It was the best place I could think to hide while I studied the glossary and the letter more closely.
Sid settled in the café. I had a reader’s card for the library, so I went to the manuscript room, where you could hear a pin drop among the low stacks, and each desk was furnished with a cushionto rest the precious books on. A few other readers had heads bent over their work. The librarians worked quietly behind their desks. The slow mechanisms of library life were familiar and soothing; I felt my head clear.
I was tempted to dive into the glossary but decided to refine my translation of the letter first, to fill in gaps where I hadn’t been able to find the right words last night.
After a couple of hours, my neck and shoulders had seized up, but my translation was done. It was still clumsy—I couldn’t capture the fine, nuanced Latin of the original in such a short time—but it was a finished draft, and once again I was captivated by the voice of the letter’s author. I felt as if she were whispering to me across the centuries, and it moved me.
To my sisters of the future,
I have been reluctant to write, delaying the moment of change, but to remain so would constitute a sin against women.
There is a book,The Book of Wonder, an ornament of our sex, that has been hidden from men who are prone to ridicule women, in word and deed. This book encapsulates such power, such knowledge, such excellence and eloquence that men would take offense if they knew of it. It exists to nourish women, to nurture them and feed their courage, their very souls.
It came into the possession of my aunt, a virtuous, extraordinary woman of great learning. The book was her most prized possession, but my aunt came to fear for its safety. She was afraid of the jealousy and destruction of men, so she hidThe Book of Wonderout of their reach.
She then bade her nieces, my sisters and me, to help her encode its resting place so that it would never be lost to the women of our family.
OurBook of Womencarefully folds the location of the other volume into its pages.
To make demanding the task of finding what is hidden, we sisterstested ourselves to elaborate on a silly, whimsical family language, first invented by us girls to communicate beyond the reach of our tutors and our brothers.
Beyond their gaze, our aunt provided money to buy us parchments and ink from her bookseller. Two sisters had the talent to draw and illuminate God’s creation on its pages, and when walls confined us in the city, women as we are, our good friend the artist who painted our other sister in fur and cloth resplendent and pure among salamander, horse’s rump, and dragon’s-kill bones allowed her the perusal of his sketchbooks, where chalk and line were, unknown to him, muse for our book.
That done, we four sisters and our aunt tasked our fair hands with the job of scribes to write the book in our secret language, using every technique and discipline our tutor instilled in us.
But now, as age and poor health soften my courage and my memory, I share my aunt’s fear that as one generation gives way to another the means to findThe Book of Wonderwill be lost to our family. Our language has not been passed on to my sisters’ daughters, and I have no offspring. The chain will break.
I have asked often in my life, what can I, a woman, do? As I lie facing death, I narrow the question. What can I do to preserve this secret for our sisters of the future?
I answered thus.
I will gift this knowledge to the good women of the wider world. I will send theBook of Womenin the company of a gray lady who will travel north with it to Augsburg and lodge it in the silence and safety of her order there. I will send with it this glossary, which reveals the working of our family’s private language. Thus, I offer to all sisters of the future a means to translate theBook of Womenand thereby to findThe Book of Wonder.
And for this effort, this gift, indulge me now, for I have a sweet dream of the woman who has the skills to translate our words and read ourBook of Women.
May she be worthy to lift its finer sister,The Book of Wonder, from its cell and use it for good for the other women of the world.
I dream that this worthy woman looks at the world through the eyes of a lynx, not a rabbit. I dream that the world she lives in rushes to offer a woman like her abundance, prosperity, and kindness, not bitterness or chains, that it doesn’t entrap her with men’s words that conjure only weakness and insufficiency out of her existence.
Across time, I long to touch hands with you, dear friend, with your wondrous flashing gaze. If you have the mind for it, I gladly offer you this glossary with this letter, both together the key to findThe Book of Wonder.
To you, dear sister in time, I ask, indulge me one small thing, in return for this. Before you seek the greater prize, first enjoy the flavors of our family in these pages, the sketches of our days, of our laughter, our love, our whimsy, our innumerable squabbles. Allow a moment in time for our souls to shine again, however fleetingly. Let sunshine bathe the meadows, fields, and flowers of Cyanum once more.
But when the moment comes to sharpen your attention and pull back the veil to reveal the location ofThe Book of Wonder, then it will be the last page of ourBook of Womenthat commands you, and with it the page of nine circles.
Read well. Read with lightning in your eyes.
Vale.
June 5, 1461
The Book of Wonder. It must be what the Institute was looking for.
I scanned the letter again. Several things leaped out. I needed to think about each of them in turn. I started with the stuff that sounded strangest, feeling as if I was trying to solve one of Mum’s riddles.
Salamander. Horse’s rump. Dragon’s-kill bones. A woman in fur and cloth. An artist’s sketches. It didn’t take my memory long to place the images. These were all elements of a fresco I’d seen.Its subject was St. George and the Dragon and it was painted by an artist called Pisanello. I remembered that half of the fresco was well preserved and that it included horses, one with its back facing outward, and a princess beside it, finely robed, in profile. The other half was badly damaged, but still visible, though barely, were a salamander and the remains of the dragon’s kill.
I googled it, confirming it was located where I thought: on the wall of the Pellegrini Chapel in a church in Verona, Italy. I dug into the identity of the woman in it. She was supposed to represent the princess of Trebizond, from the St. George legend, and at first, I couldn’t find anything about who might have modeled for it, but then it popped up, a small piece of research suggesting that a woman recently engaged to one of the sons of the Pellegrini family may be depicted in the fresco. Her name was Laura Nogarola.
