The Heretic's Mark

by S. W. Perry

  ‘It’s a bawdy-house,’ she whispers to Nicholas when he re-joins her, just as the first crack of thunder sounds and rain begins to stream down the windows. A moment later a stocky peasant woman of indeterminate years with a carnivorous eye and fists like a farrier’s clumps down into the taproom. She gesturers impatiently to a little bald fellow who nervously cradles his felt cap in his lap. As he rises to his feet, she turns imperiously and ascends once more to the upper floor. He follows, like a man going to be bled by the barber-surgeon.

  ‘Do you see? I was right.’

  Nicholas says, ‘We’ve passed nowhere else on the road since Pontarlier. It has a fire, and we’ve paid for a chamber. If we go outside, we’ll likely drown.’

  ‘Come, Husband – you cannot think me too precious to abide a jumping-house. I’ve lived on Bankside longer than you have, remember?’ Bianca tells him, as the sound of hail striking the shutters intensifies. She glances at Hella, who is questioning the landlord in serviceable French about the state of the road through the hills and onwards to the lake. ‘But what about her?’ These don’t seem like the sort of clients who’ll take kindly to being chastised loudly for loose morals.’

  ‘I’ll suggest to her that we rest until supper,’ Nicholas says, rolling his eyes. ‘If she’s asleep, perhaps she won’t notice.’

  In the event, their chamber is not conducive to rest. It smells of unwashed bodies and the mattresses feel as though they haven’t been aired in a year. Within the hour there is little to see from the window but intermittent torrents of grey rain, which thrash the branches of the trees and send dirty rivulets coursing down the steep street of the little hamlet. They fill the time as best they can, accepting their confinement, welcoming the opportunity to rest. Hella spends much of it mouthing silent prayers. Nicholas wonders if she can smell the sin.

  Supper is a tolerable stew of boar meat, better than the surroundings might suggest, though the table they eat at is as sticky as a honey jar. As the evening draws on, the inn begins to drop the thin veneer of propriety it had shown in daylight. Whenever the rain eases, men scuttle in to dry themselves by the fire: local foresters, poachers, hunters, even a few gentlemen, judging by the quality of their clothes. Where they come from is anyone’s guess; there aren’t enough houses in the hamlet to home them. The swelling crowd plays dice and cards, chalking the scores on a slate as they down flasks of sweet wine and a spirit that smells of fermented pears. At some invisible sign, a procession of young women comes down the stairs and passes amongst them, alighting first on the better-dressed customers. Their smiles are flat and sickly, their eyes dead. These are not local drabs, Bianca guesses. They have dark, almost Moorish faces, and weals on the back of their wrists where they’ve been branded with a hot iron. From her place beside the landlord, the bawd with the farrier’s fists keeps a beady eye on her stock, while a youth with one empty eye socket plays angry little galliard tunes, though no one is dancing.

  ‘It’s worse than the Tabard on a feast day,’ Bianca says under her breath. ‘I wouldn’t have this crowd in the Jackdaw if they offered me all the gold in the queen’s mint.’

  A sudden double boom of thunder, seemingly overhead, makes her wonder if Hella Maas has somehow brought the storm down upon the hamlet as a warning. But the maid merely observes the scene with detached interest, just as she might watch an ants’ nest she’d poked with a stick.

  By the time the rain eases a little, it is dark outside. The taproom is now full of revellers sprawled in the alcoves and on the floor, the drabs pouring wine and spirits into their open mouths, or relieving other appetites with a not very discreet hand beneath gown and jerkin. When copulation seems imminent, the bawd demands her money, before shooing the couple upstairs.

  ‘Never mind the Tabard,’ Nicholas says, ‘it could be a gathering of the Privy Council at Whitehall.’

  ‘Or a meeting of the Bishop of London’s ecclesiastical court,’ Bianca counters, adopting a wholly uncharacteristic primness.

  ‘Laugh if you will,’ says Hella with a quiet sadness. ‘But remember the painting. There will be a judgement for these sinners. And it will come soon enough.’

  ‘Do you want to tell them, or shall I?’ Nicholas mutters.

