The Detective and the Devil

by Lloyd Shepherd

  He emerged into a cellar: a wide space, suggesting a good-sized house above it. It was cool down here, and there were various meat-shapes hung from hooks and the strong smell of curing. There were sacks of grain and boxes of fruit and vegetables. A well-ordered food store.

  The woman closed the door, passed her metal bar over it another time, and then turned away. She walked across the cellar, up some more steps, and through an unlocked door. Horton followed her.

  ‘Please, constable, come and wait in the library,’ she said, still holding her lamp in the darkened house. ‘There is a fire in the kitchen, I shall make us tea.’

  She stepped inside. Horton followed her, and entered a room unlike any other he had encountered.

  It was finely decorated with dark wooden furniture, which the woman’s lamp picked out as she went around the room lighting other lamps. As these fired into life, more detail emerged. The furniture was, indeed, very fine, and some of it looked very old. It was the kind of furniture one might find in a well-ordered townhouse. He had seen nothing like it on St Helena, even in the Governor’s office.

  And everywhere, there were books: on shelves, piled on tables by the sides of the chairs, tumbling off a writing desk which took up almost the whole of one wall of the room. A hearth with an unlit fire occupied another wall. Looking up, he saw the room was perhaps twenty feet high, and every inch of its surface that was not occupied by the desk or the hearth was covered in books. Hundreds, if not thousands, of books.

  He walked over to one of the shelves.

  ‘May I?’ he said to the woman, who now stood waiting at the door, despite having promised tea.

  ‘You might perhaps start with that pile of books on my desk,’ the woman said. ‘There are volumes there which I think may be of interest to you.’

  He picked up one of the books from the desk. Its leather binding was cracked and dangerously dry, its spine rubbed away so there was no writing legible on it. He opened it to the front page, and saw immediately why the woman had pointed him to it. The book was in Latin, of which he had none at all, but it said it had been printed in ‘Londini’, which he took to be ‘London’. A date was given beneath this – ‘MDLXVIII’ – which he had insufficient tools to decode. The title of the book was Propaedeumata Aphoristica, and below it were the words ‘IOANNIS DEE, LONDONINENSIS’.

  John Dee, of London.

  But these signals were, to him, after effects. He knew this book was one of John Dee’s, because there at the centre of the frontispiece, on a shield entwined with snakes and what appeared to be the feathers of quills, was the device that had been inked on the chests of the Johnsons. John Dee’s device – the Monad.

  ‘These books are all John Dee’s?’ he said, and the woman smiled.

  ‘It is an interesting question, constable,’ she replied. ‘These books are indeed mostly John Dee’s, though he only wrote a few of them – indeed, the ones in that pile are the ones he wrote. But the rest are his, too.’

  She spoke in a mannered, courtly air, like an actor on the stage. As if she had been trained to it, Horton thought.

  ‘I do not understand your meaning.’

  ‘No, I expect you do not.’

  She sighed, and it was the sound of someone accepting the end of something.

  ‘My name is Mina Baxter, constable,’ she said. ‘And this room contains the library of John Dee. My grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather stole it from him.’

  VIOLENCE

  As Abigail rode through the island night with the ogre, St Helena’s angular savagery was even more potent, unsoftened by the green bucolic edges of daytime. Peaks cut jagged lines in the moonlit sky, and the lamplight landed every now and again on the demonic eyes of a goat watching them pass.

  A fragment of John Dee’s words came back to her: There is such a conjunction of rays from all the fixed stars and planets upon every point of the whole universe at any moment of time that another conjunction which is in every way like it can exist naturally at no other point and at no other time.

  Every moment in time a unique moment, and every point on the map of the cosmos a unique point. Men walked through these conjunctions under an infinity of influence.

  And women, of course. Though Dee did not mention women.

  They rode east towards the Deadwood plain, and the Moon hung high above them; one of Dee’s fixed stars, of course. He had thought much of the Moon. The Moon is the most powerful governess of moist things: it is the arouser and producer of humidity. The Sun governed fire, the Moon governed water, tugging at the tides and influencing the hysterics of the mad.

