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.
