Hella is halfway across the square when Nicholas notices someone in the growing crowd of busy citizens step directly into her path, bringing her to a halt. It is a tall man in a grey half-coat, trunk-hose and wide-rimmed boots. He wears a floppy black cloth cap that almost covers his ears. By his posture and the deftness of the way he slips casually in front of her, Nicholas judges he is young, perhaps no older than Hella herself. He can see little of the man but his back. However, he gets the distinct impression they are not strangers to each other.
How can that be? he wonders. The man is clearly neither the muleteer nor Father Peacham, and they have not been in Reims long enough to make other acquaintances. Nicholas senses the same jolt of disquiet he’d felt when he’d seen the two young pilgrims talking to the owner of the hostelry earlier and had mistaken them for Privy Council watchers.
And then the man darts away amongst the throng, leaving Nicholas to think he might have read a great deal more into the encounter than was really called for. He ducks back into the room, a spy embarrassed by his own prying.
In Florence, it has cost Bruno Barrani more scudi than he would have liked and taken longer than he had hoped, but the effort – admittedly made mostly by Luca and Alonso – has been worth it. July is not yet out and already a goodly number of Florentine artisans have proved venal enough to sell their secrets. A clockmaker near the Santa Maria Novella has boasted loudly about how he made the equatorial ring for Master Santucci’s great labour of science. A metalworker with a shop in one of the lanes off the Piazza Santa Croce would have kept them all afternoon, had not Luca said there really was nothing more he needed to know about the manufacture of planetary gear-chains. An expert engraver by the Ponte Santa Trinità has been adamant there was no one else in all Italy who could have overlain the signs of the zodiac with a matrix of hours, days, weeks and months and not have turned it into an indecipherable jumble. He even showed Bruno his own working drawings, several of which Luca and Alonso had later managed to steal while Bruno was getting him drunk at another buchetta.
Bruno himself has spent many hours drawing from memory. While he is no Leonardo – as he would be the first to admit – he has contrived his own representation of Santucci’s great sphere. In his rendering, the sphere is not a sphere at all but a misshapen bladder, and anyone relying upon it to tell them where in the sky Capricorn will be tomorrow night is as likely to end up searching the ground beneath his feet as the sky above his head. But it is not a picture of the true mechanics of the machine that Bruno is hoping to carry back to Padua. It is more an impression – an ability to describe with some accuracy to the professor of mathematics at the university how Santucci has been able to construct it. Master Galileo will surely bring his own genius to the enterprise. It is just that the more Bruno understands about the great sphere, the less Galileo Galilei will be able to browbeat him out of his rightful share of the profit.
Bruno has no need of a cosmological engine to tell him his future. He has already mapped it out. It is but a natural progression from the doge’s first Master of the Spheres to His Serene Highness’s Superintendent of the Arsenale, responsible for the construction of a new fleet of state-of-the-art galleys – at 1 per cent commission on the total spend – with perhaps a stint or two as an elected member of the city council to replenish the coffers thinned by his great public works. He can even imagine himself occupying the doge’s throne itself, the heartfelt reward of a grateful Republic. At the risk of tempting fate, he thinks he might drop a casual mention into his next letter to cousin Bianca. Most beloved cousin, he imagines himself writing, in the privacy of his study back in Padua, rejoice! You are with child, and my fortunes are about to take a turn for the better…
The rutted road to Clairvaux Abbey runs south across the valley of the Marne river, through rolling vineyards, pasture and little fields where peasants with downcast faces tend the chalky soil. When Nicholas comments on the poor state of the crops, recalling the storms that had battered Barnthorpe in the spring, Hella Maas announces that the increased prevalence of storms is a sign that a far greater hurricane is on its way, perhaps even a second Flood. Bianca says she hopes it holds off until they reach shelter, because when she walks her feet kill her, and when she rides her backside feels as though the Sisters at her old school in Padua have taken turns applying a cane to it.
‘There will be great fires, too,’ the maid says. ‘Do you not remember them? They were shown in the painting at Den Bosch, glowing in the darkness of hell.’
‘Oh, look,’ Bianca counters, pointing at the roadside, ‘there’s a bank of poppies. Aren’t they lovely?’
Early in the afternoon of the fourth day after leaving Reims they rest on the fringe of a great forest to the east of Troyes. Another group of pilgrims is encamped nearby, awaiting a local guide who will take them through to the Benedictine abbey of Clairvaux. Cecil, Essex, Coke and Popham are tethered close to where Nicholas is sitting dozing against a tree trunk, the dappled sunlight sending patterns dancing across his shirt. Bianca is gathering forest flowers and herbs, makeshift remedies for aches and ailments they have yet to suffer.
‘What will you do when you get to Padua?’
Hella’s question as she eases herself down beside him brings Nicholas out of his torpor.
‘I have scarcely dwelt upon it. They have a fine medical school there. I might return to studying – for a while.’
‘But you must have a plan. It is a great distance for an Englishman to put between himself and his home.’
‘Yes, it is. Further than I had thought to go.’
‘Why Padua?’
‘Bianca was born there.’
‘I thought she was English, like you.’
‘Her father was English, her mother Paduan.’
And then the maid says something that jars like a sudden thunderclap out of the clear summer sky.
‘Why were you hiding in the chamber of St John’s?’
Nicholas sees again the two bloodied bodies lying on the flagstones. For a moment he doesn’t answer. Then, simply: ‘I wasn’t hiding.’
‘But you were not there when I entered,’ Hella says, as though she has finally caught him out after a long deception. ‘You were not there when the rebel came in and stabbed the Spaniard. Then all of a sudden you were there. So you must have been hiding.’
‘You were there, when I told Bianca. The images compelled me to enter. Then I heard voices. I don’t know, I suppose I didn’t want to be found gawping at that painting like a superstitious peasant.’
Having said it, Nicholas thinks it a better answer than the truth: that for an instant he had feared some bounty-hunter sent by the Privy Council was about to discover him in a little disused chapel with no way out.
‘Are you superstitious, Dr Shelby?’ she asks.
‘I like to think not. I favour the new learning: observation, using our eyes to witness and record, not relying on what the ancients have written, or what the Church demands.’
‘Then are you not obedient to God, Dr Shelby?’
‘I am not sure I should be obedient, not when prayers sometimes fail to cure my patients, Mistress Hella. They didn’t save my first wife and the child she was carrying, any more than the physic I learned from Galen, Hippocrates and the other ancients did. Therefore, being of a somewhat contrary disposition, I have to ask myself why that is.’