Codex (11 page)

The phone was ringing. He opened his eyes. The answering machine picked up.

“Howdy, playmate.” It was Zeph's voice. “Re-telephone me, please, at your earliest convenience.”

Edward lay still for a while, staring blankly at the phone on his night table. The sheet was twisted up into a long rope that had gotten wound around his arms and legs somehow. With an effort he sat up far enough to see the clock radio next to his bed. It was almost one in the afternoon.

“Jesus,” he said, suddenly wide awake. “Not again.”

He looked around at the furniture in his apartment, blinking. How could he have slept for thirteen hours straight? He went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. Something must be going on deep in his subconscious, he thought, some kind of redecoration, refurbishment, reupholstering that required a lot of system downtime—some shadowy application running in the background, performing unknown operations, consuming huge chunks of psychic RAM.

The sheets had left a long crease in his skin, running from his crotch up to his collarbone, like the scar from some hideously invasive surgery. He came out into the kitchen dripping, rubbing his face with a towel, feeling the coolness on his face in the heat. He dropped the damp towel on the floor and plucked a pair of clean boxers from his dresser.

At any rate, he didn't feel sick. He should have been depressed after yesterday's disappointment, but instead he felt renewed, replenished, rejuvenated. The world looked crisp and washed, as if reality had been painstakingly restored and digitally remastered overnight for his viewing pleasure. He'd shaken off the feeling of defeat he had after yesterday's research. He was starting to enjoy his new double life—I-banker by day, book hunter by night—and he wasn't going to give it up that easily. He decided not to go to the Wents' apartment today. If he was going to tell the Wents that it was all over, that the book—whatever it was called—was lost forever, or never existed at all, he was going to do it with a full dossier on the subject in hand, complete with charts and tables and appendices and bound in leather on triple-bond paper. And he knew exactly where to start.

He turned on his computer and Googled Margaret Napier. No luck in Manhattan, but Brooklyn had an M. Napier. It was a long shot—Brooklyn to Columbia was a long commute—but he wrote down the number anyway, pricking himself when the pen poked through the paper into his bare knee.

An answering machine picked up. She didn't give her name, but that low, affectless voice was unmistakable. He was about to leave a message when the voice cut off.

“Hello.”

There was a quick riff of feedback as the answering machine shut off.

“Hi. Margaret Napier, please.”

“Napier,” She corrected, pronouncing it to rhyme with
rapier.
“This is she.”

“Margaret, this is Edward Wozny. We met yesterday at the Chenoweth library.” Silence. “I asked you about Gervase of Langford.” He felt a twinge of embarrassment; after all, she'd never actually told him her name. “There were a couple of things I wanted to follow up on with you, if you have a second.”

There was a long pause.

“I'm sorry, I'm not interested,” she said neutrally. “Good-bye.”

“I'd like to discuss a job opportunity,” he extemporized hastily. There was another pause. A bass-heavy car stereo faded in and out under his window.

“I don't understand.”

“Let me explain,” he said. “I'm under some time pressure from the Went Collection to resolve this issue of Gervase of Langford. I thought I might persuade you to act as a consultant on the project.” He wasn't exactly sure how the Went family would feel about this, but he forged ahead anyway. “You have some reservations about the book's validity. I understand that. If anything, those reservations will make you that much more of an asset. We need somebody who can anticipate any possible barriers to authenticating the volume before they arise.”

Silence. His ear was getting slippery with sweat where he held the phone against it.

“Who are ‘we'?” she said.

I'm sorry?

“When you say ‘we,'” she repeated, “to whom are you referring?”

“Myself, principally. And a woman named Laura Crowlyk who represents the Went family, the family that owns the collection.”

“How much can you pay me?”

He hadn't thought this far ahead, but the little he knew about graduate students suggested that this would be his chief source of leverage. He did some quick calculations.

“Let's say thirty dollars an hour.”

“And how much of my time would you require?”

“How much time can you give us?”

“Ten hours a week,” she said immediately.

“Ten hours. Fine.”

