Inquisition

by David Gibbins

  “So what were they up to in 1684?” Rebecca asked.

  “Like virtually everyone else in the Mediterranean, being besieged by the Moors,” Jack said. “At the time, they were thought of as the greatest bastion of Christianity in the region, the rock that would never fall. As a military order they took the fight to the enemy, meeting the Barbary corsairs on their own terms and inflicting many defeats on them. That is, until the corsairs captured the master of the order and his leading knights, causing those who were left in Malta to lose their nerve. It’s thought that some of the greatest relics of Christendom, which had been entrusted to the Knights’ care, were handed over to the corsairs to secure their freedom.”

  Jeremy opened Pepys’s diary. “There’s one mention of the Knights of Malta here, a strange one. On 17 February 1684 he writes: ‘Got a copy of the letter of thanks from the Knights of Malta to our king upon the redemption of some of them with the rest of the Christian slaves there.’ Clearly, in some way the English Crown was involved in the ransoming of captured knights, presumably the master and those others you mentioned, Jack. I can only imagine that Pepys acted as a middleman, as otherwise there would be no obvious reason for him to get a copy of the letter.”

  “He certainly had his finger in a lot of pies,” Jack said. “Clearly the King trusted him, to have sent him to Tangier to oversee the entire financial side of the evacuation. He would have been an obvious person to negotiate ransoms as well.”

  “Pepys just couldn’t stop himself from writing things down, could he?” Rebecca said. “The inveterate diarist. He thinks he’s keeping it private by writing it in his own special shorthand, but actually he’s telling the world everything.”

  “Not quite everything,” Jack said. “But he is leaving us clues.”

  The phone rang, an internal IMU number. It was Ben Kershaw, the security chief. Jack remembered the phone call the evening before from the man who had warned him to steer clear of researching the Star of David symbol. He turned to the other two. “I’ve got to take this. But don’t leave just yet. We might have some travel plans to discuss.”

  6

  Ten minutes later, Jack put down the phone and turned to Jeremy, who had been looking at the Henry Avery proclamation on the wall. “You’ll probably have gathered what that was about. Ben wanted to know who you’ve talked to about that Star of David symbol.”

  Jeremy turned round and sat down again. “I was in the National Archives when you sent the photo of the symbol on the bronze box to me. I showed it to the colleagues I was having lunch with, and it got flashed round another couple of tables. Maria has seen it as well, of course, and a couple of the research students at the Institute of Palaeography. And there’s been a symposium this week in Oxford on Sephardic culture under the Inquisition: how Jews in Spain and Portugal covertly symbolized their faith under persecution in the same way that the early Christians did in Rome. It seemed a perfect venue to reach out for ideas.”

  “Absolutely,” Jack said. “It’s just that I had a worrying phone call last night. A guy with an accent, maybe Portuguese or Spanish, purporting to be a professor at a seminary in Lisbon, wanting to know if we’d made any progress with the identification. While he was talking, I looked him up and he was bogus. I confronted him and he warned me to steer clear of researching the symbol further, then hung up. It was a mobile number, so I couldn’t get his location.”

  Jeremy pursed his lips. “Probably anti-Semitic. Flash a Star of David around and they come out of the woodwork, even among some extremist academics.”

  “Or it may show that we’re really on to something,” Rebecca said. “If somebody else is on the same trail.”

  “Just be on your guard,” Jack said. “If this guy was at the National Archives or at Oxford he’ll know you were the one who put the image out, and if he’s frustrated by my response he might decide to get back at you. And sometimes, of course, these people are not lone wolves but are part of anti-Semitic organizations. We’ve come across that kind of thing before. I’ve prepped Ben to be aware of anyone making similar inquiries showing up at the campus, and he’ll be doing a group email to warn everyone against responding to calls like this. It may be an overreaction, but we can’t be too careful.”

