by David Taylor
“I bet it is.” She gave a schoolgirl giggle before reaching for her phone to cancel her next appointment. “Right, you have my full attention.”
Freddie told her about Bacon’s correspondence with the German duke. The two men shared similar ideas. They wanted to create an international brotherhood of learning. Bacon had written about this in his utopian novella New Atlantis which was acknowledged to be a Rosicrucian tract.
There was a knock on the door and a library assistant entered with a pot of coffee and two Dresden cups and saucers.
Once she had served her guest, Heike Mittler took off her spectacles and rubbed them vigorously with a cleaning cloth before looking up at Freddie. Her eyes had narrowed to almond shards. “Get to the point, Dr Brett. Tell me what you’re up to.”
He could feel his face reddening. “I’m looking for an autobiographical treatise which Bacon failed to publish in his lifetime. I have reason to believe that he gave it to Duke August for safekeeping.”
“And why would he do that?” she asked evenly.
“This is largely guesswork. I don’t think Bacon got round to writing his treatise until he was an old man in political disgrace. By then, the Thirty Years War was raging in Europe and Catholics and Protestants were at each other’s throats. Not the best time to be releasing a radical apologia calling for intellectual freedom and church unity.”
“Perhaps not, if that’s what this treatise really contained?” Her arched eyebrows suggested otherwise. He would have to do better than that.
“You’re right. There’s more to it than that. The treatise is supposed to contain a scathing attack on James I and his son Charles,” he lied. “He felt that England was treading water under the Stuart kings, losing the chance to be a great imperial nation.”
“Is that so?” The librarian stretched out the last word as far as it would possibly go. “But why give this highly sensitive document to Duke August? He must have had trustworthy friends in his own country.”
“August was younger than Bacon, a fellow Rosicrucian, pretty liberal-minded apart from his obsession with witches, and, crucially, he was a bibliophile with a huge library. What better place to conceal a codex than in a room full of books. In his will Bacon commends ‘his name to the next ages, and to foreign nations.’ Duke August would hold on to his personal testimony and then release it when the time was right.”
“Per aspera ad astra, through harsh lands to the stars – that’s one of the duke’s mottos. But he didn’t publish Bacon’s treatise, did he? So someone else must have taken possession of it.”
“And August knew just the man – Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the first computer scientist, who joined the Societas Christiana and was a Rosicrucian lodge secretary before becoming librarian here. Your library was a Masonic stronghold in the seventeenth century.”
Heike Mittler blinked but said nothing.
“Will you help me,” he blurted out.
The Assistant Director drew herself upright: guardian of all that was orthodox and proper; enemy of anything inaccurate or abnormal. He could see a refusal forming on her lips. Yet, as Professor Kaufmann’s stand-in and an advocate of International Library Cooperation, shouldn’t she try to help this weird English scholar. Good manners and the spirit of European unity won the day.
“It’s an interesting theory you’ve got there, Dr Brett, and we will do all in our power to assist you in your quest,” delivered in a soothing monotone. “But, before we begin, perhaps you would like a short tour of the library complex.”
“That’s very good of you. I’d love to see your library. That’s if you can spare the time.”
She could and did. As they walked down seemingly endless corridors she told him about a proud moment in the library’s history. The great Venetian lover Casanova had visited Wolfenbuttel and much preferred the duke’s book collection to the local frauleins.
“And here we are,” she announced. They had entered a marble rotunda that turned out to be an optical illusion. The effect was created by thirty thousand white vellum volumes, shelved by size between marble pillars. “The White Library, just as August left it. Do you know what he said about it? ‘There is not a mountain range in which it is more pleasant to hunt.’”
“Why are they all the same?” he asked.
“That’s because the bookbinding was done here. Duke August purchased his imprints as unbound quires and shipped them to the library where they were given the same leather hides.”
He was shown an engraving of a plump whiskery old chap trying to crank up a revolving book wheel’s gearing system. It was the duke himself.
