Doctor Copernicus (17 page)

“You must give him better food. None of your slops, mind. Send to the castle for supplies if you must. Do not tell him that I spoke to you, that I gave you money.”

“O aye, your honour, mum’s the word. And I’ll do that with the prog.”

“Yes.” He looked at the cowering ingratiating fellow, and saw himself. “Yes.”

*

Church business took him with his uncle to Cracow. For once he was glad of that long weary journey. As they travelled southwards over the Prussian plain he felt the clutch of
that dread phantom in the garret weaken, and at last fall away.

In Cracow he spent at Haller’s bookshop what little time the Bishop would allow him away from his secretarial duties. Haller was publishing his Latin translations from the Byzantine Greek
of Simocatta’s
Epistles.
It was a poor dull book. The sight of the text, mysteriously, shockingly naked on the galley proofs, nauseated him.
If thou wouldst obtain mastery over thy
grief, wander among graves
. . . O! But the text was unimportant. What mattered was the dedication. He was out to woo the Bishop.

He enlisted in this delicate task the help of an old acquaintance, Laurentius Rabe, a poet and wandering scholar who had taught him briefly here at Cracow during his university days. Rabe, who
affected on occasion the grandiloquent latinised name of Corvinus, was a spry old man with spindly legs and a plump chest and watery pale blue eyes. He liked to dress in black, and sported proudly
still the liripipe of the graduate. He was no raven, despite the name, but resembled some small quick fastidious bird, a swallow, perhaps, or a swift. A jewel glittered at the tip of his sharp
little beak.

“I would have some verses, you see,” the Canon said, “to flatter my uncle. I should be grateful to you.”

They stood together amid the crash and clatter of the caseroom at the rear of Haller’s. Rabe nodded rapidly, rubbing his chilblained fingers together like bundles of dry twigs.

“Of course, of course,” he cried, in his pinched voice. “Tell me what you require.”

“Some small thing merely, a few lines.” Canon Nicolas shrugged. “Something, say, on Aeneas and Achates, something like that, loyalty, piety, you know. The verse is no
matter—”

“O.”

“—But most importantly, you must put in some mention of astronomy. I plan to produce a small work on planetary motion, a mere outline, you understand, of something much larger that I
have in train. This preliminary
commentariolus
is a modest affair, but I fear controversy among the schoolmen, and therefore I must have the support of the Bishop, you see.” He was
babbling, beset by embarrassment and nervousness. He found it unaccountably obscene to speak to others of his work. “Anyway, you know how these things go. Will you oblige me?”

Rabe was flattered, and for the moment, quite overcome, he could say nothing, and continued to nod, making faint squeaking noises under his breath. He was preparing one of his ornate speeches.
The Canon had not time for that.

“Excuse me,” he said hastily, “I must speak to Haller.” The printer approached between the benches, a big stolid silent man in a leather apron, scratching his beard with
a thick thumb and studying a sheet of parchment. “
Meister
Haller, I wish to put in some verses with the dedication: can you do that?”

Haller frowned pensively, and then nodded.

“We can do that,” he said gravely.

Rabe was watching the Canon with a gentle, somewhat crestfallen questioning look.

“You have changed, my dear Koppernigk,” he murmured.

“What?”

“You have become a public man.”

“Have I? Perhaps so.” What can he mean? No matter. “You will do this favour for me, then? I shall pay you, of course.”

He turned his attention to the galleys, and when he looked again Rabe was gone. He had the distinct, vaguely troubling impression that the old man had somehow been folded up and put neatly but
unceremoniously away: closed, as it were, like a dull book. He shook his head impatiently. He had not the time to worry over trivia

*

He had all the time in the world. There was no hurry. He knew in his heart that the Bishop would be about as much impressed with the
Commentariolus
on Doctor
Copernicus’s planetary theory (did it not sound somehow like the name of a patent medicine put out by some quack?) as he would be with dreary Simocatta. Or he might be so impressed as to
forbid publication. The times were inauspicious. In Germany the Church was under attack, while the humanists were everywhere execrated—and translating Simocatta could be, the Canon supposed,
considered a humanist pursuit, however laughable the notion seemed to him. Bishop Lucas had troubles in plenty abroad without exposing himself to the accusation of laxity in his own house. One
scandalous nephew was enough.

“What am I to do with him!” he roared, drumming on his forehead with his fists. “Come, you are my physician, advise me how to rid myself of this sickness that is your blasted
brother.”

