The Serpent Papers (17 page)

Originally the pages had been neatly scored. Ruled with grids of guide-lines and divided into two columns for the text. The prickings were made with a long fine-tipped knife, creating triangular divots along the binding side of the manuscript. The outer prickings have been trimmed. The inks used for the script were alternating black and red, iron gall and cinnabar. Black harvested from bulbous growths made by the gall-wasp in fresh buds of oak trees. I have held the dry oak apples in the palm of my hand and turned them over. They are light and hollow, filled with tannic acids. After the larvae of the wasp have chewed through the crust, the apples are knocked off the tree and pummelled into a thick pulp, before being mixed with rainwater over fire until a rich brown liquid forms. To this the scribe would have added ferrous sulphate, which turns the liquid from brown to black; and gum arabic, a thickening agent to prepare the ink. In the book, the illustrations had been gilded but they are hard to make out, because someone attacked the manuscript with malice. They slashed, burnt, crossed out, and hatch-marked until the text and pictures were almost entirely obscured. All but one miniature has been destroyed – a painting of an old man with a long white beard, speaking to a serpent sitting in a chair drawing a diagram on the sand with her tail. The diagram is fully formed, and the man and the snake analyse the contents of the serpent’s chart. The serpent wears a crown, and the old man is clearly an alchemist, judging by his cloak and the tools tied to his belt buckle and strewn on the ground around him. Behind them? A cave with a small scriptorium. Around the pair cluster other animals, birds, a nightingale singing on the branch, two deer, a wolf and a cat. They are discussing three concentric circles. An alphabet now overly familiar. Nine letters, each initial boldly drawn by the serpent’s tail in the sand. The letters also appear in the air around the serpent. Hanging from trees, in the beak of a bird.
BCDEFGHIK.
Beneath this an angry hand has scrawled in Latin:

THE HERETIC REX ILLUMINATUS TEACHES SATAN’S LANGUAGE TO THE SERPENT PHILOMELA.

The same hand has sliced through the picture with a knife, before stopping short of destroying everything. Bingley and I both know that the anonymous censor must have left this image as a warning, to show others what to look for.

‘And the surviving text?’ Bingley asks. ‘Have we been able to glean anything?’ I read the words aloud to the room:

Some have even gone so far as to mutter that the man who took my tongue should have taken my hands also. I agree that this would have been more sensible if his intention was to make me truly mute, but I have reflected on this often. He, being a man, did not think me capable of letters, and so did not think to take my hands. Now that I have proven myself in Letters, other men grow nervous. Perhaps I will name him? Perhaps I will utter what he did? They do not know that I cannot. Of all the things I cannot do, I cannot name him. In that moment he bewitched me. I did not bewitch him. He stole a piece of my flesh, and controls it cruelly. It seems that a woman without a tongue is just as powerful as one with one – perhaps even more so – as she does not have to waste time talking, and can spend most of her time thinking. This is a quandary for them, for it proves once again that a thinking woman is even worse than a speaking one. For the thinking woman came into the universe the most dangerous, the most hated of creatures, the worst enemy of man, for she desired something more than the immediate garden, something greater than the embrace of her father, and it was that impulse for knowledge, that terrible dirty impulse, that brought the human race into contact with Sin, and made us foul, and miserable and cruel, and so verily they insist that a thinking woman is worst of all, and for that they hate me and come after me and call me a great many names. In anger I have called these men the assassins of words, as they stamp daily on allusion and metaphor and flights of fancy, hunting dactyls and strophes into extinction. They are literalists in the most perverse sense. When I write in my poetry that I have dreamt of flying as a bird, they interpret me literally and refuse to listen to the explanation that in deciding to write about the sensation of flight, I extrapolated this into a real experience of flying, taking the perspective of the imagined bird as my own. But I am not a bird and have never flown and will never fly.

They do not see the sadness in this.

* * *

When we have finished discussing, I move to the adjacent table. A second grey pillow beneath a sister volume. A string of soft beads resting at the book’s side, waiting to hold the pages gently apart.

‘Here we have a book made with traditional pigments on membrane, vellum gatherings,’ I say.

A flicker of something like displeasure passes across Bingley’s face.

‘There are traces of animal blood and chemical liquids on the paper, along with some unusual plant matter. Ink severely water damaged. Washed repeatedly.’

In the medieval period some sacred books were drenched with water, so that the ink would run and pool into a basin, which was then drunk by an adept or used as the base ingredient for a curse or spell.

‘Office – ornamental. Text accordingly sized, the width of the margins delicate, the ruling made with a wooden stylus, the writing lines pricked through with a fine awl – a thin needle, handmade – you can see the pricks are uneven, which gives it a flavour of authenticity. Initials –’ I point to the large single letters that start chapters and paragraphs – ‘are historiated – built of double strokes that exaggerate the contrast of thick and thin marks – each initial illustrates a figure from the life of Rex Illuminatus. Roman characters with a Gothic flare – more reminiscent of the thirteenth-century scribes than the later medieval. They are bound tightly together. The author has avoided the fattened vulgarized, broad capitals of heavy rotunda. The pen deft – ten strokes in the
A
, outlined first, and then weighted in 
–
quietly creative choices – the calligrapher is playing stylistic games. Time and money were not constraints.’
I pause.

