Glenn Cooper - Book of Souls

“They’re light enough, they could be hollow,” Will said, “but the bases are solid.”

He closely inspected the joined segments of the complicated column. She urged him on, “Go ahead, give it a twist,” she whispered. “Turn your back to Granddad. I don’t want to give him a heart attack.”

Will wrapped his left hand around the windowed spire and tried to turn the base with his right hand, gently at first, then with more force, until his face reddened. He shook his head and put it down. “No joy.” Then he tried hers with the same maneuver. It held firm as if it were forged from a single piece of metal. He relaxed his shoulder and arm muscles when a spasm of frustration made him try one more furious twist.

The column turned.

Half a rotation, but it turned.

She whispered, “Go on!”

He kept up the pressure until the column was spinning freely and the nongilded sleeve of a tube within a tube became visible. Finally, the base gave way completely. He had one half of a candlestick in each hand.

“What are you two up to?” Cantwell called out. “Can’t hear a thing.”

“Just a minute, Granddad!” Isabelle shouted. “Hang on!”

Will put the base down and peered into the hollow-tubed spire. “I need a light.” He followed her over to one of the standing lamps, stuck his index finger inside the tube, and felt a firm, circular edge. “There’s something in there!” He pulled his finger out and tried to have a look, but the incandescent bulb didn’t help. “My finger’s too big to get it. You try.”

Hers was thin, and she slid in all the way and closed her eyes to heighten the tactile impressions. “It’s something rolled, like paper or parchment. I’m in the middle of it. There! I’ve got it turning.”

She slowly twisted the candlestick around her finger, applying firm, gentle pressure with the pulp of her fingertip.

A yellowed scroll began to emerge.

It was cylindrical, about eight inches long, multiple sheets of parchment tightly rolled. In shocked excitement, she started to hand it to him, but he said, “No, you.”

She slowly unrolled the cylinder. The parchment was dry but not brittle, and it unspooled easily enough. She flattened the sheets with both hands and Will tilted the lamp shade for more light. “It’s in Latin,” she said.

“That makes me especially glad you’re here.”

She read the heading on the first page and translated it aloud: An Epistle from Felix, Abbot of Vectis Abbey, written in the year of our Lord, 1334.

He felt light-headed. “Jesus.”

“What is it, Will?”

“Vectis.”

“You know the place?”

“Yeah, I know it. I think we hit the mother lode.”

1334

Isle of Wight

In the stillness of the night, an hour after Lauds and two hours before Prime, Felix, Abbot of Vectis Abbey, awoke with one of his terrible headaches. There was cricket song outside his window and the faint pulse of waves from the Solent cresting against the nearby shore. The sounds were soothing but gave him only a moment’s pleasure before a spasm of nausea made him sit bolt upright. He fumbled in the dark for the chamber pot and dry-heaved.

He was sixty-nine years old and fiercely doubted he would see his next decade.

There was little food in his stomach. His last meal was beef broth prepared specially by the sisters, greasy with marrow and flecked with carrots. He had left the bowl half-uneaten on his writing table.

He threw off his covers, pushed himself from his straw mattress, and managed to stand with some swaying. The rhythmic pounding in his head felt like a blacksmith striking repeated blows on an anvil, each one threatening to upend him, but he was steady enough to retrieve his heavy fur-lined robe, draped over a high-backed chair. He slipped it on over his night smock and immediately felt its comforting warmth. Then he shakily lit a thick yellow candle and slumped on the chair to massage his temples. The candlelight played against the uneven polished stones of his bedchamber floor and reflected off the gaily colored glass of the courtyard windows.

The richness of the abbot house had always disquieted him. When he entered Vectis as a novice, so very long ago, his head lowered in humility, his coarse habit bound with cord, his feet cold and bare, he felt close to God, and thus, close to bliss. His predecessor, Baldwin, a flinty cleric who took as much pleasure poring over granary accounts as conducting mass, had commissioned a fine timbered house to rival those he had seen at abbeys in London and Dorchester. Adjoining the bedchamber was a magnificent great room with an ornate fireplace, carved settle, horsehair chairs, and stained glass. On the walls were cloth hangings, finely woven tapestries of hunts and acts of the Apostles, from Flanders and Bruges. Above the hearth was an artisan-tooled silver cross, the length of a man’s arm.

Upon Baldwin’s death many years earlier, the Bishop of Dorchester had chosen Felix, the abbey’s prior to ascend to be Abbot of Vectis. Felix prayed hard for guidance. Perhaps he should eschew the finery of the position and opt for a modest reign, sleep in a monk’s cell with the brothers, continue to wear his simple habit, take his meals communally. But would that not besmirch the memory of his mentor, his confessor? Would it not brand Baldwin a profligate? He bowed to the power of Baldwin’s memory, the way he had bowed to the power of the man during his life. Ever the faithful servant, he never failed to do Baldwin’s bidding, even when he had misgivings. What would have happened if he had questioned Baldwin’s decision to abolish the Order of the Names? Would things be different today had he not, with his own hand, lit the hay that consumed the Library almost forty years ago?

He felt too ill to kneel, so he lowered his throbbing head and softly prayed out loud, his Breton accent as coarse and pebbly as when he was a boy. The choice of prayer, from Psalm 42, came to him with spontaneity, almost taking him by surprise:

Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meatum.

I will go to the altar of God. To God, the joy of my youth.

Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen

He pursed his lips at the irony of the prayer.

World without end.

Once, his beard had been as thick and black as a boar’s cheek. He had been muscular and robust, able to handle the rigors of monastic life tirelessly, the meager rations, the cold sea winds that frosted the bones, the manual labors that broke the body but sustained the community, the brief periods of sleep between the canonical hours that punctuated night and day with communal prayer. Now his beard was patchy, the dirty white of a seagull’s breast, and his cheeks were sunken. His fine muscles had withered and sagged, and his skin, drained of suppleness, was as dry as parchment and so itchy and scabbed it distracted him from prayer and meditation.

But the most alarming physical change affected his right eye, which had progressively begun to bulge and stare. It was a slow, creeping process. At first he only noticed a pink dryness, like a mote of grit that could not be lavaged. Then the mild throb behind the orbit became worse, and his vision became troublesome. Initially, there was some blurring, then blinding flashes of light, now a distressing doubling of images that made it difficult to read and write with both eyes open. In recent weeks, every man and woman within the abbey walls had anxiously noticed the bulging prominence of his eyeball. They whispered among themselves while they milked cows or tended crops, and at prayer they beseeched God to show their brother mercy.