by S. W. Perry
Hella rises to her feet and holds out the Petrine cross. But she continues smiling the beatific smile of a martyred saint. And it has none of the warmth in it that Father Peacham’s smile had.
‘I have been speaking with my sister, Hannie,’ she says. ‘Hannie has seen something she wants me to relay to you.’
‘You have a sister – in Reims?’ Nicholas says.
‘No, not in Reims; in heaven. Hannie is dead. All my family are dead, save for me and one other.’
‘And what exactly has this sister Hannie of yours seen that concerns us?’ Bianca asks, an icy knot of disquiet suddenly forming in her stomach. She stays the hand reaching out for the cross, her fingers closing on empty air.
‘A dead child,’ Hella says. ‘That is why I was praying for you. Hannie senses the presence of a dead child. I sense it, too. We could always sense things together, Hannie and I.’
‘This is an old building, Hella,’ Bianca says. ‘Many people – including children – may have died in this room over the centuries.’
But like someone unburdening herself of an unwanted secret, Hella Maas seems unable to stop.
‘We see a dead child… a dead parent – or perhaps it is a dead womb…’
Are these statements? Or questions? Is the maid in some form of trance? Bianca wonders. Is she, perhaps, even possessed?
It is Nicholas’s sharp intake of breath that makes her turn.
He is standing in the doorway, a look of terrible vulnerability on his face. Bianca knows at once what he’s thinking, and the pain goes through her so sharply that for a moment she thinks it is a knife that Hella Maas has thrust towards her, rather than a silver cross.
He’s thinking of his first wife, Eleanor, and the child his physic couldn’t save.
16
‘It was a guess, nothing more. It just happened to strike the mark,’ Bianca says, taking Nicholas’s hands in hers. ‘It’s the same sort of trick the old vagabond women play on Bankside. They say something imprecise, but portentous. That’s how they convince the gullible they can foresee the future. There was nothing mystical about it. She’s a charlatan. I’m surprised she didn’t ask for money.’
The object of her anger is at this moment topping up the well of her piety in the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Reims, making a last-minute personal appeal to God to delay Judgement Day long enough for them to reach Clairvaux Abbey, their next hope of proper rest on the Via Francigena.
‘Of all the guesses she could have made, why that one?’ Nicholas asks. ‘And how did she know there was a cross among your belongings?’
‘She didn’t. It was chance.’
It is the first time they have been alone and able to speak openly since Hella threw her handful of black powder onto an open fire the previous day. The resulting explosion is still ringing in their ears.
Nicholas says, ‘Yet the words she spoke: it was as if she knew about Eleanor.’
‘That is how it was meant to be – to convince,’ Bianca tells him. ‘Though for what purpose, other than to shock or to cause mischief between us—’ She spreads her hands in mystification.
Nicholas knows he should believe her. He is the least superstitious physician in London, a man of the new learning. Why, he even refuses to cast a patient’s horoscope before he makes a diagnosis, a practice that most in his profession believe essential. And yet the maid had sounded so certain, as if she really was seeing the things she spoke of: a dead child… and a parent. At the time, he had felt as though she was looking deep inside his heart, unearthing memories he had thought stilled for ever.
Bianca kisses him lightly on the cheek. ‘Do not feel ashamed, Nicholas. Eleanor and your child will always be in your heart,’ she says, as though she too can read his thoughts. ‘I make no complaint. That is as it should be.’ She smiles. ‘Perhaps Hella really does believe what she says: that she can see into the future, see something dreadful coming. She wouldn’t be the first. We’ve had maids like that in Italy for centuries. They start off seeing visions, and the next thing you know they’re made into saints.’
‘We’ve weeks of this ahead,’ he says. ‘Couldn’t we just slip away before she gets back?’
‘Nicholas!’
‘I know.’
He takes his wife in his arms, wondering how long they might have before Hella returns from her prayers.
