Chapter Fourteen #2
“No,” Rose said. She didn’t meet Viv’s eye. Viv took note of that, too, but if Rose was becoming suspicious, it was nothing
Viv couldn’t handle, nothing she hadn’t planned for.
“I live with her,” she said, and the doctor nodded approvingly. “Excellent. Then you’re all set.”
“I’ll be back in a second,” Viv mouthed to Rose as the doctor gave the nurse some instructions. Rose nodded. Viv went to the
visitor bathroom on the ward and locked herself in. She used the encrypted app the Order had installed on her phone to send
a message to her mentor:
They’re discharging her today.
She got an immediate reply:
You know what to do.
Anya
King’s Cross Station was crowded when Sid and I got off the train. I was still reeling from Mum’s email. We wove through the
crowds to the exit and crossed the road straight into St. Pancras Station next door and then out the other side of it, to
the British Library.
It was the best place I could think to hide while I studied the glossary and the letter more closely.
Sid settled in the café. I had a reader’s card for the library, so I went to the manuscript room, where you could hear a pin drop among the low stacks, and each desk was furnished with a cushion to rest the precious books on.
A few other readers had heads bent over their work.
The librarians worked quietly behind their desks.
The slow mechanisms of library life were familiar and soothing; I felt my head clear.
I was tempted to dive into the glossary but decided to refine my translation of the letter first, to fill in gaps where I
hadn’t been able to find the right words last night.
After a couple of hours, my neck and shoulders had seized up, but my translation was done. It was still clumsy—I couldn’t
capture the fine, nuanced Latin of the original in such a short time—but it was a finished draft, and once again I was captivated
by the voice of the letter’s author. I felt as if she were whispering to me across the centuries, and it moved me.
To my sisters of the future,
I have been reluctant to write, delaying the moment of change, but to remain so would constitute a sin against women.
There is a book, The Book of Wonder, an ornament of our sex, that has been hidden from men who are prone to ridicule women, in word and deed. This book encapsulates
such power, such knowledge, such excellence and eloquence that men would take offense if they knew of it. It exists to nourish
women, to nurture them and feed their courage, their very souls.
It came into the possession of my aunt, a virtuous, extraordinary woman of great learning. The book was her most prized possession,
but my aunt came to fear for its safety. She was afraid of the jealousy and destruction of men, so she hid The Book of Wonder out of their reach.
She then bade her nieces, my sisters and me, to help her encode its resting place so that it would never be lost to the women
of our family.
Our Book of Women carefully folds the location of the other volume into its pages.
To make demanding the task of finding what is hidden, we sisters tested ourselves to elaborate on a silly, whimsical family language, first invented by us girls to communicate beyond the reach of our tutors and our brothers.
Beyond their gaze, our aunt provided money to buy us parchments and ink from her bookseller. Two sisters had the talent to
draw and illuminate God’s creation on its pages, and when walls confined us in the city, women as we are, our good friend
the artist who painted our other sister in fur and cloth resplendent and pure among salamander, horse’s rump, and dragon’s-kill
bones allowed her the perusal of his sketchbooks, where chalk and line were, unknown to him, muse for our book.
That done, we four sisters and our aunt tasked our fair hands with the job of scribes to write the book in our secret language,
using every technique and discipline our tutor instilled in us.
But now, as age and poor health soften my courage and my memory, I share my aunt’s fear that as one generation gives way to
another the means to find The Book of Wonder will be lost to our family. Our language has not been passed on to my sisters’ daughters, and I have no offspring. The chain
will break.
I have asked often in my life, what can I, a woman, do? As I lie facing death, I narrow the question. What can I do to preserve
this secret for our sisters of the future?
I answered thus.
I will gift this knowledge to the good women of the wider world. I will send the Book of Women in the company of a gray lady who will travel north with it to Augsburg and lodge it in the silence and safety of her order
there. I will send with it this glossary, which reveals the working of our family’s private language. Thus, I offer to all
sisters of the future a means to translate the Book of Women and thereby to find The Book of Wonder.
And for this effort, this gift, indulge me now, for I have a sweet dream of the woman who has the skills to translate our
words and read our Book of Women.
