‘And finally, Father, I confess the sin of lust. I lust after my husband. I enjoy the pleasure he gives me…’
There is silence beyond the little grille of the confessional. It is a silence that demands filling. Bianca feels her face begin to scorch with embarrassment.
‘… frequently.’
There. She’s said it. And to a handsome young priest.
To her surprise, she receives a warm chuckle through the lattice of the screen. This startles her, because if God is speaking to her through this man, then God is chuckling, too.
‘“How much better is thy love than wine? And thy oils better than spices?’” The voice is mellifluous, but surprisingly knowing. ‘The Book of Solomon, child,’ Father Albani explains. ‘It tells us that God weeps at a loveless marriage. There is no sin in what you describe.’
This is not how she had expected the confession to end. Still blushing, Bianca adds, ‘And I confess the sin of impatience, Father.’
‘Even God is sometimes impatient, Daughter. It is a very small sin.’
‘I mean I fret because I have not yet fallen with child.’
It is true, she reminds herself. She is not getting any younger. A woman in her early thirties should, by now, have given her husband a son. Another omission in the long line of faults she thinks she ought to confess to Father Albani.
‘I am sure there is plenty of time left,’ Father Albani tells her.
Time. In her mind, Bianca can see the little clock sitting on the table in Robert Cecil’s study, its mechanism clicking away relentlessly. She can see the printed words of the poem by Master Shakespeare that she had been reading while Nicholas was being dragged to Essex House: Make war against proportion’d course of time…
‘And judging by what you tell me,’ Father Albani is saying, the humour brightening his voice, ‘you seem to be making every… effort… to remedy the situation.’
‘We are, Father. Every effort.’
‘Then you must not wish to hurry. He has set time upon a straight path, child. The mile markers on that path come to us at a rate only of His choosing. All in life will arrive at its appointed hour.’ The priest’s voice takes on a tone of solemn warning. ‘So it is from the moment of our birth… until the Day of Judgement.’
Judgement Day. That, Nicholas realizes, is what he is looking at – a triptych, a three-panelled painting for an altar, at least the height of a man, propped against the far wall, its panels open, as though waiting for someone to come and collect it. But it is no ordinary work of religious devotion. It is a searing representation of the torments facing the sinner on the day of God’s final reckoning. And it seems impossible that a human mind is responsible for its creation. It looks to Nicholas as though the Devil himself has instructed the artist what to paint, guiding his hand as he conjures in brilliant colours – made all the more vivid by the flickering light of a stand of candles – a cast of the most monstrous characters. Approaching the painting, he wonders if he has not fallen into some terrifying dream.
The left-hand panel shows a scene from the Garden of Eden. But even here something is not right. There are storm clouds gathering in the pastel blue sky. And instead of falling rain and hail, angels are tumbling down towards the earth. Some are pure, their arms outstretched, buoyed on gossamer wings. But others are dark and demon-like. Beneath them, Adam and Eve are already fleeing paradise.
But it is the central and right-hand panels that truly shock him. Where he might expect an inspiring image of the Resurrection, here there is something entirely at odds with heavenly mercy. In a dark, fiery landscape, naked sinners are undergoing an extraordinary series of torments. Demons in the form of lizards, birds, fish and creatures too fantastical to name – though all with something frighteningly human about them – visit horrors upon the little naked sinners that sear into his mind. A green lizard standing on its hind legs drowns a drunkard in a wine cask. A beetle the size of a man rides a sinner’s bare back. A demon in the shape of a hunter in a blue coat, his head that of a long-billed bird, carries a naked human trussed to a pole – the prey turned predator. In the centre of the main panel, a machine like a huge pepper grinder is crushing living bodies to make oil for the frying of fellow sinners. And on the right-hand paneclass="underline" more suffering, more torment, all in an even darker landscape that is unmistakeably hell itself.
Nicholas is not a superstitious man. He is a physician, a man of the new science. He is a rational man, not some Suffolk peasant who sees the Devil’s hand at work when the crops wither or the milk sours in the pail. He has little time for tales of witches and demons. But this is so finely executed, so overwhelmingly real, that he can feel the terror already turning his stomach to ice. He can only imagine what nightmares this work must give the good burghers of Den Bosch. Transfixed, he stares at the triptych, scarcely able to comprehend from what fevered imagination the images painted upon it have sprung.
And then he hears muted voices from just outside the chapel.
What makes him slip quietly into the darkness behind the buttress will be easy for him to explain to Bianca, when later she asks him why he hid. He will tell her that for all his pretence at being a recusant, he is still a heretic in this land, an enemy of its faith. To some, his mere presence in this cathedral is a mortal offence. And given that there has been hardly an hour since that night at Essex House when he has not expected the sound of a fist hammering on a door, or a rough hand seizing his arm, he has long been in the grip of a certain anxiety. A small part of him will say that he was so absorbed in the images before him that, upon hearing the approaching footsteps, he had half-expected the Devil himself to step through the little stone archway. Whatever the true reason, he will later agree with Bianca that his instinctive decision to dart behind the thick column and into the darkness very probably saved his life.
Leaning back against the stonework, he tries to steady his breathing.
By the voices he hears, he knows that two men have entered the chamber. They are speaking Latin, a language Nicholas is well versed in from his days at petty school and his medical studies at Cambridge. It is the common language of lawyers, physicians and the clergy. Are they priests then? Certainly one of them is Father Vermeiren, because Nicholas can make out those solemn tones. The other man has a slight sibilance in his voice that could almost be Spanish. He must be the important visitor Vermeiren had spoken of earlier, the reason why the priest couldn’t spare the time to hear Bianca’s confession.
‘I had thought to find the piece ready,’ Nicholas hears. ‘Why is it not packed up and ready?’
‘Bishop Gilburtus is protesting against its removal, Don Antonio. It has been part of the cathedral’s fabric since it was first painted.’
‘Protesting?’ the other man says. ‘The bishop should consider it an honour to be able to present it to His Imperial Highness, the archduke. Though I have to say, God alone knows why anyone would want to keep such a grotesque thing.’
‘It was painted by Hieronymus van Aken, a son of Den Bosch,’ Vermeiren is saying. ‘The lord bishop believes this is where it should remain.’
‘That is of no interest to my master,’ the Spaniard says dismissively. ‘If you wish this cathedral to remain a cathedral, and not become a byre for cattle, you will have your workmen cover it up and load it on the cart, so that I–’