Time Will Tell (11 page)

And so, on the third day, Andrew sought new diversions outside the archive to relieve himself from the repetitious tedium. The only part of the building that excited him was the Choir, where the lectern, around which the singers would have gathered, still stood. In his mind's eye he saw Mouton himself indicating the tempo of one of his compositions, a robed choir with arms draped around each other, the boys jostling for a view of the music. The archivist spotted Andrew deep in contemplation and came over and asked him if everything was all right. He replied rather too quickly that everything was fine; he was just taking a break. Guilt for abandoning his task was an unwelcome new sensation and he vowed to stay in the library for the whole of the afternoon rather than leaving around four as he had done the previous day.

His research had begun to feel like homework, something expected of him by others, rather than the vacation pursuit he had envisaged. Everyone else – the tourists, the shopkeepers, Karen and John at home – were out enjoying the sunshine whilst he was detained inside until he'd learned his lesson. Later that day, the archivist poked his head around the door of the library and asked hopefully whether Andrew had any questions. Andrew had looked up quickly. Every day the old man had offered to help and every day Andrew had nothing to ask. Panicked, he offered the only thing that had piqued his interest that morning, an inscription on the inside front cover of one of the bound books: ‘Qui te furetur, cum Juda dampnificetur'.

Without a Latin dictionary, his translation was only approximate and, prompted by his own mood as much as anything, he had decided that it was a warning to the reader not to feel frustrated. He had thought that
furetur
derived from
furor
, meaning anger, and had assumed that anyone becoming annoyed or displeased with these records would be damned.
Furetur
, the old man explained, came from the Latin verb meaning ‘to steal'. The inscription was a common curse written in books of all kinds in the medieval period, which, by virtue of their rarity and labour-intensive production, were very valuable. It was known as the Judas curse, added the old man; anyone stealing the book would be damned like the thief Judas Iscariot. There was nothing new under the sun, thought Andrew. As a child, he'd methodically written in all his books: ‘If this book should ever roam, box its ears and send it home, to: Andrew Eiger'.

Encouraged by Andrew's question, the archivist lingered, clearly expecting a greater challenge than this simple translation until it became obvious that Andrew had nothing more to offer. Abruptly, he turned on his heel and left.

Chained once more to the dull archives, Andrew developed a new diversion that allowed him to remain at his desk in an attitude of work: an investigation into the construction of the books themselves. They were leather-bound and fitted with heavy metal clasps and locks, the keys kept on a special key ring with which he'd been entrusted. The leather of the binding was carefully hand-stitched, as regular as the machine stitching on his shoes and more secure, the covers and spines embossed with gold lettering which now, half a millennium later, had flaked off in places. The pages were made from vellum – prepared sheepskin; once they were soft and flexible but now they were stiff. The binding was fixed by some sort of resin, discoloured by age, and redundant given the strength of the stitching. Despite the solid construction, in some instances the cover had come loose, revealing a tongue of leather that folded over the lip of the spine into the space between it and the pages. Here Andrew could see the structure of the book itself, the dark, yellowed glue and the stitching that held all the pages together, and then the spine itself, an inner layer of vellum, which filled the empty space to provide reinforcement and lent the spine its fat, plush appearance. In some cases this extra padding had disappeared as though time had wasted its bulk, and those books fell open rather too easily. It got Andrew thinking. Vellum was a valuable material, and in the medieval period everything was recycled. Maybe the stuffing in the spine contained something mundane or even something interesting? Shopping lists, rough drafts of the chapter records, a love letter perhaps? And maybe such treasures had been discovered and removed by an historian who'd been here before?

When he was sure that the librarian had gone for lunch and he was entirely alone, he took the records for the year 1501 and prepared to unpick the spine. He didn't have to force anything. The glue was old and cracked and had lost its adhesive properties, so his task was like unwrapping a Christmas present. He simply opened the fold at the top and grasped the filling between thumb and forefinger to remove it. But it wouldn't budge; the glue might no longer hold the leather binding in place, but it still held the padding to the leather.

He thought no more of it and returned to his research. The next day, however, after two hours of reading the records for 1502, he tried the same thing with a different volume and managed to extract a folded piece of vellum from one of the bindings. It was disappointing. He'd seen it, or something like it, before. It was simply one of the pages from the chapter records sullied by the scribe, a large blob of ink and a hastily scribbled ‘Merde. Merde!' over a half-completed page. Nevertheless, it was an encouraging human engagement with the past, and considerably more personal than anything he'd read thus far. Subsequently he went back over all the books he'd studied to see if he could find anything similar, and an hour later he'd discovered four similar folded sheets, further examples of nothing more exciting than scribal ineptitude.

Eventually he became almost as bored with his search as he was with the investigation into the records themselves. There wasn't even the satisfaction of developing a methodology. His early attempts had sometimes resulted in torn vellum, but, in a relatively short space of time, he'd become quite an expert. He had a feel for it now. He knew the right amount of pressure he could exert before the vellum would rip and had found that a small amount of saliva could sometimes loosen the glue. Thus his developing skills as an historical pickpocket became his real pursuit, rather than the quest for historical discovery, so much so that he found he'd extracted three folded pieces of vellum from three different books and, suddenly worried that he might put them back in the wrong places, almost forgot to consider their content. The first and second were the usual spoiled entries. The third was different: a letter. The writing was obviously not of the same hand as that of any of the scribes he'd viewed thus far, though it shared with it the same preference for loops on ‘g's' and ‘y's' in particular. He suspected that it was of the same era, a thought that was immediately confirmed by the careful dating at the top right hand of the page:
Tours, Martius 19, 1524
. Tours: Ockeghem's city, though Ockeghem had died twenty-seven years before the letter was written. It was addressed to
mon fils
– my son – and the author was a Geoffroy Chiron, a name that, at the time, meant nothing to Andrew. In floral, formal language, the father explained his poor state of health and expressed the hope that the son would be able to visit soon ‘by the grace of the Lord, and of the Duke'. Some of the words were unclear and some smudged, quite different in style from the limited, recondite vocabulary of the chapter records, but one word stood out:
ung motect
– a motet.

