The Book of Secrets

XLV

Near Brussels

Three police cars raced down the road towards the warehouse. They didn’t see the black Lexus parked down a side alley in the shadow of an industrial gasses unit. Nick waited until they were well past, then pulled out cautiously.

‘How did they find us?’ asked Emily. Her voice sounded small and lost. ‘We didn’t even know we were going there until a few hours ago.’

Nick gripped the steering wheel tighter. Ice-cold air was blasting through the shattered window; the dashboard readout said the temperature outside was ten below. He turned the heater up as far as it would go and aimed the vents towards his body.

‘What happened to Atheldene?’

‘He stayed behind. He wanted to wait for the police.’

‘Great,’ said Nick. ‘At least he can tell them that I didn’t do it this time.’

An ambulance blazed past them in the opposite direction and he glanced down, trying to shield his face.

‘So where are we going?’

‘Somewhere we can examine that book. Do we need any special equipment or anything?’

‘Books are robust. If it survived the defrosting, it should be OK to touch. Obviously a temperature-controlled, stable-humidity environment would be better than a moving car with the heating on full and an arctic gale coming through the window.’

Nick saw a gas station ahead. The lights were out, the pumps like standing stones in the darkness. He pulled into the forecourt and parked behind the kiosk, out of sight of the road. Emily came forward into the passenger seat.

‘Let’s find out.’

He was too nervous to touch the book himself: he gave it to Emily. She laid it on her lap and peeled open the cover. Nick stared at the creamy vellum, cast yellow by the car’s map light.

The manuscript began on the first page.

‘“Et si contigerit ut queratur a venatoribus, venit ad eum odor venatorum, et cum cauda sua tetigit posttergum vestigia sua…”’ read Emily. ‘ “And if it happens that the lion is pursued by hunters, he smells their scent and erases his tracks behind him with his tail. Then the hunters cannot trace him.” ’

She frowned. ‘That’s not how the bestiaries begin.’

But Nick was hardly listening. Halfway down the page a small illustration intruded on the text. Damp had smudged it so that the picture seemed to melt out into the writing, but it was still distinct. A lion sitting up on its haunches, one paw lifted in the air, staring across the page with teeth bared in an imperious glare.

‘It’s the same as the card,’ he breathed.

Nick watched as Emily turned the pages, through the fabulous menagerie of beasts that inhabited the book. Not every page was illustrated, and some had been damaged worse than others – by the damp, or by other ordeals in their long history. Many of the animals were creatures Nick had never imagined: birds that hatched from trees; a beast with a bull’s head, a ram’s horns and a horse’s body; griffins, basilisks and unicorns. But not all were so fantastical. Two cats, a black and a tabby, chased a mouse across a kitchen floor while a buxom cook slurped wine by the fire. An ox pulled a plough across an autumnal field. A stag stood on a knoll in the forest, while a bear grubbed in the dirt.

Nick tried not to show his excitement. He knew the bear – and he was pretty sure he recognised the stag from one of the deer suit cards.

‘What does it say about the bear?’ he asked.

‘ “Bear cubs appear from the womb without form, as tiny white lumps of flesh without eyes, which their mothers lick into shape.” ’ Emily read the Latin effortlessly. ‘ “They crave nothing more than honey. If ever they attack bulls, they know the best areas to strike are the nose or the horns – usually the nose, for the pain is worst in the most sensitive place.”’

Nick sat back in the driver’s seat. With the engine off, the car had become icy cold again. ‘I think the lion was closer to the mark, obliterating its traces so hunters can’t track it. That’s Gillian. We’ve got her book, we’ve got her card – and we’ve still got no idea what she found in them. And people keep trying to kill us.’

Emily went quiet. Nick gave her a sideways glance. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘There is someone who could help us. Someone who could analyse this book to see what Gillian might have found. Where it took her.’

‘Who?’

Emily drummed her fingers on the door handle. ‘His name’s Brother Jerome. He’s a Jesuit – or used to be. He’s an expert in medieval books. He was… He taught me at the Sorbonne. He’s retired now.’

