The Secret of the Glass (11 page)

“You have accepted their rhetoric, my friend.” Sarpi referred again to Rome with the same snideness as before. “Their allegations are nothing but sophistry, camouflage they used, and continue to use, to commit the atrocities of the Inquisition.”

“And what of Veronese?” Sagredo lowered his glass long enough to offer this thought into the conversation.

“Veronese?” Galileo quizzed his younger friend.

“
Sì,
Paolo Caliari, Veronese he is called, he was summoned before the Inquisition for his altarpiece painting in the Santi Giovanni e Paolo right here in Venice.”

“What was wrong with it?”

Sagredo laughed coarsely. “In my eyes, nothing, in fact I found it rather amusing. In one corner there is a fool sitting among the apostles playing with a parrot and in another there is one apostle, belly swollen with what must have been a sumptuous meal, picking his teeth with a fork.”

Galileo laughed with the other men, the room filling with the low rumbles of the male species at their ease.

“For that he was sent before the Inquisition?”

“Indeed,” Sarpi assured with a determined nod and a grin set askew with amusement.

“What happened to him? Surely he was not burned at the stake as Bruno was?”

“No.” Sarpi put his slim silver goblet down on the mahogany pedestal beside him. “If I remember correctly he was ordered to fix the painting, though I don’t believe he ever did.”

“Aha!” Galileo exclaimed. “You see, I have nothing to fear.”

“His offense was a painting. Yours would be changing the whole foundations of our world, the very core beliefs of the majority of people on the face of the earth.”

“But if it is the correct belief, then truth shall be on my side.”

Sarpi and Sagredo shared another worried glance.

Galileo waved a hand in the air.

“Aristotle did not even belong to the church. The priests and monks were the only people who could read, and they read Aristotle. They cultivated not just theology but all knowledge. For centuries, they have taught the theories of Aristotle, not because they are correct, but because they had nothing else. To say he is wrong is to say they are wrong.”

“Is it not the most magnanimous and truthful among us who can openly admit when they are wrong?” An older member of the group, a serious thoughtful man of few words, offered the idea.

“Of course,” da Fuligna answered the question posed to no one in particular, “but when has the church been magnanimous?”

Sarpi nodded, a dismissive grudging gesture. “I am already being watched, thanks to the Papal Nuncio. He has denounced me for not wearing my sandals at home, as is the rule of my order.”

“What
do
you wear?” Sagredo asked with a sidelong and sardonic glance.

Fra Paolo gave a sheepish grin to the room and all the men within it who waited eagerly for his answer, offering a guilty glance to the heavens before answering. “Slippers.”

The deep male laughter rang out strong and sure, a concert of bass and kettle drums.

“So you see,” Sarpi said to Galileo, “you are already under scrutiny for keeping such poor company.”

Galileo smiled with fondness at his dear friend.

“I will take my chances…with you, and my work.”

Seven

G
alileo’s teeth chattered in his mouth. He sat up on the settee and searched about, confused and unsure of where he was, his limbs trembling from the cold. The opulent room appeared golden and nebulous, suffused in the early evening by sun streaming in straight shafts through the western windows. In the haze he saw his three friends, sleeping on divans and cushions scattered about the room.

Remembrance dawned as he came more awake. They had come to the home of Count Camillo Trento when the heat of the day had become too potent. The Count was not in residence but the
maggiordomo
had shown them great hospitality, leading the group, weary from their walking tour about the countryside, to this extraordinary room. Such magnificent respite waited for them within, and each felt sure he had passed through the gates of heaven as the cold air hit them like a deluge of drenching cool water. It tingled upon their moisture-filmed skin. The servant had shown them the pipe that summoned the frigid air through the ground from the Caves of Costozza and the underground, ice-cold spring. He had warned them not to fall asleep with the pipe valve open. Evidently, they had not heeded his advice.

Galileo rubbed his goose-pimpled arms, creating friction he hoped would warm his freezing skin. They needed to get out of this room and back into summer’s stirring heat.

