by Clio Gray
‘The best you have!’ he demanded with his usual exuberance.
‘I really must get going,’ Caro tried to protest. ‘You’ve already been too kind, and I’ve no money to stay another night away. There must still be a last barge that can take…’
‘Nonsense, young Caro,’ Ducetti interrupted, a flamboyant wave of his arm bringing the innkeeper running with yet another bottle of wine, Ducetti pouring yet another glass for the both of them.
‘This meeting was meant to be. You did me a great favour and now I am giving you one in return. Life is too short,’ Ducetti said, ‘as we both, to our chagrin, know. But what we have must be lived to the full, Caro. Enjoy it, I say, and damn the consequences.’
Damn the consequences, Caro thought blearily. For what could be the harm?
‘And I insist on giving you a gift,’ Ducetti went on. ‘Here, take this.’
He produced a large hunting knife and sheath from his baggage.
‘A gift for my young friend, so that you will always have something to remember me by.’
Louisa heard the knocking at her door and went to it, opened it, her heart in her throat thinking it might be Caro. He’d no need to knock, she’d already told him, not anymore, but he was the kind of lad who would do it anyway. She was nowhere near finishing the stöllen she was in the middle of making for him but decided it might be even more special if Caro had a hand in making it himself, and so she quickly strode down the hall to the door. Disappointingly it wasn’t Caro, nor was it the fish-seller’s regular delivery boy who was due later that day. Instead stood a man she’d never seen before, a pony behind him with a dray on which sat two kegs of what she supposed must be beer.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, rubbing her hands in and out of her apron. ‘But we’ve ordered nothing. Our delivery for ale isn’t due for another two weeks.’
‘Nothing to do with me, Missus,’ said the man, a slight accent to his words she couldn’t identify. He had the wiry build of someone who regularly threw casks of this and that down as many chutes as there were days in his life. ‘Been told to bring ‘em here, and that’s that. All paid for too, if you’re the…’ he looked down quickly at the piece of paper he was holding in his strong hands, ‘the Grimalkins on the Singel.’
‘Well yes,’ Louisa said. ‘That’s us, but we’ve ordered nothing.’
‘And yet,’ the man said with a grin she found entirely inappropriate, ‘here it is. Gotta shift it, lady, got my orders right here on this form.’
He thrust the form at her and from the quick glance she gave it could see he was correct. There was the name and the street and after a few moments she relented, supposing that Hendrik must have ordered an extra supply now they had Ruan and Caro with them.
‘Well then,’ she said. ‘Best get it down to the cellar.’
Apparently the man agreed, for he snatched back the order from her hands and went straightaway to the dray, hoisting the first keg on his shoulder as if it weighed no more than a goose.
‘Which way?’ he grunted, and she led him through the door towards the cellar stairs, not wanting the beer to be spoiled, or the barrel burst, by this man rolling it haphazardly down the delivery chute at the back.
‘Follow me,’ said Louisa, leading him on, casting a quick glance into the kitchen at the roll of dough on her table, thinking yes, cherry Stöllen for sure. She’d several jars of wild geanies in the pantry in the cellar and she might as well fetch them while she was down there.
The man came on behind her, but the moment they reached the bottom of the stairs he put the cask down, extracted a leather-covered cosh from his belt and gave Louisa a smart smack with it on the back of her head. She couldn’t understand it – one moment she was standing upright thinking about Stöllen and cherries and Caro, the next she was down on the earthen floor of the cellar, the taste of its damp soil in her mouth, her eyes unable to focus on the boots of the dray man walking away to one side of her, placing the cask of ale on top of one of the two hay-bails they kept down here for use as kindling when the wind gusted too hard down the chimneys and blew out the range.
She was trying to lever herself up, trying to make sense of what was going on, trying to crawl her body a few inches forward when the man returned from his labours. He went up for the second barrel and, passing her by, gave her another hard thwack with his cosh, a sound in her ears like the damp snapping of rotten wood and back down she went.