  As he speaks, the plump white-haired man in the threadbare cassock that Bianca had seen earlier stumbles into their table, as his friend – a sallow-faced reed with a goitre on his neck and no teeth in his upper jaw – tries to steer him to the exit. The man is around seventy. He has a veined face flushed with drink, and a nose pocked with tiny boils. Bracing himself with one hand on the tabletop, he leers at Bianca and gurgles something in French through fumes of fermented peach spirit.

  She wonders if stabbing him in the hand with her food knife would be worth the uproar. She decides against it. His companion mutters an apology, regains control of his charge and makes it to the door without further incident.

  ‘He was wearing a cassock – do you think he was a priest?’ she asks Nicholas.

  ‘With manners like that? Probably an archbishop,’ Nicholas replies. ‘The question is: Lutheran or Catholic?’

  ‘Definitely Lutheran.’

  ‘On what grounds? The fact we’re nearing Switzerland?’

  ‘No,’ Bianca says with a shake of her head. ‘A Catholic archbishop wouldn’t be seen dead in clothes like that.’

  They sit a little longer, neither wanting to return to the uninviting chamber, trying to sustain an air of world-weary nonchalance, until the door flies open as if blown in by a sudden return of the storm. The thin fellow with the goitre stands against the black night, yelling wildly and pointing repeatedly out into the darkness.

  ‘What does he say?’ Nicholas asks Hella, even as he guesses the truth.

  ‘There has been some manner of calamity – the stream, by the bridge,’ Hella confirms.

  Barely half a dozen customers are in a fit state to help. The landlord lights a thick rush taper in the fire and leads them out into the night. Nicholas and Bianca follow, Hella taking up the rear.

  There is nothing to see beyond the meagre pool of light from the tavern windows. The night is all noise: the roaring of the wind through the trees and the rushing of hidden water. The air is heavy with moisture. For Bianca, it clings to the skin like the cold, wet winding sheet of someone who has just died from the sweating sickness. A flash of lightning further into the hills gives a momentary grey glimpse of the tumbling stream pouring through the rocky cut below the bridge.

  The men are calling out a name: Donadieu!… Donadieu!… But the night will not receive it. It hurls Donadieu back at them in angry gusts. Bianca can see only the rush taper some way ahead of her. She senses Nicholas close by, reaching out to her lest they get separated in the darkness.

  And then a sudden flurry of rain blinds her. She gropes for Nicholas’s outstretched hand. Her fingers claw at the place she expects it to be. They grasp only empty night. When she opens her eyes again, she can see nothing at all. The wind has torn the flames from the rush taper and buried them.

  She turns about, the panic rising in her. Even the pool of light from the tavern windows has gone now. Utterly disorientated, she calls out to Nicholas. She hears him answer, so close that his voice is clear above the roar of the wind. But when she tries to move towards the sound, she has the sensation she’s stepping over a cliff. Her legs lose their strength. Her feet no longer trust the pressure of the ground against them. She can’t tell if she’s standing still, turning in a circle, putting one foot in front of the other – or falling.

  Then she feels herself begin to slide. She hears the scattering of earth and rock clearly above the wind as the bank crumbles under her feet. She catches the hungry howl of the racing torrent, so close now that it freezes the unborn scream in her mouth. Flailing with outstretched arms, she knows – even before her mind can set it out in thought – that she has made the same awful error as the man called Donadieu. And then a second ripple of lightning illuminates the rocky bank inch
es away from her face.

  Hella Maas is looking down at her, her face white like that of a plaster saint, a martyr caught in the moment of heavenly release from pain. Bianca stabs her open fingers towards the image, calling Hella’s name in desperation. Waiting to feel the warmth, the strength, of human flesh seizing her own.

  But Hella does not move.

  Perhaps it is the lightning flash that robs her of all movement. It certainly slows Bianca’s own thoughts almost to a standstill, for she is too stunned for the real fear to bite yet. She is staring straight into the maid’s face.

  Is that really murderous intent she sees reflected in her eyes? Or is it just a beatific certainty – an unbending belief that this one event is merely another step along a preordained path. Either way, the intent is the same.

  Hella Maas is going to let me fall.

  Then the darkness returns as quickly as it was parted. And Bianca feels the maid’s hands around her wrists, gripping her with surprising strength, catching her in the instant before the soil beneath her feet gives way entirely.

