by S. W. Perry
‘Why not? We can hardly ignore her.’
‘Because the journey will be the perfect opportunity for me to turn your questionable Italian into a semblance of a language that a Paduan can understand. If you’re not halfway to being conversant by the time we get there, you’re not the clever man I thought I’d married.’
She’s right, he thinks – apart from the Italian. Den Bosch has become unsafe for all three of them. It is only because the captain of the garrison is a particularly unimaginative fellow – and Father Albani so persuasive – that any of them are at liberty at all. When the Spanish investigators arrive from Antwerp, the girl is almost certain to face brutal questioning and, judging by what he’s seen so far, the citizens of Den Bosch are unlikely to prove any gentler with her.
Nicholas has already planned their departure, enlisting the help of Jan van der Molen. At dawn they will climb aboard the little skiff he keeps tied up in the canal behind the house. They will leave Den Bosch by the Grote Hekel, the double water-gate that brings light shipping on the Dommel into the city. Jan has assured him that the two heavy spiked wooden beams that serve as barriers are still raised, despite the doubling of the guard. The Spanish will be on the lookout for an unfamiliar Dutch male trying to leave, a rebel from the northern states who has slipped into the town to carry out his murderous act. Jan’s familiar face will ensure an unquestioned departure. Once clear of the town, they will strike south through Brabant to the French border, joining the Via Francigena at Reims. Nicholas reckons it will take them a fortnight to reach that cathedral city.
Thanks to Gretie’s help, and with assistance from Bianca, Hella Maas has been turned from a wild-eyed stray into something almost human, though the fiery glint in those impenetrably dark eyes has not dimmed for a single moment throughout. To Nicholas, it is as if something inside her is alight, the still-molten core of a furnace whose outside walls have cooled. In such company, he fears the Via Francigena might prove to be a very long road indeed. But at least he knows where that road will end. The weight on his conscience, were he to leave the maid to her fate, might never lift.
When he and Bianca settle down to snatch a few hours’ rest before their departure, he finds the images of the day’s events are too raw in his mind for sleep to come. Bloodstained bodies – trying to stop a man bleeding to death and failing – are nothing new to him. During his summer as a surgeon with the army of the House of Orange he dealt with more than his share. It is the triptych that sets his thoughts reeling once more. The memory of those monstrous images makes him fear that sleep will carry him to a hellish landscape where demons in the shape of lizards torment his naked body; where a toad in a nun’s habit, and bearing an implausibly benign human face, fries disjointed limbs and heads in a pan; where a creature in the shape of a living blade searches for weak human flesh to stab; and where that awful mill grinds human bodies into a rich juice of sinners.
12
Den Bosch, the Duchy of Brabant, 6th July 1594
Dawn lifts the shape of a window out of the darkness of their chamber. Nicholas makes a final check of their bags while Bianca washes the sleep from her eyes from a bowl and ewer that Gretie has provided. Jan van der Molen’s discreet knock on the chamber door announces it is almost time to leave.
Downstairs in the parlour Nicholas forces a few stuivers into Jan’s reluctant hand. Nothing more remains to be done but bid Gretie and the boys farewell. Then it’s out through the rear door and onto a little wooden balcony, barely wide enough for one man to stand side-on. The dank stench of sluggish water hangs in the dawn air, though the canal itself is all but lost in a blanket of mist trapped between the houses on either side.
As startling as a pistol shot, an explosive thrashing of wings causes Nicholas’s heart to leap. A brace of waterfowl bursts out of the vapour and climbs away between the walls of the brick canyon. Jan slips down into the skiff and extends a helping hand to Bianca and Hella. Nicholas brings up the rear with the bags. When they are settled, Gretie unties the mooring rope and Jan pushes out one booted foot to propel the little boat away from the balcony. The invisible canal emits a belch of rotting vegetation. When Nicholas looks back over his shoulder, the balcony, Gretie and the whole van der Molen house has already vanished.
The waterway is so narrow that the oars almost scrape the brickwork on either side as they glide through the mist, the walls of the houses seeming to emerge from nothingness around shoulder level. Nicholas has the impression they are descending an incline towards a watery underworld, though he knows it is an illusion of the senses. No one speaks.
