by S. W. Perry
‘There was a little bald fellow in ’ere a moment ago – I believe you sold him a flagon,’ he says as peaceably as he can to the young taproom boy who stares at his bulk with ill-disguised fear. Then, seizing on the first thing that comes into his head, ‘I ’ave a message for him, but I don’t know his name.’
The taproom lad – too scared of the fiery countenance glaring down at him to wonder why someone would tell you to deliver a message, but fail to give you the name of the recipient – says, ‘You’re speaking of Master Ditworth? Is the message for him or his master?’
‘His master?’ Ned says, sensing a veil being lifted.
‘Aye, Sir Fulke Vaesy,’ the taproom lad says, gaining a little courage, now that it appears this newcomer isn’t planning to crush the life out of him with one immense hand. ‘But if it’s physic you’re after, I’d take your message elsewhere. No one around here would trust that rogue to cure a flitch of bacon.’
‘Vaesy… Vaesy?’ says Rose, looking up. She has spent Ned’s absence checking the accounts for the rebuilding of the Jackdaw. ‘Wasn’t he that professor of anatomy Master Nicholas ’ad a run-in with, a few years back?’
‘The very same,’ Ned tells her, unlacing his boots. He can smell pottage stewing in the hearth. What good fortune to have such a wife as this, he thinks. There cannot be many husbands on Bankside whose women can cook and read. He wonders if he dares ask her to teach him how to make sense of all the incomprehensible scrawls on the papers laid out before her. ‘It was the year we had all those murders,’ he adds. ‘I remember Master Nicholas telling me he’d studied under Vaesy – that Vaesy had lost his place with the College of Physicians because he hadn’t seen the signs of foul play on the bodies that Nicholas had. An’ there was that scandal with his wife, as well. From what they told me at the Hanging Sword, Vaesy’s been reduced to little better than a pox doctor.’
‘An’ you think he was the author of the false letters?’
‘Why else would he ’ave sent his little arseworm over here to see what had happened to Master Nicholas? Looks to me like Vaesy has finally decided to be revenged for his fall.’
‘But how can you be sure?’
‘I’ll ’ave to ask him, won’t I?’
To Ned Monkton, Rose has always shone with a bucolic light. If verdant fields and plump rolling hills bathed in sunlight could ever be made flesh, his wife’s face is the very model. But now, as he looks at her proudly, he sees the warmth drain out and the fear rush in.
‘Oh, Ned, be careful,’ she says, reaching out to take his hand. ‘Vaesy might have fallen, but he’s still a sir – a knight. Knights don’t take kindly to our sort calling them out. I don’t want our child to know his father only by what I have to tell him – after he was ’anged.’
‘Don’t you fear about that, Wife,’ Ned says reassuringly as he enfolds his wife’s hand with his huge fingers. ‘It’ll be the new Ned Monkton what does the asking, not the old.’
Besançon lies in the foothills of the Jura Mountains, at the fringes of the long shadows cast by the Alps. Its castle, set high on a precipitous hill on a wooded bend of the River Doubs, guards the way from France into the Protestant Swiss cantons. According to its people, Besançon’s ruler is French, Swiss, Spanish or Burgundian, depending upon the season. There are more clock-makers in the town than anywhere else in France. Counting off the hours accurately can be wise, if word comes of an army getting ready to march.
It is Lammas Day, the first day of August, and Hella Maas is waiting for Nicholas and Bianca at the town gate. She has walked ahead, outpacing the mules, and looks like the winner of a sprint, hands on hips, breathing deeply, her faced streaked with dusty sweat. But she has proved a useful lodestar, because by now Nicholas feels so cast adrift from anything even remotely familiar that he’s convinced himself it is only a matter of time before he and Bianca get hopelessly lost amidst the swelling hills, eaten by bears or murdered by brigands. Only Hella seems certain of the route. Given that none of them has walked it before, he attributes this to either blind faith or delusional self-confidence.
He has taken care not to press her further on the story of her family. And she has chosen not to expand upon it. He knows only that her ferocious piety, and her need to warn everyone she meets about what she believes lies in store for them, is the hard adult scab that has formed over childhood wounds. It has, he thinks, given her a soul that no amount of sympathy can soften, sentenced her to a life of cold, self-inflicted solitude.
