The Heretic's Mark

by S. W. Perry

  As he lies in the darkness, waiting for sleep to come, Nicholas discovers that every sound that issues from the house in the Borgo dei Argentieri – no matter how familiar or previously innocent it had sounded – has suddenly taken on the furtive, threatening nature of a warning.

  27

  ‘This is… an improvement,’ Rose says tentatively when Ned has released her from his embrace. ‘Are they treating you well?’

  She looks around the grim little chamber that has cost her five shillings in bribes to the prison warden. She takes in the dirty straw mattress, the stained privy bowl, the little table without a chair and the floor-to-ceiling wainscoting carved with names and messages of despair. It is indeed, she thinks, an improvement over the communal, stinking, low-ceilinged cellar that was Ned’s previous tribulation. The stench, the flesh rubbed raw by ankle-irons, the whisper of rats wandering with disgusting disdain amongst the straw, and the overwhelming miasma of piss, sweat and misery that is the Marshalsea prison’s common durance is going to take some time to cleanse itself from her mind. But at this moment nothing can dilute the joy she feels at seeing her husband again.

  ‘I’ve paid the warden to bring you food and ale,’ she continues. ‘Has he been true to his word or has the rogue kept them for ’imself?’

  ‘He’s fair enough, Wife. Master Nicholas cured his brother of the flux a while back, so he’s matey enough with me. I’ve good news for you.’

  Hope swells in Rose’s heart like a wave. ‘They’re letting you go?’

  ‘No. The Trinity term for the assizes is running late. I’m to go before a judge inside the week.’

  ‘That’s good news?’

  ‘If it had been held at the right time, I’d ’ave missed it,’ he tells her. ‘I’d be ’ere until the next circuit. That’d be after Michaelmas. If you haven’t noticed, Wife, there’s no hearth. I’d freeze.’

  ‘I’ve written to Lord Lumley, ’Usband. I’ve begged him to find us a lawyer.’

  ‘We ’ave no coin to pay some splitter-of-causes who tells you it’s coming on to rain and then charges an ’alf-angel for giving you his opinion.’

  ‘But we need someone of learnin’ to speak for you.’

  ‘I’m an honest man, Goodwife Monkton,’ Ned says proudly. ‘The jury will see that clear enough. In his own land an Englishman can be sure of a fair trial and a fair judgement. An’ that Ditworth witnessed everything that happened – from Vaesy drawing a blade on me, to when his ’ead hit the desk. He’ll confirm my account of what ’appened.’

  And with that, he sinks to his knees and places the right side of his huge bearded head against her stomach, the better to sense the presence of the child growing inside her.

  It is a sultry September afternoon. In the courtyard of the house in the Borgo dei Argentieri, Nicholas and Bruno Barrani are playing dice in the shade of a mulberry tree to the accompaniment of a chorus of cicadas. The game is close enough to the hazard so beloved of the Jackdaw’s customers for Nicholas to play with confidence. Indeed, he is winning. It is his turn to throw.

  ‘Go on – kiss the die and let it fall, Nicholas,’ Bruno says, his black ringlets speckled with sunlight filtering through the branches. ‘Despite the way your luck’s been running, I have the feeling it will be… what do you call the two?’

  ‘We call it deuce,’ says Nicholas with a smile. Even in defeat, nothing can dent Bruno’s natural tendency to believe his luck is on the cusp of changing. He throws. It’s a sink – a five.

  ‘Pah,’ Bruno exclaims. ‘Why do heretics have all the luck?’

  ‘Bankside gives a man as useful an education as any he’ll get from Cambridge or Oxford, and you don’t even have to know Latin.’

  Bruno raises a cautionary finger to his nose. ‘You and my cousin should have been more honest with me from the start.’

  ‘Honest? We have not lied to you, Bruno – I promise it.’

  ‘Honest about the real reason you had to flee England. Honest about why you came to Padua. And honest about the fellow you chased into the church, before you almost got yourself skewered.’

  ‘I’m sorry. We didn’t want to cause you concern. We thought it best if we just said Bianca had grown tired of England. And until I saw him at the lantern stall, I couldn’t be sure it truly was me he was following.’

  ‘And now you’re worried that he might not be alone?’

