But forgive? I feel the steel in me sharpen.
I am not so sure I can forgive what has followed me here. The night terrors. The added fear in the dark. It is not my fault. I tell myself again and again. What happened happened. But it is not your fault.
‘Quick,’ Francesc says in Catalan, ‘pull your mirror in.’
I wind down the window, and snap in the rear-view mirror to the side of the car, to allow the vehicle to pass through.
‘It’s very . . .’ Francesc takes his hands off the wheel and makes a gesture for ‘tight’, his palms almost touching. He grabs the wheel again as the car almost hits the rock walls. I laugh!
‘But el miracle is that it feels wider going out! It’s only difficult ara – now – driving in. Out not so complicated.’
As he parks the car, he reaches over and kisses me, tucking my hair behind my ear. The walls of the hermitage are mottled yellow, rocks buried in a sandstone cement, pink tiles. Baby palms and ferns windswept and tired. Water-streaked bark of the olive tree. Francesc crosses the courtyard briskly, entering the church, pulling away curtains behind the wooden door. The arc is intimate. As my eyes adjust to the dark I follow Francesc’s breath, his husky whisper.
A figure stands, emerging from the oak pews, shaking off his hood. A wooden cross and rosary beads about his neck. Fingers dipped in holy water. Warm drops against my forehead.
‘Benvinguda, Senyoreta Verco. We have been visited by a spirit,’ the monk says, the font beside him. ‘When you have a moment, I would like your help uncovering who she is.’
‘And in payment?’ I ask. We speak in the accepted code.
‘We have looked through our sources as you requested.’
He hands me a piece of furled paper which reads:
In his three houses
Each a beacon find
First there was that
Book, the dismay man’s.
The signature on the back is instantly recognizable. L. Sitwell. A creeping warmth. I feel Francesc touch my back. Steady. Steady. Arm yourself, Miss Verco. We are in the beginning. Treasure hunters embarking on a long journey. Spin, spin goes the world. And so do we.
We park the car at the bottom of the road. Francesc strides towards our house. I follow. Slowly. Earth damp underfoot. Fields verdant, the clouds crinkling at the edges, basking in new-born plumpness, a lush goose-grey down. Orchids all buried for winter, but the cone-head thyme blossoms in the gardens and the greenery of potted plants and winter vegetables are in no short decline. The air smells of fresh onions and garlic, mud, and the ash of oak fire. I inhale deeply and rejoice in the experience of being alive. Succumb. Here, now, only rapture. Intermittently the sun pierces the clouds with a beam of light that cuts across my path beneath the monasteries and stately homes, winding along wide pastures and through pine forests until the land drops away and I am alone on the Serra de Tramuntana, to my left: rocky outcrops plunging into the sea, to my right: the mammoth shards of the ridgeline, stealing the air from a woman’s breath so that she feels her mind float away above her and she is lost in the beauty of it all.
Acknowledgements
This novel could have no finer champions than my editor Jon Riley, his assistant editor Rose Tomaszewska, and the entire team at Quercus. I am truly grateful for the energy and support that has gone into every aspect of the book, from the beautiful design work, to the copyedit, to the earliest stages of drafting and rewriting. Deep thanks also to my editors Iris Tupholme and Lorissa Sengara at HarperCollinsCanada. Felicity Blunt, superstar, agent extraordinaire, has made this process wonderful. The Serpent Papers has flown further than I could ever have imagined due to the Foreign Rights team at Curtis Brown, and the creativity and passion of Katie McGowan and Rachel Clements. I am also indebted to Nick Marston, who encouraged me to keep writing many years ago.