After a few moments the canal opens out into a broader stretch of water. The mist is more fibrous here, tendrils lifting off the surface like steam from a cauldron. A yellow wash of latent sunlight brushes the silhouettes of the houses and the steeples of Den Bosch.
Soon the Grote Hekel looms ahead, its twin arches bestriding the canal below a broad gatehouse. Nicholas cannot escape the feeling that the arches are the eyes of a great sea beast, its body all but submerged. They seem to be regarding the approaching skiff far too hungrily for his liking.
The letters of safe-passage and credit from Robert Cecil can be explained away, he thinks. If the boat is stopped, he will stick to the story that he and Bianca are fugitive Catholics, and that Cecil has written the letters in generous recognition of the service his physician has done the family. If the letters are questioned, then Bianca’s Petrine cross should convince. But it is time, he thinks, to dispose of the wheel-lock pistol. After the murders in the cathedral, it is more of a liability than a protection. It will be hard to explain away to a Spanish guard on the lookout for an escaping assassin. And so it goes into the black water, silently, leaving not a ripple.
As Jan van der Molen had said, the huge wooden booms are raised inside the twin arches. The skiff enters the left-hand one, plunging immediately into shadow. Two figures stand on a raised stone walkway above the surface of the canal. By his bulk, Nicholas sees that one of them is a Spanish soldier in leather trunk-hose and breastplate. The other is a Brabantian. He calls down to Jan van der Molen to identify himself. Nicholas’s heart thumps in his chest. It seems to echo around the interior of the archway, a guilty drumbeat that must surely alert the two guards.
To his relief, he hears Jan return a laugh of recognition. ‘Hey, Aldert van Ruys, you old rogue! What are you doing here at this hour? Has your wife turned you out of bed early because she can’t abide your farting a moment longer?’
‘Better my farts than the stink of your herrings, Jan van der Molen,’ comes the reply. ‘Do you have any Dutch rebels with you this morning?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Have you not heard? One of them murdered a servant of the Archduke of Austria yesterday. Stabbed him and Father Vermeiren – in the cathedral, of all places. They say a column is on its way from Antwerp.’
‘I’d heard something of the sort.’
‘The caballero here wants to know who’s with you.’
‘Pilgrims, Aldert. Good Catholic pilgrims. They’re on their way to Reims, to join the Via Francigena. They’re off to Rome to pray for all our souls at St Peter’s.’
‘Then tell them to ask the Pope to work a miracle for me.’
‘What sort of miracle?’
‘Tell the Holy Father to pray every night to make that little baker’s daughter on the Choorstraat turn her pretty eyes upon me.’
As the Spaniard waves them through, Jan van der Molen calls out in reply, ‘The Holy Father may well be infallible, Aldert. But he’s not that infallible.’
With the guard’s laughter swallowed by the quiescent morning stillness, the little skiff slips out of the Grote Hekel and into the broader Dommel. The windmills stand black and deathly against the lightening sky. Ahead and to the south, the marshland of southern Brabant stretches away towards Antwerp, Brussels and the border with France. Nicholas is too busy staring out over the flat landscape and wondering how long it will take them to r
each Reims to notice a second skiff edge silently into the water-gate behind them.
PART 2
The Pilgrim Road
13
Florence, 8th July 1594
What manner of fellow will this Antonio Santucci be? Bruno Barrani wonders as he waits with all the other petitioners in the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio. Full of his own importance, without question. A servant of Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici is unlikely to have a single modest bone in his entire body. Especially one who holds the grandiloquent title of the duke’s Master of the Spheres.
The air is heavy with the summer heat and the scent of male flesh that no amount of laundered silk or expensive perfume can hide. The long wait for Santucci’s appearance is making Bruno drowsy. His two servants, Alonso and Luca, are unquestionably on their second bottle at some nearby buchetta del vino, enjoying themselves at his expense. His usually irrepressible good humour is flagging by the minute.
