A Dusty Manuscript
This story is going to take a bit of build up before it gets to the sex, but we'll get there once I've established who the characters are and the circumstances of this new series.
My name is Eric Wright, and though I've written a number of books, I doubt if that will impress you very much. Being a scholar who focuses on Renaissance history isn't that interesting to most people, and usually it's the furthest thing from exciting. Let me rephrase that—I love my job, but it doesn't usually give me the sorts of surprises that I can talk to people about and expect them to be impressed or excited. Hell, even my wife had little interest in hearing about my work most days. Julie—my wife—is a smart woman, but she's a lawyer, so our interests don't overlap much. The one exception is that we both like to travel, and my work does require me to visit some pretty cool places.
For example, I'd recently gotten funding from the university to visit Rome in order to do research in the Vatican Archives. Now, if you are a fan of Dan Brown, that sentence probably gives you visions of intrigue and who knows what sort of weirdness, but it's actually a lot more mundane that that. It mostly involves sitting in a rather uncomfortable reading room poring over dusty old manuscripts learned about by examining the online catalog, books other people had written, or in some instances, hints left behind in other manuscripts.
That's how I found the book that would change my life, though I didn't know that was the case right away. I had been looking into the work of the seventeenth-century Papal inquisition, most specifically regarding a little-known seventeenth-century Franciscan friar named Valerio Trionfanti. The events surrounding his life happened a bit late for the sort of scholarship I do. The short version is that inquisitors had dragged him in to investigate charges he'd cast a love spell on a newlywed woman with whom he'd had a lengthy but unconsummated affair. Her name was Laura Coccapani, and the spell involved the use of her pubic hair, though how he'd acquired that wasn't mentioned in the records. During the investigation—Trionfanti was eventually acquitted—the inquisitors went after him pretty hard, asking him repeatedly about a book he supposedly had in his possession that had once belonged to Giordano Bruno.
Bruno was my real interest here. He was a late sixteenth-century Dominican who is sometimes mistakenly held up as a martyr to science. Sure, he believed the sun orbited the earth rather than vice versa, but he did so due to some fairly obscure magical beliefs rather than any sort of scientific reasoning. The point is, inquisitors thought Trionfanti had one of Bruno's books in his possession, but had been unable to find any evidence about the location of this book. In a roundabout way I had stumbled across what I thought to be the reason why—it seems Trionfanti had handed it off to a university professor he'd known, for safekeeping. I'd picked up the trail—and a faint one it was!—and learned that he'd become alarmed by Trionfanti's trial and had gotten rid of the book in a very clever way, by leaving it in the stacks of what would, in time, become the Vatican Library.
That was almost 300 years prior and anything could have happened to the book in the meantime, so this wasn't the only thing I was looking into at the Vatican. But I was intrigued, because based on the very barebones descriptions I had, it sounded like this book had been one of Giordani Bruno's personal notebooks. Bruno had wide-ranging interests in the occult, and based on what I had been able to piece together these were his notes cribbed from reading a variety of works of magic. These ranged from 3
rd
century Hermetic works, to those of the 9
th
-century "father of Arab philosophy" al-Kindi, to the 12
th
-century Jewish kabbalist Abraham ben Isaac of Narbonne.
I could hardly believe my luck when I finally got my hands on the manuscript and began to examine it. There was nothing positively to identify it as having belonged to Bruno, but it was clearly of 16
th
century origin based on the paper and binding. Furthermore, it was all written in a single hand that looked very much like it could be Bruno's handwriting, and it contained the notes on various authors in whom I knew Bruno to be interested. The point is that I was already very excited before I started to realize what the contents of the final portions of the manuscript were. They were notes on the very love spell Trionfanti had been accused of casting, though from puzzling through the Latin and Greek scribblings it seemed that the term "love spell" might be something of a misnomer. Instead, this was a spell intended to enslave the target's will to that of the caster.
The idea that such a thing might actually work struck me as laughable in our modern scientific age, and I did actually chuckle at the thought. After all, if Bruno had access to such a spell—if, in fact, he had created it, from elements drawn from a variety of different occult traditions—then surely he'd have been too powerful for the inquisitors to have killed him. But then I realized that the spell he'd laid out would be useless as a defense against the papal inquisition. It was very complex, requiring the target to listen to a song that would put the hearer in the right mindset to be receptive to what the spellcaster had to say, and that would work if and only if the target also consumed a blend of spices combined while under the influence of a very specific sort of inhaled incense. Oh, and the caster had to consume at least one of the target's pubic hairs.
I rubbed my eyes as I thought about how complex the spell was. It had an aural, oral, and audio component, just to set the target up to take in what the spellcaster had to say. Not to mention that the spellcaster had to consume a pubic hair from the target, which would be difficult to acquire. With a chuckle I thought about the way in which this spell resembled so many others I'd seen—the very complexity of it was a feature rather than a bug, allowing a ready explanation as to why it didn't work. Any single component being out of joint could be blamed when it failed. And since there was no such thing as magic, fail it would. I mean, there isn't any such thing as magic... is there?
