‘I have saved the best until last,’ Bruno says proudly, ‘for your husband’s sake.’
The house in the Borgo dei Vignali is much like any other in the street: a four-storey façade of stucco, the entrance set back a little within a pillared arcade. When Bruno raps on the door, the answering shout comes not from inside but from above. This requires him to retreat into the lane, to where Nicholas and Bianca are waiting. He cranes his neck towards one of the windows on the third floor.
Leaning out in search of the source of the disturbance are two figures, a man and a woman. Both appear to be naked. The male has a stocky, hirsute torso, topped with the bearded face of a country taverner.
‘What do you want, Signor Purse?’ the man shouts.
‘Busy, Master Compass?’ says Bruno doubtfully.
‘University business. I’m instructing Signorina Storzzi in the acceleration of an object on an inclined plane. Can you come back in… let’s say… October?’
‘Isn’t he going to ask you for money?’ Bianca whispers into her cousin’s ear.
‘Don’t worry. He will,’ Bruno replies.
‘Who’s the pretty maid with you?’ Professor Galileo Galilei calls down from the window.
‘My cousin, Bianca Merton.’
‘I don’t suppose she’s interested in mathematics lessons?’
‘She’s married – to this fine gentleman here. He’s an English physician.’
Nicholas is looking up at a heavy-featured man about his own age, with dark, receding hair and dissolute brown eyes. He wears an expression of put-upon good humour. ‘Surely that’s not him – the professor of mathematics?’ he asks Bianca out of the corner of his mouth.
‘It would seem so,’ she says, trying to maintain a straight face. ‘He’s not at all what I expected. I hope Bruno knows what he’s about.’
‘I thought for a moment we were back on Bankside.’
‘Don’t be foolish, Nicholas,’ Bianca says. ‘On Bankside a maid would likely get frostbite leaning out of a window unclothed like that.’
The man and woman vanish back into the room. A short while later the street door opens and the mathematician reappears. He is barefoot, dressed in woollen hose and a shirt that has been hurriedly laced, judging by the apparently random criss-crossing of its points. He is alone.
‘Come in, Signor Purse. And bring your friends with you. I don’t suppose you’ve brought–’
Bianca cuts him off with an amused shake of her head.
Inside, the shady courtyard is set around with mulberry bushes in huge earthen pots. The far wall is similar to the street aspect: four rows of windows, only these have narrow little balconies. Stretched across the lowest is a line of sheets, shirts and under-shifts drying in the heat. A manservant brings a jug of wine. The mathematician toasts his visitors’ health.
‘So, a physician – from England,’ Galileo says to Nicholas. ‘Would you rather we spoke Latin?’
‘I can manage in Italian. If I have trouble, I’ll let you know.’
‘I too studied medicine, at Pisa,’ the mathematician tells him. ‘It was my father’s wish. Almost sent me mad with boredom. I gave it up and turned to mathematics. Best thing I ever did. Numbers don’t get sick and stink, they don’t leak pus and they don’t complain of bellyache. I can’t think of a worse life than spending your days sniffing boils and old men’s piss.’ His satyr’s eyes dart to Bianca and then back to Nicholas. ‘And this is your wife?’
‘Yes. We were married last summer.’
‘How are you with a sword?’
Nicholas looks puzzled. He wonders if this is some coarse Paduan euphemism. ‘Dangerous, but not in a competent way. Why?’
With a broad grin, Galileo thrusts a full wine cup at him. ‘I make it a strict rule never to launch a sally against another fellow’s woman if he can tell one end of a sword from the other.’
Nicholas decides he rather likes the brash young professor of mathematics from Padua University.
When enough wine has been taken to toast the arrival of England’s foremost man of medicine and his bride – whom Galileo generously forgives for depriving Padua of her exceptional beauty, to live in godless England – he puts two chubby fingers between his lips and lets loose a whistle that echoes around the courtyard. He shouts, ‘Matteo, take your hand off your privy sausage and get out here this moment, and bring the sketches with you. Master Purse is here and he’s brought company.’
Matteo Fedele is a gentle-looking lad of about seventeen, lean-hipped, with soft grey eyes and black hair swept back over the crown of his head and tied in a knot at the nape of his neck. The cleft in his upper lip gives him the air of a vulnerable child. Nicholas learns he is Galileo’s pupil, one of several who live in the house. Matteo has taken on some of his teacher’s rustic earthiness, but it sits uncomfortably on such a diffident character. He spreads the parchments that he brings with him over the bench in the courtyard with a flourish. On one, Nicholas sees clever drawings with Latin annotations: quadrants of cog-wheels; balances shown from above and from the side; coiled springs and levers; flywheels and drums wrapped with chain; sections of meridians with the lugs and holes intended to connect them – all clearly drawn for the instruction of the artisans who will carve, hammer or forge them. On another sheet he sees diagrams of the constellations shown from different latitudes; pictorial renderings of the zodiac; images of planets and stars, some with fiery tails drawn to show their movement through an imaginary heaven.
Matteo Fedele beams with obvious satisfaction. ‘The ability to place the planets and the stars correctly in any quadrant of the heavens, and to show them accurately from any latitude, at any date, will make astrology and astronomy the foremost of all the sciences,’ he announces. Nicholas thinks it best not to tell him he hasn’t cast a horoscope when making a diagnosis since long before Eleanor died.
‘Imagine it, Nicholas,’ Bruno says proprietorially, ‘to be able to turn the engine through year upon year in a few cranks of a handle, and so be able to look into the future and say which day was auspicious and which was not; to establish if Church doctrine is correct in the matter of the earth’s place in the cosmos; perhaps even to foretell great events by the accurate positioning of the planets and the stars. What would a prince not pay for such a window through which to view God’s plan?’
‘The plan is certainly ambitious,’ Nicholas admits.
‘That dog Santucci’s sphere is astounding enough. But the Barrani sphere will have the men of the new learning beating a path to our door.’
It is said in English. And as Bruno raises his wine cup again in a toast to the project, he does not glance at either Galileo or Matteo Fedele – leaving Nicholas to wonder just how many members of the Arte dei Astronomi know it is to be called the Barrani sphere.
For the first time since their arrival in Padua, evening brings a cooling north wind that carries away the worst of the heat. Nicholas, Bruno and Bianca walk arm-in-arm back to the house in the Borgo dei Argentieri. Mellowed by wine and good company, Nicholas is in a happy, optimistic mood. Signor Galileo has promised to introduce him to the professor of anatomy at the university, the man the world of medicine knows as Fabricius, but whom the mathematician calls by his Italian name: Girolamo Fabrici.
The offer has given him reason to think his stay in Padua might prove more beneficial than he’d thought. A few months’ study under the famous physician would give an insight into the latest advances in surgery. It would improve his Latin no end. And on his return to England it would give him a status that the College of Physicians would be unable to deny. As the trio enters the great square in front of the Basilica of St Anthony, Nicholas feels a sense of peace he hasn’t felt in all the long miles since Den Bosch.