‘I’m sorry,’ Nicholas replied with that defiant look of his. ‘But master, I almost succeeded.’
‘Experiments can be dangerous, Nicholas. You lost control of the elements. Balancing the elements requires a very fine touch.’
He looked at me. ‘But you told me I had a good feel for this, master.’
And so you do,’ I replied. ‘But intuition alone is not enough. Your talent is raw, my friend. You must learn to curb your youthful impulsiveness.’
‘It all takes so long to learn. I want to know more. I want to know everything.’
My twenty-year-old novice is at times wilful and arrogant, but that he has a great talent I cannot deny. I have never before come across a young student so eager. ‘You cannot expect me to condense into a few lessons three thousand years of philosophy and the efforts of my whole lifetime,’ I told Nicholas patiently. ‘The mightiest secrets of nature are things that you must learn slowly, step by step. This is the way of alchemy.’
‘But master, I’m so full of questions,’ Nicholas protested, fixing me with his dark, intense eyes. ‘You know so much. I hate the feeling of being so ignorant.’
I nodded. ‘You will learn. But you must learn to control your headstrong nature, young Nicholas. It is unwise to try to run when one has not yet learned to walk. You should confine yourself to theoretical studies for the moment.’
The youth sat down heavily on a chair, looking agitated. ‘I’m tired of reading books, master. Learning the theory of our work is all very well, but I need something practical, something I can see and touch. I have to believe there’s a purpose to what we’re doing.’
I told him I understood. As I watched him, I worried that too much theoretical learning might, in the end, put off this extremely gifted student. I am all too well aware myself how arid and fruitless a life of study feels without the reward of a real breakthrough, a tangible prize.
I thought of my own prize. Perhaps if I could share a little of that incredible knowledge with Nicholas, it would surely satisfy his burning curiosity?
‘All right,’ I said after a long pause. ‘I will let you see more, something that is not in your books.’
The youth jumped to his feet, his eyes flashing with excitement. ‘When, master? Now?’
‘No, not now,’ I replied. ‘Do not be so impatient, my young apprentice. Soon, very soon.’ Here I raised a warning finger. ‘But remember this, Nicholas. No student of your age will ever have been taken so far or so quickly into alchemical knowledge. It is a heavy responsibility for you, and you must be ready to accept it. Once I have shared the greatest secrets with you, they must never be divulged to anybody. Not to anybody, do you understand? I will swear you to this oath.’
In his proud manner he raised his chin. ‘I’ll take the oath right now,’ he declared.
‘Reflect upon it, Nicholas. Do not rush into this. It is a door which, once opened, cannot be shut.’
As we spoke, Jacques Clément had come in and started quietly clearing up the mess from the explosion. When Nicholas had gone, Clément approached me with a look of apprehension. ‘Forgive me, master,’ he said hesitantly. ‘As you know I have never questioned your decisions…’
‘What are you thinking, Jacques?’
Jacques spoke cautiously. ‘I know you have great esteem for young Nicholas. He is bright, and keen, of that there is no doubt. But this impetuous nature of his…he yearns for knowledge the way a greedy man lusts for wealth. There is too much fire in him.’
‘He is young, that’s all,’ I replied. ‘We were young ourselves once. What are you trying to say, Jacques? Speak freely, my old friend.’
He hesitated. ‘Are you quite sure, master, that young Nicholas is ready for this knowledge? It is a great step for him. Can he handle it?’
‘I believe so,’ I replied. ‘I trust him.’
Ben closed the Journal and reflected for a moment. It was clear that whatever this great knowledge was, Fulcanelli had learned it from the artefacts he’d recovered from the castle, and which were now, apparently, in the hands of Klaus Rheinfeld. At last, he had a proper lead.
Beside him at the desk, the laptop was humming quietly. Ben reached over to it and started clicking the keys. There was the familiar grinding screech of the internet connection, and the homepage for the Google search engine popped up. He entered the name klaus rheinfeld into the search box and hit GO.
‘What are you looking for?’ Roberta asked, pulling out a chair next to him.
The websearch results screen popped up, surprising him with 271 matches for the term ‘klaus rheinfeld’. ‘Christ,’ he murmured. He started scrolling down the long list. ‘Well, this looks promising.’
Klaus Rheinfeld directs ‘Outcast’, starring Brad Pitt and Reese Witherspoon….
‘A gripping suspense thriller…Rheinfeld is the new Quentin Tarantino,’ she read out.
Ben grunted and scrolled down further. Almost everything on the list was featuring reviews of the new movie Outcast or interviews with its director, a thirty-two-year-old Californian. Then there was Klaus Rheinfeld Exports, a wine merchant.
‘And here’s Klaus Rheinfeld the horse whisperer,’ she pointed out.
Several pages into the search results they came to a regional news item. It was taken from a small newspaper in Limoux, a town in the Languedoc region of southern France. The headline read
LE FOU DE SAINT-JEAN
‘The madman of Saint-Jean,’ he translated. ‘It’s dated October 2001…OK, listen to this…’
An injured man was discovered wandering semi-naked in the forest outside the village of Saint-Jean, Languedoc. According to Father Pascal Cambriel, the local village priest who found the man, he was babbling in a strange language and appeared to be suffering from severe dementia. The man, identified from his papers as Klaus Rheinfeld, a former resident of Paris, is believed to have inflicted serious knife wounds on himself. An ambulance worker told our reporter: ‘I have never seen anything like it. There were strange markings, triangles and crosses and things, all over him. It was sickening. How could someone do that to themselves? Rumours have suggested that these bizarre wounds are linked to Satanic rituals, though this was rigorously denied by local authorities. Rheinfeld was treated at the Hospital of the Sainte Vierge…
‘Doesn’t say where they took him after that. Damn. He could be anywhere.’
‘He’s alive, though,’ she pointed out.
‘Or was alive six years ago. If it’s even the same Klaus Rheinfeld.’
‘I bet you anything it’s the same guy,’ she said. ‘Satanic markings? Read alchemical markings.’
‘Why was he all cut up?’ he wondered.
She shrugged. ‘Maybe he was just crazy.’
‘OK…so we’ve got one crazy German covered in knife wounds, who may or may not be carrying important secrets connected to Fulcanelli, and who could be anywhere in the world. That