The Book of Secrets

by Tom Harper

  ‘The game. Did you lose it?’

  I thought of Jacques’ pulverised face, his blood on the stones. ‘No.’

  Drach gave me his crooked smile. ‘A bad workman blames his tools. A bad gambler blames the man who made the cards.’

  He suddenly turned his back on me and began walking towards the river. I could not tell if it was a dismissal or an invitation. I followed. He squatted on the bank and sluiced water over his palette. Threads of colour streamed off it into the river.

  I stood at the top of the embankment and watched. ‘How did you make them?’ I shouted down. My voice seemed unnaturally loud in the evening stillness. ‘How do you make them so perfect?’

  He didn’t look round. ‘What is your trade?’

  I hesitated. ‘I used to be a goldsmith,’ was the best I could say. ‘And if I came into your shop and asked for the secret of enamelling, or the way to fire gold with copper to bring the engravings to life, would you tell me?’

  ‘I-’

  ‘I discovered something which no man ever did before. Do you think I would share that with every stranger who passed me at a crossroads?’ He pulled the wooden palette out of the river, shook the water off and tucked it under his arm. He marched up the riverbank, straight past me.

  ‘I want to make something perfect,’ I said, and something in my voice – desperation or desolation – must have rung true. Drach turned back.

  ‘Only God is perfect.’

  Written down now it looks a pompous rebuke. But writing cannot capture the way he said it: the overblown solemnity undercut by a twitch at the corner of his mouth, the mischievous cast in his eyes as they met mine in complicity.

  ‘God – and your playing cards,’ I said.

  This answer pleased him very much. He spread his arms and took a bow. Everything was theatre to Drach.

  ‘Even God could not make two men so exactly alike as my cards.’ He considered this thought while I tried not to show my shock. ‘Except twins. And they are unnatural.’

  He looked at the sky. The sun had disappeared; the heavens were darkening to black.

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  We crossed the fields to the village. The path was narrow and broken by the plough; often we collided. I longed to take his hand and walk arm in arm, for I was already besotted, but of course I did not dare. I contented myself with the brush of his sleeve, the occasional bump of his shoulder.

  He kept his paint jars in a sack, which tinkled like harness bells wherever he walked. His conversation was the same: flowing chatter that pleased my ear and never grated. He asked my name and where I came from; when I told him Paris, he fixed me with a look that made me think he knew everything.

  ‘There is a story there,’ he said. ‘Someday I will force it out of you.’

  I could not think of anyone I would more happily tell it to. We came to an inn called L’Homme Sauvage, the Wild Man. On the sign, a man whose skin peeled off his body like foliage strummed a lute and looked over his shoulder. It was as if I had entered a different world; everywhere I looked, the cards seemed to come alive. Drach saw my gaze and nodded.

  ‘I am always welcome here. They will give us a meal and a bed for the night.’

  He said ‘us’ so casually I could not tell if he meant anything by it. To me it was like a button fallen unnoticed off his coat, to be picked up and cherished long after he had forgotten it.

  We crossed the stableyard and entered the inn. The candles burned bright after the darkness outside, while the fire in the hearth dispelled the spring chill. Though the village was too close to Strassburg to detain many travellers, there was no shortage of custom. Three men-at-arms in fine cloaks sat in the middle of the room and bragged of their deeds. In a corner, two merchants from Vienna haggled and gossiped.

  A girl with flaxen hair braided into pigtails brought wine. Drach drained his almost immediately and called her back for more. I waited for her to leave, trembling with the idea I had been nursing in all the months of my slow journey across France.

  At last she left us.

  ‘I have a proposal for you,’ I said. I had meant to wait, to tease him in with hints and subtlety. But I could not contain myself: the words spilled out of me. ‘You learned how to make perfect copies of your pictures. Did you ever think what else you could copy?’

  He cocked an eyebrow, inviting me to go on. I drew a breath. ‘Words.’

  He took a moment to understand what I meant. When he did, he laughed. ‘Words? How much will men pay for them? I have illuminated manuscripts and seen how well the scribes were paid for words.’