She wasn’t aware of him leaving nor returning with the second barrel, nor that once done he unwound a line going from the first barrel to the next, and from that one to the base of the stairs where he lit its end with his flint before scarpering quick as he could up and out, onto the dray. He drove the pony with his whip so he was off down the Singel and turning a corner towards the Brink when the lit fuse reached the barrels.
29
FIRE, AND BURNING AMBITION
Greta went from Shauna’s farm on her newly healed feet without a doubt, without a tremor. She was off on the route she’d been directed: first to the coast and the boat Shauna had told her would be waiting. Once there Greta did as Shauna had advised and pitched her voice low as she could, Padraig O’Rourke – the skipper – more sympathetic than she’d expected.
‘A tad young, aren’t you laddie?’ O’Rourke commented, noting the boy’s slight frame, the voice that had not quite broken. His first impression of this Joseph Finnerty was that he was somewhat out of the norm of the usual escapees over to France. He was a straight-backed boy, well featured, well fed, a well-packed knapsack on his back, boots that looked serviceable but rather too large for the rest of him.
There’d been a certainty to the lad’s request for passage that few of the other rebel Irish had, asking specifically for Walcheren when most just threw themselves on his mercy, knowing he was their only way out. It hadn’t escaped his noticed that this Joseph had the same surname as the famous Peter Finnerty and the boy admitted the relationship when asked. So, all in the boy’s favour as far as O’Rourke was concerned, but he recognised a pretty boy when he saw one and knew what that could mean, warning his men off in no uncertain terms. Never tangle with a journalist or his relations was what he’d learned over the years.
Although the Finnerty kid was the only one on this transport he needed to land at Walcheren, he found he’d been done a favour once he got there, discovering quite by chance that the load of wool he’d been intending for the Spanish market was now in high demand by every merchant going since the French had got wind that the English were using it to insulate the bows of their warships against foreign cannons. Those merchants were paying top money for it, and three hours after offloading Joseph Finnerty he was counting out double the cash he’d been expecting to make in Spain, stashing it in his safe, and telling his men:
Back to Ireland! There’s sheep to be shorn and wool to be shovelled into our holds!
Hendrik Grimalkin wasn’t a man who took gladly to change. The intrusion of Ruan and Caro into the usual order of his life had been unsettling, to say the least, given the faint murmur of his erstwhile father they’d brought with them and the questions he longed to ask. How was he doing? Was he happy? Did he regret leaving his family so peremptorily? Hendrik’s mother had received a few letters from the self-styled Brother Joachim over the years but Hendrik had never been permitted to see them, or to know his name.
He had spent his entire adult life dealing with the day to day concerns of the press his father had left in a financial shambles, and also with his mother’s undoubted relief that she was at last being allowed to get on with her own life, and damn the consequences. She was dead now, and perhaps just as well if Joachim was about to reappear in their lives.
Then there was Louisa, and the situation with the boy Caro. It was years since Hendrik and his wife had shared a bed once they’d realised they were unlikely to have children, a great regret on both sides. He’d gone to his work and she to her kitchen, and at night they went to separate rooms by mutual and
unspoken agreement. But since Caro had arrived Louisa had re-emerged, starting to glow right in front of him, just like when she was a young girl and they’d first met. Their eyes would meet over the table while Caro chattered amiably on about this and that.
Once, only once, Hendrik had gone later to her room and knocked quietly on her door, waiting awkwardly, breathing fast. She’d opened it a crack, and then wider, and led Hendrik in and they’d lain together between her sheets, side by side, shy and embarrassed, his hand moving gently to her shoulder, then hers to his chest, taking their time, no need to rush, no need to do it all at once, both understanding they would need to learn how to explore each other’s bodies anew. Enough for the moment to simply wrap themselves together in the darkness, a whole lifetime of nights left to see what would become of this renewed intimacy.
