Secret of the Seventh Son (38 page)

T
he hem of the abbot's white robe was soaked with blood. Each time he stooped to touch a cold forehead or make the sign of the cross over a supine body, his garment got bloodier.

Prior Felix was at Baldwin's side, supporting him by the arm so the abbot wouldn't tumble on the blood-slicked stones. They made their rounds through the carnage, pausing over each ginger-haired writer to check for signs of life, but there were none. The only other beating heart in the Hall of the Writers belonged to old Bartholomew, who was making his own grim inspection at the opposite end of the chamber. Baldwin had sent Sister Sabeline away because her hysterical crying was unnerving and preventing him from collecting his thoughts.

"They are dead," Baldwin said. "All dead. Why in God's name has this happened?"

Bartholomew was systematically going from row to row, stepping carefully over and around bodies, trying to keep his footing. For a very old man, he was moving briskly from one station to another, plucking manuscript pages off the table and making a stack of them in his hand.

He made his way to Baldwin clutching a ream of parchments.

"Look," the old man said. "Look!"

He laid the pages down.

Baldwin picked up one and read it.

Then the next, and the next. He fanned the pages out on the table to see more of them quickly.

Each page carried the date 9 February 2027, with the identical inscription.

"
Finis Dierum
," Baldwin said. "End of Days."

Felix trembled. "So this is when the end will come."

Bartholomew half smiled at the revelation. "Their work was done."

Baldwin gathered up the pages and held them to his breast. "Our work is not yet done, brothers. They must be laid to rest in the crypt. Then I will say a mass in their honor. The Library must be sealed and the chapel must be burned. The world is not ready."

Felix and Bartholomew quickly nodded in agreement as the abbot turned to leave.

"The year 2027 is far in the future," Baldwin said wearily. "At least, mankind has a very long time to prepare for the End of Days."

In
Secret of the Seventh Son,
FBI agent Will Piper trailed a series of murders that took him across centuries back to medieval times and traversing the country, with the U.S. government hot on his heels.

But if Will thought that case was a whirlwind ride, he has no idea what he's in for when a mysterious book from 1527 turns up and launches him onto a dangerous journey to solve the greatest riddle in the history of mankind....

THE SECRET CONTINUES SUMMER 2010

A
fter thirty-odd years in the rare books business Toby Parfitt found the only time he could reliably and deliciously muster a frisson of excitement was the moment when he would delicately stick his hands into a packing crate fresh from the loading dock.

The intake and catalogue room of Pierce & Whyte Auctions was in the basement, deeply insulated from the rumbling traffic of London's Kensington High Street. Toby was content to be in the silence of this comfortable old work-room, with its smooth oak tables, swan-neck lamps, and nicely padded stools. The only noise was the pleasant rustling of handfuls of shredded packing paper as he scooped them out and binned them, and then, disconcertingly, asthmatic breathing and a thin-chested wheeze intruded.

He looked up at the blemished face of Peter Nieve and grudgingly acknowledged him with a perfunctory bob of his head. The pleasure of discovery would, alas, be tainted. He couldn't tell the youth to bugger off, could he?

"I was told the lot from Cantwell Hall was in," Nieve said.

"Yes. I've just opened the first crate."

"All fourteen arrived, I hope."

"Why don't you have a count to make sure?"

"Will do, Toby."

The informality was a killer. Toby! No Mr. Parfitt. No sir. Not even Alistair. Toby, the name his friends used. Times had certainly changed--for the worse--but he couldn't summon the strength to buck the tide. If a second-year associate felt empowered to call the Director of Antiquarian Books Toby, then he would stoically bear it. Qualified help was hard to find and young Nieve, with his solid second in Art History from Manchester, was the best that twenty thousand pounds could buy nowadays. At least the young man was able to find a clean shirt and a tie every day, though his collars were too generous for his scrawny neck, making his head look like it was stuck onto his torso with a dowel.

Toby ground his molars at the deliberate and childlike counting out loud to fourteen. "All here."

"I'm so glad."

"Martin said you'd be pleased with the haul."

Toby rarely made house calls any more. He left them to Martin Stein, his deputy director. In truth, he loathed the countryside and had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, out of town. On occasion, a client would have some real gems and Pierce & Whyte would try to wheedle itself in to snatch business away from Christie's or Sotheby's. "Believe me," he assured his managing director, "if I get wind of a Second Folio or a good Bronte or Walter Raleigh out there in the provinces, I will descend on it at warp speed, even if it's in Shropshire." From what he was led to understand, Cantwell had a trove of fair to middling material, but Stein had indeed told him he would enjoy the diversity of the consignment.

Lord Cantwell was typical of their clientele, an elderly anachronism struggling to maintain his crumbling country estate by periodically selling off bits of furniture, paintings, books, and silver to keep the tax man at bay and the pile from falling down. The old boy sent his really good pieces to one of the major houses, but Pierce & Whyte's reputation for books, maps, and autographs put it in the leading position to land this slice of Cantwell's business.

