by Clio Gray
‘Um, sorry to be a bit thick,’ Greta put in, ‘but I’ve never heard of any of these people. Who’s Gali…well, whatever his name is. And what’s so important about him and what he wrote?’
‘And you called me an idiot,’ Ruan barked out a laugh, swallowing it half-way through, pinioned into immobility by the hard green stare from Greta that both repelled and fascinated him in equal measure.
He wondered if Fergus had ever witnessed it, and how they would have laughed and joked about it in earlier days, Fergus’s grizzled face so vivid in his mind that for a moment he neither heard nor saw anything else. The bald fact was that he missed his old crosser of swords and the companionship they’d always had before crossing swords was all they did. His fault, he knew. He just hadn’t been able to stop himself. The closer they’d got to Golo finally embarking on his bid to resurrect the Lynx, the more impatient Ruan had become to leave that godforsaken square of moor Johannes Eck had been so enamoured of, and that impatience had found its primary target in Fergus because the only other person in the house was Golo, and to spit his venom at Golo was unthinkable, even to Ruan Peat.
‘I never asked,’ Ruan said, leaning forward now, looking into those green eyes, ‘how it is that you came to have my ring, how you got it from Fergus.’
Greta swallowed. She’d been in tougher situations than this, but it didn’t feel like it.
‘Because he joined us…briefly anyway. He went to fight in the battle of New Ross, which didn’t go too well. He gave me letters…’
‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me this before?’ Ruan exploded, jumping up and staring daggers at Greta who flinched beneath his scrutiny. ‘Is he dead? Are you telling me he’s dead?’
‘I don’t know for certain,’ she admitted quietly. ‘But after Vinegar Hill and me getting his pouch…well, I just supposed…’
Ruan turned his back on the lot of them and moved a few yards away, eyes wet, heart hammering every last shred of hope gone from him that Fergus was still alive, guilt creeping over him, knowing that if he’d not been so spiteful to Fergus then maybe Golo wouldn’t have sent him to Ireland to keep them separated. Then Fergus would still be alive and maybe Golo too, if Fergus had been on the Collybuckie to protect him. Grief was creeping through his bones like honey fungus, strangling the life out of him unseen, so deep below the surface he was only just grasping it was there at all.
He missed the following conversation between Hendrik and Greta, caching up only at the end when Greta was summarising what she thought she’d understood.
‘…so back then no one knew that the world went around the sun and not the other way round?’
‘Precisely so,’ Hendrik nodded.
‘And your Galileo loon was one of the first to make the case?’
Hendrik nodded again.
‘But the church didn’t like it, because as far as they’re concerned we’re the be all and end all of creation.’
‘It’s changed a little now,’ Joachim put in. ‘But not, sadly, entirely.’
Greta took this comment on board and went on.
‘So if Federico hadn’t put on the timmer-breeks when he did the Lynx would have put out Galileo’s treatise a lot earlier than actually happened?’
‘You’ve caught it,’ Hendrik said. ‘And that’s why I’m saying what I’m saying. If Cesi hadn’t died in 1630 then he’d have broadcast Galileo’s Two World System under the Lincaen imprint which, at that time, had the backing of Maffeo Barberini who was by then the Pope.’
‘And if that was the case,’ Joachim added, keen to impress his son with his liberalism, ‘then the Copernican view of the world would have been accepted many years before it was, and Galileo would never have been put before the Inquisition in ‘32 when he actually published …’
‘And never have been put under house arrest for the rest of his life,’ Hendrik finished for his father. ‘And you can imagine the implications of that.’
Greta couldn’t.
‘Big?’ she offered.
‘World-changing,’ Hendrik said, smiling the first proper smile since Louisa had died, his head entirely taken up with the Lynx and what they could have, should have, achieved, if the only the sole source of their funding – Federico Cesi – hadn’t died.
‘The scientific enlightenment,’ Hendrik expounded, ‘that we are experiencing right now could have happened a couple of centuries earlier, Galileo and his fellow academics free to pursue their work without the persecution of the church; and that’s why Golo’s mission is so important. This hidden corner of our past needs bringing into the light, its legacy fully known, its traditions upheld and carried on.’
