The Academy of Secrets Read online

  THE ACADEMY OF SECRETS

  S. J. Parris

  Copyright

  HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

  Copyright © Stephanie Merritt 2020

  Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

  Cover illustrations © Alamy and Shutterstock.com

  Stephanie Merritt asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook Edition © March 2020 ISBN: 9780007481231

  Version: 2020-02-06

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Novella

  Keep Reading …

  About the Author

  Also by S. J. Parris

  About the Publisher

  Despite what they say about Fra Giordano Bruno in Naples, and the many supposed crimes and heresies that have attached to my name, I would like it known that I was nowhere near Capodimonte that autumn night of 1568 when my brother in Christ met his mysterious death there, and I certainly had no dealings with witchcraft. Of that charge, at least, I am innocent.

  I feel the need to say this bluntly because the business touched some of the most powerful men in the city, and the involvement of friars from San Domenico Maggiore in rumours of secret societies, black magic and murder could be catastrophic in more ways than one, if the Inquisition were to catch wind of the rumours.

  But I run ahead of my story. Naples is a madhouse, though you’ll know that already, my unknown reader, if you have ever set foot here. In case you are a stranger to the city, you need to understand this: Naples is a place of fierce beauty and fiercer tempers. Under the white glare of the sun, two hundred and fifty thousand souls cram together inside the ancient walls, in streets built to hold a tenth of that number. Wherever you walk in Naples, someone and his brother will be always in your face, trying to rob you or start a fight. Arguing keeps us feeling vital, whether it’s a fist fight in the market over the price of olive oil, or a disputation about the relative authority of Plato versus Aristotle in the great basilica of San Domenico; the latter has stricter rules, but not necessarily less emotion or violence. Perhaps it’s the consequence of living in the shadow of a volcano that could drown us all in fire at any moment. The threat of obliteration means people here live one day at a time, but as insurance they also make great public show of their devotion to the saints whose intercession is all that stands between the city and God’s wrath.

  When I first arrived in Naples at the age of fifteen, in the Year of Our Lord 1563, I truly thought as I walked under the Porta San Gennaro that I had entered the gates of hell. For a boy from the sleepy town of Nola on the other side of Mount Vesuvius, the heat, dust, crowds, noise, smells and riot were overwhelming; I almost turned and fled back to my father’s house, convinced I would never be able to keep a thought in my head in that Babel. But I stayed; I studied; I took my vows as a friar of the Dominican order in the great convent of San Domenico Maggiore, the city’s most influential religious house, and by the age of twenty, I couldn’t imagine feeling at home anywhere else. Naples gets under your skin; you mould yourself to it. You learn to dissemble, to fight with knives and fists, to haggle, to win at cards by any means, to sing at the top of your lungs on a tavern table, and to jump from a first-floor window when you hear a husband’s key in the door – yes, even if you’re a Dominican friar. Especially if you’re a Dominican friar. Because – let’s be honest, for once – we are also a city of hypocrites. The law forbids a man and woman to kiss in the street, but courtesans ply their trade openly in the churches. Blasphemy is punished in public, but child beggars are left to die in doorways. We are all pretending, in Naples. Above all, we pretend to be free, but we are far from it. The Kingdom of Naples is a Spanish vice-realm, and we live under occupation; everywhere you look, there are bands of Spanish troops patrolling the streets, and the viceroy’s agents lurk in every tavern, ready to report murmurs of dissent or disrespect among the Neapolitans towards our Spanish overlords.

  So being a native of Naples has always meant learning to keep your eyes open, and hide your secrets. I had become skilled at this in my five years at San Domenico, which is why Fra Gennaro trusted me with the Academy.

