“A few hours for a rough translation.”
“Do it.”
Sid emptied the minibar of snacks and sodas to keep us going, and I got to work. As the night ran into the small hours the character of the letter writer emerged and made itself known withunexpected strength. She was a woman, unnamed, and was in turns witty, learned, and bitter.
By the time I finished Sid was dozing beside me, and I nudged him awake.
“Have you done it?” he asked.
I was buzzing. “It’s just like Mum said, I think this writer is implying that the Voynich is the key to something else, and it might be another book.”
Chapter Fourteen
Anya
Sid and I abandoned the car and took the train to London very early the next morning. We’d had only a couple of hours’ rest. It was still dark when we hurried on foot to the station beneath the glow of Edinburgh’s streetlamps, our footsteps overly loud on the cobbles, street cleaners hosing the pavements slick, rain spitting.
We found seats and fell asleep. After a few hours I woke to find I had an email from an unknown address. The subject line caught me.
To: Anya Brown
From: RB
Subject: READ CAREFULLY, ANYA
Date: September 23, 2024
My darling girl,
They told me you called last night. You’ll want to know how I am. I’m feeling much better today, so don’t worry.
I don’t have much time to write this, and I’m doing so on another borrowed phone. I don’t have mine back yet. The lovely youngman who cleans my room helped me set up this email address and use his phone.
Everything I’m about to confess is true. Believe it. There’s no time for doubt. Delete this after reading it.
I should start by explaining how the glossary came to me.
A few years before I met your father, I attended a conference organized by the Society of Bookbinders. I was there because I wanted to hear a woman called Josephine Dunne speak. She was very elderly by then, and a legend in our business because she was a female pioneer in the industry. She was also well known to be very reclusive, so it felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
At the conference Josephine ran a daylong seminar and workshop for women bookbinders. Attendance was selective, we had to apply in writing and with examples of our work. I was delighted to be accepted, alongside just three others, and even more delighted when she apparently took a shine to me, approaching me at the end of the session and asking me, and only me, to come to tea with her. The others were jealous, but I didn’t care. She was my heroine.
She told me so many stories when we were alone together that afternoon and asked me so many questions. When we parted, she gave me a gift: a red leather bookmark she’d made that day as part of a demonstration during our workshop. It was made from the softest leather and tooled in gold with a beautiful design. She made a few that day, to demonstrate different techniques, each with a different Shakespeare quote on it. “Coronet weeds,” this one said. Do you remember it? When you were a child, I kept it in the little drawer in my workshop, the one you loved to rummage through.
About a month after Josephine’s funeral, and out of the blue, a courier arrived at my studio in Cambridge and handed over a package. Then I understood that she’d been vetting me that day.
The package contained the glossary, an old letter written in Latin, and a note from Josephine explaining that, together, the glossary and the old letter were the key to decoding the Voynich manuscript.
I could hardly believe it. Suddenly to find yourself in possession of the key to unlock one of the most enigmatic manuscripts in existence was quite astounding, but her note warned me that there was far more to it than that.
Josephine wrote that the glossary was important not just because it was the key to decoding the Voynich,but because the Voynich is the key to finding something else. Something far more valuable and important. She didn’t say what it was, but she wrote, “Lives have been ruined or lost searching for this object and for that reason it’s best that it’s never found.”
She told me I should hide the glossary and the letter somewhere no one would find them and keep them hidden for as long as I could. She’d chosen me to bear this responsibility, she said, because she had no daughter of her own or any other female descendants and it was important both artifacts were in the care of someone who could understood their power and who knew how to keep them safe.
I didn’t know about that. Nor did I know what to make of any of it or even whether to take it seriously. It sounded unreal. But the woman I remembered wasn’t a fantasist, and her reputation as a pioneer and a craftswoman was stellar. I decided that whatever I thought of her claims for the glossary, I would honor her wishes.
A solution presented itself. It so happened that the glossary and the letter appeared at my studio a few days before that short window of time when I had access to your father’s collection of manuscripts. I knew that it wasn’t uncommon to find the remnantsof old manuscripts in the bindings of newer ones—I’d made some discoveries like that myself—so I decided to do the same with the glossary and the letter, as you’ve hopefully found out by now. I carefully took the glossary apart and hid the pieces, and the letter, within another book. It was the most secret place I could think of, and the safest, because your grandfather had installed extraordinary measures to safeguard the collection. Magnus never suspected a thing. Nor did anyone else. I was hopeful that I’d done my bit and that I could leave the book there for years, decades, without having to think of it again.
My sense of security didn’t last long. Within weeks I found out I was pregnant with you and my relationship imploded. A few months later strange things began to happen to me. There were hang-ups on my landline and a couple of nights when I was certain someone followed me home from my studio. One morning I found the body of a mutilated owl on my doorstep, a beautiful creature. I was terrified. I knew it wasn’t coincidence. It was a message. Josephine had run a tiny independent publishing house called the Owl Press. Someone else wanted the glossary, and they’d found me.
