The Book of Secrets

LI

Strasbourg

They checked into a hotel near the cathedral. Nick felt deflated, utterly empty. Once again he had caught a glimpse of Gillian; once again she had vanished.

‘I’m going to look around the town,’ Emily announced. ‘Would you like to come?’

‘I’m not interested in sightseeing,’ Nick growled. But when he threw himself down on the hotel bed, he found he couldn’t sleep. After two minutes he hurried downstairs and caught Emily in the lobby, just about to leave.

‘Changed my mind.’

They stepped out. Although it was early afternoon, the sky was dark. The yellow lights in the hotel windows glowed warm behind them. A thin layer of snow already dusted the street, and looking at the pregnant clouds Nick guessed there was more to come. When he looked back at their footprints they seemed small and lonely, like two children lost in the woods.

He pulled his coat around him. ‘Where are we going?’

‘The cathedral,’ said Emily. ‘There’s something I want to see.’

They walked up between black and white rows of half-timbered houses and passed through the cathedral’s west door. It was so dark inside that Nick thought for a moment it must be closed – darker even than the day outside. All he could see was glass, spectral-coloured images floating above him, dizzyingly high. For a moment, he shared the awe the medieval congregation must have felt as they entered the sanctuary, the sense of a half-glimpsed heaven above.

The darkness disoriented him. He reached out in the gloom and touched Emily’s arm to reassure himself she was still there. She moved closer, as if glad of a human connection in the face of the medieval God’s icy grandeur.

Nick pointed up to the north wall, where a line of larger-than-life men stood proudly in the glass. ‘Who are they?’

‘The Holy Roman emperors. It’s one of the most famous compositions in medieval glass.’ She made a little harrumphing sound. Nick couldn’t see her, but he knew the frown of concentration that went with it.

‘What are you thinking?’

‘The kings of Israel.’ Nick wasn’t sure if she was speaking to him or the darkness.

‘I thought you said they were the Holy Roman emperors.’

‘The kings of Israel were another popular motif in medieval art. The facade of Notre-Dame in Paris was decorated with twenty-four statues of them. There’s also the Dom in Cologne, which has forty-eight kings in the stained glass of the choir, I think. They’re assumed to be the twenty-four kings of Israel and the twenty-four kings from the Book of Revelation.’

‘Thought to be?’ Nick echoed. ‘Doesn’t anyone know?’

‘Medieval cathedral builders didn’t necessarily spell out what they meant by their decoration. There are clues in the symbolism, but it’s in the nature of symbols that they’re ambiguous. The kings on the front of Notre-Dame, for example: they’re an unimpeachable biblical theme. But it’s no coincidence that they were put on a building which the kings of France wanted to use as a symbol of their own power. The medieval mind was much more sophisticated than we give it credit for. Semiotics, symbology, whatever you want to call it: they were profoundly alive to the overlapping meanings of the world. If you were a layman walking past Notre-Dame in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, you’d see the statues as the kings of Israel, but you’d also see them as the kings of France. One king becomes another, depending on how you look at it.’

‘It sounds like Gillian you’re describing.’ Nick was surprised he’d said it. ‘The same person, but so different in different contexts.’

‘Everyone’s like that, a bit.’ It could have sounded dismissive, but she said it so gently it sounded like agreement. ‘You mustn’t give up hope.’

Nick wondered if she was thinking of the picture in his wallet. ‘I just want to find her.’

‘Rescue the damsel in distress.’ Again, it might have sounded snide but didn’t. To Nick, it felt almost wistful. He smiled in the darkness.

‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’ His mind wandered back to all the late nights in Gothic Lair killing monsters and storming castles; and before that, Friday nights in high school, sitting around with his friends rolling dice in the basement, totting up the numbers that would decide whether their fellowship lived or died. Perilous quests had been so safe then, something to look forward to through the dreary week at school. A far cry from the lonely, terrifying reality.

‘What was it you wanted here?’ he asked, changing the subject. ‘Did you find it?’

‘Oh – it was the kings. They reminded me of the kings of Israel, that’s all. I thought perhaps it might trigger some sort of insight.’ She shook her had. ‘But – nothing.’

They finished their tour of the cathedral, Emily pointing out different features as they walked up and down the dark aisles. The way the architecture became more elaborate as you moved from east to west, the shift in style from Romanesque to Gothic which had happened over the centuries of its construction recorded in stone. She showed him the pillar where angels blew the trumpets of the Resurrection, and numerous stone carvings tucked away on buttresses and bosses. At first Nick paid attention out of politeness, but gradually he found himself becoming drawn into the intricacy of the art. By the time he emerged from the darkness into the gloomy day, he had a whole new vocabulary.

‘I’m going to go and buy some new clothes before the shops shut,’ said Emily. Snow was still falling, frosting the ridges of the cathedral. ‘I’ll see you back at the hotel.’

‘Be careful,’ Nick warned.