  ‘Some words are worth more.’

  In my mind, I looked back to my father’s mint, the stream of identical coins flowing into the scales. The principle of perfection had not turned lead into gold in Paris. I was convinced in Strassburg it would hold more sway with paper.

  ‘The word of God, for example.’

  Drach snorted so hard wine blew out of his nose. He gave me a keen look, wondering if he had misjudged me. ‘Bibles?’

  ‘Indulgences.’

  That surprised him. He sat back in his chair and considered it. Even turned inwards in thought his face was more alive than most men’s ever are.

  ‘Indulgences are receipts,’ he said at last. ‘Chits the Church sells you to prove you have bought remission of your sins. There is no beauty in that.’

  ‘No beauty in one,’ I agreed. ‘But in a thousand, all exactly the same…’

  ‘A thousand,’ he repeated, savouring the size of the number.

  ‘Using your art.’

  ‘It would be a single page.’

  ‘A standard text.’

  ‘We’d leave space for the names and the date.’

  ‘And the price.’ I was flushed with excitement; I felt like a key that had found its lock. I had never felt such a rush of understanding.

  ‘God knows we’ll never want for customers.’

  ‘Though by God’s grace, He will perfect us all some day.’

  It was a reflexive comment, inescapable, but it broke the spell and drew another appraising stare from Drach.

  ‘A perfect world would be a feeble place. And far less profitable.’

  ‘Of course,’ I stammered. All I wanted was to bring back the light of his countenance. ‘I only meant-’

  He cut me off with a gesture to the far corner of the room, where a woman was leaning over to pour a drink, displaying herself to the traders and field hands at the table. Her breasts sagged close to her waist, the neck of her dress almost as far. Thick red powder gave her cheeks the texture of a badly plastered wall.

  ‘As long as there are women like her – and men like those – we will be rich.’

  Still watching the prostitute, I shuddered in revulsion. The contrast with Drach – smooth, quick, aloof – was absolute. I realised he had been watching me, like a priest in confession. I composed my expression and tried to think of a remark that would cover me. Drach shook his head, as if he knew what I was going to say and wanted to keep me from embarrassing myself. He reached across the table and laid his hand over mine.

  ‘Your secret is safe.’

  He laughed at the confusion brimming in my eyes.

  ‘Your proposal. It is a plan of genius.’

  ‘The cards-’ I demurred

  ‘Were only a beginning. I sold them to rich gamblers with taste. They are a limited market. With these indulgences, all mankind is our market, and they will come back for more so long as men sin.’

  Our knees brushed under the table. I knew then that as long as Kaspar Drach and I were together, there would be no lack of sin in the world.

  XXIX

  Paris

  The Institut Georges Sagnac occupied a low concrete campus in a western suburb of Paris. Plastic blinds covered most of the windows; the few rooms with lights on shone like television screens. A group of teenagers skateboarded on one of the access ramps, but otherwise there was no one to be seen.

  Ni
ck and Emily stopped in front of one of the buildings and rang the bell marked VANDEVELDE. The plastic housing on the intercom was cracked, the speaker muffled by a collage of faded stickers advertising underground bands, radical politics, bleeding-edge art or simply proclaiming anarchy.

  ‘Oui?’

  Emily leaned closer to the wall. ‘Professor Vandevelde? It’s Dr Sutherland.’

  A noise like a buzz saw ripped through the speaker. The door clicked open.

  ‘Venez.’

  The elevator was out of order; they took the stairs. Professor Vandevelde’s office was on the fourth floor at the end of a long linoleum corridor that probably hadn’t been refurbished since 1968. They knocked, and a brisk voice summoned them in.

  It was a large office. To the left, a broad window offered bleak views of the tower blocks which barred the horizon. There was a wood-veneer desk littered with papers, a whiteboard scribbled with half-erased equations and two low chairs. Yellow foam poked out of holes in the seats. The only decoration was a poster taped to the wall, a page from an illuminated manuscript advertising a long-gone exhibition at the Louvre.

