Book of Souls by Glenn Cooper (22 page)

Isabelle was well used to the oddity of the stone building, but Will was as taken aback as the first time he had seen it. The closer they got, the more jarring the perspective. “It really looks like someone’s idea of a joke,” he said. It had the identical iconic look of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, the Gothic exterior and flying buttresses, the two broad towers topped with open arches, the nave and transept crowned with a filigreed spike of a tower. But it was a miniature version, almost a child’s toy. The great cathedral could comfortably accommodate six thousand worshippers, but the garden chapel held twenty at most. The spire in Paris soared 225 feet into the air, whereas the Cantwell spire was a scant 40 feet.

“I’m not very good at maths,” Isabelle said, “but it’s some precise fractional size of the real thing. Edgar Cantwell was apparently obsessed with it.”

“This is the Edgar Cantwell in the Calvin letter?”

“The same. He returned to England after studying in Paris, and sometime later commissioned the chapel to honor his father. It’s a unique piece of architecture. We sometimes get tourists wandering by from the walking path down the bottom, but we don’t publicize it in the least. It’s strictly word of mouth.”

He held up his hand to block the sun. “Is that a bell in the tower closest to us?”

“I should ring it for you. It’s a bronze miniature of the one that Quasimodo rang in the
Hunchback of Notre Dame.
”

“You’re better-looking than him.”

“The flattery of the man!”

They began walking onward toward the meadow. Isabelle was about to say something when she noticed he had stopped and was staring skyward at the bell tower.

“What?”

“Notre Dame,” he said. Then he raised his voice, “Notre Dame. That’s pretty damned close to Nostradamus. Do you think…?”

“Nostradamus!” she shouted. “Our prophet! Soars o’er the prophet’s name! Nostradamus’s name was Michel de Nostredame! Will, you’re a genius.”

“Or married to one,” he muttered.

She grabbed him by the hand and almost pulled him up the path to the chapel.

“Can we get up there?” he asked.

“Yes! I spent a lot of my childhood in that tower.”

There was a heavy wooden door at the base of the tower facade, which Isabelle pushed open with a shoulder shove, the swollen wood harshly scraping the stone threshold. She dashed toward the pulpit and pointed at the small Alice-in-Wonderland door off to the corner. “Up here!”

She squeezed through almost as easily as she had done as a child. It was more of a labor for Will. His large shoulders got hung up, and he had to throw off his jacket so it wouldn’t be ripped. He followed her up a claustrophobic wooden staircase that was little more than a glorified ladder up to the bell landing, a wooden scaffolding that surrounded the weathered hanging bell.

“Are you scared of bats?” she said, too late.

Hanging above their heads was a colony of white-bellied Natterer’s bats. A few took to flight, soaring through the arches, and darted crazily around the tower.

“I don’t love them.”

“I do,” she cried. “They’re adorable creatures!”

Inside the tower, he could barely stand without hitting his head. There was a view through the stone arches to neatly plowed fields and, farther away, the village church. Will hardly noticed the landscape. He was searching for something, anything, a hiding place. There was wood and masonry, nothing else.

He pushed at mortared blocks of stone with the heel of his hand, but everything within reach was solid and firm. Isabelle was already on the floor, on hands and knees, doing an inspection of the guano-covered planks. Suddenly, she stood up and started scraping at a spot with the heel of her boot, kicking up a small cloud of dried droppings. “I think there’s a carving on this plank, Will, look!”

He dropped down and had to agree there appeared to be a small, curved etching of sorts on one of the planks. He reached for his wallet and plucked out his VISA card, which he used like a trowel to scrape the plank clean. Clear as day, there was a round, five-petaled carving, an inch in length, inscribed into the wood.

“It’s a Tudor rose!” she said. “I can’t believe I never noticed it before.”

He gestured over his head. “It’s their fault.” He stomped hard on the plank, but it didn’t budge.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I’ll get the toolbox.” In a flash, she was down the stairs and he was alone with a few hundred bats. He warily looked up at them, hanging like Christmas ornaments, and prayed no one rang the bell.

