The Serpent Papers (55 page)

When the time comes,

you will know what to do.

Peter Warren is puzzled. Maybe she has forgiven him? Maybe her new security means she can trust him again? That she wants him back? Had he never stopped loving her? He wonders how many other people felt that way. How many victims fall in love with her on the stage every single night? She has a power over people that is unearthly, he tells himself, a corrosive, hypnotic beauty. Dangerous. She’s bloody dangerous, that’s what she is. Peter Warren holds the letter and book in his hands, and experiences a strange dampness welling in the corners of his eyes. And then, without warning, he begins to cry.

I stop beneath an oak tree, settle down into the dust.
Hold the book in your hands.
There is the familiar diagram of the Rex Illuminatus truth machine, heavy lines printed with comfortable precision. The book is divided into sections – the first formed of yellow paper sprinkled with brown dots of mould. The collated writings of Rex Illuminatus. Natalia has undone the stitching and bound her own folios into the core of the 1855 edition of
The Alchemical History of Things.

The nib of her pen had been metal, and torn in the corner, so that it scratched the stock slightly. Around repeated circular diagrams of the nine-letter alphabet, Natalia has drawn ornate frames of filigree leaves, ivy and rose blossoms, interwoven in blue ink, words wrapped in the spiralling skin of a winged snake, now coiling round the outer rim the page, later ending and beginning with the consumption of its tail. There are many drawings, all of which have meaning I am sure, but I do not take the time to analyse, as Fabregat is waiting in the car down the road, and my moment of privacy must be painfully brief. Despite the intensity of her illustrations, the lines of the drawings are not painstakingly deliberate, but light, and swift on the paper, strokes from the pen made with a dextrous speed that catch me in a wave of adrenaline.

For the first time I can see you clearly.

Natalia Hernández.

Exquisite as the finest painting by the greatest master. She has been likened to a renaissance beauty by her critics and extolled as a living work of art by her colleagues. Her lips are plump and red, parting slightly in the middle. Her mouth pulls too much to the sides when she smiles, a lack of symmetry that breaks the golden ratio, but lends her no uncertain charm. Her eyes empty. Skin colder than Persephone. At times it is difficult to look at her, the beholder intoxicated by the markings on her body, her freckles and moles creating a constellation of interest, leading the eye down her check to her neck, to her chest. Her breasts are not full, but round and small. Bones press against her skin, giving her a look of fragility. In repose, it can seem there is barely enough muscle on Natalia Hernández to keep her moving. But this is a deception of the eye. When she works she shakes out her hair before tying it in a tight knot at the back of her neck. She loves the smell of summer storms, the hot moisture on the air. A sky electric and powerful. For a moment I forget anxiety
.

To work, to work.

I watch her bend over the draughtsman’s table. Her desk filled with jars of pigment. Red mercuric sulphide for vermilion, cinnabar and saffron yellow, an oxidized copper compound for green, lapis lazuli, walnut ink for brown. Hammered gold in leaf.
First there was the rock, and then there was the knife, and after that came everything
, she says to herself, half in a dream. Each tool has a duality, each element a poison: the toxins in her studio, the emulsifiers and thickeners.
Even turpentine can kill a man.
Perish the thought.
Countless pilgrimages here.
Whether in the late darkness of the night, or the early morning. Gum arabic in an alabaster dish. Gouache and sable brushes. The carbon steel of her gilder’s blade rests on blue velvet.
Strike the gold leaf with your finger.
She pats gently, then hard, as her mother taught her, forcing the gold to crumble against her fingers. The leaf shatters. She pounds the gold into dust – careful not to rub the powder, adding gum arabic as she goes. Her hands work quickly.
The mixture must not be allowed to dry.

When the first leaf has lost its sheen, she adds another, tapping it as before. Then a drop of water. She continues for close to an hour, transfixed by the flaking gold, until the battered shell develops a pearl-like lustre. Next: distilled water. She watches as the gum arabic dissolves and gold dust swirls to the surface of the dish. It will set like this overnight, with the liquid removed, and become a base. Hours later she prepares the parchment. The sun rises. She selects a smooth cinnabar pigment, thinned, and dabs lightly at the page, creating a swift under-painting which will guide the gesso and later the placement of the gold shell. Once applied, the shell cannot be removed, else it will smear. She remembers the firm words of her mother.
You must negotiate your space. Set the terms of your design before applying gold. Illumination is performance. The process as ephemeral as a movement across a stage. The form, once cast, could not be recaptured. It is lost. You could not stop and begin anew. No . . . 
her lines drawn out as combs of light . . . 
Beauty is precision. Beauty is perfection like a dancer. Perfection has no room for error . . . 
The tool she has selected is gentle. She applies the gold with the thin tip, avoiding thicker strokes which will crack. A knife in her left hand, a pen in her right. Later she will burnish with a stone. Smooth agate bent in the shape of a dog’s tooth.

There is not much more time
, she thinks, and prays.
Not much more time until what she has started will be finished, and given out into the world to judge. It is her lasting gift. The most delicate.
Her brush continues working, and as she lays the first lines of gold, she loses herself in the task. On the outer sheet she draws
a serpent, followed by a conjoined figure, half man, half monster, in the style of the two-headed Roman god Janus or an Aztec deity. One human profile, cherubic face, dressed in a black frock coat, holds a golden scroll furled like a snail. His forehead is high, chin elegantly bearded, with a thin moustache across his lip, his brow shadowed and melancholy, and his mouth twisted. But this is only half his expression – as his skull and spine are fused to a monster, vastness in pleated mail, a horned bull covered in thick hair from the shoulders up, human chest bare and streaked with tattoos, the face of an ox emblazoned across his chest, and a star at the centre of his forehead. His hand rests in front of him, holding a bloody mass of flesh in balance with the scroll and beneath this the word AUREUS painted in thin red letters and a poem:

Beware Flesh-Born-Tongue-Slayer,

Drunk on the Winepress of God

False Watcher at the Gate

I mark murder with his true guise:

Blood heralds his fall like a Light from Heaven

He is the bull dragon.

