Ex Libris

by Ross King

  She had set the vial back on the table and begun rummaging among the other objects. She seemed to be shifting into and out of focus, so I lifted my spectacles from the bridge of my nose and wiped at my eyes with the handkerchief, which came away smudged with blood. When I replaced the spectacles she was turning round, the leather-bound volume-a volume bound in the style known as arabesco or arabesque-in her hands.

  'Here, Mr. Inchbold.' She extended the book. 'You find it at last. The Labyrinth of the World.'

  I made no move to accept the volume. By now I was wary of her talent for drawing the wool over my eyes; for making me feel like an awkward schoolboy. I would not be made a fool of again, I told myself. Besides, at this point I was more interested in that tiny bottle of poison, which I seemed to remember had been fuller before. Once again I considered the stories about the fine ladies of Paris and Rome poisoning their husbands. But then I felt her eyes searching mine and so asked, grudgingly, where she found it.

  'I didn't find it anywhere,' she replied, 'because it was never lost in the first place. Not in the way that you understand. It's been at Pontifex Hall all the while. It's been here in the house, carefully hidden, for forty years.'

  'It's been in your possession all this time? You mean to say that you hired me to locate a book that-'

  'Yes and no,' she interrupted, opening the front cover. 'The parchment has been in my possession, that much is true. But matters are not quite so simple as that. Please…' She motioned me forward. The bitter scent of almonds had added itself to the mélange of smells. In the poor light I could see the ex-libris embossed on the volume's inside cover: Littera Scripta Manet. 'Stand over here, if you please. You're just in time to see the last wash.'

  'The last wash?' Once again I didn't budge, only watched as she took up the vial again and sprinkled a measure of crystals into a solution of what appeared to be water.

  'Yes.' She was unstoppering another bottle. 'It's in palimpsest. Do you know what that means? The parchment has been reinscribed, so the writing must be recovered by chemical means. The process is a most delicate one. Also highly dangerous. But I believe I've finally discovered the proper reagents. I made potassium cyanide by adding sal ammoniac to a mixture of plumbago and potash. The process is described in the work of a Chinese alchemist.'

  I crept forward, made curious almost despite myself. I had heard stories of palimpsests, those ancient documents that had been discovered in monastic libraries and suchlike: old texts effaced from parchments on to which new ones had been inscribed. Greek and Latin scribes were known to recycle parchment whenever they ran short, erasing one text by soaking the leaves in milk and then scrubbing at the ink with a pumice-stone before reinscribing the surface, now blank, with a new one, so that one text lay dormant and hidden between the lines of another. But nothing disappears for ever. Over the centuries, because of atmospheric conditions or various chemical reactions, the effaced text sometimes returns, barely legible, to deliver its forgotten message between the interstices of the new script. So it was that a number of ancient books had been occulted and then discovered, centuries later: the frolics of Petronius interrupting the earnest Stoicism of Epictetus, or priapeia insinuating their bawdy verses between the Pauline Epistles. Littera scripta manet, I thought: the written word abides, even under erasure.

  I was leaning forward, squinting at the cockled page. Alethea had opened the window even wider and was now prising the lid from another vial, this one marked 'green vitriol'. So was that, I wondered, how Sir Ambrose had come upon The Labyrinth of the World? Between the lines of another text? I was intrigued. What bookseller has not dreamed of finding a palimpsest, some text that for a millennium has been lost to the world?

  'I tried an Aleppo gall at first.' She was carefully mixing the solution. I coughed gently into my handkerchief. The bitter smell had grown even stronger. 'The tannin should have bitten deeply into the parchment even after the gum arabic was dissolved. I thought a tincture of crushed gall might bring it back to the surface but…'

  'Tannin?' I was trying to recall what I knew about ink, which was hardly anything at all. 'But the ink will be made from carbon, will it not? From a mixture of lampblack or charcoal? That was how the Greeks and Romans made their ink, after all. So an oak gall will be of little use if you wish to-'

  'That's true,' she murmured absently. 'But this text was not inscribed by the Greeks or Romans.' She was bent over the volume, adding a tincture to the surface of the parchment, across which I could see lettering, which appeared to be Latin, or perhaps Italian, inscribed in black. Her hair was whipped by the breeze and the door slammed shut. 'It was written much later than that.'

  'At Constantinople?'