Bianca – eyes closed – feels the warmth of him against her cheek. Feels again the sense of safety she always experiences in his embrace. And then the hairs on the nape of her neck begin to rise. What if the child Hella had spoken of was not the one her husband had conceived with his late wife? What if it was a child as yet unborn?
For some reason Bianca dares not explore, a line from her last letter to her cousin Bruno jumps into her head: as yet, no sign of our hoped-for bounty…
On the advice of Father Peacham, further preparations are made. Boots are re-soled. Wide-brimmed straw hats are purchased, to protect against sun and rain. Coins are sewn into linings and hems to make it harder for spur-of-the-moment thieves.
If Nicholas were a true pilgrim and not simply a fugitive, he thinks he might be more inclined to walk the Via Francigena. But the two weeks it has taken them to reach Reims has convinced him that authenticity of cover has its limits. With the help of Hella Maas, he finds a muleteer who caters for the wealthier travellers on the road to Rome. The man has a business partner at a town called Mouthier-Haute-Pierre, where the Via Francigena rises into the crests and gorges of the Haut Jura guarding the way into Switzerland. Monsieur Boiseaux makes his profit sending the mules down, and Monsieur Perrault makes his profit sending them back. And just in case the Englishman is thinking of making off with them somewhere in between, he points out that there is not a pilgrim hostelry between either place that does not recognize one of the Boiseaux–Perrault mules almost as well as an old and well-respected friend, even if the colour of its coat has been artfully changed with soot or flour.
Nicholas rents four of the sturdy little beasts – the fourth to allow periods of unburdened rest. On a mischievous whim, he names them Cecil, Essex, Coke and Popham.
They choose to leave on the feast day of Mary Magdalene, the twenty-second day of July. The day dawns clear and cloudless, the early-morning shadows streaked across the cathedral square like inky lines drawn on parchment. Father Peacham has told them it is the perfect day on which to begin a pilgrimage, particularly if you’d rather trust in the safety of numbers over divine providence. And indeed, looking down from the window of their lodgings, Nicholas can see a crowd gathering. The pilgrims are easily identifiable by their plain brown tunics, broad sunhats and faces flushed with the anticipation of spiritual ecstasy. When they’ve been on the road a week or more, Nicholas recalls Father Peacham saying sadly, they’ll be looking like any other weary, footsore traveller and wondering if it is really worth the effort.
Across the square, the great doors to the cathedral are open. A battle for supremacy is taking place between the eager pilgrims, the city’s roosters and the priests chanting Lauds. Nicholas leans out of the window and fills his lungs with clean morning air. It feels cool and refreshing, though if Cecil and the others are right, it should by rights have a whiff of sulphur hanging in it. How, he wonders, can his soul be damned, simply by listening to Roman prayers in Reims? The people beginning to go about their business below – the bakers with their baskets of still-warm loaves, the farmers coming in from the outlying villages with their produce, the washerwomen carrying their bundles down to the Vesle – look much like the people of Southwark, more or less. Is this, he wonders, the enemy that his own queen fears so much she would have her Privy Council make bloody carrion of decent men like Father Peacham and Dr Roderigo Lopez?
He spots Hella crossing the square towards the lodgings, returning from a last-minute dose of spiritual fortification for the long journey ahead. He makes a promise to himself to be charitable. She cannot possibly know about Eleanor and the child she was carrying. That
was four years ago, in another land, in another time. Bianca is right: it was just a guess, a cheap street trick, though what Hella thought she might win by it is anyone’s guess.
She is walking with her head down, he notices. She moves at the same driven pace that hasn’t flagged since Den Bosch. He is sure now that it’s a moving away from something, rather than a striding towards it. Perhaps on the road to Clairvaux Abbey she might be persuaded to tell them what it is she is really fleeing from. Perhaps it has to do with what she has already partially revealed: a dead family and a sister who apparently speaks to her from heaven.
Hella is halfway across the square when Nicholas notices someone in the growing crowd of busy citizens step directly into her path, bringing her to a halt. It is a tall man in a grey half-coat, trunk-hose and wide-rimmed boots. He wears a floppy black cloth cap that almost covers his ears. By his posture and the deftness of the way he slips casually in front of her, Nicholas judges he is young, perhaps no older than Hella herself. He can see little of the man but his back. However, he gets the distinct impression they are not strangers to each other.