To look at her now, though, you would not think it. The liberating discipline of the march seems to suit that iron determination in her. Her pale skin is now sunburnt. Her dark hair, once butchered, now hangs about her cheeks in a dark ragged bob. She would be a beauty, he thinks, were it not for the fact that laughter seems to have bled out of her. But who with a heart could blame her for that, after what she has told him about her past?
They find a pilgrims’ hostelry that offers comfortable straw mattresses and the facilities to wash dirty linen. Nicholas is all for resting up for a few days, but Bianca is impatient to leave tomorrow. She can imagine that Padua is just over the next forested hill, even though she knows that in reality it is weeks away. There is still the great pass of St Bernard to negotiate before they descend into the green valley of the River Po.
‘What will you do when you reach Rome?’ Bianca asks Hella as they sit in the shadows of the Porte Rivotte, eating bread and cheese.
‘I will go to see the Holy Father,’ she says seriously. ‘I will tell him he needs to pray more.’
‘I’m sure he’ll be grateful for the advice,’ Nicholas says, chewing on his bread and flexing his aching toes inside his boots.
Bianca jams a stealthy elbow into his side. ‘Does he not pray for his flock enough?’ she asks innocently.
‘Why do you not take what I say seriously?’ Hella asks, her eyes narrowing. ‘Dr Nicholas saw the painting. He knows how the Day of Judgement will unfold. Can either of you face such a thing without fear?’
‘I’ve said it before: it was nothing more than the creation of one skilful, imaginative, but otherwise ordinary man,’ Nicholas says, trying to reassure both of them, because he knows how much these statements of Hella’s unsettle his wife. ‘The painter had no special window that gave him a view of the future. He invented it.’
‘But that invention was put into the painter’s head by God,’ Hella says, giving him a look of pity that Nicholas would find insulting, were he unaware of the tragedy that overtook her when she was young. ‘And He did so because the painter sought to know more than a man should know. He sought a truth it would have been wiser not to seek.’
‘I thought we all sought the truth,’ Bianca replies. ‘Why would we want to know nothing but lies?’
‘But sometimes the truth is more than we can bear to know. In that case, it is better not to seek it in the first place.’
‘And live in ignorance?’ Bianca counters.
‘If you knew the Devil was waiting for you behind a locked door, why would you go in search of the key?’ Hella asks. She gestures towards the surrounding lanes. ‘Look at all the clock-makers in this town. All their clever artistry devoted to making machines that turn and tick and chime – and all for what? What is the point of counting hours, when you know the only thing waiting for you at the end of them is death?’
Bianca chews the last of her bread. ‘I don’t mean to be uncivil, but I’ve had enough of melancholy. I’m going down to the river to wash my feet. They’re on fire.’ She looks at Hella. ‘That doesn’t mean I’m being toasted in brimstone, by the way.’
She rises, hitches her gown into her belt to let the air get to her ankles, and sets off towards the riverbank. Nicholas makes to follow her.
‘Let her go,’ Hella says, reaching out to seize his arm. ‘You understand me, don’t you? You know the danger that lurks in seeking knowledge, I know you do. I can sense it in you.’ She tugs at his shirt sleeve.
Why does
he not resist as she pulls him back to sit beside her? Perhaps it is because she intrigues him. Perhaps because – deep down inside – he fears there may be an element of truth in what she says. His own search for knowledge has sometimes brought tragedy in its wake. ‘You’re wrong,’ he says, though he feels far from certain.
‘I don’t believe I am.’
‘Alright, I will admit there was once a time when I would have opened that door and welcomed in the Devil with open arms. I would have sold my soul for the knowledge to save my first wife and the child she was carrying. I would have done it without a moment’s hesitation.’
‘And you would make the same pact tomorrow, if you thought it would save Mistress Bianca, wouldn’t you?’
‘It was a lack of knowledge that brought me misery, not a surfeit of it.’
‘But that merely proves my point,’ Hella says. ‘When we seek, we also invite. That’s what I am warning people about. I knew what was going to happen in Breda. I should have seen the signs. I should have stopped asking so many questions. I invited the Devil in through my own front door.’
