The Serpent Papers Read Free Page B

woman.
    ‘You make a nice couple,’ the farmer remarks as we veer into the mountain. He glances down at my chapped fingers. ‘You should wear gloves in this weather.’
    Here on the western range of Mallorca, the forest slopes from the sea. Hidden fields populated by olive groves and moribund sheep; a road, unmarked, leads from the winding coastal highway through blue, arterial woods. The truck rumbles and shrieks, mirrors pulled in; my driver inhales as we squeeze through a thin mouth of stone. A monk in the garb of a workman greets us fresh from feeding his flock. His hands crusted in a powdery, paprika dust. Teeth jagged as the Pyrenees, as he informs us in the old Mallorqui dialect of the state of this year’s lambing. No man here under fifty , I think to myself. These aged monks are a dying breed.
    As I wait for the arrival of the man who found the Book of Hours, I lean on a low rock wall. Eyes wandering over gardens and orchards and outstretched cliffs. Comforted by the wilderness. By the sea.

Harold Bingley’s voice cuts through me, mixing with the wind. I return to the grand London café. Lights dripping down from the ceiling. Ebony glass and gold inlay. Salmon and caviar. Bingley poured himself another cup of tea through a fine silver strainer. He took a bite from a finger sandwich, and gave a little murmur of pleasure. Divine. He wiped the corners of his mouth delicately with his napkin.
    ‘Crawford tells me you are something of an expert in our area. One of a select few who believe Ramon Llull’s simulacrum had flesh and blood.’
    ‘The historical evidence for the existence of the alchemist Rex Illuminatus is irrefutable.’
    ‘You are very bold in that assertion.’
    ‘Because it is the truth.’
    ‘Then what I have to say should interest you most profoundly.’
    Bingley smiled conspiratorially.
    ‘A philosopher in the thirteenth century writes alchemical recipes, in the tradition of the Franciscan alchemist John of Rupescissa’s Book of Light , onto a series of Greek codices, creating a palimpsest of a remarkable nature on two fronts. First, because the Latin work seems to have been signed by none other than Rex Illuminatus, making it the first piece of Illuminatian writing ever to have been discovered in the original. Second, because, Miss Verco, the Greek subtext echoes findings in the sixth volume of the Nag Hammadi codices. We are effectively looking at a Hellenic poem, presumably composed in Alexandria in the second or third centuries CE, which has been recopied by a later scribe onto parchment, which Illuminatus wrote over in the thirteenth century. We know of this book because we have one page of it, due to a most unusual series of circumstances .
    ‘A gift of coincidence , Miss Verco, pure chance. That ephemeral thing which drives our industry. Several months ago, a research colleague at Oxford University brought forward citations of Rex Illuminatus’s work referenced in unpublished laboratory notebooks written by the American alchemist Eirenaues Philalethes in London in 1657. These notes contain translated fragments of a text which appears to be four centuries older, excerpts from a magical book, known to medieval scholars as The Chrysopeia of Majorca . These laboratory notebooks link the authorship of The Chrysopeia of Majorca to a mysterious Catalan living at Westminster Abbey at the behest of the Abbot Cremer and Edward III between 1328 and 1331. An individual who can only be the alchemist Rex Illuminatus.’ Bingley paused. ‘You have heard of these laboratory notes?’
    ‘Yes, but I have not been given access to them.’
    ‘We can arrange that.’ Bingley made a scratch on his notepad. ‘Said laboratory notebooks were compiled and archived in the Bodleian library by a young English scholar in 1829, one Charles Leopold Ruthven, who went on to publish accounts of an extraordinary find at an unspecified monastery on Mallorca. He recounts the discovery of a palimpsest sewn into an