by Clio Gray
An exact parallel to Wynken Grimalkin returning from his war of mud, mist and fog in Lobosik, forced into violence not of his making, both giving atonement for that violence ever since: Wynken to the Servants to become Joachim, Hendrik to his library and the Lynx.
‘Anything at all?’ Joachim asked again, watching his son drum his fingers on the desk, obviously thinking hard; another moment; another few beats of his heart.
‘If there is then I can’t see it,’ Hendrik eventually said. ‘Ricardo registered as his brother with the Guild so the paltry evidence we uncovered in his room all points in the wrong direction. As for the uncle…well, it’s out of my hands. He’s been let go. Due to leave for Amsterdam tomorrow. But believe me, if I had it all to do again I would have done it differently.’
Joachim frowned.
‘How so?’ he asked. ‘What on earth could you have done to make a different ending?’
Hendrik gazed up at the large window in the upper echelons of the Athenaeum’s western wall. He loved that window, it’s ancient glass mellowing and yellowing the afternoon light, suffusing the interior of the library as it might have done a holy place, a cathedral maybe.
‘I should have been the one to rescue the library, not Ruan,’ Hendrik said quietly, ‘but before that I should have gone to the Servants. I should have hurried to your side as they expected, then none of the rest would have happened.’
Joachim was puzzled. ‘How could you respond to an event unknown to you?’
‘Because I did know,’ Hendrik said simply. ‘What would have been the point of it if I didn’t? A letter came to me at the Athenaeum purporting to be from your Abbot telling me things were badly with you. I didn’t pursue it because plainly it was a hoax. No Abbot would have written such an untutored letter. I had no idea…no idea…and I don’t understand why the Servants didn’t send me a real missive telling me you were so incapacitated…’
Joachim bowed his head.
‘They didn’t send anything because that’s not our way. Not until a Brother dies. When we enter the Order we shrug off our former lives until our lives are actually over.’
Joachim suddenly stood up, almost shouted as the realisation hit him.
‘But surely that letter is absolute proof of ill intent! Proof of the Ducetti’s involvement! The handwriting? Can’t we match it to Ricardo’s from the Guild Book?’
‘We can’t,’ Hendrik sighed, turning back to the window and the light, ‘because I threw it away. There was nothing to keep. Nothing of any meaning.’
A few moments of silence as Joachim took this in, thinking that of course it would be so, nothing of any meaning, for why would his abandoned son keep anything of him, especially something so obviously dubious.
Joachim sat down slowly.
‘Does it have to be like this, between you and me, I mean?’ he asked, looking at Hendrik, seeing his gaze fixed on the large window, the amber light falling on his son’s uplifted face. ‘Can we not term a truce? Can we not begin again? We’ve lost so much, Hendrik, you and I…’
The light was fading to the west, the sun dipping below the horizon, shadows falling over Hendrik as another night stepped in lightly on the heels of another day.
Life, he thought, is so fleeting, so temporary, its anticipated duration not to be relied on – Louisa was proof of that – and Joachim was right. They’d lost so much, the two of them. Why not wipe the slate clean and start again? Tabula Rasa. Father and son reunited.
Louisa would have been pleased about that.
42
AND RIGHT BACK AT YOU
DEVENTER & IRELAND 1799
The Lynx Affair took its time to filter over to Ireland but eventually it did, though Shauna Clooney – when she heard of it – had no inkling that her young Wexford Warrior was right at its heart. It was just another scandal involving another disgraced Cardinal. She’d heard it all before, and it was nothing compared to what Greta’s stringy thing had done, disseminated by Shauna, creating a conduit of information passing from cadre to cadre with the Loyalists being none the wiser, the only shame of it being that it had come so late in the day.
Vinegar Hill had been the last real stand of the United Irish, the sporadic skirmishes afterwards mere charades of the real thing. Not that Shauna cared overmuch, for it had given her the one piece of news she valued above all else: that her younger son had survived, away over the sea like Greta to join Napoleon’s Irish League, safe for the moment at least.