  “Understood,” Jeremy said. “You might want to mention the caller to Maria as well. Over the years she’s had to field all kinds of nonsense from oddballs about supposedly ancient symbols, ranging from cranks to neo-Nazis. Running a place called the Institute of Palaeography, you kind of invite that. And remember she’s also an expert on early Christian and Judaeo-Christian epigraphy, with her PhD being on the epigraphy and symbols from the Roman period inside the catacombs in Rome. She was the first person I emailed the symbol to and I’m sure she’ll get back if there are any comparisons to be found.”

  Jack thought for a moment. “If I do go out to Portugal to see her, will you two come along as well? I’m thinking that I might be able to squeeze in a quick visit over the next two days, before I fly out to Jamaica.”

  “Jamaica? What are you doing there?” Jeremy asked, closing his briefcase.

  “You remember Jason da Silva?”

  “Sure I remember Jason. He was in the year ahead of me in the archaeology internship program at IMU. I’d just come from Stanford, and he was on secondment from the University of the West Indies.”

  “Well then, you’ll remember that his speciality is the English colonial period in Jamaica, and that he trained with us because he wanted to expand the underwater excavations off Port Royal. The earthquake there in July this year put the international spotlight back on the site, especially as it came very close to replicating the earthquake that destroyed much of the city in 1692.”

  “The wickedest city on earth, that’s what they called it, wasn’t it?” Rebecca said. “A bit like English Tangier.”

  “There’s quite a lot of similarity,” Jeremy said. “I remember a graduate seminar where Jason gave a very vivid picture of the city in its heyday, and it sounds a lot like the Tangier we’ve been hearing about. Both colonial English outposts, both barely within the rule of law, both closely connected with the business of piracy.”

  Jack nodded. “And Port Royal is also the greatest trove of artifacts of day-to-day life in the seventeenth century other than from shipwrecks, and the nearest thing in recent historic archaeology to Pompeii and Herculaneum. Everything is lying there buried in the mud and sand, just as it was on that day when the town slid into the sea.”

  “Didn’t Jason do his PhD on the merchants’ quarter?” Jeremy asked.

  “That’s why I’m thinking of him now,” Jack replied. “I was his supervisor, remember. Jason’s mainly of Afro-Caribbean origin, but his surname comes from the fact that his great-grandmother married into one of the old Jewish merchant families of Kingston and Port Royal. The da Silvas intermarried with the Brandons in the early nineteenth century, so he and I are actually very distant cousins. His dissertation was on Jewish material culture in early colonial Jamaica, looking at artifacts from Port Royal that could be attributed to Jewish merchants, so I’m thinking he might be able to help us with our Star of David.”

  “Isn’t Maurice Hiebermeyer out there with him now?” Jeremy asked.

  Rebecca nodded. “It’s a bit tricky. He’s supposed to be looking after their son to allow Aysha to take up her visiting fellowship at Oxford. A kind of payback for all the time Maurice was away doing his own thing in Egypt.”

  “I thought he took Michael out to Port Royal with him.”

  “I’m not sure that putting Michael to work as a site assistant is what Aysha had in mind. He’s only four.”

  Jack sat back, thinking about his old friend. He and Maurice went way back, further even than his friendship with Costas, to school and university. Since getting their doctorates under Professor Dillon at Cambridge, they had gone their separate ways, Jack underwater and Maurice very firmly on dry land, but over the last few years their paths had become closely intert
wined again. Maurice’s passion for Egypt had been dealt a huge blow when the new extremist regime had expelled all foreign archaeologists, and it had been Jack’s remit to get him back on his feet again and apply his talents as a field archaeologist to IMU projects that he could regard as equally rewarding. He looked at Jeremy and grinned. “I’m with Maurice on that one. The earlier you start them, the better. I’d have loved it at that age. Anyway, Port Royal is one giant sandpit.”

  “It seems an odd place for Maurice to go,” Jeremy said. “I mean, as an Egyptologist.”

  “Same skill set, just a different period,” Jack said. “It was one of the first bits of advice that Professor Dillon gave us at Cambridge. Leave your comfort zone, volunteer on sites outside your period and place. You’ll be able to bring fresh perspectives on those excavations, and in turn take back new approaches and ideas to your own projects.”

