place again, or even in this city again, with all the dark memories it held for him–memories of a life once planned, and of the life that fortune had made for him instead.
Professor Rose hadn’t yet arrived as Ben entered the Union’s old library. Nothing had changed. He gazed around him at the dark wood panelling, reading tables and high galleries of leather-bound books. Up above, the frescoed ceiling with its small rose windows and priceless Arthurian legend murals dominated the magnificent room.
‘Benedict!’ called a voice from behind him. He turned to see Jonathan Rose, stouter, greyer and balder but instantly recognizable as the history don he’d known so long ago, striding happily across the burnished floorboards to shake his hand. ‘How are you, Professor? It’s been a long time.’
They settled in a pair of the library’s worn leather armchairs, and exchanged small-talk for a few minutes. Little had changed for the professor–Oxford academic life went on much as it had always done. ‘I was a little surprised to hear from you after all these years, Benedict. To what do I owe this pleasure?’
Ben explained his purpose in asking to meet him. ‘And then I remembered that I knew one of the country’s top ancient history scholars.’
‘Just don’t call me an ancient historian, as most of my students do.’ Rose smiled. ‘So, you’re interested in alchemy, are you?’ He raised his eyebrows and peered at Ben over his glasses. ‘Didn’t think that sort of stuff was your cup of tea. You haven’t become one of those New Age types, I hope?’
Ben laughed. ‘I’m a writer these days. I’m just doing some research.’
‘Writer? Good, good. What did you say this fellow’s name was–Fracasini?’
‘Fulcanelli.’
Rose shook his head. ‘Can’t say I’ve ever heard of him. I’m not really the man to help you there. Bit of a far out subject for most of us fuddy-duddy academics–even in this post-Harry Potter age.’
Ben felt a pang of disappointment. He hadn’t entertained high hopes that Jon Rose would have much to offer him on Fulcanelli, let alone on a Fulcanelli manuscript, but with so little to go on it was a shame to lose any potential source of dependable information. ‘Is there anything you can tell me generally about alchemy?’ he asked.
‘As I say, it’s not my field,’ Rose replied. ‘Like most people, I’d be inclined to dismiss it all as complete hocus pocus.’ He smiled. ‘Though it has to be said that few esoteric cults have endured so well over the centuries. All the way from ancient Egypt and China, right through the Dark Ages and medieval times and onwards into the Renaissance–it’s a sub-current that keeps resurfacing all throughout history.’ The professor stretched back in the worn leather chair as he spoke, adopting the tutor pose that was second nature to him. ‘Though heaven knows what they were up to, or thought they were up to–turning lead into gold, creating magical potions, elixirs of life, and all the rest of it.’
‘I take it you don’t believe in the possibility of an alchemical elixir that could cure the sick?’
Rose frowned, noticing Ben’s deadpan expression and wondering where he was going with this. ‘I think that if they’d developed a magic remedy for plague, pox, cholera, typhus, and all the other diseases that have ravaged us through history, we’d have known about it.’ He shrugged. ‘The problem is it’s all so speculative. Nobody really knows what the alchemists might have discovered. Alchemy’s famous for its inscrutability–all that cloak-and-dagger stuff, secret brotherhoods, riddles and codes and supposed hidden knowledge. Personally I don’t think there was much substance to any of it.’
‘Why all the obscurity?’ Ben asked, thinking of the reading he’d been doing over the last couple of days, running Internet searches on terms like ‘ancient knowledge’ and ‘secrets of alchemy’ and wading through one esoteric website after another. He’d turned up a wide variety of alchemical writings, ranging from the present day back to the fourteenth century. They all shared the same baffling and grandiose language, the same dark air of secrecy. He hadn’t been able to decide how much of it was genuine and how much was just esoteric posturing for the benefit of the credulous devotees they’d been attracting over the centuries.
‘If I wanted to be cynical I’d say it was because they didn’t actually have anything worth revealing,’ Rose grinned. ‘But you’ve also got to remember that alchemists had powerful enemies, and perhaps some of their obsession with secrecy was a way of protecting themselves.’
‘Against what?’
‘Well, at one end of the scale there were the sharks and speculators who preyed on them,’ Rose said. ‘Once in a while some hapless alchemist who’d bragged too loudly about gold-making would be kidnapped and made to tell how it was done. When they failed to come up with the goods, which of course they probably always did, they’d end up hanging from a tree.’ The professor paused. ‘But their real enemy was the Church, especially in Europe, where they were forever burning them as heretics and witches. Look what the Catholic Inquisition did to the Cathars in medieval France, on the direct orders of Pope Innocent III. They called the liquidation of an entire people God’s work. Nowadays we call it genocide.’
‘I’ve heard of the Cathars,’ Ben said. ‘Can you tell me more?’
Rose took off his glasses and polished them with the end of his tie. ‘It’s a terrible story,’ he said. ‘They were a fairly widespread medieval religious movement that mainly occupied the part of southern France now known as the Languedoc. They took their name from the Greek word Catharos, meaning “pure”. Their religious beliefs were a little radical in that they regarded God as a kind of cosmic principle of love. They didn’t attribute much importance to Christ, and may not even have believed he existed. Their idea was that, even if he had existed, he certainly couldn’t have been the son of God. They believed that all matter was fundamentally crude and corrupt, including human beings. For them, religious worship was all about spiritualizing, perfecting and transforming that base matter to attain union with the Divine.’
Ben smiled. ‘I can see how those views might have upset the orthodoxy a little.’
‘Absolutely,’ Rose said. ‘The Cathars had essentially created a free state that the Church couldn’t control. Worse, they were openly preaching ideas that could seriously undermine its credibility and authority.’
‘Were the Cathars alchemists?’ Ben asked. ‘The part about transforming base matter sounds very like the ideas of alchemy.’
‘I don’t think anyone knows that for certain,’ Rose said. ‘As a historian, I wouldn’t stick my neck out on that one. But you’re quite right. The alchemical concept of purifying base matter into something more perfect and incorruptible is certainly well in tune with Cathar beliefs. We’ll never know for sure, because the Cathars never lived long enough to tell the tale.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘In a nutshell, mass extermination,’ Rose said. ‘When Pope Innocent III came to power in 1198, the alleged heresies of the Cathars gave him a magnificent excuse to extend and reinforce the Church’s powers. Ten years later he put together a formidable army of knights, the biggest ever seen in Europe at that time. These were hardened soldiers, many of who had seen service fighting in the Holy Land. Under the command of former crusader Simon de Monfort, who was also the Duke of Leicester, this huge military force invaded the Languedoc and one by one they massacred every fortress, town and village with even the remotest Cathar connection. De Monfort became known as the “glaive
