Sacrilege (28 page)

Silently, though with obvious bad grace, Geoffrey rose from his seat and made his way without haste to one of the book stacks. I privately doubted whether the young man could find anything on those shelves, but I thanked the librarian and settled at a desk set in an alcove beneath one of the windows, which must once have held a statue when this old chapel was still used for worship. The assistant Geoffrey, who communicated only in monosyllables, made a slow search of the shelves and returned with a small pile of books, which he dropped heavily in front of me before resuming his own task, though I noticed he moved his books and papers to another desk from which he could usefully keep me in his line of sight. I nodded my thanks and began shuffling the volumes with the appearance of interest, wondering how soon I could leave for Langworth's house without seeming suspicious. The only sound in the empty library was the young canon's heavy breathing through his mouth and the scratching of his pen.

The first book on the pile was a bound manuscript bearing the title
Quadrilogus
, clearly of some antiquity, which on closer inspection proved to be a collection of more or less fantastical accounts of the life of Thomas Becket produced by various English and French monks three centuries earlier. Beneath it, the
Vita
of Robert of Cricklade, a twelfth-century life of the former archbishop. I sighed, flicking idly through the pages, feigning interest and offering an insipid smile to the young assistant whenever he glanced in my direction, which was more often than was strictly necessary. I reminded myself that the surest way to look suspicious was to behave as if I feared suspicion.

The air of the library was thick with the smell of dust and old paper--usually a smell I savoured, but today I felt stifled by it. A damp heat stuck my shirt to my back and inside my boot, the handle of my knife dug into my ankle. I wiped my forehead on my sleeve and leaned my head on my left hand, my elbow propped up on the table as I skimmed the book, feeling an unreasonable irritation clenching like a fist inside my chest. What on earth was I doing here, sneaking around as if I were a thief among men who at best distrusted and at worst hated me, tangling myself in two murders that had nothing to do with me, all for the sake of a woman? Ah, but was it really all for a woman, responded another, more cynical voice in the depths of my mind. Was it not more truthfully your own absurd tenacity, this voice continued, that same dogged refusal to back down that forced you to become a fugitive in your own country and an exile through Europe, living by your wits for the past eight years, because you had to prove that you knew more than everyone else? I pushed my hair off my face and gritted my teeth. Men have committed greater acts of folly than this for a woman before, I countered; in any case, was I not permitted a little licence? Every reckless or impulsive decision I had made in my life until now had been in the pursuit of knowledge. All through the years when other young men were risking their dignity or their lives fighting over women, I had dared everything for the sake of books I was forbidden to touch, in search of answers
to questions I had been told I should not ask. Surely now, at the age of thirty-six, I was allowed a little ordinary folly?

Yet, if I were completely honest, I thought, curling my lip as I watched the assistant librarian rummage absentmindedly in his ear with a forefinger and examine the result, my motives were not altogether selfless. If Sophia was cleared of murder, she stood to inherit all her late husband's property. She would have achieved her heart's greatest desire--independence. And you think she will share it with you, once she has it? cut in that same mocking voice. Marry you, so that you can stay in England, living off the profits of her first ill-fated marriage--is that what you hope for? You think she would win her independence and give it straight up again--knowing her opinion of men? Do you really imagine she sees you differently?

I clicked my tongue impatiently, causing the assistant librarian to jerk his head up with a hard stare in my direction. I had not confronted the possible end of this adventure so starkly until now, and it was a shock to acknowledge the truth of my own secret hopes. It was a life I had never dared imagine for myself, or desired, until now, because it seemed so far beyond the bounds of possibility: a wife, a home, a secure income, perhaps, in time, children. In Sophia I glimpsed the image of an entirely different future, and for the first time, I found it attracted me. Whether it would hold the same appeal for her was less certain.

