In their brief exchange beside the Gattamelata statue, they had agreed to meet outside the storehouse. But when it looms out of the fog, Bianca can see no trace of Hella. Looking upwards, she notices the glimmer of a torch or taper burning within.
She tries the huge wooden main doors, but they are locked. Slipping cautiously down the side of the building, she finds the door there ajar.
‘Hella? Are you there?’ she calls out softly.
Receiving no answer, she steps inside.
Hella is waiting for her in front of the empty cradle of Bruno’s great sphere. In the light from a lantern set upon a stack of large iron cog-wheels, she stands legs akimbo, her plain hessian gown reminding Bianca of the tougher girls who lived around her family’s lodgings and used to challenge her to fight, calling her the bastard prodigy of a Paduan mother and a heretic foreigner. She has the same swagger, the same spoiling for a brawl. And she is as unlike the pious maid from Den Bosch as Bianca can imagine. She could almost believe the maid has been possessed.
‘So you’ve found the courage to come?’ Hella says. ‘I wasn’t sure you would.’
‘We agreed to it. We Caporettis keep our promises.’
‘What do you want of me, Bianca? I have things to do. Time is running out.’
‘So you keep telling us.’
Hella allows herself a wry smile, the bestowing of respect on an adversary she might have misjudged.
Bianca forces a stillness upon herself. ‘I have come to make amends,’ she says. ‘To ask you to lift the curse you have laid upon me.’
‘Have I cursed you? I don’t recall.’
‘In Reims, and upon the pilgrim road – you foretold a tragedy for Nicholas and me. I want you to renounce it. I ask you to take back your curse.’
‘And if I don’t?’
Bianca tightens her jaw. Then I will ask Tiziano to make the venom linger in your body, so that my judgement is worse than any you might have seen in that painting, worse than any you already fear.
‘Or nothing,’ she says, as pleasantly as she can manage. ‘I ask simply as a woman who loves her husband and would see him happy.’
Hella smiles. It is the coldest of any smile Bianca has yet seen her give.
‘Nicholas will be happy,’ she says. ‘Once he is with me.’
‘Is that what all this has been about?’ Bianca snaps. ‘All the cruel talk of dead children, stillbirth and barrenness? Was it all just to send me into a confusion, so that I would doubt myself? So that you could drive a shard of ice between me and the man I love?’
Hella steps forward until she is close enough for Bianca to touch. Her pupils seem as large as golden florins, reflecting the lantern light. One corner of her mouth cracks open, like a pike about to snatch a minnow.
And then Bianca hears a sudden movement behind her. A voice calls out, guttural and harsh. The words mean nothing to her. They are shouted in a language she cannot understand. She turns.
Framed in the doorway is the figure of a man.
A man in a grey coat.
41
‘You seem untroubled by the thought of an assassin in this city,’ Nicholas says, surprised by Galileo’s airy dismissal of the warning he has just delivered. The mathematician has listened to his recounting of the death of the goldsmith Bondoni with little more than mild interest.
‘You have no proof that Bondoni was pushed. Every year someone gets hurt or killed in that horse race. I think you’re reading too much into it. And as for Matteo, he was a young fellow with a roving eye. This is Padua, Nicholas, feuds are our meat and drink. There’s always someone who thinks he has a legitimate quarrel with you – even if you’ve never met him before.’
Nicholas remembers the altercation he’d had with the youth outside the church. Perhaps Galileo is right. ‘But what about the man in the grey coat that Bruno saw before he found Matteo Fedele’s body?’
‘A man in a grey coat – which, according to Signor Purse, had no bloodstains on it.’
‘Bianca and I were followed from Reims by such a man.’
‘That doesn’t make him an assassin, does it? Besides, why would anyone follow you and that comely wife of yours all the way from France and then start murdering associates of Signor Purse – in Padua? It makes no sense.’
‘I don’t know,’ Nicholas confesses. ‘But I fear Hella could be in danger. Indeed, so could anyone in Bruno’s new guild. Speaking of Bruno, have you seen him of late?’
‘Not since this morning, but there’s nothing remarkable in that.’
‘I still think you should be careful.’
Galileo studies the bottom of his empty wine cup. ‘I thought the English were supposed to be unexcitable fellows.’
‘Are you not troubled by the possibility I might be right?’
The mathematician shrugs. ‘In all honesty, I have had little to do with Bruno’s wild scheme, other than to lend my name to it. It was Matteo who put in the hard effort. Besides, I’m accomplished at avoiding characters who wish me ill. I’ve been dodging my brother-in-law over my sister’s dowry for months. He still hasn’t caught me, and let me tell you: Signor Benedetto Landucci is a very persistent fellow.’
‘A dowry can’t stab you between the ribs, Signor Galileo.’
Galileo gives a snort of appreciative laughter. ‘Maybe not, but I’m safe enough here. Who in their right mind would attack a peaceable fellow like me, in the middle of the celebrations of the Holy Rosary? Unless he was a creditor, of course. There’s a whole army of those.’ He sets down his cup. ‘Talking of credit, mine’s run out. Fancy more wine? I’ll pay you back tomorrow.’
Exasperated by the mathematician’s sangfroid, but at the same time amused by his audacity, Nicholas calls to a waiting servant, orders another jug and pays for it. From across the Piazza dei Signori comes a sudden thunder of drums. Looking up, Nicholas sees the liveried bearers hoisting the Venetian galley aloft. He rises from the table.
‘Not going to help me drink it, Master Physician?’ Galileo asks in surprise.
‘I’m supposed to be marching with Bruno. I’ve probably missed him in this fog. He’ll be wondering where I am.’
Galileo fills his cup and raises it in a toast. ‘You’re a good fellow, Niccolò – for an English heretic. But I think you’re seeing goblins hiding under tables.’
‘Perhaps I am,’ Nicholas says with a smile, though underneath he feels a sense of unease. ‘But I’d still counsel you to take care. There may be people here tonight more dangerous than brothers-in-law.’
In the Piazza dei Signori and the adjoining side-streets the members of the city guilds have assembled beneath their banners. The sound of drumming fills the night. There is expectation in the foggy air. Nicholas is reminded of an army flushed with the thrill of conquest, preparing to march out for the final battle, exultant.
He does not share this exhilaration. The hour has come, and still there is no sign of Bruno Barrani. Worse still Luca has arrived, and he has come alone. ‘But the Signora was not in your chamber,’ he protests, looking about uneasily as though he has mislaid something precious entrusted to his care. ‘I knocked, but she had gone. I assumed she had made her own way here.’
‘It’s not your fault, Luca,’ Nicholas says, taking in the faces gathered beneath the banner of dark-blue silk emblazoned with its shooting star. They drift across his vision like half-remembered acquaintances from the past: Alonso, Mirandola the clockmaker, Pasolini the carpenter, the Corio brothers, the engraver Carlo Pomponazzi, and a gaggle of accompanying apprentices and servants. There must be almost a score of them. But no Bruno. No Bianca. The unease he’d experienced when leaving Galileo Galilei in the Piazza dei Signori a few minutes ago suddenly has the weight of lead about it.