A Book of Bones

by John Connolly

  “How?”

  “It is my conviction that your partner might have engaged Wentworth to ransack Dee’s library.”

  “Quayle? To what end?”

  “Because Quayle was searching for a book.”

  “And he thought Dee might have it?”

  “Yes, or some other volumes in Dee’s collection that might point the way to it.”

  “But why steal so much? Why ransack Dee’s accommodation?”

  “To disguise the true purpose of the raid.”

  Couvret contemplated this.

  “Then what happened to the rest of the stolen volumes?”

  “I expect Wentworth was told to dispose of them, probably by burning, or throwing them in the Thames,” said Gardiol. “Naturally, being of a criminal disposition, he was disinclined to do so, or not without first secreting away a few trifles for his troubles. Why, I cannot say.”

  “I can,” said Couvret, “although it’s only speculation. Went-

  worth may have been an illiterate, but he was envious of those who were lettered, and retained an odd fascination for books and manuscripts. I noticed the way he would stare at the contents of Quayle’s shelves. In an odd way, he understood their value. I think it might have pleased him to have had some such volumes in his possession, even if their contents were destined to remain an enigma to him.”

  The candle had grown markedly lower. Gardiol, being unwilling to plunge them into darkness, even temporarily, secured another, and lit it from the first.

  “Poisoning is an unusual death for such a man,” he said.

  “And poison is a woman’s weapon,” said Couvret.

  “I’ve heard it said that Wentworth and Zenobia might have been brother and sister.”

  “Quayle once told me they were both bastards, but added nothing of a blood connection.”

  “Which is not entirely to give the lie to the tale. Different brood mares, or so the gossips would have it, but the same sire.”

  “No great love between them,” said Couvret, “if one could poison the other.”

  “None at all, one might say. Let us suppose that Quayle sent his consort to kill Wentworth, possibly in order to silence him for fear that bitterness at his treatment should loosen his tongue. What I do not understand is why Quayle should only now have begun to ask you about the Atlas. After all, you have been in his service for a number of years.”

  “Because he had no reason to question me about it,” said Couvret. “As far as he was concerned, I was a young lawyer, and nothing more.”

  “He did not offer you employment because he already knew you had the book?”

  Couvret shook his head. “I now believe it was bad luck. Quayle has sometimes set me to tracing Huguenots during my time with him, often without sharing the reason for his interest. Most recently, these searches have centered on men who passed through the Lowlands. Now I know why: Quayle must have learned that Van Agteren came into contact with a Huguenot refugee in those parts, to whom he passed on the Atlas. It must have come as a shock to Quayle to discover only recently that he might have been sheltering that same Huguenot under his roof for so long.”

  “But you never chose to mention your knowledge of Van Agteren to Quayle?”

  “No. I can offer no reason other than that it seemed to me unwise.”

  “In light of what you knew of Quayle’s more cabalistic interests?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You are being disingenuous.”

  “I was being careful.”

  “And Quayle never spoke of Van Agteren to you?”

  “No, or not until these last few days.”

  “Because now he is certain that you are the very man he has been seeking.”

  Couvret’s skin felt clammy, and even the slight heat of the candle seemed to prickle. A hundred minor incidents over the previous months—a glance from Quayle here, a word there—started to make new sense.

  “Yes,” said Couvret. “I see it all.”

  “And when he raised the subject with you, you gave yourself away.”

  “I fear it is so.”

  They both lapsed into silence.

  “Tell me more of this shadow that haunts you,” said Gardiol.

  Couvret tried to find the right words, but it was as difficult as describing smoke.

  “It is taller than a man, although it has something of the aspect of one,” he said. “The head is overly large, and distorted in shape, as though by some malformation of the skull. Yet—”

  “Go on.”

  “Yet sometimes I think its form is not consistent,” said Couvret. “Once or twice I have caught sight of a pallor within, like a withered, gray child that has found a way to cloak itself in night. It makes no sense, I know, but what of this makes any sense?” Gardiol reached across the table and gripped Couvret’s hands, a gesture of reassurance that served also to stop them from trembling.