A polite cough reminded him of the need to press on. They moved into a locked down area where some of the library’s most precious possessions were on display – a handwritten ninth-century gospel book and the extremely rare thirty-six line Gutenberg Bible printed in an ink made out of linseed oil and soot. After a short briefing on the library’s buying policy Freddie was shown a mounted display of maps, sextants and astrolabes.
Looking beyond these ancient navigational aids, his eye was taken by what appeared to be a storeroom for baroque furniture. In a flight of fancy he imagined these fixtures and fittings to be stage props awaiting the appearance of the actors, preferably whiskered and in breeches and sleeved doublets. His guide told him they were the foundations for a future exhibition on the life and times of Duke August.
“There’s some pretty expensive junk stored here,” she said dismissively.
It was certainly an eclectic hoard: a seventeenth-century iron box with an intricate locking system; a veneered rosewood writing desk; an Augsburg ivory jewel cabinet; a large dower chest and a carved walnut refectory table with a gaming box on top of it.
“Look, I’m awfully sorry but I’ve a meeting I must go to. Let me drop you off in our digital library. I suggest you start your research by examining our Leibniz project which includes all his research papers.”
“Didn’t Francis Bacon outline the binary number system Leibniz later documented?”
The Assistant Director frowned. “All Bacon did was to show how letters of the alphabet could be reduced to sequences of binary digits, which was child’s play. Leibniz really understood binary arithmetic and invented the number system used in modern electronic digital computers. He also came up with infinitesimal calculus, although followers of Sir Isaac Newton might argue with that.”
She leaned forward, her collarbones showing through her prim blouse, like a large bird about to take wing. A mathematical flashpoint had been added to the already chequered history of Anglo-German relations, soured by two World Wars, penalty shootouts in football competitions and the single currency.
Good manners prevailed once again. “Forgive me,” she said. “We’re very proud of Leibniz. Here’s out digital library. Just go in. They’re expecting you.”
He was soon lodged at a computer terminal scrolling through the Leibniz papers. The hours passed and he found nothing. Although Leibniz had hero-worshipped Bacon, saying his thoughts ‘soared to the heavens,’ there was not a single mention of him here.
But what had he expected? Blinded by science, he was looking in the wrong place. If any Bacon correspondence had been digitally filed everyone in the library would have known about it. Cursing himself for a fool, he retraced his steps to the White Library and approached the main desk where a lean female librarian was waiting.
In response to his inquiry about old filing systems she gave him a whispered lecture. Did he know that Leibniz was the founder of library science, responsible not only for modern indexing but for what libraries came to look like. Was he aware that a domed building symbolized the universal nature of knowledge and that Oxford’s Radcliffe Camera was based on Wolfenbuttel’s library design? He knew none of these things.
“That’s most interesting,” Freddie said tactfully, “but I was wondering how Duke August arranged his books.”
The librarian warmed to the question. The Augusteer Collection
consisted of nineteen different categories covering every known university discipline plus a miscellaneous category called Quodlibetica which had its own card index. He liked the sound of that.
Flicking through the cards he reached the letter C. Would a Bacon treatise be filed as a codex, a concord or a confession? There was no mention of a codex and the other two were spelled differently in German and would come under E and K. But he had more luck with the letter D. Here he found Das Schach-oder Konig-Spiel, Chess or the King’s Game, a book written by Gustavus Selenus. The pseudonym Duke August had adopted in authoring his cipher manual!
To retrieve the volume a young assistant had to scale an incredibly long ladder and, at first glance, the book didn’t seem worth her effort. It was a fairly mundane German translation of the chess classic written by the Spanish monk Ruy Lopez.
And then he saw it. An engraving of a contemporary game of chess in which two well-dressed players were sitting on opposite sides of a refectory table with a chess board between them while, at the far end of the table, a third figure watched their game, wine glass in hand. Like the players, the avuncular spectator wore breeches and a stiff linen-lined doublet and was the spitting image of Duke August.
