by Tom Pugh
He had been less discriminating on the bottom shelf of his bookcase, where old and new were jumbled together as if they meant nothing to their owner. Taken together, they amounted to a small collection of Apocalyptica. Durant saw the Apocalypsis Nova and the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of the Witches. He rolled his eyes at man’s enduring obsession with the end of the world.
With quick, practised fingers, he shook each book gently, before putting it back on the shelves. Nothing fell from between the pages.
It was getting dark. A tinderbox and tapers lay on the mantelpiece. Durant lit one of the thick, beeswax candles and leaned against the wall, contemplating the desk.
There was a knock. Durant crossed the room in three strides, pressing his ear to the door.
“Anders?” he called softly.
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
Durant set his weight against the door and turned the key. No blade whistled through the thin gap and he risked a look.
The servant stood in the empty corridor, pulling at the collar of his liveried tunic. “How much longer?” he asked. “If I’m caught, they’ll have my...”
Durant took hold of the man’s round cheek, twisting the soft flesh between long fingers.
“I have paid you generously and by God, you’ll earn your money,” Durant twisted again. “No more interruptions.”
He locked the door, closed his grey eyes and took a deep breath, not wanting to be infected by the servant’s impatience. He walked across the scented carpets to Tycho’s desk. The drop-down cover was sealed. Durant picked the lock with a bent nail and flicked through the drawers. There was nothing of interest – a few letters from Tycho’s mother, bills from the tailor.
Durant took a step back, tapping his lips. Tycho was young. His secrets were essentially a child’s secrets. Had he tried to lend them dignity by concealing them in a hidden compartment?
Durant removed the lower drawer. Nothing seemed suspicious, but he measured the depth with a ruler he found among Tycho’s collection of stationary and found a discrepancy. He discovered a slight depression, no bigger than his fingertip, pressed firmly and heard wooden springs give way. Durant slid the central section towards him, revealing a good-sized document box. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he arranged the contents on the carpet.
There were several small pieces of jewellery and a number of religious medallions. Some were made of gold, some set with precious stones, but most were worthless. The lawyer had told him Tycho was a magpie. The household was careful with its possessions when he was around.
Pushing the trinkets aside, Durant turned his attention to a series of luridly coloured prints. There were four in all, each showing a scene from the life of Saint Agnes. In the first, Agnes – naked, high-breasted, bleeding from a dozen cuts – was being dragged through the streets of Rome. Durant knew the story. The girl had spurned an offer of marriage. The old laws forbade the execution of virgins and the young suitor’s father, a Roman Prefect, had ordered her taken to a city brothel. The second print showed Agnes among prostitutes in various states of undress, looking on in horror as a young man clutched his eyes, struck blind for trying to deflower the virgin. In the third, a naked Agnes was tied to a stake, tall flames refusing to consume her perfect body as she gazed to heaven. She wore the same ethereal expression in the final print, indifferent to the soldier stabbing her in the throat. Durant stared at the images. There was something compelling in the mixture of piety, pain and eroticism.
“Tycho,” he murmured, “I believe I’m beginning to like you.”
There was only one item left on the carpet. Durant unrolled a long sheet of parchment. Dear Tycho, he read, your mother and I are both well.
A letter between father and son on the surface, the Lübeck lawyer had said, with Latin text beneath. Secrets bequeathed from one generation to the next.
Durant pinched the material between his fingertips. The parchment was brilliantly white, without bump or imperfection, uterine vellum from the skin of an aborted calf. It was a fantastically expensive material for such mundane correspondence. He held it up to the window and saw the shadow of a second text. Memmiadae Lucretius salutem…
Lucretius sends greetings to Memmius. Durant’s breath grew short. He knew true Latin when he saw it, unlike the Church’s bastard version, but it wasn’t only the vintage that made his hands tremble with excitement; it was the flavour. Durant recognised the diction, knew the odd, rhetorical flourishes.
