Ash: A Secret History (41 page)

Subject: Ash/Angelotti mss.

Date:    10/11/00 at 04.11 p.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna –

I contacted Bernard at the Glasgow Museum. He tells me he doesn’t know where their Angelotti text is, they may no longer shelve it, or it ‘may’ be out on loan to some other institution. He asked me why I wanted to study something so patently useless to the historian, since it’s a presumed 17th century FAKE.

I don’t understand what is happening!

Both Charles Mallory Maximillian and Vaughan Davies had no doubts whatsoever about the veracity of this manuscript! In 1890 and 1939 it was catalogued as an ordinary 15th century document. When I consulted it, it was in the CATALOGUE under that designation! This is not like anything else that has ever happened to me in my academic career! They CAN’T have reclassified it in the past six months!

I can’t get anyone to talk to me on-line, and I CAN’T leave here. If I go off-site, I won’t be allowed back on again. You’re going to have to take this on for me. For our book.

– Pierce

  Message: #69 (Pierce Ratcliff)

Subject: Ash, texts

Date:    10/11/00 at 04.22 p.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

Jesus Christ Pierce what next? If one of your manuscripts is a fake, but the golems are real?

I’ll do what I can on-line, and by phone. I really don’t understand this.

Give me a list of documents to check.

Okay, I can understand that maybe Victorian historians weren’t so rigorous as modern ones. There are such things as faked manuscripts. But there’ve been two editions besides yours: if Charles Mallory Maximillian was lax, surely Vaughan Davies should have spotted something?

– Anna

  Message: #55 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash, texts

Date:    13/11/00 at 00.45 a.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna –

Yes, Vaughan Davies should have discovered if any of the documents were invalid. You are kind enough not to say it, but, so should I.

This is a list of the principal authenticated documents that I have been working from:

The WINCHESTER CODEX, c.1495, Tudor English translation of mediaeval Latin original (1480s?). Ash’s childhood.

The del Guiz LIFE, c.1516, withdrawn, expurgated and reissued 1518. German original. Plus a version by Ortense Mancini, 17c playwright, in which she mentions that it is translated from a 16c Latin manuscript – we have no trace of this. Covers, Ash’s life 1472-1477.

The CARTULARY of the monastery of St. Herlaine, c.1480, translated from the French. Brief mentions of Ash as a novice c.1467-8.

‘PSEUDO-GODFREY’, 1478 (?), a German text of dubious value, found in Cologne in 1963; original paper and ink, but possibly a contemporary forgery, cashing in on the popularity of the ‘Ash’ cycle of legends. Ash’s life c. 1467-1477.

The ANGELOTTI manuscript, Milan, 1487; appended at the end of a treatise on armour owned by the Missaglia family. Ash during the period 1473-1477.

‘FRAXINUS ME FECIT’, possibly autobiography of Ash, therefore written down no later than 1477; if a biography, between 1477 and 1481(?). Covers summer 1475 (6?)-autumn 1476.

The two previous editions of the ‘Ash’ material are: –

Charles Mallory Maximillian (ed.) ASH: THE LIFE OF A FEMALE MEDIAEVAL MERCENARY CAPTAIN, J Dent & Son, London, 1890, reprinted 1892, 1893, 1896, 1905.

This contains translations of all the above, excluding ‘Pseudo-Godfrey’ (and, of course, ‘Fraxinus’). CMM does include the 17th century poems by Lord Rochester supposedly based on episodes from the del Guiz LIFE; later research indicates this is unlikely. CMM was a widely read and reputable scholar of his period, holding the Mediaeval History Chair at Oxford.

Vaughan Davies (ed.) ASH: A FIFTEENTH CENTURY BIOGRAPHY, Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1939. Not reprinted. Plates lost.

Contents as CMM. There was also rumoured to be a pirated paperback edition, a facsimile reprint done by Starshine Press in San Francisco (1968), but I have not seen it.

This original 1939 edition itself exists only in incomplete form in the British Library. The publisher’s warehouse was bombed during the war, destroying stocks, and cutting short a popular vogue for Vaughan Davies’s book – after all, it is not every history book that is written by a man with his scientific, as well as historian’s, credentials.

