by Lyndsay Faye
I was such a man myself once, at university. For a month after I was given to understand there would be a small allowance but no inheritance from the Lomax estate, I studied with the deliberate intent of becoming a tycoon. Then a fellow cricketer left a book upon Persian stonemasonry lying about and I was lost to the world for days save for the classes I could not miss. After coming out of my trance by means of finishing the final page, I realized that I didn’t actually desire the rare objects money could procure me—I only wanted to know all about them. I told Lettie that tale, on one of her tours when I scandalously joined her in Paris before we were wed, and she smirked and reached in all her bare glory for her wine glass and said it was all right, we could have the smallest house in the West End.
“But in the West End, mind,” she’d added mock-sternly, pulling her fingertips down the planes of my chest.
“Mr. Lomax is here as an impartial expert!” Mr. Grange squeaked. “Please, gentlemen, step aside and allow him to view The Gospel of Sheba uninhibited. Your questions and comments will be answered in due course.”
“It’s not much to look at,” Mr. Scovil said ruefully as the Brotherhood parted and he flipped aside the black velvet wrapping. A pair of white cotton gloves rested next to the shabby volume he uncovered, and I donned them after sliding my half-spectacles up my nose. “Which to my way of thinking—as a connoisseur and never a professional, mind—stands in its favour. I’ve a wretchedly old townhouse the family expects me to care for, eighteenth century, you know, impossible to heat, and I discovered this in a secret room behind a sliding panel along with many other books of esoteric medicine and alchemy. Here is The Gospel of Sheba, Mr. Lomax, make what you will of it. Apparently I’m the only chap it’s taken a liking to thus far.”
Leaning down with pale gloves hovering, I eased back the cover. The Brotherhood of Solomon behind me engaged in muttered speculations—questions as to my presence, accusations of the book’s fraudulence, warnings over the dangers in dabbling with ancient vice.
The Gospel of Sheba certainly looked like a sixteenth century document to me. It still does, here upon my desk, while Grace slumbers down the hall with her stuffed rabbit clutched to her neck. It was re-bound around two hundred years ago, I believe, with crackling blue animal hide stamped in black, but the paper seemed very old indeed and the penmanship typically cramped and mesmerizing. Books can own a curiously hypnotic draw, and this is one of them, whatsoever its occult capacities may be.
Conscious of many eyes boring into me, I moved with care through the pages, noting esoteric symbols paired with line drawings of recognizably African beasts, and recalled that the Queen of Sheba was the all-powerful ruler of her Ethiope empire. There was something electrifying about thinking it possible—that here were her occult studies, combined with King Solomon’s, over the sort of giddy intimacy Lettie and I used to share, preserved by an obscure Christian monk without a name or a legacy many centuries later. I said as much.
“Yes, precisely!” cried one of the Brotherhood. “It’s the most important discovery since The Key of Solomon the King itself.”
“It’s a bloody hoax,” sighed a bearded banker.
“It’s evil made manifest, Mr. Jenkins, and you ought not to be playing with such fire,” whimpered a third man, who kept himself well away from the proceedings and had poured himself a large glass of claret. “We are scholars, mystics, men who seek the ancient insights of a Biblical king—we are not sorcerers, scheming to unleash the furies of hell upon our enemies.”
“I can think of one or two enemies I’d not mind lending that book to, as a matter of fact, if it weren’t a fraud,” quipped the banker called Jenkins, and several chuckled.
“Stop touching it, I tell you. No purity of soul could withstand the summoning of the creatures listed in that blasphemous thing.”
“It’s a little thick, don’t you think, Huggins, whinging over blasphemy at this point?” drawled a City type with a waxed moustache. “By Jove, next he’ll be trying to wring spells out of the Sermon on the Mount. I say let a scientist study it rather than we financial types—it isn’t as if we have any clue what we’re talking about in the forensical sense.”
