Free Xenograffiti by Robert Reginald

America in 1931 by Methuen and E. P. Dutton, respectively. Letters sent to his publishers proved equally negative: the American publisher referred the matter to the English house, and Methuen reported all correspondence and records destroyed during the London Blitz. What survives of the man, for all practical purposes, is encompassed within the 250 pages of his only readily available novel.
    And this is a marvelous piece of writing: witty, sparkling, filled with life and joie de vivre . Brother Dismas is a lay brother in an unspecified order of monks during the early Tudor period of English history. He has never taken the priestly vows, with good reason: his abbot has given him a dispensation to pursue the magical arts and alchemy in the hope that he can find an elixir of life to restore the abbot to youth and good health. Dismas’s final attempt with dragon’s blood merely produces an explosion, and he determines, with his abbot’s blessing, to locate those magi who claimed in their writings to have found the elixir and to ask their help in supplying the missing ingredient.
    The nearest of these men, Lucius Germanicus, was last known to be living in Germany; Brother Dismas’s way there lies through London, where he gains two companions: Gabriel, a lad of about twenty, and Thomas Brackenridge, an English physician and healer. Gabriel seeks his father, Ralph Terven, who went abroad several years before and has never returned; Thomas must flee England at once, having offended a powerful nobleman with a cure that was more painful than the illness. Gabriel leads Dismas to Ibrahim bin Judah, a Jewish magician who helps the trio escape across the Channel. From Rotterdam on the coast, they voyage up the Rhine to Dachsenberg, where Germanicus is said to have lived. They take rest in a tavern below the castle.
    During the night, the local Baron’s men, having spotted “Gabriel” while drinking in the tavern, spirit “him” away to their lord; for, as Thomas explains to Dismas the next morning, Ralph Terven had but one child, a daughter called Radegonde, and the Baron has a predilection for young, innocent girls. Dismas, although a man in his mid-thirties, is more innocent because of his cloistered life than his young companion has been, but even he realizes what peril the girl is in and determines to help her if he can. He uses the Hand of Glory, the hand of a corpse made into a candelabrum, to gain entrance to the castle, where he is confronted by the resident magus, Albrecht, son of the man he is seeking.
    Dismas is dismayed to learn that Lucius Germanicus has died at the age of 119; his son, himself now ninety-nine, claims to have found the secret of life: it lies, he says, in the last three drops of a virgin’s blood. Fortunately, the old man continues, the Baron has a virgin locked up at that very moment in a cell overlooking a sheer drop to the river; all that Albrecht has to do is to find Radegonde/Gabriel before the Baron ravages her, kidnap the wench, and then drain away the girl’s blood until only three drops are left. With Dismas as his assistant, the magus continues, they are certain to succeed. Dismas, who is beginning to have tender thoughts for the girl, is horrified at this threat, but pretends to go along with the old man to effect her rescue.
    Radegonde/Gabriel is no fool, however, and no coward; in the middle of the night, she determines either to escape or die trying, and eases herself out of her cell through its waste hole. She then makes a horrifying descent down the rock wall, using cracks, crevices, and the light of the moon to inch her way to the castle base. She loses her grip and falls backward, dropping twenty feet to the river; she is discovered there the next morning by Gita, a peasant girl. The peasants have no love for their Baron, who has used them unmercifully, and Gita and her betrothed, Hubert, decide to help the fugitive.
    Dismas, in the meantime, is persuaded by Albrecht to enter the