‘Not that everyone would choose for that to be the case,’ Joachim stated soberly, bringing everyone back to the present tense. ‘And presumably you see some points of cause and effect …’
Hendrik nodded. ‘I do, and there’s another letter here explains why. After Federico’s death the correspondence with the Athenaeum Master continued, mostly, Ruan, you might be interested to know, coming from the hand of Walter Peat himself.’
Ruan blinked, turned back, sat down, picked up Walter’s ring, turning it carefully in his fingers. Golo had letters too, all written by Johannes Eck to Walter, who had apparently bided for several years in Johannes’ house before latterly settling several miles to the west going towards Kilmartin, the place with all the ancient stones that were mimicked on his ring. That Walter must have replied, written his own letters to both Eck and other people, had never occurred to him. Hendrik paused briefly, looking at Ruan, nodding once before going on.
‘Mostly he talks about other members of the Lynx, what they were working on, how Galileo was faring under hourse arrest, how they’d devised a method of communication with him even after all his correspondence was being raked over by Inquisitionary aides keen that he not be dispersing his heretical views. But one letter is of particular relevance to us now,’ he announced, pulling a yellowing page from the sheaf and holding it up, ‘because it tells us something of what Galileo – and a few of his more outspoken followers – underwent.’
Joachim was aware of this period of his church’s history.
‘You mean torture,’ he stated soberly after a couple of seconds.
‘I do,’ Hendrik nodded, ‘one practitioner of the art, as Walter puts it, being far more enthusiastic than his fellows, and that man’s name was Lorenzini Ducetti.’
From down below them Caro – who had apparently been listening – let out a wail thin and shrill, like a titmouse in the morning, getting up from the his sofa and running past them all up the library towards the door, his hand gripping hard on the hilt of the knife Ducetti had given him. Greta was on Caro’s tail in a second, Isaac coming out of his cubby-hole as Caro reached the door, fingers already scrabbling at the heavy bolts, trying to draw them back, nails splitting and drawing blood as he went at them with all the fury his small body could muster.
‘That man! That man!’ he was shouting. ‘I’m going to kill him dead! Stone dead, I tell you!’
Greta reached him, put her arms about Caro’s waist trying to pull him away, Isaac wheezing up beside them both, stopping all escape by withdrawing the huge iron key from its lock, slipping it into the leather workman’s pouch that hung from his belt.
‘Come on, lad,’ Isaac said, soothingly, no idea what was going on but recognising sore distress when he saw it. ‘Come on now.’
Caro desisted, his hands falling uselessly to his sides as he recognised the futility of his plan, which had been to run all the way out into the afternoon and on and on and on, right out of Deventer, right back to the inn where he’d last encountered Signor Ducetti, where that man, that traitor, that murderer, had greeted Caro like a long-lost friend.
37
AND MORE INTRIGUE YET TO COME
‘I’m sorry,’ Caro whispered, curling himself into a chair beside Greta, Isaac coming with him, placing himself at a discreet distance behind the rest but unwilling to le
t Caro out of his sight, Joachim and Hendrik still on their feet, shocked by the boy’s abrupt reappearance. That he’d been listening all the while to what they’d been saying was evident, though in truth they’d forgotten he was there at all.
‘Shush now,’ Greta said, patting the boy’s arm, understanding his reaction, remembering back to old Owen and his fire and her own thoughts then of murder.
‘Alright then,’ Hendrik said, subsiding into his seat, Joachim following suit. ‘But Caro, you’re right. I do believe the Ducetti family might be behind everything that has been going on.’
‘But for why? And why now?’ Ruan asked quietly. ‘They could have killed Golo at Lock Eck if that was their plan.’
His face was paler than usual, his fine features pinched at the edges. The Lynx had always been a fairy tale as far as he was concerned, Golo’s mad obsession, nothing to do with him or the real world - except that now it was. Golo, and Fergus – probably – dead because of it. And now Walter Peat had been introduced into the mix as a real live actual person, his ancestor, his blood, someone for whom the ring Ruan had previously been so contemptuous of had been specifically designed for, worn on his finger… a puppet on an ancient stage suddenly come to life.