Sixteen hundred years ago, Memmius had been Lucretius’s patron. This letter wasn’t the original, of course. Almost nothing from that period survived, except in copies made by semi-literate monks. Durant’s fingers went to his chest, touching the small book he wore like a guardian angel beneath his doublet – Lucretius’ famous poem, On the Nature of Things – rediscovered during the last century and immediately condemned by the Pope’s censors as “a lascivious and wicked work”. Durant had chanced upon a copy printed illegally by the Otiosi. The Church claimed just reading it would see his soul condemned to damnation, but the poem had provided solace when his wife and parents were taken from him by plague. It had provided arguments in his battles with the doctrinaire professors at the medical faculty in Montpellier, and a reason to go on living when his daughter disappeared.
Tycho’s letter transported Durant from Tosterup Castle to the Roman countryside. He could almost see Lucretius, sitting comfortably in the sunshine, writing to thank his patron for a recent weekend party. As the poet’s letter moved from compliment, to insight, to the conclusion of a story, Durant had the sense of eavesdropping on a more civilized world; a company of friends, seeking answers to life’s questions in observation and reason. So different from today, when people believed the Devil lurked behind every misfortune and plotted a course through life according to the flight of birds or the turn of a card.
As I told you, the man who approached me in Rome was nondescript, almost deliberately so, and demanded I provide him with the complete works of Epicurus for inclusion in something he described, with admirable seriousness, as The Devil’s Library.
Durant stopped reading. Lucretius’ great poem, along with the rediscovery of Plato, had inspired the intellectual daring of Cosimo de Medici and Copernicus, of Vesalius and Columbus. But Lucretius was the disciple, his poem only a hymn of praise. Not a single work by Epicurus had ever been found. Durant thought of what had already been achieved – advances in science and medicine, voyages of discovery. What further marvels might occur if the Master’s works were rediscovered?
A sharp tap at the door. Durant had already stayed too long. He rolled the parchment, tucking it deep in the folds of his doublet, took one last look around the austere room, and hesitated. He had the measure of this young man; the apocalyptic texts, stolen keepsakes, the hidden compartment. Tycho was lonely and secretive, too clever for his own good, waiting for life to begin, and Durant was about to deprive him of his most treasured possession. He sat down at the desk and found a sheet of paper. What would console this boy for the loss of his palimpsest? Durant had to hurry. He scribbled furiously, penning a short letter, which he left in Tycho’s secret drawer.
My Dear Tycho,
Prayer cannot alter destiny. Good works cannot alter a fate determined even before the act of creation.
My Son, God has spoken, and named you as a fellow member of the Elect. Listen for me, for I shall come to you on the wind and together we will do God’s work, and lay waste the high and mighty and scour the earth of hypocrites, so that the calf and the lion cub may feed together.
And when our work is done, those of us who remain will live on God’s Holy Mountain, and know neither harm nor hurt. For we shall be filled with the knowledge of God, as water fills the sea.
Until that day, rest assured that I will guard your letter with my life,
Your friend in God,
G
*
Return to Lübeck and deliver the palim
psest at once. Durant had no difficulty following the first of the lawyer’s instructions, boarding a trading cog to make the short crossing from Malmo. He read the palimpsest a dozen times, sheltered behind the crates on deck. Then the light went and nothing remained on the paper but Tycho’s letter from his father.
Durant lay on the hard boards and stared up at the stars. He still remembered the first time he’d opened his own modest copy of Lucretius’s epic poem, reeling from the death of his wife, subject to daily attacks of sweating and breathlessness. The priests had been worse than useless with their stories of punishment and retribution, urging him to cherish his grief as evidence of what he’d be spared in the life to come.
Lucretius’ poem had warmed Durant like the dawn of a new day. Beautiful words, surpassed only by the beauty of the ideas.
And I insist on the testimony of the senses, against all other claims of authority. And I will work by the light of this testimony towards an understanding of the hidden structure of things.
