Chapter Sixteen #3
I thought about Mum, how she and Isotta shared a love of language and how, in her riddles, Mum never knowingly put one meaning
into words when she could put two. It occurred to me that maybe I’d been looking in the wrong place. Was there a chance that
Mum had put a hint in her email, something that might not be in the glossary or in Isotta’s letter but could have been handed
down with them, something that would either tell me I was on the right track or point me in a different direction? I couldn’t
be sure Mum had been well enough to pull off anything like her usual word tricks, but—
Verona was dark when I crept out of bed. The swallowtail merlons on the Castelvecchio Bridge were still lit, its terra-cotta
bricks glowing. Clio and Sid had been restless all night, too, but both were lightly asleep as I got up.
Quietly, I slipped my phone off the charger and found Mum’s email.
As I reread it, I thought of Isotta, of double meanings, of the importance of our choice of words.
The paragraph where Mum described the bookmark she’d been given by Josephine Dunne stood out.
There was too much detail in it for such a minor recollection.
“‘Coronet weeds,’ this one said. Do you remember it?” Mum wrote about the bookmark. “When you were a child, I kept it in the
little drawer in my workshop, the one you loved to rummage through.”
I remembered the drawer. There had been a bookmark in it, but it wasn’t made of leather, nor was it red. I searched online
for the words “coronet weeds” and found them easily. They were from Hamlet, a description of Ophelia’s flowers, the ones she had when she died.
It dawned on me, then. Mum was steering me toward a picture we’d seen together on our first-ever visit to the Tate Gallery:
John Everett Millais’s famous painting of Ophelia’s corpse floating ethereally in the river, after her death, surrounded by
flora. “Who’s that flower girl?” I’d asked, and she’d explained the play’s sad story. It was the words “flower girl” she wanted
me to remember, I realized with a jolt, and everything fell into place.
The Nogarola women had been made into literal flower girls on the Voynich’s binding. I pictured their portraits on the embroidery,
saw their initials tangled in the delicate foliage that framed each portrait: A, I, G, L, and I.
I played with the letters, wondering if I could insert them into the baffling words from the last paragraph of the Voynich
to make sense out of them. It didn’t work. I was about to give up when I noticed that the letter G and one of the I’s had
a tiny star embroidered beside them. There were another five of them beside the letter A, but nothing beside the L and the
other I. Could the stars possibly represent numbers, telling me which letters to use, and how frequently? It was my best guess.
Holding my breath, I tried different combinations until I had something.
HYPO EUM SNT MR SSUNT
became
HYPOGEUM SANTA MARIA ASSUNTA
I googled it and the results stunned me. My heart was pounding. This, surely, was the answer to the puzzle.
I glanced at Sid. He was awake, watching me. I put my finger to my lips and beckoned to him to follow me. I didn’t want to
wake Clio. I didn’t trust her not to force me to hand over The Book of Wonder to the local police if I found it.
I quickly packed and took my backpack with me as we snuck out of the room. The hotel corridors had the emptiness of the quiet
hours. The lobby downstairs wasn’t manned overnight and was empty apart from the eye of a camera trained on us. We sat close
together on the small sofa. I leaned toward Sid and told him what I wanted to do. I turned my face away from the camera so
no one could lip-read my words.
He didn’t like it, but I was ready for that. I knew how to convince him.
He ran his hand over his forehead after hearing me out. His face was already drawn with fatigue and worry, and my plan was
worsening it.
I said, “Sid, it’s going to work. I don’t see any other way.”
I had to remind myself to breathe as I waited for him to weigh everything up, knowing better than to rush him. Finally, he
said, “Okay, if you’re sure.”
He went to the front desk and rummaged behind it until he’d found a pad of paper and a pen. I wrote a note, keeping it out
of sight of the camera and gave it to him.
“Do you have everything you need?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Be careful.” He hugged me tightly.
“I will,” I told him. The words seemed too small and too ordinary for the moment. Everything else we meant to convey seemed to be glittering in the air around us, not needing to be spoken; the way it does when you love someone and they love you back. I knew he felt it, too.
He went to the elevator. The note was in his hand. As soon as the doors closed, my stomach dropped; the air stopped glittering
and darkened.
I took a card for a taxi firm from a rack on the reception desk, scanned the QR code on it, ordered a car, and waited for
it outside. There were glimmers of light to the east, and their reflections glinted on the river’s surface.
It wasn’t a long drive. I sat in the back of the taxi and stared out the window. Housing petered out and gave way to agricultural
land, pastures and fields that rested softly in the languid dawn, everything dewy and quiet. The land was mostly flat, cradling
patches of soft mist where it dipped. To our right and ahead hills rose steeply, terraced with vines; switchback roads zigzagged
up them.
I didn’t want the driver to know exactly where I was going, so I asked to be dropped in the middle of the village and used
my phone to navigate the last bit of my journey on foot. It was a beautiful, quiet, pastoral spot off the beaten track, ringing
with birdsong, a rich tang of the season in the air.
This wasn’t Isotta’s country home, but this place had surely meant something to her.
I was betting everything on a hunch that it had.
The church was simple, built from stone and brick in the same sand and coral palette as Verona. It stood on the corner of
a road, the Via Pantheon. In front of its doors was a small square with a few modest houses around it. A black cat with yellow
eyes watched me impassively from the top of a tall wall; it felt like an omen, but I didn’t know how to interpret it. Otherwise,
the place was deserted.
