by Clio Gray
‘The old Lynx Library was split early doors after Federico Cesi died,’ he said, ‘a small part to Ireland, a small part to Deventer, most going the Albani collection that’s ended up in Paris, brought back from Italy by Napoleon, and that last part’s due up for auction any time now.’
Maybe already gone, he was thinking, which would make all of this moot.
‘And?’ Greta prompted.
‘And,’ Ruan went on, injecting as much tedium into his words as he could, ‘everyone knows France is full of mad revolutionaries who don’t know the difference between the Scots and the English, and so Golo needed some good will on his side, hit on the idea of sending an Irishman in his place.’
‘Wolfe Tone?’ Greta asked quickly, sounding interested.
‘No,’ Ruan answered, surprised, never having heard that name, looking hard at Greta. ‘That wasn’t it. It was the man who had the Irish bit of the library. He’d agreed to be their agent at the auction in Paris. That’s why Fergus was sent to Ireland, first to make sure his collection really had come from the Lynx, second to make sure he wasn’t mad as the rest of them. Took my ring with him as down-payment,’ he muttered, before adding what he’d only recently learned. ‘No one realised the whole place was being hacked to bits in the middle of some stupid war.’
Greta’s intake of breath was audible.
‘Some stupid war?’ she said slowly, her voice sharpened to such a point Ruan could feel it almost physically digging into his flesh.
‘Well,’ he blustered. ‘I didn’t mean that exactly…I just meant we didn’t realise how bad it was, all that stuff in Ireland.’
Greta jumped to her feet and would have throttled Ruan there and then had not Joachim stood up behind her and pinned her by the elbows to keep her back. Hendrik hadn’t said a word throughout this brief exchange, but when Joachim stood up he saw the second red splotch of blood at Joachim’s back, heard the creaking of his ribs and intervened.
‘Enough!’ his voice was hoarse but loud enough to make everyone stop moving, all except Isaac who came out of his room to make sure everything was alright. That everything was not alright was obvious and for a moment Isaac dithered, but withdrew almost immediately on seeing the look on Hendrik Grimalkin’s face which meant Hendrik was out of whatever tunnel he’d been in and back to himself again. Enough for Isaac, who retreated to the safety of his eye-spy room and left them to it.
‘Let’s concentrate on the salient facts here,’ Hendrik said.
‘And Ireland is not one of them?’ Greta spat, thinking of the men who’d already died, and more of them dying maybe this vey minute.
‘Of course it’s important, Greta,’ Hendrik said, his voice back to calm waters. ‘But it’s more important at this moment that we figure out what is going on here, how it all ties together, and I think I have some of it at least, if everyone will sit down again.’
Greta subsided, as did Joachim, his face grimacing with the pain of having moved so quickly, a look that did not pass Hendrik by. He was going to have to come to terms with Joachim being his father and Joachim having turned into someone else, but that time was not now.
‘I have a theory I would like to put to you all,’ Hendrik said, once order was re-established. ‘Ruan, you said early doors that Golo was murdered whilst on board the Collybuckie.’
‘I never said that,’ Ruan replied, grumpy and disgruntled. ‘I said that was what George Gwilt told me.’
Joachim was about to speak on George’s behalf but a swift glance from Hendrik stopped him, Joachim never been so in awe of his son: authority in every measured movement. He’d have made a great Abbot if he’d been so inclined.
‘Let’s take it George was right,’ Hendrik went on. ‘Let’s take it that someone tried to stop you getting on the Collybuckie, but by good fortune you got on it anyway and then, by bad fortune, you were caught up in a storm and someone took advantage of it.’
‘I looked for him,’ Caro piped up quietly. ‘He didn’t like being down under didn’t Golo, being with loads of other people, especially not with it being so dark and the boat turning somersaults.’
Hendrik turned towards Caro and placed a finger beneath Caro’s chin, lifting it so the boy had to look at him.
‘So you saw Golo, during the storm?’
‘I did and then I didn’t,’ Caro replied, such misery and regret in his voice that Greta moved her hand and laid it on the boy’s shoulder, understanding how it was to know someone was in trouble and not be able to help them.
