The Book of Life
Page 33“Wool and silk.” I hesitated, then decided to risk everything—my library card, my reputation, perhaps even my job. “Can I ask a favor, Lucy?”
She looked at me warily. “That depends.”
“I want to rest my hand flat on the page. It will be only for a moment.” I watched her carefully to gauge whether she was planning to call in the security guards for reinforcement.
“You can’t touch the pages, Diana. You know that. If I let you, I would be fired.”
I nodded. “I know. I’m sorry to put you in such a tough spot.”
“Why do you need to touch it?” Lucy asked after a moment of silence, her curiosity aroused.
“I have a sixth sense when it comes to old books. Sometimes I can detect information about them that’s not visible to the na**d eye.” That sounded weirder than I’d anticipated.
“Are you some kind of book witch?” Lucy’s eyes narrowed.
“That’s exactly what I am,” I said with a laugh.
“I’d like to help you, Diana, but we’re on camera—though there’s no sound, thank God. Everything that happens in this room is taped, and someone is supposed to be watching the monitor whenever the room is occupied.” She shook her head. “It’s too risky.”
“What if nobody could see what I was doing?”
“If you cut off the camera or put chewing gum on the lens—and yes, someone did try that—security will be here in five seconds,” Lucy replied.
“I wasn’t going to use chewing gum, but something like this.” I pulled my familiar disguising spell around me. It would make any magic I worked all but invisible. Then I turned my right hand over and touched the tip of my ring finger to my thumb, pinching the green and yellow threads that filled the room into a tiny bundle. Together the two colors blended into the unnatural yellow-green that was good for disorientation and deception spells. I planned on tying them up in the fifth knot—since the security cameras definitely qualified as a challenge. The fifth knot’s image burned at my right wrist in anticipation.
“Nice tats,” Lucy commented, peering at my hands. “Why did you choose gray ink?”
Gray? When magic was in the air, my hands were every color of the rainbow. My disguising spell must be working.
“Because gray goes with everything.” It was the first thing to cross my mind.
“Oh. Good thinking.” She still looked puzzled.
I returned to my spell. It needed some black in it, as well as the yellow and green. I snagged the fine black threads that surrounded me on my left thumb and then slid them through a loop made by my right thumb and ring finger. The result looked like an unorthodox mudra—one of the hand positions in yoga.
“With knot of five, the spell will thrive,” I murmured, envisioning the completed weaving with my third eye. The twist of yellow-green and black tied itself into an unbreakable knot with five crossings.
“Did you just bewitch the Voynich?” Lucy whispered with alarm.
“Of course not.” After my experiences with bewitched manuscripts, I wouldn’t do such a thing lightly. “I bewitched the air around it.”
“Um, Diana? Whatever you were trying to do didn’t work. You’re just touching the edge of the page like you’re supposed to,” Lucy said.
“Actually my hand is over here.” I wiggled my fingers so that they peeked out over the top edge of the book. It was a bit like the old magician’s trick where a woman was put in a box and the box was sawed in half. “Try it. Don’t touch the page yet—just move your hand so that it covers the text.”
I slid my hand out to give Lucy room. She followed my directions and slid her hand between the Voynich and the deception spell. Her hand appeared to stop when it reached the edge of the book, but if you looked carefully, you could see that her forearm was getting shorter. She withdrew quickly, as though she’d touched a hot pan. She turned to me and stared.
“You are a witch.” Lucy swallowed, then smiled. “What a relief. I always suspected you were hiding something, and I was afraid it might be something unsavory—or even illegal.” Like Chris, she didn’t seem remotely surprised to discover that there really were witches.
“Will you let me break the rules?” I glanced down at the Voynich.
“Only if you tell me what you learn. This damned manuscript is the bane of our existence. We get ten requests a day to see it and turn down almost every one.” Lucy returned to her seat and adopted a watchful position. “But be careful. If someone sees you, you’ll lose your library privileges. And I don’t think you would survive if you were banned from the Beinecke.”
I took a deep breath and stared down at the open book. The key to activating my magic was curiosity. But if I wanted more than a dizzying display of faces, I would need to formulate a careful question before putting hand to parchment. I was more certain than ever that the Voynich held important clues about and its missing pages. But I was only going to get one chance to find out what they were.
“What did Edward Kelley place inside the Voynich, and what happened to it?” I whispered before looking down and gently resting my hand on the first folio of the manuscript.
One of the missing pages from appeared before my eyes: the illumination of the tree with its trunk full of writhing, human shapes. It was gray and ghostly, transparent enough that I could see through it to my hand and the writing on the Voynich’s first folio.
A second shadowy page appeared atop the first: two dragons shedding their blood so that it fell into a vessel below.
A third insubstantial page layered over the previous two: the illumination of the alchemical wedding.
For a moment the layers of text and image remained stacked in a magical palimpsest atop the Voynich’s stained parchment. Then, the alchemical wedding dissolved, followed by the picture of the two dragons. But the page with the tree remained.
Hopeful that the image had become real, I lifted my hand from the page and withdrew it. I gathered up the knot at the heart of the spell and jammed it over my pencil eraser, rendering it temporarily invisible and revealing Beinecke MS 408. My heart sank. There was no missing page from there.
“Not what you expected to see?” Lucy looked at me sympathetically.
“No. Something was here once—a few pages from another manuscript—but they’re long gone.” I pinched the bridge of my nose.
“Maybe the sale records mention them. We have boxes of paperwork on the Voynich’s acquisition.
Do you want to see them?” she asked.
The dates of book sales and the names of the people who bought and sold the books could be assembled into a genealogy that described a book’s history and descent right down to the present. In this case it might also provide clues as to who might once have owned the pictures of the tree and the dragons that Kelley removed from the Book of Life.
