The Secret Dead by S. J. Parris Page A

of the long summer’s heat; people barely made the
effort to curse as you pushed past them. There was a sense of apprehension,
too; the previous autumn had brought a season of thick fogs off the sea carrying
the contagion of fever, and the epidemic had infected half the city. I had
taken my final vows and been admitted to the Order in the spring, despite some
misgivings on the part of the novice master, who confided to the prior that Fra
Giordano Bruno had trouble submitting to authority and a taste for difficult
questions. During my novitiate, I had shown aptitude for my studies in the
natural sciences, and the prior had set me to work for a while as assistant to
Fra Gennaro, the brother infirmarian , in the belief that vigorous practical
tasks — measuring, chopping, and distilling remedies, helping to cultivate and
harvest the plants used to make them, as well as tending to the ailments of
those brothers confined to the infirmary — would occupy my mind and curb my willfulness.
In this, he was mistaken; the more I learned about the natural world, its
correspondences and hidden properties, the more my questions multiplied, for it
seemed to me that our understanding of Creation, handed down from antiquity
through the Scriptures and the Church Fathers, did not stand up to the most
elementary scrutiny and observation. Fra Gennaro regarded my questions with
forbearance and a hint of dry humor; for the most part he proved an attentive
audience, if noncommittal, while I formulated my doubts and theories aloud. Only
rarely did he reprimand me when I overstepped the bounds of what he judged a
God-given hunger for knowledge. Few of the other friars would have shown such
tolerance.
    Fra Gennaro had studied medicine and anatomy at the famous
medical school in Salerno. He had wished to become a doctor and eventually a
professor, but some years earlier his family’s fortunes had shifted for the
worse, obliging him to leave the university and offer his skills in God’s
service. It was not the worst blow Fate could have dealt him — he was granted
considerable freedom to further his medical knowledge in his new role, though I
understood there was some dispute with the prior over the morality of using
certain Arabic texts — but it was not the life he had aspired to and, though he
never voiced this, I sensed in him a restlessness, a wistful longing for his
old world. He was barely forty, but to me, at eighteen, he appeared to possess
a wealth of knowledge and wisdom that I yearned toward — and not all of it
sanctioned. In his heart, he was a man of science, and a Dominican only
incidentally, as I felt myself to be; perhaps this accounted for the
instinctive affinity that quickly grew between us.
    I was skulking through the darkened cloister one starless
night in the first week of September, clouds sagging overhead like wet plaster
and a warm, sickly wind sighing in off the bay, when I glimpsed him on the far
side of the courtyard, his arms bundled full of linen. He was heading not to the
infirmary but toward the gardens, in the direction of the outbuildings and
storehouses at the furthest extremity of the compound, where the high enclosing
wall backed on to a busy thoroughfare. Something in his bearing caught my
attention — his unusual haste, perhaps, or the way he walked with his head down,
leaning forward, as if into a gale. Though I risked punishment for being out of
my cell at that hour, I called out to him, curious to know what he was about.
If he heard me, he gave no sign of it, though I knew my voice must have
carried. Instead, he kept his eyes fixed on the ground ahead as he hurried
through an archway and disappeared.
    I hesitated in the shadows, hoping I would not run into the
watch brothers. They made a tour of the cloisters shortly after Compline to
confirm that everyone was tucked up in his cell and observing silence during
the few hours of sleep, then retired somewhere more comfortable until their
second circuit just