  ‘If the Privy Council has put a purse on my head, he may have others with him. I don’t want to put you in danger too, Bruno.’

  Bruno spits on his die and rolls it. It tumbles for a moment, and then – with a snide little quiver – settles with the deuce uppermost. Even this can’t dent his good humour. ‘Don’t fret, Nicholas,’ he says with a grin. ‘This is Padua, remember? Think of Bankside with better fashion sense, but less restraining manners. If you need protection, I can drum up any number of squint-eyed, broken-nosed omicidi who’d make that kid you barged into look like a castrato. They’ll deter anyone who thinks he can make a few ducats by causing you and my cousin trouble, never fear.’

  ‘Then I’ll only feel worse about beating you at dice,’ Nicholas says.

  Bruno takes up his die and kisses it for luck. He looks Nicholas straight in the eye. ‘She’s looking very comely, for all that walking you’ve done and the worry you’ve put her through.’

  For a moment, Nicholas is taken off-guard. ‘Bianca?’

  ‘Of course. Who else do you think I’m speaking of – Caterina de’ Medici?’

  ‘Is she?’ Nicholas asks, wondering if this is some strategy of Bruno’s to take his mind off the game.

  ‘Trust an Englishman not to notice that his wife is blooming.’

  ‘Blooming? I hadn’t thought of her as blooming.’

  Bruno gives him a sly look. ‘If the child is born in Padua, I demand you call him Bruno.’

  And then he throws a sise, and puts himself squarely back in the game.

  ‘Blooming?’

  ‘That’s what he said – “blooming”.’

  They are walking back from the Basilica of St Giustina. Bianca had wanted to show him Veronese’s depiction of the saint’s martyrdom, and it has taken Nicholas a while to regain the capacity of speech. He has never in his life seen such extraordinary colours and images. For a moment he thought he had been transported to the very moment when the cruel Moor pierced her white flesh with the tip of his knife. He can think of nothing like it in any church in England. The knowledge that Robert Cecil would consider it a dangerous papist icon only added to the thrill. Now they are stepping carefully around a gang of plasterers splashing stucco on the wall of a house fifty yards from Bruno’s. Bianca hoists the hem of her gown to avoid the pools of sticky pale soup.

  ‘And do you think I’m blooming, Nicholas?’

  He squirms. Comes out with a hurried excuse. Knows it’s lame even as he delivers it.

  ‘I’m sorry if you think I haven’t noticed. It’s just that whenever I look at you, it’s still as though I’m seeing you for the very first time.’

  Her expression changes from disbelief to icy. He thinks: she’s hurt that her cousin can see she’s with child, but her husband – her stolid English husband – is not blessed with such arcane skills.

  ‘Well, is he right? Are you—?’ he asks clumsily. ‘It is what we hoped for…’

  Bianca shakes her head to dispel the awful feeling that somehow Hella is still with them, still working her sick artifice. But it will not leave her. She recalls the awful sense of helplessness and dread she’d experienced when she’d wondered if the maid could somehow influence the workings of her body. If Bruno is right, then what kind of creature could be growing inside her – if it was somehow under the influence of another person’s will?

  Nicholas takes the tossing of his wife’s head to mean denial. ‘It doesn’t matter, there’s time enough…’

  Bianca does not reply, although inside her head her thoughts are shouting at her: Bruno is wrong. Hella was wrong. No one c
an see inside my womb except God. And no one but He can set life growing there – certainly not a wild-eyed maid who thinks of nothing but death and judgement.

  As she steps through the door of her cousin’s house and into the courtyard, Bianca Merton wonders how it is that she missed the moment when the thought of bearing her husband a child changed from joyous to terrifying.

  The storehouse lies behind the Porta Portello, on the bank of the river. They reach it by crossing a narrow stone bridge capped with the likenesses of leading Paduans got up as Roman emperors. Bruno stands before a set of high wooden doors and rams his fist several times against the planks. Nicholas detects a sequence in his knocking: two in slow time... one on its own… three in a fusillade. He thinks: if that isn’t a coded message that it’s safe to open up, then I don’t know what is. He hears the rasp of a wooden bar being slid past iron hoops, then a prolonged groaning of hinges as one half of the doors is opened. A face peers out, the eyes darting like a kingfisher’s. Once satisfied that those waiting outside are not in any way associated with the city’s law officers, its customs officials or the Holy Office of the Faith – the Inquisition – the face calls for them to enter.

