The Secret Dead by S. J. Parris

I was eighteen years old and had just
taken holy orders the summer Fra Gennaro found the girl. It was not the first
time I had seen a naked woman. I had entered the Dominican order as a novice at
fifteen, old enough by then to have tasted first love, the sweet warmth of a
girl’s pliant body in the shade of the olive trees above the village of Nola. A
distant cousin, as it turned out; her family was livid. Perhaps that was why my
father had been so ready to pay out for my education, though God knows he could
ill afford it. Sending me away to the Dominicans in the city was cheaper than a
scandal. We were given new names on taking our final vows, to symbolize the
shedding of our old selves. I took the name Giordano, though most people just
called me Bruno.
    Naples in the summer of 1566 was an inferno of heat and
noise, dust and crowds; a city of heart-stopping beauty and casual violence. Two
hundred and fifty thousand souls seething inside ancient walls built to house one-tenth
that number, the tenements growing higher and higher, until their shadows
almost shut out the sun because land was scarce, so much of it taken up by the
vast gardens and courtyards of the palazzos and the religious houses. Tensions
in the city streets brewed and boiled like the forces of the great volcano that
overshadowed them. Even walking from one side of a piazza to the other felt like
fighting through the front line of an advancing army: elbows and fists,
baskets, barrows, and hot, angry bodies jostling and shoving, trampling or
crushing one another. Horses and carts plowed through the heaving marketplaces while
the sun hammered down without pity and blazed back from walls of yellow tufa
stone or from the flashing blades of knives drawn in exchanges of rich,
inventive cursing. The Neapolitans discharged the tension by fighting or
fucking, often at the same time. Soldiers of the Spanish viceroy patrolled the
streets, though whether their presence imposed order or fueled the general air
of aggression depended on your view of our Spanish overlords. It was a city stinking
of hypocrisy: Kissing in public was illegal, but courtesans were permitted to
walk the streets openly, looking for business even in the churches (especially
in the churches). Blasphemy was also punishable by law, but beggars, vagrants,
and those without work were allowed to starve in the streets, their bodies
rounded up each night on carts and thrown into a charnel-house outside the
walls before they could spread contagion. Thieves, assassins, and whores
thrived and prospered there and, naturally, so did the Church.
    In the midst of this simmering human soup stood the
magnificent basilica of San Domenico Maggiore, where the faithful could worship
the wooden crucifix that had once spoken aloud to St. Thomas Aquinas. San Domenico
was one of the wealthiest religious houses in the city; the local barons all
sent their superfluous younger sons there as a bribe to God, and many of my
brothers dressed and strutted like the young lords they still felt themselves
to be, keen to preserve the distinction of degree despite their vows. The
deprivations of religious life were interpreted here with considerable lassitude;
it must have been well known to the prior and his officials that a number of
the novices had copied keys to a side gate and often slipped out into the heat
of the city streets at night, but I never saw anyone punished for it, provided
they were back in time for Matins. Drinking, dicing, whoring — sins such as
these were straightforward, easy to overlook in young noblemen with high
spirits. It was sins of thought that the authorities could not countenance. In
its favor, I should say that San Domenico prized other qualities than birth: It
was famed as the intellectual heart of Naples, and a mere soldier’s son like me
might be admitted at the Order’s expense if he showed enough promise as a
scholar.
    By early September, the city had grown heavy and slow,
exhausted by the ferocity