Giordano Bruno 01 - Heresy

by S. J. Parris

  On another occasion I might have challenged his insolent stare, but there was no time to spare, so I turned toward the great porch of the Divinity School and was about to mount the stairs when I saw Doctor James Coverdale hurrying down them, pushing his way against the tide of young men in black gowns crowding to get in. He noticed me and stopped, a look of relief on his face; from the corner of my eye, I saw the figure in brown against the wall stir himself and take a step forward. Coverdale also noticed; he froze for a moment and stared at the man with no ears, who looked directly at him and appeared to nod. It was clear that they recognised each other. Coverdale glared at him for a moment, his expression divided, it seemed to me, between irritation and concern, then he pasted on a smile for my benefit and guided me gently by the elbow to the right of the doorway, away from the man’s inquisitive gaze.

  “Thank you, Weston, for delivering our guest safely—you may join your friends inside,” Coverdale said pleasantly to my young guide, though his face seemed to have turned pale. Weston bowed to me before galloping up the steps and into the throng.

  “Doctor Bruno, I wondered if I might have a brief word before we go in?” Coverdale murmured. “Don’t worry, we have time—our royal visitor is not yet arrived and it cannot go ahead without him.”

  I nodded; it would be typical of the palatine not to bother arriving on time on my account. I adopted an air of polite attention; Coverdale seemed uncomfortable with what he needed to say.

  “There is to be an inquest into the death of poor Doctor Mercer, you understand, and those who were first to arrive on the scene will be required to give evidence,” he began, his hand still clutching my elbow; I could not tell if this was supposed to be reassuring or menacing. “I understand you were there early, together with the rector and Master Norris.”

  “Yes, and I will gladly recount what I saw for the inquest, though I hope it will be before my party has to return to London,” I said, expectantly, for I was sure there was more to come.

  “It is only that…ah…” Here he faltered, and produced a little nervous laugh. “The rector mentioned that you believed the garden gate into Brasenose Lane was locked when you all found poor Roger.”

  “Yes, I tried it and it was locked fast. As were both the other gates.”

  “Well, when I heard that, it occurred to me that of course you are not familiar with our college, so you would not have known that the gate to the lane has a very stiff handle on the inside.”

  I raised an eyebrow to indicate my scepticism.

  “Yes,” he went on, not quite looking me in the eye, “it is very hard indeed to turn and requires a particular knack of twisting it to the right, just so. I only mention it because if you were to suggest at the inquest that the gate had been locked—well, you can see it will add all manner of complication to what is really a very simple and tragic explanation. The porter forgot to lock the gate, a feral stray got in, poor Roger paid the price for someone else’s carelessness. It is dreadful, quite dreadful”—here he pressed his palm to his breast, his fat face worked up into a mask of sorrow—“but all this talk of locked gates might, I fear, create alarm of some conspiracy where none exists.”

  I could not quite believe what I was hearing. I removed my arm from his grip and moved to face him; students were still pressing up the stairs around us and I lowered my voice accordingly. “Doctor Coverdale, the gate was locked—I cannot be in any doubt about that fact. I tried it myself. And even if it were only closed, the dog did not close it after it strayed in.”

  “The wind could have blown it shut,” Coverdale said dismissively.

  For a moment I was incredulous. Did he really imagine I could be persuaded so easily to doubt the evidence of my own eyes?

  “A heavy wooden gate like that? I was there, Doctor Coverdale—I went through all the possibilities with the rector,” I protested, sotto voce.

  “The rector has had time now to reflect on this morning’s events with sober judgment,” said Coverdale smoothly, “and he has concluded that in the mist and panic it was hard to discern anything for certain. It was he who remembered how stiff the handle can be from the inside, and how that might confuse a foreigner. Any coroner conducting an inquest would certainly take into account that you could not be expected to know your way around the college. I mention it because for you to insist that there is some mystery will only prolong and complicate a process which will already be most distressing to Doctor Mercer’s friends and colleagues. There is nothing to be gained by adding spurious fancies and suspicions to a tragic accident.”

  I looked at him for a moment. So they had decided to rewrite the circumstances of Mercer’s death in a way that would avoid any scandal to the college—and a murderer would go free. Were they protecting someone in particular, or was it for them simply a matter of collectively saving face? I wondered if the rector would keep to his promise to investigate the matter privately, but I doubted it; he was the most anxious of all about the college’s public standing.

  “I feel that I must report to the inquest what I believe I saw this morning,” I said. “If I was mistaken, you are right—I will look a fool, but I will have to take that chance. I would not sleep easily knowing I had not given all the evidence.”

  Coverdale narrowed his eyes, then appeared to accept my statement.

