Doctor Copernicus by John Banville

might have made a serious blunder, inexperienced as they were in matters of such
delicacy, had not the grey and cautious Canon Schiller, the representative of the Frauenburg Chapter, been there to guide them with astutely timed and enthusiastically administered kicks under the
table.
    It was with Schiller that they lodged, in a gloomy villa on the damp side of a hill near the Circo Massimo, where the food was stolidly Prussian and the air heavy with the odour of sanctity.
Nicolas glumly accepted the discipline and arid rituals of the house; from his schooldays on he had been accustomed to that kind of thing, and expected nothing better. Andreas, however, chafed
under Canon Schiller’s watchful eye, in which there was reflected, all the way from Prussia, the light of a far fiercer, icier gaze. Lately he had become more morose than ever, his rages were
redder, his fits of melancholia less and less amenable to the curative pleasures of student life. What had once in him been fecklessness was now a thirst for small destructions; his gay cynicism
had turned into something very like despair. He complained vaguely of being ill. His face was drawn and pallid, eyes shot with blood, his breathing oddly thin and papery. He began to frequent the
booths of astrologers and fortune tellers of the worst kind. Once even he asked Nicolas to cast his horoscope, which Nicolas, appalled at the idea, refused to do, pleading not very convincingly a
lack of skill. Uncle Lucas had secured a canonry at Frauenburg for Andreas, and for a time his finances flourished, but he was soon penniless again, and, worse, in the hands of the Jews. Nicolas
watched helplessly his brother’s life disintegrate; it was like witnessing the terrible slow fall into the depths of a once glorious marvellously shining angel.
    Yet Andreas loved Rome. In that wicked wolf-suckled city his peculiar talents came briefly to full flower, nourished by the pervading air of menace and intrigue. He spoke the language of these
scheming worldly churchmen, and it was not long before he had found his way into the cliques and cabals that abounded at the papal court. In the eyes of the world he was a firebrand, brilliant,
careless, and hedonistic, destined for great things. Schiller cautioned him on the manner of his life. He paid no heed. He was by then treading waters deeper than that Canon could conceive of. But
he was out over jagged reefs, and his light was being extinguished; he was drowning.
    Nicolas detested the capital. It reminded him of an old tawny lion dying in the sun, on whose scarred and smelly pelt the lice bred and feverishly fed in final frantic carnival. He was shocked
by what he saw of the workings of the Church. God had been deposed here, and Rodrigo Borgia ruled in his place. On Easter Sunday two hundred thousand pilgrims knelt in St Peter’s Square to
receive the blessing of the Pope; Nicolas was there, pressed about by the poor foolish faithful who sighed and swayed like a vast lung, lifting their faces trustingly toward the hot sun of spring.
He wondered if perhaps the tavern prophets were right, if this was the end, if here today a last terrible blessing was being administered to the city and the world.
    In July Lucrezia Borgia’s husband, Alfonso Duke of Bisceglie, was savagely attacked on the steps of St Peter’s; Cesare was behind the outrage, so it was whispered. The rumours seemed
confirmed some weeks later when Il Valentino’s man, Don Michelotto, broke into Alfonso’s sickroom in the Vatican and throttled the Duke in his bed. Nicolas recalled a certain
strange day in Bologna, and wondered. But of course it was altogether mad to think that Novara and his friends could be in any way involved in these bloody doings, or so at least the Professor
himself insisted when one day, by chance, Nicolas met him on the street near the amphitheatre of Vespasian.
    “No no!” Novara whispered hoarsely, glancing nervously about. “How can you