That evening Nicholas and Bianca lie on the mattresses in their chamber. Hella is at Besançon cathedral, repairing the rents in her piety that several days on the road without benediction have torn.
‘She’s a contradiction,’ Nicholas says. ‘An educated young woman who thinks learning is dangerous. More than dangerous – possibly fatal to the soul as well as the body. She told me she knew in advance what was going to happen to her family in Breda.’
‘Like that day in Reims, when she said she knew about “a dead child” and you instantly decided it was yours and Eleanor’s.’
‘I accept it – her convictions are not always easy to hear.’
‘Convictions? All that gloom about there being no point in making a clock because all it does is count away the hours of your life?’
‘She has a point there,’ he says, trying to sound light-hearted.
Bianca rolls into him, sliding one thigh over his. ‘Well, I think clocks are a wonder.’
‘That’s not what you told Robert Cecil, in his study. I seem to recall you disapproved of his. Why have you changed your mind?’
‘Because I need to be lightened, after all this talk of inevitability. And by the chimes I’ve just heard, I’d say we have an hour before she comes back.’
18
‘Yu expect Galileo Galilei to help you build the thing?’ says the Podestà doubtfully. ‘Seriously?’
The air in the palazzo is sullen with heat. Patches of sweat darken the governor’s crimson robe and bead his fleshy upper lip. He wears an expression of overheated disbelief.
‘The Fiorentini showed me nothing but contempt, Your Honour,’ Bruno says, feigning outrage. ‘They are jealous to a man. They could not abide the idea of the Serene Republic matching them in this field of new discovery. Fortunately, I have convinced Maestro Galileo to make the required calculations – solely in honour of His Serene Highness.’
‘Professor Galileo is an argumentative rogue who demands his salary be paid in advance, because the one thing he apparently can’t count properly is money.’
‘But, sir, who else is better qualified than he?’ Bruno insists, suddenly afraid the Podestà’s apparent dislike of the young mathematician from Pisa might jeopardize his plan. ‘Men of great intellect often find the everyday chores of life too insignificant to consider. Is that not why Your Honour must employ his own servants? A man of your standing could not possibly be expected to do his own laundry; and so it is with Signor Galileo.’
‘But I don’t walk about the streets dressed as a common artisan,’ the Podestà wheezes. ‘They say he refuses to wear his professorial toga – that he prefers to go about in the garb of a common labourer.’
‘He is a modest man, it is true.’
‘I can’t say I’ve heard him described as modest, Signor Barrani. I find him somewhat full of himself.’
‘He is a man of ordinary pleasures, Your Honour. He likes to dress as such.’
‘And he argues a lot.’
‘Dispute is the air that all the finest natural philosophers breathe,’ Bruno says, wondering if he might have a career as a lawyer if this project is rejected.
‘The question is, Signor Barrani: can Professor Galileo be relied upon to fulfil the commission, or will we have to trawl the taverns to find out what progress he’s making?’
‘With the honour of the Serene Republic as his lodestar, I have the utmost confidence he will be diligent.’
‘The honour of Pisa didn’t stop him turning his back on that city for one hundred and eighty ducats per annum, I seem to recall.’
Bruno draws himself up to his full height, still a head shorter than the Podestà, and opens his palms to demonstrate an inescapable fact of life. ‘Genius must seek its own reward, Your Honour. You can’t expect to wear silken hose if you’re only prepared to pay for country wool.’
A slow, sibilant intake of breath as the Podestà considers Bruno’s assurances.
‘Do we have artisans of the required skill to build this sphere here in Padua?’
‘Undoubtedly, Your Honour,’ Bruno assures him, though at this precise moment the Arte dei Astronomi, Padua’s newest trade guild (so new in fact that it has yet to be officially entered into the approved list) boasts only three enrolled members: Bruno Barrani himself and his servants Luca and Alonso.
Is that doubt making the heavy jowls tremble, Bruno wonders, or was it the fly that only an instant ago brushed the Podestà’s official cheek? He is known to be a man who likes to cover his back. He might be the doge’s representative in Padua, but he’s not a man to put himself at risk of the doge’s displeasure. There again, his avarice is well known amongst those who come to him seeking his official blessing for this project or that. Bruno watches helplessly while the struggle rages across the corpulent battleground of the Podestà’s face.