This was not the only spark Caro had unwittingly brought to life. Hendrik had forgotten what it was like to throw himself into a project, to cast aside the quotidian duties of administration, taking stock, greeting scholars who were exploring the Athenaeum for their own purposes. And now he was exploring it for himself, alive with curiosity about the Lynx, eagerly looking forward to every new day and the promise of new discoveries.
Every moment he wasn’t thinking about Louisa and the time they’d wasted was taken up with the Lynx. He’d learned so much already, thanks to Caro’s elfin speed in going through the stacks at his direction and the notes Golo Eck had made in Caro’s book. It was all there – about the starting of the Lynx, of Federico’s Cesi’s obsession with secret names, secret symbols, the rings he’d given to the five founding members, the great risks they took right from the start in publishing daring new scientific theories, including the one that had Galileo nailed to the door of the Vatican by his heretical interpretation of the world going around the sun and not the other way round.
They’d had papal protection from one of their earliest supporters – Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, later Pope Urban VIII – otherwise the whole lot of them would no doubt have been locked up or excommunicated, their worst enemy being Federico’s own father, who’d done his best to get them all exiled, and succeeded to a certain degree with Johannes Eck.
So here was Hendrik in the Athenaeum, humming with anticipation. He’d been leafing through the latest sheaf of papers Caro had ferreted from the stacks, before he set out for Arnhem, when he came across a pearl beyond compare: a long letter, written and signed by Federico Cesi himself, addressed to the other four founding members of the society, this one apparently belonging to Anastasio De Filiis, to establish the provenance of his ground-breaking ideas. He’d crafted it like a story, shifting from first person into third when he deemed it necessary. Hendrik had already read it through once and was now going back to the beginning to pick out all the information he could.
‘On the day of my eighteenth birthday’ Hendrik read, ‘I, Federico Cesi, took a wander away from the celebrations my parents were throwing for me, away from the glitterati of Roman society, away from the people invited to the estate of Aquasparta, brought in by litter and horse-carriage the few miles out from the city.
My father had not stinted on the occasion, and the previous day the courtyard was ringing like a blacksmith’s anvil, its walls reverberating with the strikes of hammers on nails, erecting tables that were later covered with fine Luccan silk. It was adorned with huge silver platters of roasted meats, tiny songbirds on their spit-sticks, heads and feet still attached as is the custom, the suckling pigs sliced nose to tail to reveal the hares’ flesh that had been hidden inside them, the rich, dark meat soaked through with fat, and all the more edible because of it. There were salads too, fruits and olives of every colour, bread plaits flavoured with poppy seeds, peppercorns and caraway.
It was the best of everything that could be concocted in the estate’s kitchens by a team of cooks brought in from the city, and on the day of the celebrations the courtyard was a hubbub of people eating, drinking, laughing and talking, many of them clustered about the vast ice-sculpture that towered at its centre, hewn from a huge block of ice that had been kept in the ice-house throughout the winter. It had been augmented every day by servants throwing on successive buckets of water so that it grew thicker and stronger with every week, every month, all so that it could be finely chiselled, in the several preceding days before this celebration, by the famous sculptor Bernardino Bernardini, into the intricate form of Laocoon and his sons struggling with their snakes, the whole tableaux cast adrift upon an enormous wooden bowl of wine, cooling and watering the best the estate’s vineyards have to offer, guests scooping up the deep, dark wine into their fine Merano-made glasses.’
Hendrik was beside himself with excitement. This was all so up close and personal he felt like he was there. He was already imagining how Louisa and Caro would react when he read it out to them the following morning, assuming Caro was back by then.
‘It was the social occasion of the year,’ he read on, ‘not that Federico cared for any of it. He’d done the rounds, spoken to every last invitee but now, after several hours of early afternoon sun, and the rich food and wine, many of the guests had gone to cool themselves off in the grandeur of the Palazzo’s rooms, ostensibly to admire the many tapestries and paintings that were hung upon the vast plastered arena of its walls, and who soon subsided onto chairs and chaise-longues to take a snooze or canoodle, or strike deals they could not make in the public glare.
