Glenn Cooper - Book of Souls

The next clue, the Calvin letter, required more effort. John scurried off to the barn to fetch a mallet, chisel, an auger, and grout, and a full hour later, drenched in sweat, they had succeeded in prying off one of the fireplace tiles and drilling a deep hole. After inserting the rolled letter, they plugged the hole and regrouted the tile. In celebration, they raided the pantry, had some bread and cold mutton and the rest of a good bottle of wine from an onion-shaped green-glass bottle.

It was the middle of the night, but there was still work to do. The Nostradamus letter and the page from his Prophecies book needed to find their way up to the bell tower of the chapel. As long as they didn’t drunkenly ring the bell, there was little chance of being discovered so far away from the house. That task took longer than they had planned because the planking was devilishly hard to rip up, but when they were done, they had put their spent bottle of wine to good use as the repository of the pages. To finish, Will etched a small rose on the plank with his sheath knife.

They feared that dawn would come before they hid the last clue, so they proceeded with great speed to complete this task, one that they might not have been able to accomplish if sober.

When they returned to the house smudged and smelly from their physical labors, they retired to the library as the first rays of sunlight streaked the sky.

John gleefully approved Will’s idea for the poem’s hiding place and applauded its perfection. Will cut a piece of parchment to size and made it into a false endpaper. Then the exhausted boys made for the kitchen, relieved that the cooks were still in bed. The bookish Will knew how to make a bookbinder’s paste from bread, flour, and water, and in a short while they had the white glue they needed to seal the poem into place inside the back cover of the Vectis book.

When they were done, they placed the heavy book back onto its shelf. The library was getting bright from the rising sun, and they could hear the house stirring with activity. They sank into their chairs for a final laughing fit. When they burned themselves out, they sat for a while, chests heaving, close to nodding off.

“You know,” Will said, “this has all been for naught. You, yourself, will undoubtedly undo all this fine work and retrieve the papers on your own account.”

“You are probably right,” John smiled sleepily, “but it has been excellent fun.”

“One of these days I may write a play about this,” Will said, closing his reddened eyes. His friend was already snoring. “I will call it Much Ado About Nothing. ”

It was autumn when John Cantwell finally set out on the quest that had consumed him ever since the night he drunkenly conceived it. Then, he was warm and dry in his father’s library. Now, the crossing of the Solent was treacherous, and he was shivering and sea-splashed.

A stiff gale was blowing from the mainland toward the Isle of Wight, and the captain of the sailing ferry had to be persuaded with a few extra shillings to make the passage that day. John was not a seafaring man, and he spent the brief journey heaving over the gunwales. At Cowes harbor, he made straight for the roughest public house he could find to buy himself a drink, converse with the oldest men he could find, and hire a couple of locals with strong backs.

He did not bother to buy himself a bed for the night because he was planning on toiling while most men slept. During the course of the evening, he consumed a good many tankards of ale and a large bowl of cheap stew, and, thus fortified, he waited in the moonlight for his hired men to return with picks and shovels and coils of rope. At midnight, the entourage of John Cantwell and three burly islanders wielding oily torches left the tavern and headed down a footpath through the woods.

They were never more than a few hundred yards from the pounded shore. Nearby, the gulls called, the waves rhythmically crashed on the beach, and the salty, fresh breezes off the Solent sobered John and cleared his head. It was a cool night, and for warmth he clasped his fur-collared cloak over his high-collared doublet and pulled his cap down over the tops of his ears. His laborers led the way, whispering among themselves, and he gave himself to his own thoughts, daydreaming of wealth and power.

The old-timers at the tavern had been suspicious and taciturn until he loosened their lips with drink and coin. The Vectis Abbey was a ruined shell of its former self, he was told, done in during King Henry’s days by Cromwell’s henchmen. Like almost every Holy Roman church in the land, it had been sacked and looted, and the villagers and townsfolk of the island given license to use its stones for building works. The population of monks had largely dispersed, but there were diehards who lingered, and to this day, a small group of Benedictines stubbornly tied themselves to the ruins.

The old men knew nothing about any ruins of an ancient library, and they shook their heads and scoffed at the rich mainlander’s questions. Yet when pressed, one grizzled fisherman did recall that as a boy he had walked the abbey fields with his grandfather and had scampered into a grassy hollow, a large, depressed squarish plot. His grandfather had shouted at him to return to his side and had batted him with his walking stick, warning him to say away from the spot as legend had it, it was haunted ground, populated by the ghosts of hooded black-robed monks.

To John, this seemed a promising place to begin his quest, and he made it his nocturnal destination.

The footpath opened into a field, and, by the light of the moon, the Cathedral of Vectis came into view. Even in ruins, it was an imposing structure, grand in scale. As he drew closer, he could see that there was no longer a spire, and the walls were half-gone. The windows that remained had no glass, and long grass and weeds had crept into open door-frames. There were other low buildings, some in shambles, some intact. From one row of stone cottages, wisps of fireplace smoke rose from a chimney. They gave these dwellings a wide berth and circled around them toward a more distant field closer to the shore.

The laborers knew the whereabouts of the sunken ground, and they grumbled as they approached it. They had been unaware the patch of land had a taint, but the words of the old fisherman carried some weight, and they were nervous.

John took one of the torches and inspected the area. In the dark, it was hard to appreciate its boundaries. The tall grass sloped down into a flat depression not more than two feet below the level of the rest of the field. There were no visible features, no reason to favor one spot above another. He shrugged his shoulders and at random chose the ground beneath his feet. He called the men and bade them dig.

When the laborers hesitated at the edge of the hollow, John had to begrudgingly offer more compensation. But when they commenced their work, they proceeded at a furious pace, slicing through the sod into the rich, soft soil. Two of them had been grave diggers, and they were capable of shifting dirt prodigiously. In an hour, there was a good-sized hole; in two hours it was large and deep. John squatted on the edge watching, occasionally jumping down and having a closer look by torchlight. The soil was moist and brown with a fertile, earthy smell, but in time he took note of some lumps of charred wood and a layer of ash.

His heart raced. “There was a fire here,” he exclaimed.

The men were disinterested. One of them asked how much deeper he wanted them to go. He replied by telling them to quiet themselves and keep digging.

Over the sound of the gulls, John heard a clink.

A shovel had struck stone.

John jumped back into the hole and scraped at the ground with his boot, exposing a flat stone. He grabbed one of the shovels and scraped it clean then thrust the shovel into the dirt two feet away. He hit more stone. He picked another spot and dug-more stone. “Clear the whole bottom of the ditch!” he commanded excitedly.