The stories of the Sibyl and her sibylline books are recounted as factually as possible. On the subject of the Sibyl and her haunting presence in European history, H. W. Parke’s Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecies and Jorge Guillermo’s Sibyls: Prophecy and Power in the Ancient World were indispensable. As to nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments in the history of paganism, I consulted Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft and Grimoires: A History of Magic Books by Owen Davies, both published by Oxford University Press. E. J. Holmyard’s Alchemy proved the most entertaining of works on the subject, while William R. Newman’s Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature and Lawrence M. Principe’s The Secrets of Alchemy are extremely insightful. The Good and Evil Serpent by James H. Charlesworth kept me reading into many a night. Robert Graves’s The White Goddess and Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough have been equally close to hand. The London International Palaeography Summer School and the London Rare Books School offered exceptional courses at Senate House. For those interested in the works of the Catalan writer and mystic Ramon Llull, who serves as inspiration for Rex Illuminatus, I would recommend Anthony Bonner’s Doctor Illuminatus: A Ramon Llull Reader. All errors, fictions and inventions are my own.
I have been touched by the kindness and hospitality of a great many people across the world. Thanks to Roman and Olga Camps who welcomed me into their family; and Vera Salvat for her friendship and generosity. Special thanks also to Dr Mercè Saumell and the faculty at the Institut del Teatre. Pep Gatell and Nadala Fernández of La Fura dels Baus took me under their wings and showed me the hidden world of their theatre. In memory of J. Martin Evans at Stanford University, who ignited and fuelled my passion for literature, and London’s Rosemary Vercoe who, at the venerable age of ninety-three, invited me to stay for two days that turned into several years. To Francine Toon, who read the earliest drafts and encouraged me to dream. The Dodgson family gave me a second home in London, and the most delicious Sunday dinners in Highbury. Sarah and Peter Bellwood have been there since the beginning in Ojai and making bookmarks to match. Marie, David and Jane, thank you. Your wisdom has been invaluable.
I am profoundly indebted to my parents, Stephen and Clarissa, and each of my seven siblings: Joshua, Samuel, Lizzie, Matthew, Rebecca, Catherine, and Isabella. I owe this book to you. Callum. You are everything. My best friend, my great love. Thank you for an extraordinary four years.
Footnotes
1 RI breaks from the colloquial to use ‘mater’ in the Latin meaning mother. Translate within context as Prima Materia in reference to the alchymical defi nition of Prime Matter? Consider later: mater not only alchymical substance but mythological fi gure of the First Mother?
2 V. curious in extreme. RI read of Epicurus’s Letter to Herodotus, enshrined by Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers? V. few extant copies circulated in the Dark Ages, and yet RI knew of Atoms.
3 NB to the Mater preceding Adamas, RI suggests divine union of male & female archetypes.
4 Greek below. V. irritating! Too faint to read. Parsed last line only: ‘I am the Serpent’s Tongue’. One can dream of deciphering & never achieve salvation. This being the natural curse of the scientist of letters.
5 Recall Fabregat’s Letters, Verse 1: Find me in the Utterance of Birds. The answer to the riddle is clearly Philomela. The verse also references the founding of Zeus’s oracle at Dodona. Two priestesses of the Egyptian temple at Thebes were abducted and abused by assailants. The priestesses changed into doves, the first travelling west into Africa, the second winging her way north to Greece where she landed in the branches of the great oak at Dodona. As she sang more doves followed until a flock of white birds roosted on all the branches of the tree. When the wind rustled through the leaves of the oak, the birds channelled the divine breath of Zeus into coos and hums. They sang arias and told long tales of the future. Local priestesses and augurs gathered from the villages to observe the phenomena of the avian prophets. An Oracle was soon erected which rivalled that of the Delphic Sanctuary. In the fifth century bce Herodotus forwarded the theory that the prophetic lan
guage of the doves had in fact been a metaphor used to describe the foreign tongue spoken by the fugitive priestess of Thebes whose pained language resembled the aching call of the birds to local foresters.
6 Fabregat’s final letter echoes this line: ‘Serpentarius! One-who-is-arriving!’
Interview with Jessica Cornwell
Where did you find inspiration for the story?