To tell the truth, neither do I. I am a student of all disciplines, a kite upon the wind of the rare and the beautiful. I only know that something in me loved this book from the beginning, wanted to peel back its feather-soft pages and lose myself in the gentle curlicues of its embellished borders. I confess I am doing so now between jotting down these notes, my amber lamplight lost eternally the instant it hits the void-like black of The Gospel of Sheba’s ink. The Latin is lyrical enough never to be tedious, and I just translated:
Come further into the night, O spirit longing to serve me, O Many-Eyed, Hairy-Tongued Beast of Burden. Come further. Come into me with your seven furred tongues and your single hand beckoning, place your hand in my darkest place and be made flesh among the living, as you were living, as you are dead, as you were gone, as you are returned, as you are summoned, as you are MINE TO COMMAND.
It isn’t Shakespeare exactly, but it gets the point across.
At the Savile Club earlier, after I’d completed a cursory examination, I closed the book and glanced over my shoulder. Hunger must have burned in my gaze, for Mr. Scovil behind me winked a single genteel eye and gestured at the book, tilting a shoulder in question to Mr. Pyatt. Mr. Pyatt, his black head cocked at me like a magpie’s, grinned suddenly and called out to the small assembly.
“Mr. Huggins, it seems your fears will soon be tested against the facts,” he announced, proffering Mr. Scovil a flute from a waiter’s champagne tray and taking another for himself. “Our visiting scholar is having a turn with the blasted thing. You’ll see for yourself, as I promised you, Mr. Jenkins—there is an otherworldly presence in this book, and Mr. Lomax will prove it to you. Is not electricity a real, if unseen, force? Is not magnetism, is not gravity? Does not the earth travel round the sun despite our inability to sense the fact, and are these not universally acknowledged to be ancient and wholesome laws of nature?”
“I think Galileo would have words with you on that subject, were he here,” I observed, earning a few appreciative grunts.
“Just so!” Mr. Pyatt nodded sagely, his inky hair gleaming. “We men of mettle cannot allow ourselves to be hampered by outdated morals and petty superstitions. It seems this book has chosen a master for itself, and if that is the case, well, we must have Mr. Scovil upon our side in the future. That’s all I can say upon the subject. In fact, let none of us argue any further and come to regret it before our impartial judge has returned with an assessment.”
Understanding I was definitely allowed to take The Gospel of Sheba home for study, I wrapped the gloves within the covering and placed all in a leather satchel I’d carried thither in hopes of just such an event. Mr. Grange hobbled on unsteady legs towards me, breathing heavily.
“I am most grateful,” he whispered as the others turned to more usual talk of business and of ritual. “You’ll save us yet, sir, deliver us the hard facts, and we’ll make a judgment accordingly. All this political bickering will be a thing of the past.”
“Bickering can be ruinous to any club, I quite under—wait, did you say political?” I questioned, a bit bemused. But Mr. Grange had already teetered off to herald the cold pheasant’s arrival.
“Bickering aplenty. He means the role of the book and its potential spiritual dangers, obviously, but he also refers to my possible election as president of the club.” Mr. Scovil appeared at my elbow, passing me a frothing glass of champagne. “There are whispers. We’ve never had one previous, you see. I don’t want any such thing, I’ll tell them no outright if they force me, but it would be rather piggish of me to decline a position I haven’t been offered yet.”
Taking the drink, I nodded. I don’t have to employ many words for men of his type to peg me. Old money, bit of a poet, younger son,
has to make his own way. They can read it all in my manner and clothing, likely spy reflections of silver spoons in my disordered hair follicles even as my mended kerchief screams penury.
“Frankly, it’s a rotten situation to be placed in.” He took a discreet pull of sparkling liquid, his eyes dancing—an aristocrat, yes, but one who exuded affability. “I can’t explain why the book doesn’t hurt me, no more than I can explain why Mr. Grange has been so pallid since he studied it. Nor why Mr. Huggins developed severe heart palpitations, nor why Mr. Pyatt fell so dreadfully ill. It wasn’t even my idea to lend the book out after I’d presented it to the company. Oh, you’ll take every care with it, won’t you? If nothing else, it’s an antique curiosity as well as an esoteric wonder. I’m pleased to have found the thing no matter what sort of trouble it causes. I’m mad for such treasures. Isn’t it beautiful, in a simple way?”
“Yes,” I said, thinking of calmly drawn letters in perfect horizontal lines, the hours spent making words appear by hand and will. “Yes, I agree with you. I’ll use the gloves, as a matter of course.”
