The Combinations, page 28
Němec’s number into the electric flipboard that hung behind the desk, & when
he came over told him to sign something & took his ID. He watched her type
his details into a computer, twig-like fingers protruding from a lime-green
woollen cardigan buttoned up to the neck, which made a right-angle to where a
thinning head of ash-blonde had been skewered with a pair of chopsticks.
Behind the square-rimmed glasses, a pair of muddy irises peered out, which
Němec supposed must’ve been hazel once upon a time. She had the complexion
of a plant starved of chlorophyll.
At the end of all the red tape, Němec wheeled the trolley over to a desk by
the windows & took out a marbled-blue ledger tied with black ribbon. There
were two others in the pile, identical to it. With all the expectancy of an idiot he
got to work, settling himself into the least comfortable position he could find, &
setting the ledger square in front of him. Dust caught in his throat & he
coughed, smearing spittle across the thick blue cardboard. A library stamp & call
number were pasted on the top right corner, but nothing else to identify the
ledger’s contents. There he was, from the very outset, plunged into mystery.
Němec checked his list — the call number wasn’t on it. Perhaps the
attendant had made a mistake: something in-between, taken down in error,
shelved in the wrong place possibly, a number it didn’t belong to, etc. Yet
persistence had its rewards, too. Němec opened the ledger, turned some pages:
behind a dozen or so lined yellow spreadsheets was a thin carbon typescript
glued into the binding — volume of the Deutsch translation of Ashmole’s
Confiteor, the “confessions” of Mr Edworth K[elley] (accession c.). The
remaining ledgers contained, in a similarly dissembling condition, volumes &
— all, on the flyleaf, stamped with the eagle of the Third Reich.
The mystery was easily resolved: by eliminating all the other items on his
list, Němec was left with one — the shared catalogue number of the three
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ledgers, marred by his own handwriting…
Q. Did any purpose behind the seeming dissemblance present itself?
None.
Item (on the frontispiece of volume ): a murky reproduction of a
seventeenth century mezzotint depicting, presumably, the erstwhile Mr Etword K.
— alias Talbot — posing in the borrowed gowns of a university doctor. An error in
all innocence, perhaps (the artist’s), committed well after the fact & on a pre-
established model — the Man of Learning, etc., “Doctor” of Divinity, Divination &
ipso facto Divagation. The subject (K) wore a long tapering beard & round
eyeglasses. About him there hung the air (heavy with storax & gum benjamin) of a
man accustomed to the close observance of ritual, as & when it suited.
Q. Did the alchemist’s hair conceal the physical characteristic of his ears?
Indeed it did.
Q. What else could be gathered of the alchemist so portrayed?
Heading each of the Confiteor’s chapters, a series of black&white
vignettes, executed in a style identical to the frontispiece:
. K in his laboratory w/ tripod & beaker,
. K at Glastonbury standing in an open tomb,
. K & John D[ee] at Třeboň in the company of Peter von Rosenberg,
. K presenting a book to HR&IH Rudolf II at court,
. K placed under arrest by the Imperial Guards,
. K in a cell at Křivoklát bent over a tripod, the words Confitemini
Domino in blotted calligraphy, at work upon some “elixir,”
. K in silhouette, framed beneath the corbelled arch of a tower window,
. peglegged K supplicant before the great porphyry slab of the royal altar,
. K reading a parchment by faint candlelight, Scripturae Incognitorum,
. an alchemist’s lab filled with complex apparatuses, strange engines, etc.,
. a high tower w/ twin jagged lightning bolts shooting across the sky,
. K in dark robes falling from the battlements of Hněvín Castle, the
caption incomplete, Descensus ad Inferos…, a mysterious black rider looking-on
(as if, here, a less literal, more symbolic interpretation was to be sought: the
figure of “Death” [for example], the “Devil,” or — perhaps more disturbing —
Rudolf’s sinister emissary, “der schwarze Reiter,” Jan Mydlář?).
The remaining books on Němec’s list widely diverged in subject matter:
. three biographies of John D (one by the Cambridge don, Francis
Melmoth, composed in ; a thin paperback volume by Charlotte Yeats
published ; & a dusty clothbound tome by the nineteenth-century
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American scholar, Werther N. Holms),
. D’s private diary & the catalogue of his manuscript library, IN THE
ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM AT OXFORD, AND TRINITY COLLEGE
LIBRARY, CAMBRIDGE, edited by J[ames] O[rchard] Halliwell, Esq. F.R.S.
& published in (the years - redacted — reasons for which?): first
mention of K, Aug. st, , Ed. Kelly natus hora quarta a meridie ut annotatum
reliquit pater ejus,
. an account of the reign of “Rudolphus II Imperator Romanus Sacer” by
a certain Lucius Theophrastus, personal physician to the Count of Dietrichstein;
. the annotated correspondence of Thaddaeus Hagecius, translated from
the Latin by Světlana Gregorová,
. monographs variously on the work of David Pratner, Johannes Kepler
& Tycho Brahe,
. the anonymous Historia von D. Johann Fausten, published September
by the religious controversist Johann Spies, Frankfurt am Main,
. Svatopluk Prdlík’s Mitteleuropa,
. the unexpurgated Memoirs of one “Robert Jones.”