  In the morning Bianca stands with Nicholas on the bank of the raging stream, not far from the place where deep gouges in the earth bear witness to her brief struggle the night before. Nicholas has treated the gazes on her arms and shins with the balm of woundwort and sea-holly that she packed for just such mishaps. Though cleaned, the abrasions still sting.

  Together, they watch in silence while the white, bloated body of the man named Donadieu is hauled from under the bridge where the torrent has lodged it. The threadbare cassock has been torn off, leaving him naked. As the men from the hamlet drag him out, a large dark-brown toad skips down off one plump hairless thigh and jumps back into the shadows under the stonework.

  ‘Do you see now?’ Bianca hears Hella say at her shoulder. ‘I foretold there would be a reckoning. He was a lascivious sinner, his body bloated by drink. Now he has drowned in his own sinfulness. The toad is Satan’s familiar. He sends the toad to guide to him all those with lust and deceit in their hearts. It was all shown to you in the painting. Now will you believe me when I say I know what is coming?’

  20

  Padua, 7th August 1594

  The summons comes sooner than Bruno could have hoped for. As he returns to the Palazzo del Podestà in the crushing afternoon heat, he finds it difficult to maintain his cockerel’s strut. He is too short to run with any expectation of dignity, too impatient to saunter. His mood swings wildly between opposing poles. At one pole lies success: envy of the Medici has driven His Serenity the doge into a burst of uncharacteristic ardour. Yes, build me a sphere to humble the Fiorentini, and start at once! At the other, failure: the doge has dismissed his scheme out of hand. Are the Paduans all mad? Do they think I’m made of ducats?

  When at last he stands expectantly before the city governor – his forehead gleaming with sweat from taking the stairs two at a time – Bruno has to force himself to slow his formal bow and bend of the knee so that he doesn’t look like someone doubling up with colic.

  Unable to penetrate the Podestà’s inscrutably aloof expression, he takes the sheet of expensive velum offered to him. The heavy wax seal hanging from its braided ribbon swings listlessly in the stifling air. It bears the imprint of a winged lion – the symbol of the Serene Republic. As he reads the document, his eyes move too fast, too hungrily, to notice that the drops of perspiration falling from his brow are spotting the neat, official hand.

  … unthinkable that Venice should stand reduced behind the city of Florence… her rightful place as a hearth wherein the new learning may blaze… bringing rightful honour and prestige to the republic most deserving of it in all Christendom.

  His eyes only settle when he reaches the sum that His Serene Highness has approved for the project. Bruno tries not to grin. It’s everything he asked for.

  ‘This is a great honour for the city of Padua, Signor Barrani,’ the Podestà says loftily. ‘Do not give anyone the opportunity to hold us up to ridicule, especially the Medici and the rest of those thieving Fiorentini.’

  It is all Bruno can do to stop himself singing. ‘That shall be my only guiding star, Your Honour,’ he proclaims. ‘I do this solely out of love for the reputation of the Veneto and the Serene Republic.’

  ‘Really?’ says the Podestà, lifting one bushy white eyebrow.

  ‘But of course,’ Bruno protests, as though to suggest otherwise would be the gravest of blasphemies. He draws himself up to his full but modest height. ‘I will slay with my bare hands the first man who says it was ever only about the money.’

  His neighbours in the Borgo dei Vignali will tell you that you don’t need a cockerel to know when it’s sunrise at Signor Galileo’s lodgings: the sound of heated discourse will wake you soon enough. It goes on all day, and for far too much of the night. The only relief comes when the sun is too fierce even for argument in the shade, or when the young professor of mathematics is at the Palazzo Bo delivering a lecture, or in the tavern.

  The raised voices are not always unwelcome. The students who rent rooms in his house, his drinking friends, his creditors (if they dare to risk his temper) – even dapper little merchants who have dropped by with a shiny new commission from His Serenity the doge in Venice – will tell you that you’ll learn more in ten minutes in Signor Galileo’s house than most men might hope to learn in ten lifetimes.

  This afternoon is no different. A pupil is debating with the maestro why the water in a leaky rowing boat suddenly surges forward if you accidentally ram the bank whilst seeking out a shady spot on the Bacchiglione where you and your mistress might spend a while unobserved.

