Book of Souls

He was less enthusiastic about the next several volumes, some later editions of Ruskin and Fielding in dodgy condition, but he grew quite excited at Fraser’s Journal of a Tour Through Part of the Snowy Range of the Himala Mountains, and to the Source of the Rivers Jumna and Ganges , 1820, a pristine first. “I haven’t seen one of these in this state for years! Marvelous! Three thousand, easily. My spirits are lifting. Tell me, there wouldn’t be any incunabula in the collection?” From the perplexed expression on the youth’s face, Toby knew he was tapping a dry hole. “Incunabula? European printed books? Pre-1501? Ring a bell?” The young man was clearly stung by Toby’s irritability, and he flushed in embarrassment. “Oh, right. Sorry. No incunabula whatsoever. There was something on the oldish side, but it was handwritten.” He pointed helpfully into the crate. “There it is. His granddaughter wasn’t keen on parting with it.”

“Whose granddaughter?”

“Lord Cantwell. She had an unbelievable body.”

“We don’t, as a habit, make reference to our client’s bodies,” Toby said sternly, reaching for the broad spine of the book.

It was remarkably heavy; he needed two hands to drag it out securely and lay it on the table.

Even before he opened it, he felt his pulse race and the moisture dissipate from his mouth. There was something about this large, dense book that spoke loudly to his instincts. The bindings were smooth old calf leather, mottled, the color of good milk chocolate. It had a faintly fruited smell, redolent of ancient mold and damp. The dimensions were prodigious, eighteen inches long, twelve inches wide, and a good five inches thick: a couple of thousand pages, to be sure. As to weight, he imagined hoisting a two-kilo bag of sugar. This was much heavier. The only markings were on the spine, a large simple hand-tooled engraving, incised deeply into the leather: 1527.

He was surprised, in a detached way, to see his right hand trembling when he reached out to lift the cover. The spine was supple from use. No creaking. There was a plain, unadorned, creamy endpaper glued onto the hide. There was no frontispiece, no title page. The first page of the book, the color of butter, roughly uneven to the touch, began without exposition, racing into a closely spaced handwritten scrawl. Quill and black ink. Columns and rows. At least a hundred names and dates. He blinked in a large amount of visual information before turning the page. And another. And another. He skipped to the middle. Checked several pages toward the end. Then the last page. He tried to do a quick mental calculation, but because there was no pagination, he was only guessing-there must have been well over a hundred thousand listed names from front to back.

“Remarkable,” he whispered.

“Martin didn’t know what to make of it. Thought it was some sort of town registry. He said you might have some ideas.”

“I’ve got lots of them. Unfortunately, they don’t hang together. Look at the pages.” He lifted one clear of the others. This isn’t paper, you know. It’s vellum, very-high-quality stuff. I can’t be sure, but I think it’s uterine vellum, the crème de la crème. Unborn-calf skin, soaked, limed, scudded, and stretched. Typically used in the finest illuminated manuscripts, not a bloody town registry.”

He flipped pages, making comments and pointing here and there with his gloved forefinger. “It’s a chronicle of births and deaths. Look at this one: Nicholas Amcotts 13 1 1527 Natus. Seems to announce that a Nicholas Amcotts was born on the thirteenth of January 1527. Straightforward enough. But look at the next one. Same date, Mors, a death, but these are Chinese characters. And the next one, another death, Kaetherlin Banwartz, surely a Germanic name, and this one here. If I’m not mistaken, this is in Arabic.”

In a minute, he had found Greek, Portuguese, Italian, French, Spanish, and English names, and multiple foreign words in Cyrillic, Hebrew, Swahili, Greek, Chinese. There were some languages he could only guess at. He muttered something about African dialects.

He pressed his gloved fingertips together in contemplation. “What kind of town has this population diversity, not to mention this population density in 1527? And what about this vellum? And this rather primitive binding? The impression here is something quite a bit older than sixteenth-century. It’s got a decidedly medieval feel to it.”

“But it’s dated 1527.”

“Well, yes. Duly noted. Still, that is my impression, and I do not discount my gut feelings, nor should you. I think we will have to obtain the views of academic colleagues.”

“What’s it worth?”