To pass the time while he waits, Bruno reaches into his bag and draws out two small pages of parchment, once crisply folded but now a little crumpled from the rigours of the ride to Florence. It is a letter from cousin Bianca, and it arrived the morning of his departure from Padua – posted, according to the letterhead, at the end of September last. It has been making its laborious and itinerant way towards him ever since, via the hands of any number of nameless travelling merchants, banking couriers and other peripatetic travellers on the long and uncertain road from Bankside in London.
Reading it again now, for what must surely be the tenth time, Bruno can still feel joy in his heart. He imagines there will be a lot of surreptitious masculine tears shed when the gallants of Padua learn that Bianca Merton has wed. But he cannot think of a better husband for her. True, the Englishman has no fortune, no palazzi to inherit, or titles, or estates teeming with boar, no vines whose richness – when pressed out by honest labour – will delight the throat and swell the coffers. He’s not even Catholic! But Nicholas Shelby has an honest heart. And he’s a fine physician – or else Bruno himself would not be here now to approve of the match. And, Dominus Iesus in Excelsis, how he loves Bianca!
Bruno knows he owes a lot to Nicholas Shelby. Without the Englishman’s skill, he would never have survived his clandestine visit to London with His Eminence Cardinal Fiorzi. He carries the marks to this day. Sometimes his words are a little slow in coming. He still suffers the occasional headache, for which a Paduan apothecary whom he trusts prescribes various remedies, including a powder made from a new plant that has only recently arrived in the merchants’ shops in Venice – from China, it is said, though that may be only to raise the price – rhubarb. All in all, he thinks, these minor trials are but weak wine when set against what had been the very real possibility of him dying in a heretic land.
Bruno savours the letter again, kisses it and puts it back in his bag. It will be months before he receives another. A lot could happen in the meantime – for good or ill. He harbours a profound hope that when it comes it will bring news of a child safely delivered. He smiles as he recalls what the thirteen-year-old Bianca had told him, in all seriousness, after recovering from a period of religious rapture. ‘I shall bear no sons for any man to preen himself over. I will not spend the rest of my life sewing and getting fat while he dallies in the tavern and the whorehouse. I will not!’
‘The cloisters of Santa Sofia then?’ he had suggested.
‘Are you a fool, Bruno?’ she had said, glaring at him with those feline amber eyes. ‘Can you really see me at a life of prayer and contemplation?’
‘But last month that was all you spoke about.’
‘That was only because of a boy I’d seen coming out of the seminary. I’ve changed my mind now. I shall become a professor of medicine at Palazzo Bo instead.’
‘You said that when you were eight, after you decided not to marry Cardinal Fiorzi,’ he had laughed, instantly regretting his mirth as her jaw hardened with an assassin’s determination. ‘Besides, that’s impossible. You’re a girl.’
‘Impossible – why? At Bologna, Dorotea Bucca held that position almost two hundred years ago.’
‘Yes, but the Bolognese all have marsh wind in their brains. It makes them rash.’
‘Signor Barrani… Signor Barrani…. Where is the Paduan?’
The sound of someone calling his name brings Bruno out of his reverie. Looking across the courtyard, he sees a well-dressed man scanning the petitioners from halfway down the flight of grand stone steps.
Like many Italian men of genius, at first sight Antonio Santucci looks like a common labourer in a rich man’s gown. Take away the expensive cloth and you might expect to find Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici’s Master of the Spheres up a ladder laying roof tiles, or turning an axle on a foot-lathe. Bruno wonders if God requires you first to show an artisan’s ability with a chisel, mallet, saw or paintbrush, before He sees fit to pour the genius part into the mould.
‘A thousand apologies for keeping you waiting, Signor Barrani,’ Santucci says as they meet at the foot of the stairway.
Santucci is a short man, only four fingers’ width taller than Bruno. He has a boxer’s shoulders, but his hands are as light and mobile as a painter’s, the fingers almost femininely graceful. Bruno puts him in his middle forties, though the dense black beard makes him look older. If he is from humble stock – as Bruno suspects – then commissions from the Medici court and Philip of Spain have put a superiority in his gaze that could match that of a Michelangelo or a Brunelleschi. Or there again, perhaps disdain comes in the milk from a Florentine mother’s tit. Either way, Bruno makes a grand bend of the knee, to show that while the Serene Republic might not be quite the power she once was, Venice – and her attendant moon, Padua – can still remember their manners.
