It is almost too dark to see, which in itself is a mercy, even though it isn’t noon yet. The stone stairs she’s descended were not reached by a door, but by an iron grille set into the floor. What light there is down here shows a vaulted ceiling too low for a man of moderate height to stand with his head straight, and Ned – she is already casting her gaze around to spot him – is a head taller than most.
Her nose twitches as it objects to the pervading stink of piss-soaked straw, human excrement, sweat and despair. A rat the size of a large hedgehog scurries past her feet, leaving Rose to think she would almost certainly swear on her Bible that it looked up at her and thumbed its nose as it went by. Summoning all her willpower, she steps out into the cellar.
As she skirts the brick pillars holding up the ceiling she expects a cacophony of ribald comments from the men lying or sitting in the straw, but they all seem too weary, too downcast, even to turn their heads. Rose is not used to being invisible amongst male company. She worries that when she finds Ned, he will stare through her as if she wasn’t there, as if she was a ghost.
To her immense relief, it doesn’t take her long to locate him. She spots what she imagines to be a bear surrounded by its cubs, and realizes the smaller, weaker prisoners have gathered themselves around Ned for protection from the habitual predators of this awful realm.
He tries to get up, but the ankle-irons he is wearing make it difficult. Rose finds the courage to look at where they encircle his limbs, praying the metal hasn’t bitten into the flesh too deeply; in the short time it has taken to reach him she’s seen ankles bloodied and brimming with pus. To her relief, his skin is unbroken.
‘How now, Wife?’ he says cheerfully. ‘Close your eyes, an’ it smells no worse than the Tabard or the Turk’s Head after the Midsummer Fair.’
But Rose cannot laugh with him. She would sooner cry for his bravery.
‘This is beyond all enduring, ’Usband,’ she says. ‘I’m going straightway to see the warden.’
He frowns. ‘I’ll not ’ave you giving of yourself to another, just so as I can ’ave a mattress to sleep upon. Think of the baby…’
Rose puts her hands firmly on the hips of her farthingale. ‘I mean to offer him coin, you great clod-pate – not my body! To get you a better cell.’
‘Oh. Well, that’s alright,’ he says. A troubling afterthought shadows its way across his face. ‘’Cept we don’t ’ave coin to spare. I’ll not ’ave Rose Monkton go without. I’ve slept in worse places than this, I can tell you.’
She presumes he means the years he spent working in the mortuary crypt at St Tom’s.
‘That’s as maybe,’ she tells him sternly. ‘But no husband of mine is going to walk into the lodgings Mistress Bianca loaned us as a free man, if he’s smelling like he’s been stood under a window while someone emptied a full piss-pot over his ’ead.’
Ned looks downcast. ‘Is it that bad?’
She avoids a direct answer. ‘I shall take just a little of the purse she left us for the work on the Jackdaw. Not much, mind – only what’s needed to get you out of here. Mistress Bianca wouldn’t begrudge it for a moment, I know she wouldn’t.’
‘I wonder where they are,’ Ned says, looking around the durance as though he expects to find them hiding behind one of the brick columns.
Again Rose does not answer him. But she dearly wishes Nicholas and Bianca were both back here in Southwark, because frankly the thought of having to face what is approaching her husband fills her with a dread worse than anything the Marshalsea can conjure up, no matter how innocent she knows him to be.
The ranks of the Arte dei Astronomi have swelled by two. Nicholas is now the guild’s honorary physician. He will be called upon, should any member accidentally trap a finger in his pliers, skewer himself with his burin or inadvertently hammer his knuckles flat on an anvil. Bianca is the padrona di rimedi, in charge of mixing what Nicholas prescribes. Hers is a wholly invented position, as a woman is not customarily permitted to hold office in a city guild. Nor, Bruno explains in his most apologetic manner, will she be allowed to march with the Arte through the city streets on the Feast of the Holy Rosary in October.
‘I had the same trouble with the Grocers’ Guild in London,’ she sighs, ‘when I told them I wanted to practise as an apothecary.’
Nicholas asks to borrow paper, quill, ink and a pounce-pot. He writes a brief note to Robert Cecil, encoding it with the cipher the two men employ for Nicholas’s work as Cecil’s intelligencer. In it, he informs Lord Burghley’s son that he is in Padua and can be reached at the home of Signor Bruno Barrani, merchant of that city. Then he entrusts the letter to Bruno and the network of merchants and go-betweens he used for his correspondence with Bianca when she was living on Bankside. Nicholas knows it will take weeks – if not months – for the letter to arrive in London. When he might expect a reply, and whether it will tell him it is safe to come home, is anyone’s guess.
On a cloyingly hot Monday afternoon in the first week in September, he and Bianca are introduced to the other luminaries in Bruno Barrani’s bright new cosmos. In a little shop near the Torlonga tower they meet the angular Mirandola, whose spindly limbs seem almost an extension of the rods and bars that make up the skeletal frames of his clock mechanisms. He is supervising an assistant at the little furnace in the back of the shop when they walk in. With a pair of tongs, he proudly holds up what looks like a still-glowing crown with saw-teeth along one rim. ‘A better balance wheel than this you’ll not find in all Italy,’ he tells Bruno as he hands the tongs back to his apprentice. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any sign of His Serenity’s coin yet? You still have not paid me for the three foliot balances I made.’
‘All in good time, Master Mirandola,’ Bruno says engagingly. ‘There’ll be ducats and glory soon enough. Now, meet my cousin Bianca and the brave Englishman who has consented to be her husband.’
From Mirandola’s shop they move on to visit Pasolini the carpenter. He is a sullen chap of forty with only one eye. ‘Have you brought me any of the doge’s gold yet?’ he asks Bruno.
‘Patience, I beg you, Signor Pasolini,’ Bruno says. ‘Meanwhile, we’d ask you kindly to put curves in only where they are signified in young Matteo’s drawings.’
Next on Bruno’s list are the Corio brothers, whose foundry lies in the Borgo Socco. They are friendly enough, but Bianca comes away with her ears singing from the noise of hammers ringing on anvils and the roaring of bellows – and the older Corio brother’s voice shouting above the din, ‘Where’s our money, Signor Barrani?’
At the premises of Bondoni the goldsmith they meet a jovial old fellow in bright-yellow Venetian hose, his plump arms defiantly white despite the Veneto sun, and his face speckled with gilt dust as though he were a satyr in a masque. ‘Are we going to get paid before the Feast of the Holy Rosary, Signor Barrani?’ he asks with almost indecent haste, once the introductions have been made.
‘When are we to see the sphere itself?’ Nicholas asks when they leave.
‘Soon enough,’ says Bruno. ‘We’ve only the lower part of the cradle constructed as yet. And even then, we have to keep sending back Signor Pasolini’s work for his apprentice to put the correct bend in it.’
‘Where are we going next?’ Bianca asks as they cross an elegant Roman bridge over the hide-coloured waters of the Piovego canal.