Alarm bells rang in Freddie’s head but he couldn’t think why at first. Then his brain caught up with his instinct and he rushed out of the library without a word.
Heike Mittler was in the middle of a staff meeting when Freddie burst into her office waving a book in the air. “I’m awfully sorry to barge in on you like this but can I visit your storeroom?”
It was a bizarre request and he could see she was losing patience with him.
“I’m pretty sure I k-know where the Bacon codex is,” he stammered.
“Oh, really, and where would that be?”
“It’s in the gaming box on the refectory table.”
The Assistant Director gave him a long, hard look as if deciding how to classify him. L for lunatic seemed a front runner.
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight, Dr Brett,” she said, unable to keep the irony out of her voice. “You are seriously suggesting that Duke August hid a tract belonging to Lord Bacon in a gaming box that’s in our cellar. And how did this revelation come to you, may I ask?”
Freddie went red. He knew she was mocking him. “Through this book,” he replied.
The senior librarian sighed, took a bunch of keys out of a desk drawer and led the way to the storeroom. Unlocking the door and switching on an overhead light, she turned to him for further guidance.
He showed her the engraving in the chess book. “The trestle table over there is just like the one in the picture. They both have baluster legs and low circumferential stretchers. And look at this Venetian gaming box. It could have come out of the Embriachi workshop.”
The box was of ebony with inlaid walnut and rosewood squares and its side panels featured raised figures carved out of bone and horn. Heike Mittler’s tapered fingers explored a carved panel in the gaming box’s embossed surface.
“There’s something here,” she said softly. “It feels like a catch or a hinge.”
The box opened with an audible click to reveal a velvet-lined drawer in which checkers and dice were stored alongside a set of incredibly slender bone chess pieces with stacked floral crowns.
Freddie held a black knight up to the light and saw how its glossy stem was surmounted by a flat stylized horse. “These are very collectible. They are called the Selenus Set. There’s an illustration of the design in this book. I’m no expert but an original set must be worth at least ten thousand euros.”
Heike Mittler’s face glowed with pleasure as she contemplated this unexpected windfall. “What a find and we’ve got you to thank for it, Dr Brett. But I’m afraid there’s no codex in this drawer.”
“No, that would warrant a separate compartment.” He stared at the box, deep in thought, pushing and prodding each of its raised side panels before coming to a conclusion. “With your permission, Frau Mittler, I’d like to set up the pieces for a game. Perhaps you will play black.”
“But I don’t play chess.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll show you what to do.”
He arranged the pieces on the board and made the opening move. “In chess notation the squares are given letters, ‘a’ to ‘h’, left to right on the board. I’ve begun pawn to e4 and I want you to reply pawn to e5. I play knight to f3. Black mirrors the move by going knight to c6.”
“Why are we doing this?” she wanted to know.
“Oh, I’m playing Ruy Lopez’s famous opening. It’s featured in August’s book. The next move is the crucial one. It defines the game. Let’s see if anything happens.”
He moved his bishop to b5 and waited, more in hope than expectation. The room fell silent. Outside he could hear the distant rumble of thunder. But now there was a new noise, a scraping sound within the box. A drawer sprang out.
Freddie could hardly bear to look.
The compartment was empty apart from a scruffy piece of parchment that might have been used as lining paper. He took it out of the box and as he did so there was a loud gasp from the librarian.
“There’s some writing on the reverse side,” she told him.
It was an alphanumeric cipher. 13c5Kb813a6Ka82c6.
He tried to appear unruffled. “This is a stepping stone. The mixed cipher will tell us what to do next. That’s if we can work it out.” How he wished Sam was here. She was the cipher expert, not him.
“I best get started.” He took a biro and a notepad out of his jacket pocket and began the laborious business of converting numbers into letters.
Watching him work, she couldn’t control her curiosity. “Why did a picture in a book make you think the codex was in this gaming box?”