Toby reached his hand into the inside pocket of his form-fitted Chester Barrie suit and extracted his thin white-cotton specimen gloves. Decades earlier, his boss had steered him to his Savile Row tailor, and ever since, he had clothed himself in the best fabrics he could afford. Clothes mattered, and so did grooming. His bristling mustache was always perfectly trimmed and visits to his barber every Tuesday at lunchtime kept his gray-tinged hair unfailingly neat.

He slid on the gloves like a surgeon and hovered over the first exposed binding. "Right. Let's see what we have."

The top row of spines revealed a matched set. He plucked out the first book. "Ah! All six volumes of Freeman's
The History of the Norman Conquest of England
. 1877-1879, if I recall." He opened the cloth cover to the title page. "Excellent! First edition. Is it a matched set?"

"All firsts, Toby."

"Good, good. They should go for six hundred to eight hundred. You often get mixed sets, you know."

He laid out all six books carefully, taking note of their condition before diving back into the crate. "Here's something a bit older." It was a fine old Latin Bible, Antwerp, 1653, with a rich worn calf binding and gilt ridges on the spine. "This is nice," he cooed. "I'd say one fifty to two hundred."

He was less enthusiastic about the next several volumes, some later editions of Ruskin and Fielding in dodgy condition, but he grew quite excited at Fraser's
Journal of a Tour Through Part of the Snowy Range of the Himala Mountains, and to the Source of the Rivers Jumna and Ganges
, 1820, a pristine first. "I haven't seen one of these in this state for years! Marvelous! Three thousand, easily. My spirits are lifting. Tell me, there wouldn't be any incunabula in the collection?"

From the perplexed expression on the youth's face, Toby knew he was tapping a dry hole. "Incunabula? European printed books? Pre-1501? Ring a bell?"

The young man was clearly stung by Toby's irritability and he flushed in embarrassment. "Oh, right. Sorry. No incunabula whatsoever. There
was
something on the oldish side, but it was handwritten." He pointed helpfully into the crate. "There it is. His granddaughter wasn't keen on parting with it."

"Whose granddaughter?"

"Lord Cantwell. She had an unbelievable body."

"We don't, as a habit, make reference to our clients' bodies," Toby said sternly, reaching for the broad spine of the book.

It was remarkably heavy; he needed two hands to securely drag it out and lay it on the table.

Even before he opened it, he felt his pulse race and the moisture dissipate from his mouth. There was something about this large, dense book that spoke loudly to his instincts. The bindings were smooth old calf leather, mottled, the color of good milk chocolate. It had a faintly fruited smell, redolent of ancient mold and damp. The dimensions were prodigious, eighteen inches long, twelve inches wide, and a good five inches thick: a couple of thousand pages, to be sure. As to weight, he imagined hoisting a two-kilo bag of sugar. This was much heavier. The only markings were on the spine, a large, simple hand-tooled engraving, incised deeply into the leather: 1527.

He was surprised, in a detached way, to see his right hand trembling when he reached out to lift the cover. The spine was supple from use. No cracking. There was a plain, unadorned creamy endpaper glued onto the hide. There was no frontispiece, no title page. The first page of the book, the color of butter, roughly uneven to the touch, began without exposition, racing into a closely-spaced, handwritten scrawl. Quill and black ink. Columns and rows. At least a hundred names and dates. He blinked in a large amount of visual information before turning the page. And another. And another. He skipped to the middle. Checked several pages toward the end. Then the last page. He tried to do a quick mental calculation, but because there was no pagination, he was only guessing--there must have been well over a hundred thousand listed names from front to back.

"Remarkable," he whispered.

"Martin didn't know what to make of it. Thought it was some sort of town registry. He said you might have some ideas."

"I've got lots of them. Unfortunately, they don't hang together. Look at the pages." He lifted one clear of the others. "This isn't paper, you know. It's vellum, very high-quality stuff. I can't be sure, but I think it's uterine vellum, the creme de la creme. Unborn calf skin, soaked, limed, scudded, and stretched. Typically used in the finest illuminated manuscripts, not a bloody town registry."

He flipped pages, making comments and pointing ad hoc with his gloved forefinger. "It's a chronicle of births and deaths. Look at this one: Nicholas Amcotts 13 1 1527 Natus. Seems to announce that a Nicholas Amcotts was born on the thirteenth of January 1527. Straightforward enough. But look at the next one. Same date, Mors, a death, but these are Chinese characters. And the next one, another death, Kaetherlin Banwartz, surely a Germanic name, and this one here. If I'm not mistaken, this is in Arabic."

In a minute, he had found Greek, Portuguese, Italian, French, Spanish, and English names and multiple foreign words in Cyrillic, Hebrew, Swahili, and Chinese. There were some languages he could only guess at. He muttered something about African dialects.