“All right.”

“All right.” Edward was a little taken aback. Things were progressing more rapidly than he expected. “All right. When can you start?”

“Any time.”

“Today?” He might as well call her bluff.

“What time?”

“Four o'clock? Why don't you meet me at Café Lilas, on Eighty-second.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

Negotiations having been concluded ahead of schedule, there didn't seem to be anything more to say. He said good-bye and hung up.

 

SHE WAS ALREADY THERE
when he arrived, sitting in one of the rear corners of the room, her long legs crossed underneath a tiny marble-topped table. Café Lilas was a long, bright, pleasant establishment fronted by tall picture windows divided into little squares. It was full of mismatched white wire tables and chairs jumbled together at odd angles in twos and threes. White ceiling fans spun slowly overhead in sync, creating an atmosphere reminiscent of an expatriate bar at a tropical hotel.

Margaret Napier was all business. She wasn't interested in preliminaries, and that was fine with Edward. As they talked he realized he'd misjudged her. He'd mistaken her coldness and lack of affect for arrogance or just plain nerdiness, but he was wrong. It was more like a profound lack of interest. He had never met anyone so completely consumed by her work. She rarely made eye contact, and her voice always kept that low, almost mechanical tone he'd noticed when he first met her, as if she couldn't spare the extra energy to endow it with any real inflection. She spoke clearly, in long, elaborate sentences that she always took the trouble to complete, conscientiously redeeming any dangling clauses and firmly closing all parentheses, but it was all devoid of emotional investment. The effect was of somebody reluctantly reading a prepared statement off a teleprompter, a statement prepared by somebody against whom she had a bitter and long-standing grudge. He considered the possibility that she might be clinically depressed.

“Gervase Hinton, later Gervase of Langford,” she began, “was born in London in the late 1330s. It was still the Middle Ages, but it was the Later Middle Ages. The Hundred Years War with France was just starting. Edward III had just become king of England by killing his mother's lover, Mortimer, who had become king by killing Edward III's father, Edward II, by sodomizing him with a red-hot poker.

“It's important to understand how different life was in the fourteenth century. London, the greatest city in England, had a population of about forty thousand, and those forty thousand had a hundred churches between them. The English thought of London as New Troy, a city founded by the descendants of Aeneas after the Trojan War. The average man was five foot three inches tall. People ate capons and suckling pigs at feasts and believed in goblins and fairies. The men wore stockings with different-colored legs. The population was made up of noblemen, knights, merchants, servants, and peasants, in that order. All of them lived in the Christian belief that the world was in a process of slow but steady decline, which would ultimately lead to the Day of Judgment and the end of time.”

“Right,” said Edward. “King Arthur and all that.”

“No. King Arthur lived in the seventh century, if he existed at all. That was seven hundred years before Gervase of Langford was born. King Arthur was as far in the past from Gervase as Gervase is from us. In the fourteenth century King Arthur was already part of a legendary and sentimentalized version of English history. Think of
The Canterbury Tales.
Gervase was a close contemporary of Chaucer.”

A waiter brought them two glasses of white wine. Margaret sent hers back and asked for iced coffee.

“We don't know of anything unusual in Gervase's childhood. His family were dyers, and they seem to have made some money from it. His father and his uncle were prominent in the London dyers' guild. They owned property in the city and in Gloucester.

“When Gervase was around ten he witnessed the first outbreak of the plague that we call the Black Death, but which was then known simply as the Death. The plague killed somewhere between a third and a half of the population of Europe and created spectacles of unprecedented devastation. Whole villages were emptied. Ghost ships drifted on the open ocean, their crews dead. Cities were so depopulated that wolves came out of the forests and attacked the survivors. In Avignon the pope kept bonfires burning on either side of his throne to keep away evil vapors.

“Gervase was lucky. He survived the Death, and an uncle named Thomas survived as well, and when the plague receded in 1349 they inherited a fair amount of money and property from family members who died. Thomas became one of the more prominent merchants in London.