The Irish would rise again like they always did and next time round might have a better chance because of Greta, the pouch of whose shorn hair Shauna looked at every morning, crossing herself in thanks the girl had chanced across her path.
Old Owen often thought of Greta too, or rather of that perfect boy, that perfect boy with his perfect green eyes and the spikes – oh the spikes – of his perfect red hair. If Owen had seen Greta as she looked now his ardour would have quelled in an instant. Gone were the boy’s clothing and cap; gone the bandages about her chest; gone the clumpy boots and thick socks needed to fill them out; laid aside was her brother’s battered leather jacket.
She was a young woman again, looking all her eighteen years, no longer needing to hide in plain sight, nor appear younger than she was. She might not be beautiful, but she had everything else going in her favour – strong face, round cheeks, square jaw, small hands, and a smile that could set the world alight, or Ruan’s world at least. He could hardly bring himself to look at her without his heart dancing a tarantella.
‘Hells bells,’ he whispered when she came into the library decked out in a simple green dress and dainty boots – just a few of the items donated by the members of Louisa’s Sewing Circle. They’d offered her several pretty bonnets but Greta had refused them. Enough was enough. She’d spent the last several years in dirty jerkins and trousers and already felt odd and constrained in this new garb; a bonnet looking like a bird’s nest thrown together with a posy of silk flowers was a step too far.
Even so, the transformation seemed as much of a miracle as Ruan had ever seen, and the letter he’d just fetched from the lawyers slipped from his fingers. No matter. He knew what it was: the copy of Golo’s Will. Any day previous to the attempted blowing up of the library he’d have been spitting like a pole cat, absolutely raging at its contents: half of Golo’s estate to Fergus?
He would have ranted and raved, kicked his heels into the dust and sworn bloody murder at how unfair life was, how badly mistreated he’d been, cursing every last one of the hoops he was going to have jump through because of it, like how was he going to prove Fergus was dead, and how long it was going to take for anyone to verify that Fergus had no family but him and Golo. And come to that, was there any other extant family over in Ireland? That was going to take a couple of years and a lot of money to track down.
But all that was gone. Swept away. Ruan, at the grand old age of twenty, grown up overnight, the veils of his youth torn away, seeing life for what it was: precious and precarious, unpredictable at best and downright dangerous and deadly at worst, no clue given when your time was up. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen, but what had happened to him in the few days since he’d saved the Athenaeum had shifted his world view. And now, seeing Greta, it was being shifted all over again.
‘Cat got your tongue?’ Greta asked, Ruan struck dumb by her latest incarnation.
He was unaware that he seemed a different person himself: restrained and polite, offering his help wherever it would matter most, instrumental in getting the library back to working order: scouting Deventer for the workmen needed to replace the damaged floor and furniture, gathering together the few scraps of Walter’s letters that had survived fire and water, as if a couple of lines of writing out of context would be sufficient to condemn the entire Ducetti family to hell.
‘So you got Golo’s Will then?’ Hendrik asked, looking up briefly as Ruan came in before reverting back to the large piece of paper spread out on the desk before him.<
br />
Once a scholar, always a scholar. Some things could not, would not, should not change, at least not for Hendrik. He’d been witness to an experiment many years ago when a man of vision had turned the ordinary into the extraordinary. He’d placed a bowl of mercury at the bottom of a well and had a boy down there to stir it gently and, come the night, the man entertained his fellow scientists – Hendrik amongst them – with an experience beyond compare.
The swirling mercury had acted as a telescopic reflector so that they saw a hovering depiction of the night sky a few yards above the well; present but inanimate; a will’o’the wisp that had shape and form but no mass. Hendrik never forgot it, indeed it was what inspired him to install the peep-hole room in the Athenaeum. And he had his own miracle to entertain his own guests now.
‘Join us,’ Hendrik invited Ruan and Ruan sat, abandoning the lawyer’s letter without a second thought, wanting only to gaze on Greta, at what she had become, the promise of the tight-clad bud suddenly blossomed into a flower that defied categorisation. He wanted to stare at her, take it all in, but every time he raised his eyes she was looking at him and so he dropped his gaze again, listening to what Hendrik was saying.