Freddie put down his ballpoint, grateful for the distraction. “How familiar are you with the theory of association.” He explained the theory’s key principles were similarity, contiguity and contrast. On studying the engraving he had been struck by the similarity between the refectory table it depicted and the one in the library storeroom. Add to this the proximity of an onlooker who resembled Duke August and the contrast between the illustrated chess board and the gaming box downstairs.
That had set him thinking. Early gaming boxes provided playing surfaces for a variety of pastimes – chess, draughts, backgammon and nine men’s morris – and came with at least one drawer for the storage of pieces. However, some Venetian craftsmen had gone a stage further by adding mechanically operated concealed drawers as secret hiding places.
“I’ve seen one of these portable safes in the Ashmolean Museum,” he told her. “I also knew about Duke August’s love of symbols. The emblematic title page to his Cryptomenytices is a perfect example. Artists used emblems as visual shorthand in those days. Have you seen the Hatfield portrait of Queen Elizabeth in which her dress is embroidered with eyes and ears to signify vigilance? Well, chess has its own iconography. The game represents a battle of wits and the chess engraving in Selenus’ book is signed by a Flemish artist called Jacob van der Heyden who did a lot of work for the secret society to which August belonged. Van der Heyden specialized in Rosicrucian emblems like the seven-layered rose with the cross-shaped stem and he also painted Frederick Duke of Wurrtemberg to whom the first Rosicrucian manifesto was dedicated.”
The librarian was struggling to keep up. “I still don’t understand why Duke August would hide Bacon’s book in this box.”
“All right, let’s talk about your duke. As a young man August travels widely, sets up a European-wide network of agents to purchase books, is a prime mover in the Rosicrucian uprising in Germany and later succeeds to the dukedom of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, inheriting its library in the process. But there’s a major problem. Its 1635 and there’s a war going on. Wolfenbuttel is garrisoned by imperial troops. Although he can’t get into his palace, August is allowed to take possession of his library, moving his book collection there in barrels. But he’s not pre
pared to entrust his late friend’s highly sensitive treatise to a barrel or, indeed, to carry it on his person. Far better, he thinks, to smuggle Bacon’s codex into the building by hiding it in his Venetian gaming box. That’s my theory. Do you think I’m absolutely mad?”
Heike Mittler thought about this for a moment. “There’s a kind of insane logic to it,” she admitted. “You seem to know more about the duke’s history than I do.”
“It’s just a trick. I remember everything I read. It’s called an eidetic memory.”
“You have total recall?” she looked at him in wide-eyed amazement.
But his mind was elsewhere. “Surely it’s not that simple. The thirteenth letter in the alphabet used to be N and N is the notation for a knight in chess. K could stand for the king while the second letter in the alphabet is B for bishop. Of course! This is the classic endgame in which a knight and a bishop mate the king in three moves. Let’s see what happens when we play it out on this board.”
Freddie’s hand snaked out. Two knight moves forced the king to a8 before the bishop administered the coup de grace by moving to c6. There was a loud rasping noise and another concealed container appeared. He hooked his fingers into a groove beneath the drawer and pulled. It slid out half way, emitting a faint musty smell. Four hundred years of controversy would soon be resolved.
But there was nothing there.
No, he was wrong.
At the very back of the partition, in what seemed to be a recess, his fingers brushed against something that was rough to the touch. He forced the drawer out further to get a better look.
It was a sheet of coarse paper on which one word had been written in brown ink.
Schachmatt. Checkmate in German!
He stood over the drawer, frozen in disbelief. It was as if his body had turned to stone. He had come to Germany on what Simon had rightly called a fool’s errant and, against all the odds, he had found what he imagined to be the treatise’s secret hiding place, yet all he had to show for it was this mocking reference.
He felt the librarian’s hand on his sleeve. “I am terribly sorry,” she whispered. “Someone seems to have beaten you to it.”