‘Nay, Wife. I would ’ave made the same bargain, had it been you on your way to Tyburn.’
Rose takes his hand in hers. The weight of it surprises her, as it always does. She marvels at how something so hard and powerful can caress her so gently. Yes, she thinks, surely there will be others.
Lifting his branded thumb towards her mouth, she bestows a kiss upon the recently healed scar tissue, sensing the puckered M against her lips. Then she lets it fall.
‘Come, Ned Monkton,’ she says, trying to smile through her tears. ‘We cannot tarry here amongst ghosts. We ’ave a tavern to run.’
Historical Note
The extraordinary triptych The Last Judgement, painted by Hieronymus Bosch, went missing from his home town and was only catalogued, some sixty-five years after this story is set, when it appeared in the private collection of the Archduke of Austria. It is now on public display in Vienna. A congregation in the sixteenth century must have found its phantasmagorical images – intriguing and compelling even today – terrifying.
Pilgrims have been walking the Via Francigena to Rome for more than a thousand years. Archbishop Sigeric made the journey from Canterbury around eighty years before the Battle of Hastings. The story of his journey is told in a splendid audiovisual presentation in the Entry Point Museum in the beautiful Italian town of Lucca.
Girolamo Fabrici – or, to give him his Latinized name, Fabricius ab Acquapendente (I have used his Italian name throughout for ease) – held the chair of anatomy and surgery at Padua for fifty years. He is responsible for the construction of Europe’s first custom-built anatomical theatre, which can still be visited today at the Palazzo Bo. Dissections were performed there until the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
It was only about fifty years earlier than that when Ned Monkton’s ruse to escape the gallows was removed from English law. The actor and playwright Ben Johnson relied upon Benefit of Clergy to avoid being hanged for the manslaughter of a fellow actor, though he didn’t need his wife to coach him in his lines.
In 1597 Galileo Galilei, professor of mathematics at Padua, perfected his military compass. It was a bestseller. It enabled him, amongst other things, to pay back the two hundred ducats he had borrowed to settle the issue of his sister’s dowry. His subsequent career needs no further exposition here.
Which brings us, finally, to Antonio Santucci’s great armillary sphere. At 3.7 metres high – more than twelve feet – it towers over the modern-day visitor to the Museo Galileo in Florence. It looks, at first glance, like something from the set of an episode of Dr Who. What a sixteenth-century Florentine must have made of it, we must leave to the mists of history.
Acknowledgements
Once again, my deepest gratitude to Susannah Hamilton, Sarah Hodgson and everyone at Corvus Books for their hard work and encouragement, and to my agent, Jane Judd. If there was ever to be a medal for saving authors from their own howlers, one must surely go to copy-editor Mandy Greenfield, whose eagle eye and uncanny memory have once again avoided far too many embarrassments on my part.
Also due my sincere thanks are Penny and Brian Osborne, Annie and Pete Williams, Di and John Richardson, Lisa and Chris Seabourne, Sue Stirling, Gill Stringer, Naomi and Darren Standing, Mike and Sian Simpson. I must thank, too, the Chapman family: Rachel, Jeremy, Joseph and Sian; Val and John Holloway, and all those book-club members around the Worcestershire Lenches who have been generous enough to support my writing and have enjoyed and championed the Jackdaw series.
As ever, my heartfelt thanks and appreciation to my wife Jane, who inspires me, encourages me and tolerates with such good grace her husband’s frequent sojourns in the sixteenth century.
Since the Jackdaw series began, one character has actually made the journey in the opposite direction, from fiction into real life. In a few short months Buffle (who appears in two of the books) has apparently been so inspired by Elizabethan history that he’s taken to digging up the garden, in an effort – I presume – to be the first cocker spaniel to become an archaeologist.