesole, of course. I have been there several times to make my observations. The city smoke you see, obscures the stars, and then again there are the acetylene lamps…Have you more of that wine? This is good wine, for Tuscan wine, although Prussian wine is much better. But I should be careful. It will mount to my head.’
‘Not at all, signor. Wine fortifies the blood, and so feeds the seat of intelligence.’ Pasquale found that he was grinning at the thought that this crabbed colourless scholar was his only chance of gaining entry to the court of the Great Engineer, and grimaced to erase his smile. His face felt both hot and numb, as if it had been thrust into a furnace.
‘You artists are wrong, of course,’ Koppernigk said with grave precision. ‘You cannot represent the world by smearing pigments on a flat plane. It only works because the eye is so easily tricked—but it is not real. As for reality, light itself is the key, and the motion of light, of course, as so recently demonstrated by the Great Engineer. You did see his tableau of living light?’
Pasquale lit another cigarette from the twisted stub of the first. ‘I regret that I was detained elsewhere. But you have made the very point I wished to raise. There is something I want to learn, Doctor.’
Koppernigk suddenly seemed to take fright, as if he had stepped across a line only he could see, into dangers only he could apprehend. ‘I am nothing but a student in those matters. I can repeat only what is said many times, that is. I have no direct experience, no, none at all.’
Pasquale fumbled out the picture he had rescued from the fireplace at Guistiniani’s villa. Flakes of silvery stuff were caught in the black cloth he’d wrapped around the glass plate, and the darkening was worse, a lapping rim of shadows encroaching on all but the very centre. He laid it on the table and asked Koppernigk his opinion.
Koppernigk planted his elbows on the table and his sharp chin in his cupped hands, and frowned down at the picture, his eyes wrinkling in the way of the short-sighted. Then he realized what it showed and reared backwards, looking wildly around at the noisy tavern, the students carousing or singing crude national songs. They were drunk; everyone in the tavern was drunk. Koppernigk sputtered that he really knew nothing of that sort of thing, no, not at all.
‘I mean the process. I would learn of the process. This picture is crude, yes.’
Koppernigk said with what appeared to be genuine outrage, ‘It is the vilest kind of devil-worship!’
Pasquale talked quickly, stumbling over his words, explaining that a composition with artistic merit would be another matter, it was not so much the subject as the presentation. As he talked he took out paper and pen and quickly sketched from memory the outline of a tableau he had once created. His hand was shaking and yet seemed as heavy as lead at the same time; he botched the passage of the woman’s hair, and had to peer closely to get her hands right. She was couched on pillows, dressed only in a filmy clinging shift, her face dreamy with delight as she stroked her own self with the bent fingers of one hand, and weighed the globe of her breast with another. The commission had made Pasquale less than a florin, although the stationarius had reprinted it over and over.
Koppernigk watched him sidelong, as if he suspected a trick. ‘Well, I recognize that, of course. It is of its kind, I suppose you would say, an interesting piece.’
‘It was my hand that first drew it, Doctor. But you see how it is, I make a little money, and the printers make much more. This new process, though. This painting with light. If you could tutor me in it, we could together make much money. I’ll reward you well for your time—this florin, here, to begin with.’
‘Anyone can copy out a print,’ Koppernigk said, ‘especially one as popular as that one.’
‘We call them stiffeners in the trade,’ Pasquale said. ‘I’ll take you to meet the model. Then you’ll believe me.’
‘Perhaps so. Perhaps so. Ah, the wine is finished.’
Pasquale bought another flagon. They drank, to the aether, whatever that was, to Florence, to the Great Engineer. Somehow Pasquale and Koppernigk, without transition, were walking along a road, stumbling arm in arm in darkness towards a distant lamp as dim as a star in the solid darkness. The cold air smote Pasquale’s face. Wine, he had drunk too much wine. He smiled foolishly. He was in mortal peril, but at least he could still live a little.
Koppernigk was talking and talking, his hold on his store of words loosened by drink. He was talking about the aether, or the concept of the aether, it being as vaporous as the epicycles which Koppernigk evoked to keep the Earth in motion round the sun. It was, it seemed, no medium at all, but a higher state of matter, of vibration.
