42
Nicholas is upon him even as the man turns, alerted by his footsteps and his sudden, agonized intake of breath. Indifferent to the near-certainty that the assassin has a blade, Nicholas hauls him off Bianca’s body, smashing his fist into his upturned, startled face. He doesn’t feel the damage done to his own knuckles. The rage, the despair, makes pain meaningless. He strikes again, driving the man down as though he would batter him into the very earth itself and bury him. He raises his fist to strike a third time, all restraint gone, only raw murder in his mind.
And then Bianca’s voice stays his hand.
‘Nicholas, for the love of Jesu, leave Ruben be! You’re killing him.’
His right elbow thrust out at an acute angle, his balled fist held at the instant before he smashes it home, Nicholas freezes. The man slithers away from him, groaning, his face bloodied.
‘Ruben?’ he repeats, confused beyond measure. ‘You know him?’
‘I do, now,’ Bianca says. ‘His name is Ruben Maas. He’s Hella’s brother – the priest. And he wasn’t trying to harm me. In fact I owe him my life.’
For a moment Nicholas does not understand. Then he remembers the conversation he and Hella had in the forest outside Clairvaux Abbey, when she told him of the Spanish fury at Breda and the slaughter of her family: The day of the massacre I was with my twin brother, Ruben… I didn’t see him more than once or twice after that… He became a priest.
Nicholas hauls the cowering Ruben to his feet. ‘Is this true?’ he asks, still half-consumed by a murderous anger.
Ruben Maas answers in passable English, distorted only by a Dutch accent and the fact that blood from his nose and lips has found its way in no small quantity into his mouth.
‘Yes, it is true. I try my best to protect your woman. But I am not a man of action. I am a man of God. Violence does not come readily to me.’
Nicholas fishes a kerchief from his doublet and hands it to the man to clean his face. ‘If you’re a priest, why aren’t you dressed like one?’
Ruben tries to smile. ‘I have no stomach to be a martyr. I am a Lutheran. And while I may be a coward, I am no fool. Only a fool would flaunt his Protestant faith in a papist country.’
Another fragment of the conservation in the Forest of Troyes comes back to Nicholas: He refused to countenance that God could be a Catholic, like the Spanish who had murdered our family…
‘Why have you been following us all the way from Reims?’ he asks.
Ruben Maas lets out a bitter laugh that bubbles through the blood seeping from his mouth. ‘Reims? I’ve been following you from Den Bosch.’
‘But why?’
The young priest struggles to force himself upright. Nicholas’s assault has taken the strength out of his legs. He sways precariously. Nicholas puts out a hand to steady him and Maas flinches, as though he anticipates another blow.
‘It’s alright,’ Nicholas assures him. ‘I will not strike you again. But tell me why you’ve been following us all this way.’
Ruben Maas looks into Nicholas’s eyes with the pain of a man who knows he cannot meet the measure he has set for himself. He says, ‘Because I wanted to stop my sister from committing the sin of murder – again.’
‘Are you too elevated to march with us tonight, Professor Galileo?’ calls a voice teasingly from the Piazza dei Signori. ‘Is our company too dull for your exceptional mind? Or are you too drunk to walk in a straight line?’
Looking up from his wine, the mathematician sees the procession has come to one of its frequent halts. Directly in front of him, grouped in an untidy gaggle around the university’s banner, are the senior men from the Palazzo Bo. In the fog, their black scholastic togas soften their outlines, making them look as though the darkness of the night has taken on a solid, human form. By the light of the torches their servants carry, he can see them grinning at him.
‘Maestro Fabrici,’ he calls back, recognizing the speaker, ‘our august professor of anatomy! Off to do some butchery, are you? Bring me back a good slice of fresh pork.’
‘I’ll bring you back a dozen, if you like – but I doubt you’d be able to count them accurately.’
Galileo raises his cup in a good-natured salute. ‘Tell me, Professor, is the door to your new anatomy theatre locked?’
‘Locked? It doesn’t have a door yet. And I intend to take that up with Signor Fassolato of the Arte dei Carpentieri straight after Mass. Why do you wish to know?’
‘An assignation, Professor Fabrici,’ Galileo says, picking the first fiction that comes into his head. ‘You must remember those – though, in your case, it would be a very ancient memory.’
‘You’re a disgrace to the university, Professor Galileo,’ Fabrici replies with good humour, bringing mutters of agreement from his companions.
‘So anyone can just walk in?’
‘Holy Mother of God! Don’t tell me you’re inviting an audience to watch you in your rutting? Are you that desperate to raise money?’
‘Just wondered. It doesn’t sound very secure.’
‘We have a watchman, so you’ll have to bribe him.’ Fabrici gives him a foxy stare. ‘If that’s beyond even your limited resources, I can only suggest you find a convenient wall, like the lecherous rogue you clearly are.’
The drums have started up again, echoing from the head of the procession somewhere on the way to the Basilica of St Anthony. The professors gather up the hems of their togas and prepare to resume their un-martial shuffling.
‘If there should happen to be any sign of…’ Fabrici screws up his face in disgust, ‘fornication… in my anatomy theatre tomorrow morning, Professor Galileo, I shall have stern words with the rector.’
‘Why?’ says the mathematician, making a farewell flourish with his free hand as the professors move off. ‘Does the rector use it, too?’
The blood on Bianca’s dress comes from a glancing slash to her shoulder.
‘It’s not deep,’ Nicholas says, after a careful inspection. ‘But it needs binding.’ He unlaces her sleeve, removes his own doublet, rips one sleeve off his linen shirt and tears a makeshift bandage. When he has tied it in place, he turns his attention to Ruben Maas. The priest’s right eye is half-shut, the socket bloodied from where Nicholas’s first blow landed. He is dabbing his mouth with his kerchief to staunch the bleeding from the gash in his lower lip.
‘Forgive me,’ Nicholas says, ‘but I had every reason to think you were an assassin. You must see how it looked–’
The priest nods slowly through the pain. ‘There is no blame, I have brought all this on myself,’ he says miserably. ‘I am a weak man. A man of faith, not of violence. But even I should have had the courage to have acted earlier, in the cathedral at Den Bosch. Then perhaps I could have stopped all this in its tracks.’
Nicholas stares at him. ‘In the cathedral at Den Bosch? It was you in that chamber? You’re the one I caught a glimpse of as you fled?’
‘I had no idea Hella was going to kill the priest, or the Spaniard. It all happened so quickly. But then, ever since Breda she has been like that: one moment calm and placid, the next a raging she-devil. I believe it is because she has Satan inside her heart. He makes her hate herself.’
‘Hella?’ Nicholas breathes. ‘She killed them?’ He shakes his head in disbelief. ‘Why was I so blind? She wasn’t screaming in that chamber because of what she’d witnessed. She realized it was too late to run, and the knife was out of reach on the floor. She was screaming to fool me.’ He stoops to retrieve his doublet from the floor and slips it on, leaving the points unlaced. ‘Help me get my wife to the Borgo dei Argentieri,’ he says curtly, his face creased with self-recrimination. ‘I can bathe her wound properly there – and yours. You can explain everything as we go.’