‘Does he live near here? Is he trustworthy?’

‘Near the German border. Probably about an hour’s drive from here. As for trustworthy… You can trust him, I suppose.’

Nick craned around and stared at her. ‘If there’s something you need to tell me, then tell me. If this guy’s not above board, I’m not going anywhere near him.’

‘You can trust him,’ Emily repeated. She sounded close to tears. ‘It’s just… awkward. I was his student, once. He made a pass at me; I reported him. He lost his job.’

Now it was Nick’s turn to stare at the dashboard in embarrassment. ‘If you think-’

‘No. He’s the only man who can help us.’

Before they left, Nick found a tyre lever under the back seat and smashed out the remained shards of broken glass from the window. From a distance it made the car look a bit more reputable. Then he started the engine and pulled out of the gas station. He could see the highway ahead: trucks thundering across a bridge in the night. Blue signs pointed left and right. Nick slowed the car.

‘Which way?’

Italy

Cesare Gemato sat behind his desk and stared through the windows of his eighth-floor office. Rain beaded on the bulletproof glass; beyond, the ships crossing the Bay of Naples were mere smears of grey against a grey sea.

‘Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma!’

Pavarotti burst into life on his phone. Gemato saw the number flashing on the screen and grabbed it. He listened for a minute and said nothing, though his knuckles went white.

‘OK,’ he said, and hung up.

He spent five minutes delaying what he had to do next. There weren’t many people he was afraid to call, but Nevado was one. Perhaps the only one.

He picked up the black phone on his desk – the secure line – and dialled the number from memory.

The voice was there at once. ‘What happened?’

‘My men followed them to the warehouse you told them. They…’ He swallowed. ‘They were caught by some security device. Two died; one managed to get away. The man and the woman escaped.’

He waited for a tirade of abuse. Instead, all he heard was a soft voice rasping, ‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘They stole a vehicle belonging to my men. Like all our vehicles, it is fitted with a tracking system. We have traced it to a suburb of Liège near the German border.’

‘Did the American take the book?’

‘The police came too soon for us to find out.’

Gemato waited. ‘I will go myself,’ said the voice. ‘Have one of your men meet me there.’

One hundred miles to the north-west, the old man put down the phone and stared at the office wall. There were rooms in this building decorated by Raphael and Michelangelo; others that housed marvels from an art collection built up over almost two thousand years. Nevado could have had any of them to decorate his office. Yet he had chosen a small, spare room overlooking an obscure courtyard, and the only decoration on the wall was an ivory crucifix. He contemplated it for a moment.

There were records he could have consulted, books and files – he did not trust his secrets to computers – but he did not need to. Somewhere in the Vatican’s vast archive was an index card with Emily Sutherland’s name on it. He had studied it only yesterday. It had referenced another file in another basement, this one much fatter. He had read that too. He knew who Emily Sutherland wanted to see near Liège.

He buzzed his secretary. ‘I need to travel to Liège. At once, and in private.’

Near Liège, Belgium

Nick had never thought about monks retiring. If he ever had, he’d have assumed they just carried on until they died, like the pope. He certainly wouldn’t have guessed the reality. Brother Jerome had swapped the Society of Jesus for the drab mortification of the suburbs: a cul-de-sac of brick and pebble-dashed bungalows on the edge of a small town. It felt like the end of the world.

Nick parked the car against a hedge to hide the broken window. Low clouds were holding back the dawn; the world was sunk in shadows, a thousand shades of grey. A woman in a quilted jacket walked a terrier along the opposite pavement; she shot them a suspicious glare as she passed. Otherwise, the street was empty.

Emily led them up a path to a white front door and rang the bell. Nick rubbed his hands together. The cold air was the only thing keeping him awake right now.

Emily rang the bell again. A second later, Nick saw movement behind the blurred glass panels in the door. A voice mumbled at them to be patient while keys jangled and locks clicked. The door cracked open on its chain and a gaunt face peered through the gap.