‘Light is no more than matter, raised to this higher state. It is well known that light travels faster than sound, and my theory shows why. And beyond light, there is God Himself. Dear Christ, save me!’ Koppernigk slipped on a wad of filth and had not Pasquale held him up would have gone flying into the open drain that ran not at all sweetly in the centre of the street. Koppernigk hiccuped and whispered, ‘I’ll say no more because there are enemies all around who would seize on my ideas and misrepresent them. Science is not to be rushed. Those who try will burn themselves out, you mark me. Hush. What do you hear?’
It was the sound of wagon-wheels, muffled in some way, and coming towards them from behind.
Pasquale pushed Koppernigk into a deep arched gateway. The iron gate was locked at this hour, the courtyard beyond dark. Koppernigk made feeble struggles to get free, but Pasquale held him fast, and clapped a hand over his mouth when he started to exclaim indignantly. The muffled noise of the wagon grew closer, closer. Pasquale discovered that he was holding his breath. He knew what the wagon was even before it went past: it was the wagon of the corpsemasters, who roamed the city with a licence to take away any corpses they deemed fit for the use of the dissectors and experimenters in the New University. Many said that, such was the demand in these enlightened times, the corpsemasters had taken to stealing corpses from their own wakes, and even to murdering stray citizens caught out alone in the late night.
It was a low long black wagon, drawn by a single horse. The driver and his mate were hunched on the bench, both muffled in high-collared black cloaks, and with black leather masks covering their faces. The horse which drew the wagon was shod in leather boots; the wheels were wrapped with rags. There was a distinctive odour, a strong scent of violets overlying the odour of rotting meat.
Then it was past. Koppernigk made another struggle for freedom, banging against the iron gate so that it rattled. Pasquale could have hit him, but that would have been an end to his chance of entering the Great Tower. When Pasquale released him, the artificer said indignantly, ‘I know those men.’
Pasquale laughed. ‘I suppose you do.’
‘I studied anatomy, amongst other sciences, when I was a student. Theirs is an honourable profession, and they are only going about their legal business. Without them, we would not advance in the treatment of illness. There’s no need to be afraid, young man. Now where is this accursed place you said you knew? I will see the woman, then I will believe you.’
‘I have also studied anatomy, but would not like to meet those gentlemen in these circumstances. You’ll help me, Doctor. I must insist.’
Koppernigk said with drunken dignity, and not much truth, ‘You needn’t threaten me. I am not afraid of threats.’
When they reached the lamp at the corner of the street, Pasquale knew where he was, and remembered where they were going. He had promised to show Koppernigk his model, Maddalena, as proof that he was who he said he was. Wine, there is no end to truth in wine, or the trouble truth can get you into.
Then he and Koppernigk were hammering on the door of Mother Lucia’s house. A dog set to barking somewhere, and then the door opened and they tumbled inside, almost falling into the soft fat arms of the whoremistress, Mother Lucia herself. Her face was caked with white lead and rouge, but in the soft candle-light she looked, if not girlish, then more like a doll than the old woman she was. Somehow Pasquale was sitting, a cup of wine in his hands, blinking at the bright lamplight in the parlour. A trio of girls, bare-shouldered in velvet gowns, their breasts pushed up like soft rounded shelves, giggled together on the other side of the room, which seemed to be slowly sinking through the ground.
‘My friend, where…?’
‘Why with Maddalena, of course,’ Mother Lucia said. ‘Oh, Pasquale, Pasqualino, you are in your cups.’
Pasquale said stupidly, ‘You’re a good woman in your way, Mother Lucia. Did I ever tell you that?’
‘Business is business, dearie, and you think about doing another nice picture for me and we won’t say anything more about it. Brings in business, those pictures. Like now.’
‘Can’t pay, you know. Absolutely broke.’ There was the florin, of course, but he had promised it to Doctor Koppernigk.
‘Your friend pays. Don’t you worry. Where have you been, Pasquale? Your clothes are covered in mud.’
Pasquale, reduced by wine and exhaustion to sentiment, said, ‘I’m in a lot of trouble, Mother Lucia. You’re a good Christian woman to help me. I’ll never go to another place from now on.’
‘A fine compliment, I’m sure,’ Mother Lucia said, with the air of one who has heard it all before.
‘No, no. I mean it! This is a hinge of history, great terrible times. That you should help me, help me now…’
‘You remember my charity, dearie, next time you take up your pen.’ The girls in the corner giggled, and Mother Lucia shot them a severe look. She told Pasquale, ‘That’s as far as it goes. Meanwhile, don’t drink any more wine. I can’t bear to see a man cry.’