  Fra Gennaro Ferrante was the infirmarian of San Domenico, and his skills were acknowledged far beyond the walls of the convent. He was in his early forties when I first knew him, but as a young man he had studied at the famous school of medicine in Salerno, and would surely have become a renowned professor of anatomy if a decline in his family’s fortunes had not obliged him to enter the religious life. But Gennaro was not one to let the strictures of the Church’s teachings dampen his quest for knowledge; that was one of the reasons I admired him. He used his position at San Domenico to continue his investigations into the workings of the body, sometimes with the prior’s blessing and sometimes – as I had learned first-hand – without. But the prior did not like to question too closely how Gennaro’s talents were honed, because they brought money and prestige to the convent; no doctor of physick in Naples had his reputation for the ability to remove a tumour, sew a wound, set a bone so the limb was saved, or draw a breech child from the womb without loss of the mother’s life. Several times a week, a frantic servant would arrive from one of the city’s noble households, begging for Gennaro to attend his master or mistress; if the result was favourable, as it usually was, extravagant bequests and gifts would follow, to show the family’s gratitude to God. If there was tension between the Church’s teachings on how far medicine might be permitted to intervene in a soul’s journey from cradle to grave, the prior trusted Gennaro to act according to his conscience, and did not ask too many questions for fear the income would dry up.

  I had been assigned to work as Gennaro’s assistant three years previously, as a novice; perhaps the novice master saw in me some glimmer of talent for the natural sciences, though it is likely that he hoped the practical tasks of tending to ailing brothers would concentrate my mind away from the difficult theological questions I was prone to ask. He was mistaken in that regard; working with Fra Gennaro only exacerbated my instinctive sense that there was more to be read in the great book of Nature than the Church was willing to allow. This sounded a lot like heresy, and I was lucky that Fra Gennaro was of the same mind; the Inquisition already had a note of my name, and anyone else would have reported me on the instant for the questions I asked in his infirmary.

  Gennaro and I guarded each other’s secrets with honour. Two years earlier, I had assisted him in anatomising a corpse that needed to disappear in order to protect the convent’s reputation. If that event ever came to light, we would both find ourselves facing public execution; since that night, we had shared an unspoken
bond and, on occasion, when we found ourselves alone in the dispensary, he had taken me further into his confidence with details of his medical research into the forbidden secrets of the body’s workings. Even so, I was not prepared for what happened on 5th September 1568, when he knocked on the door of my cell half an hour before midnight.

  I cracked the door, expecting to find my friend Paolo suggesting an outing to the Cerriglio, the tavern by Santa Maria la Nova where the younger friars gathered at night if they could slip out while the watch brothers were looking the other way. I was ready to turn him down; I had been studying late and, in any case, I had lost my appetite for the Cerriglio after one of our brothers had had his throat cut in its upstairs brothel two years earlier. But instead I saw Gennaro’s stern face lit from below by a lantern, his eyes bright beneath heavy brows.

  ‘Are you dressed?’ he whispered.

  I opened the door further to show that I was still in my habit.

  ‘Good. Come with me.’

  ‘Where—?’

  He pressed a finger to his lips and motioned for me to follow. I shot a quick glance back at my writing table, to make sure I had not left out any incriminating papers – I knew that they sometimes searched my cell for indications of heresy when I was out. Necessity had forced me to find ingenious hiding places, and my writings were currently tucked away behind a loose board in the rafters. I pulled the door closed behind me. Gennaro raised a hand and paused for a moment, lowering the lantern and allowing his eyes to travel around the landing, in case anyone should be watching. I held my breath, waiting for his signal. When he appeared satisfied that we had not been observed, he nodded and I followed him to the stairs. We were later to learn that he ought to have looked more closely.

  Both the inner and outer cloisters were busy, considering the convent should have been sleeping. But San Domenico was not a typical religious house; the College it housed was the most intellectually prestigious university in the kingdom, and many of the brothers were spare sons of the Neapolitan barons, whose families kept the order’s coffers full, so the friars here enjoyed an unusual degree of liberty. Copies of keys to a side gate in the gardens circulated among the younger men, who slipped out at night to the local taverns to compensate for the privations of religious life. Those with money hosted extravagant suppers in their richly furnished rooms, drinking wine from Venetian glass in the light of gold candelabras. The prior turned a blind eye to these minor infractions of the rules, when it suited him. It was intellectual disobedience that he would not indulge, which meant I had to be careful; I had neither a good name nor family money to smooth my path if I crossed him, and I had already been marked as a troublemaker.

