She gives a half-hearted laugh at his attempt to console her. ‘This is different. I don’t know why, but I feel it in my bones.’
‘Is this to do with what passed between you and Hella on the Via Francigena? You still haven’t really told me what happened.’
‘I can’t,’ she says, tears welling in her eyes.
‘Why not? How bad could it be?’
‘It would make it real. Words are like stones, Nicholas. Once made, they are indestructible.’
He holds her close, knowing that to press her further will only add to her distress.
‘There are people on Bankside who believe I have second sight,’ she says, wanting his embrace, yet afraid it might feel like the embrace of a stranger. ‘Do you believe it?’
‘I wouldn’t put it past you, Bianca Merton.’
‘And do you believe Hella can see into the future, the way she claims?’
‘I think she has suffered greatly in the past, and blames herself for it. I think she looked too deeply into grief and found patterns there, when there were no real patterns to be found.’
‘You’re defending her?’
He lets go of her and stands. Bianca follows, watching him as he chooses the right words.
‘I’m a physician. I know that maladies are not confined to the body alone. The mind and the soul can sicken, too. Professor Fabrici can dissect all the cadavers he wants, but he cannot see inside a single human thought.’
‘Are you going to try to heal her, if she comes to you?’
Nicholas takes her in his arms again, running a hand through the thick, dark waves of her hair, brushing away a strand that has fallen wilfully over one eye. ‘I cannot turn away someone who is sick. It is not in my nature. You must trust me to know what is right.’
‘I thought that is what you would say.’
She sinks into his chest, laying her face alongside his neck. On the gravel path behind them, two white-haired men in professorial gowns walk past, casting scowls of disapproval at the show of intimacy. Neither Nicholas nor Bianca notices them.
‘Nicholas,’ she says after a while, ‘I believe I am pregnant.’
Releasing her, he holds her at arm’s length as though he’s inspecting something he has long coveted, but can only now afford. Then he steps back, throws his arms wide and makes three joyous circles on the path, hopping from one foot to the other as he turns, silently, though his grin is wide enough for all the words in the world to spill out.
Bianca watches him. She wants so much to sense the swell of joy in her own heart. To match his unbridled happiness. But all she can feel at this moment is fear.
32
At the house in the Borgo dei Argentieri, Bruno has ordered a feast in celebration of Bianca’s news. Alonso and Luca are dispatched at the double, returning laden with gleaming hams, vegetables bright enough to dazzle the eyes and glistening sardele and orata, which they swear on their lives arrived on ice from the Venetian lagoon this very dawn. Bruno’s collection of best plate is carried ceremoniously from his chamber, where it is kept in a locked chest on account of his servants’ propensity to forget about the rules of ownership.
‘A black bean or white bean?’ asks Bruno, grinning like a carnival mask.
Nicholas looks perplexed.
‘It’s the way the city used to record births,’ Bianca explains, sounding oddly subdued to Nicholas. ‘Beans placed in a box: black for a boy, white for a girl.’ Then, to Bruno, ‘It will be a white bean.’
‘Or a black bean,’ says Nicholas, smiling.
And then Bianca says, with a harshness that makes him glance at her in surprise, ‘White or black, as long as it’s a bean and not a poison berry.’
That evening, in their chamber, he says, ‘You have to tell me what’s wrong. You are beginning to trouble me – deeply.’
‘Do you believe in curses, Nicholas?’ she asks, in an absentminded way. ‘I suppose not. Your vaunted new learning will tell you to believe only what you can see… touch… measure.’
‘Is that what this ill humour is about? Has Hella Maas laid a curse upon you?’ he asks, astonished.
But Bianca does not answer. She turns away from him, and he can tell by the way her shoulders are tightly hunched that she is on the verge of either tears or an explosion of anger. He is unsure which he fears most.
In the dormitory of Padua’s Beguinage, the Sisters dream their pious dreams. The squat, stripped-down villa just outside the walls of the Seminary Maggiore is home to some twenty of them, the youngest seventeen, the oldest eighty-six. Being neither nuns nor wholly secular, they are a constant worry to the seminary’s praeceptor and a source of endless speculation by his young male students. If they are not exactly brides of Christ, he tells them, you may at least regard them as loosely betrothed.
As the Seminary bell marks midnight, its deep bass voice sending tremors through the Beguinage like spasms through a dying body, only two of the Sisters are still awake, sharing their mattress with two older women who snore contentedly in the darkness. One is Hella Maas. The other is a plump raven-haired girl, a year or two younger.
‘Madonna Antonella asked me where you go each day,’ Sister Carlotta says, her voice breathless with excitement. In the Beguinage, Madonna Antonella represents authority and, like young women everywhere, Sister Carlotta enjoys the thrill of defying it, even though she does so only in the smallest of measures. ‘I told her that you go to the Basilica of St Anthony, to be nearer to God. But I know that’s not it. I saw you yesterday in the Borgo dei Vignali, going into a house.’
‘Have you been spying on me, little Carlotta?’ Hella asks.
‘No! I was taking a message from Madonna Antonella to Father Giuseppe at St Angelo’s. I happened to see you, that’s all.’ A thought occurs to Carlotta, sending a tremor of vicarious pleasure through her body. ‘Are you seeing a man, Hella? Tell me! I promise I will keep your secret.’
It has taken Hella some time to bend little Sister Carlotta to her will. She has done so carefully, so as not to raise her suspicions. She has played on Carlotta’s gullibility, and her desperate need for a companion who can make her days a little more exciting. It could prove useful, Hella thinks, to have a tame creature to do my bidding, run my errands, lie for me.
‘We’re not living in a nunnery, or a prison, sweet little Carlotta,’ she says enigmatically, watching the tallow candle flicker weakly in the corner of the dormitory, set there that the older Sisters might find the night-soil pot without kicking its contents over the floor. ‘Don’t you want to know what it’s like?’
Carlotta almost squeals. ‘I don’t believe you. How can you be truly pious and yet give yourself in lust?’
‘What do you think the priests and bishops do? What do you think the Pope does?’
Another slack-mouthed gasp of excited horror. ‘You cannot say such things! It is blasphemy! You’ll be damned to the everlasting fires.’
Hella tries to stop herself smiling. Captured, she thinks. She arches her back in readiness for sleep, stares at the darkened ceiling and imagines a great golden sphere of planets and stars turning inexorably through the years towards the end of days. ‘Oh, sweet Carlotta,’ she whispers knowingly, ‘have no fear on my account. I won’t be the only one.’
In the storehouse by the river, old Bondoni the goldsmith watches anxiously while the Corio brothers hammer a series of cog-wheels onto an iron spindle the length of a man’s arm. In his hand is a gleaming brass ring from which extend a series of wires, each with a small gilded ball on the end. From each ball flows a fiery wavy tail of beaten copper. In the corner, a Corio assistant is pumping the bellows of a forge, sending showers of sparks dancing through the dusty air.