  “Very well, Doctor Bruno, you must act according to your conscience. Shall we go in?” He motioned to the steps up to the porch of the Divinity School, where the crowd had begun to thin to a trickle; most of the audience were now inside. “Oh, but—there is one rather curious thing,” he added breezily over his shoulder as he climbed the first step. “Master Slythurst told me he was on his way up to the strong room this morning when he heard noises from inside Doctor Mercer’s chamber—and when he looked in, he found the place turned upside down and who should be there, going through Mercer’s belongings, but our esteemed Italian guest? Trying to open his strongbox, no less. And the porter said you brought back a set of keys you had removed from the body.”

  I cursed my stupidity in falling asleep that morning; I had forgotten to take the clothes to the rector with my poor excuse and now, as I feared, Slythurst had covered his own tracks by suggesting I was no more than a common thief. I noticed his version omitted the detail of his having a key to Mercer’s room.

  “There is an explanation,” I began, but Coverdale held up his hand to forestall me.

  “Oh, no doubt, Doctor Bruno, no doubt. But it might be that to a magistrate such behaviour would look extremely odd—not to say suspicious—and there is such dislike of foreigners here among the townspeople, you understand, especially of the Romish sort,” he said, affecting an apologetic tone, “that judgment can often be clouded by blind prejudice. And if the inquest is made more complicated than it need be, these are just the kind of difficult details that might come to light.”

  We were now on the threshold of the Divinity School. I glanced inside and saw that the auditorium was full and students were finding themselves places along the window ledges and standing at the back. Coverdale was smiling expectantly at me after delivering this direct threat. I studied his face for a moment and then nodded.

  “I understand your meaning, Doctor Coverdale, and will certainly give some thought to the matter.”

  “Good man,” Coverdale said agreeably. “I’m sure you will see the sense in it. Shall we go in?”

  I paused at the doorway and glanced over my shoulder in the direction of the city wall; the man with no ears was still lounging there, casually watching us. I touched Coverdale’s elbow.

  “Who is that man?” I gestured with my head in his direction.

  Coverdale looked, blinked, then shook his head. “No one of significance,” he said abruptly, and held the door for me to pass through.

  I TRIED TO put this conversation from my mind as I prepared to speak. A great hush descended upon the hall, broken only by the usual shuffling, coughing, and rustling of gowns from the audience. I cleared
my throat and leaned forward over my lectern to begin my address.

  “I, Giordano Bruno the Nolan, doctor of a more sophisticated theology, professor of a more pure and innocent wisdom, known to the best academies of Europe, a proven and honoured philosopher, a stranger only among barbarians and knaves, the awakener of sleeping spirits, the tamer of presumptuous and stubborn ignorance, who professes a general love of humanity in all his actions, who prefers as company neither Briton nor Italian, male nor female, bishop nor king, robe nor armour, friar nor layman, but only those whose conversation is more peaceable, more civil, more faithful, and more valuable, who respects not the anointed head, the signed forehead, the washed hands, or the circumcised penis, but rather the spirit and culture of mind which can be read in the face of a real person; whom the propagators of stupidity and the small-time hypocrites detest, whom the sober and studious love, and whom the most noble minds acclaim—to the most excellent and illustrious vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, many greetings.”

  I bowed low toward the stage where the vice-chancellor sat, anticipating the volume of applause such an opening would invite in the European academies, and was taken aback when finally I realised that the susurration reaching my ears was that of mocking laughter. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sidney; he grimaced and made a chopping motion across his throat as if to imply that my speech had been too much. I could not understand this; in Paris, a disputation was hardly considered worth the name unless the rhetoric reached absurd heights of grandiosity, but it seemed that in this, as in so much else, the English preferred to hide behind a plain and self-effacing style. I could hear them sniggering quite openly now—and I mean the Fellows, not the students, though they were by now picking up the cue from their elders; I heard a number of them mimicking my accent like schoolboys. Across the hall, Rector Underhill was leaning on his podium with a smile that suggested he was enjoying the spectacle; evidently he seemed to think he had already won. The palatine yawned loudly and ostentatiously.

  “I reject absolutely,” I cried, banging a fist on the lectern and then raising my hand for emphasis as the laughter died away to a startled silence, “the notion that the stars are fixed on the tapestry of the heavens! The stars are no more nor differently fixed in the universe than this star the sun, and the region of the Bear’s tail no more deserves to be called the Eighth Sphere than does that of the Earth, on which we live. Those with sufficient wisdom will recognise that the apparent motion of the universe derives from the rotation of the Earth, for there is much less reason why the sun and the whole universe of innumerable stars should turn around this globe than it, on the contrary, should turn with respect to the universe. Let our reason no longer be fettered by the eight or nine imaginary spheres, for there is but one sky, immense and infinite, with infinite capacity for innumerable worlds similar to this one, rounding their orbits as the Earth rounds its own.”

  I paused for breath, better pleased with this opening salvo, and Underhill took the opportunity to jump in.

