12
Den Bosch, the Duchy of Brabant,
6th July 1594
Dawn lifts the shape of a window out of the darkness of their chamber. Nicholas makes a final check of their bags while Bianca washes the sleep from her eyes from a bowl and ewer that Gretie has provided. Jan van der Molen’s discreet knock on the chamber door announces it is almost time to leave.
Downstairs in the parlour Nicholas forces a few stuivers into Jan’s reluctant hand. Nothing more remains to be done but bid Gretie and the boys farewell. Then it’s out through the rear door and onto a little wooden balcony, barely wide enough for one man to stand side-on. The dank stench of sluggish water hangs in the dawn air, though the canal itself is all but lost in a blanket of mist trapped between the houses on either side.
As startling as a pistol shot, an explosive thrashing of wings causes Nicholas’s heart to leap. A brace of waterfowl bursts out of the vapour and climbs away between the walls of the brick canyon. Jan slips down into the skiff and extends a helping hand to Bianca and Hella. Nicholas brings up the rear with the bags. When they are settled, Gretie unties the mooring rope and Jan pushes out one booted foot to propel the little boat away from the balcony. The invisible canal emits a belch of rotting vegetation. When Nicholas looks back over his shoulder, the balcony, Gretie and the whole van der Molen house has already vanished.
The waterway is so narrow that the oars almost scrape the brickwork on either side as they glide through the mist, the walls of the houses seeming to emerge from nothingness around shoulder level. Nicholas has the impression they are descending an incline towards a watery underworld, though he knows it is an illusion of the senses. No one speaks.
After a few moments the canal opens out into a broader stretch of water. The mist is more fibrous here, tendrils lifting off the surface like steam from a cauldron. A yellow wash of latent sunlight brushes the silhouettes of the houses and the steeples of Den Bosch.
Soon the Grote Hekel looms ahead, its twin arches bestriding the canal below a broad gatehouse. Nicholas cannot escape the feeling that the arches are the eyes of a great sea beast, its body all but submerged. They seem to be regarding the approaching skiff far too hungrily for his liking.
The letters of safe-passage and credit from Robert Cecil can be explained away, he thinks. If the boat is stopped, he will stick to the story that he and Bianca are fugitive Catholics, and that Cecil has written the letters in generous recognition of the service his physician has done the family. If the letters are questioned, then Bianca’s Petrine cross should convince. But it is time, he thinks, to dispose of the wheel-lock pistol. After the murders in the cathedral, it is more of a liability than a protection. It will be hard to explain away to a Spanish guard on the lookout for an escaping assassin. And so it goes into the black water, silently, leaving not a ripple.
As Jan van der Molen had said, the huge wooden booms are raised inside the twin arches. The skiff enters the left-hand one, plunging immediately into shadow. Two figures stand on a raised stone walkway above the surface of the canal. By his bulk, Nicholas sees that one of them is a Spanish soldier in leather trunk-hose and breastplate. The other is a Brabantian. He calls down to Jan van der Molen to identify himself. Nicholas’s heart thumps in his chest. It seems to echo around the interior of the archway, a guilty drumbeat that must surely alert the two guards.
To his relief, he hears Jan return a laugh of recognition. ‘Hey, Aldert van Ruys, you old rogue! What are you doing here at this hour? Has your wife turned you out of bed early because she can’t abide your farting a moment longer?’
‘Better my farts than the stink of your herrings, Jan van der Molen,’ comes the reply. ‘Do you have any Dutch rebels with you this morning?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Have you not heard? One of them murdered a servant of the Archduke of Austria yesterday. Stabbed him and Father Vermeiren – in the cathedral, of all places. They say a column is on its way from Antwerp.’
‘I’d heard something of the sort.’
‘The caballero here wants to know who’s with you.’
‘Pilgrims, Aldert. Good Catholic pilgrims. They’re on their way to Reims, to join the Via Francigena. They’re off to Rome to pray for all our souls at St Peter’s.’
‘Then tell them to ask the Pope to work a miracle for me.’
‘What sort of miracle?’
‘Tell the Holy Father to pray every night to make that little baker’s daughter on the Choorstraat turn her pretty eyes upon me.’
As the Spaniard waves them through, Jan van der Molen calls out in reply, ‘The Holy Father may well be infallible, Aldert. But he’s not that infallible.’
With the guard’s laughter swallowed by the quiescent morning stillness, the little skiff slips out of the Grote Hekel and into the broader Dommel. The windmills stand black and deathly against the lightening sky. Ahead and to the south, the marshland of southern Brabant stretches away towards Antwerp, Brussels and the border with France. Nicholas is too busy staring out over the flat landscape and wondering how long it will take them to reach Reims to notice a second skiff edge silently into the water-gate behind them.
PART 2
The Pilgrim Road
13
Florence, 8th July 1594
What manner of fellow will this Antonio Santucci be? Bruno Barrani wonders as he waits with all the other petitioners in the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio. Full of his own importance, without question. A servant of Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici is unlikely to have a single modest bone in his entire body. Especially one who holds the grandiloquent title of the duke’s Master of the Spheres.
The air is heavy with the summer heat and the scent of male flesh that no amount of laundered silk or expensive perfume can hide. The long wait for Santucci’s appearance is making Bruno drowsy. His two servants, Alonso and Luca, are unquestionably on their second bottle at some nearby buchetta del vino, enjoying themselves at his expense. His usually irrepressible good humour is flagging by the minute.
To pass the time while he waits, Bruno reaches into his bag and draws out two small pages of parchment, once crisply folded but now a little crumpled from the rigours of the ride to Florence. It is a letter from cousin Bianca, and it arrived the morning of his departure from Padua – posted, according to the letterhead, at the end of September last. It has been making its laborious and itinerant way towards him ever since, via the hands of any number of nameless travelling merchants, banking couriers and other peripatetic travellers on the long and uncertain road from Bankside in London.
Reading it again now, for what must surely be the tenth time, Bruno can still feel joy in his heart. He imagines there will be a lot of surreptitious masculine tears shed when the gallants of Padua learn that Bianca Merton has wed. But he cannot think of a better husband for her. True, the Englishman has no fortune, no palazzi to inherit, or titles, or estates teeming with boar, no vines whose richness – when pressed out by honest labour – will delight the throat and swell the coffers. He’s not even Catholic! But Nicholas Shelby has an honest heart. And he’s a fine physician – or else Bruno himself would not be here now to approve of the match. And, Dominus Iesus in Excelsis, how he loves Bianca!