Glenn Cooper - Book of Souls

“You are ambitious,” Edgar said, managing a smile for the first time.

“I have always been so. My maternal grandfather, Gassonet, was an ambitious fellow, and he had a profound influence on my thoughts.”

Edgar tried to prop himself up. “Did you say, Gassonet?”

“Yes.”

Edgar was jolted. “That is not a common name.”

“Maybe so. He was a Jew. Lay yourself back down! You look flushed.”

“Please continue!”

“He was a great scholar from Saint Remy. From a young age he taught me Latin, Hebrew, mathematics, and the celestial sciences.”

“You are an astrologer?”

“I most certainly am. I still have the brass astrolabe that Grandsire bequeathed me. The stars have a present influence on all things on earth, including the diagnosis of the body’s ailments. Give me your birth date, and I will draw your chart tonight.”

“Tell me, can your stars tell me the date I will die?” Edgar asked.

Nostredame looked at his patient suspiciously. “They cannot, sir, but that is a very curious question, if I may say. Now, I advise you to chew three more lozenges, then go ye to sleep. I will return in the afternoon. There is a woman sicker than you on the rue des Ecoles who told me in her pitiful state this morning that if I did not come back to her soon, she would have to sew up her own shroud.”

For two more days, the doctor visited his patient and administered his prescriptions. Edgar was anxious to talk to the man and weakly pressed him to stay longer, but the doctor would protest and complain about the number of poor souls afflicted in the district. Then, one evening, when Nostredame flew in with lozenges and a pot of soup, he found Edgar sobbing uncontrollably.

“What troubles you, Monsieur?”

Edgar pointed to his groin, and cried, “Look.”

The doctor lifted the sheets. Both his inguinal folds were covered in bloody pus. “Excellent!” the doctor shouted. “Your buboes have ruptured. You are saved! If we keep you clean, I promise you, you will make a full recovery. This is the sign I have sought.”

He took his knife from his satchel and cut one of Edgar’s good linen shirts into bandages and cleaned and dressed the suppurating abscesses. He fed the man some soup and sat down wearily on the chair.

“I confess, I am tired,” Nostredame said. The setting sun was casting a golden glow into the room, which made the bearded, red-robed man look beatific.

“You are an angel to me, Doctor. You have delivered me from death.”

“I am gratified, sir. If all goes as expected, you will be restored to health within a fortnight.”

“I must find a way to pay you, Doctor.”

Nostredame smiled. “That would be most appreciated.”

“I have little money here, but I will write my father, tell him what you did, and ask him to deliver a purse.”

“That is most kind.”

Edgar bit his lip. He had rehearsed this moment for the past few days. “Perhaps, Doctor, I can give you another gift in shorter order.”

Nostredame raised an eyebrow. “Ah. And what would that be, Monsieur?”

“In my chest. There is a book and some papers I pray you to see. I believe you will find them of the greatest interest.”

“A book, you say?”

Nostredame retrieved the heavy book from under Edgar’s clothes and returned to the chair. He noted its date of 1527 on the spine and opened a page at random. “This is most curious,” he said. “What can you tell me about it?”

Edgar spilled out the entire tale, the long history of the book within the Cantwell family, his fascination with the tome, his “borrowing” of the book and the abbot’s letter from his father, his demonstration with a fellow student that the book was a true predictor of human events. Then he urged the doctor to read the letter for himself.

He watched the young doctor as he nervously pulled on his long beard with one hand and, with the other, held the pages up, one by one, to the last of the sunlight. He watched the man’s lip begin to tremble and his eyes well up. Then he heard him whisper the name, Gassonet. Edgar knew he was reading this passage from Felix’s letter:

But I cannot forget the one happenstance when as a young monk I witnessed a chosen sister issue not a boy but a girl. I had heard of such a rare occurrence happening in the past but had never seen a girl-child born in my lifetime. I watched this mute green-eyed girl with ginger hair grow, but, unlike her kin, she failed to develop the gift of writing. At the age of twelve years, she was cast out and given to the grain merchant Gassonet the Jew, who took her away from the island and did with her I know not what.

He concentrated his gaze on the doctor’s reddish hair and greenish eyes. Edgar was not a mind reader, but he was certain he knew what was in the man’s thoughts at that moment.

When Nostredame finished, he tucked the pages back into the book and placed it upon the table. Then he sat heavily back down and quietly began to weep. “You have given me something far greater than money, Monsieur, you have given me my raison d’etre.”

“You have powers, do you not?” Edgar asked.

The doctor’s hands trembled. “I see things.”

“The bowl. It was not a dream.”

Nostredame reached for his satchel and pulled out a beaten copper bowl. “My grandsire was a seer. And his too, it is said. He used this to see into the future, and he taught me his ways. My powers, Monsieur, are strong and weak at the same time. In the proper state I can see fragments of visions, dark and terrible things, but I have not the ability to see the future with the precision that this Felix describes. I cannot say when a child will be born or a man will die.”

“You are a Gassonet,” Edgar said. “You have the blood of Vectis.”

“I fear it must be so.”

“Please look into my future, I beg you.”

“Now?”

“Yes, please! By your healing hand, I have escaped the plague. Now I want to see what lies ahead.”

Nostredame nodded. He darkened the room by closing the curtains, then filled his bowl from a pitcher of water. He lit a candle, sat before the bowl and pulled up the hood of his robe, pulling it forward until his face was hidden under its tented fabric. He lowered his head over the bowl and began to move his wooden stick over the surface of the water. In a few minutes, Edgar heard the same low vibratory hum emanating from the man’s throat he had heard the night of his feverish state. The humming became more urgent. While he could not see the doctor’s eyes, he imagined they were wild and fluttering. The stick was moving furiously over the bowl. The throaty sounds were building to a crescendo, growing louder and more frequent. Edgar grew anxious at the grunting and panting and regretted sending him down this fearful path. And then, in an instant, it was over.

The room was silent.

Nostredame lowered his hood and looked at his patient with awe. “Edgar Cantwell,” he said slowly. “You will be an important man, a wealthy man, and this will happen sooner than you think. Your father, Edgar, will meet a foul and terrible fate and your brother will be the instrument. That is all that I see.”

“When? When will this happen?”

“I cannot say. This is the full extent of my powers.”

“Thank you for that.”

“No, it is I who should thank you, sir. You have given me a history of my origins, and now I know I must not fight my visions as if they were demons but use them for greater good. I know now I have a destiny to fulfill.”

Edgar gradually recovered his strength and his health, and the plague soon burned itself out in the University district. He sat for his examinations and was passed from the Sorbonne as a baccalaureate. On his last full day in Paris, he spent the morning sitting in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, admiring its grandeur and majesty for the last time. When he returned to his boardinghouse, his friend, Dudley pressed him to go to the college tavern for a last drink but there, lying against his bedroom door was a letter, left by his landlady.