Tom Harper - The Book of Secrets

‘Let me see.’

At a nod from Emily, Nick pulled the defrosted bestiary out of his bag. Jerome licked his lips and held out his hands. ‘Please.’

Nick gave him the book. Jerome almost snatched it from him. He lifted it up like a priest reading the gospel and examined it.

‘The binding is of the seventeenth century.’ He turned it in his hands. ‘Calfskin leather with blind stamping, possibly German workmanship.’

‘I thought it was supposed to be fifteenth century,’ Nick interrupted. Brother Jerome fixed him with a scornful look.

‘It has been replaced. Bindings wear out faster than pages. As bodies fail before the soul.’

He carried the book to a wooden bureau in an adjoining room and sat down. From a drawer, he extracted a foam cushion and a pair of thin gloves. He pulled them on over his bony fingers, a pathologist preparing for an autopsy, and laid the book on the desk. He slipped a finger under the cover and gently tugged, peeling it away from the page beneath to rest open on the cushion.

The illuminated lion stared off the page. Nick glanced at Jerome to see if he recognised it, and caught the old man giving him a sly glance from under his white fringe. Neither said what the other was thinking.

Jerome thumbed the crease of the page. ‘This book has not been well preserved.’

‘It was in a library that got flooded.’

‘Beyond the obvious. There is a gutter here.’

Nick stared, not sure what he was looking for. ‘What’s a gutter?’

‘The bones of a missing page.’ Jerome pushed the cover and the first page further apart. Nick saw the edge of a thin strip of parchment, barely protruding from the spine.

‘A page has been cut out.’

‘Is that normal?’

‘Depressingly so. It is hard to steal a book but very easy to take a page. An individual leaf can fetch thousands of dollars. All these ancient manuscripts are worth far more in pieces than as a whole.’

‘It’s been going on for centuries,’ Emily added. ‘This one is not so long ago.’ Jerome pointed to a series of dark smudgings on the topmost page. ‘You see here the marks where the missing page has soaked through. It has only been taken after the flood.’

Emily and Nick looked at each other, daring each other to state the obvious. Jerome watched with a wicked smile, enjoying their discomfort.

‘Gillian was a professional who loved books,’ said Nick at last. ‘She’d never have mutilated it like this. She worked in museums, for God’s sake.’

Emily avoided his gaze. ‘It would be nice to know what was on that first page,’ was all she said.

‘Maybe we find more.’

Jerome fumbled in a drawer of the desk and brought out a thin metal tube that looked like a pen. He twisted the end, and a pale beam of purplish light glowed from the tip.

‘Ultraviolet,’ he said. He shone it on the inside of the cover. To Nick’s amazement, dark letters appeared on the stiff board, emerging under the light like hidden runes. Unlike the dense bestiary text, this was written in a thin, spidery hand.

‘How did that get there?’ Nick’s voice was barely a whisper. ‘It was written by the book’s owner. When somebody else got it – by gift or purchase, or perhaps by stealing – he erased the mark of the first ownership. But the trace remains still.’

‘What does it say?’

Still holding the light, Jerome picked up a magnifying glass to read it more closely.

‘“Cest livre est a moy, Armand Comte de Lorraine.” ’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means it belonged to the Count of Lorraine. Once. The Count of Lorraine possessed one of the greatest libraries of early modernity.’

Nick didn’t know what Jerome meant by ‘modernity’, but guessed it didn’t fit with anything he thought of as modern.

‘What happened to it?’

Jerome shrugged. ‘It was lost. The Count’s heirs sold his collection piece by piece, or allowed unscrupulous men to loot it. What was left, I think, passed to the city archives of Strasbourg in the nineteenth century.’

Page by page, Jerome’s gloved fingers worked their way through the bestiary until he reached the end of the book. There was no illustration on the last page, only a couple of lines of text and a rectangular brown stain on the parchment about the size of a postcard. Nick swallowed hard and fought back the urge to pull out the playing card to overlay it. It looked as if it would fit perfectly.

‘Something has been stuck in here,’ said Jerome. He flicked another suspicious glance at them.

Emily leaned closer, holding her body very deliberately away from Jerome’s. ‘Is there an explicit? Any indication of who wrote this book, or whom for?’

‘It says, “Written by the hand of Libellus, and illuminated by Master Francis. He also made another book of beasts using a new art of writing.”’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Libellus and Francis are pseudonyms that the scribe and the illuminator used,’ said Emily. ‘Libellus is Latin for “little book”; Francis is probably a reference to St Francis, playing on the fact that he’s mastered the animals.’

‘But there have been two hands,’ said Jerome. ‘The first sentence and the second have been written by different men with different inks.’

Nick studied the aged writing. He was pleasantly surprised to find he could see what Jerome meant. He could even pick out some of the words: Libellus – Franciscus – illuminatus. The first line was written in the same black script as the rest of the book; the second sentence appeared to have been added in more ragged writing in brown ink. Was it the same hand that had pasted in the card, he wondered?

Jerome picked up the ultraviolet penlight again and scanned the back cover. Nick watched closely and saw nothing – but something seemed to catch Emily’s eye.

‘What’s that?’

‘Nothing.’ Jerome put the light down and looked round defiantly. ‘I thought perhaps there was another ex libris, but there is nothing.’

‘On the page,’ Emily insisted. Before Jerome could react, she snatched up the penlight. She held it almost parallel to the page, so that the beam barely touched the surface.

‘Hard point.’

Nick squinted. For the second time that morning, he was looking at letters that had not been there a moment before. But these were not faded ink brought out of a dark background; instead, they seemed to be written inside the parchment itself.

‘What do they say?’

Strassburg

‘Written by the hand of Libellus, and illuminated by Master Francis.’

I sat on the floor, resting against a timber post, and read the inscription for the hundredth time. I held the book like a chalice, a talisman. I could have sold it and paid off half my debts at once, but I would never do that.

Kaspar, fiddling with the press, glanced over. I knew he liked to watch me reading his book. I angled it down.

‘What is that?’

His eyes were sharp as ever. I turned the book around and raised it so he could see what I had done. The blank space underneath the explicit was now filled by the card I had pasted in: the eight of beasts, the map that led me to Kaspar.

He smiled. ‘You are a collector.’

‘A devotee.’

‘You’re right to hang on to the card. There will not be any others.’

A confused look.

‘The plate is gone. I melted it down and sold it.’

I was aghast that something so beautiful should have been lost for ever. ‘All of them? The whole deck?’

‘About half.’ He laughed at the expression on my face, though I did not find it funny.

‘Johann, you saw what happened to our own plate. Even in a few dozen pressings it decayed. The same would have happened to the cards. Nothing endures.’