The Serpent Papers (3 page)

I continue the examination.

‘It may take five or six days to remove the moisture . . . if not longer . . .’
Burns around the edges of the text block, and wax . . . Beeswax . . . not tallow . . . spattered all over the vellum, so it was likely to have been kept in a church or a wealthy household. Deep bacterial infection – deteriorating sheepskin binding . . . sixteenth- maybe seventeenth-century, wooden boards, one broken. Ornate buckle and clasp suggest baroque period, gilt tooling on cover . . . minuscule patterns. Parchment bifolia, much older, burnished on both sides, gilt highlights and iron gall ink . . . badly cockled, tannins from covering leather have stained early and final pages of the book. Wherever it was stored was unsealed and unstable. Freezing in the winter and very hot and humid in the summer. Most valuable pages missing, presumed stolen. All in all
,
I sigh,
a disaster.

But I am confident of other things.

Do not tell him what it is.

The name spinning round my head.

I park the car just north of the village of Valldemossa, along the easterly road to the Hermitage of the Holy Trinity. They have taken the book to the university, but I have declined going with them. The chemists will handle it, the supervisor. People with the appropriate skills. The book doctors. The surgeons. The right pigments and chemicals and machines. The right scalpels and humidifiers and magnets and weights. I walk angrily, burning off the energy.

To come so close, only to lose what is most valuable.
Think of Harold Bingley, warm in his Belgravia office.
Neighbours to the Queen we are, at Picatrix.
An idiosyncratic location for an office, far from the relevant libraries and museums, but the one preferred by our funder as it is nearest to his favourite hotel, though we don’t see him. Only Harold Bingley has that privilege. What will he think?
We have located the very object you have been looking for, through no genius of our own.
A freak storm, an old church, a bunch of monks putting out a fire find a book, which just happens to be the palimpsest we have been hunting for –
nothing you have done merits praise.
I imagine the man who will receive this information.
They have recovered the manuscript, sir, but the Illuminatus palimpsest is missing from within. It has been stolen. Disappeared. Lost.

Will he be angry?

Will he be sanguine?

Will he experience the same raging frustration?

I know nothing about him, though rumours abound.
He is a Texan venture capitalist, American, New York, the guy used to fund the Met. I heard he was a professor of antiquity who came into a vast fortune inherited from his recently deceased Brahmin wife. No, no, no, Picatrix is an Israeli start-up engineer who sold his platform to Google for three billion . . . originally obsessed with collecting Isaac Newton’s alchemical notebooks, he hunts for the source material Newton studied.
We talk about him, without knowing anything other than the size of his wallet, which is immense, and his intellectual persuasions, which seem – bizarrely enough – to run in parallel with mine. And now, I number one among Mr Picatrix’s team. I kick the snow. With nothing to show for it but a mildewed book with a missing set of pages.

I entered Picatrix two years ago on a sleety afternoon. Halting light peculiar to London in October. Summoned to a grand café in St James’s on Piccadilly. Dazzling black and white marble in geometric designs, sumptuous columns sprouting Japanese lacquer. Domed ceilings. Edwardian teapots in the style of George III, silver glinting. Coiffed hair and gold cufflinks. At the appointed hour Michael Crawford, Classics professor and Archivist at the Special Collections Library at Stanford University, arrived accompanied by a severe gentleman in a suit. Crawford brisk in manner, kind in language, comfortably settled into his middle sixties. Soft Midwestern tones. A mentor from my graduate days. Specialist in multispectral imaging. Papyrologist. His friend pinched in a wiry sort of way, the skin on his cheeks so pale I could see the blue of his veins.

‘Meet Harold Bingley, Deputy Head of Picatrix,’ Crawford had said.

‘A pleasure to make your acquaintance.’ I reached out my hand.

‘Likewise,’ Bingley lisped.

With that they demanded service.

‘Devilishly miserable day,’ Bingley observed, while Crawford said to the waitress: ‘No tea for me, I’ll have a fresh juice. Grapefruit and ginger? Anyone else?’ I ordered dutifully, hiding my shoes under the table. Leather brogues. I had worn them every day. Fraying laces. Holes in the side, torn seams. Mud spattered. ‘Weathered’ would be the polite word, but they were destroyed.
My anxiety grew deeper. Fingers un-manicured. Not a lick of make-up.
They’ll see right through me.

‘Do you like your current research?’ Bingley asked.

‘Very much.’

‘And your work with the universities? Challenging enough?’

I paused. Any positive affirmation would be a lie.

‘No.’

Harold Bingley scratched on a notepad produced from a pocket.

‘Novelty is good for the soul. A challenge best of all. Don’t you think, Crawford?’

‘It is indeed,’ Crawford said. Then the men asked me if I had any questions.
Picatrix is funded by a billionaire.
Would that be a constriction?

‘What’s it like working for an anonymous patron?’ I asked.

Bingley frowned.

‘How do you handle the pressure?’ I soldiered on. ‘You don’t feel at all compromised, intellectually? In terms of your parameters?’

‘I rather view it as a privilege,’ Bingley sniffed.

‘And what about the man himself?’

‘Our founder is quite secular. He does not take sides. His goal is the restoration and publication of lost manuscripts, particularly the missing literary and scientific masterpieces of antiquity . . . the disappearance of which he considers one of the greatest tragedies in history. He is an earnest palaeographer.’

‘You would describe Picatrix as a secular organization?’

