The Heretic's Mark

by S. W. Perry

  He gives her silence and waits while she decides what to do with it. To his surprise, Hella chooses to reveal more.

  ‘The day of the massacre I was with my twin brother, Ruben. We were with a learned priest who taught mathematics – my father wanted his girls to learn as boys learn, so he paid for me to study with this man. I remember it well. Ruben was terrible at mathematics, but the priest was pleased at how easily I was able to understand what he was teaching me. Then we heard shouting, screaming. The priest had a hiding place, but by luck his house was one of the few spared. I have always wished that it hadn’t been. I also wished that God had not given Hannie and me such gifts, that I had been like the other girls – content to sew, content to grow up and marry, to be a wife; then I would have been with my family when the Spanish came. We would have been together.’

  Nicholas shakes his head in sympathy. He is no stranger to such a story. Three years ago, at the Mitre in Gravesend, he and Bianca had listened to Porter Bell telling them how he, too, had survived a Spanish fury, at Naarden. How can it be, he wonders, that the same faith burns as brightly in Father Peacham’s heart as it does in that of a Spanish soldier fired up on drink and hatred of the heretic? Applying the observational rigour of the new science would tell him the fault must lie in the man, not in the faith.

  He listens in the shade beneath the tree as Hella tells him how, alone and orphaned, she and her brother sought shelter. ‘Ruben asked me to follow him to the Protestant rebel states. He refused to countenance that God could be a Catholic, like the Spanish who had murdered our family. I wouldn’t go with him. I didn’t want to leave the place where we had all been so happy. I was too young for the convent and, with my father dead, no dowry to pay for admittance. So the priest found me refuge with the Beguines, an order of pious women who live together but have not taken vows or entered a holy order.’

  ‘What happened to Ruben?’

  ‘He stayed in the rebel provinces. I didn’t see him more than once or twice after that. He became a priest, but that was much later.’

  The Beguines, she explains, had quickly discovered they had taken in a child with unusual abilities. Within months, the Bishop of Antwerp was proclaiming Hella rare amongst her sex, if not actually unheard of. With the help of the mathematical priest, she had continued her studies. She had flourished. At fifteen she had walked all the way to Leiden, twenty leagues or more, to ask the professors at the university there to let her in. They set her tests – each harder than the one before – to show her how presumptuous she was to think she could enter the masculine world of learning. To their amazement, Hella passed them all.

  For eight years the professors allowed her to remain at the university, treating her as though she were part servant, part curiosity. Some even tutored her, though always in secret. Her iron piety had protected her from the few who thought she might have other gifts they could exploit.

  By twenty-one Hella could speak five languages, cast horoscopes and solve any complex mathematical problem they cared to set her. So when she asked if she might graduate, they threw her out.

  As Nicholas listens, he thinks how Bianca had told him of her longing to study at the medical school at Padua, and how the professors there had laughed at her. He cannot help but think Hella might now be a less troubled young woman if she had done what Bianca had done: thumbed her nose at them, travelled to a different country and purchased a tavern. But the thought is no sooner in his head than he chides himself for being flippant. This young woman has known little but suffering. It does not become him, he thinks, to make light of it.

  ‘What did you hope Father Vermeiren might do, when you went to see him?’ he asks.

  ‘I wanted to convince him to burn the painting. At the very least, I wanted to stop him giving it to the Spanish.’

  ‘Burn it – why?’

  ‘Because its fame was spreading. When I returned to Antwerp, even the Beguines there knew of it. If it were to leave Den Bosch, copies might be made. Before long, the whole world might know what it contained.’

  ‘Is that such a bad thing?’

  ‘Bad? Of course it’s bad. It shows what is in store for us sinners, and to know that is dangerous. If people realize there is nothing after death but everlasting torment, think of the ills that would surely follow. Why would any man or woman live a godly life? There will be murder and sinfulness that will make what happened at Breda seem trivial. Who would obey his master, his prince, even the Holy Father, if they knew that the promise of God’s mercy was a lie, that most of us will face nothing but eternal suffering at the end?’

  ‘But that painting was just one man’s vision. And not all knowledge is bad, surely.’

