But today she has decided to act.
She slips her fingers under the bolster to retrieve the silk from its new hiding place. Then, taking care not to spoil Rose’s dreams of Ned, or Bruno’s Venetians, or Kit Marlowe, or – for all she knows – the Earl of Essex, Sir Philip Sidney and every actor in London under forty with his own hair and teeth and who can still fill his hose in a pleasing manner, she climbs out of bed, goes to her clothes chest and takes her keys from her chatelaine belt, eases the latch of the chamber door as quietly as the slight tremble in her fingertips will allow and steps silently across the passage to Bruno’s room.
The candle that Rose has placed on the chest in the corner has burned almost to the sconce. It might just last till dawn, she thinks. For a while she contents herself with merely watching her cousin by its guttering light. Watching how its flame paints slow brushstrokes of colour on his otherwise grey face. Watching the sheen of sweat on his brow. Watching the slow rise and fall of his chest. Just watching.
What manner of conspiracy are you caught up in, Cousin? What other secrets are you hiding from me?
A flurry of raindrops against the window breaks her reverie. She goes to the chest, moves the candle sconce to the floor, unlocks the lid and lays out the contents on the floor: the purse, the astrolabe, the pocket compass, Bruno’s pewter bowl…
Bianca has no idea what she’s looking for. She knows only that her curiosity will not let her discovery lie. If the little sheet of silk is a banner, then who – or what – is it calling to action?
First, she takes up the purse and empties out the ducats. A quick inspection reveals a medallion similar to the one Munt pushed across the table in Bruno’s cabin aboard the Sirena. She studies the image embossed on its face: St Margaret of Antioch standing triumphant over the serpent. And around the circumference, twelve random letters – some repeated. They mean nothing to her.
She replaces the coins and the medallion in the purse. Then she inspects the compass for a hidden compartment, without success. She does the same for the astrolabe, with the same result. Finally there is only the book of verse left to examine.
It is a fine, leather-bound volume, about fifty leaves of thick parchment. It has that fusty smell of ancient books, like an old leather cloak left too long in the rain. The print is large, perhaps only twenty well-spaced lines to the page. And despite the Latin, Bianca understands most of what is printed on the elaborately illustrated frontispiece. She can work out that the book was printed in Rome in 1545, by Pietro Bembo. She even knows who it’s dedicated to: Gian Carafa – Pope Paul IV. There he is, in miniature, sitting on his papal throne, while behind him a jaunty skeleton blows a trumpet to signify that even the Holy Father is not to be spared death and the end of days.
The image brings a childhood memory back to her. She is in the little church of St Margaret in Padua. She is eight years old. Father Rossi has ordered the maids of the district to scrub the flagstones until they gleam with a halo of devotion. For Cardinal Santo Fiorzi, the most august of all the Fiorzi family, the man who calls her his Passerotto – little sparrow – is coming from Rome to visit them. He is bringing with him a portrait of Gian Carafa to hang prominently in the church he once attended, because the great man himself is now in heaven, advising God on how to be a good Catholic.
What must such a man look like, the young Bianca wonders as she scrubs away, caught in a delicious moment of religious terror?
In fact, as she now remembers, this hammer of the heretics had turned out to be a lonely-looking old man with a big white beard. When the picture was finally hung, Bianca’s response was not pious devotion, but a profound desire to take him home and have her mother feed him a hearty dish of caparosoli.
‘I’ll get you home to Padua, Cousin,’ she whispers to Bruno, a wistful curve to her mouth. ‘No matter what it takes, I’ll get you home.’
Thinking the book might be a good place to hide the silk, she lays it flat between the frontispiece and the first page.
It fits perfectly.
The little windows no longer look out upon a landscape she can’t see, but upon the lines of print. They do not reveal a pattern. Some fall between two characters, or in places where there are no letters at all. A jolt of comprehension makes her sit bolt upright. Her heart thuds – the way it did when Father Rossi caught her reading chivalric tales of troubadour knights and captive maidens instead of the Bible.
She turns the silk upside-down. The view through the little windows remains random. Nothing fits.
She tries another page – with the same result. And then another. And another. Each time the windows refuse to let her see the landscape clearly, precisely. But now she knows what she’s looking for.
She could try every page. But she doesn’t know which is the top or the bottom of the silk. She can’t tell the front from the back. Given the number of pages of verse, there could be hundreds of combinations.
Bruno, give me an anchor to hold the ship steady in this gale.
And perhaps it’s him guiding her, or just her own imagination, but her thoughts clarify, become as sharp as diamonds.
Cardinal Carafa – Pope Paul IV.
She tries page four: front, back, up and down. Nothing.
The year of his enthronement.
She has no idea when that was. She looks again at the frontispiece, at Carafa sitting on his throne, at the skeleton behind him. The revelation lands like a slap, sharp and loud in the quiet chamber. The year of his death.
This she does know: 1559.
Thanking Father Rossi for making his young flock recite the years in which every Pope of the modern age gained his reward in heaven, she searches for page fifty-nine. There isn’t one. The book ends at page forty-eight.
She tries page fifteen, going through the same sequence of positioning the silk. Again the little windows reveal nothing but fog.
On a whim, she decides to subtract fifteen from fifty-nine. She places the silk on page forty-four as if it were a winning card.
Somewhere in the back of her mind she can hear the angels singing. The landscape has suddenly come into clear view.
In each aperture sit two letters. The very first window falls neatly over the a and the s in the Latin word astra. The next window is a little broader than the first. It falls upon the third line, bracketing ab annis, to reveal the b and the second a. Another frames the c and the u in the Latin word cupio. And so it goes on, covering every letter of the alphabet: an a matched with an s, a c with a u, an e with a d. Bianca realizes she’s looking at a transposition cipher, a code with which she could unlock a secret message. A message that would reveal to her the nature of Bruno’s conspiracy.
Were it not for one inconvenient fact: she has no message to decipher.
And then she remembers the exchange between Bruno and Tobias Munt, that day aboard the Sirena.
Have you perchance brought anything else with you, Signor Munt? her cousin is saying.
Munt’s voice forces its way to the forefront of her racing thoughts.
Ten days from today… At my warehouse on Petty Wales – the sign of the three tuns.