In November 2012 I travelled to Mallorca for four days armed with a book of Ramon Llull’s writing. When I arrived in Palma, I rented a car and drove myself to Valldemossa through pouring sheets of rain. The weather reflected my own turbulence – and it was frightening – but I was determined: I wanted to go and feel the soil beneath my feet in the Serra de Tramuntana – to see with my own eyes the landscape within which the Catalan mystic had worked and lived.
Over the course of that four day trip I circumnavigated the island by car, going to every remote monastery I could find. Eventually I came to the Monastery of La Real. I met a complete stranger who agreed to show me the medieval manuscripts in the library of the Balearics. He took me through a little door and put an old book in my hands – from the early 14th century. It was the first time I had ever held a parchment book between bare fingers. I felt something electric pass through me like a bolt. It was here. Everything I was looking for. My story was inside this incredible, seven-hundred-year-old book. The only problem was: I knew nothing about palaeography or parchment or the historical period within which these books were made.
So when I got back to my desk in London, I attacked the research.
What kind of research did you do for this novel?
I did a great deal of research on the ground in Barcelona and Mallorca between 2012 and 2014. I visited museums, monasteries, ruins and archives. I walked the paths between villages on the Serra de Tramuntana and crisscrossed Mallorca by car. I also participated in two courses through the University of London’s annual Rare Books School and the London International Palaeography Summer School. I’m still learning as I go! I went repeatedly to Paris and spent hours in the Musée de Cluny. In London I took full advantage of the British Museum and the British Library.
Fortunately, I’m not intimidated by libraries, and I love a good index. Anna’s work and Picatrix are obviously very inspired by my exposure to professional academic research at university. I don’t think of Anna as being very much like me at all – but perhaps I would have become something similar if I had gone down the career university path.
My love of Spain is something that developed before university and crystalized while I was a student. I worshipped Miró and Lorca, and was devastated by the history of the Civil War. I’ve lapped up Spanish history and authors – and have a special place in my heart for Catalonia. But I didn’t want to write about those aspects of Spanish history directly. I see what I’ve written as a kind of love letter to a city, rather than a historical homage to a specific time or place.
How much of the mythology in the book is true?
Everything relating to Sibyls and Ramon Llull is as accurate as possible. Philomela and Rex Illuminatus bend the truth a great deal more, but their histories are also rooted in actual folklore and real mystical traditions.
At best I’m a pseudo-historicist. I like fiction because it allows me to reinvent the world around me, to make things up, to experiment and explore.
Where are you taking the series next?
The Serpent Papers introduces Anna Verco and sets her up as the protagonist of the ongoing saga, taking her into a deepening menace that bleeds across European cities. I’ve started writing the second and have mapped the trajectory – so I know that Anna will be even more peripatetic, moving between Barcelona and London – but I won’t give away more than that. The series will explore the convergence of science and magic, and the portrayal of deviant women in European history.
Did you always know you wanted to be an author?
I’ve always expressed myself through stories – but no! There are lots of writers in my family. When I was a teenager I sensibly decided to rebel against being a writer of any kind. So I went to Stanford and majored in International Relations and studied Arabic. Within a year I had got myself onto a nuclear submarine in San Diego, and into a 72-hour simulation of a real-time terrorist attack on the US where I enacted the Secretary of Homeland Security – only to have a complete crisis and realize that this was not me.
I switched majors to English and decided I would become an academic. In 2008 I won a grant to study Lorca’s Cante Jondo in Spain for a month, immediately followed by a place on a research seminar in India, studying the legacy of non-violence in India. In combination these experiences were illuminating – life-changing. In India I came face to face with sectarian violence and terrorism. In Spain, I disappeared into the flamenco barrios of Granada and Seville and immersed myself in the study of Lorca. I came out of this very shook up, very electric, and I started writing. I think because I had told myself that novels were outside my remit, I began with angsty spoken-word plays, two of which were produced at Stanford in my senior year. After this I decided to go to Drama School – and return to Spain. So I did. I left a half-finished MA in Modern Thought and Literature behind me at Stanford, and never returned to complete it.
