Chapter 1
I think of my father’s workshop and the smell of the pigments and the sound of my brothers arguing over the price of a panel. I have not written to them in weeks. What would I tell them? If I do not return, at least the stone will know I was here.
From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi
* * *
The library at Grimsfell was cold. Lorenzo di Bianchi had learned in his weeks here that no fire the Cornish maids could build would prevail against the wind off the cliffs, and they had given up trying. He worked in his coat.
But he was not working. There was no work to do. That was the trouble.
The journals were spread across the long oak table.
Three of them. The oldest was bound in vellum going brown at the edges, the second in dark red leather with the corners rubbed white; the third was smaller than the others and bound in something Lorenzo suspected was pig’s skin, though he would not have staked coin on it.
All three were open. All three showed him the same thing they had been showing him since the day they came into his hands.
Nothing.
Pages and pages and pages of nothing.
He looked at the page in front of him. The axe. The vertical sword. The wave crest. A circle with a dot in the middle. A horned helmet. A box with a pointed top like a house or a throne. A broken chain. An X.
The pictograms marched across the page in tidy rows, spaced like sentences, punctuated like sentences. There was no doubt they were meant to convey something. Matteo had gone to considerable trouble to make them look like sense.
Lorenzo could not make them mean anything.
There was nothing left to try. He was an art historian.
He knew what to do with a painting he did not understand.
He examined it. He cataloged the iconography.
He compared it to other works of the same hand, the same school, the same period.
He consulted a specialist. And, eventually, he arrived somewhere.
He did not sit before a page of pictograms that he could not read and stare it into surrender.
He had tried, in the first days after the journals came to him, to catalog the pictograms as iconography.
The axe appeared in The Martyrdom of Saint Matthias in the Santa Croce sacristy.
The wave crest was in the border of the Madonna del Mare in Genoa.
The horned helmet Lorenzo had once seen sketched in the margin of a Matteo letter to a patron in Ferrara.
He had made a table. He had filled a page.
He had realized the table led nowhere. The pictograms in the journals were not iconography. They were smaller. They were regular. They were rowed out like writing. They were writing. An alphabet. That meant they were not his subject at all. That meant the tools he had were the wrong tools.
He had put the notebook away and gone to bed exasperated. He hoped Nicholas was learning something in Oxford that would help.
The next morning, Lorenzo opened the journals again and stared at them for an hour and put them away again.
Nicholas, who had left Grimsfell some weeks ago, still limping from his childhood injury, had looked at those pages and said, in a tone that declared it self-evident, “A substitution alphabet. Nothing more clever than that.” Lorenzo had stared at him.
Nicholas had said the axe was E and the underlying language was English.
English because Matteo had been here, working with Englishmen. He would have thought in their tongue eventually.
Lorenzo had not been able to credit it. But he had known, in a corner of his mind he had not previously permitted himself to look into, that Nicholas was right.
It was one of the hollow things he had been carrying since that afternoon.
That Matteo, who had painted the Madonna del Mare in Genoese sunlight, who had signed his letters Matteo di Bianchi, Fiorentino, had spent the last of his working life, however long that had been, and whenever and however it had ended, thinking in a language that was not his own.
Lorenzo did not know when. He did not know how. He did not know where.
That was the point. That had always been the point.
Three centuries of di Bianchi intrigue about what had become of Matteo, and Lorenzo had come to Cornwall to break the silence and had found himself in a library, staring at his ancestral journals written in pictograms that he could not read and could not learn to read and could do nothing about at all.
Nicholas had gone to Oxford to uncover what he could about the cipher.
Nearly two weeks earlier.
Lorenzo looked down at the axe on the page in front of him. He traced at the vertical sword. He scowled at the wave crest.
E, he thought. Then blank. Then blank. Then blank.
He turned the page. Not to read it, but to feel that he was doing something useful.
The library door opened.
He did not look up. He had heard footsteps in the passage a moment before. It would be Mrs. Roskelly, who always brought the coffee at this hour.
“Grazie, signora,” he said absently, without looking up. “Sul tavolo, per favore.”