“He is sick, my lord,” Canon Nicolas said quietly. “We must try to be charitable.”

“Charity?
Charity?
Christ in Heaven, man, don’t make me spew. How can I be charitable to this . . . this . . . this defilement, this weeping sore? You have seen him: he is
rotting, the beast is rotting on his feet! Jesus God, if they should hear of this scandal at Rome—”

“He tells me he has influence at the Vatican, my lord.”

“—Or in Königsberg! O!” He sat down suddenly, appalled. “If they hear of it in Königsberg, what will they not make of it, the Knights. Something must be done. I
will be rid of him, nephew, mark it, I will be rid of him.”

They were in the library, a large high cold stone hall that in former times had been the garderobe, where now the business of the castle, and all Ermland, was conducted. The furnishings were
scant, some uninviting chairs, a prie-dieu, an incongruously dainty Italian table, the vast desk at the side of which the Canon sat on a low stool with pen and slate before him. One wall was draped
with a vast tapestry, out of which, as from some elaborate puzzle, the Bishop’s flat stern face in various disguises peered with watchful mien, while in the middle distance, incidentally as
it were, was depicted the martyrdom of St Stephen. A seven-branched candelabrum shed a brownish underwater light. Nervous petty officials summoned here over the years had left their mark on the
air, a vague mute sense of distress and guilt and failure. It was Bishop Lucas’s favourite room. He snuffed up great lungfuls of that rank air, puffed himself up on it. In these latter days
he left the library only to eat and sleep. He was safe here, while outside the pestilence raged, that plague of the spirit made tangible in Andreas’s coming. They had returned from Cracow to
find him entrenched at the castle, determined, with hideous cheerfulness, not to be dislodged this time. Max had made him very comfortable in his master’s tower, where he passed the time
waiting for their return by reading the notes and preliminary drafts of the Canon’s secret book . . . A climate of doom descended on Heilsberg.

The Bishop began pacing again, a bell-like bundle of fear and frustration in his long voluminous purple robe, banging and booming angrily. He halted at the narrow mullioned window and stood
staring out with his fists clasped behind him. Hoarfrost was on the glass, and a pale moon like a fat cheesy skull gleamed above a snowbound land.

“I might have him murdered,” he mused. “Can you find me an assassin that we can trust?” He turned, glowering. “Can you?”

Canon Nicolas closed his eyes wearily. “My lord, your letter to King Sigismund—”

“Damn King Sigismund! I have asked you a question.”

“You are not in earnest, surely.”

“Why not? Would he not be better off dead? He is dead already, except that his black heart out of spite persists in beating.”

“Yes,” the Canon murmured, “yes, he is dead already.”

“Just so. Therefore—”

“He is my brother!”

“—Yes, and he is my nephew, my sister’s son, my blood, and I would happily see his throat cut if I knew it could be quietly done.”

“I cannot believe—”

“What? What can you not believe? He is anathema,
and I will be rid of him.
”

The Canon frowned. “Then, Bishop, you will be rid of me also.”

His uncle slowly approached and stood over him, peering at him with interest. He seemed gratified, as if he derived a certain grim satisfaction from the thought that the long list of injuries
done him by a filthy world were here being neatly rounded off.

“So you will betray me also, will you?” he said briskly. “Well well, so it has come to this. After all I have done for you. Well. And where, pray, will you go?”

“To Frauenburg.”

“Ha! And rot there, among the cathedral mice? You are a fool, nephew.”

But the Canon was hardly listening, engrossed as he was in contemplation of this new unrecognisable self that had suddenly from nowhere risen up, waving fists in defiance and demanding an
apocalypse. Yet he was calm, quite, quite calm. It was of course the logical thing to do; yes, he would leave Heilsberg, there was no avoiding that command, it sang in the wires of his blood, a
great black chord. He would embrace exile, would give it all up, for Andreas. It would be the final irrefutable proof of his regard for his brother. And there would be no need for words. Yes. Yes.
He looked about him, blinking, bemused by the joy and dismay warring in his confused heart. It was all so simple, after all. The Bishop threw up his hands and lumbered off.

“
Fool!
”

*

Andreas laughed. “Fool you are, brother. Think you can escape me by hiding among the holy canons?”

“He is talking of assassination, Andreas.”