  'Not at Constantinople either. Would you open the door, please? Cyanide becomes toxic when it vaporises. Next I tried a deliquescent sal ammoniac,' she continued, adding another drop. 'I made a solution by heating ammonium chloride and trapping the gas in oil of vitriol. I thought that the iron could be recovered if the tannin could not. The iron in the ink would have corroded over time, but I hoped to restore its colour if possible. But that method also failed. The erasure seems to have been made almost too well. You can understand that the process has been most time-consuming. It's taken several weeks altogether. Quite a number of successive washes.'

  'Which is why I was hired,' I muttered. I was feeling ill now, I could barely stand. 'As a decoy. A pawn.'

  'You created a diversion.' Another drop was added. I stumbled towards the window, bumping into her chair. Alethea, bent over the volume, seemed not to notice. 'You bought me several weeks of precious time,' she said. 'You see, not everything that I told you in Pulteney House was a lie. There is indeed a buyer for the parchment, someone willing to pay a handsome sum. But there are also those-our new Secretary of State is one-who wish to take it without paying. I believe his men paid you a visit the other night.'

  I knocked the telescope from its tripod as I swung the casement wide. A pawn. A diversion. That's what I had been-nothing more. My head reeled as it had done in the crypt of the Rolls Chapel. She began describing in the same absent tone the whole grotesque ruse-the cipher, the graffiti, the curios in the coffee-house, the volume of Agrippa, the auction catalogue. All planted for me to find. All intended to lead me further and further away from Pontifex Hall and The Labyrinth of the World. And to lead others astray as well. For why should she have sent her letters through the General Letter Office unless she wished them to be opened by the agents of Sir Valentine Musgrave?

  'But there are others involved,' she was saying in a distracted voice. 'Agents of powers even more treacherous than those of the Secretary of State. They too had to be led astray. Secret knowledge can be a dangerous thing. In the end even my father wanted to destroy the parchment. It was a curse, he said. Too many people already had died for it.'

  I was barely listening now. Overcome by nausea I thrust my head between the mullions and sucked at the cool air. The rain was sibilant against the brickwork, and above my head the gutters roared. I could see beneath me the pointed roof of the pediment sluicing yet more rain. Then my spectacles blurred, and when I wiped them with my handkerchief I thought I glimpsed a coach beyond the stone arch, far in the distance-something barely visible as it moved through the dense foliage and rising mist. But then I was startled by an exclamation from behind me. I turned round to see Alethea holding the book aloft. Between two rows of black lettering another line, smudged and indistinct, had appeared in bright blue.

  'At last,' she said. 'The reagents are beginning to take effect.'

  'What is it?' The blue characters, a series of figures and letters, dipped and swam before my eyes. Again my anger began to dissipate and I found myself intrigued. 'The Hermetic text?'

  'No,' she replied. 'A different one. One copied by Sir Ambrose.'

  'Sir Ambrose made the palimpsest?' I could feel my hairline dampening with sweat. I sank into the chair, trembling, bewildered by the turn of events.

  She nod
ded and once more the dropper hovered above the page. 'He was the one who copied the text and then effaced it. You see, he had already discovered two palimpsests in Constantinople. One was an Aristotelian text, the other a commentary on Homer by Aristophanes of Byzantium. Both were concealed behind parchments of the Gospels, but the old lettering had begun seeping back. It's called "ghosting", as if the former text had returned to haunt its successor. He realised soon enough how it would be the perfect disguise.'

  'Disguise?'

  'Yes. To hide one text within another.' More blue characters had appeared on the page, bleeding into it like ink across blotting paper, though from where I sat I could read none of them. 'It was the perfect way to smuggle a text. Especially if the reinscription was considered valueless.'

  'What do you mean? Smuggle a text from where?'

