A sudden double boom of thunder, seemingly overhead, makes her wonder if Hella Maas has somehow brought the storm down upon the hamlet as a warning. But the maid merely observes the scene with detached interest, just as she might watch an ants’ nest she’d poked with a stick.
By the time the rain eases a little, it is dark outside. The taproom is now full of revellers sprawled in the alcoves and on the floor, the drabs pouring wine and spirits into their open mouths, or relieving other appetites with a not very discreet hand beneath gown and jerkin. When copulation seems imminent, the bawd demands her money, before shooing the couple upstairs.
‘Never mind the Tabard,’ Nicholas says, ‘it could be a gathering of the Privy Council at Whitehall.’
‘Or a meeting of the Bishop of London’s ecclesiastical court,’ Bianca counters, adopting a wholly uncharacteristic primness.
‘Laugh if you will,’ says Hella with a quiet sadness. ‘But remember the painting. There will be a judgement for these sinners. And it will come soon enough.’
‘Do you want to tell them, or shall I?’ Nicholas mutters.
As he speaks, the plump white-haired man in the threadbare cassock that Bianca had seen earlier stumbles into their table, as his friend – a sallow-faced reed with a goitre on his neck and no teeth in his upper jaw – tries to steer him to the exit. The man is around seventy. He has a veined face flushed with drink, and a nose pocked with tiny boils. Bracing himself with one hand on the tabletop, he leers at Bianca and gurgles something in French through fumes of fermented peach spirit.
She wonders if stabbing him in the hand with her food knife would be worth the uproar. She decides against it. His companion mutters an apology, regains control of his charge and makes it to the door without further incident.
‘He was wearing a cassock – do you think he was a priest?’ she asks Nicholas.
‘With manners like that? Probably an archbishop,’ Nicholas replies. ‘The question is: Lutheran or Catholic?’
‘Definitely Lutheran.’
‘On what grounds? The fact we’re nearing Switzerland?’
‘No,’ Bianca says with a shake of her head. ‘A Catholic archbishop wouldn’t be seen dead in clothes like that.’
They sit a little longer, neither wanting to return to the uninviting chamber, trying to sustain an air of world-weary nonchalance, until the door flies open as if blown in by a sudden return of the storm. The thin fellow with the goitre stands against the black night, yelling wildly and pointing repeatedly out into the darkness.
‘What does he say?’ Nicholas asks Hella, even as he guesses the truth.
‘There has been some manner of calamity – the stream, by the bridge,’ Hella confirms.
Barely half a dozen customers are in a fit state to help. The landlord lights a thick rush taper in the fire and leads them out into the night. Nicholas and Bianca follow, Hella taking up the rear.
There is nothing to see beyond the meagre pool of light from the tavern windows. The night is all noise: the roaring of the wind through the trees and the rushing of hidden water. The air is heavy with moisture. For Bianca, it clings to the skin like the cold, wet winding sheet of someone who has just died from the sweating sickness. A flash of lightning further into the hills gives a momentary grey glimpse of the tumbling stream pouring through the rocky cut below the bridge.
The men are calling out a name: Donadieu!.. Donadieu!… But the night will not receive it. It hurls Donadieu back at them in angry gusts. Bianca can see only the rush taper some way ahead of her. She senses Nicholas close by, reaching out to her lest they get separated in the darkness.
And then a sudden flurry of rain blinds her. She gropes for Nicholas’s outstretched hand. Her fingers claw at the place she expects it to be. They grasp only empty night. When she opens her eyes again, she can see nothing at all. The wind has torn the flames from the rush taper and buried them.
She turns about, the panic rising in her. Even the pool of light from the tavern windows has gone now. Utterly disorientated, she calls out to Nicholas. She hears him answer, so close that his voice is clear above the roar of the wind. But when she tries to move towards the sound, she has the sensation she’s stepping over a cliff. Her legs lose their strength. Her feet no longer trust the pressure of the ground against them. She can’t tell if she’s standing still, turning in a circle, putting one foot in front of the other – or falling.
Then she feels herself begin to slide. She hears the scattering of earth and rock clearly above the wind as the bank crumbles under her feet. She catches the hungry howl of the racing torrent, so close now that it freezes the unborn scream in her mouth. Flailing with outstretched arms, she knows – even before her mind can set it out in thought – that she has made the same awful error as the man called Donadieu. And then a second ripple of lightning illuminates the rocky bank inches away from her face.
Hella Maas is looking down at her, her face white like that of a plaster saint, a martyr caught in the moment of heavenly release from pain. Bianca stabs her open fingers towards the image, calling Hella’s name in desperation. Waiting to feel the warmth, the strength, of human flesh seizing her own.
But Hella does not move.
Perhaps it is the lightning flash that robs her of all movement. It certainly slows Bianca’s own thoughts almost to a standstill, for she is too stunned for the real fear to bite yet. She is staring straight into the maid’s face.
Is that really murderous intent she sees reflected in her eyes? Or is it just a beatific certainty – an unbending belief that this one event is merely another step along a preordained path. Either way, the intent is the same.
Hella Maas is going to let me fall.
Then the darkness returns as quickly as it was parted. And Bianca feels the maid’s hands around her wrists, gripping her with surprising strength, catching her in the instant before the soil beneath her feet gives way entirely.
In the morning Bianca stands with Nicholas on the bank of the raging stream, not far from the place where deep gouges in the earth bear witness to her brief struggle the night before. Nicholas has treated the gazes on her arms and shins with the balm of woundwort and sea-holly that she packed for just such mishaps. Though cleaned, the abrasions still sting.
Together, they watch in silence while the white, bloated body of the man named Donadieu is hauled from under the bridge where the torrent has lodged it. The threadbare cassock has been torn off, leaving him naked. As the men from the hamlet drag him out, a large dark-brown toad skips down off one plump hairless thigh and jumps back into the shadows under the stonework.
‘Do you see now?’ Bianca hears Hella say at her shoulder. ‘I foretold there would be a reckoning. He was a lascivious sinner, his body bloated by drink. Now he has drowned in his own sinfulness. The toad is Satan’s familiar. He sends the toad to guide to him all those with lust and deceit in their hearts. It was all shown to you in the painting. Now will you believe me when I say I know what is coming?’
20
Padua, 7th August 1594
The summons comes sooner than Bruno could have hoped for. As he returns to the Palazzo del Podestà in the crushing afternoon heat, he finds it difficult to maintain his cockerel’s strut. He is too short to run with any expectation of dignity, too impatient to saunter. His mood swings wildly between opposing poles. At one pole lies success: envy of the Medici has driven His Serenity the doge into a burst of uncharacteristic ardour. Yes, build me a sphere to humble the Fiorentini, and start at once! At the other, failure: the doge has dismissed his scheme out of hand. Are the Paduans all mad? Do they think I’m made of ducats?