Chapter 18
Eighteen
Visiting the museum’s archives was like stepping back in time. Just a small remnant of what once had been the British Library remained, but the collection still held thousands of manuscripts in the vaulted spaces of the basement.
Eve loved the idea of so much history stored secretly beneath visitor’s oblivious feet. Like a kid in a sweet shop, she followed Henry Claymore, the Head Librarian, into the rare books section, where it smelled of dust and decaying paper. Henry sneezed.
”Probably best if you just wait here,” he said, directing her toward an untidy desk. “Gets a bit dusty. Help yourself to a biscuit.” He smiled kindly.
An open pack of chocolate bourbons lay on a jumbled pile of papers. Eve plonked herself down in Henry’s shabby leather chair and the man himself disappeared into the stacks.
“Got several tomes suited to your exhibit list,” he called. He was out of sight, but Eve could still hear him shuffling about. “In this section, somewhere.” His voice tailed off, but he reappeared briefly from behind another teetering pile a few stacks along. “The first one’s just one of those mischievous documents that seems to have a life of its own.”
His blue eyes twinkled as he pushed half-moon glasses back up the bridge of his nose. He sniffed. “Now, where is it?” He disappeared back into the shelves.
Some minutes passed, there was a good deal of clattering, the juddering scrape of a ladder on the stone floor and then Henry said “A-ha! There you are!”
It made Eve smile. She’d always liked Henry. He was so eccentric and his encyclopedic knowledge of the arcane was bordering on legendary. As was his seemingly never-ending supply of chocolate bourbons. The other staff referred to him as ‘Herodotus’ after the Greek historian. She wasn’t sure if he knew, but thought he would probably take it as a compliment.
She squeezed a biscuit from the pack and nibbled at a corner.
Henry reappeared and laid a book in front of her with a dusty whomp of air. He sneezed extravagantly.
“My apologies. The paper mites are getting out of hand again.” He eyed the chunky old-fashioned humidifier squatting behind his desk and gave it an exploratory tap with his foot. It gurgled feebly. He returned his attention to the book. To Eve’s eye it looked extraordinarily old; its cover blackened and warped by time.
“Crystal balls have long been associated with scrying, the means to communicate with another plane.” He held one hand up to his eyes as if to shield them from the sun. “Seeing into the future. That sort of thing. This one’s pretty special, of course.” He eyed the globe currently settled in its silky nest beside the biscuits. Eve had set it down there while she waited. “A sun stone of this quality is a rare natural phenomenon. Note the pearlescent glimmers despite the low levels of ambient light.”
Eve looked into the stone. It drew you in. She imagined she could see the entire universe suspended in its crystal.
“Highly sort after in the fourteen and fifteenth centuries,” Henry said in a hushed voice. “I’m pretty sure there’s a reference to them in this work by the Dutch Physician and Alchemist, Johannes Wier.” He looked up at Eve and rubbed his hands together in a self-satisfied kind of way. He opened the book with a small brass rod he’d pulled from his jacket pocket.
The pages were yellowing and stained, with heavy gothic lettering and woodcut illustrations of constellations, planets, and astrological symbols.
“Now, I have studied many astronomical treatises in my time,” Henry said. “But this is one of the few books that mentions this specific kind.”
He turned the page to reveal an illustration of a ritual. A woman laid on her back with the knives placed at strategic points on the surrounding floor.
“Johannes describes an ancient ritual, one that he translated from an Akkadian tablet discovered in Sumeria. It describes eight blades, each representing one planet, which, if used in the correct configuration with the Sun Stone, could summon a great cosmic power. Johannes refers to it as the Anima Mundi , a transformational energy.”
Eve studied the illustration. The body of the woman was covered in astrological symbols. The knives looked strikingly familiar. Just like the ones she had collected from Christie's, their distinctive hilts each bearing a gemstone, connected by rays of light to the large central gem that hung above her.
“The ritual honored the coming of Anu, the supreme god of the Babylonian pantheon.” Henry added, tracing the tip of the rod along the dotted lines between the gemstones on the hilts until it reached the blade buried in the woman’s breast. “They’re thought to have been used in human sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice?” Eve said, remembering the knicks in the blades. “Why is it the women that always get sacrificed?” She shook her head, “Especially virgins.”
Henry shuffled uncomfortably and fiddled with his collar. “Don’t worry, you’re quite safe. The knives have been lost for millennia.”
“And that’s where you’re wrong, for once, Henry,” said Eve.
He looked rather taken aback and suddenly Eve saw that he may have misunderstood her. This wasn’t the kind of conversation you had with Henry.
