S. PERRY - The Heretic’s Mark

As he sets off, the Corio cousin makes to follow. Nicholas raises a hand and smiles. ‘I’ll be fine. Stay here with Alonso, in case someone tries to steal the banner.’

Re-entering the square, he walks among the swelling crowd, taking in the aroma of cooking meat from the vendors’ braziers. A corps of drummers in vividly striped tunics is practising its staccato tattoos. A nun pushes an old man in a wooden wheelbarrow, careless of who she barges aside in the effort to find a good spot. And all the while, more and more guildsmen in their fine livery gather to their banners like soldiers mustering for battle.

Nicholas has almost completed two laps of the piazza without sight of Bruno when he hears a male voice call out, ‘Physician – heal thyself!’

He turns and sees a familiar, bearded figure sitting on a bench, his back against the stucco wall, feet up on the table in front of him. He is waving a half-empty flask of wine at him, like a patient inviting him to check his urine for an imbalance of the humours.

‘Professor Galileo! Are you not marching with the rest of the learned gentlemen from the Palazzo Bo?’

The mathematician swings his feet off the table. ‘Are you mad? An hour of being kicked in the heels to see some overfed priest bless a toy ship? Besides, they expect me to wear that ridiculous toga. If I don’t, they look down their noses at me and call me a peasant.’ He nods at the flask. ‘This is far better company. You look at a loss. Join me. I’ll call for another cup.’

Nicholas comes to the conclusion that as the buchetta is close to the side-street where Alonso is guarding the banner, it is as good a place as any to keep a lookout for Bruno. With this thickening mist, he could wander the Piazza dei Signori for a week, pass him ten times and still not catch sight of him. Besides, he thinks, if two of its members have already been murdered, then the mathematician is as much in danger as any in the Arte dei Astronomi.

‘Just for a moment, Signor Galileo,’ he says, walking over. ‘Purely to rest my feet before the parade, you understand.’

The bridge to the Porta Portello curves ahead of her into the darkening night. Torches set into the parapet turn the faces of Padua’s heroes into lurid carnival masks. On the far side, Bianca can see barely a hint of the squat stone gatehouse. The storehouse a little further along the bank is invisible. She hurries across, the soles of her shoes tapping out a metallic rhythm, like the workings of one of Signor Mirandola’s clocks.

Reaching the far side, she breathes deeply to steady her resolve. She is determined to remain calm. Once more she commands herself not to scream, not to rail. Tell Hella to her face that you seek only to put aside what has passed between you. Then ask her to lift her curse.

‘And if she refuses? What then?’

Bianca wonders where the question has come from. Because it seems not to have come from inside her head. She could swear it came out of the fog. And there is no mistaking whose voice it is: Maria Caporetti’s. It is her mother’s voice.

‘What will you do then, my daughter?’

‘Then I will walk away,’ Bianca answers out loud. ‘I will seek out the apothecary, Tiziano. I will have him procure that cantarella we spoke of. Then I will do what we Caporettis have done down the long centuries, ever since we gave Agrippina the means to poison Claudius.’

‘Then be at peace, my daughter,’ says the voice.

And then its echo fades, leaving Bianca to wonder if her mind – or the fog – is playing tricks with her. She turns along the canal bank. The water murmurs as it flows past, mocking her with teasing little sucks and gurgles, as though preparing to digest her. When a twig snaps underfoot, Bianca has to suppress the notion that Hella is pouncing from the night, arms outstretched to push her into the river.

In their brief exchange beside the Gattamelata statue, they had agreed to meet outside the storehouse. But when it looms out of the fog, Bianca can see no trace of Hella. Looking upwards, she notices the glimmer of a torch or taper burning within.

She tries the huge wooden main doors, but they are locked. Slipping cautiously down the side of the building, she finds the door there ajar.

‘Hella? Are you there?’ she calls out softly.

Receiving no answer, she steps inside.

Hella is waiting for her in front of the empty cradle of Bruno’s great sphere. In the light from a lantern set upon a stack of large iron cog-wheels, she stands legs akimbo, her plain hessian gown reminding Bianca of the tougher girls who lived around her family’s lodgings and used to challenge her to fight, calling her the bastard prodigy of a Paduan mother and a heretic foreigner. She has the same swagger, the same spoiling for a brawl. And she is as unlike the pious maid from Den Bosch as Bianca can imagine. She could almost believe the maid has been possessed.

‘So you’ve found the courage to come?’ Hella says. ‘I wasn’t sure you would.’

‘We agreed to it. We Caporettis keep our promises.’

‘What do you want of me, Bianca? I have things to do. Time is running out.’

‘So you keep telling us.’

Hella allows herself a wry smile, the bestowing of respect on an adversary she might have misjudged.

Bianca forces a stillness upon herself. ‘I have come to make amends,’ she says. ‘To ask you to lift the curse you have laid upon me.’

‘Have I cursed you? I don’t recall.’

‘In Reims, and upon the pilgrim road – you foretold a tragedy for Nicholas and me. I want you to renounce it. I ask you to take back your curse.’

‘And if I don’t?’

Bianca tightens her jaw. Then I will ask Tiziano to make the venom linger in your body, so that my judgement is worse than any you might have seen in that painting, worse than any you already fear.

‘Or nothing,’ she says, as pleasantly as she can manage. ‘I ask simply as a woman who loves her husband and would see him happy.’

Hella smiles. It is the coldest of any smile Bianca has yet seen her give.

‘Nicholas will be happy,’ she says. ‘Once he is with me.’

‘Is that what all this has been about?’ Bianca snaps. ‘All the cruel talk of dead children, stillbirth and barrenness? Was it all just to send me into a confusion, so that I would doubt myself? So that you could drive a shard of ice between me and the man I love?’

Hella steps forward until she is close enough for Bianca to touch. Her pupils seem as large as golden florins, reflecting the lantern light. One corner of her mouth cracks open, like a pike about to snatch a minnow.

And then Bianca hears a sudden movement behind her. A voice calls out, guttural and harsh. The words mean nothing to her. They are shouted in a language she cannot understand. She turns.

Framed in the doorway is the figure of a man.

A man in a grey coat.

‘You seem untroubled by the thought of an assassin in this city,’ Nicholas says, surprised by Galileo’s airy dismissal of the warning he has just delivered. The mathematician has listened to his recounting of the death of the goldsmith Bondoni with little more than mild interest.

‘You have no proof that Bondoni was pushed. Every year someone gets hurt or killed in that horse race. I think you’re reading too much into it. And as for Matteo, he was a young fellow with a roving eye. This is Padua, Nicholas, feuds are our meat and drink. There’s always someone who thinks he has a legitimate quarrel with you – even if you’ve never met him before.’

Nicholas remembers the altercation he’d had with the youth outside the church. Perhaps Galileo is right. ‘But what about the man in the grey coat that Bruno saw before he found Matteo Fedele’s body?’