Elisabetta thought that would be wonderfully helpful and gave him the Institute’s address on Via Napoleone. But when she hung up she wondered if she ought to have added, ‘By the way, Professor, I should tell you that I’m a nun.’
The Piazza Mastai was deserted and the convent was quiet. Elisabetta was happy to be in the silence of her spartan room. An hour earlier she’d pulled her curtains closed and removed her layers of clerical garb before gladly putting on her nightdress, which by comparison was weightless.
The feeling had crept up on her, the sense that her robes were becoming heavier and more stifling. When she’d first donned the habit after taking her vows, there’d been something magically light about the garb, as if the meters and meters of black cotton were but filmy gauze. But the past few days in the secular world of buses and airports and city streets and young women in their easy spring dresses had taken a subtle toll. Self-aware, Elisabetta launched into a fervent prayer for forgiveness.
Afterward, she was ready for bed. Although her praying had helped to soothe her spirit, she felt no closer to an explanation of the skeletons of St Callixtus. Tomorrow she would immerse herself in Faustus and the B text and become as knowledgeable as she could before Professor Harris arrived. But first she had to navigate a turbulent night. The old nightmares of her attack had resurfaced and had become mixed with newer terrors. She dreaded now the jumbled nocturnal world of labyrinths filled with macabre human remains and foul demons with monstrously naked tails.
With one last prayer for her safe passage through the night, Elisabetta slid between the cool sheets and switched off her light.
When Elisabetta’s light went out, Aldo Vani tossed a butt into the fountain and lit another cigarette. He’d been discreetly loitering on the Piazza Mastai for an hour or more, watching the windows on the dormitory level. He had a compact monocular scope hidden in his palm and when he was sure there were no passersby he’d swept the lighted windows repeatedly. In the two seconds it had taken for Elisabetta to pull her curtains, he’d spotted her. Third floor, fourth window from the west side of the building. He needed her window and the others on the top floors to go black before he could move.
It took nothing more than a diamond-tipped glass cutter and a small suction cup to quietly remove a pane from a ground-floor classroom window at the back of the school. Vani would have bet his life that the premises weren’t alarmed and he grunted in satisfaction when he unlatched the window and slipped through silently. Using a penlight he negotiated the rows of small desks. The hall was dark except for the red glow of exit signs at either end. His rubber soles were noiseless on the staircase at the western side of the convent.
Sister Silvia’s eyes opened at the familiar realization that her bladder was twitchy. From long experience she knew she had under two minutes before she’d suffer an accident. She embarked on the first of several night-time visits to the communal toilet.
It was a journey that began with bracing her arthritic knees for the weight of her heavy hips. Then she had to push her swollen feet into slippers and pull her bathrobe from the peg. With under a minute to spare she turned her doorknob.
The door from the stairwell to the third floor squeaked on its dry hinges so Vani had to push it open ever so slowly. The hallway was too bright for his liking. There were night lights at each end and one in the middle. He unscrewed the bulb of the closest one and paused to count the doors. The fourth door on the Piazza side of the building corresponded, he was certain, to the fourth window. It would be better if it was unlocked but it hardly mattered. There were few locks that could slow him down for more than several seconds, especially in an old building. And worse case, with a shoulder to the frame, despite the noise, he’d have his blade through her carotid in no time and would be down the stairs before anyone raised an alarm.
This time he wouldn’t fail. He’d promised K. He’d linger just long enough to watch the blood stop spurting from her neck as her arterial pressure dropped to zero.
Sister Silvia washed her hands and shuffled slowly back into the hall. Her room was two down from Elisabetta’s. She began to blink. The hall seemed darker than before.
She stopped blinking.
There was a man standing at Elisabetta’s door.
For an infirm old woman who sang her hymns in a soft, thin voice, she let out a monumentally piercing scream.
Vani took his hand off the doorknob and coolly assessed his options. It would take ten seconds to rush the screaming nun and silence her. It would take ten seconds to breech the door and finish the job he’d come to do. It would take three seconds to abort his mission and disappear down the stairs.
He made his decision and turned the knob on Elisabetta’s door. It was locked.
Other doors began to fly open.
Nuns and novices poured into the hallway, calling to each other as Sister Silvia kept pumping out the decibels.
Elisabetta woke with a start and fumbled for her light.
More doors opened. Vani’s options shrank. He knew there was only one thing worse than failing, and that was being captured.
When Elisabetta unlocked her door and swung it open she saw a man dressed in black disappearing down the stairs.
TEN
Cambridge, England, 1584
IT WAS PALM Sunday.
It had been four long years.
Every minute of every hour of every day had led to this moment. His final public disputation.
In many ways the scholar’s life had been as arduous as a laborer’s or a tradesman’s. Six days a week, awake at five in the morning for chapel. Then breakfast and lectures on logic and philosophy. Midday meal at eleven a.m., no more than a bit of meat, bread and broth, then classes on Greek and rhetoric. For the entire groaning afternoon, the study of debate and dialectical disputation, an intellectual tennis match to train young minds. Supper was little better than dinner, then study until nine o’clock when the day was done for everyone but him. While his roommates slept, he would sit at the farthest corner of the room and write his precious verses for another hour or two. Sundays were hardly easier.
Alone, he paced the dusty floorboards outside the lecture hall in his plain black gown. Through the closed doors he could hear the audience shuffling to take its place in the gallery. A few would be supporters but most were a sneering lot who would take more pleasure in seeing him fail.
Success would mean the granting of his BA degree and automatic admittance into the MA curriculum. From there, London would be his oyster. Failure would mean an ignominious return to Canterbury and a life of obscurity.
He balled up his fists, stoking his morale.
I am meant for greatness. I am meant to trample their small minds under my boots and crush their skulls like egg shells.
Norgate, the Master of Benet College, tall and gaunt, opened the doors and announced, ‘Christopher Marlowe, we are ready for you.’
Four years earlier Marlowe had made his way from Canterbury to Cambridge, a journey of seventy miles and three days of begged rides on turnip wagons listening to the blather of country folk. Left by a merchant on the outskirts of town he had walked the last mile toting his rucksack. Passersby would have hardly noticed him entering the city through the Trumpington Gate, one more lad streaming into the university for the new December term.
The sixteen-year-old had to ask his way. In an alleyway beside a tavern he saw a man pissing.
‘Which way to Benet College?’ Marlowe had loudly demanded of the fellow. No ‘please, Sir,’ no ‘might you’. It wasn’t his way.