The Book of Secrets

by Tom Harper

  ‘OK,’ he said, and hung up.

  He spent five minutes delaying what he had to do next. There weren’t many people he was afraid to call, but Nevado was one. Perhaps the only one.

  He picked up the black phone on his desk – the secure line – and dialled the number from memory.

  The voice was there at once. ‘What happened?’

  ‘My men followed them to the warehouse you told them. They…’ He swallowed. ‘They were caught by some security device. Two died; one managed to get away. The man and the woman escaped.’

  He waited for a tirade of abuse. Instead, all he heard was a soft voice rasping, ‘What are you going to do about it?’

  ‘They stole a vehicle belonging to my men. Like all our vehicles, it is fitted with a tracking system. We have traced it to a suburb of Liège near the German border.’

  ‘Did the American take the book?’

  ‘The police came too soon for us to find out.’

  Gemato waited. ‘I will go myself,’ said the voice. ‘Have one of your men meet me there.’

  One hundred miles to the north-west, the old man put down the phone and stared at the office wall. There were rooms in this building decorated by Raphael and Michelangelo; others that housed marvels from an art collection built up over almost two thousand years. Nevado could have had any of them to decorate his office. Yet he had chosen a small, spare room overlooking an obscure courtyard, and the only decoration on the wall was an ivory crucifix. He contemplated it for a moment.

  There were records he could have consulted, books and files – he did not trust his secrets to computers – but he did not need to. Somewhere in the Vatican’s vast archive was an index card with Emily Sutherland’s name on it. He had studied it only yesterday. It had referenced another file in another basement, this one much fatter. He had read that too. He knew who Emily Sutherland wanted to see near Liège.

  He buzzed his secretary. ‘I need to travel to Liège. At once, and in private.’

  Near Liège, Belgium

  Nick had never thought about monks retiring. If he ever had, he’d have assumed they just carried on until they died, like the pope. He certainly wouldn’t have guessed the reality. Brother Jerome had swapped the Society of Jesus for the drab mortification of the suburbs: a cul-de-sac of brick and pebble-dashed bungalows on the edge of a small town. It felt like the end of the world.

  Nick parked the car against a hedge to hide the broken window. Low clouds were holding back the dawn; the world was sunk in shadows, a thousand shades of grey. A woman in a quilted jacket walked a terrier along the opposite pavement; she shot them a suspicious glare as she passed. Otherwise, the street was empty.

  Emily led them up a path to a white front door and rang the bell. Nick rubbed his hands together. The cold air was the only thing keeping him awake right now.

  Emily rang the bell again. A second later, Nick saw movement behind the blurred glass panels in the door. A voice mumbled at them to be patient while keys jangled and locks clicked. The door cracked open on its chain and a gaunt face peered through the gap.

  His eyes widened. ‘Emily. Was I to expect you?’ He noticed Nick. ‘And a friend. Who is he, please?’

  If Andy Warhol had ever taken holy orders and retired to Belgium, perhaps this was what he’d have looked like. Brother Jerome was a thin, bony man with a mop of white hair that almost touched his eyes. He wore a Chinese-patterned bathrobe, loosely knotted so that when he walked his bare legs were exposed right up to his thighs. Nick had the unpleasant suspicion he was naked underneath it.

  He unchained the door and kissed Emily on both cheeks; she stiffened, but didn’t pull away. Nick got a nod, but Jerome was already leading them into a room off the hall.

  Nick looked around in amazement. The room was a mess. Books and papers overflowed from shelves that had been screwed to every available inch of wall. Mould frothed on the half-empty mugs that clustered around the battered easy chair in the middle of the room, which had several more towers of books wobbling uncertainly on the arms.

  Jerome headed for the kitchen. ‘You would like some coffee?’

  No one else did. Through the door, Nick saw him boiling a kettle.

  ‘So – Emily. It is a long time, yes? How have you been?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘I have thought perhaps I never see you again.’

  ‘We’ve got a book we’d like you to look at.’

