‘But she has clearly met with a violent death, and quite recently—’
He laid the back of his fingers on the girl’s neck, his expression speculative. ‘An hour or so, I would say.’
‘Then surely we should report it?’
‘Fra Giordano, I thought we had agreed no questions?’
I bit my lip. He paused and straightened, his hand hovering over a selection of knives. I could not miss the impatience in his face, though his voice was softer. ‘Listen. You told me you have read the work of Vesalius.’
‘I have, but—’
‘And how did Vesalius come by his knowledge of the human body? Where did he find his raw materials?’
‘He stole corpses from the gallows at night.’ I felt as if an invisible hand were squeezing my own throat.
‘Exactly. And you know he also robbed graves? In the pursuit of understanding, it is sometimes necessary to interpret the law in one’s own way.’
‘But this girl has been murdered! He may not have got far – someone might have seen something—’
‘That is not our concern, Brother.’ The sharpness in his tone took me by surprise. He sighed. ‘In the medical schools of Europe, professors of anatomy are allocated the bodies of felons for public dissection under the law – as many as four a year in some places.’ His jaw tightened. ‘I will never be a professor of anatomy now. God in His wisdom saw fit to call me to His service in another way. But that does not mean my desire to learn is any the less.’ His tone suggested a degree of scepticism about the divine wisdom in this instance. He planted both hands flat on the table and leaned across the girl to nail me with a fierce stare. ‘Listen to me, Fra Giordano. I see in you the makings of a man of science. I mean it. For such as us, pushing the boundaries of what is known, shining the light of true learning into the dark corners of Creation – there can be no higher good. I know you agree.’ He jabbed a forefinger into the air between us. ‘And do not let anyone make you afraid of God’s judgement. All of Nature is a great book in which the Creator has written the secrets of the universe. Would He have given us the gifts of reason and enquiry if He did not wish us to read that book?’
In the soft light, his face was avid as a boy’s. I hesitated. Fra Eugenio, my novice master, had taken great pains to impress upon his flock of intellectually ambitious youths that the first and greatest sin of our forefather Adam was the desire for forbidden knowledge. He held firmly to the view that the Almighty intended much of His creation to remain beyond our meagre human understanding. I was of Fra Gennaro’s mind, but I was still afraid.
‘You mean to anatomise her.’ My voice emerged as a croak. This time I did not frame it as a question.
He picked up a long knife and studied the tip of its blade. ‘You know as well as I that this city is overrun with indigents.’ He gestured with the knife towards the figure on the table. ‘She was a street girl, a whore. No one will mourn her, poor creature. If she were not lying here now, she would be on a cart full of corpses heading for Fontanelle. At least this way some good will come of her sad existence before she ends up there. In life she gave her body up to rogues and lechers. In death, she will give it up to the service of anatomy.’ He fixed me with a long look, tilting his head to one side as he pressed the knife’s point into the pad of his finger. ‘You are not obliged to stay, if your conscience advises you otherwise. But think of the opportunity. You are the only one here I would trust to assist me.’
I looked at him. How could I resist such flattery? Even so, in my gut I was deeply troubled by his proposition. In the first place, I did not believe his story about how he had come by the body. There could be no doubt that the girl had been murdered, barely an hour ago, and I feared that in disposing of her corpse – to say nothing of illegally dissecting it – we would be implicated in her death. More than this, though, it was the brutality of what he was proposing that disturbed me. I had read Vesalius’s work on anatomy and understood the value of practical experimentation. But this girl had already suffered violence at the hands of a man; whatever she may have been in life, our cutting and probing in the name of scientific enquiry seemed like a further violation. I did not voice any of this. Instead, I said:
‘Does the prior know?’
He allowed a long pause. His gaze slid back to the girl on the table.
‘The prior has, on occasion, given me permission to examine corpses where it is clear that there would be some greater benefit in doing so. When old Fra Teofilo died last year in Holy Week – you recall? – I was permitted to cut him open in order to study the tumour in his gut. And what could be more beneficial than furthering our knowledge of the female form? You cannot know how rare it is to find such an ideal specimen.’
The gleam in his eyes as he said this verged on lascivious, though not for the girl, or at least, not in the usual way. His desire was all for her interior, for the secrets she might yield up to his knife. From his studied evasion of my question, I took it that the answer was no. He tapped the hourglass with a fingernail. The sand was already piling into a small hill in the lower half.
‘Time will not wait for us, Bruno. Go or stay, but make your mind up now.’
‘I will stay,’ I said, sounding steadier than I felt.
‘Good.’ Relief rippled over his face. ‘And if you think you are going to faint or vomit, give me plenty of warning. We will have enough to clear up without that.’
He dipped a cloth in the hot water and wiped it almost tenderly around the girl’s chest, along the declivities of her clavicle, the sharp ridges of her collarbones and into the valley between her breasts. ‘Note the fullness of the breasts,’ he observed, as if he were addressing students in an anatomy theatre, as he marked the place of the first incision in a Y-shape across each side of her breastbone, ‘and the enlargement of the areola. If I am right in my speculation, we may find something of unparalleled interest here.’
I concentrated on holding the lantern steady over the table. As if I could have failed to notice the girl’s full breasts or large, dark nipples. Perhaps he had forgotten what it was to be eighteen. In his eyes she was simply a specimen, material for experimentation. To me she was too recently living, breathing, warm, with a head full of thoughts and dreams, for me to regard her as anything other than a young woman. I did not dare touch her skin; I almost believed it would still hold some pulse of life. Nor could I look at her face; the terror in those wild, staring eyes was too vivid. I had heard it said that, when a person was murdered, the image of the killer was fixed in their death stare. I did not mention this to Fra Gennaro; I did not want him to laugh at me or take me for a village simpleton.
Any unbidden lustful thoughts shrivelled in an instant as he pushed the blade into her flesh. He made two careful incisions along the breastbone and joined them in a vertical cut that ran the length of her torso to her pubic mound. The sound of the knife tearing through meat was unspeakable, the smell more so. I recoiled, shocked, at the amount of blood that pooled out. Gennaro calmly placed containers under the table at strategic points, and I saw that, like a butcher’s block, the surface had channels cut into it that diverted the blood into tidy streams of run-off that could be collected underneath. He folded back the skin on each side of the chest cavity, exposing the white bones of the ribcage. I clamped my teeth together, fighting the rising tide of bile churning in my stomach, reminding myself that I was a man of science. A wave of cold washed over my head and a sudden sunburst exploded in my vision; the cone of light from the lantern slid queasily up and down the wall. Gennaro stopped to look at me.