Chapter Fourteen #3
comparing its location to the mythical and beautiful setting of Cyane’s spring. Isotta’s obvious love of nature also fit with
the pages of botanical illustrations in the Voynich.
Evidence was mounting beyond doubt. I needed to tell Sid what I’d learned.
I packed up quickly and found him in the café downstairs. I showed him the fresco and my translation. As he looked at both,
I told him what I’d discovered, leaning across the table, keeping my voice low, aware of all the people sitting around us.
“I’ve worked out who wrote this letter. I’m certain it’s a woman called Isotta Nogarola, a famous poet and scholar from fifteenth-century
Verona. She was from a prominent noble family. Amazingly for the time, she and her sisters were all educated to the same level
as their brothers so they could easily have done this. I wonder if anyone has ever considered that the Voynich manuscript
could have been made by women.”
Sid listened carefully as I told him everything, taking it all in. When I’d finished, he had a question: “So if this Book of Women that Isotta mentions in her letter is the Voynich manuscript, what’s the nine-circle page she talks about?”
“I think I know that, too.”
We went onto the Beinecke Library’s website and pulled up their scans of the Voynich, and I found the famous rosette page,
a foldout with nine circles, one in the center and the others arranged around it at regular intervals, each linked to its
neighbor with fantastical drawings.
We pored over the screen together. Now that I had Isotta in mind as the author of the letter, I saw all sorts of details in
the manuscript that suddenly made sense. “There’s so much here that fits with the Voynich being made in Verona,” I told Sid.
“See this little castle here?” There was a small line drawing of a tower and some battlements, almost hidden among the more
indecipherable imagery. “The crenellations in that drawing is unusual; they’re called swallowtail or fishtail merlons because
of their shape. You don’t find them everywhere, but they’re all over Verona.”
I showed him a photograph of Verona’s Castelvecchio, a castle with a famous bridge beside it. Both structures had stunning
swallowtail merlons.
“These were built before Isotta was born,” I said. “You can find merlons like these in quite a few locations in northern Italy
and southern Germany, and in some places in France and Switzerland, too, but the coincidence with the Nogarolas must relate
these in the Voynich to Verona. And look at the pictures of domed buildings in the central rosette. You see architecture like
that in Venice, which Nogarola definitely visited, but also in Verona.” I clicked back to the image of Pisanello’s St. George
fresco and pointed to the fantastical buildings at the top. “See here: there are even similar domed buildings in this fresco,
which, incidentally, was painted in around 1435, precisely the period when they estimate the Voynich was made, based on scientific
analysis of the parchment. Everything fits!”
“So, what, we need to go to Verona now?” Sid laughed but he’d voiced what I was thinking, and I was deadly serious about it.
“Why not? What else are we going to do? I don’t think going abroad is the worst idea right now. We have our passports. What’s stopping us?” I paused. The gravity of our situation weighed heavy. I knew I was going to go, with or without him. “I need to do this, Sid. For Mum. For us.”
“How do you explain any of this to your dad? Won’t he be trying to find you?”
He had a point. I had no idea if the women who’d chased us as we drove away from the cottage were working for Magnus, or for
the Institute. But deceiving my father was a risk I would have to take if I was going to do this. “I’ll tell him I’m traveling
for research. He doesn’t have to know where. He might buy it for a day or two.”
Sid didn’t look sure, and neither was I, but I couldn’t see I had any other option. People were hunting for me, for us, but
I thought that if I could find The Book of Wonder before they found me, it could help us bargain our way out of danger. Even if I was wrong, I didn’t have any better ideas.
Sid nodded and I felt a surge of enthusiasm and of hope. We looked up cheap flights. By 4 p.m. we were on a train to Stansted
Airport, and by 6 p.m. we’d held our breaths as we passed through security, with the bestiary hidden in my bag, purchased
toiletries, booked ourselves an apartment in Verona that we couldn’t afford, drunk a beer at the bar, and were about to board.
For those few hours, we were energized by an illusion of control, a feeling of unstoppable momentum.
I had a window seat on the plane. As we took off, London shrank and flattened below us. We were rising through a blanket of
clouds when reality bit. A clock was ticking. At any moment we could be traced to Verona. At any moment, Mum might need me,
and I wouldn’t be there. Also staring me in the face was the fact that I didn’t know exactly what we were looking for in Verona.
All I had was a feeling that I might find something and that could amount to nothing.
The plane banked as it turned toward Europe and juddered as the dense cloud cover enveloped us. I shut my eyes and squeezed Sid’s hand. This felt incredibly reckless.
Clio
Clio sat in her flat. It was evening, dark, but she hadn’t put the light on or shut the curtain. Best no one knew she was
home. She’d left Geoff’s house earlier with alarm bells clamoring.
She sat cross-legged on the floor, her laptop on her knees, working in its glow and that of the streetlamp right outside her
second-floor window, which settled a sticky orange light over everything around her.
She hit the Zoom link that Zofia had sent her. Zofia appeared in front of the same blurred background as before.
“I can’t be long,” she said. “And I can’t do this again.”
Clio nodded.