There was a pause.
Mrs. Roskelly, Lorenzo remembered, did not speak Italian.
“Signor di Bianchi, sir.” Not Mrs. Roskelly. One of the maids, whose name Lorenzo could never remember, and whose voice was pitched high with excitement.
Lorenzo raised his head. “Yes.”
“It is Mr. Scott, sir. Mr. Scott has come back. Coach just come up the drive, sir. Mrs. Roskelly says would you like—”
Lorenzo did not hear the rest.
He was already out of the chair. The chair went over behind him.
He heard it fall as he crossed the library at a run, the flags cold through his stockinged feet, for he had taken off his boots at some point earlier, though he did not remember when, and burst into the corridor and made for the front door.
He was a scholar. He had always been a scholar. He had spent his life at desks with books open in front of him, and he had prided himself on the calm and the patience his subject required.
He was not, at this moment, a calm or a patient man.
He was a man whose ancestor’s silence might be about to break.
He flung the outer door open and stepped out into the chilly courtyard. The April cold hit him at once, and the sea wind coming off the cliff hit him a moment after, and he noticed neither.
The coach had come to a stop in the middle of the yard.
Nicholas was standing beside it. A book was under his arm and his cane in the crook of it and his hat in his hand. He appeared different in an unexpected way, not his usual sardonic self but … happy?
There was a woman beside him with curling fair hair and eyeglasses that had gone askew on her nose. She watched Lorenzo with an expression that suggested she had heard about him and was reserving judgment.
Lorenzo would deal with the woman later.
He crossed the courtyard in ten strides.
“L’hai trovato?”
He heard himself say it in Italian and could have wept for the waste of time. He tried again.
“Did you find anything?”
Nicholas reached into his portfolio without a word and produced three things.
An alphabet on a single sheet of paper. Lorenzo saw the pictograms in the left column and English letters in the right column, and his heart did something for which he had no name.
The journal he had lent Nicholas, safely returned.
A second notebook. In his neat hand, Nicholas had written across the top of the first page, Fair copy — decipherment of Journal I, pp. 1–14. Then, beneath, in Matteo’s cadences but in Nicholas’s script, the deciphered opening of the journal Lorenzo had been staring at for months.
Lorenzo took all three.
His hands went round them with the reverence he had for objects that had survived three centuries and would, God willing, survive three more.
He could not speak.
He examined the alphabet first. Twenty-six pictograms, twenty-six letters.
The axe was E, exactly as Nicholas had said.
The vertical sword was A. The wave crest was O.
The circle with the inner dot was I. The horned helmet was S.
The box with the pointed top was K. The broken chain was X.
The X was N. Every symbol in Matteo’s journals accounted for. Every one.
He opened Matteo’s journal beside Nicholas’s fair copy. He checked. And checked again. He read the first line of pictograms, then moved his eyes along the copy, confirming each letter. He read the second line. He read the third.
It worked.
It worked. Nicholas had done it.
Lorenzo drew in a breath that shuddered.
He turned to Nicholas’s fair copy and read, while standing there in the April courtyard with the wind pulling at the pages and the gulls calling somewhere above the cliff.
He read with his lips moving because he could not help it, in English, but hearing behind it the Florentine voice of a man he had been chasing for years.
In the year of our Lord fifteen hundred and thirteen, Matteo’s first sentence read, in Nicholas’s careful hand, being taken into confidence by an Order that shall not be here named, and being given the commission that shall be, God willing, my life’s greatest work, and being sworn to a secrecy I would keep beyond death—
Lorenzo stopped reading. Then he read the clause again.
Beyond death.
He glanced up. Nicholas was watching him a with tightness at his mouth that suggested he was trying not to say the wrong thing.
Lorenzo looked back down. He read about the commission, the payment, and the vow.
He read about Matteo traveling to England with only what he could carry, then about the beginning of the work …
until the fair copy ran out. Nicholas had transcribed fourteen pages in Oxford, and no further.
Which was, Lorenzo supposed, more than a man could reasonably have transcribed in a carriage jolting on the winter roads.
He raised his head. “What does it mean?”