The Heretic's Mark

by S. W. Perry

  The look Hella gives him is as empty as the surrounding mountains, and as icy. ‘I was in the women’s dormitory. How could I have seen any man, let alone the one you describe.’

  ‘Are you sure? Only I thought I had seen him before – in the cathedral square at Reims. I thought I saw him speak to you then.’

  But it seems that Hella’s ability to see what others do not see fails to extend to young men in grey coats and black caps. ‘I’m sorry, but you must be mistaken,’ she says. ‘I saw no such man here, and I know of no one in Reims. I cannot help you.’

  And, with that, she hoists her pack across her shoulder and sets off after the pilgrims, as though she and Nicholas had met barely a moment ago, and the long days spent treading the dusty miles from Den Bosch live only in his imagination.

  ‘I really cannot tell whether she was lying or not,’ Nicholas says as he extends a hand to help Bianca cross a little stone bridge over a tumbling stream. Below them a tiny cluster of stone houses lies cupped in a valley close to the border with Italy. The hills are clad with pine, bearding the mountains with a dense green. But in the open the going is soft and grassy. He is warm again, after the night spent in the pass.

  ‘Why did you not tell me about this man when we were in Reims?’ Bianca asks.

  ‘I wasn’t sure I’d seen anything other than a chance encounter. They were face-to-face only briefly.’

  ‘Perhaps he thought – mistakenly – that Hella was someone he knew,’ Bianca says.

  ‘That is what I told myself. But there is another possibility, of course.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘That it’s us he’s following, not her.’

  ‘You think he might be a Privy Council man? One of Essex’s, maybe?’

  ‘We may have laughed at them when we gave their names to our mules, but they have their people in all the major cities.’ He watches a single buzzard launch itself from a high crag and go sweeping above the trees down the valley in search of prey. ‘Especially in Catholic ones like Reims.’

  ‘You think he might have stopped Hella to ask her where we were staying?’

  ‘Perhaps. If so, she doesn’t remember him – if she’s telling us the truth.’

  ‘But if you’re right, how did he know who we were? How did he know he was supposed to follow us?’

  ‘Remember when the searchers arrived at Woodbridge?’

  ‘Of course. I could hardly forget.’

  ‘I had to show Robert Cecil’s letter of safe-passage to stop them going through your bag and finding your Petrine cross. They could have reported to the Privy Council that we’d been spotted leaving on a vessel for Den Bosch.’

  ‘Do you think he’s been following us all the way from Brabant?’

  ‘Again, perhaps.’

  Bianca looks unconvinced. ‘But we were in Den Bosch only a few days. He couldn’t possibly have received a command to follow us in such a short time.’

  ‘I know the Privy Council is a ponderous beast,’ Nicholas says. ‘It takes them weeks to agree whose signatures to place at the foot of a sentence of execution. But not Essex. Essex is a man of hot temper and swift action. With a fast rider and a speedy ship, he could have sent the order quickly enough.’

  Bianca scoffs. ‘But we were in Den Bosch, not Antwerp. Even Robert Devereux cannot have spies everywhere.’ A thought occurs to her. ‘Why didn’t you simply ask this fellow to his face, when you saw him?’

  ‘I wanted to speak to Hella first, lest I was jumping to a false conclusion.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘I don’t know. After he’d taken breakfast, I tried to follow him, but I was stopped by two of the monks. By the time I’d worked out travellers aren’t allowed in that part of the hospice, he’d vanished.’

  ‘I think you’re making too much of this, Nicholas,’ Bianca says, giving him a smile of reassurance. ‘He’s probably just an innocent pilgrim. But if we see him again, I’ll stand in his way and say, “Why are you following my husband, you saucy rogue? Away with you, or I shall fetch Hella Maas back, to drive you mad with her pious warnings of the apocalypse.”’

  It does Nicholas good to hear his wife laugh again. With the maid gone, a weight seems to have been lifted from her shoulders.

  ‘Tell me – now that she is safely gone away – what caused the coldness between you? Surely you must know that nothing happened between us that morning in Besançon.’

  For the briefest instant Bianca’s smile falters. Then it strengthens again, which Nicholas puts down to their closeness to Italy.

