The walk to the East Building, where the conservation work was done, was a short one, along a pathway shaded by a row of perfectly aligned London plane trees; if you looked directly at the one on the end, all the other slender trunks disappeared behind it. Al-Kalli, Beth noticed, was still clutching the sheaf of catchwords. Beth slipped her ID card into the slot at the door, and the electronic locks released. She escorted al-Kalli and the silent Jakob into the elevator, then down to the conservation workshop where the formidable Hildegard — a large woman in her sixties, who favored shapeless dresses in what could charitably be called earth tones — was laboring at a wide, stainless steel table, with filtered tensor lamps attached to its rim.
Beth knew she didn’t like to be interrupted at her work, but she had not been about to deny al-Kalli a glimpse of his treasure.
Hildegard brushed a wisp of gray hair away from her eyes and greeted al-Kalli politely, if not warmly. The book lay on the table in front of her, and to Beth’s horror — and she could only imagine how al-Kalli was reacting — its precious covers had been entirely removed and lay on a separate table behind her.
“How’s it coming?” Beth jumped in, to forestall any explosion.
“Slowly. The boards are beech, which is unusual, but surprisingly solid and uncompromised. The inside of the spine shows sign of dry rot, and the thongs are as brittle as twigs, but in a manuscript this old it would be a shock not to find such damage.”
“What have you done?” al-Kalli finally said, surveying his dismembered treasure. “You have torn the covers from the book? They have never been separated from the book, ever, in over a thousand years.”
“There you’re wrong,” Hildegard said. She was not one to kowtow. “I’d say the front cover was removed, and restitched, at least twice. When, I couldn’t say yet. But it might have been done by a jeweler or other artisan, someone who wanted to work on the ivory or reset the sapphires.”
Al-Kalli laid the pages of catchwords on the edge of the table and went to the covers, which he touched with his fingertips the way you might gently graze a baby’s head. Hildegard flashed Beth a look that said,
“What else have you had to do?” al-Kalli said, resignedly now. “Has the book required a great deal of repair?”
Hildegard turned on her stool, her big brown skirt still hanging nearly all the way to the floor, and said, “Not as much as you might expect.” There was a warmer tone in her voice now, not only because she could see how attached al-Kalli was to his manuscript — a sentiment Hildegard could well appreciate — but because he had asked her about her field of expertise, a subject on which she could happily expatiate for hours. As Hildegard ran through the various problems the manuscript had presented, and the ways in which she was remedying them — all of which Beth already knew — Beth picked up the catchwords and began looking them over again. With the disassembled manuscript right there in front of her, she felt as though she were suddenly much closer to solving the mystery.
One thing had always leapt out at her. It was the reference to the blue sky and the white clouds. Everything else was fairly prosaic, however intriguing — the notion that the scribe had been inveigled into an impossible task, the grumbling about feeling himself a prisoner of a powerful employer. Fairly standard stuff. But the touch of poetry, once it was coupled with the mention of the ornamented sepulcher at the end of the penultimate quire, gave Beth the feeling that she was suddenly very close to something.
So close she could barely wait for al-Kalli to leave. Only then would she be able to test the hypothesis even now forming in her head.
“The pigments in this book are interesting, too,” Hildegard was saying. “We’re using radiospectroscopy and X-ray fluorescence — don’t worry, they’re harmless — to get a better idea what they’re made of.”
“What were they generally made of?” al-Kalli asked with genuine absorption.
“Oh, that’s a big question,” Hildegard said, though it sounded as if she would be pleased to answer it at length. The only thing she liked more than her work was coming across someone who seemed to want to know all about it. “In illuminations, like these,” she said, guiding him to the illustration she’d been working on — a portrait of a snake-like creature with a blunt feline head and flicking tongue—“the coloring agents were usually vegetable, mineral, and animal extracts, though they were sometimes mixed with all sorts of things, from stale urine to honey to earwax.”
That last item Beth had never heard about.
“But you’ll notice that this book is rich in deep purples and blues, and that might be because of where it was made — ultramarine, which was made from lapis lazuli, was chiefly produced in Persia and Afghanistan.”
The lesson on pigments alone went on for several more minutes, while Beth bided her time. She studied the catchwords again, then sidled over to the neighboring table where the bejeweled front and back covers lay. The sapphires, studding the slightly yellowed ivory, winked in the overhead light. Beth longed to pick the cover up, but she did not want to test her theory until al-Kalli was gone.
Jakob, looking supremely bored, rocked on his heels, his hands folded in front of him.
But Beth wasn’t fooled; she had the impression that Jakob was always well aware of everything that was happening around him.
Beth pretended to be focused, too, on everything Hildegard was saying — she had moved on now to explaining why one side of a parchment page was always lighter and smoother than the other — while becoming, every second, more and more convinced that her own suspicions were right. When Hildegard finally took a breath, and al-Kalli consulted his watch — a gleaming gold Cartier from what Beth could see — she quickly thanked Hildegard for giving them so much time and guided Mr. al-Kalli and Jakob toward the door. She escorted them back up to the plaza, then took her leave. Even then, she deliberately walked away, back toward her office, for twenty paces, before turning around to make sure they were gone. Then she raced back down the line of London plane trees, back into the conservation building, and down to Hildegard’s office.
Hildegard was already at work again and looked downright startled to see Beth.
“I need to look at that front cover again,” Beth said, going straight to it.
“Why?”
“I need to look for something.” Beth picked it up carefully and angled its edge toward the overhead light.
“What on earth are you doing?”
“I’m looking for a space between the beech board and the ivory.”
“A what?”
“Just tell me — is there any space between these two, where something like a page of parchment could be concealed?”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Hildegard said, though her curiosity was sufficiently aroused that she quickly cleared a spot on the table in front of her. “Put it down.”
Beth did, and Hildegard pulled the magnifying glass, which was mounted on a swivel, toward her. She studied the edge of the cover. “What makes you think we’ll find such a thing?”
“The catchwords,” Beth said.
“What about them?”
“They said that the identity of the artist would be lost forever, to sleep under a blanket of blue sky and white clouds.”
Hildegard looked at her blankly.
“The cover of the book is made up of white ivory and blue sapphires. And together they make up a kind of ornamented sepulcher, which were the last catchwords in the book.”
Hildegard didn’t look sold, but she didn’t look opposed to the idea, either. She took a scalpel from the drawer and probed the top of the cover.
“Nothing here,” she said.
“Check the inside edge, where the cover would be attached to the binding.”
She turned the cover sideways and bent her head low. All Beth could see now was the top of her gray bun, with a couple of long pins stuck through it.
“Well, I never,” Hildegard finally said. With one hand, she inserted the scalpel half an inch or so, as if nudging something loose. Then she reached out and grasped a pair of long-nosed tweezers, with which she ever so slowly drew something from beneath the ivory cover. Beth’s heart was beating fast as the tweezers emerged, with several