Outside in the precincts the great bell swung into life, tolling the hour that signified the beginning of the chapter meeting. I flicked through another few pages, watching the young assistant Geoffrey, who had returned his attention to his work, his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth as he frowned in concentration. I was on the point of closing the book when I glanced down and one of the illustrations caught my eye. It was a plan of the cathedral, made at the time the first shrine was built. The crypt was clearly marked, as were all the chantry chapels that stuck out like fins either side of the vast body of the cathedral, as if it were some enormous sea creature. I peered closer; the treasury was not
marked--it must have been built later--but the chapel it adjoined was drawn and someone had marked in ink over the book's original plan a square shape with a dotted line, overlapping between the side chapel and the crypt. There were lines showing a staircase. Beside it, this unknown hand had written "sub-vault. Sometime prison." Was this another way into the crypt, from beneath the treasury? The map was old; I wondered how many people knew about the sub-vault.

I closed the book and pushed my chair back.

"Thank you for your help," I said to the assistant librarian, my voice sounding unnecessarily loud in the still air. "I'm afraid I must leave, but may I come back and read further tomorrow?" I indicated the pile of books; he gave a grunt that may or may not have been assent, and it was all I could do to keep myself from tearing down the stairs in my haste to get to Langworth's house.

There was no sign of anyone along the path that led around the north side of the cathedral--I guessed every canon was required to attend the meeting in the Chapter House--and I was able to approach the rear of the treasurer's house unobserved. The casement at the back still hung open on its hinges and again I squeezed myself uncomfortably through. This time it took only a matter of minutes to insert the blade of my knife into the lock of the door behind the tapestry in Langworth's chamber and turn the lock; to my great relief I could make out through the gloom the shape of the packet Langworth had tossed inside the room in his haste to answer the door to the dean earlier, meaning he had not been back since and therefore would not have discovered my theft. I left the door to the chamber open so that a thin light filtered through into the back room. As quickly and quietly as I could, I lifted the loose hearth tile, replaced the keys and the original letter from Mendoza in the engraved casket, and carefully turned its clasp again. My heart was pounding as I fitted the tile back into place, but I was flushed with a sense of triumph. Langworth would never know anyone had found his secret hiding place, even as my transcript of his letter was making its way to London. The canon treasurer was already on his guard against me, but my one advantage
over him was that he didn't know that I was aware of this. For as long as he felt it was in his interest to keep playing along with me, thinking he was the one with the upper hand, I could hope to gain more time. But what had he meant when he said to Samuel that he had an idea of how to keep me out of trouble, if need be? I froze, glancing at the door, my skin prickled with gooseflesh despite the heat, but there was no sound except my own breathing. Whatever Langworth had in mind for me, I would need to keep my eyes at my back at all times.

The brown paper packet he had thrown inside the room when he was interrupted lay where it had fallen. I knelt and gingerly picked it up at the corners between the tips of my fingers so as not to leave any tell-tale marks on the wrapping. Almost as soon as he heard news of Fitch's death, it seemed, he had hastened to the apothecary's shop in search of something. What could be so important that he feared it might be found?

I untwisted the paper and laid it open on the boards. Inside were two black pills, about the size of a gold angel coin and the thickness of my little finger. I lifted one; it was solid enough not to crumble between my fingers, and as I bent to sniff it I caught an odour that was familiar but I could not quite place. I closed my eyes and tried to push from my mind every pressing thought and anxiety, focusing only on allowing my memory to dredge the silt of years in search of the source of that recognition. I sniffed the black lozenge again and there flashed into my mind an image of the infirmary at San Domenico Maggiore, a workbench strewn with chopped herbs, the brother infirmarian with his hooked nose hunched over a glass jar containing some substance with this faint, musky scent...

"Laudanum." I whispered it aloud as the memory clicked into place, my voice immediately swallowed by the muffled silence. Laudanum--a remedy so powerful it was once considered to have magical properties, derived from the tears of the wild poppy. It was costly, certainly, but was that why Langworth had rushed to rescue it from the destruction of Fitch's shop? There were doubtless other valuable substances there too,
but he had gone specifically to bring back these two pills and hide them. I exhaled slowly, closed my eyes again, letting my memory feel its way.

I had learned a little of the uses of laudanum during my apprenticeship in the infirmary as a novice. The infirmarian had used it sparingly, because of the expense, but its effects were remarkable; given in a tincture with strong wine, it could temporarily dull pain and induce an intense sleep in which the patient appeared as good as dead. I recalled when one of the monks had fallen from a ladder while repairing a window in the monastery's great church and shattered his leg; the infirmarian had tried to set it, but infection had taken hold and to save the poor brother's life, it had been necessary to saw the leg off above the knee--an operation carried out with the man deep in the sleep of laudanum. As the infirmarian's assistant, I had been the one to hold the man steady on the table as his leg was removed; I recalled watching in disbelief as the blade bit deep into his flesh while he barely twitched in his sleep. Dangerous stuff, the infirmarian had told me brusquely, seeing my amazement. Brings as much pain as it takes away. The Portuguese traders to the east smoked it, for a deceptively brief pleasure, but it drove them mad with demonic dreams. The Arabs had used it in medicine for centuries, he had explained, and because of that the Church had banned its use, believing that any substance beloved of the infidels must be the work of the Devil. So the Inquisition had ensured that for the best part of two centuries laudanum had fallen out of use in Europe, and it was only at the beginning of our own century that physicians had rediscovered its properties, thanks to the writings of--

"
Paracelsus!
" I smiled to myself in the half-light, turning the fat pill over between my fingers. Of course--Paracelsus had brought it back from his travels in Arabia in just this form, supposedly hidden in the pommel of his sword. "Stones of Immortality," he called them, these black tablets made from laudanum, mixed with citrus juice and quintessence of gold.

I thought of the burned scrap of paper I had taken from Fitch's hearth. Paracelsus again. The apothecary's papers had been burned to conceal a
reference to Paracelsus, and now here was Langworth spiriting away laudanum pills which also spoke, at least obliquely, of the alchemist's work. What was the connection?

I wrapped the black pills back in their brown paper and sat for a moment in the shadows, thinking of Paracelsus. I had felt an affinity with the maverick Swiss alchemist since I first encountered his proscribed books as a young monk. I had admired the way he refused to content himself with the ideas of the past and had set out to overturn the lazy, narrow thinking of the academies, whose learning derived from tradition, not experiment. In the process he had acquired a reputation as a troublemaker and frequently found himself hounded out of the universities, accused of necromancy by those made fearful or jealous by his hunger for knowledge and his rebellious independence. Without consciously intending to follow in his footsteps, I had found myself repeating his experience half a century later, driven by (I liked to think) the same tenacious spirit of enquiry into the nature of this vast universe we inhabit.

Like me, Paracelsus had been fascinated by the secret wisdom and natural magic of Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian sage who was called the father of alchemy and natural magic. It was a lost manuscript of Hermes that I had followed from Italy to France to England and finally held in my hands for a moment last autumn, before Henry Howard had snatched it away. A book believed to contain the secret of man's divinity--a secret more powerful even than the philosopher's stone, which Paracelsus was supposed to have received from an Arabian adept in Constantinople. This was the book I dared to hope Howard might have entrusted to Langworth, via his nephew, to keep it from the eyes of the government searchers he knew would ransack his own houses for evidence of treason. And now here was Langworth hiding stones of laudanum, and William Fitch--or his murderer--burning recipes that spoke explicitly of Paracelsus. I pushed my hands through my hair, gripping clumps between my fingers, as if to press my brain into making the connections, but the sense of it all eluded me, swirling through my muddied thoughts.

Angry at myself, I left the parcel on the floor where Langworth had thrown it and concentrated on securing the secret room behind me. My fingers moved more deftly with my own knife and this time I succeeded in turning the lock. I climbed through the broken casement unobserved, at least as far as I could tell (those opaque windows of the building that backed on to Langworth's house seemed to bear down on me with accusatory stares, though I told myself not to be foolish). But as I was rounding the corner of the row of houses in sight of the cathedral once more, I almost collided with a black-robed figure heading in the opposite direction. I apologised, flustered, and looked up; to my surprise, it was not a cleric, as I had thought, but a woman.