May she be worthy to lift its finer sister, The Book of Wonder, from its cell and use it for good for the other women of the world.
I dream that this worthy woman looks at the world through the eyes of a lynx, not a rabbit. I dream that the world she lives
in rushes to offer a woman like her abundance, prosperity, and kindness, not bitterness or chains, that it doesn’t entrap
her with men’s words that conjure only weakness and insufficiency out of her existence.
Across time, I long to touch hands with you, dear friend, with your wondrous flashing gaze. If you have the mind for it, I
gladly offer you this glossary with this letter, both together the key to find The Book of Wonder.
To you, dear sister in time, I ask, indulge me one small thing, in return for this. Before you seek the greater prize, first
enjoy the flavors of our family in these pages, the sketches of our days, of our laughter, our love, our whimsy, our innumerable
squabbles. Allow a moment in time for our souls to shine again, however fleetingly. Let sunshine bathe the meadows, fields,
and flowers of Cyanum once more.
But when the moment comes to sharpen your attention and pull back the veil to reveal the location of The Book of Wonder, then it will be the last page of our Book of Women that commands you, and with it the page of nine circles.
Read well. Read with lightning in your eyes.
Vale.
June 5, 1461
The Book of Wonder. It must be what the Institute was looking for.
I scanned the letter again. Several things leaped out. I needed to think about each of them in turn. I started with the stuff
that sounded strangest, feeling as if I was trying to solve one of Mum’s riddles.
Salamander. Horse’s rump. Dragon’s-kill bones.
A woman in fur and cloth. An artist’s sketches.
It didn’t take my memory long to place the images.
These were all elements of a fresco I’d seen.
Its subject was St. George and the Dragon and it was painted by an artist called Pisanello.
I remembered that half of the fresco was well preserved and that it included horses, one with its back facing outward, and a princess beside it, finely robed, in profile.
The other half was badly damaged, but still visible, though barely, were a salamander and the remains of the dragon’s kill.
I googled it, confirming it was located where I thought: on the wall of the Pellegrini Chapel in a church in Verona, Italy.
I dug into the identity of the woman in it. She was supposed to represent the princess of Trebizond, from the St. George legend,
and at first, I couldn’t find anything about who might have modeled for it, but then it popped up, a small piece of research
suggesting that a woman recently engaged to one of the sons of the Pellegrini family may be depicted in the fresco. Her name
was Laura Nogarola.
I looked her up. She was from a large and prominent family in fifteenth-century Verona. She had many siblings and a famous
aunt, as the letter suggested: Angela Nogarola, a poet. She also had a very famous sister: Isotta. I clicked on a link to
her bio.
Isotta was a well-educated and brilliant feminist writer, a clear voice advocating for women all the way from fifteenth-century
Italy. The more I read about her, the more I became convinced she was the letter writer and that she and her aunt and sisters
had coauthored the Voynich manuscript.
The reference to a “gray lady” caught my attention, too. The description of her taking the Voynich to Augsburg and leaving
it in the safekeeping of her “order” suggested she was a religious woman, probably a nun. I knew it was a journey she could
have made in the fifteenth century. Centuries earlier, the Romans had built a road over the Alps directly connecting Verona
to Augsburg.
I discovered an order of women who went by the name of beguines and who typically wore gray habits.
They owned a network of female-only houses and convents across Europe at the time, including a property in Augsburg.
This fit what was known about the Voynich, too.
I found an article claiming that long before Voynich himself got his hands on it and gave it his name, this strange book might have been owned by a doctor who lived in Augsburg.
It wasn’t a huge leap to think he could have somehow got it from the beguines.
I was pretty much convinced already that Isotta was the mystery author of the letter, but I found one more piece of proof.
The word “Cyanum” had leaped out at me. I knew it related to the nymph Cyane from ancient mythology but not what it might
have meant to Isotta, if anything. I dug deeper and found a collection of letters and poems that she’d written. Among them
was one titled “Elegy on the Countryside Around the Spring of Cyanum.”
I read an analysis of the poem. It noted that the verses referenced the Nogarola family’s country home, just outside Verona,