“How about a diamond merchant named Daniel Eisler?”
The faintest flicker of surprise crossed the tavern owner’s features, then disappeared. It could have meant anything. “You’ve been busy, haven’t you? From what I hear, the man’s barely been dead twelve hours.” His gaze shifted, significantly, to a nearby table of leatherworkers who were suddenly looking interested. Pushing away from the doorframe, he took a step back. “Pippa? If you’ll bring us a couple of pints?”
Following him into the inner room, Sebastian found himself in a small, neat office sparsely furnished with the unpretentious functionality of a campaign tent.
“Please, sit,” said Knox, indicating the plain gateleg table that stood near a window overlooking the cobbled rear yard.
Sebastian sat and waited while the woman, Pippa, banged two foaming tankards down on the tabletop, threw him a malevolent glare, then slammed the door behind her as she returned to the taproom. He said, “Somehow, I expected you to deny knowing Eisler.”
Knox came to sprawl in the opposite chair. “Why should I? Because he’s dead? Are you imagining I killed him too?”
“Where were you last night around eight or nine?”
Knox took a long, slow sip of his ale and set it down before answering. “Here, at the Black Devil. And damn you to hell for asking.”
Sebastian looked at the dark, handsome face of the man across from him and said, “You went to see Eisler last week. Why?”
“How do you know I went to see him?”
“His butler remembered you.”
For a long moment, the other man stared back at him. Then he pushed up from his chair and crossed the room to unlock a small chest. He withdrew a flat rectangular object wrapped in oilcloth, locked the chest again, and came to lay the article on the table before Sebastian.
Roughly bound with cord, the bundle was some fifteen inches long, slightly less wide, and two or three inches thick. “What is it?” asked Sebastian.
“Open it.”
Sebastian untied the cord that held the oilcloth in place and peeled it back to reveal a crumbling brown calf-bound book. Opening the tattered cover, he found himself staring at a handwritten script that was neither Roman nor Greek, but something at once strange and vaguely familiar. Puzzled, he ran his fingertips over the page. The book was definitely made of paper rather than vellum, yet it had been written by hand, not printed on a press.
“How old is it?” he asked.
“Late sixteenth century, I’m told,” said Knox, resuming his seat.
“It’s in Hebrew?”
“So they say.”
Carefully turning the brittle, foxed pages, Sebastian studied the cramped script illustrated with curious geographical shapes and strange images. He looked up. “What does this old manuscript have to do with Eisler?”
Knox reached for his tankard, but he didn’t drink from it. Instead, he turned his head to stare out the window beside them. Watching him, Sebastian had the impression he gazed beyond the cobbled yard and the shady elms of the ancient churchyard that bordered it. Far beyond, to a distant, sun-blasted land, dry and stony and ravaged by war. In Sebastian’s experience, most ex-soldiers carried their past with them always, like a dark vision of hell that, once glimpsed, is never forgotten.
“To men like you and me,” said Knox, his voice rough, “war means burned villages, dead women and children, and fields plowed by cannonballs. It means fruit rotting in orchards because there’s no one left alive to pick it, and wells fouled by the stinking bodies of pigs and goats and dogs. It means men with their bellies ripped open and their faces shot off. But that’s because we’re just the poor sods who fight and bleed and die. For some men, war is an opportunity.”
“You’re saying Eisler was one of those men?”
A faintly derisive smile curled the tavern owner’s lips. “There were very few opportunities Daniel Eisler missed.”
“I’m told he kept agents on the Continent to buy the jewels of families that found themselves in strained circumstances.”
“So I’ve heard, although I never dealt with them myself. But Eisler also had another man in his employ, a defrocked Spanish priest by the name of Ferdinand Arroyo. Arroyo’s mission was to acquire a certain type of manuscript of interest to Eisler—mainly in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but sometimes in Old French, Italian, or German.”
Sebastian stared down at an age-mottled page half-filled by a curious representation of a winged angel holding what looked like Saturn and breathing fire. “This being an example?”
“Yes.”
“So how does it come to be in your possession?”
“It was brought to London by gentlemen with whom I do business. I was to deliver it to Eisler today.”
“Why show it to me?”