The letter was smaller than the other pieces of vellum used for bindings, and two accompanying sheets, larger still, provided further padding and had ensured the letter's survival. These supplementary sheets had been folded over themselves, widthwise and several times, to fit into the spine and thus they revealed their secret to Andrew slowly and, in retrospect, almost teasingly. The first thing he did was to unfold the extra pages, which resembled a fan. When he had smoothed out the creases, it became apparent that he was dealing with only one piece of paper. The final fold was not quite in the middle of the page so that the overlap, which had made it appear from a cursory glance like two pages, actually consisted of the top and bottom of the same sheet. This single piece of paper was stuck together but two centimetres of handwritten Latin text were visible, and above that, two parallel horizontal lines.

He recognised them straightaway, the dimensions as familiar to him as a fragment of a ledger would be to an accountant or the symbols of a wiring diagram would be to an electrician: it was the bottom of a musical stave, and two fat, square breves confirmed it as fifteenth-century music notation. He looked up to check there was no one around then slowly placed the document flat on the desk, smoothing out the folds as best he could by running his hand gently from top to bottom and side to side. He knew that he had to be careful now. The ink itself might be sticking the page together and may well have bled from one side to the other. He peeled off his white gloves and laid them to one side; this would require a delicacy of touch that could only be achieved with bare fingertips. He wiped his hands on his trousers to remove any sweat, and then looked around him once more. He was alone.

He placed the folded sheet flat on the desk and pressed down with splayed fingers and thumbs to anchor it. Then he lifted his index fingers, brought their tips together and, with the lightest of pressure, gently inserted them between the folds. It was warm to the touch and much smoother than he'd expected, as though its resting place had kept it alive. Slowly, evenly, he separated his index fingers, moving them in opposite directions, caressing the stave beneath them. The top fold loosened from the bottom and, after about a minute of this insinuating movement, he had cleared about three millimetres to reveal almost a complete new line on which were traced two new note heads. As tempting as it was to examine them, he stuck to his immediate task and, with the same tender insistence, repeated the process. After ten minutes, he had succeeded in exposing three centimetres of writing. He dropped his head so that his eyes were level with the document and congratulated himself; none of the ink had bled through and he could clearly see a bass part in fifteenth-century white notation. He was tempted to push forward now with more urgency but, fearing that the vellum might tear, he endured the beautiful torment of his calculated probing.

He repeated the same movement several times, delicately easing apart the folds of the paper to ensure that no damage came to his treasure and, after twenty minutes, he had revealed a single sheet on which three musical parts were notated. The text was
Miserere mei
– Psalm 51 – the same words that had been set countless times by other composers, most famously by Allegri in the seventeenth century. It was immediately obvious that this manuscript was not a performing edition. It was tiny and whereas, in fifteenth-century choirbooks traditionally the voice-parts were separated, here the three, named parts were ranged on top of each other, like a modern score.

It was no forgery – why would a forger hide it here, after all? – and his faith in its authenticity grew with each small discovery. Here and there he found faint
ficta
markings, which seemed to have been added afterwards. It was a living document of compositional practice and, according to the letter that accompanied it, must have been in some way linked to Tours. It was clearly what music historians called an autograph: a working copy made by – or for – a composer; and as such, it was extremely rare.

Andrew stood up, crossed the room quietly and locked the door. He was about to slide the manuscript surreptitiously into his bag and then fill the spine with another piece of paper when it occurred to him that it was not only safer to leave it here, but wiser. Provenance would have to be shown, something that could only be done with a witness, and this was far too precious to share with anyone else. He would leave it here. Back home, in America, he would gather all the necessary corroboration and consider the perfect circumstances in which to reveal it. Now, though, he had to make a copy so that if someone else discovered it – he shuddered at the thought – he could claim to have found it first.

By then it was late afternoon. He had only one day left; the day after that he would fly home from Paris. And so he returned the motet carefully to its resting place and the following day, with more confidence, he retrieved his precious find. There was less time than he would have liked; the archivist had promised to visit him that afternoon to answer any remaining questions and collect the keys.

Geoffroy Chiron's accompanying letter, whatever its relevance, could wait; the music was the thing. Suppressing his desire to study the motet itself, he yielded to immediate needs, proceeding methodically and with a detachment that belied his excitement. Firstly, he measured the document. Although it was clearly not for inclusion in any collection, perhaps its dimensions and other identifying features would allow him to tie it to a time and a place. Just because Chiron had sent it from Tours didn't mean it had been composed there. Then he traced some of the handwriting and a few of the notes and their shapes; such details might match other fifteenth-century French sources.

Finally he began to make a copy of the document itself, being careful to maintain exactly the same layout as the original scribe. He discovered almost straightaway that it was not a three-part-piece. The Latin instruction in the bass part indicated a
contratenor
part; it was a four-part motet. On further investigation of the text he saw reference to a canon and realised just how much he'd underestimated the ambition of the composition: it was, unbelievably, a piece for thirty-four separate voices.

It was difficult to concentrate now, copying a cruel necessity when all he really wanted to do was yield to the seduction of the music. There should have been choirs of angels singing, not the dull task of reproduction, and he should be running in the streets shouting ‘Eureka', spraying strangers with champagne. Instead he had to labour against the urgent ticking of the clock. It was like the nightmares he once had of sitting exams and being the only one in the examination room, looking down at a blank page, realising too late that he'd written nothing at all.