Every night for weeks Clément had been coming back, drawn almost in spite of himself by the treasures in the secret library that were hidden from the eyes of the world. After a few uneasy forays he had gradually gained in confidence. He would enter at nightfall and occasionally felt bold enough to stay for the whole of the following day. He lived on the provisions he pilfered from the kitchens at Souarcy – for he was becoming more and more distrustful of Mabile. Indeed, his initial, rather dormant mistrust had grown keener since Eudes de Larnay’s last visit. Up until then, he had been content to spy upon the spy in order to protect Agnès, but now he was on the lookout for any suspicious activity. He had soon seen through the folly of his first plan: catching Mabile red-handed in order to give the Dame de Souarcy a legitimate excuse to turn her out was too obvious – too obvious but, above all, of little or no use. Why not instead catch the spy out at her own game? Why not plant a few harmless secrets for her to find? Then if Eudes tried to use them against his half-sister, it would be easy to discredit him in spite of his lineage and wealth, which gave him nevertheless a significant advantage. All Clément needed to do now was convince his mistress to agree to this subterfuge. He knew that his lady was beginning to glimpse an unpleasant truth.

Noble victories or dignified defeats are only possible when confronting a noble enemy. The weak can fight a powerful villain only with cunning and deceit. He was certain Agnès had understood this even though she had still not accepted it completely. Still, in one sense Eudes’s villainy had done the Dame de Souarcy a good turn; it had silenced her remaining scruples and remorse. Eudes was an evil beast and in order to defeat him any line of attack was permissible.

His nightly forays into the secret library at Clairets Abbey were part of this. To begin with, Clément had comforted himself with the idea that if the Abbess had a sudden wish to go in there, he could simply hide under the spiral staircase, behind the pieces of leather that formed an improvised curtain. His fears soon proved groundless. The Abbess rarely entered the library, to which she alone possessed the keys, and of whose existence only she was aware. The fact that it held so little appeal for Éleusie de Beaufort, who was renowned for her learning, had at first surprised the child. But he had gradually begun to understand why. A number of these works contained such revelations, such shocking secrets – some so upsetting they had reduced Clément to tears. To begin with he had doubted the veracity of the words that expressed them. But the evidence was so overwhelming it had finally convinced him. Thus the earth was not surrounded by a void, but by some intangible fluid within which coexisted elements and organisms so microscopic as to be invisible to the human eye. Thus the stone in toads’ brains that protected against poison was a mere fable, as were unicorns. Thus comas, convulsions, trembling and headaches were not symptoms of demonic possession but of a malfunction in the brain – if one were to believe Abu Marwan Abd Al-Malik Ibn Zuhr, called Avenzoar in the West, one of the twelfth century’s most eminent Arab doctors of Jewish origin. Thus it was not enough to spit three times in a toad’s mouth in order not to conceive for a year. Thus, thus, thus …

Was Éleusie de Beaufort trying to hold back this tidal wave? Had she grown pale at the thought of the threat this science posed to all the stale dogmas and, more importantly, the power it gave to those who wielded it?

A single slim volume had absorbed him for almost a whole month. It was a Greek primer for Latinists. He had even been bold enough to borrow it for a few days in order to further his learning of that strange language, which seemed to him more and more essential to an understanding of the world.

He had then scoured the library’s interminable shelves for a similar work that would allow him to penetrate the mysteries of Hebrew and Aramaic; for during his feverish research a sort of logic had soon become apparent, an indefinable conducting thread that led him from one work to another.

He was stunned upon carefully opening a small collection of aphorisms bound in a kind of coarse red silk. That same name. That same name written in ink at the top of the first page in the last three books he had deciphered. He had discovered the connecting thread. Eustache de Rioux, Knight Hospitaller. Was the man dead? Had he bequeathed his books directly to Clairets Abbey or through a legatee? What was it that had drawn Clément to the works in his collection those past few days?

A sudden impulse made him go back to the shelf where he had found the book. One by one he pulled out the adjacent volumes, glancing inside them before replacing them. At last he found what he had been looking for. The large book was bound in roughly tanned leather of an unpleasant dark-purple hue that still gave off the sour smell of suint. There was no sign of any title, even on the title page, only the name of its former owner, like a code: Eustache de Rioux. From the diagrams that filled the first few pages Clément supposed it was a textbook on astronomy or astrology. The subsequent pages astonished him: in them appeared the signs of the zodiac, some accompanied by a profusion of arrows pointing to complicated calculations and annotations penned by two distinct hands. One set of writing was even and graceful, though rushed, the other more squat. It was not so much a book as a personal notebook. Did it belong to the Knight de Rioux, and to another whose name did not appear in its pages? A sentence written in italics caught his attention:

Another arrow pointed from this proclamation to the following page. What he discovered there left him utterly bewildered.

An ecliptic circle featuring only three of the zodiac signs – Capricorn, Aries and Virgo – was covered in the jottings and crossings-out of someone searching for answers. Comments ending in question marks bore out the impression of uncertainty. Others seemed only to be reminders for the author, or authors.

The Moon will eclipse the Sun on the day of his birth. The place of his birth is still unknown. Revisit the words of the Viking, a bondi, a trader in walrus tusks, amber and furs chanced upon in Constantinople.
Five women and at the centre a sixth.

Capricorn in the first decan and Virgo in the third being variable and the consanguinity of Aries in any decan too great.

The initial calculations were incorrect, failing to take into account the error relating to the year of birth of the Saviour. It is a fortunate blunder for it gives us a little more time.

These comments had been penned by the more graceful hand – visibly at ease with a quill pen. But to whom did they refer? This Filii hominis, the Son of Man, Christ? If so, then the first sentence made no sense at all, and the third even less so. More time to do what? And who was meant by ‘we’? The two authors? As for the astrological reference, it was too abstruse. What was the ‘consanguinity’ of a sign? Who were the women referred to?

Clément raised his head towards the arrow slits. Outside, the sun was setting. He had not shown his face at the manor since the previous day, and Agnès would be worried. It was almost vespers. He could slip away while they were holding the service and go back.

He paused. He had a strong urge to take the notebook he had found back to Souarcy and study it at his leisure. But his good sense quickly dissuaded him, all the more so as the volume was unwieldy. So be it, he would return to the library after matins+ and pick up where he had left off.

He stood up and snuffed out his little oil lamp, the benefits of which were that it smoked less than a torch and there were enough of them at the manor for one missing to go unnoticed, unlike the tallow lamps or candles, which were costly and therefore included in the kitchen inventory. He walked down to the storeroom.