‘Forgive me for the hurt I did you, Father. Do you feel well enough to come with me? You may be the only man able to avert further tragedy tonight.’
Ruben tries to smile through the swollen corner of his lip. ‘I’ve come this far,’ he says. ‘Only a true coward would give up now.’
The streets around the Palazzo Bo are almost empty. The tail of the procession is somewhere off to the south, towards the Basilica of St Anthony, mired in the fringes of the great crowd filling the Piazza del Santo. But Nicholas can still hear the echoing of drums and the occasional roar of public approval.
By day, the arcades that line the university are teeming with students and scholars, arguing, debating, sometimes even brawling. But tonight they stand empty, like the cloisters of an abandoned monastery. The mist drifts around the arches like a mournful sea lapping at an uninhabited shore. The watchman’s brazier burns unattended. Nicholas calls out, but receives no answer.
‘Perhaps he’s slipped away to watch the procession,’ Ruben says as he and Nicholas lift torches from an iron rack bolted to a pillar and light them in the brazier. Nicholas doesn’t answer. His fear is that the watchman has been lured away not by curiosity, but by some clever deceit – or, worse, that he has met the same fate as the Spaniard at Den Bosch, paying with his life for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
On the way from the Borgo dei Argentieri he has had plenty of time for dark images to crowd his mind. Now he understands Bruno’s failure to join the procession. He is certain that Bruno and the mathematician have somehow been lured to this place by Hella Maas. The knowledge fills him with dread. The fact that she is one young woman, alone, does not ease that dread for an instant.
Torch in hand, the flames casting devilish patterns on the plastered walls, he approaches the empty hole in the night that is the open doorway to the uncompleted anatomy theatre. He senses Ruben hesitate.
‘Be careful,’ he warns the priest. ‘This place is full of workmen’s gear and rubbish. I’ve caused you enough hurt already, without you planting your face on the floor or walking into a beam.’
‘There is no room left in my heart for any further hurt,’ Ruben says grimly. ‘It is too full of pain for what my sister has done.’
On either side of the open doorway a flight of wooden stairs curves away around the elliptical body of the auditorium, creating a narrow space between the inner and outer walls. Ahead of him, through the entrance, Nicholas can see the railed enclosure where Professor Fabrici will carry out his dissections when the anatomy theatre is in use. It is not a large space, just long enough to take a cadaver, with enough room for the lecturer to stand between his subject and the first tier of his audience.
To his horror, he sees the dissection area is not empty. By the torchlight he can make out a figure lying on the platform. He moves cautiously closer, holding up the torch. Suddenly the figure sits up. In Nicholas’s mind, he has just seen a corpse rise from its grave.
‘You’ve left the procession, Signor Physician,’ says Galileo, his voice a little slurred. ‘Wise fellow. Who wants to listen to a priest blessing a toy boat when there are taverns still open?’ He jabs a finger in Nicholas’s direction. ‘I was expecting Master Purse,’ he adds as an afterthought. ‘Has he sent you instead? Have you brought the money with you?’
‘Money?’ echoes Nicholas, confused.
‘Bruno sent me a note to meet him here. He said he had a heavy purse of the doge’s coin to give me.’
‘Did you receive this note from his own hand, Professor?’ Nicholas asks.
‘No, it was a maid. She looked like one of those Poor Clares, clad in sackcloth and brimming with piety.’
Nicholas covers his face with his free hand for a moment, as if to stop his thoughts from spinning and fix them in one place.
‘From Hella Maas?’
‘No, it wasn’t her,’ Galileo says. ‘I’d have recognized her.’
‘I fear greatly for Bruno’s life, Professor – and yours,’ Nicholas tells him. ‘I think you should come away from this place, now. There is great danger here.’
Galileo gets to his feet. He peers at Nicholas in the torchlight, trying to read his face. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’
‘Never more so.’
‘What sort of danger?’
‘Of murder.’
‘You’re still fretting about that, are you? I told you before, no one in this city would bother themselves making an affray upon my life. Apart from dear old Fabrici – and my creditors, of course.’ He frowns at his own reasoning. ‘But then what good would murdering me do them? You can’t get blood out of a stone, and you can’t get a dead man to pay his debts.’
‘The one you have to fear is the maid with the clever brain.’
‘Signorina Maas?’ Galileo says, astonished.
‘It was she who killed Matteo Fedele. Today she murdered the goldsmith, Bondoni. And she would have killed my wife, Bianca, too – had not Ruben here stopped her. I fear you and Bruno are next on her list.’
Galileo seems to chew the air as he digests what Nicholas has told him.
‘Why?’ he demands. ‘I have done her no harm. What does she want to murder me for?’
And then, out of the darkness from one of the tiers above, comes a woman’s voice, calling out in a guttural English.
‘Tell him, Nicholas. You understand the truth. You tell him why he must die.’
In the flickering torchlight, three heads move as one. Three pairs of eyes fix on the figure standing, barely visible, behind the wooden balustrade of the third tier. Hella Maas, dressed as plainly as a martyr at the stake, her hands away from her sides to grip the rail, leans out of the darkness as though intending to address an assembled crowd of loyal followers.
‘I think we should hear the justification from you, Hella,’ Nicholas answers. ‘Do not seek to make me complicit in your madness.’
‘I have to stop them, Nicholas,’ she cries out. ‘The curtain has to be drawn. The door has to be closed. We have let the Devil in too often. If we let him in again, there will be chaos. Judgement Day will be upon us all soon enough. The world must have a little peace before it does. A little rest. How else may we ready ourselves for what is coming?’
Nicholas jams his torch into the narrow gap between the dissection table and its surrounding rail, then climbs up onto the balustrade of the lower observation tier. He reaches out to steady himself against the edge of the tier above, his head tilted back so that he can look up directly into Hella’s face.
‘You are suffering a terrible malady of the soul, Hella. I understand that. But this insanity cannot continue. Come down and let your brother help you.’
Her head turns towards where Ruben stands with Galileo. ‘So the courage you found in the storehouse hasn’t deserted you yet, little brother,’ she says, a sad smile on her face. ‘You couldn’t help me after Breda, and you cannot help me now.’ She leans further out to look down at Nicholas. ‘Only you can help me,’ she says. ‘You, alone, can see a little of what is in my heart. No one else has that faculty.’ She looks puzzled as – beneath her – his face contorts with rejection. ‘You know I am right, Nicholas. Admit it.’
‘That I can see a little of what is in your heart?’ he replies contemptuously. ‘Did you really believe that killing my wife would help me to see more?’
‘She was in the way, Nicholas. She has been in the way since we met. Discard her.’
‘Discard her – for you?’
‘This close to Judgement Day we have to make brave choices.’