  And this was madness: to be galloping across a plain in the South Atlantic with only an ogre for company. This Caliban, this fairy-tale ogre, held the horse’s rein in his one good hand, and placed his handless arm behind him and half around Abigail’s waist, holding her in place with surprising strength. He smelled of oil and fire and sweat, as if he had stepped out of a furnace. And of almonds. The stench of bitter almonds hung on him like a memory of violence. She had put her trust into him, because he had promised her stories, and was that not always an item of great promise?

  They were almost at Deadwood when a shape appeared from within the rocks and shouted something at their horse. The animal reared backwards, throwing her and the ogre. She fell backwards and landed on her shoulder, which then screamed in pain at her, a white-hot spearing agony the like of which she had never felt before, and the nurse in her realised that she had dislocated the joint, and the physician in her knew that the only fix for such an injury would present even more pain.

  She tried to stand, but could get no further than her knees before the pain grew too much. Ahead of her she saw two shapes struggling in the moonlight – the ogre, and another. She could hear the ogre growling and shouting, but the other shape made no sound at all. It was taller and altogether calmer than the frenziedly angry ogre, and she anticipated the ending long before it came – a rock raised high in the air, brought down with cold belligerence, and the struggle was over.

  She breathed, heavily, trying to control her pain and her fear. There was a harsh sound as the figure dropped the rock with which it had dispatched the ogre, and she watched it stand up straight and rub its face where, presumably, a punch had landed. Then it turned to face her and spoke.

  ‘That was clever, to poison me like that,’ it said. ‘Some women are too clever for their own good.’

  ‘What will you do with me?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, to start with, I might just twist your arm a few times,’ said Burroughs. ‘But before then, I need to find that horse.’

  Mina Baxter told Horton a story.

  It was a story that had its roots in the long ago and the now very far away. It was a story of Dutchmen on the make: Amsterdam merchants, an unscrupulous mercenary named Jacobus Aakster (and his wife, Mina Koeman), and the library of the most famous magus in England, John Dee.

  Dee’s library, an untidy but extraordinary English Alexandria, was said to contain a great secret, though the man himself had become something of an embarrassment, speaking to angels and seeking the perfection of man in the achievement of a celestial magic.

  Horton heard the words the perfection of man and his eyes passed over the books in the library in which they sat. She had still not made him any tea.

  These Dutch merchants paid Aakster to steal Dee’s library, or at least to steal that part of it that would most likely contain this great secret. But the merchants were outdone by another Dutchman on the make: Aakster himself. Word had reached other men of Aakster’s interest in Dee, and he was approached by, of all things, a Jewish merchant from Portugal. This man told him of a certain manuscript which he had bought from a rogue Janissary which he had then sold on to John Dee. He called this text the Opera. It was said to have been written by an ancient Persian named J[ā]bir ibn Hayy[ā]n.

  When Mina Baxter said the name of this thinker, it sounded to Horton like she was clearing her throat, so he asked h
er to say it again.

  ‘The name doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘The Europeans called him Geber.’

  Geber was an alchemist; some said he was the original alchemist. To Dee and men like him, he was a giant of the obscure science they wallowed in. To find an unknown text by him would have excited Dee beyond understanding.

  But there was a problem – the text of the book was in Arabic. And Dee had no Arabic. The Arab works he owned were Latin translations. But if what the Janissary had told the old Portuguese Jew was true, the contents of the Opera were such that he could not rely on any translator to keep them secret. Dee was trapped inside his own secret stories, unable to exploit whatever lay inside the old book.

  It was one of those strange coincidences from which stories grow. For Jacobus Aakster, a man of several parts, had been captured as a young man by pirates off the Barbary coast. He had served five years as a slave, before escaping. During that time he had become a mercenary. And he had also learned Arabic.

