‘It’s an ill wind,’ said Postmartin.
‘Maybe the records were lost,’ I said. ‘You’re always moaning about gaps in the historical record.’
‘According to my friend at Queen’s,’ said Postmartin, ‘and he can bore for England on the subject, we have good records from the Inquisition in Seville for that period. Their absence speaks to secrecy, rather than rising damp or rapacious mice.’
‘You think he was part of an occult branch of the Inquisition?’ I said.
‘Or perhaps the whole of that branch,’ said Postmartin. ‘Or a mere consultant brought in on an ad-hoc basis. Whatever his official standing, I believe I have found his nemesis.’
Postmartin produced another A4 hard copy of an antique portrait. Judging by the flattened greyscale, this was a monochrome printing of a full-colour painting. This man was darker-skinned than the previous guy, younger, and his hair was cut long enough to show loose curls. His eyes were black, his nose what they call patrician, and his expression one of utter confidence. Even without colour I could see that his clothes – the embroidered doublet, the ruff, the silver chain around his neck – were not just richer but finer than those of the magister. He was practically smirking at the painter.
‘Enrique Jorge Perez,’ said Postmartin. ‘Born 1570, also in Carmona, died 1656 in London at the ripe old age of 86, in bed and surrounded by the weeping and wailing of his family.’ Postmartin winked at me. ‘Now, that’s the way I want to go, although I think I’m good for at least a century – don’t you?’
I said, if anything, he seemed to be getting younger.
‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ he said. ‘He was a converso, a New Christian whose family probably converted following the pogroms of 1391.’
When the synagogues of Seville had been converted to churches, the Jewish quarter was looted and Jewish property seized by the Church. Postmartin suspected that the Perez family had abandoned their original Jewish family name when they bowed to the inevitable.
‘But possibly not the religion of their fathers,’ said Postmartin. ‘As evinced by later events. Because we don’t know their original family name, we can’t trace their activities prior to 1391, but given the speed with which they built a reputation as apothecaries, alchemists and natural philosophers, I suspect that they had been pre-Newtonian practitioners under the Almohad Caliphate.’
Who had been the Muslim rulers of Morocco and southern Spain until Charlton Heston turned up tied to his horse and drove them out. I admit I may have faded out a bit during that part of Postmartin’s explanation. I tuned back in at 1478, when Seville became host to the first Spanish Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Three years later they held their first auto-da-fé, which is Latin for ‘act of faith’, in which sinners were helped to give penance for their sins by being set on fire in front of a festival crowd. Most of these sinners were new Christians who had been judged insufficiently Christian – or worse, secretly Jewish.
‘Denunciation was a common way to settle scores or duck out of debts,’ said Postmartin. ‘So it probably isn’t that surprising that a rich and powerful family like Enrique Perez’s would be denounced. Still, they managed to stay out of trouble for over a century until Enrique was accused in 1622.’
The Inquisition locked Enrique up in the Castle of San Jorge by the River Guadalquivir that served as their HQ and jail. Just to be on the safe side, and because the Inquisition was nothing if not thorough, they locked up his wife, his children, his sisters, their husbands and their children. They seized all the family’s property and did a very thorough assessment of their worth.
‘It was the sheer amount of glassware, crucibles and metalworking gear,’ said Postmartin, ‘that allowed us to identify Enrique as an alchemist.’
There was no detailed account of any subsequent investigation or trial. Instead, there was only a sketchy report of a severe fire at the castle, which claimed a surprisingly large number of members of the Inquisition.
‘It is the very next month that Magister Romano is enrolled as a calificador,’ said Postmartin. ‘It’s possible that his name turns up in other records we haven’t checked yet, but the last reference to him we have is the payment he received from the Bishop of Seville of a large sum in silver.’
Enough to build a small castle.
Postmartin pulled out some more prints to show me. A woodcut of the Castle of San Jorge, a map of Europe with arrows showing the Jews’ escape routes from Spain and Portugal. And a portrait of what I realised was an older Enrique Perez.
‘Antwerp, 1645,’ said Postmartin, ‘only now he is calling himself Rodrigo Alfonzo and claiming to be a Portuguese merchant.’
‘The same Alfonzo family that left the lamp at Bevis Marks?’ I asked.
‘That seems likely,’ said Postmartin.
Antwerp, while under Spanish control, was a cosmopolitan trading city. The Inquisition had yet to get a foothold there, and it became a well-known stop on the underground railway that was moving threatened Jews from Spain and Portugal to the relative safety of the Ottoman Empire. Going a very long way around – according to the map.
The alchemist formerly known as Enrique Perez had white hair, grown sparse and thin, but the artist had captured a great satisfaction in the eyes and the twist of his lips. This was a man who was obviously pleased with himself. He was resting his right hand on a cluttered bench – both he and the bench were illuminated by daylight streaming in through a window. Behind him, the shadows hinted at expensive wood panelling, portraits and furniture.
Postmartin passed me a blow-up detail of the workbench and grinned.
Next to the subject’s right hand was a tall fluted glass lamp with gold and silver intaglio around its base and a brass cap – either Leon Davies’s lamp or its twin. Next to that was a thick book, open to show pages that were blank except for a single line of Latin. Scattered across the pages, with deliberate casualness, were seven silver rings. The artist had taken care to ensure that his work was detailed enough to guarantee that the occult symbols on the rings were visible, and the writing legible.
Quoniam requirens sanguinem eorum recordatus est, I read. ‘“Because requiring their blood it is remembered”?’
‘It’s from the Av HaRachamim, a medieval Jewish prayer,’ said Postmartin. ‘The rest goes like this in English …
Why should the nations say, “Where is their God?”
Let it be known among the nations in our sight
that You avenge the spilled blood of Your servants.
And it says: “For He who exacts retribution for spilled blood remembers them.
He does not forget the cry of the humble.”’
‘He definitely wanted the world to know what he’d done,’ I said.
‘It gets even better,’ said Postmartin, who was practically vibrating with excitement. ‘This particular painting was part of the Cathedral collection in Seville. It may have been seized by the authorities in Antwerp, but I prefer to think that Enrique Perez sent it to the Church authorities himself. He didn’t care about the rest of the world, but he definitely wanted the Inquisition to know he’d bested them.’
The painting had been sold as part of a job lot in the late 1970s to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The details of the book, the rings and the lamp were obscured until the painting was restored in 2008 as part of a push to uncover hidden artistic gems. Which meant that somebody – possibly Brian Packard – could have spotted the lamp and rings at the gallery. There’d been a great deal of publicity surrounding the restoration, and a special exhibition of the restored works. The portrait and the close-up Postmartin had showed me had been featured in an online article.