The Book of Illumination (33 page)

Before our eyes, Father Quinn seemed to crumple into a much smaller and older version of himself. He closed his eyes and nodded.

I glanced around. The bishop wore a compassionate look of concern, and Sam looked panicky. Sylvia slid her chair over beside his and took his hand.

I sighed and glanced at Bishop Soares. “Should I go on?”

“Please,” he said.

I took a deep breath. “We’re in the presence of two monks. We think they died in Ireland in the twelfth century. We’re pretty sure they created the book that was stolen, and we think that book was the Book of Kildare.”

“You think,” said Bishop Soares. “If you’re able to speak to them, why don’t you know for sure?”

“Because,” I answered, “earthbound spirits are kind of stuck in the period of time in which they lived. And died. The monks are uncomfortable revealing information to me. They wanted to speak with a person from the Church.”

“All right. So, here I am. Speak, dear friends!” Bishop Soares glanced around the room, but of course he couldn’t see them. “Where are they?” he asked me.

“Over by that table,” I said, indicating a table by the far wall.

Bishop Soares stood up and crossed the room. He held out his hands. “Speak, brothers,” he said. The younger monk made a gesture of yielding to his superior; the abbot would speak for both of them.

I could tell that the old ghost hated to rely on me, being compelled to pause every sentence or two while I related his story to the people in the room, but we soon fell into a rhythm. Here is the story he told, just as he told it.

“Saint Brigid was my patroness; the monastery at the Church of the Oak—Cill-Dara—was our home. Welcomed the traveler did we, with ‘a clean house, a big fire, and a couch without sorrow.’
Lived we by the words of our grace before meals, to us come down through the ages from our saint of saints:

“Simple was our daily life, and clear were our tasks. From the hands of our brothers in God came parchment, from the breeding of the beasts with the lightest of fur, and the lightest of skins, beasts delivered, shorn of these skins, back to God their Creator in the month of the Feast of the Harvest, Lunasa. For one Bible, needed we the skins of hundreds of beasts: into His Kingdom may God welcome them, and so my brothers for the cleaning and the stretching of the skins.

“Ogham was our alphabet, but soon learned we the Latin and the Greek. A spell for the eye weaved we, letters of magic to sanctify the page as the flower sanctifies the meadow and the song of the bird the air.

“Nightly came the angel to my cell. In sleep, opened he my eye to the vision of the beauty of the Kingdom of God. By day held he my pen, flowing the lines of my ink, pressed by my brothers from the lees of the wine, and the rind of the pomegranate. With my pen wove this angel his spell from the tombs of Valley of the Boyne, the spell for the eye of no circle, but a spiral, of no line as is the line between the sky and land, but alone as the curve where wave meets sand.

“Then, by night, come the Vikings and with sword and fire consume our earthly shells. Fly our souls inland with the horse and, on his back, the devil, our ransacked book in his cape rudely wrapped. To this place, tonight, come we, shades of our earthly forms, as in the song of the psalmist, through a thousand years, which is as yesterday when it is past.

“For the fields of heaven long we. For the table of Saint Brigid long we. For the embrace of our Lord God long we. Yet stay we in the shadows of this earthly world until the will of Our Lord be done: to the abbey of Cill-Dara is returned its jewel.”

This was easier said than done. First of all, the abbey didn’t exist anymore. Bishop Soares stepped in at this point, assuring the ghosts that he would
personally
safeguard the manuscript’s journey, right into the hands of Pope Benedict XVI, if need be. This was all very well and good, an earnest promise if there ever was one, and one that visibly delighted the monks, but the fact remained that we didn’t actually have a book for the bishop to safeguard.

Then came the second worst news we’d had in the past ten
days: someone—a woman, we eventually figured out—had lately been coming into the bindery in the middle of the night and using a “flint” to remove individual pages from the book. By a process that resembled a game of charades, we managed to ascertain that a flint was the twelfth-century equivalent of a razor blade.

“Oh my God,” said Sam.

“What?” I asked.

“Oh no, nothing,” he said. “I’m just … taken aback that someone would … to a priceless manuscript like that.” He shook his head in dismay.

The bishop was due at an important dinner in less than an hour, so we thanked him profusely for coming, accepted a round of blessings, and made arrangements to keep in touch. As he reached for his coat and gathered his belongings, I pulled Father Quinn aside.

“I’m really sorry I sprung that on you.”

He nodded and shrugged.

“If you like, I could meet with you some day, alone. You could talk to her; I could help you.”

“I’m confused,” he said. “I never knew …”

“How could you? But she hasn’t crossed over for a reason, the reason being that she’s not at peace. I’m sure you want that for her.”

“It
was
my fault,” he said. “All these years, I—”

“When would you like me to come?” I asked.

And so it was agreed. He would call me in a couple of days and we would figure out a time and a place. In the meantime, I told him, he should speak to her.

“She can hear every word,” I said.

“You’re absolutely sure she’s there?” he whispered.

“I’m sure,” I said.

It was Amanda, Sam informed us. She was the one who was cutting up the book. There wasn’t a shred of doubt in his mind.

“What?” said Sylvia. “
Amanda?”

A wave of anger swept through me as I remembered that day in the bindery, how she had been checking me out over her precious little glasses. Wearing four-inch heels.

Sylvia turned to me. “Then why aren’t the ghosts hounding her?”

“Maybe they are, or trying to, at least,” I said. “Not everyone feels their presence. Besides, the manuscript’s been here in the bindery, with you, and before that, with Finny and you. You’re the person associated with the book.”

Sam looked on gravely. I glanced at the clock. It was seven twenty-two, and I really should have been on my way, in case there were delays on the T, but I sat tight. This was a story I had to hear.

“It’s not the first time,” he said, pacing sadly. Sylvia and I exchanged shocked glances as we waited for him to continue. He didn’t speak for a long time. Finally he stopped and looked up. With a tone of steely resolve in his voice, he said, “But it’s going to be the last.”

“Sam!” Sylvia said. “What do you know? Tell us!”

Sam took a deep breath, then sighed. He came back over and sat down.

“Two years ago,” he began, “I was at an antiquarian’s conference in Seattle. There are often two parts to these things, a symposium where people present papers and give talks, and a market, where dealers offer prints and books and such for sale. Anyway, I had some time on my hands, and I stopped by the booth of a well-known dealer, an English fellow who’s been in business for
decades. On the walls of his booth, obviously the showpieces of his current collection, were some stunning prints, gorgeously matted and framed.”

“For sale?” I asked.

Sam nodded, took a breath, and continued. “I recognized them! I was sure I had seen them before. There were eight in all. Four were maps, eighteenth-century maps of Japan and Indochina, and four were copper plates. A plate of the whole Celestial Planisphere, and one each of the constellations of April, May, and June.

“Now, this dealer’s not a fly-by-night guy. He’s been in business for … oh, probably forty years. He had to have a provenance on the prints, or he couldn’t have been asking the prices he was asking—people aren’t going to plunk down thousands, or in a couple of cases
tens
of thousands, of dollars if there’s a chance the prints are just reproductions and not first editions.

“Anyway, I chalked it up to my having spent too many years staring at books of prints, all the ones I worked on and too many others. But I couldn’t let it go. Where in the
world
had I seen them?

“One morning, a few weeks later, I woke up and I knew. It was like my brain had been searching my memory, day after day, and had suddenly come up with the answers. We
owned
the books that the prints were in! They were the property of the Athenaeum!

“I couldn’t wait to get to work. I came right in, didn’t have breakfast, didn’t even have coffee—just hopped on the T and got here as fast as I could. I knew exactly where the books were. And when I opened them, sure enough, the pages were gone. Removed with a razor blade.”

Sam broke off briefly, then repeated a version of his last sentence, to make sure we understood its importance. “The prints I’d seen framed on the walls of Cecil Kennedy’s booth had been
removed with a razor blade from valuable first editions owned by the Athenaeum.”

He broke off for a minute, shaking his head.

“I didn’t tell anyone. I closed the books and put them back on the shelves, went about my business as though nothing at all had happened. But I started doing a little detective work. I went to London and paid a visit to Kennedy. I knew he’d been taken in by somebody, and somebody very, very savvy. He’s a top guy; he’s got no interest in selling stolen goods. It’d be the end of his reputation if word got out, if not the end of his business. He immediately took the prints off the market and agreed to help me trace them.”

“And the trail led back to Amanda,” I guessed.

Sam nodded. “I should have gone right to the police. Right then and there. But I didn’t. It was the biggest mistake I ever made. I went to see her first. I wanted to give her a chance to explain. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t really believe she was involved in this. I just couldn’t get my head around that fact.”

Sam went over to the watercooler and poured himself a glass of water. He had a long sip.

“She didn’t even try to deny it. It was as though she always expected to be caught. Oh, she made all the excuses: she was deeply in debt, she’d made bad investments, her divorce had ruined her. To tell you the truth, I always thought there was something a little
off
about her: she was two years here, two years there, never staying in a job for very long. There was an incident at the Tate that I got wind of. All very hush-hush, but I know they let her go, under a cloud.”