“The letter from your Jewish butcher!” Isaac shouts. Unamused, his mother shuffles back into the cottage.
“The letter comes with the seal of Prince Charles and his father King Pepin. They ask Haroun to send them a king for their new kingdom, a gardener to tend their garden a thousand miles away.”
“Gan!” Isaac smiles.
“Precisely,” I smile back. “Haroun al Rashid turns pale at the request and touches his forehead. His dream, his young sapling, stands before him in the full light of day. He knows that to cut the tree means disaster. Yet Haroun’s sense of diplomacy and politics shake his certainty. And so he prepares to go …”
“To Septimania?”
“Ah! Now you are curious.” I offer the pipe back to Isaac, but he is in the full flow of the distraction I intended. He is the one, I have no doubt. “Shall we make the journey?”
1/5
UON GIORNO, DOTTORE.”
Malory opened one eye. A shaft of pre-dawn light. A grizzled buzz cut, a twisted nose, a tortured breath. One friar, a Roman friar, backed by stone and shadow — Fra Mario, was that his name? Malory closed his eye. Through one ear he heard the shuffle of feet in the cloister, the polyphony of baritone virgins.
“È tempo,” Fra Mario said. More chanting, more shuffling. Tempo for what? But the Roman friar was gone.
THE VICAR HADN’T SAID MUCH AT THE GRAVESIDE.
“I am merely a messenger,” he said, wiping his hands with a handkerchief that mixed the scent of lavender with the fenny pong of the loam that covered his grandmother’s remains. “Mrs. Emery, you may know, was not technically a member of the parish.”
“Yes,” Malory said, with surprise at his own anti-clerical passion.
“Whistler Abbey itself belongs to some distant foundation. But there is an inheritance for you — what it is, I haven’t a clue. Your grandmother gave me this envelope some time ago. To hand over to you on the event of her death.”
The vicar reached into an obscure pocket and handed Malory a cream-colored envelope. The flap was embossed with the same S fenced in by the seven-sided box that graced the cover of the journal belonging to the seventeenth-century friend of Isaac Newton. On the front, a single name in purple ink: Hercule.
“A train ticket, Mr. Malory. You are to go to Rome. Those were her instructions. You are to go to Rome and stay with the Dominicans”—the vicar couldn’t help his sneer—“and await instruction from a Signor Settimio. Name ring a bell?”
“The Dominicans?” Malory asked.
“Santa Maria sopra Minerva,” the vicar said. “I understand there is a monastery next to the basilica. You can walk from the train station.”
“And then?”
“You might inspect their organ,” the vicar smiled. “I’m certain it needs tuning.”
Rix had offered, in a spirit of soldierly camaraderie, to pack up Malory’s books and store them in a corner of Trinity where they wouldn’t be bothered for a century or two. Antonella had wept and left Malory with a complex kiss and a simple tinfoil packet of biscuits that Malory packed into the rucksack along with three changes of clothing and a Tesco bag of toiletries. If Malory brought little with him it was not with the expectation that he would follow his grandmother’s instructions and then return to Cambridge in a few days. It was with no expectations whatsoever, or with the minimal expectations of the stunned.
By train from Cambridge to London, London to Rome; by foot from the station. As Malory walked with only the dimmest directions from Termini towards Santa Maria sopra Minerva, sensation returned to his brain, and he wondered whether this journey was taking him nearer to or farther from the Louiza he had last seen on the same day he’d last seen his grandmother alive. There were a few late-night drinkers on the steps of the Pantheon. A pair of wistful buskers were scraping out “Limehouse Blues” on fiddle and guitar, leaning on an ancient brick wall beneath an even more ancient arch that once, in an even more ancient past, must have led through a grand opening to some palazzo, some temple, some somewhere full of hope. The façade of the church of Santa Maria was so uninviting, so graffiti-free, so plain that merely a single gypsy, hidden beneath sacks of muslin and crepe, had thought to camp out on its steps. Not even the music of the buskers penetrated the midnight air. Only Bernini’s statue of an elephant retained its sense of humor, standing quizzically with its half smile, a lonely ornament in the center of the piazza, an arbitrary pink obelisk balanced on its howdah. An act of vandalism or pity had decorated the animal — the elephant shone, even in the moonless night — a rich enamel blue as deep as Louiza’s eyes.
Sì, Fra Mario said, answering Malory’s bell, they had received his grandmother’s letter. Sì, they had been expecting Malory. Sì, he knew Signor Settimio well and would alert him in the morning to Malory’s arrival. Sì, they were giving Malory a special cell at his grandmother’s request—la cella di Galileo! Galileo, lo conosce? — and Fra Mario wiggled his fingers next to his head in a way that made Malory wonder whether his entire journey were an act of madness. No, Fra Mario said, no one had said that the organ was broken. If indeed Malory could fix the organ — for which he, Fra Mario, being a fallen-away Neapolitan, had no real ear, although, come to think of it, the organ was clearly rotto—it might be a good thing. This, at least, was how Malory, with his little Italian, deciphered the stream of language that flowed from Fra Mario’s smile before he sank in exhaustion and incomprehension onto the bed that had once borne Galileo.
MALORY SAT UP. IN PAIN. WITH A BURN IN HIS RIGHT SHOULDER AND AN ache in his left thigh, his neck bent like an over-tuned crumhorn, and the back of his skull throbbing as if some Old Testament barber had taken vengeance on the wilderness of his scalp. Had the Dominicans slept any better? Did these monks, whose bowels and prostates sang their flatulent matins as they passed Malory’s cell, did these outdated old men, great-grandsons of the Inquisitors, vestiges of a time when the one true God inspired a singular terror through the hearts and across the shoulders of the religiously nervous, did these pious men really sleep on beds made of rope and straw? Did torture focus the mind? It had been 350 years since the Inquisition had invited Galileo to Rome, invited him here to the monastery of Santa Maria sopra Minerva for his trial. Malory couldn’t quite remember if it was dropping balls off the Leaning Tower of Pisa or inventing the telescope that got the Florentine into trouble. With his eyes half-conscious, Malory could only conjure a fuzzy image of Galileo in stringy beard and long robe and a kind of squinty velvet hat that reminded him of Jethro Tull. Legend had it that it only took a few days for the Inquisition to persuade Galileo that he wasn’t 100 percent certain that the Earth revolved around the Sun. It wasn’t the days that changed Galileo’s mind. Legend had it wrong. Legend hadn’t spent a night in Galileo’s bed.
“Forse oggi,” Fra Mario said, returning to Malory. Malory stood. There was no need to dress as he had fallen asleep in the jeans and corduroy jacket that had borne him from Cambridge the day before. He had no idea whether Fra Mario was taking him to Signor Settimio or the organ or, more hope against hope, to breakfast. Leaving his rucksack on Galileo’s bed of inquisition, Malory slung his Kit Bag over his right shoulder and followed Fra Mario into the corridor. “Forse oggi,” Fra Mario said again. And Malory gradually understood that the Dominican activity around him was the vague optimism of a New Era in Rome. Fra Mario and the dozen Dominican monks of Santa Maria, and indeed all of Rome and much of the rest of Italy and, for all Malory knew, much of the world were expecting the College of Cardinals to announce a successor to poor John Paul I, who had just died after barely a month in office.