“Ludovico!” Tommaso exclaimed. “Heavens preserve me. I would have thought you dead!”
The man flinched. “Your pardon, Fra,” he said, an odd expression coming over his seamed face, “but Ludovico Benedetti was my father, now gone for twenty years. I am his son, Bartolomeo.”
“His son?” Tommaso leaned forward to peer closer. “The likeness is astonishing. Poor Ludovico, may his soul rest in peace. And you continue your good father’s trade?”
“I am an honest lute maker,” the man said, a quaver in his voice. “Theobros and even chitonnes, as well-made as you could find in Bologna.”
Instruments hung on the walls in various states of assembly, along with saws, wood frames, coiled lengths of gut. “I am Fra Tommaso, an old friend of your father’s. He was of great service to me in various scientific inquiries.”
The artisan seemed to retreat into his collar, like a tortoise before a predator. “I know nothing of those,” he said. “I make instruments, nothing more.”
Tommaso was surprised. “Did Ludovico never teach you of Pythagorean proportions, what the harmonic relations reveal about the cosmos? His zeal for exploring such matters was unflagging.”
“Reverend Father, I have never pursued any worldly matter but the making of lutes.” The man seemed miserable, almost terrified. “What my father did has nothing to do with me or my family, who do not deserve his shadow to fall across their lives.”
Tommaso stared at him in puzzlement, then his expression changed. “Good Lord,” he said. “Don’t tell me that Ludovico suffered for his association with me.”
The artisan would not meet his gaze. “My father was a good man; I was thirteen when he died. They seized his papers, detained him and questioned him, but he was never formally accused. Our business suffered for years afterward; I couldn’t marry until I was thirty-three.”
Tommaso was looking, appalled, at the younger man. “I remember you,” he said suddenly. “You swept shop, and sometimes held the guide when your father marked for cutting. He once stretched a string across his workbench, then showed you how the harmonious divisions of the diapason followed classical ratios. I remember him explaining how musica practica was, without an understanding of musica theorica, merely the trilling of birds.”
Bartolomeo shook his head. “I remember nothing. My apprenticeship was unending toil, usually with my father’s assistants. If he wanted to teach me about the universe, he never got the chance.”
One of the guards looked in the door, glanced incuriously around the gloom, then withdrew. Bartolomeo gaped, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a float when the fish takes the bait.
Tommaso took pity on the terrified man. “I am sorry for your father, and sorry you do not remember him better,” he said gently. “Give me the location of a good lumberyard, and we will leave you.”
He stepped out of the shop a moment later with a scrap of paper in his hand. “Poor Ludovico,” he said aloud, a pang in his chest. “A pious man who loved God’s works. Did they harry every Roman I spoke to?”
Further expeditions confirmed the unavailability of various needful substances in the Eternal City, and Tommaso wrote letters (reviewed unsmiling by Father Niccolo) to procure them from Venice, port city to everywhere. He read deeply in the library of the Holy Office, then sought permission to visit other libraries in the Vatican’s ant nest of buildings and palaces. Refused, he demanded that the necessary books be brought to him, and a shelf was in time designated for the books (scandalous, the librarian seemed certain) that were delivered for Fra Tommaso’s study. Libris diaboli, he overheard them called. He observed (though only to himself) that if these books were indeed heretical, the Holy Office would doubtless possess its own copies.
Astronomical treatises, to verify what he had heard about coming eclipses. Diacetto, Ficino’s second-rate disciple, whose De Pulchro might (Tommaso thought) lack the master’s cunning in obscuring the implications of his meaning. Della Porta, who seemed to take from Telesio (Tommaso’s own master) the doctrine of a sensate and living universe and who knew—and was rash enough to say—that demons, while their fallen natures had cost them God’s grace, “did not because of that lose their natural ability to know the virtues of the heavens, metals, stones, plants, and animals.” Tommaso was less interested in this truth (which he knew well) than in Della Porta’s doctrine of the signaturae by which the affinities and correspondences between the diverse elements of nature could be known. Trithemius, who seemed to share Finico’s belief in planetary angels, and who had probably called upon them for magical operations of his own. His Steganographia had been defended as a simple treatise on cryptography, the angels and spirits mentioned in it merely illustrations of methods of encryption; but Tommaso knew better. The first two books were indeed that, but the third dealt not with ciphers, but rather described a method of sending an instantaneous message through the medium of an angel. Like many writers of his time, Trithemius believed that thoughts could be transmitted over distances through the agency of a wind spirit.
Tommaso read and annotated, not on the sheets the librarian provided but in the laboratory notes of his mind, which no inquisitor could rifle. Most of these authors, he noticed, seemed to want to do things with their celestial knowledge: send a letter across enemy lines, predict the deaths of princes, restore vigor to one’s dissipated humors like an old man easing his piles. They sought to comprehend the machinery of the universe only in order to determine what cogs could serve as their tool, as though creation were an ancient viaduct still good to water their hogs. You think it shall run forever, he thought grimly, but Our Father created the cosmos for a purpose; and, that purpose fulfilled, shall toss it like an old scroll into the fire.
Tommaso also noticed how Giambattista Della Porta, who had suffered his own troubles with the Inquisition yet grew rich and famous during the decades that Tommaso had languished belowground, shared Ficino’s disdain for the vulgar masses, from whom the secrets of nature must stay hidden. “Secrets of such great price should not be profaned by the vilest sort of people that might happen upon them,” wrote Della Porta, seeking favor from Rudolf II. Thus the desire for gain corrupts, thought Tommaso, and those who probe the secrets of nature for material advantages are quick to deny them to others.
And so he moved beyond those writers Ficino influenced to those earlier ones who influenced Ficino: men of a ruder but less callous age, who knew little of the classical texts that were recovered and translated only in the last century yet burned with a cleaner flame than today’s corrupt and guttering minds. Tommaso read their crabbed, scholastic Latin with the wonder of a man dropping a flaming brand into a well. Peter of Abano, cited repeatedly in De Vita coelitus comparanda, recklessly likened magic to the Holy Eucharist, a metaphor (he seemed to mean the miracle of Transubstantiation) likely to be more easily defended to scholarly readers than to the Inquisition. He proved an apparent source for Ficino’s fascination with talismans. Roger Bacon the Englishman also wrote of talismans and planets, and Tommaso read carefully through his treatises, wondering whether Bacon’s reverence for the exploded Secretum Secretorum meant that he would have to read through that enormous fraud as well.
And why should he not? Even Ficino’s contemporaries had recognized the Secretum as pseudo-Aristoteliana, and Tommaso well knew Picatrix (with its cool claim that both Aristotle and Plato had written books on magic) was largely nonsense as well. But it was plainly nonsense that Ficino had used in elaborating his talismanic theories, so Tommaso had to consult it. He had better look at the Secretum as well, all ten volumes of it.