  Jerome came out of the kitchen with a steaming mug. It looked as though it hadn’t been washed up in weeks.

  ‘You want to give this to me?’

  ‘We want you to help us.’

  The words had an extraordinary effect on Jerome. His bowed head suddenly snapped up with a furious stare; his body went rigid.

  ‘Do you know why I am here?’ He flung out an arm at the dilapidated living room. Hot coffee spilled over his fingers and dribbled onto the carpet, but he didn’t notice. ‘Do you know the reason of this exile? Do you?’

  Emily bowed her head. A tear ran down her cheek. Nick moved closer to protect her, but neither she nor Jerome noticed. He had no part in their story.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Emily whispered. ‘If I could go back…’

  ‘You would do the same. And so would I.’

  As abruptly as it had flared up, his anger died away. He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around Emily. Her face was hidden from Nick, but she looked as though she was hugging a corpse.

  Jerome stroked her hair. ‘Let us no longer deceive ourselves with remembrance of our past pleasures. We only spoil our lives and sour the sweets of solitude.’

  Emily pulled back – gently – and straightened her hair. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. But we need your help. And… I thought you would appreciate this.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  At a nod from Emily, Nick pulled the defrosted bestiary out of his bag. Jerome licked his lips and held out his hands. ‘Please.’

  Nick gave him the book. Jerome almost snatched it from him. He lifted it up like a priest reading the gospel and examined it.

  ‘The binding is of the seventeenth century.’ He turned it in his hands. ‘Calfskin leather with blind stamping, possibly German workmanship.’

  ‘I thought it was supposed to be fifteenth century,’ Nick interrupted. Brother Jerome fixed him with a scornful look.

  ‘It has been replaced. Bindings wear out faster than pages. As bodies fail before the soul.’

  He carried the book to a wooden bureau in an adjoining room and sat down. From a drawer, he extracted a foam cushion and a pair of thin gloves. He pulled them on over his bony fingers, a pathologist preparing for an autopsy, and laid the book on the desk. He slipped a finger under the cover and gently tugged, peeling it away from the page beneath to rest open on the cushion.

  The illuminated lion stared off the page. Nick glanced at Jerome to see if he recognised it, and caught the old man giving him a sly glance from under his white fringe. Neither said what the other was thinking.

  Jerome thumbed the crease of the page. ‘This book has not been well preserved.’

  ‘It was in a library that got flooded.’

  ‘Beyond the obvious. There is a gutter here.’

  Nick stared, not sure what he was looking for. ‘What’s a gutter?’

  ‘The bones of a missing page.’ Jerome pushed the cover and the first page further apart. Nick saw the edge of a thin strip of parchment, barely protruding from the spine.

  ‘A page has been cut out.’

  ‘Is that normal?’

  ‘Depressingly so. It is hard to steal a book but very easy to take a page. An individual leaf can fetch thousands of dollars. All these ancient manuscripts are worth far more in pieces than as a whole.’

  ‘It’s been going on for centuries,’ Emily added. ‘This one is not so long ago.’ Jerome pointed to a series of dark smudgings on the topmost page. ‘You see here the marks where the missing page has soaked through. It has only been taken after the floo
d.’

  Emily and Nick looked at each other, daring each other to state the obvious. Jerome watched with a wicked smile, enjoying their discomfort.

  ‘Gillian was a professional who loved books,’ said Nick at last. ‘She’d never have mutilated it like this. She worked in museums, for God’s sake.’

  Emily avoided his gaze. ‘It would be nice to know what was on that first page,’ was all she said.

  ‘Maybe we find more.’

  Jerome fumbled in a drawer of the desk and brought out a thin metal tube that looked like a pen. He twisted the end, and a pale beam of purplish light glowed from the tip.

  ‘Ultraviolet,’ he said. He shone it on the inside of the cover. To Nick’s amazement, dark letters appeared on the stiff board, emerging under the light like hidden runes. Unlike the dense bestiary text, this was written in a thin, spidery hand.

