The Serpent Papers (26 page)

* * *

Some time later, a knock at Guifré’s door pounds three times. Guifré dusts off his hands.

‘And so the treasured calm departs,’ he hums, hopping off his chair. Emily watches his belly wobble as he pads to the door and gingerly greets the inspector.

‘
Bon dia
, Jorge.’ Inspector Fabregat embraces the professor. ‘Have I caught you in flagrante?
Hòstia!
Who is this lovely young lady?’ He doffs his hat at Emily in the corner. She flushes a bright crimson. Inspector Fabregat saunters deeper into the office.

‘Refreshments, Guifré? Is there such a thing as refreshments in this establishment?’

The fat professor bristles. Emily finds the inspector handsome. Disarming. A world apart from the men at the university. She has trouble focusing, scratching at the corner of her thumbnail, tearing at the skin. Inspector Fabregat flops into a plush armchair.

‘I’m tired,’ he proclaims loudly. ‘The whole business is terrible for the morale, Gordito!’
Little fatty
. ‘I’ve been thinking of an early retirement.’ He puts his feet up on the coffee table, resting them on a history of the Balearic world. Guifré grumbles. Emily stifles a giggle.

‘I want to know what you think of what the bastard sent me! I wish you’d come down to the damned site, man.’

‘You are well aware I am working for your department on a casual basis,’ the professor huffs loudly. ‘Until we unlock the language of the text, we will be of little use to you. And please take your feet off the table. That footstool you have colonized is my most recent publication.’

Fabregat does as he is told, settling his weight into the seat below him, his shirt tight at the seams. He worries his cap between his fingers. ‘You’ve seen the files? And no – I don’t take sugar.’ He puts a hand out to stop Emily, catching her eye. He winks. ‘Bitter. Just milk will do.’

Professor Guifré adjusts his spectacles on his nose and frowns. Emily hands round the drinks. Guifré asks that Emily bring the files up on the projector. Illustrations dark on the page, indigo close to black. Fabregat studies the notched dial at the centre of the figures.

Confronted with the inspector’s brash exterior, Emily struggles to remember what she meant to suggest as analysis. One letter stands out purely for its beauty – Emily is enchanted by the delicate brushwork, the authenticity of the characters –
painstaking hours for every stroke
,
she thinks.
A calligrapher’s life of dedication.
Curled into the letter B – she had gazed in awe! – a male devil with the feet of a goat who carries a bird Emily identifies as a nightingale, woven into a single consonant accompanied by a green lion, holding a map of Barcelona – the old town and Gothic, with the church peaks rising out of the mass of thatched roofs. The letters are dotted with ornate combinations of consonants and numbers – generally consisting of a strange gibberish. The devil always paired with a soaring bird – a nightingale, from whose beak emerged ornate lines of poetry. Most of all she admires the design of the golden serpent that recurs as a signature in the corner of each page, the size of a dime or the stamped press of a wax seal.

Emily’s notes direct Inspector Fabregat to the
Libro di Biadiolo
, held in Florence, and the
Belleville Breviary
at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris – with special emphasis on the royal illustrator Jean Pucelle, who employed ornamental flowers, dragonflies, swallows, and distorted, miniature musicians in the border of his work – such that the text itself appeared to sprout petals and leaves, curling ivy and roses, like the music of devils that play the flute menacingly, vines tumbling forth from terrible illustrations of vengeance against young women, dramatizations of the lives of martyrs, Emily assumes, weaving into and out of a nonsensical combinations of letters and words.
The artist is clearly well-versed in the art of illumination, and its history, drawing references from the period.
Beyond this observation, however (and a detailed explanation of the typical meanings of an array of classical symbols), there is limited information Emily can give about the nature of the writings. ‘
Egg tempera and leaf gold
’;
as to the paper, ‘
Parchment
made in the traditional style
’,
are her descriptive comments. It is obvious that the anonymous author had a purpose in writing – but whether that purpose was sheer madness or eccentricity – or what import these letters held – neither she nor Guifré can say.

Fabregat and Guifré discuss the mystery for a while in oblique terms. Later she voices her feelings that the lines of poetry were intermingled with a text that took direct inspiration from the illustrated manuscripts of the thirteenth or fourteenth century (hence the medieval dates at the bottom of two verses).

Her phone buzzes silently in the pocket of her dress, against her thigh, a hot, warm warning. Emily offers coffee from a stainless steel pot on Guifré’s desk. Fabregat accepts.

‘Do you want to answer that?’ he asks her, phone still buzzing in her pocket.

‘No.’ She blushes again. ‘Sorry. I’ll turn it off.’

Fabregat terse. ‘Let’s cut to the chase. The lines of poetry. Do you have any idea of what the hell this means?’

‘No.’ Guifré flustered as a beetroot. He huffs and heaves. ‘Did he send you any more than this? Have you received anything else?’

Fabregat shakes his head. Emily’s interest piqued.

‘God help us,’ Guifré laments. ‘We know what they are, Fabsy, I’ve told you as much, but what, why, or who sent them?’ The professor sorrowful. ‘I am not a savant. I cannot know these things.’

The inspector barks back at him. ‘So there’s nothing in any of the letters that provides any clue to what it means?’

