‘Oh, Ned, be careful,’ she says, reaching out to take his hand. ‘Vaesy might have fallen, but he’s still a sir – a knight. Knights don’t take kindly to our sort calling them out. I don’t want our child to know his father only by what I have to tell him – after he was ’anged.’
‘Don’t you fear about that, Wife,’ Ned says reassuringly as he enfolds his wife’s hand with his huge fingers. ‘It’ll be the new Ned Monkton what does the asking, not the old.’
Besançon lies in the foothills of the Jura Mountains, at the fringes of the long shadows cast by the Alps. Its castle, set high on a precipitous hill on a wooded bend of the River Doubs, guards the way from France into the Protestant Swiss cantons. According to its people, Besançon’s ruler is French, Swiss, Spanish or Burgundian, depending upon the season. There are more clock-makers in the town than anywhere else in France. Counting off the hours accurately can be wise, if word comes of an army getting ready to march.
It is Lammas Day, the first day of August, and Hella Maas is waiting for Nicholas and Bianca at the town gate. She has walked ahead, outpacing the mules, and looks like the winner of a sprint, hands on hips, breathing deeply, her faced streaked with dusty sweat. But she has proved a useful lodestar, because by now Nicholas feels so cast adrift from anything even remotely familiar that he’s convinced himself it is only a matter of time before he and Bianca get hopelessly lost amidst the swelling hills, eaten by bears or murdered by brigands. Only Hella seems certain of the route. Given that none of them has walked it before, he attributes this to either blind faith or delusional self-confidence.
He has taken care not to press her further on the story of her family. And she has chosen not to expand upon it. He knows only that her ferocious piety, and her need to warn everyone she meets about what she believes lies in store for them, is the hard adult scab that has formed over childhood wounds. It has, he thinks, given her a soul that no amount of sympathy can soften, sentenced her to a life of cold, self-inflicted solitude.
To look at her now, though, you would not think it. The liberating discipline of the march seems to suit that iron determination in her. Her pale skin is now sunburnt. Her dark hair, once butchered, now hangs about her cheeks in a dark ragged bob. She would be a beauty, he thinks, were it not for the fact that laughter seems to have bled out of her. But who with a heart could blame her for that, after what she has told him about her past?
They find a pilgrims’ hostelry that offers comfortable straw mattresses and the facilities to wash dirty linen. Nicholas is all for resting up for a few days, but Bianca is impatient to leave tomorrow. She can imagine that Padua is just over the next forested hill, even though she knows that in reality it is weeks away. There is still the great pass of St Bernard to negotiate before they descend into the green valley of the River Po.
‘What will you do when you reach Rome?’ Bianca asks Hella as they sit in the shadows of the Porte Rivotte, eating bread and cheese.
‘I will go to see the Holy Father,’ she says seriously. ‘I will tell him he needs to pray more.’
‘I’m sure he’ll be grateful for the advice,’ Nicholas says, chewing on his bread and flexing his aching toes inside his boots.
Bianca jams a stealthy elbow into his side. ‘Does he not pray for his flock enough?’ she asks innocently.
‘Why do you not take what I say seriously?’ Hella asks, her eyes narrowing. ‘Dr Nicholas saw the painting. He knows how the Day of Judgement will unfold. Can either of you face such a thing without fear?’
‘I’ve said it before: it was nothing more than the creation of one skilful, imaginative, but otherwise ordinary man,’ Nicholas says, trying to reassure both of them, because he knows how much these statements of Hella’s unsettle his wife. ‘The painter had no special window that gave him a view of the future. He invented it.’
‘But that invention was put into the painter’s head by God,’ Hella says, giving him a look of pity that Nicholas would find insulting, were he unaware of the tragedy that overtook her when she was young. ‘And He did so because the painter sought to know more than a man should know. He sought a truth it would have been wiser not to seek.’
‘I thought we all sought the truth,’ Bianca replies. ‘Why would we want to know nothing but lies?’
‘But sometimes the truth is more than we can bear to know. In that case, it is better not to seek it in the first place.’
‘And live in ignorance?’ Bianca counters.
‘If you knew the Devil was waiting for you behind a locked door, why would you go in search of the key?’ Hella asks. She gestures towards the surrounding lanes. ‘Look at all the clock-makers in this town. All their clever artistry devoted to making machines that turn and tick and chime – and all for what? What is the point of counting hours, when you know the only thing waiting for you at the end of them is death?’
Bianca chews the last of her bread. ‘I don’t mean to be uncivil, but I’ve had enough of melancholy. I’m going down to the river to wash my feet. They’re on fire.’ She looks at Hella. ‘That doesn’t mean I’m being toasted in brimstone, by the way.’
She rises, hitches her gown into her belt to let the air get to her ankles, and sets off towards the riverbank. Nicholas makes to follow her.
‘Let her go,’ Hella says, reaching out to seize his arm. ‘You understand me, don’t you? You know the danger that lurks in seeking knowledge, I know you do. I can sense it in you.’ She tugs at his shirt sleeve.
Why does he not resist as she pulls him back to sit beside her? Perhaps it is because she intrigues him. Perhaps because – deep down inside – he fears there may be an element of truth in what she says. His own search for knowledge has sometimes brought tragedy in its wake. ‘You’re wrong,’ he says, though he feels far from certain.
‘I don’t believe I am.’
‘Alright, I will admit there was once a time when I would have opened that door and welcomed in the Devil with open arms. I would have sold my soul for the knowledge to save my first wife and the child she was carrying. I would have done it without a moment’s hesitation.’
‘And you would make the same pact tomorrow, if you thought it would save Mistress Bianca, wouldn’t you?’
‘It was a lack of knowledge that brought me misery, not a surfeit of it.’
‘But that merely proves my point,’ Hella says. ‘When we seek, we also invite. That’s what I am warning people about. I knew what was going to happen in Breda. I should have seen the signs. I should have stopped asking so many questions. I invited the Devil in through my own front door.’
That evening Nicholas and Bianca lie on the mattresses in their chamber. Hella is at Besançon cathedral, repairing the rents in her piety that several days on the road without benediction have torn.
‘She’s a contradiction,’ Nicholas says. ‘An educated young woman who thinks learning is dangerous. More than dangerous – possibly fatal to the soul as well as the body. She told me she knew in advance what was going to happen to her family in Breda.’
‘Like that day in Reims, when she said she knew about “a dead child” and you instantly decided it was yours and Eleanor’s.’
‘I accept it – her convictions are not always easy to hear.’
‘Convictions? All that gloom about there being no point in making a clock because all it does is count away the hours of your life?’