The Detective and the Devil (34 page)

Horton heard the words
the perfection of man
and his eyes passed over the books in the library in which they sat. She had still not made him any tea.

These Dutch merchants paid Aakster to steal Dee’s library, or at least to steal that part of it that would most likely contain this great secret. But the merchants were outdone by another
Dutchman on the make: Aakster himself. Word had reached other men of Aakster’s interest in Dee, and he was approached by, of all things, a Jewish merchant from Portugal. This man told him of
a certain manuscript which he had bought from a rogue Janissary which he had then sold on to John Dee. He called this text the
Opera.
It was said to have been written by an ancient Persian
named J
[ā]
bir ibn Hayy
[ā]
n.

When Mina Baxter said the name of this thinker, it sounded to Horton like she was clearing her throat, so he asked her to say it again.

‘The name doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘The Europeans called him Geber.’

Geber was an alchemist; some said he was the
original
alchemist. To Dee and men like him, he was a giant of the obscure science they wallowed in. To find an unknown text by him would
have excited Dee beyond understanding.

But there was a problem – the text of the book was in Arabic. And Dee had no Arabic. The Arab works he owned were Latin translations. But if what the Janissary had told the old Portuguese
Jew was true, the contents of the
Opera
were such that he could not rely on any translator to keep them secret. Dee was trapped inside his own secret stories, unable to exploit whatever
lay inside the old book.

It was one of those strange coincidences from which stories grow. For Jacobus Aakster, a man of several parts, had been captured as a young man by pirates off the Barbary coast. He had served
five years as a slave, before escaping. During that time he had become a mercenary. And he had also learned Arabic.

So, on the night of the raid, he found the book. He read the first page or two, while the morons he had hired rampaged through Dee’s library. He realised, instantly, what the book was
about. Out on the river his wife Mina was waiting with a boat, just in case. It turned out it was needed. Aakster left with Mina, and disappeared.

This modern Mina, Mina Baxter, told the story easily, as if she had been rehearsing all her life for the moment she had an audience.

Jacobus Aakster disappeared for three years. During those years the merchants paid experts to pore over Dee’s stolen books. They grew exceedingly knowledgeable on the influences of the
stars and the mystical properties of mathematics – none of which they cared a jot about. None of what they learned could be turned into the one thing the merchants really did care for: money.
Even Dee’s thoughts on navigation were either old hat or pure tat.

At which point, Aakster returned. He introduced himself to the merchants again, who expressed their fury at his disappearance. He silenced them, though, by simply stating the substance of the
book he had stolen from Dee’s library. That shut them up. They asked to see the book. He told them he had destroyed it. They grew angry.

Then he told them he had memorised the book’s contents.

It took a while for the implications of this to sink in. If the book contained the secrets he claimed, then it might be worth money. More money than it was possible even to quite imagine. But if
no copy existed (and the merchants certainly didn’t know of one), the only way to turn that theory into cash was via the mechanism of Jacobus Aakster’s memory.

‘Prove it,’ demanded the merchants. So Aakster did, with the help of some alchemical apparatus and some unusual ingredients. One of the men appointed to help him with the process
ended up dying, succumbing to a strange substance which turned from liquid to gas at dangerously low temperatures and which smelled of bitter almonds. They worked in an icehouse deep in the flat
Dutch countryside, its temperature kept low by the North Sea waters. This particular worker had not been as careful as he needed to be.

But the test was successful. And thus Aakster’s request was agreed to, without delay. What was needed was a distant place, one where Aakster could go about his business undisturbed. At
least, this was the requirement Aakster demanded. He wanted to be far from Holland, far from Europe, far from prying eyes and glittering temptations. He would establish a new dynasty, and he knew
the place for it. He had discovered it during those three years of investigation.

So he and Mina Koeman had set sail for St Helena on a vessel bound for the Dutch East Indies. They set up home there, out on the eastern lip of the island, and put the processes outlined in the
Opera
into action. Aakster also demanded that the other books stolen from Dee’s library be handed to him, though it was never clear why. The merchants were happy to hand the books
over. Aakster had taken the only one that mattered, and now it existed only as recollections in the canny fellow’s head.

