Jacques le Boeuf, electrician, was pushing his luck. He had a job to do and only an hour to do it.
It was one of those cold November nights when darkness fell quickly, like a stage curtain at an unexpected interval in a play. It seemed as if all the students and most of the lecturers had simply vanished as if, save for him, the whole College of Bruges was deserted. He’d been told to do whatever it took to finish the job in Professor Benitez’s room, for there were funding interviews that had to go forward the following morning.
“Merde,” he said as he got the brief. This was one of the college’s medieval buildings, where the job was never simple.
“If only they could have told me earlier,” he muttered, raking his deft fingers through curly black hair. And so, with faint tremors of frustration, he began moving a bookcase to the side. It was then that he saw the problem: crumbling, damp plasterwork and cloth-wrapped wires had almost rotted through. No wonder Benitez kept getting “blacked out.” The wires must have been placed there long ago, probably before the Nazis came through Belgium in World War II. What stories of occupation and liberation, he wondered, would the room be able to tell?
“Sacre bleu,” he said as he dropped the chisel down a cavity at the back of the plaster. “Stop rushing, you fool,” he said to himself. The soccer match was starting in thirty minutes.
The tool room was locked, and he’d neglected to bring the key. Without the chisel, how was he going to get the job done at all?
He rushed around the room, knocking over piles of papers and books. “Slow down, Jacques,” he told himself. He carefully picked up the books and papers and sat in Benitez’s squeaking antique chair with its cracked leather arms and put his head in his hands. It was then that a thought arose like a cobra from a snake-charmer’s basket. Could he possibly do what he’d promised not to? To retrieve the chisel, he’d have to use his blunt hammer and punch deeper into the ancient wall.
He leapt up from the chair, got the hammer, and punched out an extra piece of plaster. Droplets of sweat formed on his brow as he hammered. Cracks appeared, and then a chasm opened; a pile of plaster lay around his crusted brown leather boots.
He couldn’t stop now.
The chisel had tumbled far back into the wall cavity. After some groping, he found it, but there was something else there, too. It felt like a wooden box, about the size of an encyclopaedia. It was wedged tightly into the cavity behind the plaster wall.
Jacques reached farther back, his breath coming in quick bursts. At last he got a grip on it and, inch by inch, breath by breath, he twisted it until it was free.
“Mon Dieu,” he said as he brought it to the light.
It was a simple wooden box with an ill-formed star scratched on the surface. An old wasp’s nest, gummed to the lid, disintegrated under his breath. Then, like a child not quite knowing what to do, he shook the box. Something inside rattled and rolled.
How long had the box been there? Was it hidden during World War II? He saw the star clearly now: the Star of David, ever so faintly. Jacques knew that there had been Jews in Bruges who perished during the war, so perhaps this box contained the lost treasures of a family that had been transported to Auschwitz or Dachau.
The professor’s wood-framed clock, something that could have come from Dickens’s London, ticked loudly and broke his train of thought. After all, every minute spent here was another minute of soccer that was wasted. Perhaps he would just throw the box in the skip with the plaster and be done with it.
He quickly fixed the wires with gaffer tape and swept up as best he could. He’d return the following day to re-plaster the wall, but at least the electrics would be working for the interviews. He dragged the bookcase back to hide the hole in the wall. Not knowing what to do with the box, he grabbed it and put it under his right arm. He slammed the heavy oak door shut, turned the key with a resounding clunk, and was gone.
* * *
The next day, Jacques, who usually avoided the academics, watched closely until the last interview was done. He then went back to the office of Professor Benitez and knocked lightly on the door. At Benitez’s command, he opened it and, with his head down, approached the professor.
“Sir, I have something to give you,” he said, stuttering as he held up the box. ‘Truth is, I made a botch of that job last night, and I found this box stuck behind the wall.”
“Made a botch of the job?” Benitez, the famous linguist, replied. He laughed like a beloved uncle. Jacques had assumed the professor would be furious with him or at least threaten him with disciplinary action. But he’d underestimated the kind-hearted Benitez, with his two-tone beard. When he saw what Jacques had in his hands, he jumped up like a man half his age. He pushed aside a sea of books that surrounded him and walked to Jacques.
“What on God’s earth do we have here?” Benitez asked with a smile.
He gently took the box from Jacques’s rough hands, and with his own soft white fingers, he drew it to his nose. Jacques watched as the professor put the box down and unhooked the brass pin, green with corrosion, and opened the lid. They both peered at the contents as if looking into an ancient tomb.
Inside lay a small book with a withered brown jacket. The professor lifted it and found a bundle of papers beneath it, as well as another book and tightly rolled parchment. In the corner of the box was a ring with a gold Star of David engraved on a blue enamel face.
“It’s just that the plaster gave way behind that very wall, and the box was there,” Jacques explained. “So, I took it.”
Benitez leaned over and kissed Jacques le Boeuf on both cheeks like he was his own son. He then swore Jacques to secrecy.
* * *
Benitez abandoned his other work, even the funding interviews, while he spent the next two months in isolation at the Musea Brugge. It took him that long, with a team of conservators, to understand what Jacques had discovered. Much of the writing in the book was in code. It was tiny, as if it had been written under a magnifying glass. Some of it was in Spanish, some in Latin, some in Arabic. The latter part was written almost entirely in poor English. The small parchment was carefully unrolled and identified as a sketch by Hans Holbein of England’s Sir Thomas More. The gold ring was unique, for it was in the English Tudor style, and yet it had the Star of David on its face.
It was at the end of the second month that Benitez realized that he was examining the secret writings of one of Bruges’s great men. The books and parchment were indeed what he’d hoped they would be: the lost voice of one whose secrets were precious and beautiful. If revealed at the time, such secrets could have implicated hundreds or perhaps even led to civil war. These were the writings of a man truly ahead of his time, someone who had strived against insurmountable obstacles to make the world a better place. He had become the tutor of Princess Mary Tudor and was the confidante of both Catherine of Aragon and King Henry VIII, playing the impossible game of double agent.
It was a year before the writings were published. Benitez was torn as to how he should translate them, for the man who had written the ancient diaries hated lofty academic speech. He prized clarity, and Benitez was determined that the world would hear this man’s authentic voice.
One year to the day Jacques le Boeuf discovered the box of secret writings, there was a press conference at the Musea Brugge.
“We have been blessed,” Benitez broadcast at the press conference, “with a lost portrait of England’s Sir Thomas More and a unique gold ring. But more importantly, we have the secret diaries of a great renaissance scholar, the friend of royals and the most secret of all Jews: Señor Juan Luis Vives.”