His eyes widened. ‘Emily. Was I to expect you?’ He noticed Nick. ‘And a friend. Who is he, please?’

If Andy Warhol had ever taken holy orders and retired to Belgium, perhaps this was what he’d have looked like. Brother Jerome was a thin, bony man with a mop of white hair that almost touched his eyes. He wore a Chinese-patterned bathrobe, loosely knotted so that when he walked his bare legs were exposed right up to his thighs. Nick had the unpleasant suspicion he was naked underneath it.

He unchained the door and kissed Emily on both cheeks; she stiffened, but didn’t pull away. Nick got a nod, but Jerome was already leading them into a room off the hall.

Nick looked around in amazement. The room was a mess. Books and papers overflowed from shelves that had been screwed to every available inch of wall. Mould frothed on the half-empty mugs that clustered around the battered easy chair in the middle of the room, which had several more towers of books wobbling uncertainly on the arms.

Jerome headed for the kitchen. ‘You would like some coffee?’

No one else did. Through the door, Nick saw him boiling a kettle.

‘So – Emily. It is a long time, yes? How have you been?’

‘Fine.’

‘I have thought perhaps I never see you again.’

‘We’ve got a book we’d like you to look at.’

Jerome came out of the kitchen with a steaming mug. It looked as though it hadn’t been washed up in weeks.

‘You want to give this to me?’

‘We want you to help us.’

The words had an extraordinary effect on Jerome. His bowed head suddenly snapped up with a furious stare; his body went rigid.

‘Do you know why I am here?’ He flung out an arm at the dilapidated living room. Hot coffee spilled over his fingers and dribbled onto the carpet, but he didn’t notice. ‘Do you know the reason of this exile? Do you?’

Emily bowed her head. A tear ran down her cheek. Nick moved closer to protect her, but neither she nor Jerome noticed. He had no part in their story.

‘I’m sorry,’ Emily whispered. ‘If I could go back…’

‘You would do the same. And so would I.’

As abruptly as it had flared up, his anger died away. He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around Emily. Her face was hidden from Nick, but she looked as though she was hugging a corpse.

Jerome stroked her hair. ‘Let us no longer deceive ourselves with remembrance of our past pleasures. We only spoil our lives and sour the sweets of solitude.’

Emily pulled back – gently – and straightened her hair. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. But we need your help. And… I thought you would appreciate this.’

‘Let me see.’

At a nod from Emily, Nick pulled the defrosted bestiary out of his bag. Jerome licked his lips and held out his hands. ‘Please.’

Nick gave him the book. Jerome almost snatched it from him. He lifted it up like a priest reading the gospel and examined it.

‘The binding is of the seventeenth century.’ He turned it in his hands. ‘Calfskin leather with blind stamping, possibly German workmanship.’

‘I thought it was supposed to be fifteenth century,’ Nick interrupted. Brother Jerome fixed him with a scornful look.

‘It has been replaced. Bindings wear out faster than pages. As bodies fail before the soul.’

He carried the book to a wooden bureau in an adjoining room and sat down. From a drawer, he extracted a foam cushion and a pair of thin gloves. He pulled them on over his bony fingers, a pathologist preparing for an autopsy, and laid the book on the desk. He slipped a finger under the cover and gently tugged, peeling it away from the page beneath to rest open on the cushion.

The illuminated lion stared off the page. Nick glanced at Jerome to see if he recognised it, and caught the old man giving him a sly glance from under his white fringe. Neither said what the other was thinking.

Jerome thumbed the crease of the page. ‘This book has not been well preserved.’

‘It was in a library that got flooded.’

‘Beyond the obvious. There is a gutter here.’

Nick stared, not sure what he was looking for. ‘What’s a gutter?’

‘The bones of a missing page.’ Jerome pushed the cover and the first page further apart. Nick saw the edge of a thin strip of parchment, barely protruding from the spine.

‘A page has been cut out.’

‘Is that normal?’