Jacobus and Mina were immediately successful. And they continued to be successful for another twenty years. Merchants came and went. Some of them demanded that Aakster increase production, or
move his manufactory to another location, perhaps on the southern tip of Africa. But Aakster refused. He had made a comfortable life for himself, and he knew he could defend his position in St
Helena. He could see the ships as they arrived, and with the help of an ugly little Portuguese beast who lived on the island he carved out a great manufactory beneath the fort and his home.

During their time on the island Mina Koeman gave birth to two sons: Carl and Jacob. The family travelled to and from Europe, indulging themselves in the shops of Amsterdam and Antwerp, but
always returning to their island refuge. But on one of these European jaunts their son Carl was intercepted by representatives of the merchants and tortured, desperate as they were for the secret.
But Carl had not learned the
Opera
; that had been Jacob’s role. Carl returned to St Helena quite out of his wits, driven utterly mad by the labour of the merchants.

When Aakster learned of his son Carl’s fate, he grew angry and threatened to end production, at which point the merchants panicked and apologised, and proposed an almost Imperial deal.
Aakster’s other son Jacob would marry one of their own daughters, Claudia van Denburg, and Aakster would be given a significant stake in the merchants’ new venture: the Verenigde
Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company.

Years passed, things changed. The English forced the Dutch from St Helena during a moment when the Dutch government had been casting avaricious eyes on the southern African coast. The Dutch
merchants had never formalised their ownership of St Helena; it was the property of the Dutch government, not the new VOC, and that government had no idea what the Aaksters were about. So a great
prize slipped from the merchants’ grasp, and they were annoyed – particularly as their rivals in London, the East India Company of England, had been the ones to seize this lucrative
little asset.

Did the London East India Company know what they had in St Helena? Perhaps – it might even have encouraged them to persuade the English authorities to seize the island from the Dutch in
the first place. And they realised soon enough when they discovered this Dutch family of murky provenance. Old Jacobus was dead by this time, and his son Jacob was not long for the world of men,
either. Carl also still lived, but was destroyed by his imagination and by the books in the library which Aakster had assembled from the remnants of that stolen from Mortlake. Carl started to
believe himself to be John Dee himself, his soul occupied by the undying power of the old magus.

But Jacob’s wife Claudia, the daughter of great merchants and a woman of considerable parts, handled negotiations with the new owners of the island, the East India Company. A new way of
trading was established. The Aaksters would continue their work and continue their shopping, though in London rather than Antwerp. They reported to a secret committee back in London. They changed
their names. The only child of Jacob and Claudia, Cornelius, would henceforth carry the surname Baxter.

And so the little business continued. Elder sons took over from fathers, each of them learning the
Opera
by heart; other siblings were sent back to England to quietly thrive on
substantial but not exotic dowries and bequests. The Honourable East India Company kept the secret to itself; the profits from St Helena preserved the good health of its accounts in the leanest
years, when the Indians turned up their noses at heavy English woollens and the Company was forced to fall back onto violence, extortion and taxation to keep the fiscal wheels turning.

The family may have taken an English name, but it still proceeded with Dutch care. Cornelius Baxter handed the reins of the operation to Edwin, who handed them to Frederick, who handed them to
Gilbert. All the time, the Company pressed for expansion of the project, for a new facility to be opened somewhere else. But the Baxters resisted. They knew where such a move would end. It would
end with the destruction of their family.

But then, disaster. Gilbert’s wife died giving birth to a son. He was left on the island with no wife, and no male heir. He was left with only a daughter. She was named after Jacobus
Aakster’s canny wife: Mina. She never married, but that is not the same as saying the line ended.

The pain in Abigail’s shoulder was like nothing she had ever experienced. She tried to keep her arm still and wondered about fashioning some kind of sling, but Burroughs
gave her no time, returning with the ogre’s horse within minutes and yanking her by her good arm with such gleeful violence that she feared her good shoulder would also dislocate itself.