  “I should like to look upon this Atlas,” he said.

  “No!” Couvret yanked back his hands. “You must not.”

  “Why? How can I help you if I’m speaking in ignorance of the subject?”

  “Because the book is alive,” said Couvret. “No, that’s not right. Better to say that some consciousness has found a way to inhabit it, or use it as a window into our world. It sees, and then registers, its surroundings. Once it has done so, it endeavors to replicate them in its pages. I have witnessed it done.”

  “And what then?”

  “I do not know, but the shadow and the Atlas are linked. Were you to open the book, I fear you might bring whatever is following me down upon yourself. For the present, I alone am afflicted. I do not want company in my suffering.”

  “Then why not simply surrender the Atlas to Quayle? It’s clear that he wants it, and believes you may know of its whereabouts.”

  “Do you think he would let me live, once I did so?”

  Gardiol considered this.

  “Possibly not,” he said. “That was foolish of me.”

  “But there is more.” Couvret reached beneath his shirt and withdrew a plain wooden cross, secured around his neck by a strip of leather. “The Atlas is no instrument of God. I admit that its existence has sometimes caused me to doubt my faith, but never to abandon it entirely. Without faith, I am nothing. If I give the book to Quayle, I believe I may render myself complicit in some great evil, and be damned for it.”

  “Then what will you do? You cannot destroy it. You told me so yourself.”

  “Neither can it stay here, in these apartments. Quayle knows you and I are intimates, and that you are a man of learning. He will quickly realize that if I were to have entrusted the book to anyone, it would be to you.”

  Gardiol rose.

  “It’s late,” he said, “and tiredness will only cloud our judgment. Let us both sleep on the problem. We are wise fellows, and with two such heads, some solution must surely present itself.”

  They embraced, and Couvret returned to his lodgings. He watched the dark as he walked, but the only shadow that trailed after him was his own.

  * * *

  Over the days that followed, Couvret did his best to act naturally around Quayle. He was aided by the fact that the firm was currently embroiled in a difficult and complex inheritance case, the legal costs for which were steadily consuming the very estate over which a rogues’ gallery of relatives was fighting, with the consequence that all were likely to end their days in debt to the lawyers. But once or twice, as he worked on the latest sheaf of claims and counterclaims, Couvret caught Quayle contemplating him in a way that gave him to understand the subject of the Atlas had not been forgotten, nor his response to the broaching of the subject.

  * * *

  On the third night following his conversation with Gardiol, Couvret woke to find his dead wife in the room with him. A smell of rot had caused him to emerge from sleep, and when he opened his eyes, Marianne was standing at the end of his bed. She was withered, and a gray-green mold covered much of her fa
ce and torso. Her belly had been opened, and she was holding something small and red in her hands. She extended it toward him, so that he might know it for what it was.

  “I was pregnant when you left me,” she said. “I did not realize it then, but I was growing large with child by the time they came to find you. They asked me where you were hiding, but I could not tell them, so they each took a turn with me before cutting our baby from my womb. Look! Can you see? It was a boy, a little boy.”

  And as she spoke, the dead infant opened its mouth. It fixed its lips to what remained of her left breast, and she gave it suck.

  “We are in torment,” she said, “but it can be brought to an end.”

  Couvret did not want to enter into discourse with this phantom, but the word came despite this.

  “How?”

  “Give them the book. Let it be made complete. If you ever loved me, permit it to be done.”

  Then she was no longer at the end of his bed, but by his side. She leaned down to plant a kiss upon his mouth, and Couvret woke in earnest this time, screaming and thrashing, dawn’s light trickling through the drapes. He pushed the bedsheet aside, and felt wetness upon his hands.

  He looked down, and saw that they were coated with mold.

  * * *

  The next evening, he returned to Gardiol’s lodgings. He knocked, but received no answer. He tried the lock, and the door opened to his touch.