‘We found out something very interesting while you were away,’ Hendrik began. ‘And strangely enough it has to do with you, and with Golo and Fergus.’
Ruan stared hard at Hendrik but Hendrik did not look up, his long fingers moving slowly about the sheet of paper he had in front of him on the desk, Ruan’s interest piqued because he’d seen something similar before: that mucky beet bag Greta had brought out of her satchel when she’d been banging on about the khipu.
‘Greta noticed something,’ Hendrik went on, Ruan’s heart annoyingly jumping at the mention of her name, making him glance involuntarily towards her, her rounded cheeks, her curling hair…
‘She saw the khipu,’ Hendrik drew Ruan’s attention back, ‘when Fergus first showed it to her cousin Peter and then later to Mick Malloy.’
Peter. Her cousin then, so not some long lost lover, and thank God for it.
Ruan tried to concentrate.
‘But it’s different now,’ Greta added, and at the sound of her voice Ruan could take no more. He stood up suddenly, swiping the lawyer’s letter up from the floor just for something to do, reverting for a moment to his old persona.
‘And so what?’ he blustered. ‘It’s nothing. It’ll be the Lynx again, a whole crate of rubbish that should’ve been thrown on the fire years ago.’
The hurt he saw in Greta’s eyes floored him. He sat back down, turning the lawyer’s letter over and over in his hands, wishing he could take back those words, take back everything he’d ever said about the Lynx, his understanding of their purpose and importance only just having crept into his consciousness like a tide runs through the polders on a low slung beach.
‘Ah,’ Hendrik went on, undisturbed by Ruan’s theatrics. ‘But you don’t know what Isaac found in the stacks. A copy of the Mellisographia…’
‘The folio the Lynx dedicated to Maffeo when he became Pope,’ Ruan reacted as if someone had struck his knee with a hammer, the lore of the Lynx soaked into him right down to the marrow. ‘First ever depiction of a bee studied under a microscope, sign of the Barberini family name. But isn’t it very rare?’
Ruan sounded so uncharacteristically enthusiastic that both Greta and Hendrik lifted their heads and looked at him. Same black hair, same pale face, but gone was the scepticism they were so used to seeing, replaced by a keen interest that was enchanting.
‘It is, my young sir,’ Hendrik replied happily. ‘I’m impressed by how much you know, though I suspect what I’m about to tell you is of a different order. I assume you know the Lynx used the khipu to communicate messages between themselves and latterly between themselves and Galileo, once he was under house arrest?’
Ruan closed his eyes because of course he knew; those men so fond of their codes and cryptograms, their rings, secret names and emblem; obscurely heartened to realise he was still a part of it way down the line, wearing Walter’s oversized ring on his finger. He wondered how he would have been cast if he was there at the first: probably Il Ignorami, Il he-doesn’t-give-a-cuss, Il he-doesn’t-even-know-Latin-well-enough-to-get-his-own-monniker-right. He was kidding himself. He would never have been invited into their inner circle as Walter had been. Il Ignorami, and deservedly so.
‘Yes,’ Ruan said quietly, in answer to Hendrik’s question, opening his eyes, looking with longing at Hendrik, eager now for answers. ‘And yes, I know I’ve been the most abominable ass for the most time I’ve known you, but please believe me when I say that I’m curious now.’
Hendrik smiled broadly at the expression on the young man’s face, seeing there what Golo and Fergus always had before Ruan became so insufferable, so intolerant of his confinement in the house on the shores of Loch Eck.
Just a boy growing up, Hendrik thought, kicking at his bounds, forgiving Ruan all that had gone before, saddened that neither Golo or Fergus were here to do the same.
‘I’m glad of it,’ Hendrik said, and meant it. ‘But what you may not know,’ Hendrik went on, ‘is that Fergus and Golo had a working theory of how the Lynx adapted the khipu for their use. Not the way the Incas did it obviously, for it’s highly unlikely anyone will ever be able to solve that particular conundrum. But the Lynx? Well, we now have it chapter and verse. Or rather Caro had it in his book, and a very interesting little book it is too, Caro.’