  From among the contents of the Imperial Library in Prague, she gradually explained as she continued her work, bent over the table as if performing delicate surgery. This had been in the year 1620, at the outset of the warring between the Protestants and Catholics. Frederick had been elected King of Bohemia one year earlier, a Protestant on a Catholic throne, and so his followers across Europe had suddenly gained access to the contents of the magnificent library assembled by the Emperor Rudolf. The nuncios and ambassadors scuttling back to Rome and her allies among the princes of the Catholic League were alarmed at this turn of events, because a library is always, like an arsenal, a locus of power. After all, had not Alexander the Great planned a library at Nineveh that he claimed would be as much an instrument of his rule as his Macedonian armies? Or when one of Aristotle's other students, Demetrius Philareus, became counsellor to Ptolemy I, monarch of Egypt, what did he advise the King to do but collect together all of the books that he could on kingship and the exercise of power? So the idea of Rudolf's great collection in the hands of Rosicrucians, Cabalists, Hussites, Giordanisti-heretics who for years had been undermining the power not only of the Habsburgs but of the Pope as well-set the tocsins ringing all over Europe. Thus as the armies of the Catholic League marched on Prague in the summer and autumn of 1620, one of their foremost aims, Alethea claimed, was the recovery-and the suppression-of the library.

  'Dozens of heretical books were held in the collection,' she continued, 'copies of them had been burned in Rome and placed on the Index. Now the floodgates were about to burst. No sooner had Frederick arrived from Heidelberg than scholars from all over the Empire began their pilgrimages to Prague. The cardinals in the Sant'Uffizio realised they would soon lose control over who was allowed to read what book or manuscript. Knowledge would have been disseminated from Prague in a great explosion, fostering sectaries and revolutionaries both within Rome and without, creating still more heresies, still more books for the bonfires and the Index. The library in Prague had become a Pandora's box out of which, in the eyes of Rome, a swarm of evils was about to fly.'

  I was sitting beside the window, letting the breeze cool my brow. The rain was falling harder than ever. The ceiling in the corridor had begun to leak and the vials and cuvettes were chiming together on the table. Heretical books? I scratched at my beard, trying to think.

  'What manner of evil?' I asked when she fell silent, bent over the parchment. 'A new Hermetic text that the Holy Office wished to suppress?'

  She shook her head. 'The Church no longer had anything to fear from the writings of Hermes Trismegistus. You of all people must know that. In 1614 the antiquity of the texts had been challenged by Isaac Casaubon, who proved beyond a doubt that they were forgeries of a later date. In the end, of course, Casaubon, for all his brilliance, turned his magnificent guns upon himself. With his book he hoped to refute the papists, Cardinal Baronius in particular. But instead he merely succeeded in destroying one of their greatest enemies.'

  'Because the Corpus hermeticum was used by heretics like Bruno and Campanella to justify their attacks on Rome.'

  'And dozens more besides them. Yes. But with one stroke Professor Casaubon did away with a thousand years of magic, superstition and, in the eyes of Rome, heresy. After the texts had been dated, a new one was valueless, hardly of interest to anyone except a few half-mad astrologers and alchemists. It therefore made the perfect disguise.'

  'Disguise?' I shifted uneasily on my chair, still struggling to understand. 'What do you mean?'

  'Have you not guessed, Mr. Inchbold?'

  She laid the thin volume aside, and before the wind riffled the pages I saw that the top half of the front one was now covered in the blue script, the ghost of a former text summoned back to life by her poisonous concoction. She dabbed carefully at the ink with a piece of blotting paper and then closed the cover. The wind had begun whistling in the necks of the flasks, raising an eerie chorus. A piece of dislodged slate clattered against the gutter and fell to the ground. The casement slammed shut. Alethea pushed back her chair and rose from the work-table.

  'The Labyrinth of the World was only the reinscription,' she said at last, 'only the surface text. It was a forgery like the others, an invention used by Sir Ambrose to occult another text, one that was much more valuable. One in which the cardinals in the Holy Office would have interested themselves.' Carefully she stoppered the vial of cyanide. 'Many others as well.'

  'Which text? Another heresy?'

  'Yes. A new one. For if one world died in 1614, another was being born. In the same year that Casaubon published his attack on the Corpus hermeticum, Galileo printed three letters in defence of his Istoria e dimostrazioni, which had been published a year earlier in Rome.'

  'His work on sunspots,' I nodded, perplexed. 'The work in which for the first time he defends Copernicus's model of the universe. Though I fail to see what-'

  'By 1614,' she continued, oblivious, 'Ptolemy had been vanquished along with Hermes Trismegistus, his fellow Egyptian. Together the two of them were responsible for more than a thousand years of error and delusion. But the cardinals and consultors in Rome were less willing to accept the downfall of the astronomer than the shaman, and so the letters that Galileo published in 1614 are a plea for them to read the Bible for moral instead of astronomical lessons, to continue their practice of reading the Holy Scripture allegorically wherever it conflicts with scientific discoveries. All in vain, of course, since in the next year one of the letters was laid before the Inquisition.'

