‘And do you hear an answer?’
‘If there is one, I believe it will be found by adopting the practices of the new science, not by praying harder or casting a more accurate horoscope.’
Her face darkens. She says, as if to warn him, ‘In the end, the answer will be the same for both of us.’
He can almost see the images on the Den Bosch painting dancing in her eyes. Hurriedly he changes the subject. ‘We still have much to learn about you, Mistress Hella. A young maid who says she attended Leiden University, speaks five languages and can discourse on the writings of Master Copernicus – any one of those achievements would make you a rarity in this world.’
‘I have told you, God gave my family unusual gifts.’
‘All of them? That was generous of Him.’
‘Please don’t laugh at me.’
‘Forgive me, I didn’t mean to,’ he says, colouring.
‘It was Hannie, my sister, who received most of his bounty. She was cleverer by far.’
‘And Hannie is dead?’ he says, tiptoeing around the subject as gently as he can.
‘They are all dead. Breda is dead.’
For a moment he wonders if Breda is another sister. Then he remembers the name. It belongs to a dark litany he had learned by heart during his summer as a physician to an English company of pistoleers serving with the Dutch Protestant army: Antwerp… Naarden… Haarlem… Breda: any one of them could stand as a monument to the frenzied brutality of Spanish troops when they slip the leash. Breda had been the least bloody – only some six hundred of the population dead. At the others, the butcher’s bill could be counted in the thousands. Now he understands why Hella Maas holds conversations with a dead sibling.
‘You lost all your family at Breda?’
‘Almost all. Hannie, my father, one of my two brothers… My mother had already gone before them – giving life to me. At least she was spared what happened later.’
He gives her silence and waits while she decides what to do with it. To his surprise, Hella chooses to reveal more.
‘The day of the massacre I was with my twin brother, Ruben. We were with a learned priest who taught mathematics – my father wanted his girls to learn as boys learn, so he paid for me to study with this man. I remember it well. Ruben was terrible at mathematics, but the priest was pleased at how easily I was able to understand what he was teaching me. Then we heard shouting, screaming. The priest had a hiding place, but by luck his house was one of the few spared. I have always wished that it hadn’t been. I also wished that God had not given Hannie and me such gifts, that I had been like the other girls – content to sew, content to grow up and marry, to be a wife; then I would have been with my family when the Spanish came. We would have been together.’
Nicholas shakes his head in sympathy. He is no stranger to such a story. Three years ago, at the Mitre in Gravesend, he and Bianca had listened to Porter Bell telling them how he, too, had survived a Spanish fury, at Naarden. How can it be, he wonders, that the same faith burns as brightly in Father Peacham’s heart as it does in that of a Spanish soldier fired up on drink and hatred of the heretic? Applying the observational rigour of the new science would tell him the fault must lie in the man, not in the faith.
He listens in the shade beneath the tree as Hella tells him how, alone and orphaned, she and her brother sought shelter. ‘Ruben asked me to follow him to the Protestant rebel states. He refused to countenance that God could be a Catholic, like the Spanish who had murdered our family. I wouldn’t go with him. I didn’t want to leave the place where we had all been so happy. I was too young for the convent and, with my father dead, no dowry to pay for admittance. So the priest found me refuge with the Beguines, an order of pious women who live together but have not taken vows or entered a holy order.’
‘What happened to Ruben?’
‘He stayed in the rebel provinces. I didn’t see him more than once or twice after that. He became a priest, but that was much later.’
The Beguines, she explains, had quickly discovered they had taken in a child with unusual abilities. Within months, the Bishop of Antwerp was proclaiming Hella rare amongst her sex, if not actually unheard of. With the help of the mathematical priest, she had continued her studies. She had flourished. At fifteen she had walked all the way to Leiden, twenty leagues or more, to ask the professors at the university there to let her in. They set her tests – each harder than the one before – to show her how presumptuous she was to think she could enter the masculine world of learning. To their amazement, Hella passed them all.
For eight years the professors allowed her to remain at the university, treating her as though she were part servant, part curiosity. Some even tutored her, though always in secret. Her iron piety had protected her from the few who thought she might have other gifts they could exploit.
By twenty-one Hella could speak five languages, cast horoscopes and solve any complex mathematical problem they cared to set her. So when she asked if she might graduate, they threw her out.
As Nicholas listens, he thinks how Bianca had told him of her longing to study at the medical school at Padua, and how the professors there had laughed at her. He cannot help but think Hella might now be a less troubled young woman if she had done what Bianca had done: thumbed her nose at them, travelled to a different country and purchased a tavern. But the thought is no sooner in his head than he chides himself for being flippant. This young woman has known little but suffering. It does not become him, he thinks, to make light of it.
‘What did you hope Father Vermeiren might do, when you went to see him?’ he asks.
‘I wanted to convince him to burn the painting. At the very least, I wanted to stop him giving it to the Spanish.’
‘Burn it – why?’
‘Because its fame was spreading. When I returned to Antwerp, even the Beguines there knew of it. If it were to leave Den Bosch, copies might be made. Before long, the whole world might know what it contained.’
‘Is that such a bad thing?’
‘Bad? Of course it’s bad. It shows what is in store for us sinners, and to know that is dangerous. If people realize there is nothing after death but everlasting torment, think of the ills that would surely follow. Why would any man or woman live a godly life? There will be murder and sinfulness that will make what happened at Breda seem trivial. Who would obey his master, his prince, even the Holy Father, if they knew that the promise of God’s mercy was a lie, that most of us will face nothing but eternal suffering at the end?’
‘But that painting was just one man’s vision. And not all knowledge is bad, surely.’
Hella considers this in silence, the shadows of the forest’s edge casting her face into darkness, so that Nicholas cannot see what is in her eyes. But he can feel the fear in her, as if he had wrapped his hand around a mortally injured bird.
‘Sometimes, Dr Shelby,’ she says, ‘when you unwrap a gift you discover it is not a gift at all – but a curse.’
Clairvaux Abbey is a sprawling complex of buildings set beside the River Aube and protected by densely wooded hills. To Nicholas, it seems preternaturally still. He can hear hens bickering in a garden somewhere, but not a single human voice. And then a chapel bell begins to ring, echoing out across the valley. It sounds to him like a strong heartbeat in a patient who’s just been brought back to life.
Clairvaux has sheltered pilgrims on the Via Francigena for centuries. There are guest lodgings, a dormitory for single men, another for unmarried women. There are kitchens to prepare nourishing food from the abbey farm and – for a price – monks skilled at leatherwork to restore shoes and boots worn down by long hours treading the road. There is even a paddock, where Cecil, Essex, Coke and Popham can graze. Nicholas takes a wicked delight in the thought of four such resolute Protestants gorging on succulent Catholic forage.