  Gardiol was seated at the table in the center of the room, the candle before him long extinguished, his hands palm-down upon the wood. The floor—or the parts of it not covered by a litter of documents and torn books—was slick with blood, and Gardiol’s mouth was stuffed with crimson-stained papers. As Couvret drew nearer the body, he saw his old friend’s hands had been impaled upon the table so that his fingernails might be more easily removed, and between the mangled limbs lay his tongue and eyes. How he had finally died, Couvret could not at first tell, until he looked down and saw the redness staining Gardiol’s hose at the groin, and what lay on the stool between his legs.

  Couvret turned away, and was profoundly sick in the fireplace. Only when his stomach had nothing left to offer up did he return to the body. He composed himself, found a fresh candle, and commenced an examination of the scene. He did so carefully, his training as an avocat of the Paris Bar coming to the fore, since, unlike Quayle, he had always preferred criminal law. He had almost given up on finding anything of use when a slim object mired in the blood by Gardiol’s left foot caught his eye. Couvret knelt, and removed from the gore a silver pin, of the kind used to fix one piece of a lady’s wardrobe to another. Only the bottom half of the pin was bloody, indicating that it had fallen to the floor during, or soon after, Gardiol’s murder. It meant a woman had been present when his friend died, and Couvret could guess her identity: Quayle’s lover—no, in deference to Gardiol’s memory, Quayle’s whore—Zenobia.

  Couvret secured the door to Gardiol’s chambers, and found the entrance to the cellar. It was cool, and unusually dry, which was why Gardiol kept many of his papers there. As in the room above, most of these now lay scattered on the ground, but the cellar wall appeared intact. Couvret tested the bricks in the far left corner, and they moved under the pressure, revealing three books wrapped in thick, oiled canvas to discourage the rats. The wires binding the largest of them remained intact; Gardiol had resisted the urge to view the book for himself, but then, he had always been strong-willed—sufficient to endure torture and mutilation at the hands of Zenobia rather than give up the Atlas because, like Couvret, he was a man of faith.

  But where was God while Gardiol’s lifeblood was flowing from him? To this, Couvret had no answer.

  He unwrapped the canvas, exposing the Atlas for the first time in years. He laid his hand upon it, and felt the familiar pulsing, but fainter than before, as of a sleeping animal. As Gardiol had suggested, Couvret had slept on the problem—at least before some simulacrum of his dead spouse had appeared to him, threatening to banish sleep forever. But it was not Marianne who had come to him, not truly. The eyes were not hers. Even in death they could not have changed so, becoming serpentine in their blank hunger. And if this had not been Marianne, then the fetus in her hands could not have been that of his unborn son.

  Or so he told himself, because to believe otherwise was to risk going mad.

  Couvret assembled before him some of the tools of Gardiol’s trade—for a seller of books must also, of necessity, become a repairer, even a maker, of his stock—but mainly the sharpest of them, the blades. The Atlas could not be destroyed, and it would not be lost.

  But perhaps it could be taken apart.

  * * *

  Having first sent a message to Quayle advising him of the necessity of a brief absence on personal business, Couvret commenced his labors. He worked through the night, and all of the following day and the night after. The vellum was tough, and resisted the knives, while the pages were held together by threads stronger than catgut. At times, he discovered his fingers to be damp with moisture, as though the book were weeping some vital fluid during the process of its anatomization. After many hours of labor, he had succeeded only in removing a third of the pages, and these he commenced inserting into other volumes. His duties as Henry’s spy had endowed him with certain talents in the art of concealment, and using these he now hid sections of the Atlas in the spines of other books; placed them against the pastedown endpapers before adding new layers to obscure the additions; or folded them into older manuscripts, which he then sealed with wax. When he became too exhausted, he slept, before waking again to continue. He ate what food was left in Gardiol’s larder: some cheese and meats, and a little stale bread. His fingers bled, and a savage pain seized his skull. Eventually, he could go on no longer, for to remain in Gardiol’s home was to risk discovery, and possibly arrest on a charge of murder.

