Bruno knows he owes a lot to Nicholas Shelby. Without the Englishman’s skill, he would never have survived his clandestine visit to London with His Eminence Cardinal Fiorzi. He carries the marks to this day. Sometimes his words are a little slow in coming. He still suffers the occasional headache, for which a Paduan apothecary whom he trusts prescribes various remedies, including a powder made from a new plant that has only recently arrived in the merchants’ shops in Venice – from China, it is said, though that may be only to raise the price – rhubarb. All in all, he thinks, these minor trials are but weak wine when set against what had been the very real possibility of him dying in a heretic land.
Bruno savours the letter again, kisses it and puts it back in his bag. It will be months before he receives another. A lot could happen in the meantime – for good or ill. He harbours a profound hope that when it comes it will bring news of a child safely delivered. He smiles as he recalls what the thirteen-year-old Bianca had told him, in all seriousness, after recovering from a period of religious rapture. ‘I shall bear no sons for any man to preen himself over. I will not spend the rest of my life sewing and getting fat while he dallies in the tavern and the whorehouse. I will not!’
‘The cloisters of Santa Sofia then?’ he had suggested.
‘Are you a fool, Bruno?’ she had said, glaring at him with those feline amber eyes. ‘Can you really see me at a life of prayer and contemplation?’
‘But last month that was all you spoke about.’
‘That was only because of a boy I’d seen coming out of the seminary. I’ve changed my mind now. I shall become a professor of medicine at Palazzo Bo instead.’
‘You said that when you were eight, after you decided not to marry Cardinal Fiorzi,’ he had laughed, instantly regretting his mirth as her jaw hardened with an assassin’s determination. ‘Besides, that’s impossible. You’re a girl.’
‘Impossible – why? At Bologna, Dorotea Bucca held that position almost two hundred years ago.’
‘Yes, but the Bolognese all have marsh wind in their brains. It makes them rash.’
‘Signor Barrani… Signor Barrani…. Where is the Paduan?’
The sound of someone calling his name brings Bruno out of his reverie. Looking across the courtyard, he sees a well-dressed man scanning the petitioners from halfway down the flight of grand stone steps.
Like many Italian men of genius, at first sight Antonio Santucci looks like a common labourer in a rich man’s gown. Take away the expensive cloth and you might expect to find Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici’s Master of the Spheres up a ladder laying roof tiles, or turning an axle on a foot-lathe. Bruno wonders if God requires you first to show an artisan’s ability with a chisel, mallet, saw or paintbrush, before He sees fit to pour the genius part into the mould.
‘A thousand apologies for keeping you waiting, Signor Barrani,’ Santucci says as they meet at the foot of the stairway.
Santucci is a short man, only four fingers’ width taller than Bruno. He has a boxer’s shoulders, but his hands are as light and mobile as a painter’s, the fingers almost femininely graceful. Bruno puts him in his middle forties, though the dense black beard makes him look older. If he is from humble stock – as Bruno suspects – then commissions from the Medici court and Philip of Spain have put a superiority in his gaze that could match that of a Michelangelo or a Brunelleschi. Or there again, perhaps disdain comes in the milk from a Florentine mother’s tit. Either way, Bruno makes a grand bend of the knee, to show that while the Serene Republic might not be quite the power she once was, Venice – and her attendant moon, Padua – can still remember their manners.
‘An uneventful journey, I trust,’ Santucci says, making an even deeper obeisance. ‘I hear there are still brigands in the Veneto.’
‘We expelled them some time ago,’ says Bruno, smiling diplomatically. Along with their cousins, the Florentines. ‘And yes, thank you, the journey was good – though the road through Fiesole was surprisingly untended for such a prosperous place.’
‘My secretary tells me you are here on a commission from the Doge of Venice himself. I understand you wish to discuss the cosmological sphere I constructed for His Highness, Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici.’ Santucci raises a quizzical eyebrow. ‘You are a man of the new science, perhaps? An astronomer, or a mathematician?’
Bruno must admit to himself that he isn’t a man of any science, new or old – except perhaps the science of trying to make a living in an uncharitable world. It is of no interest to him whether the stars move about in crystal spheres or are immutably fixed in the heavens; it is enough that they shine. Neither does he particularly care if the earth sits motionless at the centre of the cosmos, or if it spins around like a peasant dancing the tarantella. If he knows anything about anything, it is how to spot an opportunity for profit. And of one thing he is certain: Pasquale Cicogna, the Doge of Venice, is that most useful of sales prospects: a man who doesn’t know he has need of a thing until you tell him what he’s missing.
‘I confess I am neither,’ he says sadly, ‘merely a humble emissary from His–’ He pauses momentarily, remembering how Santucci had described Duke Ferdinando only as ‘His Highness’. Not to be bettered by a Florentine, he continues, ‘His Serene Highness. As for the new science, that I leave to greater minds than mine – the professors at Padua University. I am, shall we say, merely the oil that will aid the mechanism to turn.’
‘How much are we speaking of?’
‘Just the one device.’
‘Ducats, I mean.’
Bruno thinks: trust a Florentine to get straight down to the money.
‘His Serene Highness is a generous man,’ he says reassuringly, ‘I am sure he will make it worth your labour, Master Santucci.’
‘Labour? Are you under the impression I build the apparatus with my own hands?’
Is that amusement Bruno can see in the Florentine’s eyes? Is the Medici Master of the Spheres laughing at him?
‘I assumed–’
Santucci lifts a delicate hand. ‘It will require a host of skilled workmen: clockmakers, engravers, carpenters, experts in the application of gilt and gold leaf, forgers of iron…’
Now it is Bruno’s turn to be supercilious. ‘Of which we have a great number in Venice, Master Santucci. The ships that bettered the Turk did not build themselves. Nor did the clever instruments by which they navigate. The artisans who work in the Arsenale are amongst the finest in the world.’
‘Would you expect me to come to Venice? I hear there are more mosquitoes there than there are beggars.’
Bruno places one gloved hand before his mouth and coughs. But not nearly so many Florentine fleas.
‘Do not fear, Signor Santucci,’ he says brightly. ‘We bring in the finest muslin from the Orient, to make the nets. The mosquitoes die of a surfeit of admiration before they can find a way through.’
The tightness of Santucci’s answering smile makes the extremities of his beard flick upwards. ‘I suppose you would like to see the apparatus, having come all this way.’
‘If that is not an inconvenience.’
‘You are fortunate, Master Barrani,’ says Santucci. ‘His…’ A pause, followed by an expression of superiority that Bruno has difficulty not punching, ‘His Most Gracious and Mighty Highness, Duke Ferdinando, is inspecting the new work on the Belvedere bastion today. I can show you to the Hall of Maps without fear of disturbing his private studies.’