Q. What forces were at work determining K’s fate?
The man Němec was searching for was supposed to’ve lost his ears in the
pillory on Elizabeth Tudor’s personal instructions. Yet, according to Yeats,
Holmes & Halliwell, this self-same Elizabeth subsequently employed her
darkest emissaries to repeatedly entreat K to return from Bohemia, where he
appeared to’ve sought sanctuary (mistaking, as the courtly poets once said, the
bryteness of the Moone for the prosaic lyte of day). In a long letter dated
(further specification “redacted”), Lord Burleigh (Her Majesty’s spy-keeper)
instructed one Edward Dyer (a former pupil of D’s, at that time serving as the
Faerie Queene’s man in Hanover) to utilise every means within his power to
induce Sir Edwierd Kelley to come over to his natyve country and honour her Majesty
with the fruites of such knowledge as God hath gyven him… Why?
Q. Had K foreseen a plot? One designed for his entrapment or worse
(worse than an ear-cinching), & tendered his demurral, Yours most humbly, etc.,
gambling on prospects somewhat more amenable under the patronage of Rudolf
(a pederast, admittedly, dabbler in the occult, ineffectual & morose politician —
eventually, so fate would have it, to be stripped Prospero-like of crown &
jewelled sceptre by a most conspiratorial younger brother), the benefit of
hindsight notwithstanding, post-hoc, prompter-hoc, & all that? In illo tempore,
this aforesaid Rudolf (in name, if nothing else: Holy Roman Emperor, King of
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Hungary & Croatia, King of Bohemia & Archduke of Austria) had fashioned
his court into the omnium gatherum & enlightened heart of Europe Renascent
— what better place for an alchemist on the lam? what more provocation to a
coldblooded virgin inclined to homicide?
It’d all worked out well for K so far: already in his beneficence Rudolf, per
se, had seen fit to bestow certain sui generis public honours upon D’s ex-skryer, to
wit: eques aureus de Imany — going even so far as to employ him ad hoc as a
“Councillor of State.” Placed in such a light, K’s decision to keep all his eggs
warm in Imperator Rudolf’s basket rather than risking any of them in the wintry
nest of Eliza Regina dieu et mon droit might’ve seemed a proverbial no-brainer.
But K’s counter-plot, poorly timed (though how could he’ve known?), came
hurriedly unhatched: very soon K discovered himself at the proverbial breakfast
table with a clucking hen in lieu of the desired omelette. For on May of this
annus profundis, while en route to the estate of his erstwhile benefactor, Peter
von Rosenberg, K was arrested by officers of the Imperial Guard.
Němec returned to the frontispiece to get the measure of his man, caught
(as they say) between a T* & a hard place. In K’s shadow, Němec paced the
battlements &, pausing from time to time like a man perplexed, ogled the
spectacle of K dangling from his homespun rope under the castle walls, at wit’s
end (so to speak), gartered legs thrashing about, carp belching below in the
stinking weed-strewn moat. Like the mad castellan in the story book, Němec
was possessed by a desire to shout out, What shall I do with this absurdity?
The Sphinx
The selection at the Klementinum refectory was (it barely seemed possible)
worse than at the hospital mensa: slabs of jellied headcheese vied for space
beside tureens of plastinated goulash, lentil salad, carp paste, slurried pasta with
green peas & textureless rehydrated vegetable proteins. It was just at the end of
the lunchtime rush & the tables were piled with debris. A portable radio stood
atop the high counter with Burt Bacharach gushing out of it.
Němec ordered a bread roll & some pickles & wedged himself into a corner
by the window furthest from the noise. The bread wasn’t as stale as it could’ve
been, nor the pickles as sour: all-in-all the standard fare. He considered risking the
Turkish coffee, but a cup that’d been left sitting on the table (beside a newspaper
* “Rook” (sic). [:]
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& a pile of gravy-crusted plates) — an inch deep with clotted grounds & a plastic
spoon sticking straight up out of it, the lip serrated with chipped ceramic — put
paid to that idea. It looked as Turkish as a moustachioed psychopath wearing a fez
& waving a scimitar. He wondered if the Turks had anything vaguely equivalent
& if they called it Golem coffee, if only to return the compliment.
The newspaper the cup was sitting beside was folded in half at the last-but-
one page, with the funnies & crosswords & all the usual drivel to exercise your
average thinking man’s dice-box. Němec pushed the cup & plates to one side &
turned the paper over. The top left hand column was taken up with an article
about the boy pharaoh of Ancient Egypt, Tutankhamen, whose tomb was
discovered on such&such a date by the Englishman Howard Carter. The
members of Carter’s expedition party, the article said, subsequently perished one-
by-one in mysterious circumstances, etc., etc. — cursed by the pharaoh’s mummy,
supposedly (though with the possible collusion of that lunatic thelemite, Frater
Perdurabo, a.k.a. the Great Beast, a.k.a. Aleister Crowley, who claimed to’ve done
them all in on behalf of the offended gods — by means of cunning voodoo).