  Couvret gathered the fruits of his toil and carried them upstairs. When they were all together, he put them on the cart that Gardiol used to sell his wares, and added to them as many more intact books from his friend’s collection as the cart could hold. Only the Atlas, now much reduced, did he keep separate, returning it to its canvas and placing it in one of Gardiol’s cloth satchels, which he slung over his shoulder.

  Outside, daylight was fading. Nearly two days had passed since his discovery of Gardiol’s remains. The old man had started to decay, and flies buzzed around the corpse. Someone would soon come to investigate the smell, and it would be best for Couvret if he were long gone by then. He wheeled the cart into the street, and summoned one of the street children to him, ordering him to assemble a dozen of his peers. When they arrived, he shared between them what coins he had, and instructed them to take a handful of books and papers each, to be dispersed among the booksellers at St. Paul’s, and on Paternoster Row, but with no indication of their source. Others were to be left at the houses of the wealthy by the Thames, between Westminster and London. The boys took the books, as many as each could carry, and vanished into the warrens of the city.

  At that instant, Couvret’s eyes began to bleed, as the Atlas, already wounded by its disassembly, sensed its further dispersion. He staggered into the laneway by Gardiol’s dwelling, bumping into a stranger along the way, who shouted after him in irritation, but Couvret kept moving. He fell to his knees in a puddle of water, and got back to his feet, but by now he was seeing the world through a veil of red. He heard his wife call his name, and knew that this time it was truly she, because the voice was full of love. He followed the sound of it, and smelled the river, but his whole body burned with pain, and his clothing was covered with pinpricks of blood as he hemorrhaged from every pore. Only then did he realize that he no longer had the Atlas. The strap of the satchel must have broken at some point, the Atlas falling with it, and he had failed to notice this in his agonies.

  His vision darkened. He believed himself at last to be going blind, but could still make out the shapes of buildings and houses, and the bank of the river before h
im. Then all grew cold, and the darkness took on a new form, one reminiscent of a man but much larger, and topped by a deformed skull on which Couvret could perceive a pair of blunt horns. Within the shadow glowed a shape that might almost have been mistaken for that of a pale, deformed child.

  Couvret heard his wife’s voice telling him not to be afraid, although he could not help but be so. The darkness stretched out a finger to him, the member hardening to the consistency of bone as it pierced his chest and entered his body.

  He called out to God, but God did not answer.

  Couvret’s heart was rent asunder as the pain of his old life was ended, and a new torment commenced.

  CHAPTER XLII

  The Northumbria investigation team gathered shortly after 8.00 a.m. to go through Sisterson’s autopsy findings, and the actions for the day, including the ongoing effort to establish Romana Moon’s movements in the hours leading up to her death. Priestman left the best—or worst—until last, when she passed around the set of misbaha, which she now knew to be the correct term for Muslim prayer beads. Sisterson, having completed the coup de théâtre to his satisfaction, had given her a long disquisition on the misbaha before entrusting them to her care. He was, Priestman concluded, a very unusual man.

  Most of those present recognized the misbaha for what they were, and anyone who didn’t was quickly brought up to speed. It was left to Hynes to encapsulate the thoughts of everyone present.

  “Shit,” he said. Which was also what the chief superintendent had said when Priestman told him about the beads, variations on the same word subsequently being offered by various DCIs and other senior officers. Two possibilities existed: either Romana Moon had been killed by a Muslim who wanted to signal a religious motive for the murder, or someone was trying to cause a great deal of religious, political, and social unrest.

  “I spoke to Nabih before I came in,” said Priestman. Nabih Uddin was one of a handful of Muslim detectives on the force. He was not yet part of the Romana Moon investigation, but the discovery of the misbaha meant that was about to change. “He said it was unlikely a devout Muslim would have left a set of beads in a woman’s body, but he also suggested that a devout Muslim wouldn’t have killed her to begin with.”