When at last he stands expectantly before the city governor – his forehead gleaming with sweat from taking the stairs two at a time – Bruno has to force himself to slow his formal bow and bend of the knee so that he doesn’t look like someone doubling up with colic.
Unable to penetrate the Podestà’s inscrutably aloof expression, he takes the sheet of expensive velum offered to him. The heavy wax seal hanging from its braided ribbon swings listlessly in the stifling air. It bears the imprint of a winged lion – the symbol of the Serene Republic. As he reads the document, his eyes move too fast, too hungrily, to notice that the drops of perspiration falling from his brow are spotting the neat, official hand.
… unthinkable that Venice should stand reduced behind the city of Florence… her rightful place as a hearth wherein the new learning may blaze… bringing rightful honour and prestige to the republic most deserving of it in all Christendom.
His eyes only settle when he reaches the sum that His Serene Highness has approved for the project. Bruno tries not to grin. It’s everything he asked for.
‘This is a great honour for the city of Padua, Signor Barrani,’ the Podestà says loftily. ‘Do not give anyone the opportunity to hold us up to ridicule, especially the Medici and the rest of those thieving Fiorentini.’
It is all Bruno can do to stop himself singing. ‘That shall be my only guiding star, Your Honour,’ he proclaims. ‘I do this solely out of love for the reputation of the Veneto and the Serene Republic.’
‘Really?’ says the Podestà, lifting one bushy white eyebrow.
‘But of course,’ Bruno protests, as though to suggest otherwise would be the gravest of blasphemies. He draws himself up to his full but modest height. ‘I will slay with my bare hands the first man who says it was ever only about the money.’
His neighbours in the Borgo dei Vignali will tell you that you don’t need a cockerel to know when it’s sunrise at Signor Galileo’s lodgings: the sound of heated discourse will wake you soon enough. It goes on all day, and for far too much of the night. The only relief comes when the sun is too fierce even for argument in the shade, or when the young professor of mathematics is at the Palazzo Bo delivering a lecture, or in the tavern.
The raised voices are not always unwelcome. The students who rent rooms in his house, his drinking friends, his creditors (if they dare to risk his temper) – even dapper little merchants who have dropped by with a shiny new commission from His Serenity the doge in Venice – will tell you that you’ll learn more in ten minutes in Signor Galileo’s house than most men might hope to learn in ten lifetimes.
This afternoon is no different. A pupil is debating with the maestro why the water in a leaky rowing boat suddenly surges forward if you accidentally ram the bank whilst seeking out a shady spot on the Bacchiglione where you and your mistress might spend a while unobserved.
‘It is because the earth is in motion, carrying the water along with it,’ says the pupil, Matteo Fedele, as he tries to remember Galileo’s explanation, made before the wine started to flow. ‘If you are on its surface and come to a sudden stop, the water in the boat will seek to maintain its velocity.’
Galileo swigs at his wine jug, belches loudly and counters, ‘You don’t think, young Matteo, that it might be because you were too busy ogling her tits to notice the bank approaching, and that it’s God’s way of telling you you’re an unobservant little self-abuser?’
‘You can’t speak to me like that, Maestro,’ the pupil says with good-natured defiance. ‘I pay rent, and my father pays you to teach me.’
‘You don’t think I’d bother with a brain like yours if he didn’t, do you?’ Galileo tells him.
‘I should have studied medicine under Professor Fabrici,’ Matteo laments. ‘At least he wouldn’t make me climb the bell tower with a sodding cannonball on my shoulders to see if it fell faster than an apple. How come Girolamo always gets to carry the lighter objects?’
‘Because Girolamo pays more rent. That’s how shit at mathematics you are, Matteo.’
Bruno Barrani listens to these exchanges with a rictal smile on his face, as though he understands everything that is said about who is right on matters of natural motion: Aristotle or Archimedes, or whether Master Copernicus is a genius or a heretic, and just how large the heavens must be if his cosmos is to be realistically contained within them. At Signor Compass’s house, Signor Purse does a lot of nodding. Not to mention nodding off.
Diverted by a discreet cough from the doorway, all three men look up.
‘Signor Galileo, if I might be permitted a word with Your Honour… about your account?’
The man standing in the street entrance is a lanky fellow who looks like a loosely draped sculptor’s armature, all rods and angles. His moist, bulbous eyes peer out timidly from beneath a mop of pure-white hair.
‘Ah, good morrow, Signor Clockmaker,’ Galileo says pleasantly, offering the man a slice of pork sausage with one hand while wiping the grease from his own mouth with the other. ‘Far too early in the day to speak of something as profane as money. We’re not finished debating the new learning here. Have some of this fine Bondola.’
The newcomer declines as gracefully as his unpaid bill allows. ‘Very kind, Signor Galileo, but no, thank you. I’ve come about the outstanding–’
The professor cuts him off with an airy wave of his hand and turns to Bruno. ‘Signor Purse, in the matter of the doge’s new sphere, we will need someone with a clockmaker’s skills, will we not?’
‘Most certainly we will, Master Compass,’ Bruno agrees. It’s the first question he’s been able to answer since he dropped by to tell the professor that His Serene Highness has approved the plan.
‘What excellent fortune, Signor Mirandola!’ Galileo says happily, slamming the jug of Bondola onto the table for emphasis. ‘How would you like to count yourself amongst those who hold a warrant of approval from the Doge of Venice?’
‘The doge?’ says Mirandola the clockmaker, interest and suspicion wrestling in his eyes. Interest wins by a throw. ‘Me, working for His Serene Highness? How? Does he have need of a clock?’
Galileo looks at Bruno and gives him a theatrical wink.
‘Oh, Signor Mirandola,’ he says, reaching for the wine again, ‘he will have need of much more than that. Tell us: what’s the biggest clock you’ve ever built?’
Six weeks since leaving Bankside, and Nicholas has given himself up to exile because exile has an allure all of its own. Here, on the path down to the northern shore of Lake Geneva, the air is sharper, more bracing even than a tub of cold Thames water, more cleansing than the stinking fug he breathes in the narrow lanes of London. Here, you cannot breathe without inhaling dreams of high peaks and eagles wheeling in the glare of the sun. The horizon – at least when he views it from a craggy rim of granite – is wider than any he has ever seen, including the marshy wastes of Suffolk. England seems like a half-forgotten memory from his early childhood, a place he thinks he may have read about once, like Avalon or Troy. Cecil is the name of a mule he rode until a short while ago – not a man made of flesh and blood. The only Essex he has ever known had a coat of coarse grey-brown hair, and would only think of following him in order to receive a handful of freshly torn grass.