The Serpent Papers (35 page)

& I would also turn your attention to the Canon Episcopi (10th century) in Gratian’s
Decretum
which rejects the belief that certain members of the gentle sex are capable of transformation, but does suggest that women worship the Goddess Diana in Secret & therefore commit Acts of Heresy & that these women come together in vast gatherings & believe they can transmute into animals as an alchemist transmutes lead into gold & thus forbids the pagan faith in shape-shifting. The explanation for such revelry always devolves into supposed pacts with the Devil & demons who enable ‘transformation’ or ‘transmutation’. They are anti-science & anti-art, two things as a gentleman of Queen & country I have sworn nobly to defend – I hasten to add the only things I
care
to defend – & I do hope you feel honour-bound to follow suit. I point your attention also to the
Margarita
of Martinus Polonus (
d
. 1278) & his work on alchemy – ‘
Alchemy seems to be a degenerate art due to the fact that the alchemist who believes that he can transmute one species into another, except by the beneficence and majesty of God, is both a heretic & an infidel & far worse than a pagan.
’
Curious evidence also in the rhetoric of Alfonso de Spina –
Fortalitium Fidei
(1459) – whose sentiment echoes the following: ‘
Many perverse & vile Christian alchemists are fooled, having consorted with demons, believing that they transmute iron into gold through their art.
’

More to follow.

Captain Charles Leopold Ruthven

P.S. Find me in London. I will be at my club shortly. Assuming, of course, that I am still alive.

* * *

19 November 1851, Valldemossa, Majorca

Katherine, my love, curiosity has doomed me to the fate of the most miserable of foot soldiers. My tutors at Cambridge did warn that when I had begun to understand Rex Illuminatus, his omissions and obscurities might drive me to near madness. Perhaps these were not empty threats. Coupled with the information I have received from Ruthven, I find myself awash with confusion. My life has become one of the very novels I used to read so dearly, and while you did tell me, Katherine, that if I went seeking monsters, I should find them – I did not at first believe how true your faint words were. Since leaving Barcelona, I have been plagued by ill-luck and ill-humours. On the lamentable morning of my departure from the city, the servant Brass Buckle drove me to port and placed me on a packet ship bound south to Majorca. Ruthven did not accompany me, afraid as he is to leave the safeguard of his home, but made certain I took his documents on my person. I assured him I would do my best to help him, and to make whatever headway necessary in the aid and protection of a friend. As to the men who stalk him – if what Ruthven tells me of their methods is true, then I am sure their obliteration is a worthy cause and I am happy to lend myself to it. To that end, I carried a letter from Captain Ruthven to his friend and ally Padre Lloret, priest of the Holy Trinity at the village of Valldemossa on Majorca. True to his word, Ruthven purchased my passage, a fine first-class cabin, and posted me as his messenger with a firm shake of the hand. His eyes, however, had the haunted look of desperation, and earlier that morning he had made many foreboding remarks about this being our last goodbye. Unlike his master, the servant felt no sadness to see the back of me, his very being pervaded with an atmosphere of brutal animosity. As I watched the face of Captain Ruthven’s servant merge into the rocks, the mainland quickly became nothing more than a black smudge on the horizon. I ruminated then on the unspoken sadness of travel. Katherine, I would not have thought it possible, but I find nothing so depressing as a vanishing skyline. The retreating vision of land as it disappears, fading into mist on water. My heart grew dull with melancholy. What I had seen pervaded my dreams and disturbed me deeply. I had not learnt what I wished from Ruthven. Barcelona had not been as I expected. All this before seasickness took me. I spent the majority of my voyage in pain and misery, reflecting on the body of the woman I had seen. The injustice rankled me. Storms buffeted from all sides; clouds of bitter dankness surged up from the sea, pelting down rain and cracks of lightning, and waves crashed into the hull of our ship, sending our sails skimming across the surface of the world. For a while I believed that I would die in passage, held in the grip of a gale the like of which I have never seen nor experienced, my journey marked by a contrary wind seeking out my bones, and my cabin mates trembling with fear. The rain did not cease in the port of Palma, where I hired a buggy to take me to Valldemossa, a day’s ride from the capital. I had not imagined that the island would be so mountainous nor so violent in its beauty.

God has carved Majorca in the shape of an axe head and her women, I am told, feast at certain times of the year on water rats, considered a rare delicacy in the more rural environs. The island’s garb is lush and wild, the roads near wilfully jagged and rocky. As my poor driver bravely attempted to summit the sierra, the rain lashed it down, the horses spooked by the weather and my driver’s brimmed hat dripping with water, I occupied myself by looking out the buggy window. En route through the lower foothills I passed fields where poor sheep had been summarily drenched. Once arrived in Valldemossa, I made my way as per Ruthven’s directions to the rooms at the Charterhouse. The village is not large and the people for the most part are friendly. At the door to my lodging I was greeted by a buxom woman who enquired as to my name and took payment for my chambers. When I asked of Padre Lloret, she coloured brightly in each cheek and spoke to a small boy playing in an anteroom. The child promptly disappeared and I was left in a state of bemusement. The woman encouraged me to wait, offering a cup of cocoa, which I welcomed gratefully, and a half-hour later a man appeared at the door in farmer’s garb, a country cap on his head and a shepherd’s crook in his hand. The man shook off his cloak at the door and left his rain-soaked hat on a hook, before striding across to greet me. ‘Master Seetweelll!’ he cried with an enthusiasm that shook my expectations. He was a warm sort of man, with a mountain face and almond eyes and a rustic mouth given readily to smiling. I can see why his name brought a flush to the good woman’s cheeks as he was perhaps the most roguish priest I have ever met: his manly visage ornamented by a black, well-trimmed beard, his eyes bright. I placed his age at around thirty-five. Lloret smiled when I told him I had met Ruthven. In the company of the priest I felt surprisingly at ease. He was jovial and warm, a far cry from the vampiric shadows of Ruthven, and I struggled to imagine how the friendship had formed, the two men seemed so at odds with each other. Lloret requested that I follow him to his quarters, bidding me to leave the Charterhouse when the rain had lightened. We strode through the village passing a series of farm buildings. The houses here have no kitchens within them, but little huts across the street, so that at meal times, mothers and wives and sisters can be seen tripping across the cobbled roads to make their meals, kept (perhaps more sanitary than our English ways) away from the animals that populate the ground floors of homes. As we processed I found myself much observed in the village as an anomaly.