  ‘How did that get there?’ Nick’s voice was barely a whisper. ‘It was written by the book’s owner. When somebody else got it – by gift or purchase, or perhaps by stealing – he erased the mark of the first ownership. But the trace remains still.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  Still holding the light, Jerome picked up a magnifying glass to read it more closely.

  ‘“Cest livre est a moy, Armand Comte de Lorraine.” ’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means it belonged to the Count of Lorraine. Once. The Count of Lorraine possessed one of the greatest libraries of early modernity.’

  Nick didn’t know what Jerome meant by ‘modernity’, but guessed it didn’t fit with anything he thought of as modern.

  ‘What happened to it?’

  Jerome shrugged. ‘It was lost. The Count’s heirs sold his collection piece by piece, or allowed unscrupulous men to loot it. What was left, I think, passed to the city archives of Strasbourg in the nineteenth century.’

  Page by page, Jerome’s gloved fingers worked their way through the bestiary until he reached the end of the book. There was no illustration on the last page, only a couple of lines of text and a rectangular brown stain on the parchment about the size of a postcard. Nick swallowed hard and fought back the urge to pull out the playing card to overlay it. It looked as if it would fit perfectly.

  ‘Something has been stuck in here,’ said Jerome. He flicked another suspicious glance at them.

  Emily leaned closer, holding her body very deliberately away from Jerome’s. ‘Is there an explicit? Any indication of who wrote this book, or whom for?’

  ‘It says, “Written by the hand of Libellus, and illuminated by Master Francis. He also made another book of beasts using a new art of writing.”’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Libellus and Francis are pseudonyms that the scribe and the illuminator used,’ said Emily. ‘Libellus is Latin for “little book”; Francis is probably a reference to St Francis, playing on the fact that he’s mastered the animals.’

  ‘But there have been two hands,’ said Jerome. ‘The first sentence and the second have been written by different men with different inks.’

  Nick studied the aged writing. He was pleasantly surprised to find he could see what Jerome meant. He could even pick out some of the words: Libellus – Franciscus – illuminatus. The first line was written in the same black script as the rest of the book; the second sentence appeared to have been added in more ragged writing in brown ink. Was it the same hand that had pasted in the card, he wondered?

  Jerome picked up the ultraviolet penlight again and scanned the back cover. Nick watched closely and saw nothing – but something seemed to catch Emily’s eye.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Jerome put the light down and looked round defiantly. ‘I thought perhaps there was another ex libris, but there is nothing.’

  ‘On the page,’ Emily insisted. Before Jerome could react, she snatched up the penlight. She held it almost parallel to the page, so that the beam barely touched the surface.

  ‘Hard point.’

  Nick squinted. For the second time that morning, he was looking at letters that had not been there a moment before. But these were not faded ink brought out of a dark background; instead, they seemed to be written inside the parchment itself.

  ‘What do they say?’

  XLVI

  Strassburg

  ‘Written by the hand of Libellus, and illuminated by Master Francis.’

  I sat on the floor, resting against a timber post, and read the inscription for the hundredth time. I held the book like a chalice, a talisman. I could have sold it and paid off half my debts at once, but I would never do that.

  Kaspar, fiddling with the press, glanced over. I knew he liked to watch me reading his book. I angled it down.

  ‘What is that?’

  His eyes were sharp as ever. I turned the book around and raised it so he could see what I had done. The blank space underneath the explicit was now filled by the card I had pasted in: the eight of beasts, the map that led me to Kaspar.

  He smiled. ‘You are a collector.’

  ‘A devotee.’

  ‘You’re right to hang on to the card. There will not be any others.’

  A confused look.

  ‘The plate is gone. I melted it down and sold it.’

  I was aghast that something so beautiful should have been lost for ever. ‘All of them? The whole deck?’

  ‘About half.’ He laughed at the expression on my face, though I did not find it funny.

  ‘Johann, you saw what happened to our own plate. Even in a few dozen pressings it decayed. The same would have happened to the cards. Nothing endures.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ I insisted.