  ‘It is because the earth is in motion, carrying the water along with it,’ says the pupil, Matteo Fedele, as he tries to remember Galileo’s explanation, made before the wine started to flow. ‘If you are on its surface and come to a sudden stop, the water in the boat will seek to maintain its velocity.’

  Galileo swigs at his wine jug, belches loudly and counters, ‘You don’t think, young Matteo, that it might be because you were too busy ogling her tits to notice the bank approaching, and that it’s God’s way of telling you you’re an unobservant little self-abuser?’

  ‘You can’t speak to me like that, Maestro,’ the pupil says with good-natured defiance. ‘I pay rent, and my father pays you to teach me.’

  ‘You don’t think I’d bother with a brain like yours if he didn’t, do you?’ Galileo tells him.

  ‘I should have studied medicine under Professor Fabrici,’ Matteo laments. ‘At least he wouldn’t make me climb the bell tower with a sodding cannonball on my shoulders to see if it fell faster than an apple. How come Girolamo always gets to carry the lighter objects?’

  ‘Because Girolamo pays more rent. That’s how shit at mathematics you are, Matteo.’

  Bruno Barrani listens to these exchanges with a rictal smile on his face, as though he understands everything that is said about who is right on matters of natural motion: Aristotle or Archimedes, or whether Master Copernicus is a genius or a heretic, and just how large the heavens must be if his cosmos is to be realistically contained within them. At Signor Compass’s house, Signor Purse does a lot of nodding. Not to mention nodding off.

  Diverted by a discreet cough from the doorway, all three men look up.

  ‘Signor Galileo, if I might be permitted a word with Your Honour… about your account?’

  The man standing in the street entrance is a lanky fellow who looks like a loosely draped sculptor’s armature, all rods and angles. His moist, bulbous eyes peer out timidly from beneath a mop of pure-white hair.

  ‘Ah, good morrow, Signor Clockmaker,’ Galileo says pleasantly, offering the man a slice of pork sausage with one hand while wiping the grease from his own mouth with the other. ‘Far too early in the day to speak of something as profane as money. We’re not finished debating the new learning here. Have some of this fine Bondola.’

  The newcomer declines as gracefully as his unpaid bill allows. �
��Very kind, Signor Galileo, but no, thank you. I’ve come about the outstanding—’

  The professor cuts him off with an airy wave of his hand and turns to Bruno. ‘Signor Purse, in the matter of the doge’s new sphere, we will need someone with a clockmaker’s skills, will we not?’

  ‘Most certainly we will, Master Compass,’ Bruno agrees. It’s the first question he’s been able to answer since he dropped by to tell the professor that His Serene Highness has approved the plan.

  ‘What excellent fortune, Signor Mirandola!’ Galileo says happily, slamming the jug of Bondola onto the table for emphasis. ‘How would you like to count yourself amongst those who hold a warrant of approval from the Doge of Venice?’

  ‘The doge?’ says Mirandola the clockmaker, interest and suspicion wrestling in his eyes. Interest wins by a throw. ‘Me, working for His Serene Highness? How? Does he have need of a clock?’

  Galileo looks at Bruno and gives him a theatrical wink.

  ‘Oh, Signor Mirandola,’ he says, reaching for the wine again, ‘he will have need of much more than that. Tell us: what’s the biggest clock you’ve ever built?’

  Six weeks since leaving Bankside, and Nicholas has given himself up to exile because exile has an allure all of its own. Here, on the path down to the northern shore of Lake Geneva, the air is sharper, more bracing even than a tub of cold Thames water, more cleansing than the stinking fug he breathes in the narrow lanes of London. Here, you cannot breathe without inhaling dreams of high peaks and eagles wheeling in the glare of the sun. The horizon – at least when he views it from a craggy rim of granite – is wider than any he has ever seen, including the marshy wastes of Suffolk. England seems like a half-forgotten memory from his early childhood, a place he thinks he may have read about once, like Avalon or Troy. Cecil is the name of a mule he rode until a short while ago – not a man made of flesh and blood. The only Essex he has ever known had a coat of coarse grey-brown hair, and would only think of following him in order to receive a handful of freshly torn grass.