‘Stranger,’ Lloret reassured me, ‘do not fear – now that you have walked with me, no one will think ill of you.’

At his table, Lloret offered me a glass of red wine and produced a round earthenware bowl of olives. ‘Last season’s,’ he told me proudly, intimating that his friends the monks had grown them. I gave him the letter from Ruthven. He asked if he might take a moment to review the contents. The priest studied the letter closely before putting it down with a sigh. I decided then that he was good and honest, watching the emotion play across his face.

‘How much do you know?’ he asked.

I told him what I had seen. A mighty interrogation ensued. Had anyone else met me with the Captain? Did any person or persons know of my current whereabouts? Did I trust his servant? I replied that I did not. Lloret frowned. Had I written letters, or shared confidence with any individuals close to me? I did not tell him, Katherine, that I write all my secrets to you – which was unusual as I consider myself honest to a fault, but he looked to be a man who would trespass on this weakness, and force a silence between us, a prospect frankly I cannot stomach.

‘That is good,’ Lloret said when we had finished. ‘You have escaped with your reputation unscathed.’ He then intimated that I had been wise to stay indoors. ‘God has been with you. The more innocent you stay, the better,’ Lloret declared ominously. ‘I am loath to reveal anything, though Ruthven has asked me to share what I know. The Captain has made an enemy of a very powerful and diabolical class of people. I am concerned for his safety, and by extension yours,
Anglès
. He has rendered you more vulnerable than you likely realize.’ The fields beyond Lloret’s window were covered by a canopy of storm. Trees shook free their burdens. I heard the rumble of thunder, and pulled my cloak tighter round my shoulders.

‘And what of the men who stalk Ruthven?’

‘They are an anonymous organization operating within Catalonia and abroad – their leader is known as the Duke, of what I am not sure. They are formed of rogue members of the clergy and high society, devoted to the extermination of forbidden books. For a while we thought they had disappeared into the folds of history, like so many devils before them, becoming legends – fuel for fairy tales. You have heard of werewolves and vampires no doubt?’

‘I have read the accounts of Dom Augustin Calmet.’

‘Some truths are worse than myths. You cannot seek the holy flame without encountering its equal and opposite, Master Sitwell.’ I shuddered at the thought of the drawings I have made in my journals, depicting the woman I had seen with Ruthven.

‘But what has this to do with Rex Illuminatus?’ I asked.

‘Like many thinkers of his age, Illuminatus made strong enemies, the greatest of whom was the Inquisitor General of Aragon, Nicholas Eymerich of Girona. Do you know the name, Master Sitwell?’

I intimated that I did not

Lloret crossed himself twice.

‘Ruthven has asked me to discuss him with you – and this favour I will do. Eymerich was one of ours . . . not of our order but of our inclination – he was a shepherd before God, and a monster before men, who hated our Illuminatus. Eymerich believed that the Doctor was a sorcerer and a heretic who held a poisonous influence on society. Eymerich was famous for piercing the tongues of heretics with nails so that they could not speak – he studied practices of torture and fear, the best temperature to burn a witch – the most honest keys of pain.’

Lloret raised his eyebrow and looked at me. ‘Do I continue?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said gravely, imagining what it would look like if a woman’s tongue were pierced with a nail.

‘In 1376, the Grand Inquisitor published what would become a definitive manual of the Spanish Inquisition, the infamous
Directorium Inquisitorum
. In it he expressed a great disapproval for Alchemy. But it was not until twenty years later that he published
Contra Alchimistas
.’

‘This I have heard of,’ I replied.

‘Let me assure you it is a disgusting book. In his
Contra Alchimistas
Eymerich outlined the heresies of the alchemical philosophers that had swept up the passion of Catalonia and the world beyond. When the treatise was finished, the Inquisitor dispatched the book promptly to Rome, demanding the erasure of Illuminatian works. I have a copy of it here. Rex Illuminatus was an artist, a thing that Eymerich hated above all else.’

Lloret walked slowly to a shelf, from which he removed a dusty, thin volume. He opened it to a page marked with a thin strip of cloth. Read, he said, pointing at the Latin. I translate for you now:

Through art, alchemists seek to imitate life, whose image and figure they conjure tirelessly. These copyists are false in their creation of new works, as they cannot imitate life perfectly in regard to features, most especially faces. In fact, the alchemist cannot imitate life in any sense of the word, because all imitations must be by definition false and corrupted, and devoid of motions and singing and all consciousness and passions, as art cannot conjure the flight or song of birds, nor the odours or flavours of the forest, nor the virtues or deformities of men.

‘Ah,’ I said, pretending to understand. The priest ate an olive slowly before informing me of the following: