by S. W. Perry
‘There is a bridge. I live in an old wreck of a boat, underneath it.’
Nicholas has to stifle a disbelieving laugh. ‘You live under a bridge?’
‘Do I look to you as though I live in a palace?’
‘Forgive me, I didn’t mean—’
But it seems the maid is used to hasty judgement. ‘It is safer for me there. The people do not bother to trouble me.’
‘Well, first we must clean you up,’ Bianca says. ‘Father Albani will want the gown returned, and we can’t leave you looking like the victim in a Greek tragedy.’
They are leaving the square now, entering a cobbled street barely wide enough for a single cart to pass. It runs down towards the canal and the van der Molens’ house. ‘Perhaps Mistress Gretie can assist,’ Nicholas suggests.
A few yards ahead of them Nicholas sees a wool merchant’s warehouse, as familiar to him as any in Woodbridge. Two storeys above the cobbles, a sturdy iron bracket thrusts out from the wall, rigged with block and tackle. Directly beneath its eye, all but blocking the lane, is one hessian-wrapped bale waiting to be hoisted. There is no sign of the labourers. Nicholas guesses they’ve either skived off to the Markt square or they’re skulking in the nearest tavern because the wool merchant is out of town.
He is about to lead Bianca and Hella Maas past the abandoned bale when he hears a shout from behind. Turning, he sees they have been followed into the alley by three men and two women. Clad in cheap broadcloth, the men are bare-headed and look malevolent. The women wear dirty linen coifs on their heads. None of them seems particularly rich when it comes to the possession of teeth.
‘You – Satan’s bitch! We want a word with you,’ one of the women calls out in coarse Dutch.
‘Burning’s too good for Lucifer’s whore,’ shouts the second woman.
One of the men notices the pulley rope looping down from the high bracket to a shackle lying on top of the wool bale. ‘But hanging will suffice,’ he calls eagerly. ‘Your vile blatherings have brought death into God’s house. It’s time to choke off your wailing once and for all.’
Bianca instinctively pulls the maid towards her, as if the two of them together might outmatch the hatred of five. Without even thinking, Nicholas moves to shield them, pushing them towards the narrow gap between the bale and the wall of the warehouse. ‘Take her to the van der Molens’,’ he says urgently. ‘Tell Jan I might need some help. It’s not far – hurry!’
Even as he speaks he knows he’s wasted his breath. Bianca Merton does not run from danger. And she has seen what he – until this instant – has not.
Hanging from the shackle at the end of the rope is a bale-hook, a curved iron rod used for manhandling the great parcels of wool. It has a wooden T-handle at one end. The other is sharpened to a wicked point. With one arm around Hella Maas’s shoulders, Bianca lifts it from the bale and brandishes it at the three men.
‘Nicholas, what’s the Dutch for “One step nearer and I’ll geld you all like spring-born lambs”?’ she asks through gritted teeth, her amber eyes blazing.
But there is no need for Nicholas to translate. The look of murderous intent on his wife’s face is universal, and she is wielding the bale-hook as expertly as if she’s been taking lessons in swordplay at Signor Bonetti’s school at Blackfriars.
The women goad their menfolk on. But there is no mistaking the personal harm Bianca intends to do them if they choose to chance their luck. They hang back, like feral dogs confronted by a burning brand. A moment later two labourers appear at the opening below the iron bracket and demand to know what’s going on. The would-be lynch mob breaks and runs, back towards the Markt square, hurling insults over their shoulders that Nicholas thinks best not to translate.
As the narrowness of their escape hits her, Bianca bends her knees and takes deep and steadying gasps of air, as though recovering from a sprint. The arm thrown protectively around Hella relaxes. Instantly the maid slips her grasp. She flees down the lane towards the canal, oblivious to Nicholas’s calls for her to stop.
From the upper floor of the warehouse, one of the labourers delivers a stream of robust but good-natured Dutch.
‘What’s he saying?’ Bianca asks.
Nicholas laughs, partly in admiration and partly in relief. ‘He wants to know what it’s like being married to a harpy. And can he have his bale-hook back?’
Bianca lifts her gaze towards the labourer and raises the hook to her lips. She gives the iron shaft a bawd’s kiss and throws it onto the top of the bale.
For a moment the two labourers can do nothing but stare down into the lane in disbelief. Then, their courage fortified by height and distance, they break into roars of joyous approval.
Playing the affronted husband, and failing miserably because it is all he can do to smother the laughter bubbling in his throat, Nicholas takes Bianca gently by the arm. ‘Come, Wife,’ he says. ‘You’re not on Bankside now.’
‘Goodness, child! You look as though you’ve been gutting a barrel of herring all by yourself,’ exclaims Gretie van der Molen as she surveys the state of Hella’s gown. Shooing Nicholas and Bianca away, she leads the girl into the parlour, calling on the twins to heat a cauldron of water on the fire. An hour later Hella is sitting at the van der Molens’ table, looking like a freshly scrubbed novice in the plain cloth gown Father Albani loaned her and tucking into a plate of Gretie’s appeltaerten.
In need of a stiff drink to settle their nerves, Nicholas and Bianca find a tavern in a little cobbled square close to the Dieze, a few minutes’ walk away. There are tables outside and the evening is warm, the sky a soft vermilion.
‘Did you hear about the Spaniard and Father Vermeiren?’ the potboy asks when he brings their drinks.
‘Yes, we did,’ says Nicholas in the best Dutch accent he can manage.
The potboy gives him a suspicious stare. ‘You’re not from Brabant, are you, Meneer?’
‘No. But neither am I the assassin. We’ve already made an account of ourselves to the captain of the garrison.’
‘I was only asking,’ the potboy says with a shrug. He disappears inside the tavern, but not before casting another glance over his shoulder to make a note of their faces.
‘How long will it take for the Spanish to send their investigators from Antwerp?’ Bianca asks under her breath, after they have spent a while tiptoeing around the shadows of the day’s events.
‘I should think they’ll be here sometime tomorrow.’
‘If it’s too dangerous to stay here, then where do we go?’
Gazing into his cup, Nicholas considers her question in silence. ‘We could go north, into the Protestant rebel provinces,’ he says at length, his voice full of doubt. ‘But Holland is teeming with agents of the Privy Council. All it will take is a word sent from Essex, Coke or Popham, and they will be fighting amongst themselves to be the first to claim the bounty. No, I fear the north is closed against us. We could go south, into France – Paris, perhaps. Or east, to the German states. Then there’s Bohemia, and the Palatine.’
Bianca considers the choices as she sips at her glass of jenever. ‘Paris might suit,’ she says unconvincingly. ‘I hear tell Paris is a fine city.’
‘Paris it will be then.’
‘But not so fine that I would consider wearing out my shoes to get there,’ she muses, hearing once again Father Albani’s voice in her head, a voice redolent with the mellow warmth of Italian sunlight at eventide.
‘So, not Paris.’
‘Probably not.’
‘You have somewhere else in mind, do you not?’ he says, with a perceptive smile.
‘I might do.’
‘You have that look in your eyes.’
‘What look?’
‘The one you use to disguise what is really in your thoughts.’
Draining her glass of jenever and savouring the taste of juniper in the back of her throat, Bianca says confidently, ‘The Via Francigena.’
‘That’s the old pilgrim rou
te down through France, across the mountains and on to St Peter’s in Rome,’ he says, giving her a quizzical look. ‘Why would we go to Rome? I’m content to play a Catholic for a while, but I’m not sure Sir Robert Cecil would ever employ me again if he knew I’d been that close to the Pope.’
For a moment she just looks at him over the top of her jenever glass.
And then – as her true intention dawns on him – a knowing grin spreads across his face. ‘But it’s not Rome we’re heading for, is it?’
‘No, Husband,’ she says sweetly, her eyes gleaming. ‘It is not.’
Nicholas has often suspected that one day she would come to this decision. Even on Bankside, where the roots of her new life seem so vigorous, he has always known there is a part of Bianca Merton that the Veneto has not relinquished. And from the very moment he first considered what would happen when she realized it, he has always known he would go with her. A river may encounter any number of narrows and rapids on its journey, but it cannot ever stop itself seeking the open sea.
