Nicholas takes the tossing of his wife’s head to mean denial. ‘It doesn’t matter, there’s time enough…’
Bianca does not reply, although inside her head her thoughts are shouting at her: Bruno is wrong. Hella was wrong. No one can see inside my womb except God. And no one but He can set life growing there – certainly not a wild-eyed maid who thinks of nothing but death and judgement.
As she steps through the door of her cousin’s house and into the courtyard, Bianca Merton wonders how it is that she missed the moment when the thought of bearing her husband a child changed from joyous to terrifying.
The storehouse lies behind the Porta Portello, on the bank of the river. They reach it by crossing a narrow stone bridge capped with the likenesses of leading Paduans got up as Roman emperors. Bruno stands before a set of high wooden doors and rams his fist several times against the planks. Nicholas detects a sequence in his knocking: two in slow time… one on its own… three in a fusillade. He thinks: if that isn’t a coded message that it’s safe to open up, then I don’t know what is. He hears the rasp of a wooden bar being slid past iron hoops, then a prolonged groaning of hinges as one half of the doors is opened. A face peers out, the eyes darting like a kingfisher’s. Once satisfied that those waiting outside are not in any way associated with the city’s law officers, its customs officials or the Holy Office of the Faith – the Inquisition – the face calls for them to enter.
Inside, Nicholas is surprised to find the place is not as dark as he’d expected. High windows set into the far wall let in a dusty light. A small forge glows in one corner. One of the Corio brothers, clad in a leather apron, is beating still-glowing iron into shape. The ringing of his hammer sings around the plaster walls. In the centre of the space sits a large, circular cradle-like structure of wood. It rests on four splayed feet, carved in the shape of a crouching lion’s paws, claws extended. By the chisel marks, Nicholas can see it is a work in progress.
‘A nice touch, don’t you think?’ Bruno asks. ‘The emblem of Venice is the winged lion. He’ll like that, the doge, when it’s all gilded properly. Our goldsmith, Signor Bondoni, says it should be done by the Feast of St Francis. But he has six children by his mistress, who’s an ogre, so we have to be flexible in the exact timing.’
Propped against one wall are the quadrants of a huge brass ring, which – when completed – Nicholas judges will be twice the height of a man in diameter.
‘That’s the equator ring,’ Bruno explains. ‘It will sit on the rim of the cradle. The sphere will revolve within it. Of course, when I say sphere, it’s actually concentric rings that move the sun, the stars and the planets in their appropriate motions. The true sphere, the earth itself, is at the very heart of the engine and remains motionless, just as the true earth sits motionless at the centre of the cosmos.’
‘You really can do this,’ Bianca says, smiling in admiration. She embraces her little cousin. ‘I’m so proud of you, Bruno. I take back all my doubts.’
Proudly Bruno leads them to a bench where young Matteo Fedele is bent over a spread of papers, making notes and calculations with a quill.
‘How goes it, Signor Matteo?’ Bruno asks.
Fedele looks up with a start. ‘Forgive me, I was miles away. The maestro set me to thinking on how it might be possible to show the flight of meteors through the celestial rings. I told him that everyone with any learning knows meteors emanate from within the earth and glow because they absorb the sun’s heat as they travel through the heavens. Therefore they should not be depicted in the orbits of the planets.’
‘And the answer Signor Compass gave you?’
Matteo’s cleft lip gives a little quiver of indignation. ‘He told me I had the imagination of a castrated lapdog.’
‘Knowing Signor Compass, I think you escaped lightly.’
Matteo rubs his forehead. ‘But I still can’t work out how to do it. It would be a lot easier if we were making a sphere based on what Signor Copernicus writes. If the sun were at the centre of the engine instead of the earth, we wouldn’t need nearly so many cogs and counter-movements.’
The colour drains from Bruno’s face. A nervous tick causes the corner of one eye to tremble. ‘I don’t want to hear that, Matteo. We’re doing this to make money.’ He adds, as an afterthought, ‘And for the glory of the Republic, of course. That’s a given. I have no intention of getting into the middle of a philosophical debate.’
‘It does seem a shame not to consider the latest thinking on the matter,’ Nicholas observes. ‘Seeing how much effort you’re putting into this device.’
‘I am reliably informed by Signor Galileo that no one in Venice gives any credence to such a demonstrably false idea, Nicholas,’ Bruno says. ‘If the doge doesn’t disagree with Holy Mother Church, I’m not going to be the first one to tell him he ought to. You clever fellows can debate such matters all you like, but I’m a businessman. And I have no interest in being burned alive in the Piazza dei Signori. I have sensitive toes.’
Bianca says gravely, ‘Don’t joke about such matters, Cousin. Remember what happened to my father, dying alone in a cold cell because he challenged the Church’s dogma on how the world is made. It is why I left Padua. Don’t give me reason for a second exile.’
Bruno answers her with a dazzling smile. ‘Rest easy, Cousin,’ he says. ‘Not even the Holy Father in Rome and all his cardinals – be they as pious as St Peter – will find a single fault with what your clever cousin and Signor Compass are building here. If Church dogma says the earth is made of custard, then I would happily give His Serenity a custard earth. And I won’t risk being burned for heresy by sticking a cherry in it, either.’ He points at the high windows of the storehouse. ‘Do it any other way and, if I open that, I’ll be able to hear that rogue Santucci laughing at me all the way from Florence.’
Bruno has hired a barge for an afternoon on the river. He says it’s what all the best people do. He tells them it’s in honour of Bianca’s return to Padua and her marriage to Nicholas. Galileo and Matteo Fedele are invited – the professor because he is good company, Matteo in reward for his labour. Luca and Alonso pack sausages of fine Lombardy pork, Lodigiano cheese and a skin full of rich red wine. ‘Best make it two,’ says Bruno. ‘Signor Compass will have had a hard morning trying to unblock the ears of his students.’
The sky is the purest blue, the shade beneath the boat’s awning soporific. While Bruno and Bianca doze, Nicholas develops an easy friendship with the professor of mathematics. Both of a similar age, both from relatively humble origins, both harbouring a mistrust of ancient teaching, they find they have much in common. Where Nicholas’s Italian fails, they revert to Latin, the professional language they share.
To Nicholas’s surprise and delight, he discovers Galileo refuses to wear a professor’s toga when out in the city streets. He thinks of the disgust on the faces of the Censors of the College of Physicians when he’d told them he’d thrown his own gown into the Thames, rejecting the false efficacy of so much of his medical training.
Galileo promises to introduce him to the famous Girolamo Fabrici, professor of anatomy and surgery. As the wineskins flatten and the villas on the banks of the Bacchiglione drift by in the hazy afternoon heat, Nicholas begins to think there could be worse places in the world than Padua to be a physician. Beside him, Bianca watches the world drift pass, aware that something is missing. It is the familiar ache that she’s been expecting for days now. The one that warns her menses are on the way.