‘I tried to find him,’ Caro whispered. ‘I knew he would be out there on deck. We all did. He hated being under. But all the lamps had blown out by then and I was only up a few minutes when I was suddenly over the side and in the water, and would’ve drowned if Mr Peat hadn’t hauled me in.’
Hendrik blinked, partly for the bleakness of Caro’s description of his last moments on the Collybuckie, spent in his desperate search for Golo Eck in the middle of a storm, partly because it seemed that Ruan had for once done something good for someone other than himself.
‘And then you landed up at the Servants,’ Hendrik stated, Caro nodding.
‘I wasn’t there very long,’ he said. ‘Had to take one of the passengers to Middelburg on account of him not knowing the lay of the land. You remember Signor Ducetti, Mr Ruan? I mean, who wouldn’t? Fat as a giant dormouse he was, and we both dragged him onto the raft, remember?’
Ruan nodded. Of course he remembered. The man had been an arse of the first order, hardly let up talking the whole time they were plunging in and out of waves the size of houses, but Ruan had to admit he’d kept them all going with his inane banter, his ability to laugh at his own stories, making them chortle with him like madmen, hysterical with their fear and the fact that someone could carry on a non-stop stream of anecdotes despite the fact – or maybe because of it – that at any moment the lot of them might be upturned into the churning waters and never seen again.
‘Ducetti,’ Hendrik repeated quietly, ‘and you’re both absolutely sure that was his name?’
‘Of course,’ Caro and Ruan answered in the same moment, looking at Hendrik, seeing the sudden darkness on his face.
‘And I saw him on my way back from Arnhem,’ Caro added. ‘I almost forgot to say. I saw him on… my…way…back…’
Caro’s voice slowed, halted, came to a stop, cheeks going red and then white and then green as he tilted off his chair and threw up on the floor beside him, the rest of him following so he was on his hands and knees like a dog that has swallowed a bone the wrong way. Greta was off her seat and down beside him, heedless of the thin string of vomit that was coming from the boy’s mouth, and the rest of it into which she knelt.
‘What is it, Caro?’ she said, gently as she could, patting a hand on Caro’s back as he coughed and retched, coughed and retched.
‘Kept me from the barge,’ Caro hiccupped. ‘Kept me at the inn overnight. Got me to tell him all we’d been doing…in Deventer… oh my Christ Saviour…’
He retched again before he could get any more words out because, just like Hendrik, his lines of comprehension had suddenly crossed and he understood.
‘I told him!’ Caro wailed, the sound of a fox in pain in the middle of a dark night in the middle of nowhere and with nowhere to turn. ‘And he kept me there! He told me! He told me he was repaying me a favour and I never understood!’
There was no consoling Caro, who fled the company and flung himself onto the green ocean of leather sofa where Hendrik had spent his grieving hours.
Greta got to her feet.
‘I can’t understand why he’s so upset,’ she said.
‘I can,’ Hendrik said grimly, ‘and I think Ruan might be able to provide some answers, if he’s a brain in his skull worth tapping into.’
It was a cheap shot, Hendrik regretting the words immediately, but Ruan didn’t react because he too was beginning to see a pattern: Ducetti on the raft telling them of his great trading feats in Italy and A
msterdam and how he and his nephews had been in Port Glasgow to set up yet another shop, how there was just the scrape of a possibility they could have been the cause of the falling boulders and the holing of the ferry. What he couldn’t understand was the why of it, how Golo could possibly have been any threat to them. And why set Hendrik’s house on fire?
He could see how Ducetti could easily have talked Caro so casually into spilling out the details of how they spent their days in Deventer – Ducetti being a man who could talk the guts out of a dying donkey – and was aware that had it been a normal day they would all have been in the house at the time the fire had started, having just partaken of Louisa’s lunch. The only reason it hadn’t been a normal day was precisely because Caro wasn’t there to do her bidding.
Usually he would have ferreted Hendrik from the library in time, come looking for Ruan too, who was normally to be found mooching about the Brink, visiting various pawnbrokers and jewellers trying to ascertain what he could get for his ring if he had to sell it, maybe dropping into the Golden Globe or one of the other taverns scattered liberally about the square, spending a precious coin from his fast diminishing supply on a drop or two of ale.