He slid off the divan, approaching Malipiero where he lay on a cushioned chaise beneath the windows. The young man reclined on his side, his face to the wall.

“Giusieppe? Wake up, Giusieppe,” Galileo beckoned, but the man did not rouse.

Galileo reached out a shaking hand, took his friend’s shoulder, and pulled.

The body fell limply in his direction and Galileo screamed.

He shrieked at the skeleton’s horrific glance—screeching in panic and shock as he ran from body to body, only to have the round empty sockets of the skulls stare at him in accusation. He screamed until…

…he woke up. The cold sweat dripped off his rigid body. His chest heaved with his ragged breath. His eyes bulged from his head as he saw the green walls of his room at the Venetian inn, saw the small sitting room beyond the bed in its alcove. Slowly, like the ebbing tide, the terrifying nightmare began to recede.

How many times must he relive that awful day? He needed no nightmare to remind him of that bleakest of moments, of the days and weeks of illness that followed, the headaches and the coughing and the fever. He remembered vividly their withering bodies, their moans of pain, and the smell of their sickened flesh as he watched his friends die, one by one, until he remained the sole survivor. The guilt of his endurance remained with him like a scar branded onto his skin.

Galileo turned in bed, and hung his spindly legs over the edge, rubbing his hands over his face and through his short, disheveled hair. There would be no more sleep for him tonight. With a few tender steps of his aching feet, he began to cross the small room, the smooth, worn wooden planks cool beneath his bare, gnarled feet. Like the nightmare, the distinct twinge of pain that often began in his feet, in the ball joints that seared with each step, marked the first wave of another cycle of sickness. His life had been spared on that fateful day when the strange fumes from the caves had killed his friends, but he had not come away unscathed.

The ague would overcome him at irregular intervals, spurred on by any number of things, some tangible, some not—anxiety, excitement, overwork, or lack of rest. It crept up on him like the slow change of seasons; the low hum of pain like a bee buzzing off in a distant meadow, thrumming through his bones until it enveloped him and lay him low. It struck at him without rhyme or reason, lasting a few days or a few months. There were times when it forced him to bed, when the pain and fatigue became too powerful a combatant, but he did not succumb easily.

It was the fight that was his to fight; the pain his penance for being the last to remain. His life had been spared and Galileo would not let it be for naught. He believed he had survived for a purpose; that his life, among all the others, had been saved for a reason. With the illness, God had pointed the way, for if it had not been for that first attack and the long, slow months of recovery, he never would have read Copernicus’s book, would never have found the path chosen for him as if the stars themselves lighted the way. He would fight against the illness, against the pain and the weakness. He would raise his fists to it and curse its name.

Galileo hobbled across the room from bed to table. Beneath his thin nightshirt, his body curved into a question-mark shape, the pain curling the joints in upon themselves in defense. He rubbed at the low ache at the base of his neck, a foreshadowing of the coming fever. Galileo felt his dry, hot eyes squinting in the dark, the meager wick of the lone oil lamp casting but a thin smidgen of light. He turned the diffuser higher, and the brighter flame illuminated the jumble of vellum strewn upon the buried surface.

The drawings sprang to life upon the parchment; in his mind they were alive and animated, scribblings that formed others and moved across the surface. He studied and ruminated, calculating and recalculating, drawing over and over again the long tube, the innumerable combinations of tube and lens variants.

And then he saw it, saw it as assuredly as he saw his own wrinkled hands on the table before him. It was so clear. The answer lay in the notes he had taken while talking with Father Sarpi. It would work, this miracle would happen.

A twinge of pain seared through his left wrist and he looked down at it as if he could see the treacherous ache coursing through his veins. Galileo grabbed his wrist, flung himself back in his chair, and laughed.