I knew from the reading I’d done that morning that the church hadn’t been built when Isotta was alive.
In her time there was a smaller church here, but it was rebuilt from scratch about the same time that she died.
Pretty as it was, I didn’t think it was worth looking inside.
Nothing from Isotta’s time was likely to have survived.
I was much more interested in what was directly below it: the Hypogeum Santa Maria Assunta.
I’d learned from Google that it was an underground system of tunnels and chambers used by the Romans to worship water nymphs,
nymphs like Cyane. After the Romans, St. Zeno of Verona had baptized people in the underground spring. By Isotta’s time, it
was an important place of Christian pilgrimage.
I was convinced that Isotta would have known of this place and visited it. She wasn’t just an educated woman with an interest
in mythology, and Cyane in particular, she was devout, too, and had the means to travel.
Just as compelling as the hypogeum’s history were the photographs of it that I’d seen online. Deep underground was something
so remarkable I couldn’t believe more people didn’t know about it: an ancient, incredible ceiling decoration. I’d never seen
anything like it before and it looked so much like some of the most mysterious imagery in the Voynich that it had taken my
breath away.
For centuries no one had been able to explain the weird imagery of water pipes, tubes, and bathing pools that appeared on
so many pages of the Voynich manuscript, or the naked women who bathed in them. But if you linked them to this hypogeum and
to Isotta’s poetry, you surely had the answer: the women were water nymphs.
Finally, everything felt right. This was the place where everything came together. The evidence, my gut, and a sense of connection
with Isotta that I couldn’t deny told me The Book of Wonder was more likely to be here than anywhere else.
The site’s history didn’t put me off. The hypogeum may have been in use over centuries, but it had been a holy place, preserved intact, no intensive archeology or modern development for tourists.
Of all the sites I’d considered, this seemed the one where secrets had the most chance of remaining hidden for centuries.
I felt sure that even if I didn’t find the book down there, I would find another clue to where Isotta had hidden it.
The entrance to the hypogeum was behind a closed and padlocked metal gate. Through it, at the bottom of a flight of steps,
I could see the mouth of a tunnel, dark and unwelcoming.
I wasn’t sure when the hypogeum would next be open to the public and I couldn’t wait. I rattled the gate, making a small space
between it and the post, but it wasn’t wide enough for me to get through. I thought the gap above the gate might be. It looked
be tight, but not impossible.
I took my backpack off, climbed up the gate, dropped it over—no going back now—and squeezed myself through the gap, falling
down heavily on the other side. I got up and dusted myself off, feeling as if the thud I’d made must have alerted someone,
but the square remained deserted, the cat still watching, its tail flicking.
I walked down the steps and was soon underground. The darkness was so complete it was as if someone had thrown a hood over
my head, as if I’d stepped into every story that had ever terrified me. The outside world had gone. There was no noise or
light in front of me, just blank silence. My brain screamed at me to retrace my steps and get out, but I turned on my phone’s
flashlight, and kept going.
At the bottom of the steps the beam of my flashlight revealed a niche in the wall, with a statue set into it of a man dressed
in a toga, the first trace of the ancient origins of this place. To my left was another dark passageway. The torchlight only
illuminated the first few meters. I was hyperaware of what might lie in the shadows and my breathing sounded too fast and
too loud, a sharp ebb and flow of hot fear disturbing the dank, still air. If there were predators down here, they would easily
mark me as prey.
I heard water flowing, a strong trickle, but the sound was muted, as if the water was separated from me, perhaps running somewhere
deeper, beneath my feet or behind the wall. I guessed I was hearing the underground spring.
I’d memorized the hypogeum’s layout from a plan I’d seen online and knew this was the second of three tunnels I had to go through to reach the main complex of chambers where the walls and ceilings were painted.
I tried to swallow my fear as I pushed on, but claustrophobia got a grip on me, and I was panting by the time I emerged into a small, square space carved out of rock.
A marble mausoleum lay along one wall, squat and heavy. I ran my hands over it, feeling how cold and smooth it was. I looked
for inscriptions but there were none. The lid was far too heavy for me to move to see what might be inside. I was starting
to realize that this was no place to hide any book, let alone one as valuable as The Book of Wonder. It was too cold and damp down here. I pinned my hopes on seeing something that would tell me what to do or where to go next.
A low stone lintel marked the entrance to the final tunnel. Its ceiling was very low—I would need to stoop to walk through
it—and it was horribly narrow.
I took off my backpack again. With the bestiary inside, it was bulky and heavy, awkward to stoop in. The tunnel seemed to
last forever. I felt as if the walls were closing in around me, as if the oxygen would run out. My heart raced. Light from
my phone bounced off the rough stone walls and floor. It felt like I was walking to the center of the earth. When I finally
emerged, the space around me opened up and I lifted my head gratefully.
I was standing in an atrium, an explosion of color and pattern above and around me, covering the walls and ceiling. It was
shocking to see such incredible work hiding all the way down here. It was powerful and marvelous.
On either side, the atrium opened out into two chambers. My light gave me glimpses of their mosaic floors and semi-domed ceilings.
I was looking for the paintings that had lured me here, and I caught my breath when I got my first glimpse.
I’d never felt such a sense of wonder before, but it was shattered in an instant. From somewhere close behind me I heard footsteps.