Chapter Sixteen #2
care for your own mother, your own flesh and blood. Did you ever wonder whether I really wanted to spend all my days caring
for her? Did you really believe that was enough for me? Big mistake, Anya. I’m an esteemed member of the Order of St. Katherine.
I matter!”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Where’s Mum?”
“Gone. Good luck finding her.”
“Where is she?” I shouted. “Tell me!”
“You heard me, and guess what, Dr. Anya Brown, everyone knows that Folio 9 was forged. They did it to lure you in. And now
you know how it feels to be used, you can stop pretending how clever you are, because you’re not!”
She was screaming. I felt sick to my stomach. She hung up, and when I tried to call back, it went to voicemail. It was the
same when I tried her number. We had no neighbors at the cottage, no one I could ask to go and check on Mum. I threw my phone
at the bathroom door.
Sid rattled the handle. “Anya! What’s wrong?”
I unlocked the door. Clio was standing on the other side with Sid. I told them everything.
“I should call this in,” Clio said.
“What if that puts Mum in more danger?”
“We need to find out what’s happened here.”
“No,” I said. “Please. Let’s just think about this. If the police get involved, the Katherine people might do something to Mum, but if I find this hidden book, I can offer it to them to get her back.”
“If a crime’s been committed, it’s my duty to report it,” Clio said, but then she seemed to reconsider. “Okay. We think, but
when I say it’s time to report it, we do.”
I told them what Viv said about Folio 9. “She can’t be serious, can she?” I asked Sid. “Surely she was just trying to get
at me.” My stomach dropped when I saw how he looked. “Oh, my God. You knew this already? Is it true?”
“I’ve seen it said before, in a chat room online. Someone claimed that Alice Trevelyan had the forgery made. I thought it
was gossip. It probably is!”
“When did you see it? Why didn’t you tell me? What the hell, Sid!”
Clio interrupted. “Can I interject?” Her voice was calm. Her training was showing.
I couldn’t let it go.“This makes me a fraud,” I said. “I was right all along.”
Clio raised her voice. “Who is Alice Trevelyan?”
“She’s a professor at Oxford. She supervised my PhD, and she was the person who showed me Folio 9 for the first time. She
told me it was a new discovery. She also encouraged me to take the job at St. Andrews.” I remembered something Sid had said.
“Didn’t you tell me Diana and Trevelyan studied together? Oh, God. They set me up years ago, didn’t they?”
“It sounds as if they were grooming you,” Clio said. “I think I’m only just starting to understand how far their influence
reaches. They’re not just dangerous, they’re really sophisticated, too. And that goes for both groups.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” I asked Sid.
“Your mum had just gone into hospital. I didn’t think you needed to hear it right then. I also wasn’t even sure it was true,
and for what it’s worth, even if it is, I don’t think it makes any difference to your achievement. You were still the only
person to translate it.”
“It makes all the difference! I’m a fraud.”
I felt ashamed and appalled. I thought of the press release, the job offers. All of it seemed hollow now. It made me an embarrassment.
I’d been used to get to Magnus, that was all.
Worse still, I thought of Mum’s pride in me and how painful it would be to shatter it. That is, if I ever got the chance.
But the thought brought me back to myself. I should stop being selfish. We needed to find Mum. Viv’s words echoed, chilling
me: “They have her.”
It had never been more urgent to locate the book, and I’d never felt so incapable of finding it.
Clio
Clio got into the elevator, saw herself reflected in the mirrored wall, and looked away.
Was she a civilian or an officer? She had to decide. All she knew for now was that she shouldn’t be here, but she didn’t know
what else she could have done.
Her sense of duty, usually rock steady, an anchor for her, had come untethered from her moral compass, and that was a nauseating
feeling.
She hit the button for the ground floor. Sid and Anya needed space, and she was going to ask a colleague to make inquiries
about Anya’s mother, no matter what the two of them wanted. It was her duty.
There were people in the lobby. She tucked herself into a chair in a quiet corner, and checked her mail while she considered
whether to call Izzy and ask for another favor regarding Rose Brown or report it directly. It was late, but she could get
some messages sent off so people would see them first thing in the morning.
Anya Brown would be upset, angry even, but Clio wasn’t working for her. She’d taken an oath, and she had to believe in it.