‘It’s Padua,’ he says. ‘You want to go home.’
She searches his face, unsure how her suggestion has been received.
‘Just for a while – until this is all over and we can return safely to Bankside. Is that such a terrible thing to admit?’
‘No. Deep in my heart, I think I have always known. Why didn’t you suggest it at the start, rather than agree to Antwerp?’
‘I thought you’d want to be close enough to England to return easily when you’re exonerated. And Padua is a very long way away. It will take us weeks of walking.’
In truth, he rather likes the idea. He knows of Padua’s reputation as a city open to the new learning. It has a fine medical school. Nicholas is aware – from the latest letter to arrive on Bankside from Bianca’s cousin, Bruno Barrani – that a purpose-built anatomy theatre is being constructed there for the great Fabricius, the university’s professor of anatomy and surgery, and that Padua has tempted away from Pisa a brilliant young mathematician named Galileo Galilei, whose fame, according to Bruno, is already spreading beyond Italy. Nicholas can think of worse places to spend a few months in exile, even if it is much further away from London than he had planned. And it will be good to renew his friendship with the diminutive Bruno. Yes, Padua it shall be.
Nicholas is about tell Bianca he wholeheartedly approves, when a sudden movement close by their table drags his eyes from hers.
How long Hella Maas has been there, neither Nicholas nor Bianca can say. Nor how much of their conversation she has overheard. But people at the surrounding tables are already nudging each other, pointing in the maid’s direction. And all their faces tell the same story: Hella Maas is trouble. It would be better for everyone if she made herself scarce; stopped alarming decent folk with her dire warnings of the Devil’s imminent return. Better, perhaps, if the Spanish hanged her in lieu of a rebel assassin.
‘I am a pilgrim, too,’ she says to Nicholas, her gaze so penetrating that he wonders if perhaps she can see things that reveal themselves to her alone. ‘You saved my life once. Now I ask you to do so again. Let me come with you.’
A world away from the little town of Den Bosch, the day’s heat is leaching out of the hot stucco walls of a grand, elegantly arcaded building on Padua’s Piazza delle Erbe. The Palazzo del Podestà is the official residence of the city’s civilian governor, who holds his authority from His Serene Highness Pasquale Cicogna, Doge of Venice.
As a liveried minion escorts Bruno Barrani up the wide stone stairway to the Podestà’s audience chamber on the first floor, Bianca’s cousin is quietly confident. How hard can it be to convince the doge’s representative in Padua that his master should count himself amongst the select owners of a marvel of the new sciences? These days a prince’s reputation – a doge’s reputation – is judged as much by his patronage of the arts and learning as it is by his prowess on the field of battle.
The servant stops before an imposing pair of wooden doors that reach from floor to ceiling and, for all Bruno knows, keep on going through the roof and up to heaven. He gives a discreet knock and pushes open the left-hand door. ‘The merchant Signor Barrani,’ he says in a soft, reluctant voice, the sort he might employ when announcing to mixed company the arrival of the pox doctor.
The chamber is simply furnished, though certainly not frugally. The huge desk is made of imported Indian teak, carved to within an inch of its life by clever guildsmen of the Arte dei Carpentieri. A Christ of African ivory hangs crucified on the wall behind the desk, his head turned down towards a window open to relieve the heat. The Podestà is standing at the sill, observing the crowd in the piazza, as though he’s checking on their mood for the figure on the cross. He turns towards Bruno, his fleshy lip pursed into a cod’s pout. Sixty if a day, Bruno reckons, a barrel of Venetian dignity wrapped up in a red gown of office, a black silk cap draped across his white curls. He looks like a prosperous cardinal with a questionable past.
‘I have read your letter with interest, Signor Barrani,’ he says in a whistle that makes Bruno wonder if there isn’t a tame flautist hidden somewhere to accompany him. ‘I have to say I am not versed in matters astronomical. The questions I have are purely practical.’
‘I shall endeavour to answer them to the fullest of my abilities, Your Honour,’ Bruno says, making a second sweeping bow in as many minutes.
‘First, is such an engine even possible?’