  So I kept my face hidden beneath my cowl as I followed Gennaro through the shadows, fearful that even the licence the infirmarian enjoyed might not be enough to protect me if I were seen and reported. He led me away from the gate used by the night-time revellers, along an overgrown path through the convent’s lemon grove to the stables on the far side of the grounds. Here a boy was waiting with a horse ready saddled; he handed Gennaro the reins without a word and the infirmarian motioned to me to mount behind him. A gate was unlocked and I saw Gennaro lean down and slip the boy a coin as we passed through. ‘Keep your hood up,’ was all he said to me as we set out into the narrow streets.

  ‘Are we visiting a patient?’ I asked, as we wove north-west past Santa Chiara towards the Porta Reale. Torches flamed in wall brackets outside the larger palazzi, and a full moon gave out a pale gleam to light our way. Catches of music and arguments carried from the back streets; Naples was never quiet, even at night.

  ‘That’s what I told the prior,’ he said. I waited for further explanation, but he fell silent again. The air was warm, but without the heavy, torpid heat that hung in shimmering waves over the city during the day. A night breeze stirred my hair under the cowl, carrying scents of citrus and the sea.

  ‘So – we’re not? Seeing a patient, I mean?’ I tried again, leaning around his shoulder to gauge his expression.

  ‘Wait and see,’ he replied, and his mouth quirked in a half-smile that sent a jolt of excitement and fear up my spine. Whatever we were about to see was clearly illegal or forbidden, if he had lied to the prior about it, and for a young man as determined in the pursuit of prohibited knowledge as I, this was encouragement enough. You might question whether someone so rebellious by nature was suited to the religious life at all, and you would be right to wonder; the obvious answer is that I wanted to study, and since my family had no money to send me to the secular university, my only path to learning was as a monk or a friar. The Dominicans had seen my potential and opened their doors to me, in return for my obedience. It had not taken them long to realise that it could not be bought at the expense of my intellect, and so they kept a close eye on me.

  The Porta Reale was locked at that hour, and guarded by soldiers, but I had already discovered that Gennaro was a familiar figure in the night streets of Naples; he dismounted, saluted them, and exchanged greetings in Spanish. I could not hear what was said, but I saw him laugh and clap one of them on the shoulder. Coins changed hands discreetly, and a small door in the main gate opened for us; Gennaro led the horse through and passed me a lantern handed to him by one of the soldiers, before mounting again.

  The sound of the gate locking behind us shifted my nervous excitement towards fear. We were in lawless terrain here, outside the city walls; the road sloped steeply up into the hills and the dark pressed in closer. I breathed the scent of night blossoms and listened hard for any hint of danger, either from wolves or bandits, but heard only the hunting cries of owls. To our left, I could make out the fortifications of the Castel Sant’Elmo, black against the sky. We followed the road north towards Vomero; here and there, pinpricks of light glimmered on the hillside showing the few villas built by the nobility to enjoy the view over the bay, away from the stink and heat of the city. I held the lantern awkwardly, but Gennaro seemed to know where he was going without the need for light. I noticed that he had pulled his cloak back to reveal a dagger belted around his waist.

  ‘Will I be back in time for matins?’ I asked, after a while, when he had still not said a word about the purpose of our trip. The watch brothers came around with a bell to wake us for the office of matins at two o’clock, and any friar asleep in his cell – or, worse, not in his cell at all – would face discipline. Even the dedicated revellers knew to be back in time, lest they test the prior’s patience too far and face a tightening of the rules. Better to turn up and chant the responses half-drunk and smelling of quim than not turn up at all.

  ‘You’re excused matins,’ Gennaro said, over his shoulder. ‘I told the prior I needed you tonight. I assured him that, thanks to my attentive training, you have attained a level of skill that makes you a valuable assistant during difficult operations, which can only enhance the reputation of San Domenico. He seemed reluctantly convinced.’