She screamed out, and Burroughs laughed at her. He laughed a lot as they rode back to the fort, talking as they went.

‘Did you read any of the books in Johnson’s house, Abigail?’ he said, his arms reaching around her to the reins, his breath warm on her neck.

‘The books?’

‘The
Mathematicall Preface
, perhaps. That is the volume with the most to say to a sceptic such as yourself.’

‘I read it.’

‘And what did Abigail Horton’s fine mind make of it?’

‘Please, my shoulder.’

He shifted his weight slightly behind her, and the movement felt obscene to her. But the pain in her shoulder lessened somewhat.

‘I found all of Dee’s writings to be misguided,’ she said, her voice pulled tight by the agony. ‘He appeared a very intelligent man misguided by his trust in fallacious
authorities.’

‘Ah, yes. It is well put. He took the cosmos to be Aristotle’s, when in fact it was Galileo’s. But he never met Galileo. I made the same mistake.’

‘You? You believed Dee’s writings? His talk of angels?’

‘I did. I believed it all. I was schooled by those books. I grew up alone in my uncle’s house in Kent, surrounded by a facsimile of Dee’s library.’

‘A facsimile?’

‘My uncle believed Dee’s secret – the secret your husband came here to uncover – was not in
one
book but in
all
the books. So he acquired copies of all
of them. He reconstructed Dee’s library, and I read the books. I learned my Latin and my Greek and even my Arabic. By the time I was twenty-five I was, in my way, a facsimile of John
Dee.’

‘That must have been extraordinary.’

‘It was. I believed I saw the universe as it truly was. I was obsessed with that Monad. Dee believed it held the entirety of the cosmos in its design.’

‘You must explain that to me.’

‘One day, Abigail. When you and I are embarked on our project.’

‘Our project?’

The secret your husband came here to uncover
, he had said.

‘I must speak to your husband first. It is only right.’

‘What happened to you?’

‘Enlightenment happened to me, Abigail. Or, to be more accurate,
the
Enlightenment happened to me. In one singular year, I read Galileo, and Halley, and Kepler, and Herschel, and
every edition of the
Philosophical Transactions
since the Royal Society’s first meeting. I saw the cosmos for what it was. A vast predictable mechanism. I turned away from magic, and
I embraced the Machine. I put away childish things, and I drowned my books.’

‘Yet you read your Shakespeare.’

‘My dear woman,’ he said, as the silhouette of the fort rose above them and he climbed down from the horse. ‘I read
everything
.’

And with that, he pulled her from the horse and carried her down into the tunnels below. She imagined his cloven feet as they made their way down and within, her shoulder lashing its pain
through her whole body.

Eventually they came to a deep fissure at the bottom of which she could hear the sea. He lashed her to one of six massive cauldrons which lined the fissure, and by carefully positioning herself
as he did so she managed to line her arm and shoulder up in such a way that Burroughs’s rope held her shoulder in place. An accidental sling, which did nothing but turn knives of pain into
needles, but it was better than nothing.

And then, the worst thing of all. Then he stood to leave.

‘Leave me a light,’ she said, desperately.

‘You have no need of one,’ he replied. ‘What do you expect to do? Read?’

He laughed, again, and he left. With the light. His laughter resounded off the rock walls, and the glow of his torch receded, and then she was in darkness. Complete, solid darkness, of the kind
that seems to fill your nostrils and slither down your throat. The only sound that of her breathing and the breathing of the ocean, below.

As Mina Baxter told her tale Horton remembered himself back into the Drury Lane Theatre, to where this strange story had began, watching Prospero cast his spells over another
island. Mina Baxter was a mesmerising storyteller – as mesmerising, to a man of Horton’s deliberate mind, as Shakespeare himself.

He looked up, despite himself, to the roof of the library in which they were sitting, and he half expected to see a hole up there. On the other side of that hole, he would catch a glimpse of the
candles of the Drury Lane Theatre swaying in their chandeliers. He would see Prospero peeking over the edge of the hole to look down at him, his staff in his hand and his magical eyes blazing. He
might even see himself high up in the gallery, enchanted.