Nicholas jumps back down from the rail. ‘Ruben, go to the doorway. Take the steps on the right; I’ll go left. Be careful. I think her mind is so disordered she might strike at either of us without even realizing she’s doing it.’ He turns to the mathematician. ‘Professor, you go to the Piazza del Santo. Tell the first of the Podestà’s night-watch you come across that we need help here. Tell him I fear the doge’s Master of the Spheres is in danger. Hurry!’
Perplexed, Galileo shakes his head. He seems to have sobered up rapidly. ‘Don’t you want me to stay and help? The maid knows me. Perhaps I may reason with her.’
‘There has been nothing resembling reason in that poor maid’s mind for a long while, Professor. And speaking of what is reasonable, getting yourself stabbed as a way of avoiding paying your sister’s dowry is not it.’
With a harsh laugh, the mathematician heads for the doorway, his body silhouetted there by the light of the brazier burning in the mist beyond.
Nicholas takes up the torch from where he planted it and follows him, taking the left-hand flight of wooden steps. Ruben takes the right.
Hemmed into the narrow space between the wall of the auditorium and the outside masonry, Nicholas begins the steep climb into the blackness. Shoulders hunched, he thrusts the torch out ahead of him, moving within its dancing sphere of light into an otherwise impenetrable cosmos.
He climbs the first flight and reaches a curved landing barely wide enough to allow him passage. To his left is an open space to enable the audience of students to spill out and fill the observation tier; to his right, the brickwork of the building’s shell. He hears movement on the tier above, the clatter of footsteps on timber. From the far side of the auditorium comes the sound of Ruben pleading with his sister to stay where she is.
Moving forward, he stumbles upon the next flight of stairs. He begins to climb once more. Again he hears movement above him, a desperate and doomed slithering of shoe leather on freshly planed timber. A crossbeam support left in place by the carpenters springs out of the darkness and almost brains him. And then, out of the wall to his left, Hella emerges.
‘Come with me, Nicholas,’ she says in a pleading voice, holding out her hand, staring at him in the torchlight. ‘Come with me and we will find our rest together, before the last day.’
Turning her back on him, she hurries ahead. He catches a shadowy glimpse of her climbing the next flight of steps. Then he loses her again in the pitch-black confinement of this seemingly never-ending prison.
He does not count the tiers they climb together in this strange pursuit. But then suddenly there are no more steps, just an opening to his left. He turns to face it and steps forward.
By the light of the torch, Nicholas sees he is standing on the very top tier, looking out into space. There is no wooden balustrade here, only an elliptical, uncompleted walkway of planking held up by scaffolding. Two steps forward and he would go over the edge. He feels the unsecured planks move under his feet. Looking down, he sees glimpses of the tiers of the auditorium set out beneath him, as though he were peering over the edge of an elliptical stairwell, forty or more feet down into the darkness. A faint, single wash of yellow from the brazier in the courtyard falls on the now-empty dissection table. He feels his knees weaken, his stomach lurch. His free hand clutches at the wall in a bid to stop the reeling of his senses.
From his right he hears the rasp of planks raking against each other. Turning his head, he catches a glimpse of Hella lunging towards him, her arms outstretched to carry them both over the edge. She moves so quickly, so suddenly, that he doesn’t even think of stepping back out of the way. He closes his eyes and waits to feel the brief moment of fatal freedom as he falls.
The night rings to the sharp crack and clatter of un-nailed planks sprung out of place by the impact of careless feet. A scream. A sickening glissando of impacts as Hella’s body strikes the rails of the lower tiers as it plunges. A final crack – mercifully brief – of a human skull striking the unyielding edge of the dissection table.
Then silence, save for the sound of his own breathing and the faintest rat-a-tat-tat of drums, like the sound of a victorious army leaving the battlefield to the defeated and the dead.
43
A disturbance at the Palazzo Bo – even one involving a fatality – is just another irritant in a busy night for the Podestà and his staff. The night-watch has had its hands full ensuring that the Feast of the Holy Rosary passes off without the great and the good of Padua having their purses lifted by the larcenous, or the honour of their wives and daughters insulted by the impertinent. Thus it is daylight before Bruno Barrani’s body is found in the chamber below the dissection table of Professor Fabrici’s almost-completed anatomy theatre.
Found in the new black silk doublet he wears – purchased specifically for the procession, but now stained with dried blood from a single knife-thrust to the back – is a letter claiming to be from the rector of the university. In it, Bruno is asked to meet him in the seclusion of the anatomy theatre, the more privately to discuss the prospect of Signor Barrani taking a leading position on the university’s Studium, in reward for his tireless work on behalf of the city’s reputation. When the letter is shown to the rector, he barely reads beyond the first line before pronouncing it a forgery. ‘It’s not even in my hand,’ he says, before adding dismissively, ‘Anyway, why would Padua want a chancer like Signor Barrani for an exemplar?’
Bianca is almost inconsolable, and for a while Nicholas is racked by the fear that she will lose the child. He realizes that if she does, it will prove the power of Hella Maas’s curse, and he blames himself for not seeing through Hella’s deceit from the very start.
‘You saw what you thought was another human soul in distress,’ Bianca tells him. ‘You’re a physician. What choice did you have?’
Madonna Antonella allows the Podestà three days’ grace before she seeks an audience. He receives her in his palazzo with all the grace due to her piety. But as she tells him why she has come, his podgy face clouds over.
‘Heresy – here in our city? How did you learn of this, Madonna?’
‘A young Beguine, Sister Carlotta, who knows her duty to our Lord, has come to me,’ Antonella tells him from a kneeling position, adopted because, in his red gown, the Podestà looks to her very much like a cardinal, and she thinks it better to be safe than sorry. ‘She heard, apparently from our poor sister who had that dreadful accident in the Palazzo Bo, that this blasphemous device is able to predict events that God – and our Holy Mother Church – would wish impressionable minds not to know of.’
‘What manner of events, Madonna?’
‘The precise date, for instance, of the day of our final judgement.’
The Podestà manages a weak smile through the grinding of his jaw. When he regains control of his face, he reaches out to raise her to her feet. ‘You are right to have come to me, Madonna,’ he says generously. ‘But you need have no fear. None whatsoever. The device is not heretical, merely scientific.’ And with a benign smile he sends her on her way. He is a practical man; 4 per cent of the money His Serene Highness in Venice has set aside for the late Signor Barrani’s scheme cannot be endangered by the concerns of one unworldly woman, however pious.
But the Podestà has judged Madonna Antonella unwisely. She has contacts. She uses them. Ten days later he receives a visit from Cardinal Lorenzo Priuli, the Patriarch of Venice, who carries with him not only the doge’s authority, but that of God Himself.
‘If what Madonna Antonella tells me is true, this engine is heretical,’ he tells the Podestà, having failed to offer him one single smile since he walked through the door. ‘What is more, if the common people were to get hold of it, understand its workings, use it to determine matters the Almighty desires to remain unknown, then no prince in all Christendom would be safe from insult and overthrow.’ Then Priuli reminds him that while the Serene Republic likes to consider itself open to the new learning, it has its limits. Was not the heretic prior, Giordano Bruno, arrested in Venice only two years ago, after spreading his vile theories on the universe – and man’s place in it – throughout Europe? He will surely burn before long. And Podestàs, the cardinal observes ominously, are no more immune from God’s wrath than are heretic friars.