“Absolutely!” I replied.
Lucy boxed up the Voynich and returned it to the locked hold. She returned shortly thereafter with a trolley loaded with folders, boxes, various notebooks, and a tube.
It took thirty minutes simply to organize the materials on the long table. Some of it would be no use at all: the tube and the scrapbook full of newspaper clippings, the old photostats, and lectures and articles written about the manuscript after the collector Wilfrid Voynich purchased it in 1912. That still left folders full of correspondence, handwritten notes, and a clutch of notebooks kept by Wilfrid’s wife, Ethel.
“Here’s a copy of the chemical analysis of the manuscript, a printout of the cataloging information, and a list of everyone granted access to the manuscript in the past three years.” Lucy handed me a sheaf of papers. “You can keep them. Don’t tell anyone I gave you that list of library patrons, though.”
Matthew would have to go over the chemistry with me—it was all about the inks used in the manuscript, a subject that interested both of us. The list of people who’d seen the manuscript was surprisingly short. Hardly anyone got to look at it anymore. Those who had been granted access were mostly academics—a historian of science from the University of Southern California and another from Cal State Fullerton, a mathematician-cryptographer from Princeton, another from Australia. I’d had coffee with one of the visitors before leaving for Oxford: a writer of popular fiction who was interested in alchemy. One name jumped off the page, though.
Peter Knox had seen the Voynich this past May, before Emily died.
“That bastard.” My fingers tingled, and the knots on my wrists burned in warning.
“Something wrong?” Lucy asked.
“There was a name on the list I didn’t expect to see.”
“Ah. A scholarly rival.” She nodded sagely.
“I guess you could say that.” But my difficulty with Knox was more than an argument over competing interpretations. This was war. And if I were going to win it, I would need to pull ahead of him for a change.
The problem was that I had little experience tracking down manuscripts and establishing their provenance. The papers I knew best had belonged to the chemist Robert Boyle. All seventy-four volumes of them had been presented to the Royal Society in 1769, and, like everything else in the Royal Society archives, they were meticulously cataloged, indexed, and cross-referenced.
“If I want to trace the Voynich’s chain of ownership, where do I start?” I mused aloud, staring at the materials.
“The fastest way would be for one of us to start at the manuscript’s origins and work forward while the other starts at the Beinecke’s acquisition of it and works backward. With luck we’ll meet at the middle.” Lucy handed me a folder. “You’re the historian. You take the old stuff.”
I opened the folder, expecting to see something relating to Rudolf II. Instead I found a letter from a mathematician in Prague, Johannes Marcus Marci. It was written in Latin, dated 1665, and sent to someone in Rome addressed as “Reverende et Eximie Domine in Christo Pater.” The recipient was a cleric then, perhaps one of the men I’d seen when I touched the corner of the Voynich’s first page.
I quickly scanned the rest of the text, noting that the cleric was a Father Athanasius and that Marci’s letter was accompanied by a mysterious book that needed deciphering. The Book of Life, perhaps?
Marci said that attempts had been made to contact Father Athanasius before, but the letters had been met with silence. Excited, I kept reading. When the third paragraph revealed the identity of Father Athanasius, however, my excitement turned to dismay.
“The Voynich manuscript once belonged to Athanasius Kircher?” If the missing pages had passed into Kircher’s hands, they could be anywhere.
“I’m afraid so,” Lucy replied. “I understand he was quite . . . er, wide-ranging in his interests.”
“That’s an understatement,” I said. Athanasius Kircher’s modest goal had been nothing less than universal knowledge. He had published forty books and was an internationally bestselling author as well as an inventor. Kircher’s museum of rare and ancient objects was a famous stop on early European grand tours, his range of correspondents extensive, and his library vast. I didn’t have the language skills to work through Kircher’s oeuvre. More important , I lacked the time.
My phone vibrated in my pocket, making me jump.
“Excuse me, Lucy.” I slid the phone out and checked the display. On it was a text message from Matthew.
Where are you? Gallowglass is waiting for you. We have a
doctor’s appointment in ninety minutes.
[des: the next 3 lines are both 04 Body Text and 06 Text Message and
should all be in one line]
I cursed silently.
I’m just leaving the Beinecke,
I typed back. [end of text message]
“My husband and I have a date, Lucy. I’m going to have to pick up with this again tomorrow,” I said, closing the folder containing Marci’s letter to Kircher.
“A reliable source told me you were on campus with someone tall, dark, and handsome.” Lucy grinned.
“That’s my husband, all right.” I smiled. “Can I look through this stuff tomorrow?”
“Leave everything with me. Things are pretty slow around here at the moment. I’ll see what I can piece together.”
“Thanks for your help, Lucy. I’m under a tight—and nonnegotiable—deadline.” I scooped up pencil, laptop, and pad of paper and rushed to meet Gallowglass. Matthew had seconded his nephew to act as my security detail. Gallowglass was also responsible for monitoring Benjamin’s Internet feed, but so far the screen had remained blank.
“Hello, Auntie. You’re looking bonny.” He kissed me on the cheek.
“I’m sorry. I’m late.”
“Of course you’re late. You were with your books. I didn’t expect you for another hour at least,”
Gallowglass said, dismissing my apology.
When we got to the lab, Matthew had the image of the alchemical wedding from Ashmole 782 in front of him and was so absorbed that he didn’t even look up when the door pinged. Chris and Sherlock were standing at his shoulder, watching intently. Scully sat on a rolling stool nearby. Game Boy had a tiny instrument in her hand and was holding it dangerously close to the manuscript page.