  ‘It is of no matter, Nicholas. She’s gone. Let any enmity I felt go with her.’

  But inside Bianca is thinking again of the words Hella had spoken on the lakeside at Montreux: I am the last person you should blame… now that you are with child. Angrily she imagines herself stamping on the words, crushing them underfoot. Words are nothing, she tells herself. A few words in French do not prove fluency in five languages. Simple tricks with numbers do not make a person a mathematician. Naming a few stars in the night sky does not prove the ability to discourse on the merits of Master Copernicus’s model of the heavens. And telling me I am pregnant does not make it so.

  And yet…

  And yet.

  Below them the bell tower in the village of Saint-Rhémy signals the way down into the fold of the valley and the track on into Italy. As Bianca walks beside her husband she cannot escape the alternative possibility: that Hella Maas was speaking the truth.

  That Hella Maas can do all these things, and more.

  That Bianca is pregnant.

  That there will be a death.

  Echoing between the granite peaks, the sudden ringing of the Saint-Rhémy bell sends a jolt through her body. And in its wake come more of the maid’s words, as though all it was ever going to take to breach the dam was this single, sudden shock: It will break his heart when the child you are carrying is stillborn… How much of a disappointment will you be to him – barren after a stillbirth?

  The mist hangs in the valley of the Po like a pale banner discarded after a saint’s day parade. It hugs the hem of Pavia’s city walls, lies as still as death on the surface of the Fossa Bastioni that guards the western gate. In the calm morning air the smoke rising from countless chimneys looks like pale strings suspending the city from a crystalline heaven. Almost a week has passed since they left the mountains, and Bianca and Nicholas are footsore and hungry. But before they seek out somewhere to breakfast, there is first a task Bianca has been anticipating with growing pleasure. She finds a scrivener’s shop near the Porta Santa Croce. The message she writes there with a borrowed quill is brief:

  Most beloved cousin, we are in Pavia. God willing, we shall rest in Padua by the end of August. We come by way of Verona, and each step fills me with a greater joy at the prospect of our meeting again.

  May God’s kindness and mercy carry these words to you on joyous wings.

  Your cousin,

  Bianca

  And having paid the scrivener to seal the letter with wax, she drags Nicholas off in search of one of the many couriers, official and mercantile, whose sweating mounts speed so imperiously between the cities of La Serenissima.

  On Bankside, serenity is in scant supply. The River Thames lies beneath a sullen sky like a trail of melted pewter after a fire. A penetrating drizzle falls on Southwark, more appropriate to a grey January than late August. And while Bianca entrusts her letter to a messenger, Rose Monkton is answering a sudden, imperious hammering on the door of the Paris Garden lodgings. She finds Constable Hobbes on the step, flanked by two of the Bankside watch, their leather jerkins black with rainwater and their official cudgels dripping like driftwood lifted from the riverbank after the tide’s gone out. It is a sight that at any other time would make her laugh out loud. Today, however, she knows intuitively that all her unspoken fears have been realized.

  ‘I pray you, Mistress Rose, counsel your Ned to come peacefully and without anger,’ Hobbe
s says, not entirely confidently. He is still somewhat new to his role, his predecessor having succumbed to the plague that stalked Bankside last year.

  ‘What am I charged with, Constable Hobbes?’ Ned asks from behind Rose’s shoulder. ‘A fellow should know what manner of felony he’s being accused of. That’s the law, ain’t it?’

  Ned says this without the slightest animosity, as though he has long been preparing himself for this moment. Rose turns and stares at him in horror.

  ‘Manslaughter, Master Ned,’ says Constable Hobbes. ‘I am informed by the coroner that Sir Fulke Vaesy died of his injuries last night around nine of the clock, in his bed, following an assault occasioned by you some days ago. You are to be taken to the Marshalsea for examination by the justices, in preparation for arraignment.’

  Rose seizes her husband’s hands, pulling them towards her as she might tug two large joints of meat across a table. She kisses the knuckles frantically.

  ‘Oh, ’Uusband, what ’ave you done?’ she manages through her tears. ‘My dear, dear, foolish Ned.’