‘Give it to me.’

Bingley takes the book in thin, birdlike hands, and turns it mincingly. He holds it roughly by the cover, letting the pages hang down to the floor.

‘Rubbish. You have brought me rubbish.’ His voice curdles.

‘We break,’ he pronounces to the room. ‘Ten minutes. No – not you, Miss Verco. I would have a word with you here.’

Francesc shoots me a look as he disappears through the door.

Hold your ground. Don’t worry.

‘Where did you get this?’ Bingley asks once the room has cleared of listeners.

‘A private sale.’

The frown across his lips heavy as a funeral.

‘Why didn’t you come to me first?’ His hand rests threateningly on the cover of the book.

I can feel the shaking begin in my knees.

‘This is a forgery, is it not?’

‘I—’

‘This is a fake, Anna, a beautiful fake, but a fake nonetheless. Those should have been the first words out of your mouth. Unless you couldn’t tell?’

His eyes narrow.

‘Knowing your abilities, I highly doubt this is the case.’

My stomach churns.

‘You acquired this without asking. Am I right?’

‘I didn’t think—’

‘Precisely. We have protocols in place for a reason. I’m sure you would not object to repaying the cost of the manuscript, wasted
as it must have been, from your salary.’

‘I didn’t waste anything.’

Bingley’s upper lip twitches. ‘Nothing at all? Not even my time?’

‘The manuscript was given to me.’

He looks at me incredulously.

‘Given to you?’

‘It’s on loan.’ Pride burns behind my eyes, threatening to push out hot tears. ‘Our team has already tracked down the source and is getting into litigation – they were trying to sell the work as an original volume from the 1390s . . .’ I cannot look at his face. ‘The real value didn’t appear until I ran a check against other documents in our database for possible leads—’

‘Remind me again. What are we looking for?’ he interrupts.

‘A palimpsest, bound into a Book of Hours.’

‘Which this is not.’

‘No.’

‘And how long have you been looking?’

The shame hangs around my neck like a noose.

Bingley examines his fingernails. ‘You promised me six months and it’s been two years. It must be very nice to be paid to think. But there is a price on this service, a cost which you owe me.’ His mouth purses in displeasure. The red burns brighter on my cheeks. ‘For the moment, I will give you the benefit of the doubt. Why?’ He points to the book. ‘You have five minutes to answer.’

I struggle to keep my temper down.
Let the work speak for itself.
Open the book. Stay silent.
A large miniature of a nude woman. A rainbow serpent curls round her throat, broad as a python, her Gordian knot, vermilion-spotted, gold, green and blue, covering the woman’s breast and private parts in snake hide. Crimson rings interweaved with silver moons. The woman steps from an open book, cupped like a shell beneath her feet. One outstretched hand offers a golden fig leaf. The eyes of her serpent hungry, combative. On the facing page, a second image, clearly alchemical. A glass amphora heated over a fire, suspended from a tree at the centre of a city. Inside the glass amphora, clouds of different colours – swollen red, lamp black, titanium white – and what appears to be a severed bifid tongue, resting alone at the heart of the jar. In the branches of the tree the illustrator had suspended the words:
El meu coll estava serp, però les paraules jo vaig parlar . . . My throat was serpent, but the words I spoke . . . 
My heart beats faster as Bingley’s eyes consume the black ink.

‘Who wrote this?’ Bingley whispers.

‘A living ghost,’ I say, drawing his attention to the colophon at the end of the quire. A woman, encircled by the golden Ouroboros. The nightingale perched close to her ear. A book in her left hand.
Bingley breathes a low, little whistle.

‘The signatures on both works are identical.’

Bingley’s gaze sharpens.

‘Provenance?’ he asks.

‘Barcelona.’

‘Year?’

‘1995.’

‘And what do you make of it?’

‘The colophon is a mark of a bloodline or a family name rather than an individual.’

He nods.

‘And the author?’

‘Anonymous.’ I run through the details faster. ‘But we have deduced who she is through plays on words. Games. She begins her poem with the line
El meu coll estava serp –
my throat was serpent. Later –’ I turn the page and point – ‘she calls herself a
Snake
.
Then the Latin
mulier habens pythonem 
– a woman having a familiar spirit – and –’
I flipped through to a second marked page. ‘Here . . . 
una pitonissa
. A pythoness. Bringing to mind the Witch of Endor – an
engastrimyth
in Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible, but in the Latin Vulgate is labelled a
mulier habens pythonem 
. . .’

‘And the Pythia at Delphi . . .’ he says softly.

I do not need to explain to Bingley that according to the myths, Apollo took the Oracle at Delphi from a coiling
drakaina
 – a dragon snake whom the god transfixed with a thousand arrows. In Greek Homeric verse, the serpent is female: the terrible, vindictive daughter of the Earth goddess Gaia whose blood rotted into the Castalian spring, infusing the divine vapours with her essence. The word python, meaning rot, became a name for Apollo, Pythian, slayer of the serpent, which in turn became the name of his Oracle – the Pythia at Delphi.