‘With absolute sincerity.’

‘And if I worked for you, you would not curtail my interests.’

‘On the contrary, Miss Verco, we would fund them.’

You would what?

‘All of them?’ I stammered.

‘Within reason.’ He turned to Crawford. ‘You’re certain about her?’

I did not inspire faith.

Crawford nodded conspiratorially. ‘She’s one of our best, Bingley; I wouldn’t send you anything less.’

Bingley coughs delicately into a linen handkerchief.

‘This is our offer, Miss Verco. It will only come once. Our team is elite. We are in the unique position of being able to empower the minds we wish to work with. Picatrix trusts your intelligence, and if you prove yourself in the field, we will follow where you go. Now, as this is your interview, it’s my role to ask questions. How would you describe yourself?’

‘You’ve knocked the wind out of her, Harold.’ Crawford laughed across the table.

Harold Bingley smiled coyly.

‘Why so shy, Miss Verco? Where does your elusive passion lie?’

On the road from Valldemossa to the Hermitage of the Holy Trinity I pull my collar up against the cold. The monks will show me where they found that damn book. Now. Today.
Walk faster.
The rain has turned to snow, and it drifts lightly down. It is not a long journey and the cold helps clear my head, scarf wrapped round my throat, hat pulled close over my ears. Bare fingers in pockets. Buses fly by, roaring up into the mountain, careening around a one-lane highway. I move swiftly, heading towards Deià, where the road forks, until I hear the
honk-honk
of a truck behind me. ‘
Bon dia, Nena! Com estes?
’
the farmer calls, his red nose swollen, slapping the side of his pickup, arm hanging from the open window. ‘Where are you going?’
I tell him I am walking to the hermitage. ‘
Anem!
’ he shouts.
‘
Hop in! It’s too cold to walk.’
In the truck he chatters idly. ‘Did you hear? The bolt struck a chapel! In the dead of night! A fire on the clif
f
!’ I listen to the farmer, who asks about the house, our garden, if my Francesc can help him with his wife’s roses. I nod.
Francesc has green thumbs, Francesc has broad hands.

‘You’re not at the university today?’ the farmer asks. ‘I saw your man going down this morning in the car.’

‘No,’ I shake my head.
I’m a free woman.

‘You make a nice couple,’ the farmer remarks as we veer into the mountain. He glances down at my chapped fingers. ‘You should wear gloves in this weather.’

Here on the western range of Mallorca, the forest slopes from the sea. Hidden fields populated by olive groves and moribund sheep; a road, unmarked, leads from the winding coastal highway through blue, arterial woods. The truck rumbles and shrieks, mirrors pulled in; my driver inhales as we squeeze through a thin mouth of stone. A monk in the garb of a workman greets us fresh from feeding his flock. His hands crusted in a powdery, paprika dust. Teeth jagged as the Pyrenees, as he informs us in the old Mallorqui dialect of the state of this year’s lambing.
No man here under fifty
, I think to myself.
These aged monks are a dying breed.

As I wait for the arrival of the man who found the Book of Hours, I lean on a low rock wall. Eyes wandering over gardens and orchards and outstretched cliffs. Comforted by the wilderness. By the sea.

Harold Bingley’s voice cuts through me, mixing with the wind.
I return to the grand London café. Lights dripping down from the ceiling. Ebony glass and gold inlay. Salmon and caviar. Bingley poured himself another cup of tea through a fine silver strainer. He took a bite from a finger sandwich, and gave a little murmur of pleasure.
Divine.
He wiped the corners of his mouth delicately with his napkin.

‘Crawford tells me you are something of an expert in our area. One of a select few who believe Ramon Llull’s simulacrum had flesh and blood.’

‘The historical evidence for the existence of the alchemist Rex Illuminatus is irrefutable.’

‘You are very bold in that assertion.’

‘Because it is the truth.’

‘Then what I have to say should interest you most profoundly.’

Bingley smiled conspiratorially.

‘A philosopher in the thirteenth century writes alchemical recipes, in the tradition of the Franciscan alchemist John of Rupescissa’s
Book of Light
, onto a series of Greek codices, creating a palimpsest of a remarkable nature on two fronts. First, because the Latin work seems to have been signed by none other than Rex Illuminatus, making it the first piece of Illuminatian writing ever to have been discovered in the original. Second, because, Miss Verco, the Greek subtext echoes findings in the sixth volume of the Nag Hammadi codices. We are effectively looking at a Hellenic poem, presumably composed in Alexandria in the second or third centuries CE, which has been recopied by a later scribe onto parchment, which Illuminatus wrote over in the thirteenth century. We know of this book because we have one page of it, due to a most unusual series of circumstances
.

‘A gift of
coincidence
, Miss Verco, pure chance. That ephemeral thing which drives our industry. Several months ago, a research colleague at Oxford University brought forward citations of Rex Illuminatus’s work referenced in unpublished laboratory notebooks written by the American alchemist Eirenaues Philalethes in London in 1657. These notes contain translated fragments of a text which appears to be four centuries older, excerpts from a magical book, known to medieval scholars as
The Chrysopeia of Majorca
. These laboratory notebooks link the authorship of
The Chrysopeia of Majorca
to a mysterious Catalan living at Westminster Abbey at the behest of the Abbot Cremer and Edward III between 1328 and 1331. An individual who can only be the alchemist Rex Illuminatus.’ Bingley paused. ‘You have heard of these laboratory notes?’