How can that be? he wonders. The man is clearly neither the muleteer nor Father Peacham, and they have not been in Reims long enough to make other acquaintances. Nicholas senses the same jolt of disquiet he’d felt when he’d seen the two young pilgrims talking to the owner of the hostelry earlier and had mistaken them for Privy Council watchers.
And then the man darts away amongst the throng, leaving Nicholas to think he might have read a great deal more into the encounter than was really called for. He ducks back into the room, a spy embarrassed by his own prying.
In Florence, it has cost Bruno Barrani more scudi than he would have liked and taken longer than he had hoped, but the effort – admittedly made mostly by Luca and Alonso – has been worth it. July is not yet out and already a goodly number of Florentine artisans have proved venal enough to sell their secrets. A clockmaker near the Santa Maria Novella has boasted loudly about how he made the equatorial ring for Master Santucci’s great labour of science. A metalworker with a shop in one of the lanes off the Piazza Santa Croce would have kept them all afternoon, had not Luca said there really was nothing more he needed to know about the manufacture of planetary gear-chains. An expert engraver by the Ponte Santa Trinità has been adamant there was no one else in all Italy who could have overlain the signs of the zodiac with a matrix of hours, days, weeks and months and not have turned it into an indecipherable jumble. He even showed Bruno his own working drawings, several of which Luca and Alonso had later managed to steal while Bruno was getting him drunk at another buchetta.
Bruno himself has spent many hours drawing from memory. While he is no Leonardo – as he would be the first to admit – he has contrived his own representation of Santucci’s great sphere. In his rendering, the sphere is not a sphere at all but a misshapen bladder, and anyone relying upon it to tell them where in the sky Capricorn will be tomorrow night is as likely to end up searching the ground beneath his feet as the sky above his head. But it is not a picture of the true mechanics of the machine that Bruno is hoping to carry back to Padua. It is more an impression – an ability to describe with some accuracy to the professor of mathematics at the university how Santucci has been able to construct it. Master Galileo will surely bring his own genius to the enterprise. It is just that the more Bruno understands about the great sphere, the less Galileo Galilei will be able to browbeat him out of his rightful share of the profit.
Bruno has no need of a cosmological engine to tell him his future. He has already mapped it out. It is but a natural progression from the doge’s first Master of the Spheres to His Serene Highness’s Superintendent of the Arsenale, responsible for the construction of a new fleet of state-of-the-art galleys – at 1 per cent commission on the total spend – with perhaps a stint or two as an elected member of the city council to replenish the coffers thinned by his great public works. He can even imagine himself occupying the doge’s throne itself, the heartfelt reward of a grateful Republic. At the risk of tempting fate, he thinks he might drop a casual mention into his next letter to cousin Bianca. Most beloved cousin, he imagines himself writing, in the privacy of his study back in Padua, rejoice! You are with child, and my fortunes are about to take a turn for the better…
The rutted road to Clairvaux Abbey runs south across the valley of the Marne river, through rolling vineyards, pasture and little fields where peasants with downcast faces tend the chalky soil. When Nicholas comments on the poor state of the crops, recalling the storms that had battered Barnthorpe in the spring, Hella Maas announces that the increased prevalence of storms is a sign that a far greater hurricane is on its way, perhaps even a second Flood. Bianca says she hopes it holds off until they reach shelter, because when she walks her feet kill her, and when she rides her backside feels as though the Sisters at her old school in Padua have taken turns applying a cane to it.
‘There will be great fires, too,’ the maid says. ‘Do you not remember them? They were shown in the painting at Den Bosch, glowing in the darkness of hell.’
‘Oh, look,’ Bianca counters, pointing at the roadside, ‘there’s a bank of poppies. Aren’t they lovely?’