“Obliged,” he said, raising his glass.
Prior to dinner, I inquired as to the health problems suffered by each of The Gospel of Sheba’s borrowers chronologically—Mr. Pyatt first, then Mr. Huggins, and finally Mr. Grange. Each reported identical symptoms: freakish numbness, chest pains, the virulent inability to digest foodstuffs. But I am no doctor, so such details meant little to me. After dinner and talk of stocks, banks, acquisitions, and rites enacted within sacred circles chalked by holy madmen, I made my goodbyes. As I departed, I passed Mr. Scovil and paused to ask him the question which had been nagging me.
“Why this hobby, Mr. Scovil?” I inquired. “You’ve the means to explore any field you desire, and then add more—form Arctic expeditions, excavate tombs. Why dark magic?”
He shrugged in the fashion very rich people do, when the slight flex of a muscle is pleasing to their own bodies.
“It’s in the family, as it were. Anyway, why art?” he replied, smiling. “Why hospitals? Why battle and conquest? Why patronage or charity? A man has to have something to work for, doesn’t he, besides money?”
I thought so, too. I think so now. And yet …
I want to know whether or not Lettie believed me when I told her we would never be well off all those years ago. Is it reasonable to wonder if perhaps she imagined me overly modest, or afraid of designing females, or simply a liar? She may have thought me the branch of a great tree which would flower in its due course, showering her with perfumed blossoms that glimmered in the sun.
When in fact, as is becoming heartrendingly clear, I am only a sublibrarian.
Note pasted in the commonplace book of Mr. A. Davenport Lomax, September 17th, 1902.
Papa,
I wonder if you could say when mother is coming home I only ask becaz Miss church wants me to pick new clothes for spring and when mother is heer it’s a lark. If you tell me, Ill paste it in my small calendur she sent from Florents.
Love, Grace
Excerpt from the private journal of Mr. A. Davenport Lomax, September 18th, 1902.
My life has taken a stark turn towards madness.
The Librarian approached me in the stacks today, exuding pipe smoke and benevolence, and I seized my opportunity.
My wife is beautiful, and she is kind, and she is witty. She deserves better than cold meat picnics in Regent’s Park. So does Grace, for that matter, even if she is quite content when in the company of bread and ducks. Is it humiliating for a man of my breeding to ask for money? Exceedingly. But I cannot always be sending Lettie accounts of new research projects and old books, not when she is art to be held up and wondered over and praised by dukes and even kings—sometimes, I must write to her of victories. Even of salary increases.
The Librarian opened his mouth to compliment me, and I mine to request a larger wage, one Lettie might consider livable and may even bring her home, when suddenly he stopped.
“Are you all right, Mr. Lomax?” he asked. “You seem very pale, my dear boy, and your expression … I’ve never seen it before. Are you resting quite enough?”
Standing there, dumb, I found he was correct. I was wearing a look painted by an unknown artist—and I found it singularly difficult to adjust my features into my usual warm if somewhat harried expression. My heart was racing for no earthly reason, and my fingertips had gone decidedly numb.
The Librarian clucked sympathetically. “I fear my great enthusiasm for my most admirable sublibrarian has led to overwork on your part. Go home, Mr. Lomax, and leave a list of your appointments upon my desk. I shall see to everything.”
I obeyed him and, after returning home and resting for an hour, drew out The Gospel of Sheba and returned to studying it, translating the Latin as I went into a separate notebook:
When summoning the Nameless Crone who Birthed the Five Pale Ones, suffer a virgin lamb to be drugged but not killed. And after calling unto the Crone, take up the iron needle you have forged, and sew into the live lamb’s flesh the words …
To my shock, I grew dizzy midway through my third paragraph. I tore my half-spectacles off my face, panting. My heart leapt like a fish on a glad summer’s day. The nausea I have been feeling and ascribed to purposely cheap meals and poor cuts of meat increased.
Is an ancient tome to cause my demise? Can such an object actually send evil through its ink into my person? It would prove ironic, I grant, for a lover of books to be murdered by one—and yet, stranger things have happened. I study paradoxes, after all.