  So, on the night of the raid, he found the book. He read the first page or two, while the morons he had hired rampaged through Dee’s library. He realised, instantly, what the book was about. Out on the river his wife Mina was waiting with a boat, just in case. It turned out it was needed. Aakster left with Mina, and disappeared.

  This modern Mina, Mina Baxter, told the story easily, as if she had been rehearsing all her life for the moment she had an audience.

  Jacobus Aakster disappeared for three years. During those years the merchants paid experts to pore over Dee’s stolen books. They grew exceedingly knowledgeable on the influences of the stars and the mystical properties of mathematics – none of which they cared a jot about. None of what they learned could be turned into the one thing the merchants really did care for: money. Even Dee’s thoughts on navigation were either old hat or pure tat.

  At which point, Aakster returned. He introduced himself to the merchants again, who expressed their fury at his disappearance. He silenced them, though, by simply stating the substance of the book he had stolen from Dee’s library. That shut them up. They asked to see the book. He told them he had destroyed it. They grew angry.

  Then he told them he had memorised the book’s contents.

  It took a while for the implications of this to sink in. If the book contained the secrets he claimed, then it might be worth money. More money than it was possible even to quite imagine. But if no copy existed (and the merchants certainly didn’t know of one), the only way to turn that theory into cash was via the mechanism of Jacobus Aakster’s memory.

  ‘Prove it,’ demanded the merchants. So Aakster did, with the help of some alchemical apparatus and some unusual ingredients. One of the men appointed to help him with the process ended up dying, succumbing to a strange substance which turned from liquid to gas at dangerously low temperatures and which smelled of bitter almonds. They worked in an icehouse deep in the flat Dutch countryside, its temperature kept low by the North Sea waters. This particular worker had not been as careful as he needed to be.

  But the test was successful. And thus Aakster’s request was agreed to, without delay. What was needed was a distant place, one where Aakster could go about his business undisturbed. At least, this was the requirement Aakster demanded. He wanted to be far from Holland, far from Europe, far from prying eyes and glittering temptations. He would establish a new dynasty, and he knew the place for it. He had discovered it during those three years of investigation.

  So he and Mina Koeman had set sail for St Helena on a vessel bound for the Dutch East Indies. They set up home there, out on the eastern lip of the island, and put the processes outlined in the Opera into action. Aakster also demanded that the other books stolen from Dee’s library be handed to him, though it was never clear why. The merchants were happy to hand the books over. Aakster had taken the only one that mattered, and now it existed only as recollections in the canny fellow’s head.

  Jacobus and Mina were immediately successful. And they continued to be successful for another twenty years. Merchants came and went. Some of them demanded that Aakster increase production, or move his manufactory to another location, perhaps on the southern tip of Africa. But Aakster refused. He had made a comfortable life for himself, and he knew he could defend his position in St Helena. He could see the ships as they arrived, and with the help of an ugly little Portuguese beast who lived on the island he carved out a great manufactory beneath the fort and his home.

  During their time on the island Mina Koeman gave birth to two sons: Carl and Jacob. The family travelled to and from Europe, indulging themselves in the shops of Amsterdam and Antwerp, but always returning to their island refuge. But on one of these European jaunts their son Carl was intercepted by representatives of the merchants and tortured, desperate as they were for the secret. But Carl had not learned the Opera; that had been Jacob’s role. Carl returned to St Helena quite out of his wits, driven utterly mad by the labour of the merchants.

  When Aakster learned of his son Carl’s fate, he grew angry and threatened to end production, at which point the merchants panicked and apologised, and proposed an almost Imperial deal. Aakster’s other son Jacob would marry one of their own daughters, Claudia van Denburg, and Aakster would be given a significant stake in the merchants’ new venture: the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company.

  Years passed, things changed. The English forced the Dutch from St Helena during a moment when the Dutch government had been casting avaricious eyes on the southern African coast. The Dutch merchants had never formalised their ownership of St Helena; it was the property of the Dutch government, not the new VOC, and that government had no idea what the Aaksters were about. So a great prize slipped from the merchants’ grasp, and they were annoyed – particularly as their rivals in London, the East India Company of England, had been the ones to seize this lucrative little asset.