Early in the afternoon of the fourth day after leaving Reims they rest on the fringe of a great forest to the east of Troyes. Another group of pilgrims is encamped nearby, awaiting a local guide who will take them through to the Benedictine abbey of Clairvaux. Cecil, Essex, Coke and Popham are tethered close to where Nicholas is sitting dozing against a tree trunk, the dappled sunlight sending patterns dancing across his shirt. Bianca is gathering forest flowers and herbs, makeshift remedies for aches and ailments they have yet to suffer.
‘What will you do when you get to Padua?’
Hella’s question as she eases herself down beside him brings Nicholas out of his torpor.
‘I have scarcely dwelt upon it. They have a fine medical school there. I might return to studying – for a while.’
‘But you must have a plan. It is a great distance for an Englishman to put between himself and his home.’
‘Yes, it is. Further than I had thought to go.’
‘Why Padua?’
‘Bianca was born there.’
‘I thought she was English, like you.’
‘Her father was English, her mother Paduan.’
And then the maid says something that jars like a sudden thunderclap out of the clear summer sky.
‘Why were you hiding in the chamber of St John’s?’
Nicholas sees again the two bloodied bodies lying on the flagstones. For a moment he doesn’t answer. Then, simply: ‘I wasn’t hiding.’
‘But you were not there when I entered,’ Hella says, as though she has finally caught him out after a long deception. ‘You were not there when the rebel came in and stabbed the Spaniard. Then all of a sudden you were there. So you must have been hiding.’
‘You were there, when I told Bianca. The images compelled me to enter. Then I heard voices. I don’t know, I suppose I didn’t want to be found gawping at that painting like a superstitious peasant.’
Having said it, Nicholas thinks it a better answer than the truth: that for an instant he had feared some bounty-hunter sent by the Privy Council was about to discover him in a little disused chapel with no way out.
‘Are you superstitious, Dr Shelby?’ she asks.
‘I like to think not. I favour the new learning: observation, using our eyes to witness and record, not relying on what the ancients have written, or what the Church demands.’
‘Then are you not obedient to God, Dr Shelby?’
‘I am not sure I should be obedient, not when prayers sometimes fail to cure my patients, Mistress Hella. They didn’t save my first wife and the child she was carrying, any more than the physic I learned from Galen, Hippocrates and the other ancients did. Therefore, being of a somewhat contrary disposition, I have to ask myself why that is.’
‘And do you hear
an answer?’
‘If there is one, I believe it will be found by adopting the practices of the new science, not by praying harder or casting a more accurate horoscope.’
Her face darkens. She says, as if to warn him, ‘In the end, the answer will be the same for both of us.’
He can almost see the images on the Den Bosch painting dancing in her eyes. Hurriedly he changes the subject. ‘We still have much to learn about you, Mistress Hella. A young maid who says she attended Leiden University, speaks five languages and can discourse on the writings of Master Copernicus – any one of those achievements would make you a rarity in this world.’
‘I have told you, God gave my family unusual gifts.’
‘All of them? That was generous of Him.’
‘Please don’t laugh at me.’
‘Forgive me, I didn’t mean to,’ he says, colouring.
‘It was Hannie, my sister, who received most of his bounty. She was cleverer by far.’
‘And Hannie is dead?’ he says, tiptoeing around the subject as gently as he can.
‘They are all dead. Breda is dead.’
For a moment he wonders if Breda is another sister. Then he remembers the name. It belongs to a dark litany he had learned by heart during his summer as a physician to an English company of pistoleers serving with the Dutch Protestant army: Antwerp… Naarden… Haarlem… Breda: any one of them could stand as a monument to the frenzied brutality of Spanish troops when they slip the leash. Breda had been the least bloody – only some six hundred of the population dead. At the others, the butcher’s bill could be counted in the thousands. Now he understands why Hella Maas holds conversations with a dead sibling.
‘You lost all your family at Breda?’
‘Almost all. Hannie, my father, one of my two brothers… My mother had already gone before them – giving life to me. At least she was spared what happened later.’