And then, suddenly, all is light and joy.
‘I shall write to His Serenity immediately and recommend we go ahead,’ the Podestà proclaims with a happy tremor. ‘After all, God has set Venice above Florence on the map. How then can we allow her to be below Florence in matters of the new science?’
‘That is all that has ever driven me, Your Honour,’ Bruno says, contriving the studied modesty of a plaster saint.
The Podestà returns to his desk. He sits down and adjusts the crimson folds of his gown over the arms of his chair, as if Bruno were a painter and he the subject preparing for a sitting. ‘I will need a full tally of the proposed cost of the project, of course. His Serenity’s purse is not limitless.’
‘Of course. I have already prepared one,’ Bruno says, producing a document from his doublet.
The Podestà takes it, scans it in a cursory manner and frowns. ‘There appears to be an entry missing.’
‘Surely not. I have been most diligent in the accounting,’ Bruno assures him. ‘To the last scudo.’
With a smile that says, Come now, we’re both men of the world, the Podestà leans forward, tapping Bruno’s estimate with the tip of one fleshy fingertip. ‘It can go… here.’
‘What can, Your Honour?’ Bruno asks, noticing that the official digit seems to have alighted upon blank parchment.
‘The cost of my favour,’ he says. ‘Four per cent of the gross. Shall we call it… “supplementary reckonings”?’
The street door of Sir Fulke Vaesy’s house on St Andrew’s Hill lies beneath the overhang of the upper storey. Rose and Ned have timed their arrival carefully. It is late afternoon, and this side of the lane is now in deep shadow. As a further precaution they linger until it is almost empty. Then, with Ned flattening himself as best he can beside the door, Rose announces her presence with a determined hammering on the little iron grille set into its face. Almost at once she hears footsteps beyond. The grille slides open and she sees a pair of anxious eyes peering out.
‘I bear a message for Sir Fulke Vaesy,’ she says in
the authoritative voice she uses for Bankside tradesmen whenever they try to deliver a skimmed order to the Jackdaw. ‘My mistress has need of a physician. She is ill, and rich. Very rich.’
As the door opens, Ned moves with a speed not even Rose expects of him. He barges inside, driving Ditworth before him and sending him stumbling backwards onto the floor rushes. Rose slips in behind, closing the door after her.
‘Where is the rogue?’ Ned growls, hauling Ditworth to his feet and holding him up by the neck of his jerkin like a child’s rag doll.
‘Have mercy on me, Master,’ Ditworth pleads, trying to make his head disappear into his tunic on the presumption Ned is about to decapitate him. ‘There’s nothing in the house worth stealing.’
Ned, who for all his faults has never stolen so much as a button, drops him like a hot coal. ‘I’m no house-diver, you scoundrel! I’m an honest man.’
‘God’s wounds!’ Ditworth cries, getting his first proper look at the intruders. ‘It’s you – from Bankside.’
Rose demands, ‘Where is your master?’
Like a cornered fox, Ditworth seems reluctant to take his eyes off Ned. His head gives a twitchy little jerk over his shoulder, towards a door set into a wall covered from floor to ceiling in cheap wainscoting. Silently, Ned motions for him to open it. Rose pushes the servant through and follows. She hopes that by placing herself in front of her husband she can prevent any inclination he might have towards murder, though the anger burns so hotly in her that she fears she may be the one to lose all control.
She finds herself glaring at a shabby-looking man in his fifties, frozen in the act of rising from behind a desk cluttered with astrological charts, leather-bound medical books, pots and vials, and a scattering of knives and lancets that makes her think of a meal table after the plates have been cleaned away. Clad in the dark gown of a doctor of medicine, with a tangled grey beard framing an aggressive jaw, Vaesy waves a quill at the intruders as though he intends to defend himself with it. ‘What is this rank discourtesy?’ he demands to know, almost knocking over a flask of straw-coloured liquid that looks to Rose suspiciously like urine. ‘Who makes such ungovernable sport with my privacy?’
