‘There, sweet, there. Trouble yourself no more. You will sleep easy tonight.’
She looks up at him. ‘How?’ she asks. ‘How shall I sleep, when all I think about is losing my Ned?’
‘Let me tell you of the time before I met you, Rose,’ he begins. She feels the great rumbling of his voice through his shirt, as it flows from the wellspring deep inside him. ‘You know well that I was a solitary man…’
She nods.
‘My days and my nights were not spent like other men’s. I lived amongst the dead – in the mortuary crypt at St Tom’s hospital. You know that.’
Another nod.
‘The dead were all I had for company. They were poor, for the most part: men, women, children… vagrants, vagabonds, outcasts… sailors drowned in the river… suicides destined to lie alone in unconsecrated ground. They were my only company. An’ when they left the crypt for a pauper’s grave – an unmarked pauper’s grave – they had only me to remember them, to mourn them. So I remembered their names. An’ if they had no name, why, I would give them one. An’ every day I would take a moment to speak those names – a score or so in a sitting – so that they would not be forgotten.’
Ned pulls Rose even closer. She can smell his unwashed body and the musty smell of his linen shirt. It is like a balm to her. He could be a father soothing his child to sleep, telling her a tale of knights and princesses, dragons and queens. She feels safe for the first time in weeks.
‘So fear not for my memory, Rose Monkton,’ he whispers softly as he kisses the top of her head, inhaling the clean scent of apple from the pomatum she uses to tame her wild curls, ‘’tis as sharp as it ever was.’
As Bruno Barrani approaches the stone bridge to the Porta Portello in the early evening of the following day, his thoughts whine like the clouds of zanzare rising from the surface of the canal. And, like their bites, they cannot be ignored. Until the Podestà acceded to his request for the Arte dei Astronomi to take part in the great parade to celebrate the Feast of the Holy Rosary, he hadn’t appreciated how much there would be to consider.
For instance: where in the parade should the Arte be permitted to march? At the front, naturally, Bruno had suggested boldly. The Podestà had laughed at that, pointing out that the vanguard was reserved for the most influential guild – the richest guild. The best Bruno had been able to screw out of the pompous old clown was a position in the rear third, between the water carriers and the basket weavers. That had stung. But he could live with it; next year, perhaps…
Then there was the matter of a suitable banner. After much consideration, he had decided upon a field of dark-blue silk, with a pattern of stars woven out of gilded thread. It would be carried on a cross of spruce.
Livery was something else he hadn’t thought about until now. The city’s newest company could not possibly march in its present attire. Look at the Corio brothers: they dress like bandits. Bondoni can’t afford to dress any better than a beggar, because his mistress and their six children leave him without so much as a scudo for clothes. So Bruno has had to pay through the nose to get them fitted out. And finding a tailor at this late hour who can stitch a straight seam has taken all his ingenuity. Still, he thinks, it will all be worth it when his own bust is placed with great ceremony upon the balustrade of this bridge, beside the other great men of Padua.
He has called a meeting of the Arte to let its members know how diligently he has been working on their behalf, and to dismiss their usual complaints and objections. He is early. This is because first he wishes to see if Pasolini the carpenter has delivered the corrected segments of the mount that carries the sphere’s equatorial ring. He doesn’t trust Pasolini’s eye. He intends to lay out the segments himself, checking that they fit together and that, once assembled, they form a circle and not something resembling a child’s doodle.
So engrossed in these practicalities is Bruno that it is only in the instant before they collide that he notices the man hurrying towards him from the opposite direction.
They meet at the crown of the bridge. Bruno opens his mouth to apologize. Or to protest. Later, he won’t be able to remember which. He catches only an indistinct impression of someone in a plain grey coat, his leather half-boots playing a staccato drumbeat on the pavement, a black cap of Germanic style on his head. He might have heard a muttered apology, but there again he might not. And if he did, it was in a foreign language. Sotto voce.
The collision is glancing, shoulder-to-shoulder. But it is enough to make Bruno – by a good margin the smaller of the two – stumble.
When he has regained his balance, he turns. But all he sees is the man’s back, disappearing into a lane adjacent to the one from which he himself emerged just a few moments before. He utters a coarse condemnation of the foreign students at the university and their deplorable manners. It does not occur to Bruno for a moment that he might have veered into the man’s path because he was distracted. Nor is his mind clear enough to connect the man in the grey coat with the description Nicholas had given a few days before.
The man who rents the storehouse – from another man who rents the storehouse – has provided Bruno with a key to the side-door. Bruno has become concerned that the theatrical rapping of an appropriate code on the big entry doors at the front is too likely to attract attention. But when he follows the side-wall, he sees that the smaller, single door is ajar.
He hears the buzzing of the flies – smells the blood – even before he puts one smartly booted foot across the threshold.
The interior is hot and stuffy, neatly partitioned by columns of evening sunlight lancing down from the high windows. They fall upon the cradle of the great sphere, remaking it as an altar or tabernacle dedicated to some ancient pagan god. Lying across one of them is a body, the arms stretched out in the stance of a diver caught mid-plunge. As Bruno approaches, the little cloud of flies lifts and disperses, like fragments of a soul fleeing heavenwards. He stops a few paces away, his heart pounding.
Face-down, the youth’s head has been battered against the floor, the bloodied tangled hair dishevelled. Lying discarded across the neck is an iron bar, part of the sphere’s internal mechanism. Even before he moves closer to kneel beside the body, Bruno knows he is looking at the corpse of Matteo Fedele.
36
Searching for a pulse seems pointless. The back of Matteo’s head looks as though it has been savaged by the claws of a wild beast. A broad trail of blood smeared across the flagstones marks his desperate but ultimately futile attempt to crawl away from his attacker, even as the blows rained down and the life drained out of him. But in forlorn hope, Bruno does so. He finds nothing. But Matteo has not been dead for long. Warmth still lingers in the flesh.
Leaving Matteo’s body, Bruno embarks on an inspection of the storehouse. His first thoughts, to his shame, are for the sphere. He checks to see if any of the stacks of parts have been smashed or stolen. He finds them intact, save for a few sections of gilded wooden rings – now bloodstained – that have been scattered during Matteo’s desperate struggle to escape. He offers up a brief prayer of repentance to the nearest beam of sunlight for his insensitivity and turns his attention back to the crime.
Following the winding wake of smeared blood, he comes across the place where he assumes the attack began. It is in a corner, well away from the main entrance or the side-door, marked by a sudden spray of crimson droplets. A surprise attack then, after Matteo invited his killer in. No chance to defend himself.