Here at least was fiction in its proper milieu. In keeping with the
Egyptian theme, the weekly chess teaser, flanked by eight column-inches of
trivia about cats, was a puzzle called The Sphinx:
“The Sphinx.” White to mate in eleven moves…
It was called The Sphinx because the ultimate arrangement of the pieces on the
chessboard was supposed to resemble the Great Sphinx at Giza in profile…
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There must’ve been something the writer saw that Němec couldn’t, so he took
the writer’s word for it. As for the puzzle, the idea apparently was for white to
force checkmate in only eleven moves. The catch was, while it could be done in
fewer, you had to figure out how to do it in exactly eleven moves. Eleven being
some sort of magical number, the Ancient Egyptians having been fond of
isopsephy. But why this magic number & not some other magic number, the
writer didn’t say. Němec wasted five minutes looking at the problem, playing
through the moves in his head, before giving it up as belonging to the same
category as flying carpets & dancing camels.
With the taste of sour pickles & stale bread still in his mouth, Němec
returned to the Reading Room to find out if the odds on getting the facts about
Meister Edwarp Kelley straight had improved in the meantime, but after another
four hours of reading he was still no nearer to knowing who the parlous K really
was. There were tantalising hints, the name Baresch appearing several times, a
reference here & there to Kircher’s cryptology, Dee’s “Enochian,” the “Egyptian
Oedipus,” Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon, & the omnipresent Francis Garland. Was
Bacon Shakespeare? Was K a spy? Was the Voynich Manuscript concocted as part
of an English ploy to undermine the European Powers? Could this, a travesty
penned by a truant tragedian, have been the unacknowledged cause of the Thirty
Years War? And more? Much, much more?
Like Rudolf himself, this K was a figure grown so fabulous no sense of
realism seemed to adhere to him at all. His existence was all metaphor &
allegory, a paranoiac waxworks, a cipher in the larger destinies of men, riddled
between the lines. Yet it was precisely this that focused Němec’s resolve. With
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the Prof in mind (who, after all, perhaps never believed that K’s connection to
the Voynich Manuscript was anything other than circumstantial & ˆ
paradoxically integral), Němec decided that the only way to proceed was by
indirection, deviation, triangulating the facts by means of echoes, traces,
repetitions, coincidences of the remotest order. To locate the centre, as the
saying went, it was necessary to begin at the periphery — but how do you locate
the periphery if you don’t know where the centre is?
K
D = π
Every account of K began with D. And where D intersected the Radiant Centre,
K occupied an obscure periphery. But then, in transit from Fair Britannia to
Fickle Bohemia, all changed. K, having started out as D’s handyboy, skryer,
blunt instrument, “crystal ball reader,” learned to speak with the angels,
discovered thereby the long-sought-after Elixir, the Philosopher’s Stone, the
secret of baking dung into gold, became King of Alchemists to the alchemists’
king. Now D was the sideshow to K’s main act. At the angels’ behest they even
swapped wives: order transfigured by another, submerged order.
Before K’s ascent, D was the biggest wisearse in the country, the envy of
every two-bit Francis Bacon from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. He was a
founding fellow of Trinity College, a school rector & a member of the most
Worshipful Company of Mercers. His career wasn’t without incident, though.
By reason of having cast the horoscopes of Mary, Queen of Scots, & (the as-yet
Princess) Elizabeth, D was summonsed to the Star Chamber on charges of High
Treason & narrowly escaped (in Melmoth’s words) a moste grievous beheading.
Then in , as fortune would have it, on a day he himself had long-prophesied
(tea leaves, magic marbles, phases of the moon, all that), D made the
acquaintance of that certain Edwand K… It read like a put-up job.
By a pretty coincidence, K (so he claimed) just happened at that time to’ve
come into possession of a certain document, the socalled Glastonbury
Manuscript, which, according to Melmoth, detailed by divers spelles and magik
conjugations a method (K’s “Three-Point Plan”)* for transmuting the most
saturnine plumbum ( on the Periodic Table of Elements) into most rare, most
precious, most lustrous aurum () by means (quoth Melmoth) of a mistryous
* Under exclusive licence. [:]
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reddish powdyr — the “Dragon’s Blode,” so said, of high morte-d’Arthuriana.
Q. Could further details be adduced in confirmation or contradiction
thereof?
Of D’s other two biographers (Yeats & Holms respectively), both insisted
that it was D (& not K) who’d unearthed, in a Bishop’s tomb, beneath the ruins
of Glastonbury Cathedral, a quantity of this socalled “Red Elixir” — one grain
of which was enough to miraculously transmute a piece of a cast-iron warming
pan. D had already established a reputation for salvaging rare manuscripts from
monasteries dispossessed by Henry VIII — most notably the scientific writings
of one Roger Bacon. Like Bacon, D had a reputation as a polymath. He himself
