“I can feel something, but I didn’t see anything,” Raphaella whispered. “Are you sure?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.”
“Well, I feel better now that you’ve cleared that up. And why am I whispering again?” she added, annoyed with herself.
“We’re both on edge.”
“The edge of sanity, I’d say. Let’s go in.”
Any doubts I had held about my vision disappeared as soon as we closed the library doors behind us. The acrid odour of smoke was so strong it stung my nostrils. Raphaella stood still beside me, sniffing the air. A cold fingernail of dread scratched the back of my neck.
“Where there’s smoke there’s-”
“A ghost,” Raphaella cut in, drawing air through her nose like a professional wine taster, analyzing the ingredients of the invisible smoke the way I had seen her nasally exploring the medicines in the Demeter. Dealing with herbal remedies required a finely tuned olfactory organ, she had often told me.
“This is what you’ve been telling me about?”
“It’s him again,” I said. “But the smell is stronger this time.”
“I see-smell-what you mean.” Raphaella wrinkled her nose. “Burnt wood, cloth,” she murmured, as if taking inventory, “leather, hot iron, paper. And-ugh-underneath it all, something fetid. But why smoke?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why would this presence leave behind the smell of burning?”
“I assume because he caused the fire that led to the professor’s…”
“Maybe,” Raphaella mused. “But you’d think-”
“Look,” I exclaimed, leading the way across the room. “Something’s disturbed the manuscript.”
“I left it in two neat stacks.”
The bitter stink was more pronounced here. The books I had been using lay open where I had left them, but the manuscript had been tampered with. Several pages were askew. I checked the window. It was closed and locked as it always was when I left the library, so no breeze had moved the pages.
I looked around, alert for any more signs of the spirit’s presence. Was he here now, I wondered, keeping himself invisible? My eyes probed the alcove. The bookcase door hung open, exposing the secret cupboard with its rolled-up door and empty shelves. The cross gleamed on the tabletop, untouched, with the small wooden box beside it.
“There’s a page on the floor,” Raphaella said, bending to retrieve the sheet. Between trembling hands she clutched it, with its lines of neatly typed letters and pencilled scribbles here and there, and sniffed it.
“Smoky,” she murmured.
“Look at the edges,” I pointed out.
Along one margin and across the top of the typed page, the thick white paper showed a faint brown stain. I had seen marks like that on lots of old books. Books that had been near a fire.
II
“I’D BETTER PHOTOGRAPH the pages now,” Raphaella cautioned. “Just to be safe.”
We worked fast. Raphaella leaned over the stack, snapped a picture, I removed the page, the camera clicked again, and so on. When the PIE’s memory was full, she emailed the images to her address at the Demeter, cleared the memory, and started shooting once more. It was a tedious process, but we got it done.
Raphaella tidied up the manuscript and tucked it back into its file case, securing the flap with a stouter than necessary knot. She tossed the PIE into her backpack. I returned the Compendium and cross, box, and manuscript to the cupboard and locked up.
“We have to make sure we do this-return everything to the cupboard-whenever we leave the library,” I said.
“Right. Well, I’m ready,” she said, looking around nervously.
“Let’s get out of here.”
Tucking the little brass keys into their place under the rosary in the box and closing the escritoire drawer, I was unable to shake the feeling that the spirit was watching every move.
We found Mrs. Stoppini sitting at a small desk in the main-floor room she called the parlour, writing letters on thick creamy paper with a fountain pen as if she was still in the last century. She insisted on seeing us to the door.
“See you soon,” I said.
“I shall look forward to it.”
Outside, Raphaella kissed me goodbye and slid behind the steering wheel of her mother’s car. She waved out the window as she drove off down the shady lane. She had a few hours’ work to do at the Demeter.
I went into the shop, gave the refinished table a quick final inspection. It looked great. Dad will be pleased, I thought as I locked up. I pulled on my jacket and helmet, mounted up, and piloted the motorcycle through the estate gates, glad to be leaving the place and wondering once again how Mrs. Stoppini could live in that house without contact with the spirit that I was more and more sure was full of dark intentions.
And not for the first time I felt guilty leaving her alone there. I reminded myself that she had been by herself in that big house when I met her, and beyond her fear of the library-which I could now fully relate to-she had showed no signs of knowing about any spiritual visitations.
I rode straight into town, heading for the public library across the road from the Olde Gold. The beginnings of a plan were moving around in my mind, like puzzle bits scattered across a tabletop.
AN HOUR OR SO later I walked in the back door of my house with two books on Savonarola under my arm-the same titles I had been reading in the prof’s library. In our kitchen I listened for signs of activity from Mom’s study. All was quiet except for the ticking of the clock above the kitchen sink.
“Anybody home?” I called out.
Things had been tense since Dad and I had ganged up on my mother about the Afghanistan assignment. For a day or so it had seemed she had given up on the idea, but she had never said so in so many words. All three of us avoided the subject altogether-which made it one of those “elephant in the living room” things that just kept everybody on edge.
So I was kind of glad to have the house to myself for a while. Tension was one thing I didn’t need right then. My nerves were tight as piano wires as it was. I fixed a mug of tea and took it up to my room, dumping the books on the desk.
I set up my recliner on the balcony beside a small table, then took my notebook, library books, and tea outside. There was just enough breeze to stir the leaves on the maples along Brant Street and to bend the column of steam rising from the mug. I picked up the book I had been reading at the mansion, found the page where I had left off, and settled back in the chair.
III
WITH HIS FIERY ZEAL and deep intelligence, Savonarola quickly established himself among the Dominicans at Bologna, gaining a reputation far and wide as a fiercely intense, repent-or-burn-in-hell preacher. He had lost none of his hatred of the world, his disgust with the Church and its riches and corruption, his puritanical opposition to art, literature, costly garments-anything that in his sour view would lead a person away from religious devotion. He still wore his scratchy hair shirt under his clothing, and had added a spiked belt to punish his flesh even more. According to my reading, that kind of “mortification of the flesh” was widely practised at the time. After seven years he was sent in 1482 to San Marco’s priory in the most important city in all Italy.
The friar from Ferrara was thirty years old when he walked through one of Florence’s twelve gates, bound for the Dominican convent at San Marco Church and bursting with zeal to clean up a republic with a reputation-among fundamentalists like him-as one of the most sinful in Europe, a cesspool stained by every shade of wickedness. One of the largest centres in Europe, enclosed by a high wall and divided in two by the Arno River, Florence contained almost 42,000 “souls,” sixty parish churches-one for every 680 inhabitants-and dozens of friaries, convents, and religious brotherhoods. You couldn’t walk down one of the narrow streets without bumping into priests, nuns, or monks. Religion-and only one religion-coloured every part of a person’s life.