  He bends down and brushes his lips across the crown of her head. ‘I did not murther ’im, Wife. It were not done maliciously, I swear it. ’Twas an accident.’

  She looks up at him pleadingly, while Constable Hobbes fidgets uncomfortably in the drizzle. ‘Did you not think of this child of ours that I carry in my belly?’

  ‘At every moment on the journey there; through every word of insult that Vaesy threw at me while he wrote down his admission of guilt.’

  ‘And then the old Ned came back to claim you?’

  He smiles, his great ruddy face infused with more gentleness than she has ever seen in him. ‘When I ’ad the letter from ’im exonerating Master Nicholas, I went to turn my back to leave. He drew a blade. I took it off ’im – pushed ’im away. He went down, struck his head upon the desk.’ Ned slaps the back of one huge hand into the palm of the other, causing Constable Hobbes to wince. ‘If I am guilty of anything,’ Ned continues, ‘it’s that for a moment, hearin’ ’e’s dead, I was glad.’

  Rose turns to the dripping constable. ‘There, Master Hobbes – you see. My ’usband is an innocent man.’

  ‘But he must still come with us to the Marshalsea, Mistress Rose, to answer for the death,’ Hobbes says regretfully.

  And so Rose Monkton stands in the doorway and watches her husband go, unresisting, a giant figure flanked by the two watchmen and led by Hobbes. She has the image in her mind of a tired old bear being led to a baiting. As the grey drizzle takes him from her, he turns and calls out, ‘Do not fret for me, Wife. The servant, Ditworth, will confirm what I say. He was there. He saw it with ’is own eyes. You ’ave no need to fear for me. No need whatever.’

  PART 3

  The Mathematician

  25

  Padua, 29th August 1594

  The last two days of their long journey have taken them over the vine-clad Berici hills. Sheltering from the sun in the shade of the willows that line the path along the edge of Lake Fimon, they have watched pike and eel slumber in the torpid water. In sight of the hazy, towering Monte Venda, they have marvelled at the fine villas of wealthy Paduans nestling amongst stands of poplars and groves of olive trees, and passed vineyards so bountiful that the gnarled old vines seemed almost too weak to stop the grapes from flying off like plump purple fledglings. Long before she reaches the walls of Padua, Bianca Merton has all but discarded the years she has been away. She leaves the memory of them lying in her footsteps like sloughed-off snakeskin.

  She stops beside a little roadside shrine, barely a hundred paces from a moat filled with brackish brown water. On the other side of a stone bridge, the path runs on beneath an imposing square gateway set into the modern brick ramparts. She kisses her fingertips, then touches them to the feet of the crude plaster effigy of the saint, giving thanks for having arrived safely. Today, she recalls, is the Feast of the martyrdom of St John the Baptist. It is sixty-seven days since they left Bankside.

  Nicholas leaves her to sit alone by the roadside in contemplation. Sometimes, he notices, she rests her head on her knees, deep in thought. At other times she watches the traffic passing through the Porta Liviana. She does so wistfully, as though she is still an exile viewing the scene only in her imagination. Once or twice she draws the back of one wrist across her eyes, mumbling something about the sun being too bright. At last, when the emotions have quietened in her, Bianca climbs to her feet, goes over to where Nicholas is guarding their bags and says, almost inaudibly, ‘Come, it is time.’

  Nicholas has lost count of the city walls he has passed through since leaving London, but these are amongst the strongest he has yet seen: modern sloping defences designed by clever military architects to provide enfilade fire from matchlock and crossbow, and to withstand bombardment by stone and iron shot. He is glad of a brief moment of shade as they enter the city through the Porta Liviana. The archway smells of manure and human sweat. It echoes to the sound of haggling, bargaining, complaining and petulant denial, as the traffic passing in and out collides with the two soldiers trying – and failing miserably – to keep an orderly flow.