  “And there’s the small matter of Egypt,” Rebecca said. “The problem that for almost two years now it’s been a no-go zone for archaeologists, with the regime showing no signs of faltering. Maurice and Aysha have simply had to refocus elsewhere. Aysha has been happy to return to her research on the early development of hieroglyphics, something she can do without having to be in Egypt, but for Maurice it would have to be something hands-on.”

  “He’d go stir-crazy trapped in a library,” Jack agreed. “It was always a problem when we were students. I had to lock him in his room to force him to get his essays done. He’s a dirt archaeologist through and through. Any site, any period, as long as he’s up to his neck in it.”

  “Are we finally going to see him get his feet wet and put on diving gear?” Jeremy said.

  “That would be the day,” Jack replied. “The truth is, he’s not just out there in Jamaica to get his archaeology fix. After the earthquake in July, when IMU agreed to fund part of the rescue excavation, we needed an experienced site director to lead our team. The idea was that Maurice would take over the land excavations, allowing Jason and his team of divers to focus on the newly exposed material on the seabed, especially organic artifacts in danger of disintegration or being washed away.”

  “So you’re definitely going out there to see them?” Rebecca asked.

  Jack looked out of the window at the overcast sky. “I was supposed to go last week, but I postponed when I saw that we might have a final brief spell of good weather on the site here. I’m flying into Kingston the day after tomorrow.”

  “You diving?”

  “That’s the idea. It’s pretty exciting. A whole new section of the merchants’ quarter has been revealed, literally rising up out of the mud on the sea floor.”

  “Is Costas going with you? Sounds like another place for you to get stuck down a hole together.”

  “Depends how he gets on. He and Lanowski want to have Little Joey ready for a demo for the board of governors when they visit tomorrow. To convince them to fund it.”

  “Surely a nod from Efram will see to that?”

  “If IMU funded everything those two cooked up, we’d have a budget bigger than NASA. The Jacobovich Foundation has been incredibly generous, but it doesn’t have pockets quite that deep.”

  “You should get him to take Little Joey out to Port Royal for its trials. Lanowski spent two hours with his portable blackboard and a supply of chalk explaining the nanotechnology to me. It’s a miniature sub-bottom excavator, a kind of underwater mole. Might be just the right thing for Port Royal.”

  Jack nodded. “I’ll see how it looks when I get there and might suggest it. Jason tells me there may be intact cellars and storerooms, a real time capsule of seventeenth-century life.”

  “Seventeenth-century life on the edge, you mean,” Jeremy said. “Port Royal wasn’t exactly a haven of civilization, was it?”

  “Pirate Central,” Rebecca added.

  “All part of life’s rich tapestry,” Jack said. “And it fascinates me because the artifacts are going to complement those we’ve had from the Schiedam. They’re all part of the maritime culture of the period.”

  Rebecca eyed him wryly. “There’s more to it than that for you, isn’t there?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s that look you have. Costas is always on about it. When there’s something else driving you but you’re not ready to let on. Something that’s coming out of what we’ve just been talking through. The Schiedam, the Star of David, Pepys, the Jewish connection, that Maltese cross, Jamaica. You’re on the trail of something, aren’t you?”

  Jack gave her a piercing look. “As soon as I have anything to go on, I’ll let you know. I promise.”

  “You’d better. And if you need me to carry on with you from Portugal to Jamaica, I’m good with that.”

  “It’s a grand place for a honeymoon, I hear,” Jeremy said nonchalantly.

  Rebecca and Jack stared at him. Jeremy raised his arms in defeat and picked up his briefcase. “Okay, okay, I get it,” he said. “Howards,” he muttered, shaking his head. At the door, he turned back and looked at Rebecca. “Remember, we have a date tonight. You promised.”

  “Yeah, in the archive room. If you want to burn some midnight oil together, that’s where I’ll be. I want to collate all the material you’ve got in that briefcase before we fly out, just in case we’ve missed any clues.”

  Jack smiled at her. “I’m really grateful. And to you too, Jeremy. Brilliant work on all the Pepys stuff. I’ll get the Embraer put on standby to fly us out from RNAS Culdrose tomorrow afternoon. I’m going to call Maurice now.”