‘Depressingly so. It is hard to steal a book but very easy to take a page. An individual leaf can fetch thousands of dollars. All these ancient manuscripts are worth far more in pieces than as a whole.’

‘It’s been going on for centuries,’ Emily added. ‘This one is not so long ago.’ Jerome pointed to a series of dark smudgings on the topmost page. ‘You see here the marks where the missing page has soaked through. It has only been taken after the flood.’

Emily and Nick looked at each other, daring each other to state the obvious. Jerome watched with a wicked smile, enjoying their discomfort.

‘Gillian was a professional who loved books,’ said Nick at last. ‘She’d never have mutilated it like this. She worked in museums, for God’s sake.’

Emily avoided his gaze. ‘It would be nice to know what was on that first page,’ was all she said.

‘Maybe we find more.’

Jerome fumbled in a drawer of the desk and brought out a thin metal tube that looked like a pen. He twisted the end, and a pale beam of purplish light glowed from the tip.

‘Ultraviolet,’ he said. He shone it on the inside of the cover. To Nick’s amazement, dark letters appeared on the stiff board, emerging under the light like hidden runes. Unlike the dense bestiary text, this was written in a thin, spidery hand.

‘How did that get there?’ Nick’s voice was barely a whisper. ‘It was written by the book’s owner. When somebody else got it – by gift or purchase, or perhaps by stealing – he erased the mark of the first ownership. But the trace remains still.’

‘What does it say?’

Still holding the light, Jerome picked up a magnifying glass to read it more closely.

‘“Cest livre est a moy, Armand Comte de Lorraine.” ’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means it belonged to the Count of Lorraine. Once. The Count of Lorraine possessed one of the greatest libraries of early modernity.’

Nick didn’t know what Jerome meant by ‘modernity’, but guessed it didn’t fit with anything he thought of as modern.

‘What happened to it?’

Jerome shrugged. ‘It was lost. The Count’s heirs sold his collection piece by piece, or allowed unscrupulous men to loot it. What was left, I think, passed to the city archives of Strasbourg in the nineteenth century.’

Page by page, Jerome’s gloved fingers worked their way through the bestiary until he reached the end of the book. There was no illustration on the last page, only a couple of lines of text and a rectangular brown stain on the parchment about the size of a postcard. Nick swallowed hard and fought back the urge to pull out the playing card to overlay it. It looked as if it would fit perfectly.

‘Something has been stuck in here,’ said Jerome. He flicked another suspicious glance at them.

Emily leaned closer, holding her body very deliberately away from Jerome’s. ‘Is there an explicit? Any indication of who wrote this book, or whom for?’

‘It says, “Written by the hand of Libellus, and illuminated by Master Francis. He also made another book of beasts using a new art of writing.”’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Libellus and Francis are pseudonyms that the scribe and the illuminator used,’ said Emily. ‘Libellus is Latin for “little book”; Francis is probably a reference to St Francis, playing on the fact that he’s mastered the animals.’

‘But there have been two hands,’ said Jerome. ‘The first sentence and the second have been written by different men with different inks.’

Nick studied the aged writing. He was pleasantly surprised to find he could see what Jerome meant. He could even pick out some of the words: Libellus – Franciscus – illuminatus. The first line was written in the same black script as the rest of the book; the second sentence appeared to have been added in more ragged writing in brown ink. Was it the same hand that had pasted in the card, he wondered?

Jerome picked up the ultraviolet penlight again and scanned the back cover. Nick watched closely and saw nothing – but something seemed to catch Emily’s eye.

‘What’s that?’

‘Nothing.’ Jerome put the light down and looked round defiantly. ‘I thought perhaps there was another ex libris, but there is nothing.’

‘On the page,’ Emily insisted. Before Jerome could react, she snatched up the penlight. She held it almost parallel to the page, so that the beam barely touched the surface.

‘Hard point.’

Nick squinted. For the second time that morning, he was looking at letters that had not been there a moment before. But these were not faded ink brought out of a dark background; instead, they seemed to be written inside the parchment itself.

‘What do they say?’