When she returned with the toolbox, he hammered a thin, long screwdriver into the space between two boards and repeated the maneuver up and down the length of the inscribed plank, each time gazing upward to see if he was bothering the dormant mammals.

When he created enough separation, he drove the screwdriver all the way through and used it as a pry bar to jerkily raise the board a quarter inch. He slid a second, thicker screwdriver into the space and pushed down hard with his full weight. The plank creaked and popped up, coming away clean in his hand.

There was a space underneath, a foot deep, between the floor and the ceiling planking. He hated sticking his hand into a black space, especially with all the bats around, but he grimaced and plunged it in.

Right away, he felt glass against his fingertips.

He grabbed on to something smooth and cold and brought it into the light.

An old bottle.

The vessel was handblown into an onion shape, made of thick, dark green glass with a flat bottom and a rolled string lip. The mouth was sealed with wax. He held the glass up to the sun, but it was too opaque. He shook it. There was a faint knocking sound.

“There’s something inside it.”

“Go on,” she urged.

He sat down and wedged the bottle between his shoes and began lightly chipping away at the wax with one of the screwdrivers until he saw the top of a cork. He switched to a Phillips head and gently tapped the cork into the bottle with the hammer. It plopped to the bottom.

He turned the bottle over and shook it hard.

A roll of parchment, two sheets thick, fell onto his lap. The sheets were crisp and pristine.

“Here we go again,” he said, shaking his head. “This is where you come in.”

She unrolled the pages with trembling fingers and scanned the pages. One was handwritten, the other printed.

“It’s another letter to Edgar Cantwell,” she whispered. “And the title page from a very old and very famous book.”

“Which one?”

“The
Prophecies of Nostradamus
!”

EDGAR CANTWELL BEGAN to feel unwell while taking his evening meal at Madame Pucell’s boardinghouse. He had been vaguely aware of a soreness in his groin for a day or two but had thought nothing of it, a strain of the muscle, perhaps. He was eating a lamb chop and a plate of leeks when the chill hit him, flying through his body like a swarm of winged insects. His colleague, Richard Dudley, another English student, noticed the unpleasant look on his friend’s face and remarked on it.

“A chill, nothing more,” Edgar said, excusing himself from the table. He made it only to the parlor, where he was seized with an overwhelming nausea and threw up a copious amount of undigested food onto Madame’s chaise longue.

When the doctor visited him later that night in his bedroom at the top of the stairs, Edgar was doing poorly. He was pale and sweaty, and his pulse raced. The ache in his groin had progressed to exquisite pain, and his armpits too were sore. His nausea was unabated and he began to have paroxysms of dry coughing. The doctor lifted his sheet and directed his bony fingers straight for his groin folds where he palpated a cluster of firm lumps the size of hen’s eggs. When he pressed down on them, Edgar howled in pain.

He needed to see nothing more.

In the parlor, Dudley seized the doctor’s arm, and asked, “What is the matter with my friend?”

“You must leave this house,” the doctor barked. His eyes were wild and fearful. “All must leave this house.”

“Leave my house? Why?” the landlady exclaimed.

“It is the plague.”

Edgar was only scant months away from completing his studies and returning to England for good. He had grown to be a confident young man who compensated for his rodent-like looks with a quiet air of nobility and superiority. He had survived Montaigu, so he reckoned he could tackle anything in life. Three years earlier, he had transferred to the College de Sorbonne, and he had acquitted himself well there. His final examinations were looming, and if all went according to plan, he would return to his country with a prestigious baccalaureate in canon law. His father would be proud, his life would be set on a glittering course.

Now, he was alone and most probably dying in a fetid room in a small boardinghouse in this wretched, plague-infested city. He was too weak to drag himself off his soiled bed, and he barely had the strength to sip at a jug of bitter tea the doctor had left at his fleeting last visit. In his feverish and desperate state, he saw images running through his mind: a snarling boar that turned into the snarling face of a cane-wielding Bedier, a funeral procession of somber, black-robed men, his precious book, flung open with the name Edgar Cantwell, Mors, floating above the page, then the long, animated face of a reddish-haired young man with a long, reddish beard and crimson cheeks, so close, so real.