Durant could think of no better description for the wave of new thought breaking across the continent. How, then, to account for Lucretius’ sudden descent into the sort of slippery riddles beloved of charlatans and doomsayers? What did the poet mean, when he declared in his letter to Memmius that "the shining sun does never look upon them, but the moon shows them the way, and we, by Jupiter’s leave and damning Ptolemy’s eyes, journey with them into Hell"?
Durant shook his head. The verses were clumsy, sensationalist; a far cry from the unrhymed, six-beat lines in which Lucretius cast his poetry. And what was the meaning of the word, VITRIOL, repeated three times, and always in capitals?
And what was the meaning of the short anecdote – the stranger who’d approached Lucretius in Rome. To my own surprise, I agreed to provide him with the complete works of Epicurus for his library. And then the story finished. Elsewhere, Lucretius described the glories of his patron’s table, the warmth of the sun on his back, the changes wrought by illness on the face of a mutual friend. He was a poet, a storyteller. Where were his descriptions of the mysterious librarian who wanted the works of Epicurus for something he called – with admirable seriousness – the Devil’s Library?
A Riddle? The more Durant thought about it, the more convinced he became – Lucretius had encoded the location of this secret library in the text of his letter to Memmius. He couldn’t begin to guess at the true meaning – couldn’t even conceive of which questions to ask – but if anyone could, then surely the man who sought it…
Durant shook his head. Could such a Library possibly still exist; the complete works of Epicurus, and God alone knew what else?
It was late afternoon when the cog bumped gently against the quay. Durant said farewell to the captain and marched down the gangplank. The guards at the dock asked him to recite the Freeman’s Oath. He rattled it off absentmindedly, so lost in thought that the crowds in Breite Strasse came as a surprise. He turned smartly aside, narrowly avoiding an over-burdened servant. Mathern Schoff’s fine townhouse lay nearby. Durant had not liked the lawyer, and found he couldn’t yet bring himself to place such a priceless document in his hands.
He returned to his rooms in Lübeck’s third best inn, by the landlady’s own reckoning, to wash and eat, putting off the moment when he would have to part with the palimpsest. He untied the drawstrings of his heavy pack, looking for fresh clothes among the various boxes and bags. The strips of silk on his Coat of Seven Colours caught the light. Durant sank into an armchair. The young doctor who’d treated his wife had worn it as protection against the plague, and stayed with his patient long after the priests and servants had fled, pulling at the damp collar in fear and helplessness, but doing everything he could to alleviate her pain.
Durant had been a different man in those days, still believing it might be possible to fashion meaning from tragedy. Inspired by the doctor’s courage and infuriated by his ignorance, he had taken his young daughter to Montpellier and enrolled as a student in the Faculty of Medicine. For seven years, he’d listened to the learned professors in their high pulpits, read everything in the university library, and paid precious little attention to Laure. Until the day she disappeared.
Restlessly, Durant rose to his feet and pulled on a clean black doublet. It was dark outside – too late to visit Mathern Schoff – but he knew he wouldn’t sleep and had no desire to spend the night tossing and turning on the ill-slung mattress. He crept downstairs and let himself out through the back door. It was already past the hour of curfew, but he lit no torch to show he was abroad on legitimate business. Instead, he closed his black doublet to hide the white shirt and took his chances with the watch.
The tramp of heavy feet sounded in the distance. Constables pursuing some criminal or troublemaker, moving with the ease of men born to Lübeck’s ways. Durant paused to listen for the rumble of chains. In a moment, the guardsmen would wind them from the drums on every corner, to block the streets and trap their prey. There.
Durant smiled; pleased to think he had the measure of this place. Once, Lübeck had been the centre of a mighty League of German trading cities. Now, they couldn’t even keep Livonia safe or stop the English from trading directly with Muscovy. Profits were down, wages were falling and confidence was low.
The chains shook the townsfolk from their beds. Windows swung open and men leaned out, dutifully lighting the torches mounted on the sides of their homes. Durant stepped into deep shadow and waited for Lübeck to grow quiet.