‘Ruan?’ Hendrik prompted, and Ruan let out a breath, irritated by Hendrik treating him like a student he was coaxing towards the answer to a logic problem.
‘I get it,’ he said sharply. ‘The Ducettis, big store owners. Italy, Amsterdam, Glasgow. I get they might possibly have had opportunity, I simply don’t get the why.’
‘Store owners?’ Greta asked. ‘What kind of store?’
‘What the hell does that matter?’ Ruan shot back.
Greta shrugged. ‘All grist to the mill.’
‘Importing artefacts and armaments, I think,’ Ruan complied testily.
‘What kind of armaments?’ Joachim’s turn to ask a question.
‘Oh for God’s sake!’ Ruan snapped. ‘How the hell am I supposed to know? Crossbows, daggers, hunting gear, that kind of thing, from what I remember the man saying while we were being tossed about like a bad salad on a raft that was damn near breaking up in the middle of a God Almighty storm!’
Hendrik looked at Joachim, who had closed his eyes briefly. Store owners who sold armaments, store owners who would be obliged to demonstrate their goods; assistants, sons or nephews young and nimble enough to climb trees and let off arrows…
‘But why?’ Great asked, unconsciously echoing Ruan’s earlier question. ‘Why any of it?’
Hendrik did not answer, instead started going through the documents again; now he knew what he was looking for his eyes flicked and filtered, his paper-fluent fingers fluttering through the mass until he found what had previously eluded him.
‘Because,’ he said, holding up a sheaf of documents, ‘of these.’
36
STARS ALIGN
‘What are they?’ Greta and Ruan asked in unison, exchanging angry glances with one another to have spoken the same question in the exact same words at the exact same time.
‘They’re letters,’ Hendrik said, ‘written from the Lynx to the Master of this library who was of their ranks. And they’re an explanation of sorts, the first informing him of the death of Federico Cesi…’
‘Frederick whosit?’ Greta interrupted.
‘The founder of the Academy of the Lynx,’ Ruan answered, as much to his own surprise as everyone else’s. A knee jerk reaction. All that information drummed into him over the years that he’d hardly paid attention to and yet there it was, taking up valuable space in his head that he would have preferred it would vacate for facts more important.
‘Go on,’ Hendrik said, and Ruan did, parroting out the words he’d been taught.
‘First scientific academy in Europe,’ he said. ‘Federico Cesi, Francesco Stelluti, Johannes Eck, Anastasio de Filiis and Walter Peat. Founded August 17th 1603, met on Christmas Eve later that year to establish their constitution: Eck the Master, Cesi, Stelluti and Peat chief counsellors, de Filiis the secretary. One for all and all for the Lynx, the all-seeing eye; their aim to study nature in all its component parts, figure out why the world is as it is and what makes it tick.’
Greta raised her eyebrows and looked at Ruan with curiosity; not such an empty vessel after all then, though obviously he went to great lengths to hide it.
‘All got secret names and emblems,’ Ruan went on, flinging his two rings out upon the table. ‘Look here. First one’s Golo’s, from his ancestor Johannes Eck – L’Illuminato – a moon at quarter lit by the sun; second is mine, from Walter – Il Petrogradia – emblem: the stone circle at Kilmartin and the rising sun.’
‘So the ring I brought with me really belongs to you?’ Greta asked, understanding now why Ruan had snatched it up the moment she’d produced it, wondering why he’d not said anything about it at the time, wondering when was going to be a good time to tell him that Fergus was most likely dead. Ruan sighed.
‘That’s what I’m telling you. All great pals, those five men, stuck together their whole lives through, even after Cesi’s bastard father had the lot of them kicked out of Rome on charges of heresy and Eck formally exiled for trying to convert Federico to Protestantism which was ridiculous, considering he was a rabid Catholic, which is why he left Deventer in the first place. But it was never forgotten that Cesi and his pals had Johannes Eck sprung from prison, where he was serving out a sentence for beating to death his apothecary over some dispute or other. Not to mention the fact that the other four were a few years older than Federico and there were hints of more than brotherly love going the rounds.’
