Майкл Ридпат: The Wanderer

`So, John. Do you still think the Vinland Map is for real?’

Emilio’s dark blue eyes glinted with amusement as he laid the trap for Nancy’s husband to lumber into. They were only on their third bottle of wine, dinner was still bubbling in the kitchen, and the sun had not yet set behind the village perched on its hill just above the house. It was still a little early in the evening for Emilio to bait John.

The three of them had polished off two bottles at lunch, and Nancy had felt an incipient hangover when they had sat down on Emilio’s terrace, but his fine red wine, the produce of the tiny vineyard lazing beneath them, had soon sorted that out. John and she never drank that much back home. She was rather enjoying it.

‘I’m darned sure it’s real, Emilio,’ said John. ‘You Italians have got to face the facts: the Norsemen discovered America, not Columbus. All the evidence points that way. The Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. The sagas. You know all that; you’ve just got to accept it.’

‘Vinland’ was the name the Norse explorers had given to the land they found to the south-west of Greenland, vínber being the Norse word for the grapes they had found there. The Vinland Map had turned up in Geneva in 1957, and had been bought by an American book dealer called Larry, an old friend of John’s. It showed the island of Greenland, and next to it, a similar sized island labelled Vinland. What had shocked the world, especially the historians of Columbus’s discovery of America, was that the map was supposed to have been drawn by an Italian cartographer in 1440, a full fifty years before Columbus’s journey across the Atlantic.

The map had been bought by the millionaire Paul Mellon, who had donated it to the library at Yale. Since then the argument had raged, both in the academic world and among the fraternity of rare-book dealers, such as Emilio, and collectors, such as John.

‘I know a few Vikings got lost a thousand years ago and washed up in Canada,’ said Emilio. ‘I’m not prejudiced against the map. I just know a fake when I see it.’

‘But you haven’t seen it!’ said John. ‘I have, and I can tell you it’s genuine. And we both know Larry. He’s a stand-up guy, I know he believes it’s real.’ John was leaning forward, his voice rising an octave, his hands chopping the air with frustration. But Nancy knew he was enjoying himself; he liked a good argument with Emilio.

Emilio sat back, his broad mouth twitching up in a half-smile. Everything about Emilio was broad: his brow, his cheekbones, his chin, his chest. He was short, compact, powerful. Nothing like Nancy’s tall, stooped husband with his narrow shoulders and domed skull. John was beginning to act a little old, a little weak. Despite his greying hair, Emilio looked younger than his forty-nine years.

Nancy sipped her wine. She loved her husband very much; she always would.

But she was desperately attracted to Emilio.

She had known him for twenty years, ever since she had met him on the first of at least a dozen trips to Europe with John to seek out new items for John’s collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books. Emilio had taken them both out to dinner in Geneva, and a business relationship had soon turned into genuine friendship. During the following two decades Emilio’s wife, never much present, had disappeared from the scene. She had retreated to Turin, where her parents lived, leaving Emilio to his books, his fabulous manor house in the hills of Tuscany, and his women. A son and a daughter shuttled between the two of them during university vacations.

Visiting Emilio had become the high point of the European trip for Nancy.

And also for John. John liked Emilio too.

‘What about the ink?’ said Emilio. ‘I don’t think the map is a fake because I’m Italian. I think it’s a fake because it was drawn with modern ink!’

John shook his head, gulping his wine in frustration. It was true: science appeared to be on Emilio’s side. Yale had sent the map for chemical analysis and the results had suggested that although the vellum was five hundred years old, the ink must have been manufactured after 1920 because it contained traces of anatase, a titanium compound only added to ink after that date. It was a conclusion John was just not prepared to accept.

‘OK, there is anatase in the ink, but I was talking to a guy from the Bibliothèque nationale who said that anatase occurs naturally in some parts of Europe and there are dozens of authentic manuscripts from the fifteenth century with anatase in the ink. Larry says Yale is going to get the map re-examined by another lab.’

Nancy’s attention drifted from the detailed discussion of the chemistry of inks, modern and medieval. She sat back, sipped her wine, and let the soft evening sun caress her face. The poplars above them rustled, and a breath of wind propelled a distinctive piquant scent to her nostrils. Capers. From the purple-flowering caper bushes growing out of Emilio’s garden wall.

She watched the dark shadow thrown by the mountains ten miles away creep towards the house over the valley of speckled green in front of them. The lane, sweeping down from the house past the vineyard and a small field of sunflowers to the unseen stream at the valley’s bottom, made a pleasing arc through the countryside. The composition was perfect, as though the landscape had been put together by an artist, rather than random geological mutations moulded by a hundred generations of landowners and peasants. Emilio’s ancestors had been drinking their wine and admiring this view for centuries, probably as far back as the time when the Vinland Map was drawn.

Supposedly drawn.

‘So what do you think, Nancy?’ said Emilio. ‘You’re the one who really knows the Vikings.’

She was. Nancy Fishburn was a professor of history at a small college in Pennsylvania, where she specialized in the Viking age. She had read many times the two Vinland sagas — The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Erik the Red — that described the exploration of North America, and she had taught her students about the discovery of the Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in 1960. She had just finished writing a book on Gudrid the Wanderer, Erik the Red’s daughter-in-law, an extraordinary woman who had been born in Iceland, got married in Greenland, had a son in Vinland and then returned to Iceland, before going on a pilgrimage to Rome.

‘Scientists can change their minds. But in fifteenth-century Iceland, the discovery of Vinland was well known. And there were plenty of Europeans who fished and traded with the Icelanders then, especially the English; they would have brought that knowledge back to the mainland. A curious Italian cartographer could easily have heard of it.’

‘You think so?’ said Emilio, raising his eyebrows.

‘Of course,’ said Nancy. ‘You know Columbus visited Iceland in 1477 on an English merchant ship? He mentioned it in a later letter to Ferdinand and Isabella.’ The vast trove of old books about Columbus was one of Emilio’s specialities. ‘He would have heard about America then for sure. So why couldn’t another Italian nearly forty years earlier?’

‘Which would mean Columbus really didn’t discover America,’ said John with a note of triumph. ‘He knew about it already!’

‘Absurd!’ said Emilio. ‘You are not making any sense. And your glass is empty.’

They drank another two bottles of wine, gently arguing into the night.

Then they went to bed.

Together.

Nancy paced up and down in the small kitchen and checked the clock above the stove yet again. Ten of five. She had calculated that John should be back from the island’s little airport at a quarter of.