‘Because of the enclave,’ Joachim said quietly, shaking his head, closing his eyes, everything clearer now, including the attack on him back at the Servants: a tactic probably intended to bring Hendrik running to his dying father’s side, stop him digging any further into the Lynx on Golo’s behalf, at least for a few more weeks, unaware that father and son had not communicated with each other for twenty four years.
‘Exactly,’ Hendrik nodded, echoing Joachim. ‘The enclave are sitting right now, just as the priest reminded us at Louisa’s graveside. The present Pope is sick, sick enough for everyone to believe he is about to shuffle off his mortal coil. So bad that the cardinals were told several months ago to prepare for the worst, think of his prospective successors, rake through their pasts, make reckonings of who they are and where they have come from and, if they are elected, whether their familial history will bear the scrutiny that will inevitably follow.’
‘I don’t get it,’ Greta said, wrinkling her nose. ‘What do you mean, the enclave? And what’s it to do with anything?’
Hendrik laid out Walter’s letter on the table before him.
‘You’re a Catholic?’ he asked Greta.
‘I am,’ she said stoutly, ‘but we don’t take sides like that anymore. Not since the Uprising. Altogether we are, Catholics, Protestants and Dissenters.’
Hendrik smiled, as if this should always have been the case.
‘But you haven’t heard of the enclave sitting?’
‘We haven’t,’ Greta said, ‘but we’ve had other things to think about.’
Like New Ross, for instance, and Vinegar Hill, and me running the country up and down and over the sea to here.
Hendrik nodded, as if she’d spoken these last thoughts out loud and made a great truth of it.
‘Quite right,’ Hendrik said. ‘For the plain fact is that people like you, Greta, and me, live in a world that is unstable, constantly shifting, the sitting of the enclave hardly of great import to us. But for others, for the families connected to the forerunners for the post of Pope that is not the case. They stand to make a great deal of money on the outcome.’
Joachim was shocked. The sitting of the enclave was of the greatest importance to him and his order, and to every other order of monks the world over.
‘But how can you say that?’ he asked.
‘Because it’s true,’ Hendrik said sadly. ‘You people live in a bubble,’ no rancour to his words. ‘You live in seclusion, away from the rest of us, forgetting how we live. You forget too that the election of a new pope has little relevance for the quotidian; of far more importance to most of Europe now is the revolution that has just shaken France root and branch, and the enormous implications it is having for everyone who lives close by its borders. Whatever the French are doing is of far more significance that a load of old religious electing another old religious to be dressed in white and given a papal tiara, a staff and told he is the most important person in the world.’
Joachim dropped his gaze. Hendrik hadn’t wanted to be so brutal, but honest to God he needed to get this point across, because this was the nub of his argument.
‘To us here, today,’ he said, ‘around this table, what everyone needs to understand is that one of the two forerunners for the enclave to consider is one Cardinal Eduardo Ducetti, because if he beats off the opposition and is elected then the rest of the Ducetti family stand to do very well out of it. Very well indeed. Once – if – he is elected then all well and done. The Pope is infallible. But a public revelation that a previous member of the family took great pleasure in torturing heretics – particularly heretics who had previous Papal support, like a member of the Lynx, like Galileo himself – well. That would not go down well at all.’
‘All for the matter of a few weeks,’ Joachim whispered. ‘Stopping Golo in his tracks, murdering him when the opportunity arose, setting fire to your house in the hope of putting an end to your researches once and for all…oh Hendrik! I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Hendrik said with bitterness. ‘It’s no one’s fault but the Ducettis. Our problem now is trying to prove it.’
Silence then, as everyone digested the plain truth of it.
‘Um, everyone?’ Greta was the first to speak, the first person to not only see the stratagem in what had been presented but a further stratagem in how they might proceed. She’d not spent the last few years with the United Irish without learning something of attack and defence and the means with which to combat both.