  Hella considers this in silence, the shadows of the forest’s edge casting her face into darkness, so that Nicholas cannot see what is in her eyes. But he can feel the fear in her, as if he had wrapped his hand around a mortally injured bird.

  ‘Sometimes, Dr Shelby,’ she says, ‘when you unwrap a gift you discover it is not a gift at all – but a curse.’

  Clairvaux Abbey is a sprawling complex of buildings set beside the River Aube and protected by densely wooded hills. To Nicholas, it seems preternaturally still. He can hear hens bickering in a garden somewhere, but not a single human voice. And then a chapel bell begins to ring, echoing out across the valley. It sounds to him like a strong heartbeat in a patient who’s just been brought back to life.

  Clairvaux has sheltered pilgrims on the Via Francigena for centuries. There are guest lodgings, a dormitory for single men, another for unmarried women. There are kitchens to prepare nourishing food from the abbey farm and – for a price – monks skilled at leatherwork to restore shoes and boots worn down by long hours treading the road. There is even a paddock, where Cecil, Essex, Coke and Popham can graze. Nicholas takes a wicked delight in the thought of four such resolute Protestants gorging on succulent Catholic forage.

  That evening, as a summer storm hurls itself against the gentle white walls of Clairvaux, Nicholas plays the part of a pilgrim to its fullest. He joins Bianca and Hella at Mass. Like an explorer stepping onto a foreign shore, he stares around in wonder while trying to maintain the fiction that he’s done this a thousand times before. Taking his lead from Bianca, he does his best to look practised. If all that he has learned from childhood is true, he should be able to feel the fiery hand of damnation taking hold of his soul. He should, by rights, feel revulsion at the well-known excesses and corruption of papist priests. But he feels nothing, save for a lifting of the spirit as he listens to the Kyrie eleison and the Sanctus. A doubting Protestant pretending to be a Catholic, he thinks. I am not sure what I am – I think I may be a heretic to either faith… He wonders what he will do when he returns to England. He can have no future as the queen’s physician, not when he has heard the Mass delivered by a priest whose faith proclaims her the Antichrist and calls for her overthrow. And what use will Robert Cecil have for an intelligencer who no longer sees the enemy as the enemy?

  They leave the chapel in the twilight, taking the gravel path back to the guest lodgings. If damnation awaits, thinks Nicholas, it is presenting a surprisingly benign face: nothing more menacing than a few black clouds left as an afterthought by the storm in an otherwise clear evening sky. Over the wooded hills, the stars are coming out.

  Tomorrow they will take the road to Langres and on to Besançon. From there, according to the monks of Clairvaux, the going will become more difficult as the land begins to fracture. They will face deep gorges; mountain meltwater that can carry away unwary travellers, drowning them or smashing their bodies against boulders; dense woodland where wild boar and bears rule, and an English physician, his wife and a maid from Brabant count for very little.

  ‘You look remarkably untroubled for a man who has just thrown his soul into the balance,’ Bianca says, only half in jest, as they walk, Hella trailing a few paces behind.

  Nicholas replies with nothing more than a gruff laugh, to show he’s hear
d her. But he understands now how much it must have cost her to keep her own faith hidden during the years she’s been in England.

  When they reach the door of the guest lodge, something makes Nicholas look back over his shoulder. Hella is standing on the gravel path, staring in the dusk towards the darkening hills, to the track they descended earlier in the day.

  What has drawn her eye? he wonders. What is she searching for?

  For an instant he thinks he sees – just as he’d seen from the window of their lodgings in Reims – a tall man in a grey half-coat, trunk-hose and wide-rimmed boots, a floppy black cloth cap almost covering his ears. He is making his way down towards the abbey.

  But when he rubs his eyes, Nicholas sees it is nothing other than the evening shadows thrown across the path by the setting sun.

  17

  Padua, the Veneto, 31st July 1594

  ‘What else do you expect from the Fiorentini? Thieves and numbskulls, to a man. Why do you think my father made sure he was safely in Pisa before he sired me?’

