Chapter 14 #2
The Upper Library of Merton College was the oldest continuously functioning academic library in the world. It announced this fact not through any plaque or declaration but through the simple, incontrovertible fact of being exactly what it was.
First floor of a fourteenth-century range, completed in 1373. The oak-paneled wagon roof dated from the early 1500s. The room ran the length of the upper floor in a series of bays, each bay furnished in the stalled continental fashion.
A bookpress stood on either side, tall wooden shelves fitted with a desk and seat, so that a scholar sat between two walls of books, his work spread before him and the volumes immediately at hand without the need to rise.
The books in the older bays were chained at the lower board edge to iron bars running along the press, the chain staple visible at the base of each volume.
A system of custody that had been in place since before printing had made it theoretically redundant and which Merton had retained because Merton retained procedures that worked.
The ceiling bosses caught Nicholas’s eye immediately.
Circular metal, not carved wood. Each one bearing the arms of Henry VII.
Tudor roses and leopards’ heads, pressed in the heraldic shorthand of the first years of the sixteenth century, installed in the period when Matteo di Bianchi might have been in residence in this college as a guest draughtsman.
Working in these rooms. Sitting at these presses. Staring up at exactly these bosses.
Nicholas examined them and felt a truth that was not quite what he had expected to feel, the clarifying sensation of a fact arriving in the right context after a long journey through the wrong ones.
You were here, he thought, to no one in particular. You sat in this room and looked up at these and drew them in the margin of the page that has been lost in the great estates of England, waiting for someone to work out what you meant.
“Best light at this press,” Pembroke said.
He had been quite amenable to granting access during the tea, reminiscing about the baron, and Nicholas had been surprised he quite liked the scholar.
“And the man on duty this afternoon means no unnecessary hovering.” He nodded to the librarian, thin with a careful watchful manner, who took the custody of chained manuscripts seriously and intended to continue doing so.
“This is Mr. Scott. He will be consulting the Geoffrey. See him settled, would you.”
The librarian assessed Nicholas, determining whether he was the kind of scholar who could be trusted with a chained manuscript.
“The Merton Geoffrey,” Pembroke repeated pleasantly, in the tone that made it clear that requests in this room had never been declined him and who saw no reason to anticipate a change in that arrangement. “When you have a moment.”
“Of course, Dr. Pembroke,” the librarian said, apparently satisfied that such a lauded Fellow was vouching for him.
Pembroke turned back to Nicholas. “Present yourself at my rooms before you leave,” he said. “I want to hear what you make of it.” He said it with a straightforward curiosity, genuinely a man who liked people more than most. Then he went to attend to his own afternoon’s business.
The manuscript was brought.
Historia Regum Britanniae written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century.
It contained marginal notations in multiple hands from multiple readers across multiple generations, the accumulated thoughts of scholars finding points worth remarking on and proceeding to remark on it in small, precise script.
And among those marginal notes, visible on close examination under the library’s north-facing light, a set of notations in a different ink entirely.
Cooler, darker. Perhaps the ink of the early sixteenth century rather than the medieval?
Made by a hand that was not a scholar’s untidy scrawl but a draughtsman’s?
Small and exact. Marking passages with annotations that suggested complete certainty about which verses mattered and why they mattered.
Nicholas stared at these notations for a long time.
He opened his own notebook, and set Matteo’s journal open beside it, and considered what he had.
He had known the axe was E since Grimsfell.
He had worked it out from frequency analysis, the simple, tyrannical mathematics of English text in which E appeared more often than any other letter and considerably more often than any other vowel.
The axe had appeared in Matteo’s cipher columns with exactly the regularity that E demanded. He had known the correlation for weeks.
He had not known the reason for it. And the difference between knowing a correlation and knowing the reason for it had been sitting with him since the library table at Grimsfell like a puzzle incompletely resolved.
He had learned enough about Matteo di Bianchi over the past several weeks to suspect that nothing in the cipher was without reason.
He found the relevant section of Book IX and read through it with undivided attention. The chapters on Arthur’s imperial campaign. Geoffrey’s Latin, dense, the hand of a medieval scribe working in the early 1100s with the concerned economy of vellum that cost dearly and could not be wasted.
And he found the first word he was searching for.
Enemy.
He sat with it for a moment. In Latin it was hostis, which told him nothing. But Matteo had been encoding in English.
The English word was enemy. The first letter was E.
The symbol assigned to E throughout the journal was the axe.
Not arbitrary, he thought, satisfied his hypothesis had just been confirmed and expanded simultaneously.
Not a random assignment. The axe is not a symbol for E.
The axe is the weapon that the enemy uses to attack, and enemy begins with E.
The pictogram is the word. The word’s first letter is what the pictogram carries.
He moved through the passage with a systematic pace, the pattern, once located, rendering the remaining work a matter of application.
The word Saxon two lines later, and in Matteo’s alphabet he found that was the horned helmet. S.
The box with the pointed top, a throne, appeared in a passage about a king. K.
The broken chain, appearing in a verse about a warrior driven into exile. X.
The image of an X, which was the symbol for N, because it stood in place of a name when a man did not know how to read or write.
He worked through them all. Each pictogram yielded to the same logic.
The same system. The mind of a Renaissance draughtsman who had read Geoffrey’s Latin account of Arthur’s Britain and had seen in its vocabulary a complete working alphabet.
One image for each letter. Each image the first letter of the item it depicted.
It was elegant in the way of the best systems. Not clever for cleverness’s sake, but functional, carrying its own internal logic so completely that once the key was found the whole lock opened without resistance.
He had the full alphabet in ninety minutes.
He set the Historia aside with the mindful respect due to a manuscript that had been sitting on this press for many centuries and deserved to be returned to it without incident.
He turned Matteo’s journal to page three, to the coded text beneath the boss sketch. And he derived the alphabet word by word with patience, understanding that the last step of a three-hundred-year-old puzzle was not the place to introduce errors through haste.
The text resolved.
He read it.
He read it again with the amazement of someone who had just experienced a revelation and required a moment before continuing onwards.
This is the secret journal of one Matteo di Bianchi, commissioned by Regis Aeterni in the year 1513 to build a path that yields only to the rightful hand.
Odd phrasing. The rightful hand? But he did not have much attention to pay because a sense of destiny had washed over him.
He sat in the oldest continuously functioning academic library in the world, or at least Merton liked to claim as much.
In the room where Matteo had sat hundreds of years before him with the same manuscript open on the same press.
He stared at the ceiling bosses. He thought about his friend, Lorenzo di Bianchi, waiting at Grimsfell to solve his mystery centuries in the making.
About what this meant. About Millie on the street outside who did not yet know any of it.
Oddly, he felt connected to this mysterious Matteo who had come to England, only to vanish into the mists of time. More connected to this stranger dead three hundred years than he had felt to his own mother when she had died the year before. Then, he shivered.
He assured himself he had just been caught in a draught, but he had a sneaking sensation that there was more to it than that. That he was truly experiencing a sense of fate.
Shaking his head, he put his things away with the satisfied attitude of a man concluding a productive afternoon’s work. Rising, he went to find Pembroke.