“What of it! A dagger in the throat is not the worst thing that can befall me. O go away, you. Your false concern is sickening. You would like nothing better than to see me dead. I know
you, brother, I
know
you.” The Canon said nothing. What there was to say could not be said. No need for words? Ah! He turned to go, but Andreas plucked him slyly by the sleeve.
“Our nuncle will be interested to know how you have occupied yourself all these years under his patronage, do you not think?”

“I ask you, say nothing to him of this work of mine. You should not have read my papers. It is all foolery, a pastime merely.”

“O, but you are too modest. I feel it is my duty to acquaint him with these very interesting theories which you have formulated. A heliocentric universe! He will be impressed. Well, what
do you say?”

“I cannot prevent you from betraying me. It hardly matters now. Heed me, Andreas, and leave Heilsberg, or he will surely do you grievous injury.”

Andreas grinned, grinding his teeth.

“You do not understand,” he said. “
I want to die!
”

“Nonsense. It is revenge that you want.”

They were startled by that, the Canon no less than Andreas, who stepped back with an offended look.

“What do you know of it?” he muttered sulkily. “Go on, scuttle off to your pious friends at Frauenburg.” But as the Canon went down the stairs the door flew open behind
him and Andreas appeared, framed against the candlelight like a dangling black spider, crying: “Yes! Yes! I will be revenged!”

*

Canon Koppernigk set out for Frauenburg by night, a cloaked black figure slumped astride a drooping mare. He was alone. Max had elected to stay and serve Andreas. That was all
right. They might try, but they would not take everything from him, no. If the sentry were to accost him now he would announce himself fiercely, would bellow his name and impress it like a seal
upon the waxen darkness for all Heilsberg to hear:
Doctor Copernicus!
But the sentry was asleep.

*     *     *

D
ay up there on the Baltic broke in storms of petrified fire. He had never seen such dawns. They were excessive, faintly alarming, not at all to
his taste. He had come to detest extremes. The sky here was altogether too vast, too high, and too much given to empty tempestuous displays. It was all surface. He preferred the sea, whose hidden
deeps communicated a sense of enormous grey calm. But sometimes the sea too disturbed him, when by a trick of tide or light it rose up in his window, humped, slate-blue, like the back of some
waterborne brute, menacing and ineluctable.

He had asked for the tower at the north-west corner of the cathedral wall. The Frauenburg Chapter thought him mad. It was a grim bare place, certainly, but it suited him. There were three
whitewashed rooms set squarely one above the other. From the second floor a door led out to a kind of platform atop the wall. This would do for an observatory, affording as it did an open view of
the great plain to the south, and north and west across the narrow freshwater lake called the Frisches Haff to the Baltic beyond, and of the stars by night. For furniture he had a couch to sleep
on, a table, two chairs, a lectern. That second chair troubled him in its suggestion of the possibility of a guest, but he allowed it stay, knowing that perfection is not of this world. Anyway, the
desk far outweighted in garishness any number of chairs. It was his father’s desk from Torun, which he had asked Katharina to let him have, as a keepsake. A big solid affair of oak, with
drawers and brass fittings and a top inlaid with worn green leather, it fitted ill in that stark cell, but it was a part of the past, and in time he grew accustomed to it. He felt that to have left
the rooms entirely bare would have been preferable, but he was not a fanatic. It was only that he had perceived in this grey stone tower, this least place, an image of his deepest self that
furniture, possessions, comforts, only served to blur. He was after the thing itself now, the unadorned, the stony thing.

The Chapter demanded little of him. His fifteen fellow canons considered him a dull dog. They lived in the grand style, with servants and horses and estates outside the walls. His tower to them
was a mark of incomprehensible and suspect humility. Yet they treated him with studied deference. He supposed they were afraid of him, of what he represented: he was, after all, the Bishop’s
nephew. He had not the interest to reassure them on that score. Anyway, their fright kept them at a welcome distance—the last thing he wanted was companionship. On his arrival at Frauenburg
he was immediately, with indecent haste almost, appointed Visitator, a largely honorary title thrust on him in the hope apparently of mollifying for the moment the hunger for advancement that the
canons imagined must be gnawing at this stark alarming newcomer. He compelled himself to attend all Chapter meetings, and sat, without ever uttering a word, listening diligently to endless talk of
tithes and taxes and Church politics. Easier to bear were the daily services at the cathedral. As a canon without Holy Orders he was called on to be present, but not of course to officiate. Unlike
the Chapter sessions, where his mute brooding presence was patently resented, in church his reticence was ideally matched, was absorbed even, by God’s huge stony silence.