“Can you hear me, Monsieur Cantwell?”

He heard a voice, saw a full pair of lips moving.

“Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”

He felt a strong hand underneath his palm and exerted all his will to grasp it.

“Good.”

Edgar blinked in confusion into the man’s gentle, gray-green eyes.

“I met your doctor at the house of another victim. He told me he had an English student. I am fond of the English, and I am especially fond of students as I was one myself not so long ago. All the study and hard work, a pity to have it snuffed out by the plague, wouldn’t you agree? Also, I hear your father is a baron.”

The man moved away from the bedside and flung open Edgar’s window, muttering something about foul vapors. He was wearing the red robe of a doctor of medicine but to Edgar, he seemed a red angel, flying around the room, delivering a measure of hope.

“Your doctor is old and superstitious, the kind who is no use in the plague. I have discharged him and will personally assume your care, Monsieur. If you survive, you will find it in your heart to pay me, I am sure. If you do not, you will be added to my account in heaven. Now, let us get to work. This chamber is squalid and will not do!”

Edgar drifted in and out of consciousness. This red angel was a talker, and every time Edgar became sensate, he heard a torrent of words and exposition.

The only way to defeat the plague, the man was explaining, was to remove filth and effluents and administer apothecary medicaments. When the plague struck, he said, the streets had to be emptied of bodies and washed with fresh water, the corpses buried deep in quicklime, the trash burned, the houses of the victims cleaned with vinegar and boiled wine, the sheets kept clean and laundered, the servants to the dead and dying made to wear leather gloves and masks. He had no need to fear for himself, he chattered, as he had survived a mild case of the plague in Toulouse and was thus protected from future affliction.

But he insisted that nothing was as important as his medicines, and Edgar, scrubbed and clean, felt pleasant-tasting lozenges being pushed into his mouth followed by small mouthfuls of fresh, diluted wine. He heard the man telling him he’d return later with soup and bread, and Edgar was finally able to form some words and speak just above a whisper, “What is your name, sir?”

“I am Michel de Nostredame, Apothecary and Physician, and I am at your service, Monsieur.”

TRUE TO HIS WORD, the physician later returned to Edgar’s bedside and for that, the sick man was grateful. More lozenges were administered and small chunks of bread soaked in a potage of vegetables. Edgar remained feverish and in pain, his body wracked by paroxysms of coughing, but the sight of his red angel soothed him and gave him a respite from despair. The bread stayed down in his stomach, and before long he felt his eyes growing heavy, and he let the blackness come.

When he awoke, it was night, and the room was dark except for a single candle burning on his table. His red angel was sitting in a chair staring down with a glazed look in his eyes. There was a copper bowl on the table, filled to the brim with water. It was this bowl that commanded the man’s full attention and every so often, he made the water move by wiggling a wooden stick into it. The candlelight played on the water’s surface and cast a fractured yellow glow up onto the man’s dark face. There was a soft humming emanating from his mouth, a low chant? He seemed fully absorbed, unaware he was being watched. Edgar thought he should ask what he was doing but before he could, fatigue overcame him again, and he drifted back to sleep.

In the morning, the light poured through his open window, and a refreshingly cool breeze wafted in. By the bed, there was a plate of salted cod carefully broken into little pieces, a chunk of bread, and a vessel of light ale. He had just the strength to take a few bites, then lift the chamber pot into service. He listened for any sounds in the house and, hearing none, found himself able to call out. There was no reply.

He lay awake waiting for the hopeful sound of footsteps on the stairs. Before the morning had fully passed, he was elated finally to hear them.

The red angel was back, with more lozenges and cloves of garlic. He seemed pleased with Edgar’s progress, and cheerfully told him that it was a good sign he was not yet dead. He quickly inspected the hen’s eggs in his armpits and groin but agreed to Edgar’s panicky pleas not to put pressure on them as they were fiery hot and agonizing. He made it apparent he intended it to be a flying visit because he kept his cloak on and moved about the room quickly, cleaning and freshening.