Tom Harper: The Book of Secrets

Closer to what?

It must be something she’d been working on. But why send it to him? Was it valuable? Bear is the key. He’d tried clicking on the bears in the picture, but nothing happened.

He tried another tack. He opened the web browser and pulled up sites he knew she’d frequented, a sad lover drifting around his old flame’s former haunts. Blogs she’d posted on, forums she might contribute to. There wasn’t much. A review of a book he’d seen her reading not long before she left him; something about goldsmithing on a discussion board for medievalists. He tried to read it, but the words blurred in his brain. There was almost nothing since July, the last time he’d seen her. Was that a coincidence? Maybe it had affected her worse than she’d let on. The thought was strangely comforting.

Almost as an afterthought, he tried a social networking site he knew she’d used. Like a lot of people, she’d signed up, spent two weeks constantly updating her profile and cajoling her friends to join, then decided she had better things to do with her life. Nick had never known her spend any time on it since. But she must have come back to it quite recently. At the top of the page, in the space where users could upload pithy one-line commentaries on what they were doing, he read,

Gillian Lockhart

is in mortal peril

(last updated 02 January 11:54:56)

Was that another joke? It was the sort of melodramatic overstatement she specialised in. But she also loved the slipperi ness of irony, things that were simultaneously true and not true. She teased you with possibilities but never gave answers.

Nick sucked the last drops of his milkshake out of the cup. The air frothed and popped in the empty straw.

Frankfurt, 1412

In my youth I saw two men burned alive. It was in Frankfurt, a day’s journey from Mainz. My father had some business there at the Wetterau fair and brought me with him, three months after the incident at the mint. He was in a merry mood, laughing with his companions at the hucksters and cripples who thronged the road. I laughed too, though I did not understand the jokes.

The crowd thickened as we reached the town square, but my father used his bulk and his staff to push through to the front so I would have an unbroken view. My eyes were wide with excitement, wondering what entertainment could draw such an audience. I hoped it would be a dancing bear.

The gallows stood in the middle of the square like the frame of an invisible door. Even at that age, I knew where it led. Bales of straw were piled underneath it. I wanted to cry but knew my father would not allow it.

Two sergeants led the prisoners out of the crowd. One wore a long black gown and a white mitre on which was painted a string of devils holding a banner that proclaimed ‘Heresiarch’, the Archbishop of Heretics. The other man was bareheaded, his skull shaved, his wrists and ankles chained together.

‘What has he done?’ I asked.

‘This man was a mint master,’ my father explained. ‘He debased his coins, like a wicked brewer watering down his beer.’ He squatted down beside me and pulled out a gulden. He turned it in his fingers so that the gold faces winked at me.

‘Who do you see?’

‘St John.’

‘And on the other side?’

‘The arms of the prince.’

My father smiled his approval. My heart glowed. ‘The saint and the prince. The power of God and the power of man. The two pillars of our world.’

He gestured to the mint master. The sergeants had manacled his hands to an iron hook in the crossbar, and were now trying to attach his chained legs to a second hook at the far end. One of the sergeants stood with the condemned man’s legs straddling his shoulders, while the other crouched and heaved from underneath. The crowd whistled and shouted lewd encouragements.

‘Against whom was his sin, Henchen?’

‘Against the prince, Father.’

‘And?’

‘God.’

He licked his fat lips and nodded. ‘If the coinage is not kept perfect – if even one grain of gold is missing – no man will credit it and God’s order will collapse. Even one grain,’ he repeated.

Up on the gallows, the two sergeants had finally managed to sling the mint master between the hooks, a carcass suspended from a spit. This would make him burn for longer before he died. The heretic was more fortunate: he was bound upright to a post, where the flames would quickly consume him. From this I judged that his crime was the lesser.

Bailiffs brought wood and tinder from the corners of the square and piled them over the straw. The sergeants sprinkled them with oil from a flask, making sure that some splashed over the prisoners. The magistrate stood on a box and read the charges from a great sealed scroll. I could not hear what he said, though my father took great pleasure repeating it to me. That the heretic had denied that Christ was the son of God and the Church was the path of salvation. That he had called for the Church to surrender its property. That he had summoned Lucifer himself in a black rite at midnight; mingled the communion wine with the ashes of stillborn children; fornicated on the altar and committed incest with his sister. It was hard to believe, looking at that mild-faced man with his pronounced Adam’s apple; but, as my father said, the devil delights in disguise. Perhaps I should have listened more carefully.

Clouds gathered; the wind rose. The torch in the sergeant’s hand grew brighter as the day darkened. The condemned men whimpered frantic prayers. The magistrate’s face went purple as he bellowed to be heard above the noise of beasts, bells and onlookers. The moment he had finished, he jumped off his box and signalled the sergeant to set the fire.

It took in seconds, racing over the piled wood and licking at the wretches above. The heretic died instantly, or perhaps fainted; the forger lasted longer. I saw flames tear open his shift where spots of oil had soaked in, almost as if the fire were consuming him from the inside out. Screams and the crackle of wood mingled with the shouts of the crowd.

I felt something strike my back and looked up. It was my father. His bandy legs were splayed apart, his eyes turned to heaven, his face burning with righteous glee as his staff rained down blows over my shoulders, beating the memory into me.

Later in my life I watched other men burn for their unnatural sins. And each time, a small part of my soul withered in sympathy.

New York City

Even in New York the weather could get to you. Nick was woken by rain, ice-hard needles lancing against his window. He rolled over, clinging to the comfort of the last shreds of sleep for a few seconds longer. Until he remembered.

His eyes snapped open. The watch on his bedside table said ten to eleven, though the sky outside was so dark it could have been any time. No wonder he’d overslept. He swung himself out of bed and crossed to the open laptop on the shelf by the window. He’d left it running all night, the volume turned up in case she called again. There was nothing. He scanned the emails that had come in, not even bothering to delete the junk. Nothing there either. A dull pain began to throb behind his temples. He needed coffee.

He knew he was up too late the moment he saw Bret. His room-mate was sprawled in front of his computer in an easy chair, tapping a keyboard with one hand while the other dangled a limp slice of last night’s pizza.

‘What’re you up to?’

‘Captchas.’ Bret spoke through a mouthful of pepperoni. ‘This site gives you free porn for every hundred.’

When machines took over the planet, Nick thought, Bret would be their fifth column. He was a bottom feeder, a parasite nibbling at the Internet’s underbelly. Harvesting email addresses for spammers, bidding up prices in online auctions, advertising the benefits of dubious medications or, now, deciphering the distorted letters that websites used to block automated registrations: there was nothing Bret wouldn’t do for a few cents. If there was such a thing as an anti-Internet pressure group – Nick supposed they existed somewhere – Bret would be their Exhibit A. Nick still wasn’t exactly sure how they’d ended up sharing the apartment.