  He clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Some survive in Dunne’s workshop. Speaking of whom, I must go. He has some work for me.’

  I wrapped the bestiary in its cloth and followed Kaspar out. My joy in the book had gone. Nothing endures. Except failure, I thought – and my engagement to Ennelin.

  I made my way through Strassburg to an apothecary’s shop where my credit was still tolerated. The lead cast I had made of Dunne’s plate barely survived my experiment: the metal was so soft it blurred the moment it touched the paper. But, like the first print I ever saw from Konrad Schmidt’s ring in Cologne, I had recognised something in it. I knew I could make it stronger. Already, by alloying it with tin and antimony I found I could make a good clean cast. The hope was just enough to hold off the full weight of my dread whenever I thought of Ennelin.

  She was still lurking in my thoughts when I passed the Rathaus, the city hall. I almost missed her. The court was in session, and crowds thronged the street outside waiting for verdicts. I glimpsed her coming down the steps and almost dismissed it as a manifestation of my imagination. But it was enough to make me look again, just in time to confirm it was indeed her. Her mother was behind her. They stepped into the crowd and vanished before I could reach them.

  I found someone who knew her, a member of the wine merchant’s guild, and asked why they had been in court.

  ‘They have just heard the suit regarding her late husband’s estate. He had a son by his first wife who challenged her inheritance.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The son won. The widow – his stepmother – is left with nothing but a room to live in and food to eat.’

  Before I could react, a heavy hand clamped down on my shoulder and spun me around. I looked down into the last face I wanted to see. Stoltz, the moneylender, a regular acquaintance of mine.

  ‘Were you in court this morning?’

  I shook my head, too numb to speak. ‘The widow Ellewibel’s estate is worthless.’

  ‘I have just heard.’

  He grabbed me by the collar. ‘I loaned you fifty gulden against that inheritance.’

  ‘And I can repay it.’

  He was a small man, lean and cunning. Even so, for a moment I thought he might try to shake the money out of me. Then something behind me caught his ey
e – no doubt another debtor of doubtful means. He let me go.

  ‘I will come and visit you to discuss it presently.’

  I left him and ran down the street. The two women had disappeared, but I could guess where they had gone. I overtook them just outside their front door. Ellewibel’s eyes narrowed as she saw me; her face was grim. Her daughter kept her eyes downcast and said nothing.

  ‘Herr Gensfleisch. I am sorry – this is not a good time for us.’

  ‘I know.’

  She drew herself up and fixed me with her sternest stare. ‘A few days ago you came to my house and confessed your prospects were not as promising as you had led me to believe. I admired your honesty and treated you generously, though I was under no obligation to do so. I hope that now you will extend me the same courtesy.’

  ‘There will be no marriage.’ The words were sweet in my mouth.

  ‘You have agreed the contract. You cannot break it off.’

  ‘You have broken it. You promised me your husband’s estate, two hundred gulden.’

  ‘I promised nothing of the sort,’ she said quickly, a gambler who had been waiting to play her top card. ‘I promised you my claim on the inheritance. In good faith, I believed it was worth what I told you. I could not foresee that the court would side with my stepson.’

  ‘Perhaps if you had mentioned the suit I could have judged its prospects for myself.’ I drew myself up with a shiver of righteous glee. ‘Perhaps if you had paid me the courtesy of fair dealing I would be more inclined now to forgive the deficiency of Ennelin’s dowry.’ That was a lie. ‘As it is, you have tricked me twice over. The contract is void.’

  The pleasure must have told in my voice. It only added to her fury.

  ‘This is not the end of the matter, Herr Gensfleisch. I will take you to the courts for breach of contract, if I must, and this time they will side with me.’

  I turned to Ennelin. ‘Goodbye, Fräulein. I am sorry it has ended this way.’

  Ego absolvo te. I free you. I did not need to buy an indulgence: I had never felt freer.

  XLVII

  Belgium

  Nick stared at the letters that had appeared on the page. ‘What is that?’