Chapter 6

Maddie and Frank decided to complete the ink analysis of the Carthusian manuscript while he instructed her in Guild lore as his new apprentice. Frank said he wanted to check the manuscript for any later transfers of the Wyrich Gospels that might have been mentioned in the records. Keith was so exhausted, however, that he left the workshop and collapsed in bed for a nap.

He awoke with Maddie snuggled close beside him. He took a quick inventory of his wounds and realized that most of the small cuts that peppered his body and face didn’t hurt, but with the healing process were itching fiercely. The dozen stitches in his left hand ached and his left eye was covered and puffy. Beside him, Maddie was comparably perfect. He hesitated to wake her, not knowing if it was day or night. Keith could hardly wait to check his search results to see if he could locate the other missing document. He was not excited enough about the search, however, to pull himself out of bed and leave Maddie sleeping. When he kissed her shoulder she stirred and snuggled closer to him. He settled back beneath the covers and she welcomed him into her careful embrace.

“Cyanide,” Maddie whispered to him.

“How romantic,” he answered. “Are we making a suicide pact?”

“No,” she answered. “It’s what killed the Carthusian monks.”

“They were poisoned?”

“By the ink,” Maddie confirmed. “The final two pages of the manuscript show an increase in the level of cyanide in the ink.”

“The monks copying manuscripts would ingest small amounts of ink each day as they touched their pens to their tongues when they wrote,” Keith said, reconstructing the scenario in his mind. He shuddered. “That sounds like a long slow death.”

“The catalog also records the receipt of supplies for the scriptorium,” Maddie added. “The last delivery of ink came with a manuscript and request for two hand-written copies. The entries with cyanide in the ink cover about four years, right up until the last entry.”

“Talk about a poison pen,” Keith said. “What was the manuscript?”

“Something called ‘The Wisdom of Ptolemy,’ according to the record. There was a short description saying it was a treatise on Egyptian history and Ptolemy’s power over demons.”

“That doesn’t ring a bell,” Keith said. “I wonder what they were using that introduced cyanide into the ink. It’s certainly not common in inks of the 19th century. The records we have say the monastery’s fatal epidemic occurred in 1852. The property was burned because the people in the nearby village believed it was infected with a plague.”

“Which means that the level of cyanide in the blood built to a fatal level over those four years before everyone started dropping dead,” Maddie said. “Spooky. But here’s something more spooky. The last entry in the catalog was the return of the manuscript and its copies to the original owner along with what was recorded only as ‘and many other important works.’”

“Sounds like they emptied the scriptorium to protect the books from the inevitable burning that would come when all the monks died.”

“Yes,” Maddie affirmed. “But I’m afraid it also means that unless the monks considered the Wyrich gospels to be an important work, it was probably still in the monastery when it was burned, and whatever Gutenberg’s secret was probably went up in flames.”

In the afternoon, Keith resumed his search. He was refreshed after the nap and feeling better after taking painkillers, but it was still difficult to read the thousands of results with just one good eye. Normally, he would scan results before starting to pare them down to see if anything jumped out. With his difficulty reading, he decided to run comparisons on the search results electronically, winnowing out obviously false returns with his friend’s search algorithms. While the reports were being generated, he checked to see if there was anything new regarding the bombing of the library.

“Say, Maddie,” he called to her from the study. “We made the news, sort of.”

Both Maddie and Frank came from the living room where they had been discussing the finer points of document dating and authentication.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Take a look at this. I haven’t read it all yet,” Keith answered. “You can fill in the details for me.”

“It’s an analysis of the bombing of the Kane Memorial Library and says it appears to be ‘part of a new wave of global biblio-terrorism‘ sweeping the world. It reports half a dozen attacks on libraries in the past year and lumps in book burnings from Hitler forward. At one point, the analyst even goes so far as to cite instances of people defacing books by crossing out words and writing in the margins. Is this for real?”

“Who wrote a thing like that?” Frank asked.

“There’s no by-line,” Maddie answered, “It just says that according to authorities, ‘the attack on the Kane Memorial Library should not be considered an isolated event. Any library could be a target.’ Whoa!”