“But I looked at the embroidery, and the poem. If you put the two pieces of the embroidery together there’s still a chunk
missing, I think about half a centimeter where it’s frayed.” Clio nodded. She’d seen that when she’d tried. “But you see a
few things. There’s some lettering I don’t have an explanation for, and the portraits I can’t identify in such a short time.
Because they’re of women, it’s less likely we can find a name for them because history rarely records the names of women.
What I can tell you is that there are two heraldry shields in that section in the middle. One got ripped through and it’s
impossible to get anything from it. The other is damaged but complete and I think I might know which family it relates to.
Honestly, I’m not sure I would have figured it out without the clue I got from Eleanor Bruton’s poem, the line that says,
‘He who on the ladder has the sacred bird displayed.’” Clio nodded, and Zofia went on. “So, I think, if you look carefully,
that we can just make out the outline of a ladder in this shield and there are a set of bird wings above it, both of which
are mentioned in the poem. Do you see?”
Clio peered at the photograph on her phone. “I think so,” she said but it was really hard to tell.
“The ladder and eagle are emblems for the Della Scala family, from Verona, in Italy,” Zofia said. “A very famous family. They
ruled Verona for centuries. And look, the blue and the yellow? Those are the colors of the city of Verona. The Della Scala
family was famous for hosting the poet Dante when he visited Verona. Okay? So, I was looking at Dante. This is what he wrote:
‘Your first refuge and your first inn shall be the courtesy of the great Lombard, he who on the ladder bears the sacred bird.’”
“That’s a line in Eleanor Bruton’s poem!” Clio said.
“And the man who hosted Dante was a powerful aristocrat called Cangrande. Which in English means Big Dog. Eleanor Bruton had
worked out that this came from Verona, I think.”
“Wow,” Clio said. “Thank you.”
“That’s all I have on the embroidery, but I think it has more stories to tell. It was nice to see it. It’s very rare to have
a book covered in fabric at this time from Italy. It was more common in England.”
“Do you think we can find out who the women in the portraits are?” Clio asked.
“I would need a library. It’s too risky for me to do more. I left all this behind for a reason.”
Clio heard the plea in her voice. “I understand,” she said. “Thanks so much for everything.”
“Can you promise me something?”
“Try me.”
“Will you look after the new girl? I have a Google alert, and I know the Institute just hired someone. A young academic. I’m
worried for her.”
“Of course. What’s her name?”
“Dr. Anya Brown.”
In the quiet after the call ended, Clio looked up Dr. Brown.
There was an impressive press release about her work, including a photo of a young woman with a sweet but hesitant smile.
She’d only just started at the Institute.
Clio wanted to talk to her, but she needed to know a bit about her first. You could find a lot of murk beneath the surface of even the nicest-looking people.
The easiest way to do it would be to run Anya’s name through the systems at work, but she couldn’t log on from her flat.
She messaged Izzy, asking her if she’d do it, without explanation, and waited nervously for the reply, wondering if it was
too soon to ask a favor.
She got a quick reply. Can you talk?
Sure, Clio wrote back.
Give me five.
She picked up on the first ring. Izzy was clearly outside. Wind whistled down the line.
“I just stepped out of the office,” she said.
“You’re working late.”
“Yeah. Listen, I take it you’re still interested in the St. Katherine case?”
“Definitely.”
“The boss is going up to St. Andrews to interview the staff at the Institute. I overheard him talking about it. One of the
lecturers’ husbands just died in suspicious circumstances. His body was found on the site of some old ruins. Suspected suicide.
It looks as if he climbed up there and threw himself off. His partner said he’d been struggling with his mental health for
a while. Autopsy is happening tomorrow.”
“Seriously?”
“That’s not all. This Anya Brown you asked me about has gone away.”
“Isn’t it the beginning of term?”
“Maybe it’s a work trip or something personal, but the boss thinks it’s odd.”
“Do we know where she went?”
“I thought you might ask. I did some checking. She boarded a flight at Stanstead an hour ago; she’s due to land in Italy in forty minutes.”
“Where in Italy?” Clio felt the buzz she got when the pieces of an investigation began to slot together, even if she couldn’t
see the big picture yet.
“Verona.”
“Huh,” Clio said.
“Also, the boss wanted to know what we looked at in the evidence room. He was being weird about it.”
“What did you tell him?” Clio held her breath.
“I told him we signed everything out, but didn’t have a chance to examine it before he called to let me know I was off the
case.”
“Thanks.”
“He let slip that he already knew how long we’d had the evidence out for. He’d checked.”
“Do me a favor, Izzy, keep your head down, don’t change that story, and don’t show any interest in that case. You need to
be deaf, dumb, and blind around it, okay?”
Izzy was silent for a beat, then spoke softly, “Understood.”
“You and I should stop speaking, for now. If anyone knows we talked tonight, tell them I was calling to get advice on joining
the criminal investigations division.”
“But—”
“Just tell them that, Izzy. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“And watch your back.”
Clio hung up. The murky light in the flat seemed electric, suddenly, charged with danger.
After a few minutes thinking, she went back online and booked herself a flight to Italy first thing in the morning.