  Galileo Galilei fits Bruno Barrani’s model of an Italian man of genius to perfection – a rough artisan with a mind of quicksilver. He’s young for a professor of mathematics: turned thirty in February; a carouser who can think five times as fast as any other man, even when he’s in his cups. Bruno has the wild idea that if you got into a fight with him and landed a blow to his head, it would shower bright sparks instead of blood.

  But driving the intellect is a labourer’s canny gauge of how much his toil is worth, calculated to the nearest giustina. And that gauge – as Bruno knows only too well from their frequent drunken sessions when together he and Galileo put the world to rights – shows clearly that Master Galileo is persistently broke. Which is why Bruno is certain that the august professor of mathematics and astronomy at Padua University in the Palazzo Bo is the perfect man for the task.

  They are sitting in the sunshine outside Galileo’s lodgings in the Borgo dei Vignali. Bruno, still dusty from the ride from Florence, has brought a skin of wine to celebrate. Galileo has just listened intently to his friend’s denunciation of Antonio Santucci.

  Bruno remembers well the day they first met: the Feast of St Anthony, the June before last. A mutual acquaintance had introduced them. They had hit it off immediately: the quick-witted little Paduan cockerel, always on the search for a commercial opportunity, and the new professor recently arrived from Pisa, searching for heaven-knew-what – for Bruno could barely understand one sentence in five, if the subject turned to the intellectual.

  Galileo had told him he was working on a new military compass-rule, a folding device made of etched brass that could calculate just about everything, from how much gunpowder you would need for a given weight of shot, to the required angle of the cannon’s barrel when you came to fire it at your enemy. They were commonplace enough, but Galileo had boasted that he could make one smaller, more accurate and easier to use than any yet available. Bruno had advised him on the mercantile considerations of selling it to a wider market abroad: how to beat down the middlemen, or how much it might cost to keep a customs official sweet. By the end of the evening they were pleasantly drunk and the very best of friends. Each had bestowed upon the other an affectionate nickname: Bruno was Signor Purse; Galileo was Signor Compass.

  ‘The question is, Signor Compass,’ Bruno says now, to the accompaniment of snoring from the open doorway where one of Galileo’s students, Matteo Fedele, is slumbering off the effects of a discourse on Euclidian postulates, ‘can you make the calculations?’

  ‘Based upon the drawings you’ve brought me, Signor Purse?’

  ‘Based upon the drawings.’

  ‘It’s possible. The internal workings look clear enough. Who drew the picture of the sphere as a whole? The one that looks like a half-rotten lemon?’

  Bruno winces, but presses on regardless. ‘Because if you can, and we can build a better sphere than that neutered monkey Santucci, then His Serenity the doge will shower us with a weight of ducats heavier than even your clever little gauge can calculate.’

  Galileo leans back against the warm mortar of the wall. He tilts his head at the sky and closes his eyes. His eyebrows, bushy arches below a broad, high forehead, make Bruno think of the vaulted roof of a deep cistern where numbers and symbols tumble like cascading water. Bruno takes another mouthful of wine while he waits for the brilliant mind to reach its conclusion.

  Then Signor Compass opens one eye. He fixes Bruno with the penetrating gaze of a Pythagoras or an Aristotle. ‘My brother-inlaw,’ he announces cryptically.

  ‘What about him? Is he a mathematician, too?’

  ‘No. He’s suing me for my sister’s dowry – the one my father forgot to pay before he died,’ Galileo growls. ‘I’ve had to ask the university for a year’s salary in advance to buy him off. If the doge is paying well, Signor Purse, he can have more spheres than a Florentine bitch has teats. Now pass me the wine.’

  ‘This will be the last time I go across the river, I promise you,’ says Ned Monkton. ‘I’d stay to comfort you, but—’

  ‘Go! Just go,’ groans Rose. She is slumped across the side of the bed, her head over the bowl she keeps there, because these days – whenever she wakes – there are always demons stirring paddles in her stomach. She is beginning to wonder if, when she finally gives birth, the little rogue might not have cloven hooves instead of little pink toes.

  ‘Are you sure, Wife?’ asks Ned uncomfortably. Until he fell in love with Rose, he had never encountered intimate female frailty at close hand. His instinct is to stay and comfort her; but this seems to be the very last thing she wants. He is confused. ‘I can bring you some oysters from Ralph Stout’s shop, if it might please you.’

