‘Where should we go?’ Nicholas asks. ‘I saw a lot of spires when we arrived.’
‘Oh, that’s easy to answer,’ the fisher of salted herring says. ‘You should go to the cathedral of St John the Evangelist.’
Before Bianca can make confession, she must first find a priest who can speak English or Italian. She would prefer the latter. Her mother’s tongue has been the language of the confessional all her life, and a Catholic priest in Brabant is as likely to have been ordained in an Italian seminary as a Spanish or a French one.
Gretie van der Molen makes some enquiries amongst her neighbours. An appointment is made.
Four days after arriving in Den Bosch, late in the afternoon, Gretie takes Bianca and Nicholas to the great cathedral in the Markt square. There they are met by two priests wearing the black cassocks and four-cornered birettas of the Church of Rome. The older of the two is a plump, ruddy-faced man of fifty. He has a dour look about him, as though the hearing of other people’s sins serves only to add to his general disappointment with humanity. Bianca thinks: no matter; he’s a man of God. A confession is a confession, whatever the character of the priest who takes it.
‘So you are the husband and wife who have fled the realm of the excommunicated whore Elizabeth,’ he announces uncompromisingly in English, his Dutch accent almost inaudible. ‘I am Father Vermeiren. I studied at the English College at Douai.’
Hearing his queen so described sends a little shiver of alarm through Nicholas. Such words, spoken aloud in England, would have every Privy Council informer for miles queuing up at Whitehall to claim the reward.
‘Mevrouw van der Molen tells me you had to flee England in haste.’
‘We were denounced,’ Nicholas says, enlisting a truth in the service of their cover.
‘It is the duty of every man, woman and child in England to obey the papal Bull Regnans in Excelsis issued by our Holy Father Pius the fifth, and rise against the heretic whore Elizabeth,’ Vermeiren says helpfully. ‘Yet we see that they do not – save for a very few who know their duty to God.’
‘It’s really not that easy,’ Nicholas says defensively.
‘Tyrants are not in the business of making their overthrow easy,’ Vermeiren announces, implying they haven’t tried hard enough. ‘Nevertheless, you are welcome here.’
Gretie van der Molen looks at Bianca apologetically. Clearly she had no idea Father Vermeiren spoke English.
‘I have come to you because I am ready to make my confession, Father,’ Bianca says, though she suspects – given that Father Vermeiren doesn’t appear to have a forgiving bone in his body – that she’ll be saying Hail Marys till Judgement Day.
‘I would receive it myself,’ Vermeiren says with an apologetic frown, ‘but my duties here prevent it. An important visitor is expected at any moment.’ He glances at his companion, a much younger man. ‘Father Albani here studied at Bishop Borromeo’s seminary in Milan. He hails from that city. He will take your confession, Daughter.’ With a curt nod, he leaves them in the care of the younger priest.
Father Albani is a youthful, handsomely made man. He has a studious face, with boyishly smooth skin, mirthful brown eyes and receding hair. Bianca feels a twinge of embarrassment. He’s far too good-looking to hear the secrets in her soul.
‘From Padua, child?’ Albani remarks in a quietly grave manner that speaks of trust and reassurance. ‘A daughter of the Veneto.’
Child. He can’t be more than a half a dozen years older than herself.
‘And, afterwards, does your husband wish me to hear his confession also?’
When Bianca translates, Nicholas gives a grim laugh. ‘Only if he’s not busy. It might take a while.’
‘Perhaps later,’ Bianca says in Italian. ‘My husband is still getting used to the freedom here. In England, confession is forbidden – unless it’s to confess you are a lamb of the one true faith; in which case, they employ not the confessional but the rack.’
Father Albani shakes his head sadly.
Gretie van der Molen bobs a farewell to the two priests and heads off to the square to browse the market stalls for vegetables. Nicholas settles into a pew while Father Albani leads Bianca to the confessional. Alone, he lets curiosity lead his gaze. It is not the first time he has been inside a papist church, but it is the first one he’s entered that hasn’t been visited by a victorious band of Protestant mercenaries. The pews are intact, not torn up for firewood; the saints still stand serene in their niches; the altar is intact, not desecrated; the great pillars reaching to the vaulted ceiling are a pristine milky-white – not smeared with graffiti or excrement. Even the stone-scented air is clean, untainted by the stink of soldiers’ bodies, stabled horses or spilt blood.
The interior is in shadow now, the images in the grand stained-glass windows of the sacristy flat and lifeless. The insubstantial forms of worshippers move around him, taking their places quietly in the pews; sitting, heads bowed in prayer; rising unburdened to leave. Two nuns, hooded in pale-brown habits tied at the waist with knotted rope, take turns to light candles with a single glowing taper, their footsteps lost in the echoing cavern of the nave. Nicholas feels an oddly comforting pressure working upon his body, as though the prayers of centuries still linger.
It is curiosity, not impatience, that makes him rise from the pew and wander along the nave’s southern wall. He responds with cautious courtesy to the murmured acknowledgement of a tall man in a dark-blue civic gown and starched ruff who passes him in company with a much younger woman who could be a wife, a daughter or a servant; her impassive face gives him no clue. He returns the watery smile of a rotund burgher of immense dignity whose every step is tapped out with a walking cane as though it were a point of order in a courthouse. He knows he should think of them as heretics, but they seem so ordinary: people going about their lives and hoping to find here the promise of salvation. Eventually he finds himself in the grip of a sensation he can’t quite place. A sense of returning? Surely not. He has helped thwart Catholic plots against his own homeland, served a man as implacable to the heresy of papistry as it is possible to be. And yet Nicholas must admit to himself now – in his own act of confession – that he has always been a reluctant recruit to Robert Cecil’s holy war. And how can a faith be heresy, when the woman he loves more than life itself embraces it?
Pondering these questions, he finds himself standing before a narrow archway set into the cathedral wall. The door is open, held back by a solid iron hook. Inside, candlelight dances to some unfelt draught. Again out of curiosity, Nicholas peers in.
He is looking into what once might have been a side-chapel, a disused shrine whose saint has fallen out of fashion and been removed. The plain stone walls show blank shapes where frescoes might once have stood. There are holes in the floor for railings to keep the devout at a safe distance. A thick stone buttress – part of the bones of the building – cuts it almost in two, leaving part of it in darkness. But it is the thing immediately opposite the door that seizes his attention. For a few moments Nicholas can make no sense of what he’s seeing.
Later, he will say it was curiosity that made him enter the little chapel. But in his heart he will admit it was something darker. Because, when the images writhing before him suddenly fall into place in his understanding, Nicholas realizes that he is looking directly into hell itself.