That’s all I have on file, I think there may be one or two confirmatory mentions in contemporary letters, but I don’t have the data with me.

I’ve now completed the next translation of the del Guiz/ Angelotti ‘Ash’ material, and will send it to you after this.

Isobel, of course, is insisting that I IMMEDIATELY finish ‘Fraxinus me fecit’ for her, and she wants the translation done meticulously – so, I think, do I; but she knows that.

Please contact me. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND what is happening here. I have been an academic for twenty years; I do not believe I could make an error – or a series of errors – of this magnitude.

– Pierce

  Message: #73 (Pierce Ratcliff)

Subject: Ash, documentation

Date:    13/11/00 at 10.03 p.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

I took a day’s leave and spent it in the British Library. I didn’t particularly want to explain at the office that there may be problems with your book – not when we’ve put it in the Spring catalogue.

I have grave problems with what I’ve found.

Some of the documents you mention, I just can’t find – the Pseudo Godfrey, and the Cartulary (log-book, I suppose) of this St Herlaine monastery. I can’t find any record of the monastery either.

I’ve managed to trace the German del Guiz ‘Life’, but you won’t like it, Pierce.

In 1890, it was classified under ‘Late Mediaeval History’. Charles Mallory Maximillian was obviously being completely above-board when he did his translation of it. By 1939, it was re-classified, this time as ‘Romance Literature’, along with the Nibelungenlied! I found a reference to your 1968 American printing of Vaughan Davies, which has the del Guiz manuscript in it, and the whole thing is classified under ‘General Fiction’! And as far as the British Library’s concerned now, they don’t have any record of having a copy.

They don’t have a record of any mediaeval manuscript by an ‘Angelotti’, either.

As far as I can see, this material was thought to be genuine in the 1890s, was discovered to be fake in the late 1930s – and Vaughan Davies just ignored this. What I can’t understand, Pierce, is why YOU’VE ignored this.

Unless you can give me a convincing explanation, I am going to have to discuss this with my Managing Director.

– Anna Longman

  Message: #60 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash, archaeological discoveries

Date:    14/11/00 at 11.11 a.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna –

I didn’t ignore anything.

When I last consulted these documents, in the British Library, less than two months ago, they were classified under ‘Mediaeval History’. There was NO suggestion that they might be anything else.

Please do nothing rash.

If these documents are so unreliable – why is the ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE backing them up?!

– Pierce

PART FOUR

13 August–17 August AD 1476

The Garden of War

I

A young woman’s body lay on a mattress stuffed with goose-down. Whether this was too soft, she too unaccustomed, it was not possible to tell. She stayed unconscious. She nonetheless rolled a little, from side to side, and as her head turned it could be seen that she had a shaved patch over her left ear, hair sheared away from the swollen skull. A fine silver stubble grew back.

To stop her moving, they tied her with linen bands to the wooden frame of the bed. She seemed hot, with a fever, and restless. Someone washed and combed out and plaited the rest of her hair into two loose-woven braids, so it should not turn into impenetrable sweat-glued tangles.

Sometimes there were angry voices over her. A swearing-out of devils, or a fierce quarrel between soft-voiced women. Someone trailed oil over her forehead, and it rolled down the bridge of her nose and over her slashed cheek. When the linen sheet was taken back, half her body was spotted with black bruises, and a poultice of comfrey and Self-Heal was strapped to her right ankle, and another to her right wrist.

Someone washed her body with water from a silver basin.

Bees wove around the room, in the bright air between white walls, and back over the sill where climbing flowers nodded. A soft, rhythmic murmur of doves sounded beyond the window. Being washed and turned, she saw out of the window to the birds, blazing white in the sun, one of them with golden beams shining from its head and beak and golden eye: the Holy Spirit nesting in the dove-cote, along with the other doves. Then there was fire and pain and shouting, and she was bound back on the bed with new linen, and the world went away to the sound of an angry voice that rose up the registers from contralto to alto to shout.

All the time, there was the light.

It came first always with a cold pink and yellow glow, through the night-shuttered windows. It grew, slanting, into bars of brightness: as bright as light down the edge of a sharpened blade. And light shook from the surface of the water in the jug, that stood on an oaken chest beside the bed; dancing in blotched reflections on the white curving plaster of the ceiling.