‘Ah. “Meaning” . . . what is the meaning of meaning?’ Guifré laments again to no one. ‘We can make some headway. Individually, the illustrations, for instance, are translatable,’ Guifré says. ‘The diagrams belong, as we have already told you, to the medieval Catalan philosopher Ramon Llull. The snake is an ouroboros and most likely a signature of the sender. The dates beneath the verses here –’ he points to the screen – ‘and here, also link to Ramon Llull. We start with
1312–1317
, if we are to assume they reference the Common Era. This is the window within which Ramon Llull died. We have no historical confirmation of this event, which is estimated to have occurred between 1315 and 1316
ce
. Coincidence? I think not. The second set of dates
1182–1188
are more perplexing. We cannot be sure of what they refer to in the life of Llull . . . Emily has gone through possibilities, and the strongest implication seems to be the 1184
ce
Papal Bull of Pope Lucius III, the
Ad Abolendam
, which emerged from a growing desire to eradicate diverse heresies in Western Europe, particularly the Cathars
.
’ Guifré muddles his words, takes a deep breath and starts again with a loud huff.

‘Given that Ramon Llull was the victim of a similar anti-heretical Papal Bull two centuries later, there could be something there . . .’

‘And what do you make of this?’

Guifré shrugs. ‘That your writer is a fan of Ramon Llull, perhaps?’

* * *

It leaps out at me as soon as Emily begins speaking to me about her involvement in the whole affair. It would not have been their fault. Guifré didn’t misread the signs.

No. Not at all.
To some extent the assumption was justified.
But they are not the same. Their language is different. And this is key. Accurate translation is crucial in a game of symbols. Misread the reference, and you are doomed.
Guifré would not have wanted to see the alternative, though he might have recognized the parallel. And he would not have wanted to see the difference because it would not have followed
logically
,
given the information he had to hand.

Is there any doubt?

I ask myself.

Could you be wrong?

No.

Guifré would have argued against you if he were alive.

Yes.

He would have said: Llull’s venerated tomb in Palma is emblazoned with a stained-glass crest in the Basílica de San Francisco. A golden crescent moon hanging against a scarlet shield, sliver curved towards the earth, facing the abyss.

He would have said: Is this not the moon carved between the breast of three girls?

Is this not the divine alphabet on her clavicle, on her cheek, on her belly, on her thigh, on her calf? Do these letters not correlate exactly with Ramon Llull? Do the symbols not align?

Yes and No.

I scratch things in my notepad.

An exquisite misinterpretation. No one else will follow me.

It is true that Ramon Llull was born in 1232
ce
on Mallorca. In 1315, at the venerable age of eighty-three, after a career which took him to the University of Paris and into the heart of papal power, Llull travelled by Genoan ship to Tunis as a Christian missionary. His last official works were written in December 1315, dedicated to the Sultan Abu Yahya Ibn al-Lihyani. Christian lore claims that the Doctor was stoned to death by infidels and died a martyr. More likely he was forced to flee the city, becoming fatally ill on the Genoese ship that delivered him home, and expiring before reaching his native island. As a result of conflicting testimony, scholars do not know precisely when or where Llull died. In a life that is otherwise painstakingly recorded, he vanishes from history. There is no end date. No final word. No closure. But something very interesting happens after Llull dies.

He posthumously becomes one of the most significant alchemists in Renaissance Europe. Everyone reads his treatises on base metals and
Sal ammoniac
. His
Secrets of Secrets.
From Giordano Bruno (whose proclivity led him to an untimely end) to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (who tutored Michelangelo), to Paracelsus and Athanasius Kircher, to the poets John Donne and – perhaps even – John Milton, to Montaigne and Voltaire right down to the Enlightenment luminaries. The avaricious Newton and his earnest enemy Leibnitz both kept copies of Llull’s works in their libraries. Despite the fact that Ramon Llull never wrote in favour of the alchemical arts, he became its rising star, a legend, one of the few who achieved success, who minted rosy nobles. And like his counterpart Nicolas Flamel, Llull was famed to have lived forever.

Who was responsible for this shift?

Someone who took his name, or was given it accidentally (so the story goes): a true alchemist. A genius of the arts. A man whose writing first appeared in 1332
ce
, identified as a Catalan alchemist living in London. In contemporary studies we call this man – or men – the ‘Pseudo-Llull’, and the texts he produced
pseudo-Llullian manuscripts
.

Academics now generally conceded that the anonymous Catalan alchemist who wrote
The Book of the Secrets of the Nature of the Quintessence
(
Liber de secretis naturae seu de quinta essentia
) and the highly circulated
Testamentum
was none other than Rex Illuminatus. Which changes everything. Dates rattling through my memory: court records of Castile and León declare that on 2 December 1572, Rex Illuminatus was repatriated from the Peruvian colony, having been charged with a crime of witchcraft. Allegations place the age of the alchemist at 343, a remarkable claim generally accepted as false
. He has all his teeth
, the report notes,
and the face of a young man, and yet the Alchemist claims to have been born on Mallorca in 1229.
The report concludes that the alchemist is immortal – well over 300 years old. His name was
Llum
 – meaning
Light
 –
which became easily confused with
Llull
, due to the fact that both simultaneously took on the title
Doctor Illuminatus.
Rex Illuminatus possessed a highly unusual lineage, and as a result was immediately suspicious. ‘
All is One and One is All
’ was the proclaimed mantra of the alchemist, but in the damning words of the Inquisitor General:
Rex Illuminatus belongs to no one.
(
Let them call me what they will
, Illuminatus said,
but they will never have my soul, which I give only to an eternal sensation of Love, Love without strictures. Love without boundaries. The Engendering Love of Creation.
)