house!” Gallowglass’s booming, cheerful voice rose up from the downstairs hall.
Matthew’s kiss was hard and demanding. I gave him what he needed, deliberately softening my spine and my mouth so that he could feel, in this moment at least, that he was in charge. “Oh. Sorry. Shall I come back?” Gallowglass said from the stairs. Then his nostrils flared as he detected my husband’s overpowering clove scent. “Something wrong, Matthew?”
“Nothing that Baldwin’s sudden and seemingly accidental death wouldn’t fix,” Matthew said darkly.
“Business as usual, then. I thought you might want me to walk Auntie to the library.”
“Why?” Matthew asked.
“Miriam called. She’s in a mood and wants you to ‘get out of Diana’s knickers and into my lab.’”
Gallowglass consulted the palm of his hand. It was covered in writing. “Yep. That’s exactly what she said.”
“I’ll get my bag,” I murmured, pulling away from Matthew.
“Hello, Apple and Bean.” Gallowglass stared, besotted, at the images on the fridge. He thought calling them Baby A and Baby B was beneath their dignity and so had bestowed nicknames upon them.
“Bean has Granny’s fingers. Did you notice, Matthew?”
Gallowglass kept the mood light and the banter flowing on our walk to campus. Matthew accompanied us to the Beinecke, as though he expected Baldwin to rise up out of the sidewalk before us with a new phone and another dire warning.
Leaving the de Clermonts behind, it was with relief that I opened the door into our research room.
“I’ve never seen such a tangled provenance!” Lucy exclaimed the moment I appeared. “So John Dee did own the Voynich?”
“That’s right.” I put down my pad of paper and my pencil. Other than my magic, they were the only items I carried. Happily, my power didn’t set off the metal detectors. “Dee gave the Voynich to Emperor Rudolf in exchange for Ashmole 782.” It was, in truth, a bit more complicated than that, as was often the case when Gallowglass and Matthew were involved in the transfer of property.
“The Bodleian Library manuscript that’s missing three pages?” Lucy held her head in her hands and stared down at the notes, clippings, and correspondence littering the table. “Edward Kelley removed those pages before Ashmole 782 was sent back to England. Kelley temporarily put them inside the Voynich for safekeeping. At some point he gave two of the pages away.
But he kept one for himself—the page with the illumination of a tree on it.” It really was impossibly tangled.
“So it must have been Kelley who gave the Voynich manuscript—along with the picture of the tree—to Emperor Rudolf’s botanist, the Jacobus de Tepenecz whose signature is on the back of the first folio.” Time had faded the ink, but Lucy had shown me photographs taken under ultraviolet light.
“Probably,” I said.
“And after the botanist, an alchemist owned it?” She made some annotations on her Voynich timeline. It was looking a bit messy with our constant deletions and additions.
“Georg Baresch. I haven’t been able to find out much about him.” I studied my own notes.
“Baresch was friends with de Tepenecz, and Marci acquired the Voynich from him.”
“The Voynich manuscript’s illustrations of strange flora would certainly intrigue a botanist—not to mention the illumination of a tree from Ashmole 782. But why would an alchemist be interested in them?” Lucy asked.
“Because some of the Voynich’s illustrations resemble alchemical apparatus. The ingredients and processes needed to make the philosopher’s stone were jealously guarded secrets, and alchemists often hid them in symbols: plants, animals, even people.” The Book of Life contained the same potent blend of the real and the symbolic.
“And Athanasius Kircher was interested in words and symbols, too. That’s why you think he would have been interested in the illumination of the tree as well as the Voynich,” Lucy said slowly.
“Yes. It’s why the missing letter that Georg Baresch claims he sent to Kircher in 1637 is so significant.” I slid a folder in her direction. “The Kircher expert I know from Stanford is in Rome. She volunteered to go to the Pontifical Gregorian University archives, where the bulk of Kircher’s correspondence is kept, and nose around. She sent me a transcription of the later letter from Baresch to Kircher written in 1639. It refers back to their exchange, but the Jesuits told her the original letter can’t be found.”
“When librarians say ‘it’s lost,’ I always wonder if that’s really true,” she grumbled.
“Me, too.” I thought wryly of my experiences with Ashmole 782.
Lucy opened the folder and groaned. “This is in Latin, Diana. You’re going to have to tell