  'So the text is one published by Galileo?' I was remembering Salusbury's translation of the Dialogo, the volume responsible for the astronomer's persecution by the Pope, the one whose contents Galileo had been forced to recant. 'One suppressed by Rome after the Holy Office banned Copernicanism in 1616?'

  She shook her head. She was standing before the window with her hand resting lightly on the telescope, which she had carefully replaced on its tripod. Through the fogged panes I could see that the coach toiling through the mud had drawn a little closer. Nearer to the house I could make out through the curtains of rain the whorled outlines of the hedge-maze; even from this height, it looked hopelessly confused, an endless warren of curlicues and cul-de-sacs.

  'No,' she replied, taking a small bucket from the work-table and picking her way into the corridor. 'This particular document was never published.'

  'Oh? What is it, then?'

  Water was not so much dripping as streaming through the ceiling. I watched as she stooped and placed the bucket beneath, in the middle of the puddle, then straightened.

  'The parchment will keep for now,' she said. 'Let us continue our talk elsewhere.'

  I took a last look through the window-the coach had disappeared behind a stand of trees-and followed her to the top of the staircase. Who was inside the vehicle? Sir Richard Overstreet? All at once I felt even more uneasy.

  I gripped the banister and began to descend. I was about to say something, but after only two steps she stopped and turned round so quickly that I almost bumped into her.

  'I wonder,' she said, looking at me with a kind of avid amusement, 'how much you know about the legend of El
Dorado.'

  Chapter Eight

  The smell of the library was in sharp contrast to that of the laboratory. Everything about the cavernous chamber was precisely as I remembered, only now the pleasantly musty air was spiced with the familiar aromas of cedarwood oil and lanolin, as well as a resinous tang of new wood, for a few of the shelves had been repaired and the railing in the gallery replaced. The scents reminded me of my own shop, for smells always return us to the past more keenly and swiftly than any other stimulation. All at once I felt the same gust of heartsickness as on that last morning in the Half Moon Tavern. It might have been years rather than days since I last saw my home.

  Alethea was motioning for me to take one of the leather-upholstered chairs beside the window. These too were new, as was the walnut table separating them and the hand-knotted rug, complete with monkeys and peacocks, on which they sat. I shuffled across the floor and obediently creaked into one of the chairs. Phineas was nowhere to be seen. Even his trail of blood had disappeared. For a second I entertained the notion that the disgraceful altercation had been only a product of my feverish imagination.

  I crossed and uncrossed my legs, waiting for Alethea to speak. In those days I knew a little about the myth of El Dorado, or 'the Golden One', that will-o'-the-wisp that for the best part of a century had lured countless adventurers into the dangerous labyrinth of the Orinoco river. It is mentioned by chroniclers of the Spanish conquests such as Fernándo de Oviedo, Cieza de León and Juan de Castellanos, all of whose works I had briefly consulted in those first few days after my return from Pontifex Hall, and all of whom tell conflicting versions of the story. Rumours of El Dorado had reached the ears of the conquistadores soon after Francisco Pizarro's conquest of Peru in 1530: a city of gold governed by a valiant one-eyed chieftain, el indio dorado, whose practice it was to paint his body each morning in the dust of gold fished from the Orinoco, or perhaps from the Amazon… or perhaps from one of their hundreds of tributaries snaking through the jungles. The Spaniards were intrigued by the rumours, and in 1531 a captain named Diego de Ordás received a capitulación from the Emperor Charles V to ascend the Orinoco in search of this new Montezuma and his city of gold. Although he found no sign of it, other would-be discoverers were undaunted, and for the next few decades one conquistador after another set off into the jungle like knights-errant in the romances of chivalry so popular at the time. One of them, a man named Jiménez de Quesada, tortured any Indians he found by burning the soles of their feet and dropping bacon fat on their bellies. Under these encouragements his victims told stories of a hidden city of gold-now sometimes called either 'Omagua' or 'Manoa'-in the middle of the Guianan jungle, or perhaps even, like Tenochtitlán, in the middle of a lake.