Chapter Seventeen #2
There was a stack of masonry, broken stone, and marble piled against a wall. They looked like fragments of tombstones. I heaved
a few pieces on top of the planks. Just in case. I didn’t know how many people were down there, if there was someone my size
who might be able to follow me up.
I took stock of the state of my body. Blood stained my T-shirt, and my trousers, but I wasn’t feeling pain yet, adrenaline
doing its job. I needed to get away. Even if they couldn’t climb up the well, it wouldn’t take them long to get out of the
hypogeum and find me above ground. I put my backpack on. It was still dry.
I was in an old building, a small, dusty, low-ceilinged room lit dimly by daylight coming through a little window.
It seemed to be part storeroom, part priest’s room.
Old-fashioned, formal chairs with ornate wooden arms flanked a large table.
Vestments hung from a set of brass hooks.
A glass-fronted cabinet contained books and a crucifix.
Rows of tarnished brass candlesticks stood in orderly rows on a shelf, beside boxes of pamphlets and a painting, turned to the wall.
The floor was grander than the rest of the space, made from huge slabs of marble, just like the pavements of Verona. One or
two of them had inscriptions, too faded to read but I realized they were ancient gravestones. I figured I was in a building
adjacent to the church and quickly realized what I was looking at was the floor of the more ancient church that originally
stood on this site, in Isotta’s time, before it was rebuilt.
That older church’s footprint must have been a little different from the current building’s. I felt a little surge of hope,
that maybe something remained of the older building, that maybe there was still a chance of finding a clue Isotta could have
left here, but the hope quickly drained away. I could no longer hear shouting from the well, which meant the man was almost
certainly on his way up. I had to get away.
I looked through the window but saw only an enclosed courtyard strung with an empty washing line, a hose lying uncoiled on
a patch of grass, a terra-cotta pot spilling with geraniums beside an open door. I thought of trying to escape through there
but the window was painted shut.
I turned to the door, afraid someone could be waiting for me behind it already. The doorway was low and narrow, the door made
of thick planks of oak, with a forged latch. It creaked as I opened it and I stepped right into the nave of the present-day
church.
Inside the church it was hushed and still, but men’s voices were audible from outside.
I looked around for a place to hide, but there were slim pickings.
The confession box, but they’d find me in a heartbeat.
Maybe behind the altar, but it would hardly offer me cover.
The pews were too open; I couldn’t even crouch between them.
I turned to retreat back into the little room when the doors burst open and a man entered.
“Anya Brown,” he said in heavily accented English. Behind him I could see the village square, a blast of morning sunlight
that made me squint, and another man, the same one who tried to follow me up the well. I was dripping wet and hurting. I was
cornered. I had no option except to face him.
“Yes,” I said.
“Your father wants you.”
Sid
The taxi traveled down a long, straight road. Sid and Clio sat silently in the back.
Sid had a view of the imposing house at the end of the road, a large, three-story edifice, fortresslike, U-shaped in plan,
two arms extending to enclose the front lawn: the Nogarolas’ country home.
They drove through the remains of a pair of very old gateposts, remnants of the building’s earlier lives, and pulled into
a parking lot in front.
Close up, the villa looked shabby and unkempt. On the ground floor of the central section, three huge arches enclosed a terrace.
You could see through to trees and parkland on the other side.
Sid knew from a YouTube video that this was the original part of the building, the part the Nogarola family had used as their
summer home. The rest was added on later. There were other buildings on the grounds, too, of mixed use. Some looked like homes,
others were offices or storage.
Anya should be here somewhere. He knew he’d betrayed her by bringing Clio to this place, but he was afraid for her.
Clio asked the driver to wait for them, and he cracked his door, lit a cigarette. His radio played 1990s pop tunes.
“Wait here,” Clio told Sid. He watched her approach the building and enter a section of it that had a sign out front.
He ignored Clio’s instruction to stay where he was and walked up to the terrace, looked out the other side. There was a shallow
river behind the house, and the park, a hint that this place had been isolated and in unspoiled surroundings, once, but the
steps behind the terrace were covered in bird shit and the doors off the terrace were locked. Anya couldn’t be back here.