“I won’t believe that until I see it in print,” Frank said.

“It almost sounds like a challenge,” Maddie said.

“Or a warning,” Keith added.

“Warning to whom?” Maddie asked.

“Us? Or maybe to the world? Stay away from libraries.” Keith swung around in his chair so his one good eye could take in Maddie standing over him. He almost lost his train of thought just looking at her. She nudged him and he went on. “Maybe I’m seeing things where nothing exists, but it’s got too much in common with the note the agent showed us,” Keith went on. “Read this last paragraph.” They all looked at the screen to read the last statement.

Since the Garden of Eden, there have been governments and religions intent on keeping humanity away from the tree of knowledge. But key to the story is the fact that you can’t know what you are missing until after you’ve eaten the fruit.

“I’m not sure if it’s directed to us or not,” Maddie said at last. “But ‘tree of knowledge’ and ‘key’ in an article about ‘biblio-terrorism’ gives me the willies. I’m a little concerned about walking back into work Monday morning like nothing happened.”

“The damage was pretty superficial,” Keith said. “They didn’t really get explosives into where they would do damage to the books. The façade and atrium were badly damaged, but as far as we know, no books were harmed. It was like they tried to do it in a hurry and didn’t get their explosives to the right places.”

“Or like they wanted to harm the library, but not the books?” Maddie asked.

Frank had been quiet during this exchange and Keith noticed that he looked as if his thoughts were far away. His eyes fell on the Psalter in its glass case.

“Are you okay, Granddad?” Keith asked.

“Yes,” the old man hesitated. “Yes, yes,” he repeated. “I was just thinking what a shame you kids missed your vacation to Jamaica.” The non sequitur startled both Keith and Maddie. Maddie smiled and went to touch Frank’s arm.

“I’m thinking that we’re going to have lots of opportunities to take a vacation together,” she said gently.

“Well I certainly hope so,” Frank said. “None of this summer romance stuff. You’re both too old. I was just wondering if you could take another week off work, Madeline.”

“You think we should go to Jamaica now? I guess the sun might help these cuts heal,” Keith said.

“I wasn’t exactly thinking Jamaica,” Frank said. “How about Mainz?”

Keith was silent. He had told Maddie they might take the book to Mainz, but hadn’t been so sure that they needed to after they got to Frank’s laboratory. “Well, I’d like to see the Gutenberg Museum,” Maddie said. “I understand it has a wonderful collection of rare books.”

“If you include both the museum library and the Guild, the collection of unique manuscripts and incunabula is probably more extensive than any other in the world, including the British Library,” Frank said. “I know Keith is aching to give you the tour.”

“As much as I’ve been aching from everything else,” Keith said. The hasty exit from the hospital and cross-country flight had taken its toll. Every time he took a pain pill he could hardly keep his eyes open.

“All the documents aren’t in the library or museum?” Maddie asked, genuinely shocked at Frank’s statement.

“Many are considered Guild secrets,” Frank interjected. “They have been in the same hands for nearly six hundred years.”

“Still, it seems that the world should know,” Maddie said.

“Perhaps so,” Keith responded, “but once they were given to the world, as you say, who would have access to them?”

“Scholars and archivists,” Maddie answered quickly.

“Exactly the people who have access to them now,” Keith responded. “We make sure that appropriate knowledge is disseminated to the world, and there is a debate in every generation about making the entire collection public. Some of the documents have to do with the secrets and rituals of the Guild, and as such to release them would effectively destroy the Guild.”

“For all our care, however,” Frank said, “there are documents that have gone missing over the years. We have delved into this matter, searching the world for them, but once they are out of our care, they are very hard to locate again, or to re-acquire.”

“I get that you think the letter fragment Keith found is a missing document of the Guild,” Maddie said. “But how did it end up in a collection we just happened to acquire at the Whit?”

“We didn’t even know the document was missing,” Frank acknowledged. He sighed.

“See, that is what I’m talking about,” Maddie argued. “In a real library or museum, documents like that wouldn’t just disappear.”

“Even within the Guild,” Keith said, “not all documents are available to all members. Certain items are seen only by those who have reached the highest level of mastery.”