  “Do you say so, sir?” he countered, that self-satisfied smile still playing at his lips. “It seems to me that, rather than the sun standing still and the Earth running around it, it is your head which runs around and your brains which do not stand still!”

  He turned to the audience of Fellows for congratulation and was not disappointed; a chorus of guffaws erupted and it was some moments before I could make myself heard in response.

  The disputation, I am sorry to say, was not a success, and I will not trouble my reader with any more of its substance. It continued in much the same manner; Rector Underhill advanced nothing but the old, tired arguments in favour of Aristotle—claiming no more scientific proof than the weight of scholastic authority in placing the Earth at the fixed centre of the universe, as if authority has never been mistaken, and at one point suggesting that Copernicus had never meant his theory to be taken literally but had only developed it as a metaphor to aid mathematical calculation. All these arguments I had heard and rebutted many times before, in better society than this, but I was barely given the chance that evening, since Underhill’s main concern seemed not to persuade the audience by his own skill in debate (most of them were already squarely of his opinion and had not the courtesy even to listen to my arguments) but to ridicule me and expose me as often as possible to the mockery of his peers. This, it seemed, was their idea of entertainment, and the manners of the crowd were so poor that for the most part they chattered and commented throughout both our speeches. I was partway through an impassioned argument involving complex mathematical propositions when I was interrupted by an alarming noise that sounded like the low growl of a dog; overly sensitive to such sounds since the morning’s events, I started visibly and turned, only to discover it was in fact the palatine noisily snoring, but by then, the thread of my argument was badly frayed. A few moments later, we were disturbed by a great scuffle as an undergraduate pushed his way through the ranks of the seated Fellows to attract the attention of one of them; it turned out that he sought Doctor Coverdale who, apparently responding to a summons, immediately left his place in the middle of a row, apologising in a theatrical whisper to all those between him and the door who were obliged to rise in their seats to allow him through. I would not have expected Coverdale to show any restraint on my behalf, but I was surprised to see him behave with so little courtesy to his own rector as to leave in the middle of the debate.

  We proceeded laboriously toward an ending that was nothing like a conclusion. I put forward my own complex calculations to account for the relative diameter of the moon, the Earth, and the sun in terms even an idiot could understand, and in response Underhill merely repeated the old scholastic misconceptions common to all those who conflate science and theology and believe the Holy Scripture to be the last word in scientific enquiry. He also made frequent pointed references to my status as a foreigner, implying that it necessarily bestowed inferior intelligence, and more than once noted that Copernicus too was foreign and therefore could not be expected to display the robust reasoning of an Englishman—apparently forgetting that the whole occasion for this sorry pretence at debate was to honour Copernicus’s royal countryman. I was glad to be done with it; I bowed tersely to the smattering of insincere applause and climbed down from my pulpit feeling bruised and belittled.

  Afterward, as the hall cleared, none of the departing Fellows would meet my eye. I remained seated morosely beneath the window, thinking that I would wait for them all to leave so as to avoid any further mockery—or, worse, commiseration—when I saw Sidney fighting his way down from the dais. He pushed through to me, shaking his head.

  “This evening I was ashamed of my university, Bruno,” he exploded, two spots of crimson flaming with indignation on his cheeks. “Underhill is a weasel—he didn’t once engage with the substance of your argument! I call it shameful—it was a display of pure blind arrogance.” He shook his head, his lips pressed together as if he were reprimanding himself. “It is our least attractive trait as a nation, this belief in our own superiority.”

  “I have been too fortunate in counting you and Walsingham among my acquaintance,” I said, shaking my head. “I imagined all Englishmen to be as liberal-minded and curious about the world. I see I was badly mistaken.”

  “Mind you,” he said, philosophically, “you don’t help yourself, Bruno—what was that opening speech all about?”

  “It served me well in Paris.”

  “No doubt. But it’s not really how we do things here. We tend not to warm to those who sing their own praises too fulsomely—I think that was when you lost your audience. And perhaps leave out the circumcised penises next time?”

  “I will bear that in mind,” I said, stiffly. “Though I doubt there will be a next time.”

  “It has not been much of a visit for you thus far, old friend, has it?” he said, with an affectionate cuff on the shoulder. “First the company of that Polish oaf, then a man is brutally done to death outside your win
dow, and now you suffer this indignity from fools who could not begin to comprehend your vision. I am sorry for it, truly. But perhaps now we can concentrate on our real task,” he added, dropping his voice. “In any case, we are all invited to dine at Christ Church tonight, so let us empty their wine cellars, forget all about this dreary business, and make a night of it, what do you say?”

  I looked up at him, grateful for his efforts but thinking that his buoyant company was the last thing I wanted that evening.

  “Thank you, Philip, but I fear I would not be much of an addition to the table this evening. Let me retire to lick my wounds and I promise by tomorrow I will be ready for any adventure you propose.”