‘An uneventful journey, I trust,’ Santucci says, making an even deeper obeisance. ‘I hear there are still brigands in the Veneto.’
‘We expelled them some time ago,’ says Bruno, smiling diplomatically. Along with their cousins, the Florentines. ‘And yes, thank you, the journey was good – though the road through Fiesole was surprisingly untended for such a prosperous place.’
‘My secretary tells me you are here on a commission from the Doge of Venice himself. I understand you wish to discuss the cosmological sphere I constructed for His Highness, Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici.’ Santucci raises a quizzical eyebrow. ‘You are a man of the new science, perhaps? An astronomer, or a mathematician?’
Bruno must admit to himself that he isn’t a man of any science, new or old – except perhaps the science of trying to make a living in an uncharitable world. It is of no interest to him whether the stars move about in crystal spheres or are immutably fixed in the heavens; it is enough that they shine. Neither does he particularly care if the earth sits motionless at the centre of the cosmos, or if it spins around like a peasant dancing the tarantella. If he knows anything about anything, it is how to spot an opportunity for profit. And of one thing he is certain: Pasquale Cicogna, the Doge of Venice, is that most useful of sales prospects: a man who doesn’t know he has need of a thing until you tell him what he’s missing.
‘I confess I am neither,’ he says sadly, ‘merely a humble emissary from His—’ He pauses momentarily, remembering how Santucci had described Duke Ferdinando only as ‘His Highness’. Not to be bettered by a Florentine, he continues, ‘His Serene Highness. As for the new science, that I leave to greater minds than mine – the professors at Padua University. I am, shall we say, merely the oil that will aid the mechanism to turn.’
‘How much are we speaking of?’
‘Just the one device.’
‘Ducats, I mean.’
Bruno thinks: trust a Florentine to get straight down to the money.
‘His Serene Highness is a generous man,’ he says reassuringly, ‘I am sure he will make it worth your labour, Master Santucci.’
‘Labour? Are you under the impression I build the apparatus with my own hands?’
&nb
sp; Is that amusement Bruno can see in the Florentine’s eyes? Is the Medici Master of the Spheres laughing at him?
‘I assumed—’
Santucci lifts a delicate hand. ‘It will require a host of skilled workmen: clockmakers, engravers, carpenters, experts in the application of gilt and gold leaf, forgers of iron...’
Now it is Bruno’s turn to be supercilious. ‘Of which we have a great number in Venice, Master Santucci. The ships that bettered the Turk did not build themselves. Nor did the clever instruments by which they navigate. The artisans who work in the Arsenale are amongst the finest in the world.’
‘Would you expect me to come to Venice? I hear there are more mosquitoes there than there are beggars.’
Bruno places one gloved hand before his mouth and coughs. But not nearly so many Florentine fleas.
‘Do not fear, Signor Santucci,’ he says brightly. ‘We bring in the finest muslin from the Orient, to make the nets. The mosquitoes die of a surfeit of admiration before they can find a way through.’
The tightness of Santucci’s answering smile makes the extremities of his beard flick upwards. ‘I suppose you would like to see the apparatus, having come all this way.’
‘If that is not an inconvenience.’
‘You are fortunate, Master Barrani,’ says Santucci. ‘His…’ A pause, followed by an expression of superiority that Bruno has difficulty not punching, ‘His Most Gracious and Mighty Highness, Duke Ferdinando, is inspecting the new work on the Belvedere bastion today. I can show you to the Hall of Maps without fear of disturbing his private studies.’
Santucci leads him up the broad stone steps, past snow-white statues of ancient heroes and on into the depths of the palace. As they walk, the soles of their shoes clacking on the marble, the Florentine drops names every time they pass a painting or a piece of sculpture: Botticelli… Donatello… Michelangelo … Bruno feigns an air of boredom. He has long ago stopped kneeling before an altar painting or a chapel fresco without wondering how much he could sell it for.
