Tom Harper - The Book of Secrets

‘It is good to see you looking so well,’ he told me. I believed it: he always took genuine pleasure from those around him. ‘Are you married?’

Some memory of the disaster with Ennelin must have shown on my face. Even before I could demur he hurried on. ‘For myself, I am lately in love. Smitten. There is a woman at the inn where I am staying – Agnes is her name – from Biscarosse. The most sublime creature.’

Despite myself, I was drawn into his story. ‘Is she travelling alone?’

‘Her husband is a merchant. He leaves her there while he travels up and down the river to contract his business. I saw him at breakfast two days ago. He is a fool. He does not deserve her.’

‘Is this how you plan to reform the Church? By seducing other men’s wives?’

Aeneas gazed on me with a soulful look. ‘I could never take the vows of a priest. She ravished my heart with a single glimpse. Do you see these bags under my eyes? I cannot sleep because of her. Every night I go to her door and plead with her, but she is cool and steadfast as marble. She does not admit me – yet she gives me reason to hope. Perhaps tonight I shall finally conquer. I must, for tomorrow I return to Basle.’

He dropped his head like a dog. ‘I know this love is ruinous. But I would rather this agony than a lifetime of numb comfort. Can you understand that?’

‘I understand,’ I murmured, and the longing in my voice must have penetrated Aeneas’ self-pity. It drew a swift glance.

‘I will not ask,’ he said. ‘You never tell me anyway. But I hope we both win our hearts’ desires.’

I raised my glass to that.

‘And now I must go.’ He stood abruptly. In another man it would have been discourteous; with Aeneas, it signified only that his busy mind had leaped forward again. ‘I must sleep now if I am to woo my Agnes tonight.’

I was sad to part. He had reminded me of a simpler age in my life, a humble time when all that mattered was faithfully copying what Nicholas said. Also how wretched I had been before he rescued me. All I had repaid him with were sudden disappearances and evasions. I owed him more; I wanted him to know my gratitude.

‘I am sorry about Basle.’ I pulled the mirror out of the pouch on my belt. It had become a talisman for me in those golden months, proof of our good fortune. I carried it everywhere. ‘I never forgot your generosity.’

His face lit up with delight. He embraced me. ‘I am glad I found you. I hope you do not disappear again.’ He took the mirror from my hand and examined it, smiling. ‘My Aachen mirror. I had almost forgotten it. I do not know that it ever brought me good fortune, but perhaps it averted some great misfortune that would otherwise have befallen me. Perhaps I stood too far away to feel the full effects of the rays.’

He handed the mirror back. ‘I have just returned from Aachen, actually, on an errand for the council.’

‘Is all well there?’ I asked, feigning carelessness. I had not told him the secret of the mirrors. ‘Is all in hand for next year’s pilgrimage?’

‘It is a disaster.’ Aeneas began to turn away, eager to be back to his inn. ‘Has the news not reached here yet? An outbreak of the plague has swept the north. No one knows when it will end or how many souls it will claim. The authorities in Aachen have had no choice but to postpone the pilgrimage for a full year.’

He peered at me through the deepening gloom. ‘What is wrong, Johann? You look as though you are about to disappear again.’

Strasbourg

They checked into a hotel near the cathedral. Nick felt deflated, utterly empty. Once again he had caught a glimpse of Gillian; once again she had vanished.

‘I’m going to look around the town,’ Emily announced. ‘Would you like to come?’

‘I’m not interested in sightseeing,’ Nick growled. But when he threw himself down on the hotel bed, he found he couldn’t sleep. After two minutes he hurried downstairs and caught Emily in the lobby, just about to leave.

‘Changed my mind.’

They stepped out. Although it was early afternoon, the sky was dark. The yellow lights in the hotel windows glowed warm behind them. A thin layer of snow already dusted the street, and looking at the pregnant clouds Nick guessed there was more to come. When he looked back at their footprints they seemed small and lonely, like two children lost in the woods.

He pulled his coat around him. ‘Where are we going?’

‘The cathedral,’ said Emily. ‘There’s something I want to see.’

They walked up between black and white rows of half-timbered houses and passed through the cathedral’s west door. It was so dark inside that Nick thought for a moment it must be closed – darker even than the day outside. All he could see was glass, spectral-coloured images floating above him, dizzyingly high. For a moment, he shared the awe the medieval congregation must have felt as they entered the sanctuary, the sense of a half-glimpsed heaven above.

The darkness disoriented him. He reached out in the gloom and touched Emily’s arm to reassure himself she was still there. She moved closer, as if glad of a human connection in the face of the medieval God’s icy grandeur.

Nick pointed up to the north wall, where a line of larger-than-life men stood proudly in the glass. ‘Who are they?’

‘The Holy Roman emperors. It’s one of the most famous compositions in medieval glass.’ She made a little harrumphing sound. Nick couldn’t see her, but he knew the frown of concentration that went with it.

‘What are you thinking?’

‘The kings of Israel.’ Nick wasn’t sure if she was speaking to him or the darkness.

‘I thought you said they were the Holy Roman emperors.’

‘The kings of Israel were another popular motif in medieval art. The facade of Notre-Dame in Paris was decorated with twenty-four statues of them. There’s also the Dom in Cologne, which has forty-eight kings in the stained glass of the choir, I think. They’re assumed to be the twenty-four kings of Israel and the twenty-four kings from the Book of Revelation.’

‘Thought to be?’ Nick echoed. ‘Doesn’t anyone know?’

‘Medieval cathedral builders didn’t necessarily spell out what they meant by their decoration. There are clues in the symbolism, but it’s in the nature of symbols that they’re ambiguous. The kings on the front of Notre-Dame, for example: they’re an unimpeachable biblical theme. But it’s no coincidence that they were put on a building which the kings of France wanted to use as a symbol of their own power. The medieval mind was much more sophisticated than we give it credit for. Semiotics, symbology, whatever you want to call it: they were profoundly alive to the overlapping meanings of the world. If you were a layman walking past Notre-Dame in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, you’d see the statues as the kings of Israel, but you’d also see them as the kings of France. One king becomes another, depending on how you look at it.’

‘It sounds like Gillian you’re describing.’ Nick was surprised he’d said it. ‘The same person, but so different in different contexts.’

‘Everyone’s like that, a bit.’ It could have sounded dismissive, but she said it so gently it sounded like agreement. ‘You mustn’t give up hope.’

Nick wondered if she was thinking of the picture in his wallet. ‘I just want to find her.’

‘Rescue the damsel in distress.’ Again, it might have sounded snide but didn’t. To Nick, it felt almost wistful. He smiled in the darkness.

‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’ His mind wandered back to all the late nights in Gothic Lair killing monsters and storming castles; and before that, Friday nights in high school, sitting around with his friends rolling dice in the basement, totting up the numbers that would decide whether their fellowship lived or died. Perilous quests had been so safe then, something to look forward to through the dreary week at school. A far cry from the lonely, terrifying reality.