He scanned the front, watched Clio come out of one of the buildings, frowning. He watched her look into a few more entrances
until she’d exhausted them all. He was getting a bad feeling that Anya might have lied to them both.
He got out his phone. Reception was terrible, just one bar.
“What are you doing?” Clio had spotted him and was striding toward him.
“Nothing,” he said.
“She’s not here, is she?”
“I swear I thought she was.”
“She could be in serious danger, Sid. That’s my priority right now, and I know it’s yours, too.”
He hesitated fractionally. Clio was right, but he was loyal.
She held out her hand. “Sid! Her life could be in danger. Show me your fucking ‘Find My.’”
Anya
One of the men seized me by the arms. There was no getting away. I was no match for his size and strength. I could feel the
violence in him, smell his sweat.
My body shook as I stood in his grip in the middle of the central aisle. Shafts of watery sunlight streamed through the windows
of the church, but they weren’t strong enough to warm the air. Cold crept through my wet clothing and into my bones.
The other man shut the church doors firmly.
He paced energetically in front of them as he made a call, big with the energy of capturing me.
He spoke in Italian, and I couldn’t understand it, but I got the gist: I may not have found what I was looking for, but they had.
I was treasure to them, and they were getting instructions for what to do with me.
I tried to stand tall. I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of displaying any submission. I didn’t want it to get back
to my father that I’d shown weakness. That, at least, I could do for Mum.
Suddenly, the tone of the man’s voice changed. He glanced at me, and his expression transformed from victorious to angry.
The man holding me saw it, too. He tightened his grip on me and barked a question. The answer was barked back. The atmosphere
shifted. I sensed fear in them and steeled myself because I didn’t understand why or what it meant.
I was roughly dragged up the aisle toward the doors, where they had another angry exchange over my head, close up, spittle
flecking, and I flinched at every word. I was looking for a chance to get away but not finding one. I was shaken like a doll
as they shouted at each other. I cried out, and the man let go of me suddenly, shoving me away. I fell hard into the back
row of pews and was struggling to sit up, when they fled, and the church door swung shut behind them.
The silence in the church felt loud. The patches of sunlight seemed to be burning. The animal smell of the man hung on me.
All my senses were in overdrive, and it took me a few moments to come back to myself. I was very sore. I moved, gingerly,
to sit in a pew but I couldn’t get comfortable because I was still wearing my backpack. My arms and torso ached as I slowly
wriggled to get it off, and as I did, my shadow moved against the wall beside me, and something there caught my eye.
In a shallow side chapel, windowless and unadorned, a wooden chest was pushed up against the wall.
It was very old, the lid warped, the sides carved.
It stood a few inches off the ground on solid legs and was about four feet long.
It looked as if it weighed a ton. Hidden among the carvings on the front of it, I saw the faint but distinctive outline of the Nogarola coat of arms and beneath it, a line that I recognized from my translation of the Voynich. I caught my breath.
Even if nothing of the original church building had survived, apart from its floor, might this object be a survivor from that
time? A chest that could relatively easily have been saved from the older building and moved into the newer church after it
was built? A chest obviously commissioned by the Nogarolas and perhaps gifted to this special place?
The lid creaked as I lifted it. The chest was packed full of altar cloths and vestments. They were dusty and moth-eaten, but
neatly folded. I pulled them out, dumping them in heaps beside me, and ran my hands over the inside of the chest, looking
for somewhere, anywhere, that The Book of Wonder might be hidden. It felt like this had to be its resting place, though it wasn’t long before I realized that was wishful
thinking: the book wasn’t there. I sat back on my heels, exhausted. Disappointment scythed through what felt like my final
chance of hope.
Dust motes swirled in a shaft of sunlight above me as I reached out to touch the chest and my fingertips traced the outline
of the Nogarola crest and the familiar words carved beneath it. A dog barked outside, and from somewhere in the distance,
I heard the faint sound of police sirens.
I felt exhausted, ready to give up, but I realized there was one more place I could try. I leaned down and tried to see beneath
the chest, but it was too dark. The sirens were getting louder. They were for me, I realized. They were the reason the men