  Once inside the walls, Bianca leads him through pleasant open gardens where smart houses with tiled roofs stand, and to another moat and an older set of high walls encircling the heart of the city. Only when he is through this last barrier does Bianca’s birthplace truly show itself to him. At its core, it is little different from the denser parts of London: narrow lanes that seem to lead nowhere, revealing only at the last moment an escape to left or right; cut-throughs and angles that rob him of any sense of progress; dark colonnades with benches piled high with fruit and meat, which attract more flies than customers in the heat; piles of decaying vegetables and cow dung; open sewers that are the last resting places of drowned cats. If it were not for the heat and the din of voices calling out in Italian, Nicholas thinks he could be back on Bankside.

  And then they emerge into a wide sunlit square that is anything but Bankside. Beneath the elegant façades, and in shady colonnades, brightly dressed citizens shop at well-stocked stalls and young men in vibrant hose and vivid capes play thrust and parry with their eyes, with maids in full-sleeved gowns. The glances they exchange are as sharp as any of the rapiers carried at such jaunty angles from the belts of the gallants, or the hairpins keeping dark tresses in place. Nicholas is captivated. He understands now where Bianca imbibed her spirit.

  Stopping at a pastel-washed corner house of three storeys pierced by narrow shuttered windows, Bianca puts down her bags and bangs twice with her fist on the double door. A moment later there is the rasp of a bolt being slid back, and a thin, dark face peers through the gap in the cautiously opened doors. It takes in the couple standing expectantly in the lane and disappears again.

  ‘If I know Bruno, he’s sent his servant to make sure I’m not a creditor,’ Bianca says with a laugh.

  And as if to prove her right, the twin doors fly open and there he is: all five feet three of him, clad in a fine black jerkin and red-and-white striped hose, his dark curls almost as full and as long as Rose Monkton’s: her little cockerel of a cousin, Bruno Barrani.

  Nicholas observes the explosion of delight with a smile. First Bruno seizes Bianca by the waist and dances a violent volta with her, round and round, lifting her off her feet so that his eyes are at a level with the bottom of her laced blouse. She towers over his head, squealing with happiness, like a little girl being tossed over a father’s shoulders. People in the lane stop and smile.

  ‘My cousin!’ he tells them. ‘Safely returned to us from the clutches of the heretic English!’

  Setting her on her feet once more, he grasps Nicholas’s arms and reverts to English. ‘My new brother!’ he exclaims. ‘If only I had enough to give you a proper dowry.’

  ‘A dowry?’ Nicholas replies.

  ‘I am cousin Bianca’s only living male relative. It is up to me to provide a dowry for her new husband.’

  ‘That
really won’t be necessary.’

  Bruno looks relieved. ‘But one day – soon – Barrani will make you a grand dowry. Enough to buy you a nice house in South-walk.’ He steps back and bends his head, showing Nicholas the crown. He parts his curls to reveal a line of scalp. ‘You see? Very good heal. Fortunately there are no bald Barranis. Not even the women.’ He is showing the scar of the wound that – three years ago, on Bankside – almost killed him. ‘If it was not for your English physic, there would be no Bruno Barrani any more, and the doge in Venice would be a man of no repute.’

  Bianca looks at him askance. ‘The doge? In Venice? What does his reputation have to do with the healing Nicholas gave you on Bankside?’

  Bruno pulls himself up to the limit of his modest height and puffs out his chest. ‘Everything – because had I not lived, His Serene Highnesses would have been unable to appoint a Master of the Spheres.’

  Bianca throws back her head and closes her eyes. On her mouth is an expression that is half-admiration and half-exasperation. ‘Oh, Bruno!’ she says, laughter in her voice. ‘What wild scheme are you embarked upon now? Wasn’t trying to sell Lombardy rice to the English enough to make you see reason and get a proper job?’

  For the next two days Nicholas and Bianca take their rest as best they can in Bruno’s house in the Borgo dei Argentieri. It is a fitful rest, interspersed with the urge to be up and about. Luca and Alonso hover like damselflies, ever attentive to their needs – especially Bianca’s. As for her cousin, he has always brimmed with a confidence that no commercial disappointment has yet dented. Now Bruno seems borne on a wave of almost delirious expectation.

  ‘And the doge is paying for all this?’ Bianca asks him when he has given her and Nicholas an account of his visit to Florence and the progress of the grand project of the Arte dei Astronomi.