He pressed his gloved fingertips together in contemplation. "What kind of town has this population diversity, not to mention this population density in 1527? And what about this vellum? And this rather primitive binding? The impression here is something quite a bit older than sixteenth century. It's got a decidedly medieval feel to it."

"But it's dated 1527."

"Well, yes. Duly noted. Still, that is my impression and I do not discount my gut feel, nor should you. I think we will have to obtain the views of academic colleagues."

"What's it worth?"

"I've no idea. Whatever it is, it's a specialty item, a curiosity, quite unique. Collectors like uniqueness. Let's not worry too much about value at this stage. I think we will do well by this piece." He carefully carried the book to the far end of the table and put it on its own spot away from the others, a pride of place. "Let's sort through the rest of the Cantwell material, shall we? You'll be busy entering the lot into the computer. And when you're done, I want you to turn every page in every book to look for letters, autographs, stamps, et cetera. We don't want to give our customers freebies, do we?"

In the evening, with young Nieve long gone, Toby returned to the basement. He passed quickly by the whole of the Cantwell collection, which was laid out on three long tables. For the moment, those volumes held no more interest to him than a load of old
Hello!
magazines. He went straight for the book that had occupied his thoughts all day and slowly laid his ungloved hands on its smooth leather. In the future, he would insist that at that moment he felt some kind of physical connection with the inanimate object, a sentiment unbefitting a man with no inclination to this kind of drivel.

"What are you?" he asked out loud. He made doubly sure he was alone, since he imagined that talking to books might be career-limiting at Pierce & Whyte. "Why don't you tell me your secrets?"

Will Piper was never much for crying babies, especially his own. He had a vague recollection of Crying Baby #1 a quarter of a century earlier. In those days he was a young deputy sheriff in Florida pulling the worst shifts. By the time he got home in the morning, his infant daughter was already up-and-at-'em, doing her happy-baby routine. When he and his wife did spend a night together and Laura cried out, he'd whine himself, then drift back to sleep before Melanie had the bottle out of the warmer. He didn't do diapers. He didn't do feedings. He didn't do crying. And he was gone for good before Laura's second birthday.

But that was two marriages and one lifetime ago, and he was a changed man, or so he told himself. He had allowed himself to be molded into something of a twenty-first-century metrosexual New York father with all the trappings of the station. If, in the past, he could attend crime scenes and prod at decomposing flesh, he could change a diaper now. If he could conduct an interview through the sobs of a victim's mother, he could deal with an infant's crying.

It didn't mean he had to like it.

There had been a succession of new phases in Will's life and he was a month into the newest. Nancy was back to work after maternity leave. For at least brief stretches of time, he was left on his own to experience fatherhood unfiltered. In the morning, when Nancy closed the apartment door behind her, the six-month-old would sense the rift and start working his diaphragm. Their budget didn't allow for more than thirty hours per week of nanny time, so for a few hours a day Will had to fly solo.

Mercifully, Phillip Weston Piper's high-pitched squall was squelched by rocking, but it abruptly resumed when Will put him back in his crib. Will hoped beyond hope that he'd burn himself out and slowly backed out of the bedroom. He put the living room TV onto cable news and tweaked the volume to harmonically modulate the nails-on-chalkboard squeal of his offspring.

Even though he was chronically sleep-deprived, Will's head was awfully clear these days, thanks to his self-imposed separation from his pal Johnnie Walker. He kept the ceremonial last half-gallon bottle of Black Label three-quarters full in the cabinet under the TV. He wasn't going to be the kind of ex-drunk who had to purge the place of alcohol. He visited with the bottle sometimes, winked at it, sparred with it, had a little chat with it. He taunted it more than it taunted him. He didn't do AA or "talk to someone." He didn't even stop drinking! He had a couple of beers or a generous glass of wine fairly regularly and he even got buzzed on an empty stomach. He simply prohibited himself from touching the nectar--smoky, beautiful, amber--his love, his nemesis. He didn't care what the textbooks said about addicts and abstinence. He was his own man and he had promised himself and his new bride that he wouldn't do the falling-down-drunk thing again.

He sat on the sofa with his large hands lying dumbly on his bare thighs. He was set to go, kitted out in jogging shorts, t-shirt, and sneakers. The nanny was late again. He felt trapped, claustrophobic. He was spending way too much time in this little parquet-floored prison cell. Despite best intentions, something was going to have to give. He was trying to do the right thing and honor his commitments and all that, but every day he grew more restless. New York had always irritated him. Now it was overtly nauseating.

The buzzer saved him from darkness. A minute later, the nanny arrived, launching into an attack on public transport rather than an apology. Leonora Monica Nepomuceno, a four-foot-ten-inch Filipina in her fifties, threw her carrier bag on the kitchenette counter, then went right for the crying baby, pressing his tense little body against hers. "Ay, ay," she sighed to the boy, "your Auntie Leonora is here. You can stop your crying now."