‘If only I could start painting now…you’re an angel, Lucia. My friend, has he finished?’
‘Old men always take a long time,’ one of the whores said with a sniff.
‘A strange son of cove,’ Mother Lucia observed, taking a cup from another of her whores with a regal gesture. ‘Asked me if I did the operation on my girls, you know, the one where a piece of skull is taken out to make them docile. A little hole it is, and a wire is inserted to stir out the devil. I told him this was a straight establishment, and he said it was the other way around, that I was unregulated. Why, I regulate as I please, you know that, Pasqualino. I know his sort, they’d make us all machines fit only for one thing or another, according to their wants.’
Pasquale must have dozed, for he woke to the echo of a shriek from somewhere in the house. He jumped up and pushed past the whores, who clutched at him and told him to sit down, to leave it be, and found himself running down a candlelit passage. There was a roaring in his ears. He kept banging into one or the other of the walls. A door burst open and he tumbled inside.
Maddalena was kneeling on a wrecked bed, a sheet pulled up to her chin in bunched fists. Her unbound hair tumbled down to the small of her back. ‘He did a runner, right out the window,’ she squealed, and the Moorish servant who’d followed Pasquale nodded grimly and ran back out.
‘You better go,’ Mother Lucia said, out of breath at the doorway. ‘We’ll sort him out.’
Pasquale flung open the shutters of the window, but there was only an empty alley below. He leaned into the cold dark air, his head spinning with an excess of wine and high excitement. ‘Don’t hurt him,’ he said. ‘I have need of his services.’
Mother Lucia said in a splendid rage, ‘He gives service and cuts and runs—a fine kind of gentleman he must be!’ Her bare upper arms, hung with fatty flesh like dewlaps, quivered. ‘He won’t do that again at my establishment. Fine kind of friends you have, Pasquale. There’ll be a reckoning over this.’
‘Two paintings. Three. Big as you like. Where did he go?’
‘I heard the corpse-wagon outside,’ Maddalena said. ‘Maybe it frightened him.’
Pasquale went to the ewer and up-ended it over his head. Gasping and blinking, soaked and more nearly sober, he said, ‘I think I’ll need to use the back way.’
Then there was a hammering on the front door.
Maddalena gave a squeak of fear and the sheet fell, exposing her breasts. Mother Lucia said, ‘You know the back door well enough, I think. Don’t be in a hurry to return, Pasquale.’
‘Never mind,’ Pasquale said, ‘they’d follow me that way anyway.’
He swung his legs
over the sill of the window and let himself down until he was clinging by his fingertips, then dropped and landed sprawling on the half-frozen muck of the alley floor. He picked himself up, ran to the end of the alley, and squinted around the corner.
The corpse-wagon was parked in the street hard by the door of Mother Lucia’s establishment. The two black-cloaked corpsemasters were wrestling with Mother Lucia’s big Moorish servant; even as Pasquale watched, one of the men produced a sap and knocked the Moor sprawling. Then the two were inside the house and Pasquale heard Mother Lucia’s loud indignant voice.
A man’s voice, no doubt that of one of the corpsemasters, rode over it. ‘Where is the thief?’
‘He ran,’ Mother Lucia said. ‘One of your artificers had one of my girls and ran off without paying. You should pay, as you also work for the New University. And make recompense for wounding my guard!’
‘It was the artificer who told us that the man who brought him here tried to rob him. Where’s your pimp? He’s the thief we’re interested in.’
Pasquale groaned. Clearly, drink and spent lust had inflamed Koppernigk’s suspicions.
‘I have no need of pimps. I have,’ Mother Lucia said with incandescent dignity, ‘my reputation. Wait! Where are you going?’
A moment later there was the sound of furniture being overturned, and then a window went out in a cascade of glass, followed by the sound of a whistle blowing, the alarm call for the city militia.
Pasquale could run of course, but he doubted that he would get far. Surely if Koppernigk had alerted these two, then he would alert others. And besides, he must still gain an audience with the Great Engineer. There was only one thing for it, only one way to get into the New University without being seen. He jumped on to the back of the wagon, lifted the heavy oiled canvas sheet, and scrambled beneath.
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