His daughter had been twelve when she disappeared. Coming home from the university one evening, Durant had walked into her room to say goodnight. An empty bed, nothing missing from the wardrobe, no sign of a struggle. He’d scoured Montpellier for weeks, interrogating her friends and hounding strangers. Then he’d expanded the search. For months, he’d accused innocent villagers of unnatural crimes, and paid the landless men who lived in the hills for scraps of information. Eventually, rumour and desperation took him to Marseille. He’d been drifting from city to city ever since, asking questions, deliberately risking his life for the Otiosi and spending too many of his nights in gambling dens.
For the first time in years, Durant closed his eyes and pictured his daughter. She’d had her mother’s eyes, his pale complexion and high cheekbones. The girl in his imagination smiled. Durant thought of the secret library, filled with the promise of a better life for others. He thought of the sour-faced lawyer who’d sent him to Denmark, and knew he couldn’t simply hand over the palimpsest.
CHAPTER 8
Florence, February 7th, 1562
Giacomo Vescosi was tall with a narrow frame and soft paunch. Past fifty, his shoulders were bowed from long hours spent poring over manuscripts and the once fine head of hair had receded to a pair of grey tufts, poking up behind each ear.
As a young man, he’d inherited a fine house overlooking the Piazza della Signoria, and enough capital to save him from the necessity of earning a living. The people of Florence knew him as an eccentric scholar, lucky enough to live from the achievements of his forebears, while most members of the once proud family were forced to work as small traders and clerks.
The door of the scriptorium banged open. Vescosi looked up from his work. Aurélie’s cheeks were flushed with suppressed rage, blue eyes ablaze with indignation.
Vescosi set down his quill. “I see you’ve heard.”
The Church had passed an edict, threatening booksellers with excommunication if they failed to provide lists of their customers’ purchases. Written in the Pope’s name, it was no secret this was Gregorio Spina’s work. The Master of the Sacred Palace had made it clear that sufficient resources would be made available to ensure compliance.
Aurélie pushed a lock of blond hair out of her eyes. “I know you’re trying to protect me, Giacomo, but enough is enough. Why go to the trouble of educating me, only to shut me out of the most important part of your life?”
“What do you think you know?”
She stepped into t
he room, eyes roaming over the bookshelves and glass-fronted vitrines. “Twenty years ago you founded a society known as the Otiosi, dedicated to printing and distributing books banned by the Pope’s censors,” she grinned; it was clear she’d waited a long time to deliver this speech. “You acquire these works via a network of clerks and scribes, and distribute them through sympathetic merchants. The Otiosi’s main printing press is in Strasbourg, but I suspect there are others; in locations where high-ranking noblemen are able to provide discreet protection.”
Vescosi rocked on his heels. How in God’s name… It was like witchcraft. “Twenty years?” he snapped. “How do you arrive at that figure?”
She had the cheek to laugh. “It would have taken something powerful to tear you away from your books.”
He scowled, to mask his curiosity. “Well?”
“The Indices Librorum Prohibitorum. Lists of banned books appearing in cities throughout Europe; that was the catalyst.”
She smiled in triumph. Vescosi’s expression must have betrayed him. He attempted to scoff. “And you claim I founded this cabal of do-gooders? How do you suppose I built this continent-wide network of clerks, scribes, merchant and noblemen?” He ticked them off on his fingers.
Aurélie’s blue eyes turned hard and flat. “Don’t treat me like a delusional girl,” she took a deep breath. “Ten years ago you saved my life, when you rescued me from marriage. Now I’m asking you to give it meaning.”
Vescosi could only admire the art in her appeal. No one would have her for a wife, not anymore. He’d seen to that when he agreed to take her in, perhaps even earlier when he’d taught her to read. Aurélie’s father was a distant cousin, driven to distraction by the girl’s endless questions. Vescosi still remembered how the man had framed his proposal. She’ll make a good match one day, if you’ll only cure the cleverness. And she’ll be company for you, all alone in this big house.