Eight

F
ather Paolo Sarpi sat on the hard wooden stool in the small, windowless stone chamber that served as his home in the monastery of the Servite friars. It was stark and cold—no art graced its walls, no rug warmed its floor. The thick and heavy scent of incense slithered under the door and between the cracks of the old wood door. As Venice’s Official Senate Counselor, any one of the lavish rooms in the Doge’s Palace were always at his disposal, some of which he made use of on many occasions when he needed to confer with senators or with
Il Serenissimo
himself. Today he needed these indistinct surroundings and the lack of distraction afforded by the bareness of this room.

He sat in the middle of two towers, mountains of papers—one beside each hand—that rose higher above the desk than did his own small frame. Discarded and dull quills, empty and blackened inkpots, and the sifter of blotting sand with the crude and clogged holes in its lid lay on the meager work surface not covered with paper. On the floor rose more piles, boxing him in like the parapets of a castle that guarded their solitary resident. Every now and again the clacking of sandal-clad feet passed by, the sound rising and falling as the faceless person came and went, and Father Sarpi unconsciously pulled his slippered feet farther under the hanging folds of his rough-hewn robe while keeping his concentration focused on the task at hand.

Doge Donato had instructed him to draft a reasoned and measured reply to the Pope’s edict. Reasoned and measured…the Doge’s words stifled the usually prolific man’s abilities and he clutched his unmoving quill with white knuckles. How could he be reasonable with those without reason? For the men in Rome, this conflict was not about what was right, either morally or legally, as it should have been, but about power and the abuse of it. The Vatican and those who controlled it used these issues to launch an attack upon the glittering jewel that was Venice, and as their ancestors had hundreds of years ago, the Venetians would not collapse in the face of the onslaught.

The
cittadini
of
Venezia
owed a debt of gratitude to the Barbarian Alaric and the Goths, for if not for their plundering, the citizens of the mainland, those from Padua and Altino, Concordia and Aquilea, would not have sought salvation on this
arcipelago
. They had come in waves, and as each surge of the marauding invaders crossed into their lands, more and more of them turned toward Venice. Behind their bishops they found their refuge, bringing with them nothing more than steely determination, a mistrust of Rome’s rulers, and the sacred relics that bound their new life to their old.

The birth of Venice, early in the fifth century, encompassed the unique islets and a swath of land along the main shore. By the middle of the sixth century, the distinctive silhouette of the Venetian flat-bottomed trading barges was instantly recognized in every port along the rivers of north and central Italy. It was not long afterward that the ships of Venice, manufactured in the
Arsenale
, the first industrial complex of its kind, ruled the seas beyond, becoming the most powerful fleet, both merchant and military, in the Adriatic, a domination that demanded the utmost respect from all of its neighbors.

Foreigners of ever country flocked to this strange and mesmerizing land, more and more of them every year, called by its beauty and wonder, yet no one loved Venice more than the Venetians. They could, and would, do anything to maintain its independence and dominance.

Sarpi’s pride in, and devotion to, his homeland stirred in his blood—the devout patriotism pumped along every nerve like adrenaline. It gave him strength and surety of purpose. He set his face with grim determination toward the blank parchment before him but no longer felt fear or trepidation, no longer felt anxious that he would not find words or the right words to say. His ink-stained hand prodded the quill furiously across the paper, as the urgent scratching filled the room with its unmelodious song.

…respectful but unyielding…Princes, by divine law, which no human power can abrogate, have authority to legislate on matters temporal within their jurisdictions; there is no occasion for the admonitions of Your Holiness, for the matters under discussion are not spiritual but temporal.

Nine

T
hey poured in from every direction, along every canal and
calle,
filling the piazza with their energy and their somber robes, stark among the bright-colored civilians like storm clouds against a brilliant blue sky. Every member of the Venetian government had been called to this early morning meeting and the hundreds of men of the
Maggior Consiglio
streamed toward the Ducal Palace.

This building, this complex, served as the focal point of all Venetian life and culture; every Palazzo Ducale in history had stood on this very spot, where the waters of St. Mark’s Basin meet the land. From the desolate and dark structure built as a massive defensive fortress over eight centuries ago, the grandiose and glorious palace now rose in triumph over the lagoon and the glittering city Venice had become.