  Professor Vandevelde stood and came around the desk to shake hands. He was a tall heavyset man, dressed in cord trousers and a blue sweater, his shirtsleeves rolled up over the arms. Apart from the silver-rimmed spectacles he wore, Nick thought he looked more like a fisherman than a physicist.

  ‘Emily Sutherland,’ said Emily. ‘This is my assistant, Nick.’ Vandevelde flipped on a kettle balanced on top of a grey filing cabinet. He motioned them to sit.

  Emily perched on a chair and crossed her legs. ‘Thank you for seeing us at such short notice, and on a Saturday afternoon. I’m so sorry my email never arrived.’

  Vandevelde wiped a spoon on his sweater and opened a jar of Nescafé. ‘ça ne fait rien. I am here anyway. And you have come all the way from the Metropolitan Museum in New York.’

  ‘I’ve read so many of your papers.’ Pulled off the Internet in a smoky café and skimmed in the time it took to finish an espresso. ‘But my colleague struggled to understand the process.’

  Nick smiled apologetically as if to say he didn’t blame Vandevelde.

  ‘I wondered if you could explain for him.’

  ‘Of course.’ The professor stood and ushered them through a side door into a plain windowless room.

  ‘This is where we have the proton milliprobe.’

  The machine looked like something out of a dentist’s surgery: white metal pipes sticking out of the wall and the ceiling, ending in a nozzle that pointed at a steel lectern. A bundle of thick cables snaked away from it to a computer on a desk against the wall.

  ‘What we are doing, it is called PIXE technique. Particle-induced X-ray emissions.’ He exaggerated each word so slowly that with his thick accent they became almost unintelligible. ‘It has been developed in San Diego in the 1980s. What you are doing is to fire a beam of protons through the pipe – ici – into the object you analyse. In my experiments it is a page from a book. The protons, they pass through the page, they hit the atoms and they break them. This release the X-rays, who we measure with a fluoroscopy system.’

  He tapped the nozzle suspended from the ceiling, then pointed to the computer. ‘It analyse the emission and tell us what is inside the page.’

  ‘Doesn’t that damage the book?’

  ‘Non. We scan only one millimetre of the page and the protons break only a few atoms. Except at the molecular level, there is no damage.’

  Nick glanced at Emily. She seemed happy for him to continue with his questions. ‘And this tells you what’s in the paper?’

  ‘It tell us what is in the ink. Every ink have a chemical signature we identify. We analyse the early printed texts so that we see who have made them.’

  Nick took a deep breath and reached into his coat. ‘So what did you find when you scanned this?’ He held up the card, keeping his eyes fixed on Vandevelde’s.

  ‘I work only with books. I have not analysed this card.’

  But Nick had seen it on his face – recognition, and something else. Fear? ‘A woman called Gillian Lockhart brought this to you.’

  ‘I have never seen this Gillian Lockhart.’ He said it in the same laboured way he had explained the PIXE acronym earlier, something memorised.

  ‘What did you find?’

  ‘I have told you. I have not ever seen this before.’ Vandevelde stood. ‘I think perhaps you are not interested in my work. I am sorry, I cannot help you.’ He put his hand on the door. ‘S’il vous plaît…’

  Nick and Emily stayed where they were. ‘When did Gillian come here?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘She called you a month ago. Three weeks after that, she disappeared. ’

  Vandevelde sighed. ‘I am sorry to hear this. Truly. But – I cannot help.’

  ‘Do you remember her calling you?’

  ‘What do you say is her name?’

  ‘Gillian Lockhart.’

  Vandevelde shook his head a fraction too soon. ‘Non.’

  ‘We have her phone records. The conversation lasted almost fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Perhaps my secretary have put her on hold while she look for me. Perhaps she does not give me her name – or not her actual name. Perhaps she pretend she is interested in my work because she want something else.’

  He let go the door handle and walked back to his machine. ‘You think I hide something from you? I hide nothing. I promise to you I have never seen your friend, or this card. But if you want for me to analyse it, if this makes you happy, I do it. Oui?’