Caro beamed. He would have nodded his head if he’d been able, but his neck was strictured and immobilised by the tightly bandaged collar the surgeon had applied so his stitches could heal correctly. He’d also been directed not to speak for a couple of weeks. It was a small price to pay for Caro who knew how close he’d come to dying, still feeling the coldness that had crept over him as Isaac held his strong fingers to his throat, still hearing the words Isaac spoke to him: Come on lad. Just stay calm, just keep still and try to breathe. Which was what he’d been doing ever since: keeping still, trying to breathe.
Most of his life had been spent balanced on a knife edge on board one ship or another, be it a whaler, fisher or tramper like the Collybuckie, and he’d always understood it could end at any moment. But now, because of all the bizarre things that had happened, Caro could actually envision his life stretching on and on and on, and all because Golo Eck had given him a book. Without it, without Golo, Caro could never have started his life again.
‘It…was…the bees,’ Caro croaked, unable to stop himself, smiling all the more when Hendrik and Greta tutted at the same time, absurdly glad that not one, but two people cared enough for him to do so.
‘The bees it was,’ Greta took up the reins. ‘Golo hid a little picture show in the corners of the pages of Caro’s book, like the flicker books you sometimes see where usually there’s a lady undressing…’
Hendrik coughed.
‘Quite,’ he said shortly. ‘Just like that, except this one had a far more important message to impart than a small boudoir thrill. It was giving us direction, guiding us to its source. It’s long been known that Apis Mellifera, to give the honey-bee its correct name, are masters at communicating information amongst the individuals of a hive, mostly to do with the whereabouts of food sources. And that’s precisely what the Lynx were doing with the khipu: communicating information. The little flicker book Golo created for Caro shows us a single bee hopping from flower to flower, each flower’s stem having a different twist in it, sometimes two, with a letter or word beside each one…’
‘Just like your beet bag,’ Ruan said, suddenly aware he’d not looked away from Greta since she’d spoken.
‘Just like my beet bag,’ Greta replied, dropping her eyes as she remembered Shauna leaning over the table in her little cottage, remembering Shauna’s kindness, wondering if Shauna had ever made use of the rudimentary khipus they’d created from scraps of leftover wool, if Shauna had ever had word about her sons.
‘And
much more,’ Hendrik added animatedly. ‘And so much more. Your Golo, Ruan, was a genius! How he worked it out I don’t know, but it’s all here. Like Caro said, it’s all about the bees. They’re dotted throughout the pages like doodles; a shorthand, if you will, for how the khipu works. Undoubtedly Golo would have made proper records that were lost with him, but luckily for us we still have the gist here, namely that he realised the Lynx were highly likely to have kept detailed notes of their conversations – natural list-makers all – and would be consistent, in their own idiosyncratic way. Every message passed between themselves and between themselves and Galileo – amongst others – jotted down so that in later, less judgemental times such as ours, they could all be revealed and understood.’
Il Ignorami – emblem: an ostrich buried in the sand right down to its feet – was beginning to catch up. No wonder Golo had been so keen to acquire the lost library of the Lynx in Paris and Ireland.
‘But that could be huge,’ Ruan said, leaning forward, elbows on the table, mind skewing away from Greta, concentrating on the task at hand because it really could be huge if they found the last conversations of a man as famously ground-breaking as Galileo talking to the Lynx. It could open the doors of Galileo’s mind and let the world blow in.
‘Huge is the word,’ Hendrik said, with not a small amount of glee, ‘and I have the proof of it. It’s been here all along – lost until today perhaps – but not in Paris, nor in Ireland, not anywhere but right here in the Athenaeum, lying like a corpse within a tomb…a coda tacked into our rebound copy of the Melissografia…’
Greta interrupted, leaning forward, placing her hand on Hendrik’s arm.
‘That’s all well and good,’ she reminded him, ‘and maybe there’s some fantastic new idea that Galli-whatsit told them, ready to be revealed, but you’ve forgotten what we were supposed to tell Ruan…’