Goat-Clad Beauty.

Aureus. I look at the name with a start.
Golden one.
A detail valuable for the inspector, but not for me – even now I am not certain, even now I could be wrong.

Her work is the prelude to a secret.
Throw back your head and listen.
Fireworks of colour! Heavy incense and raging fires, stone reliefs, the rumble of a subterranean spring.
An extraordinary cacophony of sounds!
Silver moss damp as an old man’s moustache.

Abruptly Natalia’s illustrations stop. There is a shift I have been waiting for – a hallucination – in a split second I transcend the boundary of the real. Everything I have been seeking comes racing towards me. In the woods, beneath the oak tree, I am a philosopher presented with an ancient orrery, a cartographer surveying a mechanical map of a distant galaxy, for bound into Natalia’s copy of
The Alchemical History of Things
rests a set of pages made of membrane.
Inside this book she has inserted a single quire of mottled parchment, texture like woven leaves, a dead animal’s veins forming a pattern reminiscent of bark. My breath sucks in. I feel the tremors come, the shaking. Within the folds of Natalia’s book, amidst the illustrations and thoughts and printed diagrams, the
missing pages of the Illuminatis Palimpsest
lie as the tomb of an ancient king, sealed into a funereal urn towards the end of the volume, out of sight and tucked away, pages folding into themselves like a dream. The Serpent Papers. My hands tremble as I turn sheets, pulling back the parchment as the wings of a bird. Where before the writing was monastic, ascetic, on this fine quire there is gold. Gold in vast quantities. Redolent, dazzling, burnished gold. Unlike the ordered menagerie, the ruled lines and figures of a liturgical illuminated manuscript, the gold here spurts in chaotic swoops and curves, making a jungle of the palimpsest.

The Illuminatian script is puzzling in an agitated way.
I bring my nose closer.
What are the gold letters hiding?
My heart leaps at the sight of milky red impressions, marks of an older hand, the continuing lines of a poem. Much more beautiful than I expected. Suddenly I am terrified. Afraid to touch them. To put my fingers to the sheets of skin, to turn them over.
Will I burn? Will my body be destroyed? Will the voices echo through me?
No. I am my rational, intellectual self. Modern. Unbound.
Turn the leaves over
, I order myself. Mismatched sheets.
One quire, full gathering
 – very thin, sheets like tracing paper – through which I have unstitched the binding – a loose thread, finest grain, weaving in and out of the pages . . . and the faintest hint, the almost disappeared subtext . . . stanzas of a poem, soft smudge of Greek.
Deliciously unknowable.
Above this the alchemist has written in gold:

For Amat, or as he is knowne Ramon Llull, Raimundis Lullius, Raymond Lully in the oulde bookes, I saye the following: it is my owne fault he hath beene robbed of sayntehoode. What I hath done, they saye he hath done. My chymstry, my magick, my philosophie, they hath given it all to him, though they do seek me in secret, robbing me the rights to my artes. I am not of Lully’s worlde, but his mere shadowe. I do not holde truck with his religion, and for this they hath persecuted me most crewelly. Once we were freynds. We sought the same answers. We constrewed mirrors seeking the same simbols in fyre and ayre, oyle and bloude. We made wayes of understandyng the cosmos aboute us, a woven tongue for being. His was a ladder to God, leading to the divyne, whereas myne was rooted to the harte, seekyng the divyne spark of man. We practyced the sayme artes, forged the sayme letters, spake the sayme language, though we wrote our thoughts for difrent purposes. Those who hunt me doe mistake us, seeing my worke for his and his worke for myne, they doe give us the sayme name. Illuminatus. But we were not borne one, and we did not dye as one. His worke sought for conversion of the outward world, and so he dyed under the stones of his enymies. I practice my artes for liberation of the soul. To know the essential mater of myselfe, and thereby know others. My choice was Chrysopoeia, the amalgamyng, and so it was I, Rex Illuminatus, who belonged to no one, borne a poore orphan in the rubble of a conquered island . . . It was I who became immortal.

The principal layer of the palimpsest consists of alchemical drawings. Battered down with a stone and sealed with an oil varnish. On the first leaf, inscribed with a steel point and coloured on the vellum is an illustration of a winged snake dressed in glorious detail, encircling an upturned crescent moon on a red shield. On the second leaf, the snake returns, this time appearing crucified on a cross, head impaled by a nail, on the third, a series of snowy mountains leading to a jungle and then a yellow desert formed of the teeming bodies of snakes. Following this, a depiction of a pagan god, a man brandishing his rod around which a bronze serpent coils. The god beats the clouds above his head, but he is hounded by a wraith, a deathly spectre of a skeleton wielding a scythe in raised arms. Death cuts at the god’s knees. On the following leaf, a second man, in robes and kingly ruff, surveys a path of gold leading to a palatial temple engulfed in flames; at its centre, amidst the flames, the alchemist has drawn a lone bird, a small nightingale perched on a rose bush. Behind, beasts prowl through dark woods. Dragons and griffons stalk the land. A knife hangs suspended from the clouds. Above this, a winged serpent soars across the sky. The final picture is of a woman holding a book. Beneath, the alchemist has written in clear, pristine Latin: