She grabs his arm. Nicholas almost gasps at the strength of her grip, at the alarming fervour in her eyes. ‘Take me to Padua. When the endtime comes, I don’t want to face it alone.’
Nicholas pulls away. ‘Hella – go to Rome with the other pilgrims. You’ll be safe there. If the Pope and all his cardinals can’t give you peace, no one can.’
And then he is looking into the crumpled, tearful face of a small girl, the survivor of a slaughtered family, a child who’s convinced herself that if she had tried, really tried, then she could perhaps have moved the world off its axis. She could have turned it, so that the day that brought her such pain had not dawned.
‘Please let me tell you one more truth, Nicholas,’ she says, fighting back the tears. ‘About Bianca. Did you know she is preg–’
But he stops her dead, raising a hand as if to ward off a blow. ‘No! Enough! I will hear no more of this.’
And he turns away, leaving Hella and her reflection in the rock-pool to the judgement of the mountains.
Later, as darkness falls, they see ahead of them torches burning like beacons from the walls of the monastery of St Bernard, signalling to the exhausted pilgrim that safety lies just a short distance ahead. Set beside a lake of meltwater at the highest point on the pass, it seems to carry the cold solitude of the mountains in its stones. They are welcomed by an ancient Augustinian monk who appears to make no gesture, speak no word that is not glacial.
The mules are stabled; they will carry their riders no further. From here the journey will continue on foot. But at least it will be downhill.
Inside the hospice the furnishings have a competitive frugality: pious restraint set against rustic simplicity. Meals are taken communally: men in one room, women in another. The fare is plain and limited, but Nicholas hears no complaint. If a traveller reaches here and thinks he’s had an easy journey, he’s either in the grip of a religious delirium or he’s been born without feeling in his legs.
The dormitories are austere, but weary bones take comfort where they can. There is no provision for married couples, so Nicholas and Bianca must sleep apart. Instead of the reassuring sound of her breathing, he must endure the murmured prayers of the other pilgrims, their echoing flatulence and the occasional agonized grunt as cramp bites stiffening muscles.
Matins is sung against the crashing of a violent summer storm. Lightning blazes in the darkness beyond the narrow windows of the dormitory. Nicholas shivers miserably under a thin blanket while he waits for sleep to claim him.
He is troubled by what Hella said to him earlier. No matter how often he reminds himself of what Bianca believes – that she’s driven by the need to provoke, that her wild claims of precognition are nothing but the sleights of the street-trickster – he cannot now help but wonder if her performance by the rockpool really was just a masque. Could it be that there was truth in it? Occasionally he laughs at himself, the believer in the methods of the new learning losing his critical faculties to a young maid’s play-acting. But whether she can see the future or is merely deluding herself, in his heart Nicholas feels a deep sadness at the damage fate has inflicted on her, robbing her of even the slightest warmth of hope.
Alone in her own darkness, Bianca lies awake and thinks of Hella’s unfathomable face caught in the lightning flash of another storm, and wonders if she is now – finally – rid of her malign influence.
The monks rise before dawn. The stillness is oppressive after the thunder of the night. It is broken only by the murmur of prayer. Nicholas takes a plain breakfast of bread and water, the liquid like cold fire on his tongue. He sits apart from the other pilgrims, the only Englishman present. They are an unremarkable crew. Some have faces made rosy by a surfeit of holy fervour, others scowl with the intensity of the overtly pious or the thought of how many leagues remain between the mountains and St Peter’s in Rome. He would pay them little heed – were it not for one of their number who draws his attention like a beacon blazing on a dark shore.
Alone, he sits stooped at his bench while he chews his bread, head lowered, his face almost hidden by his steepled hands. He wears a grey half-coat. His legs, clad in trunk-hose, fold back under the bench, the toes of his leather half-boots flexed against the flagstones as though ready for flight at the first sign of danger. And on his head is a floppy black cap that almost covers his ears. All in all – though a little dustier, a little wearier in the face – a man almost unchanged from the morning he stepped out in front of Hella Maas in the cathedral square at Reims, one hundred leagues and almost as many years ago.
24
The storm during the night has left the mountains so sharp that just looking at them pricks the eyes. From the hospice of St Bernard, the path descends in giddying coils like a serpent basking in the morning sunshine, down towards the valley of Aosta. From the flat ground beside the lake, Nicholas watches a group of pilgrims moving amongst the scree, making their way into Italy.
‘I must hurry if I am to catch them,’ Hella says. ‘You have been kind. I would have died in Den Bosch, had you not saved me.’ She turns to Bianca. ‘I am sorry if neither of you wanted to hear what I have say. I do not seek these revelations that come to me. I mean only to tell the truth of what I know.’
Bianca, who has informed her husband that the maid has decided to attach herself to the group in the distance rather than wait until they reach Pavia and the road to Rome, affects an expression that says, It’s not my doing, if that’s what you think.
Nicholas says, ‘Before you leave us, will you answer me one question? There was a man sheltering here last night. A man wearing a grey coat, black cap. Tall and thin, a little younger than I am. Did you see him, perhaps?’
The look Hella gives him is as empty as the surrounding mountains, and as icy. ‘I was in the women’s dormitory. How could I have seen any man, let alone the one you describe.’
‘Are you sure? Only I thought I had seen him before – in the cathedral square at Reims. I thought I saw him speak to you then.’
But it seems that Hella’s ability to see what others do not see fails to extend to young men in grey coats and black caps. ‘I’m sorry, but you must be mistaken,’ she says. ‘I saw no such man here, and I know of no one in Reims. I cannot help you.’
And, with that, she hoists her pack across her shoulder and sets off after the pilgrims, as though she and Nicholas had met barely a moment ago, and the long days spent treading the dusty miles from Den Bosch live only in his imagination.
‘I really cannot tell whether she was lying or not,’ Nicholas says as he extends a hand to help Bianca cross a little stone bridge over a tumbling stream. Below them a tiny cluster of stone houses lies cupped in a valley close to the border with Italy. The hills are clad with pine, bearding the mountains with a dense green. But in the open the going is soft and grassy. He is warm again, after the night spent in the pass.
‘Why did you not tell me about this man when we were in Reims?’ Bianca asks.
‘I wasn’t sure I’d seen anything other than a chance encounter. They were face-to-face only briefly.’
‘Perhaps he thought – mistakenly – that Hella was someone he knew,’ Bianca says.
‘That is what I told myself. But there is another possibility, of course.’
‘Which is?’
‘That it’s us he’s following, not her.’