‘Don’t know if you’re all forgetting but just before the undertaker came and all that, well, we was talking about a man that was seen?’
Pieter Dulke’s description of the man with dark hair, the one who looked foreign, with bad pock marks on his face.
‘Well,’ Greta went on, ‘I was starting to say then that I think he was at the Servants – or someone very like him – sweeping floors he was, but stopped his sweeping the second the Brother I was with mentioned Deventer.’
Caro fluttered into life beside her.
‘She’s right,’ he said, trembling all over, the need to fight coming back into his veins like a flame enlivened by the wind. ‘And it was Signor Ducetti sent him back with me! Said he needed succour, a place to stay…’
And then someone spoke who no one had even realised was there: Isaac, standing in the shadows beyond Caro’s chair, listening intently, and reacting now with concern and some trepidation.
‘Excuse me, sir, Mijnheer Grimalkin,’ Isaac was loathe to interrupt but had to speak up.
‘If you’ve anything that can help,’ Hendrik said, ‘then now, please God, is the time to say it.’
‘Excuse me,’ Isaac said again, embarrassed, hoping he wasn’t about to muddy the waters or add to Hendrik’s burdens, for Christ knew that was the last thing he wanted. He swallowed, cleared his throat, embarked on the longest speech he’d ever given in his life.
‘It’s just that I spoke to Pieter Dulke earlier, and he sort of caught me up on what’s been going on and, well, I don’t know if I should say so, but there was a man very like the one you’re describing who was here at the library, a few weeks back. He wanted in, to study he said. But all he had with him was a certificate from the Guild of Silver and Copper Workers for his credentials which, as you know, is by no means enough to give the man entry, so I sent him away. Told him to apply in writing, as is usual. But it strikes me now that of all the options open to you, Mijnheer, maybe the Guild would be a place to start.’
Hendrik peered into the shadows in which Old Isaac was hiding, Old Isaac who had been here for years and years and years, for as long as Hendrik could remember. Old Isaac, who knew every in and out of the library and the way it worked. He should have thought to ask hi
m sooner about any unusual happenings but it would have been like asking the walls themselves, such a fixture was he.
‘Oh Isaac,’ Hendrik said warmly. ‘But where would we be without you? Thank for this, thank you a hundred times.’
Hendrik was already on his feet, looking at the clock face set into the wall above the Athenaeum doors and that it was showing ten minutes to six. Ten minutes to get to the Guild House before it closed for the night. He moved abruptly, grabbing Isaac’s face between his hands, kissing him swiftly on one cheek and then the other.
‘Thank you old friend. I’m leaving now. Lock the doors and batten down the hatches. No one in unless it is one of the people you see here with me right now. No one, do you understand?’
Isaac nodded, dumbfounded, but Hendrik was already on the move.
‘Joachim,’ Hendrik commanded, ‘stay here with Caro. Greta and Ruan, with me.’ Pick the strong ones, his mind was telling him, no matter that one of them was Ruan Peat. Hell, let Ruan come on anyway; this was as much his fight as Hendrik’s, and tossing it up for discussion was not an option. Off Hendrik went, up and away down the library aisle on a run, only thing stopping him being that he had to wait for Isaac to puff up after him and put his key in the lock, set this mystery and its machinations free.
38
GUILDSMEN, GOLO, AND SLIP-SLIDING EELS
The House of the Guild of Silver and Copper Workers was just off the Brink, Greta running fast on the wet cobbles now the rain had started up again, trying to keep pace with Hendrik Grimalkin who was racing ahead like a hare with a hound on its tail. Ruan was somewhere behind her, at least she thought he was. She didn’t bother wasting time looking back to find out. They’d only minutes left to get to the Guild before the place closed up for the night, and Hendrik certainly wasn’t going to wait until the morrow.
The Brink was deserted, all street stalls packed up for the night the moment the rain came down. The big clock was already striking the hour of six, its woodcutter coming out on obligation before swiftly departing. Greta was alarmed to hear Hendrik shouting, We’re going to be too late! We’re going to be too late! before suddenly diving into an alley at the top right of the plaza.