  ‘For Jesu’s sake, go!’

  At the Mutton Lane stairs he waits in the sunshine until a wherry arrives. Sitting silently in the stern during the crossing to Blackfriars, he looks downriver to London Bridge, lying like a street full of tall houses dropped into the water by mistake. It holds dark memories for him. Two men have died beneath those arches – at his hands. They died because they intended to murder Nicholas Shelby, and he and Mistress Bianca had refused to let that happen. He wonders what Rose would think of him if she knew. Knowing her loyalty to Mistress Bianca and Master Nicholas – as strong as his own – he trusts she would approve and forgive him.

  At the Blackfriars stairs he bids a curt thank-you to the wherry-man and saunters – if a man of his size can ever be said to saunter – up Water Lane towards Ludgate. All the while he stays on the lookout for a small, bald fellow with perpetually hard-done-by features. He knows it would be far easier to ask after him in the shops and taverns, but that would only advertise his interest. This, he knows, has always been a game of stealth.

  But today Ned is ready to take the chance. He has promised Rose that he will make no more forays into this part of the city, so the risk has been made acceptable by desperation.

  At the top of Water Lane the old buildings of the order of the Black Friars have been pulled down or turned over to more secular use. Now it is full of shops, tenements and private dwellings. Maintaining a determined pace, Ned suddenly has to hurl himself into a shadowed cut between a skinner’s shop festooned with hides and a pouchmaker’s stall. To his consternation, the very quarry he has hunted so fruitlessly for so long has just stepped out from beneath a lurid sign of a blade dripping blood – the entrance to the Hanging Sword tavern. Balanced on his shoulder is a large stone jug, which he steadies with his left hand.

  The pouchmaker opens his mouth to protest at Ned’s sudden intrusion. He swiftly shuts it again as he digests the interloper’s true size. He goes back to his seat without a word.

  Ned is almost certain the fellow with the jug has seen him. But when he sneaks another glance, he sees that the man’s heavy load forces him to walk with his head at an angle, limiting his view. Ned turns his face towards the pelts hanging from the wall and waits for the fellow to pass by. When he’s s
ure it’s safe to move, he mumbles an apology to the pouchmaker and slips out into Water Lane.

  The fellow with the jar is some twenty yards ahead. He walks stiffly under his burden. Ned hangs back. He knows that if his prize so much as shifts the heavy jar on his shoulder, he could be seen.

  Following him in the direction of the Blackfriars water-stairs, Ned sees the man turn left into a narrow alley connecting Water Lane with St Andrew’s Hill. He hangs back, only daring to enter when he’s sure the coast is clear. Reaching the end of the now-empty cut, he looks to his right towards the river. He sees no sign of the fluted top of a stone jar swaying above the other heads. He looks left, up St Andrew’s Hill. Within a moment he has the man in sight again. Ned resumes his quiet pursuit.

  He knows he sticks out like a performing bear. If the man spots him, his only hope will be to catch him before he drops the jar and runs. And a shattered jar spilling its contents over the street and around everyone’s feet will be an effective barrier, even to legs as sturdy as Ned Monkton’s.

  After barely a hundred yards the man stops outside a narrow, unremarkable timbered house in a row of five, set between the church of St Andrew of the Wardrobe and Carter Lane. Ned steps briskly into the shade of the overhang of the building opposite. He has nothing to rely on for cover, other than the people passing by. Wishing for once he was half the man that God had chosen to make him, he gets glimpses of the fellow hoisting the jar into a more comfortable position and rummaging in the pocket of his jerkin with his free hand for a key. A cart piled high with thatcher’s reeds rumbles past. When it has gone, the man with the jar has vanished inside.

  His heart pounding, Ned Monkton makes a careful study of the lane, so that he can identify the correct house on his return. Then he goes back to the Hanging Sword.

  When he walks in, he gets the reaction he’s become accustomed to whenever he enters an unfamiliar tavern: some customers turn their glances hurriedly away, while others – he can see it in their eyes – weigh up the odds of making their reputation as a slayer of giants.