  ‘And did you mean it?’ My pleasure at the flattery was undermined by the suggestion that my mentor had used it as a ruse.

  ‘In a sense.’ He was enjoying being enigmatic.

  ‘Damn it, Gennaro – can’t you just tell me why you’ve dragged me out here?’

  He laughed. ‘All in good time, my eager young friend. Tell me – that memory trick of yours, where you recite a psalm in Hebrew and then recite it backwards – can you do it on demand?’

  ‘Psalm eighty-six. Yes.’

  ‘And you can explain how you do it?’

  ‘Of course. I have been studying the ancient memory systems of the Roman orators, together with the writings of the Spanish mystic Ramon Lull, and I have syncretised them with ideas of my own to form—’

  ‘All right, save your breath. As long as you can articulate your process, if you should be called upon.’

  ‘Who wants to know about my memory system?’ I asked, with another flash of alarm. The art of memory had become my passion since my earliest studies of the Roman orators;
I was convinced that I could improve on their methods and so learn to carry an entire library of books in my head, but I was well aware that, to the Inquisition, some memory systems danced perilously close to occult knowledge. For that reason, although many of my brothers at San Domenico admired and envied my talent for memorising swathes of scripture or commentary, I had been cautious about who I trusted with my ideas. Why would one of Gennaro’s nocturnal patients need to hear me explain how I taught myself to recite the psalms backwards in Hebrew?

  The infirmarian didn’t answer; instead he pointed ahead. The road wound upwards and narrowed through rocky cliffs of tufa stone, and I could see torchlight in front where a series of terraces had been built into the slopes of the hill. The bulk of an impressive villa was silhouetted against the sky in the distance as we passed high walls and gates.

  ‘Here we are,’ Gennaro said, slowing the horse as we rounded the next bend. ‘Hold up the light.’ He pulled to a stop and dismounted, taking the lantern from me to illuminate a plain wooden door set into the rockface. He knocked twice with the side of his fist; when the door opened an inch, he muttered a word in a low voice and it swung back, though I could not see whose hand had opened it. Gennaro glanced over his shoulder. ‘Well, don’t hang about there all night,’ he said, and entered the doorway.

  ‘What about the horse?’ I slid down from the saddle, casting around for somewhere I could tether the animal. Suddenly, a shadow stirred at my side, making me whip around and curse in surprise. A thin, pale man with one hunched shoulder had appeared as if conjured from the air; I could not see if he had come from the doorway or the shadows beneath the cliff, but he merely nodded to me as if our business were agreed, and held his hand out for the reins. I hesitated, then passed them over; there was nothing I could do now but trust Gennaro.

  I followed him under the low entrance into a passageway carved through the rock. The door slammed after us with alarming finality, making the lantern’s flame shiver in the draught; I glanced back, and hurried after Gennaro. The passage was tall enough to stand upright, wide enough that I could not touch the walls with my arms outstretched; ahead it was illuminated by torches fixed at intervals. As we progressed, the rough-hewn walls of rock gave way to plaster, engraved to give the appearance of opus reticulatum, the diamond-shaped brickwork used by the ancient Romans. Niches had been built into the walls at head height, such as you might find in a chapel; they contained statues, though the figures represented were certainly not saints or virgins, but had the appearance of characters from antiquity, from the myths of the Greeks or the Egyptians. After about thirty feet, the tunnel ended in another door. Gennaro knocked, the same sequence; a voice muttered from the other side, he repeated a word in a language I did not recognise, and the door swung open. We found ourselves in an antechamber with a higher ceiling. The wall facing us held another closed door, but that was not its most striking aspect; above this portal, two openings had been cut into the wall, evenly spaced to give the effect of eye sockets, with the doorway as the mouth. From where we stood, I had the impression of looking at a giant skull. Memento mori, I thought. Was this some kind of mausoleum? I could hear the sound of running water somewhere. Gennaro gestured to the far wall and I saw an alcove where a spring bubbled up, apparently from the rock itself, then trickled into a marble basin. Beside the fountain, a servant stood looking impassively ahead, white linen cloths folded over his arm.