  Did the London East India Company know what they had in St Helena? Perhaps – it might even have encouraged them to persuade the English authorities to seize the island from the Dutch in the first place. And they realised soon enough when they discovered this Dutch family of murky provenance. Old Jacobus was dead by this time, and his son Jacob was not long for the world of men, either. Carl also still lived, but was destroyed by his imagination and by the books in the library which Aakster had assembled from the remnants of that stolen from Mortlake. Carl started to believe himself to be John Dee himself, his soul occupied by the undying power of the old magus.

  But Jacob’s wife Claudia, the daughter of great merchants and a woman of considerable parts, handled negotiations with the new owners of the island, the East India Company. A new way of trading was established. The Aaksters would continue their work and continue their shopping, though in London rather than Antwerp. They reported to a secret committee back in London. They changed their names. The only child of Jacob and Claudia, Cornelius, would henceforth carry the surname Baxter.

  And so the little business continued. Elder sons took over from fathers, each of them learning the Opera by heart; other siblings were sent back to England to quietly thrive on substantial but not exotic dowries and bequests. The Honourable East India Company kept the secret to itself; the profits from St Helena preserved the good health of its accounts in the leanest years, when the Indians turned up their noses at heavy English woollens and the Company was forced to fall back onto violence, extortion and taxation to keep the fiscal wheels turning.

  The family may have taken an English name, but it still proceeded with Dutch care. Cornelius Baxter handed the reins of the operation to Edwin, who handed them to Frederick, who handed them to Gilbert. All the time, the Company pressed for expansion of the project, for a new facility to be opened somewhere else. But the Baxters resisted. They knew where such a move would end. It would end with the destruction of their family.

  But then, disaster. Gilbert’s wife died giving birth to a son. He was left on the island with no wife, and no male heir. He
was left with only a daughter. She was named after Jacobus Aakster’s canny wife: Mina. She never married, but that is not the same as saying the line ended.

  The pain in Abigail’s shoulder was like nothing she had ever experienced. She tried to keep her arm still and wondered about fashioning some kind of sling, but Burroughs gave her no time, returning with the ogre’s horse within minutes and yanking her by her good arm with such gleeful violence that she feared her good shoulder would also dislocate itself.

  She screamed out, and Burroughs laughed at her. He laughed a lot as they rode back to the fort, talking as they went.

  ‘Did you read any of the books in Johnson’s house, Abigail?’ he said, his arms reaching around her to the reins, his breath warm on her neck.

  ‘The books?’

  ‘The Mathematicall Preface, perhaps. That is the volume with the most to say to a sceptic such as yourself.’

  ‘I read it.’

  ‘And what did Abigail Horton’s fine mind make of it?’

  ‘Please, my shoulder.’

  He shifted his weight slightly behind her, and the movement felt obscene to her. But the pain in her shoulder lessened somewhat.

  ‘I found all of Dee’s writings to be misguided,’ she said, her voice pulled tight by the agony. ‘He appeared a very intelligent man misguided by his trust in fallacious authorities.’

  ‘Ah, yes. It is well put. He took the cosmos to be Aristotle’s, when in fact it was Galileo’s. But he never met Galileo. I made the same mistake.’

  ‘You? You believed Dee’s writings? His talk of angels?’

  ‘I did. I believed it all. I was schooled by those books. I grew up alone in my uncle’s house in Kent, surrounded by a facsimile of Dee’s library.’

  ‘A facsimile?’

  ‘My uncle believed Dee’s secret – the secret your husband came here to uncover – was not in one book but in all the books. So he acquired copies of all of them. He reconstructed Dee’s library, and I read the books. I learned my Latin and my Greek and even my Arabic. By the time I was twenty-five I was, in my way, a facsimile of John Dee.’