  Inside, Nicholas is surprised to find the place is not as dark as he’d expected. High windows set into the far wall let in a dusty light. A small forge glows in one corner. One of the Corio brothers, clad in a leather apron, is beating still-glowing iron into shape. The ringing of his hammer sings around the plaster walls. In the centre of the space sits a large, circular cradle-like structure of wood. It rests on four splayed feet, carved in the shape of a crouching lion’s paws, claws extended. By the chisel marks, Nicholas can see it is a work in progress.

  ‘A nice touch, don’t you think?’ Bruno asks. ‘The emblem of Venice is the winged lion. He’ll like that, the doge, when it’s all gilded properly. Our goldsmith, Signor Bondoni, says it should be done by the Feast of St Francis. But he has six children by his mistress, who’s an ogre, so we have to be flexible in the exact timing.’

  Propped against one wall are the quadrants of a huge brass ring, which – when completed – Nicholas judges will be twice the height of a man in diameter.

  ‘That’s the equator ring,’ Bruno explains. ‘It will sit on the rim of the cradle. The sphere will revolve within it. Of course, when I say sphere, it’s actually concentric rings that move the sun, the stars and the planets in their appropriate motions. The true sphere, the earth itself, is at the very heart of the engine and remains motionless, just as the true earth sits motionless at the centre of the cosmos.’

  ‘You really can do this,’ Bianca says, smiling in admiration. She embraces her little cousin. ‘I’m so proud of you, Bruno. I take back all my doubts.’

  Proudly Bruno leads them to a bench where young Matteo Fedele is bent over a spread of papers, making notes and calculations with a quill.

  ‘How goes it, Signor Matteo?’ Bruno asks.

  Fedele looks up with a start. ‘Forgive me, I was miles away. The maestro set me to thinking on how it might be possible to show the flight of meteors through the celestial rings. I told him that everyone with any learning knows meteors emanate from within the earth and glow because they absorb the sun’s heat as they travel through the heavens. Therefore they should not be depicted in the orbits of the planets.’

  ‘And the answer Signor Compass gave you?’

  Matteo’s cleft lip gives a little quiver of indignation. ‘He told me I had the imagination of a castrated lapdog.’

  ‘Knowing Signor Compass, I think you escaped lightly.’

  Matteo rubs his forehead. ‘But I still can’t work out how to do it. It would be a lot easier if we were making a sphere based on what Signor Copernicus writes. If the sun were at the centre of the engine instead of the earth, we wouldn’t need nearly so many cogs and counter-movements.’

  The colour drains from Bruno’s face. A nervous tick causes the corner of one eye to tremble. ‘I don’t want to hear that, Matteo. We’re doing this to make money.’ He adds, as an afterthought, ‘And for the glory of the Republic, of course. That’s a given. I have no intention of getting into the middle of a philosophical debate.’

  ‘It does seem a shame not to consider the latest thinking on the matter,’ Nicholas observes. ‘Seeing how much effort you’re putting into this device.’

  ‘I am reliably informed by Signor Galileo that no one in Venice gives any credence to such a demonstrably false idea, Nicholas,’ Bruno says. ‘If the doge doesn’t disagree with Holy Mother Church, I’m not going to be the first one to tell him he ought to. You clever fellows can debate such matters all you like, but I’m a businessman. And I have no interest in being burned alive in the Piazza dei Signori. I have sensitive toes.’

  Bianca says gravely, ‘Don’t joke about such matters, Cousin. Remember what happened to my father, dying alone in a cold cell because he challenged the Church’s dogma on how the world is made. It is why I left Padua. Don’t give me reason for a second exile.’

  Bruno answers her with a dazzling smile. ‘Rest easy, Cousin,’ he says. ‘Not even the Holy Father in Rome and all his cardinals – be they as pious as St Peter – will find a single fault with what your clever cousin and Signor Compass are building here. If Church dogma says the earth is made of custard, then I would happily give His Serenity a custard earth. And I won’t risk being burned for heresy by sticking a cherry in it, either.’ He points at the high windows of the storehouse. ‘Do it any other way and, if I open that, I’ll be able to hear that rogue Santucci laughing at me all the way from Florence.’