‘Federico understood that all of this day had been planned down to the tiniest detail, engineered for just one purpose: to give him the connections he would need to get on in Roman society, secure a good place in politics or commerce, give him the social network that would serve him well for the rest of his life. That this path his father had marked out for him was not the one Federico had chosen to follow was neither here nor there, not this afternoon, for Federico had his own decisions to make, and today was the day to make them.
‘He’d come of age now and had his own money devolved upon him from his mother’s side of the family, and although he’d undertaken to take these first few steps upon his father’s track, starting with this big gathering of high society, he had partaken of them only out of duty. He knew fine well he would go no further down its road, for there were other places, other goals, Federico had the calling to pursue. And his road, unlike his father’s, did not entail clinging like a grub to the Holy Roman soil his father had spent his life burrowing himself deeper into. Federico’s aims were entirely converse.
‘He longed instead for the open air, for the spaces and landscapes that existed outside the narrow, mercenary streets of Rome. He had a yearning to learn everything he could of the world that was all about him, and how it worked: the mechanics of its clouds and rocks, mountains and plants, the moon and stars beyond it, and the sun. It had never been enough for him to note their existence, but had an urgent thirst to understand the realities of how they had come to be, how they grew, how they moved and changed and interacted, of what they would one day become. Somewhere deep inside the young Federico Cesi there had always been an unnamed realisation that the earth itself had a rhythm, a set of rules by which it lived, and it was to understanding these rules that he, that same day, decided to dedicate his life.
‘And so he absented himself from the celebrations as soon as he decently could, late afternoon and the sun partway descended from its zenith, moving down its arc, heading for the same hills Federico was going towards now – those barren cliffs, white and bleak, that hemmed the western edges of his father’s lands of Aquasparta. He’d been to the same spot more times in the last few years than he could count and yet still could not come up with an adequate explanation for the strange forest that grew from them, could not account for the trunks and branches of the trees that were evidently emerging horizontally from the otherwise stubbornly fruitless slopes. Only boles and branches – never leaves, nor either twigs nor buds – yet every fissure and crevasse of their bark so clearly demarcated. And when he touched
his fingers to them they felt like stone, warmed by the sun maybe, but stone all the same. Lichen and moss grew upon their knots, but there was also a different kind of growth in their deepest parts that was metallic, and not a living kind of thing at all.
‘A few weeks previously, Federico had got one of these anomalous trees – for certainly they were trees, no matter how strangely formed – dragged out of the cliff so he could study it, get at its root system, determine once and for all whether it was alive or dead. Despite the crumbling nature of the cliff, and the looseness of its composite shale, it took eight pairs of oxen half an hour to haul the selected trunk just a few inches from out of the place where it had apparently taken root, and two hours more to get it removed completely
‘Froth had boiled from the oxen’s noses with the effort like milk from an overheated pan, their efforts disturbing a great hive of bees that swirled up into the air like an angry rush of leaves, hanging in a shimmering golden globe for a few moments before their migrating queen led them on. And when it finally came free there’d been even more of a puzzle set for Federico Cesi, for the five yard length of trunk they’d dragged clear seemed not to be attached to anything at all, was a mere stump at its buried end, just as it had been at the other.
‘Federico was as baffled as he was amazed, and could not decide if these trees, on the very edge of Aquasparta, were vegetation that was somehow turning itself into stone, or – just as mysteriously – if it weren’t the other way around entirely. If, by some unknown, anti-intuitive mechanism, they were stones turning themselves into something living. This was the conundrum that finally made up his mind: this would be his life, pursuing the answer of this puzzle wherever it would take him, like a shepherd will drive his flock through a difficult and alien terrain to reach the lush green fields he knows are hidden in the dark mountains beyond.