“Most of what we know about Gervase's life comes from official records and fragments of paper that have survived purely by chance. Family records were sometimes used as scrap paper to make bookbindings, and they can occasionally be recovered from inside old books. A psalter from Langford that was disbound for repairs gave us a receipt from the household of the Earl of Langford for pants and boots for a ‘Gyrvas Hyntoun,' and from this we assume that Thomas Hinton sent the young Gervase north to serve as a page there. We can guess that Gervase probably took part in the siege of Paris in 1360, because the Earl of Langford and his retinue were there. We don't know anything more until 1362, when Gervase reappears as a law student at the Inns of Court in London.

“All this was perfectly ordinary for the ambitious son of a well-to-do merchant. But what followed was not. A young man in Gervase's position could have expected to become an esquire or a vallettus in the service of the king and eventually rise to a position of considerable consequence, as Chaucer did. But Chaucer was a go-getter, a company man, who knew how the game was played and played it well. Gervase was something else, something different. He gave up his position at court and went back north, back to the service of the Earl of Langford, where he became a kind of family associate and pet scholar. He helped manage the estate, he ran important errands for the earl, and in his spare time he wrote his books. Langford was not a prominent family, and Gervase was probably a painful disappointment to his uncle.”

Margaret stopped there. She seemed to lose her train of thought, staring vacantly out through the front window. A noisy crowd of college students was getting settled around a big table in the corner of the café. Edward waited for her to go on, but she didn't.

“Is that it?” Edward asked. “But why did he go back to Langford, if he could have done better in London?”

“Nobody knows,” said Margaret. “I think he left London under a cloud, some kind of political disgrace. No one knows exactly what. It must have been fairly severe to send him to the provinces—look at Chaucer, who was tried for rape and went on to become head of customs for all of London. Something different happened to Gervase, something worse, and it cast a shadow over his career from which he never recovered.

“Gervase accompanied one diplomatic mission, to Venice. I've even heard it suggested that he was involved in espionage, and that his undistinguished career was just a cover identity, but again, there's really no evidence to back it up. Maybe Gervase thought a less prominent position would give him more time to write, although from what I can tell the earl worked him like a dog. It's useless to speculate, there's no way we can know.”

Edward nodded. “Poor bastard.”

He sipped his wine and studied Margaret's curiously pale oval face. The sun gleamed off her dark, straight hair. She met his eyes with her own unreadable stare.

“Well,” he said. “So much for his life. What about his books?”

“By our standards, Gervase didn't write very much.” He sensed that Margaret was bored, but her speech remained as concise and composed as a prepared lecture. “There are a dozen or so minor poems attributed to him, occasional verses which he may or may not actually have written. We know for certain that he wrote a book of animal fables,
Les Contes merveilleux,
which are witty in places but otherwise very conventional. His masterpiece, such as it is, is the
Chronicum Anglicanum,
an account of what was then England's recent history, the eleventh and twelfth centuries. He completed it in 1362. In those days Gervase was probably considered pretty unfashionable for his interest in the recent past—that kind of scholarship went out of style with the Venerable Bede.”

Edward had ordered a piece of dense flourless chocolate cake. He shaved off a thin slice with the edge of his fork.

“Have you read it?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Is it as dull as it sounds?”

She didn't take the bait. “It's an important document. It's a very scholarly piece of research in a period when serious scholarship was out of fashion. Is there something more specific I can tell you about it?”

“No. Sorry, go on. So he stayed at Langford for the rest of his life?”

She nodded.

“As usual, history only records the bad parts. He was robbed once, on the road from Langford to Hull. His losses were never recovered. He married a woman named Elizabeth who was very young even for that time. It seems to have been a marriage of convenience; she was a handmaiden to the countess. She died two years later, and there were no children. Gervase received the usual petty awards and annuities from his noble masters, but they were never sufficient to make him well-off. He engaged in the usual legal squabbles. Around 1370 he suffered some kind of serious injury on the castle grounds; possibly he fell from one of the walls. Some have called it a failed suicide. After that he kept to his bed.