‘Yes, we did,’ says Nicholas in the best Dutch accent he can manage.
The potboy gives him a suspicious stare. ‘You’re not from Brabant, are you, Meneer?’
‘No. But neither am I the assassin. We’ve already made an account of ourselves to the captain of the garrison.’
‘I was only asking,’ the potboy says with a shrug. He disappears inside the tavern, but not before casting another glance over his shoulder to make a note of their faces.
‘How long will it take for the Spanish to send their investigators from Antwerp?’ Bianca asks under her breath, after they have spent a while tiptoeing around the shadows of the day’s events.
‘I should think they’ll be here sometime tomorrow.’
‘If it’s too dangerous to stay here, then where do we go?’
Gazing into his cup, Nicholas considers her question in silence. ‘We could go north, into the Protestant rebel provinces,’ he says at length, his voice full of doubt. ‘But Holland is teeming with agents of the Privy Council. All it will take is a word sent from Essex, Coke or Popham, and they will be fighting amongst themselves to be the first to claim the bounty. No, I fear the north is closed against us. We could go south, into France – Paris, perhaps. Or east, to the German states. Then there’s Bohemia, and the Palatine.’
Bianca considers the choices as she sips at her glass of jenever. ‘Paris might suit,’ she says unconvincingly. ‘I hear tell Paris is a fine city.’
‘Paris it will be then.’
‘But not so fine that I would consider wearing out my shoes to get there,’ she muses, hearing once again Father Albani’s voice in her head, a voice redolent with the mellow warmth of Italian sunlight at eventide.
‘So, not Paris.’
‘Probably not.’
‘You have somewhere else in mind, do you not?’ he says, with a perceptive smile.
‘I might do.’
‘You have that look in your eyes.’
‘What look?’
‘The one you use to disguise what is really in your thoughts.’
Draining her glass of jenever and savouring the taste of juniper in the back of her throat, Bianca says confidently, ‘The Via Francigena.’
‘That’s the old pilgrim route down through France, across the mountains and on to St Peter’s in Rome,’ he says, giving her a quizzical look. ‘Why would we go to Rome? I’m content to play a Catholic for a while, but I’m not sure Sir Robert Cecil would ever employ me again if he knew I’d been that close to the Pope.’
For a moment she just looks at him over the top of her jenever glass.
And then – as her true intention dawns on him – a knowing grin spreads across his face. ‘But it’s not Rome we’re heading for, is it?’
‘No, Husband,’ she says sweetly, her eyes gleaming. ‘It is not.’
Nicholas has often suspected that one day she would come to this decision. Even on Bankside, where the roots of her new life seem so vigorous, he has always known there is a part of Bianca Merton that the Veneto has not relinquished. And from the very moment he first considered what would happen when she realized it, he has always known he would go with her. A river may encounter any number of narrows and rapids on its journey, but it cannot ever stop itself seeking the open sea.
‘It’s Padua,’ he says. ‘You want to go home.’
She searches his face, unsure how her suggestion has been received.
‘Just for a while – until this is all over and we can return safely to Bankside. Is that such a terrible thing to admit?’
‘No. Deep in my heart, I think I have always known. Why didn’t you suggest it at the start, rather than agree to Antwerp?’
‘I thought you’d want to be close enough to England to return easily when you’re exonerated. And Padua is a very long way away. It will take us weeks of walking.’
In truth, he rather likes the idea. He knows of Padua’s reputation as a city open to the new learning. It has a fine medical school. Nicholas is aware – from the latest letter to arrive on Bankside from Bianca’s cousin, Bruno Barrani – that a purpose-built anatomy theatre is being constructed there for the great Fabricius, the university’s professor of anatomy and surgery, and that Padua has tempted away from Pisa a brilliant young mathematician named Galileo Galilei, whose fame, according to Bruno, is already spreading beyond Italy. Nicholas can think of worse places to spend a few months in exile, even if it is much further away from London than he had planned. And it will be good to renew his friendship with the diminutive Bruno. Yes, Padua it shall be.
Nicholas is about tell Bianca he wholeheartedly approves, when a sudden movement close by their table drags his eyes from hers.
How long Hella Maas has been there, neither Nicholas nor Bianca can say. Nor how much of their conversation she has overheard. But people at the surrounding tables are already nudging each other, pointing in the maid’s direction. And all their faces tell the same story: Hella Maas is trouble. It would be better for everyone if she made herself scarce; stopped alarming decent folk with her dire warnings of the Devil’s imminent return. Better, perhaps, if the Spanish hanged her in lieu of a rebel assassin.
‘I am a pilgrim, too,’ she says to Nicholas, her gaze so penetrating that he wonders if perhaps she can see things that reveal themselves to her alone. ‘You saved my life once. Now I ask you to do so again. Let me come with you.’
A world away from the little town of Den Bosch, the day’s heat is leaching out of the hot stucco walls of a grand, elegantly arcaded building on Padua’s Piazza delle Erbe. The Palazzo del Podestà is the official residence of the city’s civilian governor, who holds his authority from His Serene Highness Pasquale Cicogna, Doge of Venice.
As a liveried minion escorts Bruno Barrani up the wide stone stairway to the Podestà’s audience chamber on the first floor, Bianca’s cousin is quietly confident. How hard can it be to convince the doge’s representative in Padua that his master should count himself amongst the select owners of a marvel of the new sciences? These days a prince’s reputation – a doge’s reputation – is judged as much by his patronage of the arts and learning as it is by his prowess on the field of battle.
The servant stops before an imposing pair of wooden doors that reach from floor to ceiling and, for all Bruno knows, keep on going through the roof and up to heaven. He gives a discreet knock and pushes open the left-hand door. ‘The merchant Signor Barrani,’ he says in a soft, reluctant voice, the sort he might employ when announcing to mixed company the arrival of the pox doctor.
The chamber is simply furnished, though certainly not frugally. The huge desk is made of imported Indian teak, carved to within an inch of its life by clever guildsmen of the Arte dei Carpentieri. A Christ of African ivory hangs crucified on the wall behind the desk, his head turned down towards a window open to relieve the heat. The Podestà is standing at the sill, observing the crowd in the piazza, as though he’s checking on their mood for the figure on the cross. He turns towards Bruno, his fleshy lip pursed into a cod’s pout. Sixty if a day, Bruno reckons, a barrel of Venetian dignity wrapped up in a red gown of office, a black silk cap draped across his white curls. He looks like a prosperous cardinal with a questionable past.
‘I have read your letter with interest, Signor Barrani,’ he says in a whistle that makes Bruno wonder if there isn’t a tame flautist hidden somewhere to accompany him. ‘I have to say I am not versed in matters astronomical. The questions I have are purely practical.’
‘I shall endeavour to answer them to the fullest of my abilities, Your Honour,’ Bruno says, making a second sweeping bow in as many minutes.