Bianca looks at him askance. ‘The doge? In Venice? What does his reputation have to do with the healing Nicholas gave you on Bankside?’
Bruno pulls himself up to the limit of his modest height and puffs out his chest. ‘Everything – because had I not lived, His Serene Highnesses would have been unable to appoint a Master of the Spheres.’
Bianca throws back her head and closes her eyes. On her mouth is an expression that is half-admiration and half-exasperation. ‘Oh, Bruno!’ she says, laughter in her voice. ‘What wild scheme are you embarked upon now? Wasn’t trying to sell Lombardy rice to the English enough to make you see reason and get a proper job?’
For the next two days Nicholas and Bianca take their rest as best they can in Bruno’s house in the Borgo dei Argentieri. It is a fitful rest, interspersed with the urge to be up and about. Luca and Alonso hover like damselflies, ever attentive to their needs – especially Bianca’s. As for her cousin, he has always brimmed with a confidence that no commercial disappointment has yet dented. Now Bruno seems borne on a wave of almost delirious expectation.
‘And the doge is paying for all this?’ Bianca asks him when he has given her and Nicholas an account of his visit to Florence and the progress of the grand project of the Arte dei Astronomi.
‘By the cartload. But it will be the fame and renown attached to the device itself that will make the doge’s Master of the Spheres his fortune. The name of Barrani will be known throughout the civilized world. Even in England they will know of me.’ He grins at Nicholas. ‘Perhaps your heretic queen will invite me to construct one in her palace. The English must have need of a machine to tell them where the constellations will be at any given time – as the skies are always cloudy.’
‘But what exactly is it for?’ Bianca asks.
Bruno contrives a scholarly look. ‘Well, it turns… and the wheels and the ellipses and the meridians all move within it – to show when the solstices and the planets…’ He wrangles his hands together, the fingers like entwining snakes, to describe what his vocabulary cannot.
‘You don’t really know, do you?’ Bianca says with a sigh for the litany of Cousin Bruno’s doomed commercial enterprises.
‘It’s an armillary sphere,’ Nicholas says. ‘I’ve seen small ones, when I was at Cambridge. Robert Cecil has one. They show how the heavens move with time. They’re much used in the sciences of astronomy and astrology. But I’ve never heard of one as large or as complex as this one by Master Santucci.’
Bruno snorts an explosive sneer. ‘Santucci is a dunderhead! He’s a Florentine. I wouldn’t trust him to make me a climbing frame for my fagioli.’
‘But how are you building it, Bruno? You’re a man of commerce, not of science,’ Bianca points out.
If Bruno is hurt by the implication behind her question, he doesn’t show it. ‘A great admiral does not climb the mast to set the sail, does he, Cousin?’ he says haughtily. ‘I have gathered the best men in Padua to assist. My friend, Signor Galileo, is the professor of mathematics at the Palazzo Bo. His student, young Matteo, is making the calculations under his wise and guiding hand. As for the construction, the Arte dei Astronomi is already at work. I will show you, tomorrow.’
‘But how did you get the plans?’ Nicholas asks.
Bruno shrugs and adopts an air of total innocence. ‘Let us say they blew off the back of a cart – with the help of a little wind fanned by a few of His Serenity’s ducats.’
‘But if it’s for the doge, why build it in Padua?’ Bianca asks.
‘Because Signor Galileo is in Padua,’ Bruno says, as if even a child would know the answer to her question. ‘When it is complete and working, and he is satisfied that it is performing its calculations as it should, we will dismantle it, take it to Venice and reassemble it in the Sala dello Scrutinio. His Serene Highness will then be able to gather his ministers and the citizens about his Serene personage in St Mark’s Square, hoist his golden mantle around his Serene waist, bend over and expose his Serene arse in the general direction of Florence and Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici. And your cousin Bruno will be there to enjoy the spectacle and watch the ducats flow in.’
‘Can he do it? Is it truly possible?’ Bianca asks Nicholas that night as they lie abed, bathed in sweat from the oppressive heat, a wash of stars glittering in the ink-black sky above.
‘We have never doubted that Cousin Bruno is a man of great determination. And there is no question that Venice would have her reputation much enhanced by the possession of such a machine.’
‘But is it even possible to make a device that mirrors the motion of the cosmos?’
‘The Florentine seems to have achieved it. And if this professor of mathematics at Padua University is even half as good as the professor of anatomy – Fabricius – then he’ll be a man of rare ability. Fabricius is known even amongst medical men in England. I hope to meet them both. I could learn a lot while we’re here.’
In the darkness, Bianca frowns. ‘I’m worried Bruno has let his flights of fancy run wild. Padua may like to show herself as a city open to new learning, but the Inquisition still exercises much power in the Republic. Free thought is tolerated only so far. Look what happened to my father: he died in a cell here for his ideas and his writings. Do you not recall what my cousin wrote in his last letter to me?’
‘About the friar, Giordano Bruno?’
‘Arrested when he went to Venice, to speak upon his revolutionary theories. He thought he was safe in the Veneto. But he wasn’t. Now he’s in Rome, on trial for heresy. I don’t want that to happen to my Bruno.’
‘The sphere itself is not heretical – not if it conforms to the Church’s teachings on the movement of the cosmos,’ Nicholas says. ‘But judging from the way your cities are fortified against each other, I’d be more worried about Florence sending some rogues here to threaten Bruno or smash the engine to pieces.’
Bianca throws back the single sheet and rolls over, spreading her gleaming limbs in an effort to cool herself. She glances out of the window at the pale rooftops of Padua, then back at her husband.
‘Enough of this disagreeable talk. I am more interested in the movement of my own cosmos,’ she says.
‘It’s very hot,’ he replies.
‘Perhaps. But being an academic man, are you not inclined upon some interesting discovery of your own? You never know what you might find.’
Nicholas props himself on one elbow. He feels a cold rivulet of sweat run down his upper arm and pool in the fold of his elbow. With a husky catch in his voice, he replies, ‘Mistress Merton, in the quest for the new learning there is no avenue a man intent on diligent study should be reluctant to explore.’
26
Rose Monkton feels her stomach heave. The smell assaults her nostrils and makes her plump, happy face contort in disgust. She stops in her tracks at the foot of the steps and clutches at her black ringlets, pushing them over her nose and mouth even as she hears the gaoler laugh behind her.
Though Bianca Merton might call her ‘Mistress Moonbeam’, and newcomers to the Jackdaw – before it burned down – think her not entirely anchored to the practical, and though she might look as if she’s just come in from milking cows or gathering fruit in some idyllic pastoral setting, Rose has endured a hard schooling. She grew up in a stew behind the Mutton Lane shambles. The sound she most recalls from her childhood is not the singing of the lark, but the scream of cattle having their throats cut. It takes a lot to make her knees go weak. But the common durance – the public dungeon – of the Marshalsea prison tests her fortitude to the limit.