That evening, as a summer storm hurls itself against the gentle white walls of Clairvaux, Nicholas plays the part of a pilgrim to its fullest. He joins Bianca and Hella at Mass. Like an explorer stepping onto a foreign shore, he stares around in wonder while trying to maintain the fiction that he’s done this a thousand times before. Taking his lead from Bianca, he does his best to look practised. If all that he has learned from childhood is true, he should be able to feel the fiery hand of damnation taking hold of his soul. He should, by rights, feel revulsion at the well-known excesses and corruption of papist priests. But he feels nothing, save for a lifting of the spirit as he listens to the Kyrie eleison and the Sanctus. A doubting Protestant pretending to be a Catholic, he thinks. I am not sure what I am – I think I may be a heretic to either faith… He wonders what he will do when he returns to England. He can have no future as the queen’s physician, not when he has heard the Mass delivered by a priest whose faith proclaims her the Antichrist and calls for her overthrow. And what use will Robert Cecil have for an intelligencer who no longer sees the enemy as the enemy?
They leave the chapel in the twilight, taking the gravel path back to the guest lodgings. If damnation awaits, thinks Nicholas, it is presenting a surprisingly benign face: nothing more menacing than a few black clouds left as an afterthought by the storm in an otherwise clear evening sky. Over the wooded hills, the stars are coming out.
Tomorrow they will take the road to Langres and on to Besançon. From there, according to the monks of Clairvaux, the going will become more difficult as the land begins to fracture. They will face deep gorges; mountain meltwater that can carry away unwary travellers, drowning them or smashing their bodies against boulders; dense woodland where wild boar and bears rule, and an English physician, his wife and a maid from Brabant count for very little.
‘You look remarkably untroubled for a man who has just thrown his soul into the balance,’ Bianca says, only half in jest, as they walk, Hella trailing a few paces behind.
Nicholas replies with nothing more than a gruff laugh, to show he’s heard her. But he understands now how much it must have cost her to keep her own faith hidden during the years she’s been in England.
When they reach the door of the guest lodge, something makes Nicholas look back over his shoulder. Hella is standing on the gravel path, staring in the dusk towards the darkening hills, to the track they descended earlier in the day.
What has drawn her eye? he wonders. What is she searching for?
For an instant he thinks he sees – just as he’d seen from the window of their lodgings in Reims – a tall man in a grey half-coat, trunk-hose and wide-rimmed boots, a floppy black cloth cap almost covering his ears. He is making his way down towards the abbey.
But when he rubs his eyes, Nicholas sees it is nothing other than the evening shadows thrown across the path by the setting sun.
17
Padua, the Veneto, 31st July 1594
‘What else do you expect from the Fiorentini? Thieves and numbskulls, to a man. Why do you think my father made sure he was safely in Pisa before he sired me?’
Galileo Galilei fits Bruno Barrani’s model of an Italian man of genius to perfection – a rough artisan with a mind of quicksilver. He’s young for a professor of mathematics: turned thirty in February; a carouser who can think five times as fast as any other man, even when he’s in his cups. Bruno has the wild idea that if you got into a fight with him and landed a blow to his head, it would shower bright sparks instead of blood.
But driving the intellect is a labourer’s canny gauge of how much his toil is worth, calculated to the nearest giustina. And that gauge – as Bruno knows only too well from their frequent drunken sessions when together he and Galileo put the world to rights – shows clearly that Master Galileo is persistently broke. Which is why Bruno is certain that the august professor of mathematics and astronomy at Padua University in the Palazzo Bo is the perfect man for the task.
They are sitting in the sunshine outside Galileo’s lodgings in the Borgo dei Vignali. Bruno, still dusty from the ride from Florence, has brought a skin of wine to celebrate. Galileo has just listened intently to his friend’s denunciation of Antonio Santucci.
Bruno remembers well the day they first met: the Feast of St Anthony, the June before last. A mutual acquaintance had introduced them. They had hit it off immediately: the quick-witted little Paduan cockerel, always on the search for a commercial opportunity, and the new professor recently arrived from Pisa, searching for heaven-knew-what – for Bruno could barely understand one sentence in five, if the subject turned to the intellectual.
Galileo had told him he was working on a new military compass-rule, a folding device made of etched brass that could calculate just about everything, from how much gunpowder you would need for a given weight of shot, to the required angle of the cannon’s barrel when you came to fire it at your enemy. They were commonplace enough, but Galileo had boasted that he could make one smaller, more accurate and easier to use than any yet available. Bruno had advised him on the mercantile considerations of selling it to a wider market abroad: how to beat down the middlemen, or how much it might cost to keep a customs official sweet. By the end of the evening they were pleasantly drunk and the very best of friends. Each had bestowed upon the other an affectionate nickname: Bruno was Signor Purse; Galileo was Signor Compass.
‘The question is, Signor Compass,’ Bruno says now, to the accompaniment of snoring from the open doorway where one of Galileo’s students, Matteo Fedele, is slumbering off the effects of a discourse on Euclidian postulates, ‘can you make the calculations?’
‘Based upon the drawings you’ve brought me, Signor Purse?’
‘Based upon the drawings.’
‘It’s possible. The internal workings look clear enough. Who drew the picture of the sphere as a whole? The one that looks like a half-rotten lemon?’
Bruno winces, but presses on regardless. ‘Because if you can, and we can build a better sphere than that neutered monkey Santucci, then His Serenity the doge will shower us with a weight of ducats heavier than even your clever little gauge can calculate.’
Galileo leans back against the warm mortar of the wall. He tilts his head at the sky and closes his eyes. His eyebrows, bushy arches below a broad, high forehead, make Bruno think of the vaulted roof of a deep cistern where numbers and symbols tumble like cascading water. Bruno takes another mouthful of wine while he waits for the brilliant mind to reach its conclusion.
Then Signor Compass opens one eye. He fixes Bruno with the penetrating gaze of a Pythagoras or an Aristotle. ‘My brother-in-law,’ he announces cryptically.
‘What about him? Is he a mathematician, too?’
‘No. He’s suing me for my sister’s dowry – the one my father forgot to pay before he died,’ Galileo growls. ‘I’ve had to ask the university for a year’s salary in advance to buy him off. If the doge is paying well, Signor Purse, he can have more spheres than a Florentine bitch has teats. Now pass me the wine.’