I spent the rest of the week puzzling through Bruno's scrawled notes and outlining what they meant. No one but me knew of the existence of this manuscript, which had gone undiscovered for more than two centuries. I was sure to get a publishable article out of this discovery, which was more valuable than a mind control spell that couldn't possibly work, right? Nevertheless, by the end of the week I had a pretty firm grasp on the spell and its components, with the one exception of the musical component. I'm a textual scholar rather than a musicologist, so I couldn't figure out what the song was supposed to be.
I wasn't able to take a photo—that's forbidden in the Vatican Archives—but I did meticulously draw out the diagrams Bruno had made, and by this point I was convinced this really was his work. I also copied down all his notes. With these in hand I emailed an image I took of these notes back to a colleague in the states who was an expert on Renaissance music. If anyone could figure this song out, Dr. Elizabeth Cogwell was the one.
At the end of the week, having accomplished a great deal from a scholarly perspective as well as having had a bit of fun in Rome, I flew back home. Julie picked me up from the airport, looking great as always. We'd been together for ten years, married for almost seven, and she'd only gotten more beautiful as time went by. Only 5 feet tall, she had become increasingly interested in both exercise and fashion as she had approached her 30
th
birthday. Although she was barely more than 100 pounds, she had C cup breasts that looked huge on her petite frame, a set of washboard abs, and lusciously dark hair that beautifully set off her olive skin and coal dark eyes.
I, on the other hand, had gotten out of some of my better exercise habits as I had aged. A few years older than Julie at 34, I'd spent too much time in libraries and eating on the road. While I wasn't fat by any means, my 6-foot frame now sported a definite paunch and as if to add insult to injury, my hairline had started to recede as well. All that combined with the fact that I dressed like an academic approaching middle age while Julie dressed like a fashion model meant that we looked like quite the odd couple. I consoled myself with the fact that she loved me, even if our sex life had taken a nosedive over the last year or so. That was regrettable, but only to be expected after a decade together, I supposed.
In spite of the infrequency of our lovemaking, we had sex twice over the next week. I'd been gone for some time, after all. It was a bit perfunctory and though Julie was happy to receive oral, she didn't offer to return the favor. I missed the feel of her mouth on my cock, a sensation with which I had been very familiar at one time. But things change, and her pussy was still almost as tight as it had been when I took her virginity. She had been a 20-year-old undergrad and I had been her 24-year-old teaching assistant in the Western Civilization class she was taking at the university. Maybe what we did was against university rules, but it felt very right, and we'd been together ever since.
I was a little distracted thinking about all this, so it caught me off guard when Elizabeth stopped by my office. She rapped on the door frame and laughed as I jumped, then asked, "Doing a bit of woolgathering Eric?"
I chuckled in return as I got up to hug Elizabeth. We'd been friends since I started at the university. I won't lie, I enjoyed the feel of her big tits as they pressed up against me, just below my breastbone. Elizabeth is taller than Julie at 5'6", but still considerably shorter than me. She contrasted with Julie in a number of other ways as well, having light brown hair, a little bit of a pudge around the middle, and she isn't a very fashionable dresser. She was also "mostly gay" as she once told me, meaning that she wasn't completely opposed to the idea of sex with men, but usually found herself with women, whereas Julie had zero sexual interest in women so far as I could tell.
Elizabeth plopped down in the guest chair in my office and adjusted her black-framed glasses. "So, get ya' any since your return from Rome?"
I just laughed. "Of course. Julie wouldn't be so cruel as to deny me after I'd been away almost a month."
Elizabeth picked Julie's photo up off my desk and looked at it as she said, "Well, if she ever decides to switch teams, let me know..."
I yanked the photo out of her hand with a mock scowl. This was a game we'd played many times before, but it never got old. I wagged my finger at her and asked, "Did you come here just to make lewd comments about my wife?"
Elizabeth chuckled as she pulled some papers out of her bag, saying "Not this time. I've analyzed what you sent me..."
We spent the next fifteen minutes discussing Bruno, his idiosyncratic musical ideas, and finally Elizabeth handed me a thumb drive. I looked at it with an expression of puzzlement and Elizabeth said, "I went ahead and played the piece and made a recording for you. It's quite lovely, in an odd sort of way."
Elizabeth is quite an accomplished violinist in addition to a fine musicologist, so I plugged the thumb drive in and we gave her recording a bit of a listen. She was right—it was both lovely and odd. And as it played I realized it was very relaxing as well, putting me in a calm state of mind to the point that I didn't even realize a half almost an hour had passed until the piece ended and I gradually came to realize it was over.
Elizabeth seemed to have fallen into the same relaxed state as me, as she shook herself and said, "So anyway, there you go. Don't forget me when you write this up."