  “And Maria?”

  “And Maria.”

  Jeremy hesitated, then turned back and took a blank sheet of paper from Jack’s desk, quickly drawing on it and handing it to him. It showed a Star of David and a Maltese cross, followed by a blank space with a line under it. “Maria would set us these exercises when I was a graduate student. She said that when you’re sitting in front of a mass of evidence, when you know it’s trying to speak to you yet you’re not quite hearing it, you should distil it down to the essence. Stare at those few images for long enough, and you might just have that eureka moment.”

  “Why the blank space?”

  “Because if you need to do the exercise, then it means there’s something missing. Something that provides the key to unlocking everything else.”

  Jeremy picked up his briefcase again, and Jack watched him follow Rebecca out and shut the door behind him. He stared at the sheet for a moment, then looked up at another framed image on the wall in front of him, between the map of Cornwall and the Henry Avery proclamation. It was a print of English Tangier made in 1670 by Wenceslaus Hollar, something that Jack had acquired when they had begun the excavation of the Schiedam the year before. It showed the walls and towers of the old town, built by the Portuguese but refortified by the English, and within them the buildings of the administration and the garrison, the merchants’ quarters and warehouses, the wharfside taverns, smoking dens and whorehouses, and beyond that the huge mole projecting out into the Mediterranean, the ships nestled within. Like Port Royal in Jamaica the town had become synonymous with iniquity and vice, and like Port Royal it had come to a dramatic end, not by natural catastrophe but by the stroke of a royal pen in London.

  He picked up the copy of Pepys’s Tangier diary and leafed through it, trying to transport himself back to those final few days of the evacuation in 1684, his mind racing. What was the true meaning of those symbols? How did a Portuguese Jewish merchant named João Rodriguez Brandão fit into the story? And what the hell had Samuel Pepys really been up to in Tangier?

  Part 2

  7

  The English colony of Tangier, North Africa, 4 April 1684

  Another mortar round came whistling in over the walls from the west, bursting nearby in a sheet of flame that lit up the room with a dull orange glow. The man in the wig and frock coat shifted in his chair uncomfortably, pressed the pieces of sea sponge deeper into his ears to block out the noise, and blew the dust from
the vibrations off the sheet in front of him, cursing under his breath as it got caught up in the wet ink. He picked up his quill and carried on writing hastily in his shorthand, leaning back to keep the cold sweat that was dripping off his nose from spoiling the paper. Do intend to write a history of this whole lamentable business, he wrote, candid and disinterested, not in the style of panegyric or apology, which sort of writing seldom have any great authority or lasting reputation with posterity. He lifted his pen to dip it in the ink, trying to stop his hand from shaking, and continued. Myself pretty well having vomited this morning, did feel wonderful purged, yet then did the ague and the old pain return, and did reflect most heavily on the scourge of the Pox.

  He put down the pen and raised a trembling hand to his forehead, feeling the throb, still smelling the musty perfume of his companion of the night before, then reached out for the brimming glass of wine on the desk beside his papers. In the old days, a few hasty gulps would do the trick, but now, in his middle years, the hair of the dog could no longer keep at bay the remorse and grief that assailed him in the cold light of morning, remorse for having let himself down again, grief above all for having ill-used his late lamented wife by his absence and his fornication.

  He stared at that last sentence in his diary, wondering whether to strike it out. To be frank and truthful, to be true to himself, his unequaled self, was to try to atone for the excesses of the night before, excesses that his younger self had indulged in freely but that his older self condemned in others, in those whose corruption and venality had made this place where he now resided such a den of vice. He took a deep breath and picked up the pen again, striking a line through the sentence. He was no longer that man, and had no time for such introspection. His diary now was about history, a history that he himself was making. All that mattered now was to record the detail, for therein lay the truth of history, and in so doing to reflect the care with which he, Samuel Pepys of the Admiralty, Fellow of the Royal Society, aspired to manage his own remaining span on God’s earth, serving loyally His Gracious Majesty King Charles, and above all his beloved Royal Navy.