Ruan took a breath, unaware of the stunned silence into which he had poured his words.
‘What then?’ Hendrik asked. He knew a fair amount about the Lynx from his burrowing through the archives for the last few weeks, but the way Ruan spoke was so un-academic, so immediate, it made it all very real.
‘What’s to say?’ Ruan answered. ‘The others scattered over Italy, except for Eck who always had itchy feet. He went barging off across the whole of Europe to drum up support for the Academy. Came back to Deventer briefly, but was exiled again for being too Catholic. Went to Scotland with Walter, who tickled him pink by taking him to Loch Eck, loving symbolism and symmetry like they all did, not that there’s any connection with the name. Gaelic one side, Dutch the other, but enough to make Johannes build a house there. Golo’s house.’
My house now, the thought flashed through his head, not that he ever wanted to see it again.
‘All small stuff so far,’ Ruan went on, ‘and they carried on publishing, including some by Johannes Eck, like his pamphlet on the Nova of 1604 and his fever book…’
‘My God!’ Joachim interjected. ‘But I know that work! On the Plague, and why it has particularly spread through the Low Countries, and how to treat it. I used it to treat you, Ruan. It’s my medical bible, so to speak. The author being Johannes Heckius of Deventer, Lincean Knight, though I never understood what that meant before.’
He took a couple of deep breaths to steady himself. In went the woodcutter and out again. From darkness into light. Symbolism and symmetry. Ruan had hit it bang on the head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Please go on, I didn’t mean to interrupt, it’s just…’
Coincidences upon coincidences, as Greta might have said.
‘Well, like I said. Small potatoes,’ Ruan picked up the thread, ‘but then Galileo came to Rome to show off his telescope, and Federico and his pals threw a massive banquet for him, promised to publish his more controversial work, persuaded him to become a member, which he did. Fifth living member, because by then de Filiis was already dead.’
‘Why did you never tell me any of this before?’ Hendrik asked mildly. ‘You knew I was looking into the Lynx, carrying on where Golo left off…’
Ruan cast Hendrik a look and Hendrik let out a breath, understood, held up his hands, because of course Ruan wouldn’t have said anything, precisely because Hendrik was carrying on where Golo had left off and wa
nting nothing to do with it. Hendrik felt like pulling Ruan inside out to learn all else he knew. He had an idea how it could all have culminated in the fire on the Singel, but first he needed to get a few facts straight in his head, explain a few things yet unpuzzled out.
‘Thank you, Ruan,’ Hendrik said. ‘So before I say what I’m going to say, I need to emphasise just how important the Lynx were, despite the fact they’ve been subsumed by silence. Back then they did what hadn’t been done before; they were in the right place at the exact right time, and served to connect the greatest minds in Europe, from Scandinavia to Spain, mostly because of Golo’s ancestor, Johannes Eck. Including Galileo, as Ruan rightly said, who valued them highly enough to style himself a Lincaen Knight on all his correspondence and in the frontispieces of his books. They changed history in their way, and would have changed it far more if Cesi hadn’t died when he did.’
‘You mean The Dialogue,’ Ruan put in, with a small sigh. ‘Golo went on and on about that. About to publish Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems when Cesi kicked the bucket, all hold put on publication, his wife having better things to think about and all their six children dead in infancy, so no one to carry on the flame.’
Joachim grimaced to hear such tragedy spat out so flatly, but the young were young, after all, and scarcely understood such loss. He looked over at Hendrik, amazed all over again. Hendrik had no surviving children any more than Cesi had but, like Cesi before him, he had survived and thrived and made an extraordinary life for himself. Master of the Athenaeum of Deventer, no less.
‘Yes, Ruan, that’s what I mean,’ Hendrik said, unaware of his father’s scrutiny. ‘Because if Federico hadn’t died when he did then the Lynx would, in all likelihood, have obtained license to publish that particular work. Don’t forget that Cardinal Barberini was a member of the Lynx from the start, his whole family very well connected in the church, made a Pope in 1623: Urban VIII.’