Abandoning the project, gasping for air, I threw open a window in my study and hid The Gospel of Sheba in its dark cloth. There must be a scientific explanation for this phenomenon. There simply must, for the two remaining options are quite untenable: either I am a lunatic, or the world’s delicate mechanism has smashed to pieces before my eyes.
Meanwhile, the relations between the Brotherhood of Solomon were rather peculiar, I think. Their conversation nags at me just before sleeping, when usually I am dreaming of Lettie’s rare guileless smile or of Grace’s belly-shaking laugh.
The pressure in my chest, a sensation I’d attributed to the sudden steep fall in London temperatures, tightened to a bone-crushing ache just now, as if an iron crowbar had struck my heart.
Perhaps I ought to seek a doctor after all. Or barring that, some sort of priest.
Letter sent from Mrs. Colette Lomax to Mr. A. Davenport Lomax, September 19th, 1902.
Darling,
It is horrible, it is unfair to you, but I cannot write at any length just now. Forgive me. There are no canals in Strasbourg, and you know how the sight of water always calms me when I am distressed, and I am engaged yet again to be paraded like a show pony before the Duke. I long so for home, and a good pint of bitters though you know I cannot palate beer generally, and for a little stillness.
Love,
Mrs. Colette Lomax
Excerpt from the private journal of Mr. A. Davenport Lomax, September 19th, 1902.
The numbness in my hands is increasing. Every time I pick up The Gospel of Sheba, it sinks into my veins and spreads outward like bad liquor in the gut.
I cannot bring myself to care. There, I have set it down at last, hours after I should have done. The post arrived this morning as usual, I sorted my correspondence, we sat down to dinner, I read One Thousand and One Nights to Grace, I worked at the translation, and finally I have opened my journal and hereby admit that I cannot care whether or not I am being poisoned by a blighted book of spells. I want to fight, desperately. It shames me, this lack of will, this sorrow. Grace is beginning to notice, and Grace deserves none of this. Who is meant to shield her from such things if not her father?
I hope most ardently that Grace will never be exposed to a document as wicked as The Gospel of Sheba. Nor learn after I have read her mother’s latest l
etter to us aloud that there are in fact plentiful canals in Strasbourg.
Where in the world has my wife taken herself?
Excerpt from the private journal of Mr. A. Davenport Lomax, September 20th, 1902.
A light glimmers, though a dim one, and one which gives no appreciable warmth. Casting my mind back throughout the day, I recalled every nuance of conversation I could glean from the gathering of the Brotherhood of Solomon, and I believe an answer may be close to hand. The Librarian commented again upon my haggard looks, but I blamed it on the daggerlike turn in the weather and my wife’s extended absence.
The latter cause of my symptoms, I will confess here if only here, is not far from the honest truth.
Excerpt from the private journal of Mr. A. Davenport Lomax, September 21st, 1902.
Casual herbalism and knowledge of where to find the best books on the subject within my intellectual anthill of a workplace has never served me so well as today, which already makes this date worthy of note. And this evening for the first time—which must be of some significance, if only to me personally—I consulted the celebrated Mr. Sherlock Holmes of 221B Baker Street.
To my great happiness, after ringing the bell and being shown upstairs by a porcelain figure of a snowy-haired old woman, I found Watson occupying the rooms he once called his own. Indeed, it was he who opened the door to the first floor flat, just as Mr. Holmes was chuckling, “No, it’s a positive crime you weren’t there. I tell you that Lestrade couldn’t breathe for laughter and Hopkins will never look at a pennywhistle the same way again in his life.”
Into this easy merriment I intruded, just as Watson was laughing his fullest. Despite my devastating circumstances, I could not help but smile at him in return as I clasped his hand.
“You’ve solved it, then?” I said to the doctor. “The … Chinese pottery matter?”
“Lomax! I’d meant to wire you on the subject—we have indeed, and no small thanks to you, my good man. Am I already delinquent in returning your book? Well, well, that’s all right, then, I didn’t suppose you lot made house calls. Come in at once, it’s ghastly out there. Take the chair nearer the fire,” Watson greeted me, shutting the sitting room door.