  He held out his hand, his head cocked to one side. Nick glanced at Emily, who nodded cautiously.

  The Frenchman laid the card flat on the lectern in front of the pipe, then fussed with the nozzle until it was aligned to his satisfaction. Nick leaned in and squinted.

  ‘It’s pointing at nothing.’

  ‘We take two measurements. The ink is absorbed in the paper, yes? So first we measure the paper by itself, then with the ink. If we subtract the first measure from the second, we have left only what comes from the ink.’

  He turned a handle to lock the nozzle in place, then crossed to the computer. Nick still crawled with misgivings. ‘Do we have to leave the room or anything?’

  ‘It is very safe. You absorb more protons standing fifteen minutes in the sun. If you do not trust me, you can be holding the card all the time I do the experiment.’

  Nick took a step back. ‘I’ll watch from here.’

  There was almost nothing to see. Vandevelde pressed a key on the computer; there was a rumbling sound from behind the wall, and a red light went on over the pipe. Seconds later, the light went off and the rumbling stopped. Vandevelde readjusted the nozzle so that it now pointed at a luxuriant part of a lion’s mane, where the ink was thickest. The light blinked on again, then off. A jag-toothed graph appeared on the computer screen.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It shows the different elements we can detect.’ Vandevelde traced one of the sharp peaks with his finger. ‘This line shows the sodium content. This is the copper.’

  ‘So… what? You can figure out what the ink was made of?’

  ‘Not all of it. Some elements the X-ray fluoroscopy system cannot measure. Sometimes we do not know where it has come from. For example, we find lead. Perhaps it has come from massicot, which is an agent for the drying; or it has come from a heated lead oxide for the colour; or – if it is a book – it has rubbed off from the lead alloy types. All we can say with this machine is there is lead.’

  ‘So what’s the point?’

  ‘Every ink have a signature, you understand? Every printer, he uses a different ink. We have a database.’

  ‘Can you check this ink?’

  ‘Bien sûr. I show you.’

  He pressed a button on the computer. An hourglass spun lazily over the graph. A few seconds later a single line of text appeared at the bottom of the screen. Nick guessed what it
meant even before Vandevelde gave his one-word summary.

  ‘Rien.’ He shrugged and edged away from the computer. There was a wariness in his movements, Nick thought, like a dog that has been kicked too often. He gave Nick and Emily a sad look. ‘If your friend have come here – and I promise she did not – I would tell her the same.’

  Nick took the card off the lectern, wrapped it in the tissue paper and put it in his bag. He stared at Vandevelde, certain that there was more but unable to think of anything to say.

  Vandevelde opened the door and gave a sad smile. ‘I hope you find your friend.’

  Reluctantly, Nick stepped into the dark corridor. As Emily followed, Nick heard Vandevelde mutter something to her in French before he shut the door. They walked down the stairs in silence. Outside, the sun had set and the skateboarders had gone. The only light now came in orange pools under the street lamps. The air was bitterly cold.

  ‘What did he say when you were leaving?’ Nick asked.

  ‘He said, “Not all the marks on the card are ink.”’

  Nick glanced back, wondering what it meant. But when he looked up, the room on the fourth floor was dark.

  XXX

  Near Strassburg, 1434

  ‘Be careful. If you spill even a drop we’ll burn like heretics.’

  Drach speared an onion on a sharpened stick and grinned. That frightened me. He only smiled when he was serious.

  Perhaps it was Drach’s promise of danger, but all my senses sang at a high pitch that day. The sweetness of coal and the surly smell of flax-seed oil; the bright August sun that made pillars of light in the smoke; the viscous bubbles swelling and popping inside the cauldron that stood between us. I could feel every drop of sweat running down my naked back.

  Drach crouched with his skewered onion beside the cauldron. I pulled on a pair of leather gloves and reached for the copper hat that covered the pot. Our eyes met through the oily steam.

  ‘Remember. Not one drop.’

  I was at one with the world. I had never been so happy.