She stuttered quickly back into speech. “Dr Knight has them now, the knives, that is. He bought them from Christies.”
Henry blinked at her. “Dr Knight? Has he?”
An icy shiver ran down her spine as she remembered the nicks on the blades. Somehow, it made their history even more real. The idea that she’d held one sent a thrill of horror through her.
“Yup. Being stored in the vaults just across the hall,” she continued, “I’m heading over there with the Sun Stone. The reason I’m down here, really.”
Henry had gone rather pale. “Reunited,” he said in a whisper.
“There are all sorts of related items coming in.” Eve waved Lucien’s shipment list at him. “I need to check on their progress. Another reason to come down. Not that it isn’t lovely to catch up,” she added quickly. “What does that say?” She pointed to a series of pictograms on the page woven around the line connecting the gemstone to the sun.
Henry bent forward. His glasses slid down to the tip of his nose. Words formed silently on his lips as he read the text.
“Ah, Transitus Veneris , the transit of Venus, yes. It has always been a particular favorite with ancient civilizations. Fascinating planet. One of the most visible objects in our sky. They call it the Morning Star, which is, of course, another name for Lucifer—Light Bringer in Latin.”
“What’s a transit?” Eve asked, trying to remember the order of the planets. Astronomy had never been one of her strongest subjects.
“Let us consult the work of the Astronomer Royal, Sir George Airy,” Henry said, flourishing his brass rod like and wand and producing another ancient book from beneath a heap of papers on the desk. He noticed Eve’s raised eyebrows. “I’ve been doing a little research myself,” he said. “I like to get ahead when a new exhibition is being planned.”
He opened the almanac to reveal a series of hand drawn observations and geometric calculations.
“The transit of Venus is when Venus moves between the earth and the sun, blocking out some of its light. Apparent moving across the sun, do you see? A rare event, only occurring every two hundred and forty years or so. The last was in 1882. It caused all manner of unusual weather. Over thirty ships were reported lost to freak storms.”
Eve was struggling to see what was so important about it. “So, it's some sort of eclipse?”
Henry shook his head. “Not exactly no. More of an astronomical alignment.” He carefully turned the pages. “According to Johannes’s interpretation, the Babylonians believed it was a sign that one of their gods, Shamash, the sun god, had turned his eyes away from them, allowing all manner of demons to be let loose upon the world. Only Ishtar could protect them.”
She frowned. “Ishtar?” There was that name again.
He produced another book. “Or Inanna—Queen of Heaven. Goddess of love, beauty, war, and fertility. Lots of hats.”
He flipped open another leather-bound tome, turned to a specific page and rotated it so she could see. There was an illustration of a queen equipped with weapons on her back, a horned helmet, and trampling a lion held on a leash. “She was a powerful entity.”
“Can I borrow these?”
Henry’s nostrils flared. “All of them? They are rather precious.”
“A bit of background reading. Get up to speed. Like you said, get ahead .”
Henry looked at her over the top of his glasses. A furrow formed between his eyebrows. “Good idea, yes.”
Eve pored over the books to absorb their detail. Once she’d left the sun stone in the curator's care, she’d felt strangely bereft. The winter weather lashed at the exhibition space windows and she hunkered down at her desk in her coat, lost in the old books’ pages.
Bad weather was a bit of a theme. According to one book, the goddess Ishtar was reputed to unleash storms upon the earth in fits of rage, the power to wield the weather being just one of the hats she could wear, as Henry put it. Eve wondered if there really was some truth in the myth, now that the weather had turned so bad and the transit of Venus approached.
The day passed in a chilly blur, interrupted by the arrival of a number of display cases, which she positioned in key spots through the two rooms, and a phone call from Lucien.
“I’m going to see a contact in Paris tomorrow,” he said, and Eve pulled her coat a little tighter around herself. “There are a couple of things I’d like to lay my hands on, and she may have other artefacts pertinent to our theme. I’d appreciate the backup of an Egyptology expert. Are you free?”
Eve snorted a little into the phone before she composed herself. It was perfectly obvious to her she’d be delighted to go. Paris was a place Eve had never visited and going as Dr Lucien Knight’s fellow expert was somewhat surreal.
“I think I can clear my diary,” she said in a strangled voice. She was glad he couldn’t see the dopey smile spreading across her face.
“Excellent,” Lucien purred. “If Madame Laveau can’t get what I’m looking for, then nobody can. I’m glad you can come,” he said. “I think you’ll enjoy the experience.”
Eve’s insides fluttered.