  Bruno has hired a barge for an afternoon on the river. He says it’s what all the best people do. He tells them it’s in honour of Bianca’s return to Padua and her marriage to Nicholas. Galileo and Matteo Fedele are invited – the professor because he is good company, Matteo in reward for his labour. Luca and Alonso pack sausages of fine Lombardy pork, Lodigiano cheese and a skin full of rich red wine. ‘Best make it two,’ says Bruno. ‘Signor Compass will have had a hard morning trying to unblock the ears of his students.’

  The sky is the purest blue, the shade beneath the boat’s awning soporific. While Bruno and Bianca doze, Nicholas develops an easy friendship with the professor of mathematics. Both of a similar age, both from relatively humble origins, both harbouring a mistrust of ancient teaching, they find they have much in common. Where Nicholas’s Italian fails, they revert to Latin, the professional language they share.

  To Nicholas’s surprise and delight, he discovers Galileo refuses to wear a professor’s toga when out in the city streets. He thinks of the disgust on the faces of the Censors of the College of Physicians when he’d told them he’d thrown his own gown into the Thames, rejecting the false efficacy of so much of his medical training.

  Galileo promises to introduce him to the famous Girolamo Fabrici, professor of anatomy and surgery. As the wineskins flatten and the villas on the banks of the Bacchiglione drift by in the hazy afternoon heat, Nicholas begins to think there could be worse places in the world than Padua to be a physician. Beside him, Bianca watches the world drift pass, aware that something is missing. It is the familiar ache that she’s been expecting for days now. The one that warns her menses are on the way.

  28

  The Queen’s Bench Prison, 16th September 1594

  Ned Monkton is one of twenty prisoners appearing this morning before a justice of the assizes. He is next in the queue, between a permanently soused woman of sixty accused of naming her cats Lucifer and Belial, and a labourer indicted for stealing an awl and a hammer from his employer.

  The clerk has already read out the charge, first in Latin, which was meaningless to Ned, and then in English: that he did, in chance medley – that is, in a hot quarrel – kill Sir Fulke Vaesy, knight, a resident of the Castle Baynard Ward of the city, in contravention of the queen’s common law.

  Ned has submitted his plea: not guilty. The findings of the coroner’s jury and his own deposition, writt
en for him by Rose, have been presented to the justice in advance. A jury of residents drawn from nearby Borough High Street has been assembled. A small crowd has gathered to watch the proceedings. Rose stands amongst them, drying her eyes on her sleeve. She doesn’t want Ned to see her distressed.

  The conversation between the magistrate – imperious in a red gown and a black cloth cap – and the prosecuting sergeant dies on their lips when Ned is brought before them. They stare at him, the magistrate through a pair of slightly opaque spectacles. Then, hurriedly calculating the distance between the accused and their own suddenly vulnerable bodies, they independently wave the two court guards to move closer to the giant standing in the body of the court.

  What is to be made of him? the justice wonders, tugging a little nervously at his ruff. Look at that bushy auburn beard. You could hide a whole gang of cut-purses in that thicket. Look at the ruddy complexion – clearly a man drunk from dawn to dusk. Or is he flushed with an inveterate and dangerous anger? And those huge hands. Murderer’s hands, without a doubt. This humble show that he is putting on must be intended to deceive. It cannot be his true nature. That is not how God has fashioned the bear.

  ‘You plead not guilty,’ the sergeant says, ‘yet you look like a man easily roused.’

  Rose calls out, ‘Oh, he’s easily roused, Your Honour. It’s a job to stop him being roused. Sometimes I ’as to ask for a night off.’

  Guffaws from the assembled spectators.

  ‘Restate your account of what happened, Master Monkton,’ the magistrate says, quieting the laughter with a downward wave of his hand.

  Intimidated by the majesty of the law, Ned does his best. And it is not at all bad. He has a confidence in him that Rose hasn’t seen before. It makes her proud. It makes her weep again.