The Grand Inquisitor had taken vows of poverty. However the small print, had there been any, did not forbid the possession of a wealthy brother. And like many wealthy Romans from the Emperor Hadrian onwards, the Inquisitor’s brother had a villa in the hills near Tivoli. It was a place to escape the hot, stinking, malaria-ridden plain of Rome during the summer months. And shortly after the trial, Vincenzo’s books and instruments were delivered, for disposal, to the Inquisitor, who was then in residence at his brother’s Tivoli villa.
The Cardinal recalled that Copernicus’s De Revolution-ibus Orbium Coelestium had been placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1616, whereupon, the following year, the Dutch heretics had published an Amsterdam edition. And Elzevirs of Leyden had been quick to publish the works of Galileo. He would allow no such embarrassments to fall on the Church again. Across the front cover of each of Vincenzo’s ten volumes, he wrote cremandum fore: they would be consigned to the flames.
What happened next is unclear, Virginia wrote. Maybe the Grand Duke’s Secretary had applied a little pressure. Whatever, Terremoto scored out cremandum fore and replaced the words with prohibendum fore: they were not to be burned, merely not to be read. A few copies were made but were lost, all but the one which had found its way to the Bodleian. Virginia had appended a surviving letter from the period:
Reverend Father. His Holiness has prohibited a book in octavo entitled Phaenomenis Novae, in ten volumes, by Vincenzo Vincenzi, son of Andrea Vincenzi of Florence. The book contains many errors, heresies, and pernicious and schismatic propositions. I am informing your reverence so that you may promulgate an edict prohibiting the book, ordering booksellers and private individuals to surrender whatever copies they possess, on pain of established penalties. I note that your reverence discovered copies of the Republic and Demonomania of Jean Bodin, in a bookshop of your city. These were indeed, by order of Gregory XIV of blessed memory, condemned. All copies of the above book are to be burned on seizure. Your zeal in these matters is well known to His Holiness and to the Congregation, and we do not doubt that you will apply it to the matter in hand, in the service of our Lord God. May He preserve you in His holy grace. I commend myself to your prayers.
The Grand Duke never succeeded in adding Vincenzo’s works to his great library. The Cardinal put them in a dark basement room in his brother’s house, hidden amongst the junk and detritus of a large family home; and there they remained, forgotten, for over a hundred years.
In 1740, a librarian from Florence by the name of Dr. Tomasso Bresciani was passing through a marketplace in Rome. He bought a sausage at a stall and took it away wrapped in an old paper. Unwrapping the sausage in the Triano park overlooking the Colosseum, he found the wrapper to be a letter from Vincenzo, now long dead. Webb imagined the good librarian choking on his sausage. The paper was traced to a junk collector and thence to a house belonging to the grandsons of a nephew of one of the Grand Inquisitors, who were selling off waste paper from their basement. Bresciani recovered the notebooks, which found their way to the famous Riccardian library in Florence, where they were indexed, filed, restored, bound, and once again forgotten.
They next turned up two hundred years later, in 1924, in the attic of a farmhouse in Provence. Another footnote: “Almost certainly Napoleon’s troops. They were forever looting museums and libraries from Italy and carting stuff over the Alps. Women too, I expect. Ollie, when are you coming back?”
Three thousand crates went north, some of which fell into Alpine torrents. Many of the remaining manuscripts, with a value beyond money, were turned into wrapping paper in Paris. Most were shredded and sold as scrap, an unparalleled act of vandalism by greedy Parisian businessmen. Phaenomenis was a lucky survivor.
They were then purchased from the farmer for pennies by the famous monk Helinandus (“copy of receipt scanned in if you’re interested”), and so they came back down the road, all the way to Rocca Priora, south of Rome, becoming part of the Cistercian monk’s famous collection of astronomical manuscripts.
A fact which made Webb sit up.
Unfortunately, Virginia’s note continued, along came the Second World War. While the Allies were advancing inland from Anzio, trainloads of good things were being taken north by the retreating Germans. One of those trainloads got stuck in a tunnel between Frascati and Rome, and in a bloody fight the partisans reclaimed the booty which included, but of course, a collection of manuscripts hastily taken from the monastery by some German officer. Unfortunately, in the confusion of Nacht und Nebel which is battle, some of the sacred relics, art treasures and rare manuscripts simply disappeared. Vincenzo’s manuscript has never been seen since.
There is of course the Bodleian transcript of the original by some anonymous Dutchman. Or was, darling. But as that too has now gone missing, along with your photocopy of it, it seems that the works of Vincenzo have vanished from the face of the Earth.
And at this point, Virginia stopped. She had scanned in her flowery signature; it took up almost the entire screen of his laptop.
Webb stared into the dark night. For the first time since Glen Etive, he fully believed that the task was hopeless. To find a manuscript which had gone missing in some forgotten skirmish almost a lifetime ago? In twenty-four hours?
He decided that he would send Virginia, the librarian with the steamy hormones, some flowers. He looked at his watch. He’d have to be quick: a planet without flowers was due along.
He had almost overlooked the last page, assuming it would be blank. But now he clicked the return button on his laptop and saw that Virginia had added a postscript to the end of her file:
“Ollie dear — you might want to get in touch with that Rocca Priora monastery. There are rumours.”
Monte Porzio
The short Atlantic night was drawing to a close, and a pale sun was beginning to illuminate a solid sheet of cloud which hid the ocean below.
Webb put his laptop aside and stretched. He tried to gather his thoughts.
Maybe, Webb wondered, I’m being paranoid. Maybe in my excited state I’d misunderstood the wheelhouse circuitry. If so, Leclerc’s death made for a very strange accident; but an accident nevertheless?
And what about the fast response of the robotic telescope? Perhaps that’s all it was: a fast response, made possible by the quietness of the electronic flow across the Atlantic at that time of night.
On the other hand, Webb speculated, what if Leclerc’s death was murder, and the Tenerife observations were a fraud? It would have to mean that Leclerc had been getting close to Nemesis, and that someone on the team didn’t want it to be identified. That is, someone on the team wanted an asteroid to wipe out their country. Family, friends, home, community, even their dog if they had one, someone wanted the lot to go.
Webb was vaguely aware of being less worldly than the average street trader; but even allowing for his own limited insight into the human condition, he could not believe in a folly which plumbed such depths. The proposition made no sense.