It’s just nesting birds, gumming up the mechanism with straw and mud, the Podestà’s men announce. We’ll have it fixed in time for the horse race. But their assurances find little purchase with those who prefer a more supernatural explanation.
In the race stables, the favourite stallion suddenly rears without warning. Panicked, its flailing hooves break the skull of the groom’s thirteen-year-old assistant. The groom lays the blame on a rat seen running across the cobbles. Highly strung stallions are prone to such terrors, he tells the owner – who has him soundly flogged for trying to spook the horse on behalf of a competitor in the hope that it might injure itself. But by the time the news is common knowledge, another explanation is already in play: the mount reared in terror when an eagle – the colour of the darkest night – alighted upon the rail of its stall.
The wise men at the university on the Palazzo Bo laugh at these stories. The common people do not. Italians, Bianca reminds Nicholas as they walk to the Piazza dei Signori to watch the start of the race, often have superstition running in their veins more thickly than blood. But it doesn’t make them stupid.
The piazza itself is too packed for Bianca’s liking, so they find a place in a nearby street where there is still room to stand in relative safety, their backs to the stucco houses. The make-up of the crowd has Nicholas imagining that the entire population of Padua has been poured into a bucket, stirred with a ladle and decanted into the streets. Gallants in satin doublets and striped hose rub shoulders with artisans in broadcloth; women in vibrant gowns stand beside friars in brown sackcloth; children shelter between the steel knee-guards of men-at-arms, glancing up at them with wary fascination.
The Podestà’s men have proved to be overconfident. The hour-hand of the clock on the Torre dell’Orologio is still jammed. But the bell in the tower works. As it begins to toll, the Podestà drops his official baton. In the side-street where Nicholas and Bianca are standing, heads turn expectantly towards the great roar coming from the Piazza dei Signori. Bianca clings tightly to Nicholas’s arm.
And then the ground seems to sing, as though an invisible tide is beginning to flow over the cobbles. Bianca senses the people around her holding their collective breath. From the direction of the piazza comes a noise that she can only liken to barrels of ale rolling down the ramp to the Jackdaw’s brewhouse. Faint at first, it swiftly rises to a frightening roar.
At the end of the side-street where it gives onto the Piazza dei Signori, a tight phalanx of horses bursts out of the mist. Heads tossing, jaws grinding on iron bits, nostrils gaping, spume flying, they plunge forward like creatures fleeing out of hell. Their jockeys ride bareback, stirrupless. Clad in vibrantly coloured silk tunics, they crouch low over the necks of their mounts, gripping the reins with one hand, lashing furiously with a leather crop held in the other. For Nicholas, it is impossible to distinguish the crowd’s shrieks of terror from its screams of encouragement. He has the brief impression of a dark wall of rippling muscle bearing down upon him, then a roar like a mountain falling into a wild ocean.
And then they are gone. Almost as one, the crowd lining the street turns to watch them go. Catching his breath, Nicholas says, ‘I’ve never seen the like. It was terrifying.’
‘I don’t like the way they whip the horses,’ Bianca confesses. ‘And you wouldn’t want to be a bull in Italy.’
He looks at her quizzically. ‘A bull? The Paduans race bulls, too?’
‘No, Husband,’ she replies, grinning. ‘The whips. If you’re a bull, they cut off your pizzle, dry it out in the sun, stretch it and make a lash out of it.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind, next time we argue,’ he says, realizing that it’s the first time they have laughed together in a long while.
And then he notices, further down the street, people beginning to break away from the crowd. They are running in the direction of the vanished horses, and something about the agitation in them tells him these are not merely supporters trying to follow the progress of the race. Something is amiss. A woman’s scream pierces the mist.
‘Oh, Jesu, there’s been an accident,’ Bianca says, raising a hand to her mouth.
Without even thinking, Nicholas runs towards the commotion, Bianca at his heels. Rounding the bend at the end of the street, he runs into the back of a throng of spectators, all jostling for a view. He calls out in Italian, ‘I’m a physician, let me pass.’ Grudgingly, the crowd separates and Nicholas finds himself at the front.
A crumpled, bloodied figure in bright-yellow Venetian hose lies face-down in the street, his awful stillness a rebuke to the agitation of the people gathered around him. Rivulets of blood snake out through the spread of white hair, finding the easiest path through the cobbles like the first tentative signs of a turning tide. Too old to be a competitor, Nicholas thinks.
A quick glance around tells him he is right. Two horses stand a short way off. One is being calmed by his rider, who stands beside his mount’s sweating neck, cursing his luck. The other is riderless, his head making great sweeping bows, vapour pluming from his nostrils. A spectator struggles to hold him steady by the reins. The jockey sits propped up against the wall of a house, his face screwed up in agony, one leg twisted outwards at a sickening angle. Someone has torn away the hose from the injured limb and an elderly, grey-haired man in a black gown has his ear close to the flesh, listening for the telltale noise of bone fragments moving. Nicholas recognizes him from his visits to the Palazzo Bo as a colleague of Professor Fabrici.
Satisfied the jockey is in good hands, Nicholas turns his attention to the body in the street. As he does so, a woman and a clutch of children break out of the crowd and fall upon the inert form lying on the cobbles, wailing and lamenting with piercing cries. The woman, stout and plump-cheeked, rolls the body onto its back. She cradles it in her muscular arms, turns her tear-drenched face to the opaque sky and begins to harangue an uncaring God.
‘Merciful Mother of Jesus,’ Bianca whispers at the same instant that Nicholas recognizes the dead man. ‘It’s one of Bruno’s people – it’s the goldsmith, Signor Bondoni.’
40
The people emerging from the mist, heading towards the Piazza dei Signori to watch the start of the parade, or to the Basilica of St Anthony to catch its end, barely notice the couple passing in the opposite direction towards the Borgo dei Argentieri, heads down, lost in their own thoughts.
‘Are you sure?’ says Nicholas for the third time in ten minutes.
‘As sure as I may be,’ Bianca replies wearily. ‘I asked everyone who was standing close to Bondoni the same thing. No one saw him pushed, certainly not by a man in a grey coat and a black cloth cap.’
‘But all eyes were on the horses and riders.’
‘Perhaps it really was just an accident, Nicholas. Every year someone gets injured – even killed – during these races.’
Nicholas lets out a short, brutal laugh. ‘Mind you, with a wife who looked as though she would happily wrestle an armed brigand, and six children with mouths like hungry sparrowhawks, perhaps Bondoni stepped under the horses by choice.’
Bianca rebukes him with a sharp look. ‘Nicholas! You of all people should not make light of the sin of self-destruction. Besides, she wasn’t his wife. Bruno said he has a mistress and six children.’