Who is Anna Verco – and where do you place her as a female lead?
I’m a feminist and I think The Serpent Papers is, at its core, a feminist take on the thriller/serial-killer caper, which traditionally has often sensationalized or commercialized femicide. I started writing it in frustration against the profusion of prostitutes found mutilated in European dumpsters. And yes – I have mutilated women in the novel – but I do so in dialogue with a tradition. Their bodies are written on – written over – and maybe that’s labouring the point, but I believe I’m confronting the roles of gender in the genre. Women’s bodies are written over all the time in serial killer narratives. This time though – it’s conscious. It has a deeper meaning. The Serpent Papers speaks to an ancient – I mean centuries- and centuries-old – attack on the female form, on the female body.
Anna Verco takes her lead from The Killing’s Sarah Lund, The Bridge’s Saga Norén (with whom I am completely obsessed) and Lisbeth Salander – she owes her birth to the queens of Scandi Noir – but she’s also a very different interpretation of the genre’s damaged ‘woman detective’ or female protagonist – she blends the supernatural and the hyper-real, and in that way I think she’s extremely original – and genre-bending – to me she feels fresh and new.
My favorite thing about Anna – and I think this is quite groundbreaking for a female lead – is that she doesn’t easily give herself to you. I like that in a narrator. She isn’t compelled to spill her own secrets just because she’s telling you a story. That makes her unreliable. Male narrators seem permitted to do that more frequently but when women do this it can feel strange, odd. I think she’s very radical – reacting against this conceit that her gender should compel her to bare her soul more openly. I can say that you will get to know her more as the series develops. Your intimacy with her story will enable her to build that trust – to reveal who she really is.
The Facts Behind the Fiction
Rex Illuminatus
Alchemy
Philomela
The Sibyl
Rex Illuminatus
I started reading the works of Ramon Llull in the fall of 2012 and my study of his work lead to the invention of a character, Rex Illuminatus, the alchemist at the heart of my novel and Anna’s research. I took the lead from the events of Llull’s life and his posthumous legacy. For those who don’t know the name Ramon Llull – and I’m assuming most English speakers won’t – he was:
• Born around 1231 in Palma, the newly conquered Catalan capital of Mallorca
• A Christian philosopher steeped in the Neoplatonic tradition
• An intellectual product of a cosmopolitan and powerful medieval kingdom, whose web of political and economic influence stretched
out across the Mediterranean, reaching deep into Europe and North Africa
• A leading European mystic at the vanguard of the radical religious and mystical thinkers who emerged from the Iberian Peninsula in the 13th century
• One of the first Europeans to write prose novels
• One of the first Europeans to pioneer the use of a Romance vernacular in the fields of philosophy, theology, and science
• A founding father of literary Catalan
• A Christian apologist, missionary and creator of a school of oriental languages at Miramar outside Valldemossa
• The inventor of the ‘Art’ – the complex system of symbolic notation and combined diagrams that serves as the direct inspiration for the ‘Truth Machine’ attributed in The Serpent Papers to Rex Illuminatus
As a young man, Llull was the appointed seneschal (steward) to the son of King James the Conqueror, the future James II. Later in life, he described his troubled youth wonderfully dismissively, saying that he had once been wed and with children, financially comfortable, licentious and worldly (he was known to have taken many lovers). But when Llull was thirty he had a series of Christian visions, in which God commanded him to abandon his life of ribald poetry and the Mallorcan court, and devote his life to writing and the development of a universal tool of conversion. He left behind his wealth and his family, embarked on a pilgrimage and took up an ascetic habit. This realization led to prolific output: Llull produced two hundred and sixty-five literary works in his lifetime. He travelled widely, presenting his combinatorial systems and theories to kings and sultans, popes and universities – and wrote to such an extent that he became incredibly famous. He was given the title Doctor Illuminatus, and his fame carried the legacy of that name well beyond his grave, lifting Llull’s work up through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.
The Serpent Papers Page 39