A woman’s life might be at stake.
While she considered how best to proceed, she noticed that the footage from the British Museum had arrived in her inbox.
She clicked play. The entrance footage didn’t tell her anything.
Too many people. She didn’t spot any familiar faces or red flags, but they’d be easy to miss, especially as she was so tired.
On the footage from the Medieval Europe gallery she watched herself and Lillian come into the gallery and enter the Everly Bequest room where the embroidery was kept, but the camera didn’t have a view into the room.
It was hard to watch Lillian, knowing what was about to happen to her.
A few others entered and left the gallery.
Clio saw the guard pass by the entrance to the Everly Bequest room, pausing on a second pass to take a closer look in, then moving on and speaking into her radio.
She took note. That could be something or nothing, a coincidence. Or not. She rolled her head, trying to get the kinks out
of her neck, and ran the final piece of footage she’d been sent. The camera was trained on an area just outside the gallery
entrance, where there was a café. She caught Lillian arriving, visible from behind, then herself, about ten minutes later.
The café filled up soon afterward. A man on his own working on a laptop, earbuds in. A woman reading a novel. A grandma and
a mum with two small kids who were creating mayhem. She watched until she saw herself and Lillian leaving, this time catching
a glimpse of Lillian’s face.
On the footage, Clio was walking slightly ahead of Lillian, so on the day she hadn’t noticed Lillian take a hard look at the
two women sitting at the table with the kids. Nor had she noticed Lillian taking another look over her shoulder before they
went out of shot. They walked downstairs right after that, Clio remembered, and exited the museum, which was when Lillian
became agitated. On the footage, the older woman watched them leave, then got her phone out and sent a message. Her face was
grim. She put the phone back in her bag and pulled one of the grandkids onto her lap. The younger woman said something to
her, but she didn’t notice. She was still looking toward the staircase.
Clio reran the footage, screenshotted the woman’s face, and sent it to Izzy with a message: Can you run facial recognition on this for me first thing?
Izzy replied right away.
I don’t need to. That’s Mrs. Tony Axford, my boss’s wife.
Clio zoomed in on the picture. It was blurry, but she was pretty sure Mrs. Axford was wearing a silk scarf with a Catherine
wheel symbol on it. She’d been blindsided.
Anya
I barely slept that night in the hotel, worrying whether we could easily be found there. When I did doze off, it was in snatches
of time. In the dark hours, fear of my mother coming to harm danced grotesquely through my dreams and my waking nightmares,
hand in hand with an excoriating feeling that I’d failed her. Viv was right. I should have been less selfish, less sure of
myself. Mum was what mattered, not a career move that turned out to have been a bait and switch.
The stakes had been raised to a level I could barely comprehend. Viv’s suggestion that Folio 9 might have been forged was
unproven and very possibly a lie designed to hurt me, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it and wondering: If it was true, what else had I got wrong? It made me question every leap of logic I’d made, yet by 5 a.m. I’d been over everything
multiple times and couldn’t see things differently. Trusting my gut felt dangerous, but it was all I had.
Isotta’s country home. Was The Book of Wonder there? It was my best guess and I had to run with it.
I picked up my phone. Magnus’s messages from last night were still there, unread.
More had arrived since. I glanced through them, terrified I might learn that he was closing in on me, but they just contained more threats and said horrible things about me and Mum.
I tried to put him out of my mind as I looked on Google Maps at the Nogarola family villa at Castel d’Azzano.
The villa was still intact, but the original building had been extended and altered a lot over the ages. It had swallowtail
merlons on its roof, which was good to see, though the internet wasn’t clear about when that part of the house had been built.
I could see that a river ran behind it and that the villa bordered a nature park, and I thought Isotta might have been pleased
to know something of her idyll had been preserved. But as Sid had said, the house itself was used by the town’s council now,
and there was almost no trace left of the building Isotta would have known.
It still felt right to me in theory that The Book of Wonder might be hidden there but doubts were creeping in. Why hide the book on private property, where most people would be denied
access, or which could change hands? This solution also felt too easy. Isotta wanted the book to be found by a “worthy woman.”
Had I done enough to solve the puzzle she’d set? I wasn’t sure. I felt as if I might have missed something even though I’d
read her letter and my translation over and over.