Chapter Fifteen #3
Anya nodded but twisted her lips. Not great, then, Clio thought, but she held back from asking more.
“I know you’ve just started work at the Institute, but I need to ask if you’ve noticed anything unusual about it.”
The question seemed to electrify them. They exchanged a glance, another silent communication. They were close enough to read
each other’s thoughts easily, that was obvious.
Sid was the one to speak, cautiously at first, then warming up. Two names Clio recognized came out of his mouth: Minxu Peng
and Zofia. He’d been told they’d disappeared and believed they’d been killed. The person who’d told him—the husband of Anya’s
colleague—had died the night they’d decided to leave St. Andrews. He’d seen the body. Clio could tell it was haunting him.
She recognized the look in his eyes.
She’d seen it on her colleagues. When he stopped talking, Anya took over, filling in gaps in the story she’d just told about
Diana and her father, describing a hidden letter and a glossary that was the key to the famous Voynich manuscript, important
because the Voynich encoded clues to the location of an object that some dangerous people were looking for.
Anya stopped speaking, and they all fell silent. Clio’s mind was racing to join the dots between what she was hearing and
what she already knew.
A bell tolled nearby, four strikes, after the last of which something slammed so heavily from somewhere inside the building that all three of them flinched and glanced toward the door.
“Can you take a look at something for me?” Clio asked.
She took out her phone and showed them photographs of both pieces of the embroidery. Anya pored over the images, flicking
between them. Her focus was intense.
She got up suddenly and disappeared into the bedroom, returning with a laptop and some pieces of an old manuscript and a letter
that she laid out on the table.
“This is the glossary and the letter that were hidden in my father’s manuscript.” She turned the laptop so Clio could see
the screen. It showed a high-res image of pages from the Voynich. “And I think the embroidery pieces could be from the Voynich’s
original binding. When you put them together they’re the perfect size. Where did you find the missing piece?”
“I can’t divulge that yet,” Clio said. Anya didn’t have to know everything.
“Have other people seen it?”
“It was discovered by a woman who we believe kept it hidden to study it. She seems to have written a poem about it.”
“Can I see it?”
Clio watched Anya carefully as she read Eleanor Bruton’s words. Her cheeks were flushed when she looked up. She said, “Whoever
wrote this linked the embroidery to Verona, but that’s all. They didn’t connect it to the Voynich. Can you tell me who wrote
it?”
Clio explained about Eleanor Bruton, without naming her, and about the two groups of women, one with links to St. Katherine.
“Oh my God, the couple we saw earlier. She was wearing a St. Katherine brooch,” Anya said.
Clio thought of the remote island where Eleanor Bruton died. “It’s possible they’ve followed you here. These women are dangerous
and well resourced.”
“Should we tell the Italian police?” Sid asked.
Clio considered it. If she stayed under the radar, the carabinieri wouldn’t be in touch with her office in London, but if she involved them, chances were it would get back to the UK quickly. There were protocols. “Nobody’s broken the law, so let’s watch and wait for now.”
“But you said they were dangerous.”
“They are. But we can’t be sure that the people you saw are involved with the group. St. Katherine is a popular saint, and
this is a Roman Catholic country. Let’s not be hasty.”
They seemed to accept it and she felt a pang of guilt for the ways she was misleading them. She would have to make sure she
kept them safe.
“Can you show me how the embroidery links to the Voynich?” she asked.
“It’s so intricate, it probably connects in loads of ways, but this is one of the more obvious.” Flipping between the photos
of the two embroidery pieces on Clio’s phone again, Anya pointed out the five embroidered circles, each containing a portrait
of a woman in profile, including the one that had been ripped in half. “The letter I translated, from Isotta Nogarola, says
that the Voynich was made by five women from her family: her, three of her sisters, and their aunt. I think these profiles
are portraits of them, and I think that because each one has her initial beside her, and a plant that’s relevant to her name,
growing through it. Juniper for Ginevra, laurel for Laura, basil for Isabella, honeysuckle for Isotta, and angelica for their
aunt Angela. She and Isotta were famous poets. What’s exciting is that you can see drawings of these same plants inside the
Voynich, on the botanical pages. And look here, I think the Nogarola family crest is also in the embroidery. Do you see here,
where it’s been ripped?”
Clio peered at it.
“I think it’s another heraldic shield,” Anya said. “You see there’s one that’s intact below the central roundel?”
“Yes,” Clio said. Zofia Danek had mentioned two shields but she hadn’t been able to identify the torn one.
“If the embroidery hadn’t been ripped in that exact place, this destroyed shield would have been the more prominent one. And look, on each piece we can just see the ends of a pair of kinked lines that would have run diagonally across the shield. That’s the Nogarola family crest.
And those kinked lines appear as a motif in the Voynich, too, twisted to make the shape of the roots in one of the botanical
drawings.” She found the page on her laptop.
“It’s playful,” Clio said.
Anya nodded. “You get a sense of what the family were like. It’s nice.” She smiled. Clio warmed to this side of her. She read
everything Anya showed her, looking most carefully at her translation of the final page of the Voynich. “What does this mean?”
She pointed at a row of capital letters that Anya hadn’t translated yet.
“I’m not sure,” Anya said. “It’s been a bit of a puzzle figuring out these letters from the Voynichese, and I’m not sure I’ve
got it right. The Latin doesn’t translate easily.”
She copied the letters out onto the side of her tourist map of Verona:
HYPOEUMSNTMRSSUNT
Then, eyes narrowed, played with them, rewriting them a few different ways until she had:
HYPO EUM SNT MR SSUNT
“‘Hypo’ is Latin for ‘beneath,’” she said, “but it’s a prefix. ‘Eum’ is a demonstrative pronoun, I believe, so what I’m about
to say doesn’t quite make sense, but at a stretch it could be translated as ‘beneath that,’ or ‘him,’ but the grammar isn’t correct for either word. On first glance at the other groups of letters, I’m seeing an abbreviation.
The letters could stand for Santa Maria Assunta, Saint Mary of the Assumption. Churches are commonly dedicated to her.” She
frowned, thinking aloud. “Which means that the gender for ‘eum’ is also wrong.”
Clio interrupted. “Are there any churches dedicated to this saint in Verona?”
“The cathedral.”
“Is that the one with the Roman remains beneath it?” Sid asked.
“It’s built over two older churches and a Roman site, and it has a separate baptistery with a famous font.” Her eyes lit up.
“And it’s right beside the river. You know, water is a huge theme in the Voynich.”
“Should we go back there?” Sid asked.
“I’ll go,” Clio said. “You two should stay here, especially if you suspect you were being followed.”
“But you’ll need us,” Sid said. “Well, you’ll need Anya to interpret what you’re looking at, and I’m not letting her go without
me.”
He got up and went to close the doors to the balcony, then froze, and stepped back from them.
“What is it?” Clio asked.
“The woman and man we saw earlier.”
“Where?” She stood beside him, both of them in the shadows. He pointed out a younger man and a middle-aged woman, looking
in a shop window opposite. Doubtless, they weren’t shopping but using the reflections to see behind them and tell them who
was entering and exiting Anya and Sid’s building.
In that same reflection, Clio could see the St. Katherine’s wheel brooch on the woman’s lapel.
“Is there a back way out of here?” she asked.