Bruno takes a step backwards, as though presented with an obstacle he has only this moment seen. ‘Possible?’ he says, feigning surprise. ‘More than possible, Your Honour. It already exists.’
‘In Florence, you say?’
‘And also in Madrid. The Medicis have one. So, too, does King Philip of Spain. New wonders of discovery are being made almost every day. Surely we cannot permit the Serene Republic to remain deficient.’
The Podestà nods wisely. Hooked already, thinks Bruno.
‘How did you come to hear of this apparatus, Signor Barrani? You are not from Florence?’
‘Heavens, no! A loyal Paduan, born and bred.’
‘Nor, I understand, are you from the Palazzo Bo.’
‘Trade has been my university, Your Honour.’
‘A merchant, I am led to believe?’
‘Indeed, Your Honour. A very humble merchant. One who keeps his ears open on his travels, particularly when the Fiorentini find it impossible not to boast about their latest acquisition in the new sciences.’
‘And you wish to set up a guild with the express purpose of building one of these – these engines – for His Serene Highness?’
Bruno gives the Podestà an engaging smile. ‘The Arti dei Astronomi.’
‘It has a good ring to it, I’ll give you that,’ says the Podestà.
‘If we are not to remain in thrall to the Fiorentini indefinitely – a state of affairs that I presume His Serenity would consider most injurious to the Republic’s reputation – then a guild should be enrolled at once.’
‘With you to lead it?’
‘I thank God I have eyes clear enough to see my duty when it beckons, Your Honour,’ Bruno assures him.
‘Have you actually seen this device? Are there plans in existence?’
‘That is why I have come to you, sir. I intend to visit Florence again at the first opportunity, in order better to study Signor Santucci’s achievement.’
‘Santucci? I haven’t heard of him. Who is he?’
‘The architect and constructor of the device, Your Honour.’
‘A Florentine?’
‘I fear so.’ A sad shrug. ‘And Florence is a long way off, and the price of lodging there extortionate. In short, I need a patron.’
The light of understanding flares in the Podestà’s watery eyes. ‘You want the trip financed? Is that it?’
‘As I told you, Your Honour, I am but a humble merchant. Sadly, my humility is down to its last few ducats.’
The Podestà returns to the window and l
ooks out into the piazza, as though he might see His Serene Highness there, ready to give him a verdict. At length, his back still towards Bruno, he says, ‘The Medicis and the King of Spain, you say?’
‘And without doubt there will soon be others, Your Honour,’ Bruno assures him, trying not to sound too pushy. ‘The French, the Swiss… even, God forbid, the English…’
The Podestà turns back into the room. Being somewhat like-minded, Bruno spots the glow of avarice on his fleshy face even before the turn is complete.
In the parlour of the van der Molens’ house, Hella Maas is taking a third helping of Gretie’s waterzooi. Nicholas and Bianca can hear the clatter of her spoon as she wolfs down the fish stew, smell its aroma pervading the house, picture her trying to fix the bowl with an intense stare as though she fears it is only a transparent product of her hunger. It is ten o’clock, and beneath the window the canal is a bottomless black chasm.
It has been agreed between them that Hella Maas will accompany them as far as Pavia, on the far side of the Alps. After that, she will join the real pilgrims on the Via Francigena for the journey on to Rome and St Peter’s.
‘It’s a matter of simple Christian charity,’ Nicholas says softly. ‘Those people by the warehouse, they would have hanged her. And we can’t leave her to the mercies of the Spanish – they don’t have any. Besides, it will only be until we’ve crossed the pass of St Bernard. We can put up with her until then, can’t we?’
‘The Apocalypse for breakfast… Armageddon for supper: we might as well be locked in a room with the worst sort of Puritan for a month.’
‘Bianca! Where’s your compassion?’
‘It’s my ears I’m worried about. And my sanity.’
But Nicholas isn’t about to let her off so easily. ‘We know she’s witnessed two terrible murders, and that she isn’t safe here. And you’re not the woman to leave a pious young maid to a cruel fate. It is not in your humour.’
‘I suppose so,’ Bianca says reluctantly. ‘Anyway, we won’t have to spend much time in conversation with her.’
