“My father and his wife. His driver. The bookseller.”
“Had you never met your father before?”
“No. He and Mum were estranged before I was born.”
“And he istheMagnus Beaufort?” Clio wanted to confirm. He was famous. Fame complicated everything.
“He is.”
“And did you agree to work with him?”
“I did.” Anya Brown spoke quietly, calmly. If she had big feelings, she kept them locked behind the eyes. “My father wants me to be involved with the library he’s building in Cambridge. It’s a big legacy project for him, and apparently”—she raised her eyebrows a little—“it’s always been a dream of his that I work with him on the collection. I don’t know my father well, but he has a lot of grand ideas, and this is one of them.”
“I take it you don’t feel enthusiastic about the collaboration?”
“My feelings about him are complicated.” Anya’s gaze was as steady as her voice. Brave, Clio thought. Outwardly controlled.
“How did you spend the rest of that day?”
“I traveled to Cambridge to see some of the books in his collection. They were at his house. I also visited the site where he’s building the library. When I got back to London that evening, I had a call from my mum’s carer saying she’d been taken to hospital, so I took the train to Bristol to be with her.”
“Is she okay?” Clio asked.
Anya nodded but twisted her lips. Not great, then, Clio thought, but she held back from asking more.
“I know you’ve just started work at the Institute, but I need to ask if you’ve noticed anything unusual about it.”
The question seemed to electrify them. They exchanged a glance, another silent communication. They were close enough to read each other’s thoughts easily, that was obvious.
Sid was the one to speak, cautiously at first, then warming up. Two names Clio recognized came out of his mouth: Minxu Peng and Zofia. He’d been told they’d disappeared and believed they’d been killed. The person who’d told him—the husband of Anya’s colleague—had died the night they’d decided to leave St. Andrews. He’d seen the body. Clio could tell it was haunting him. She recognized the look in his eyes.
She’d seen it on her colleagues. When he stopped talking, Anya took over, filling in gaps in the story she’d just told about Diana and her father, describing a hidden letter and a glossary that was the key to the famous Voynich manuscript, important because the Voynich encoded clues to the location of an object that some dangerous people were looking for.
Anya stopped speaking, and they all fell silent. Clio’s mind was racing to join the dots between what she was hearing and what she already knew.
A bell tolled nearby, four strikes, after the last of which somethingslammed so heavily from somewhere inside the building that all three of them flinched and glanced toward the door.
“Can you take a look at something for me?” Clio asked.
She took out her phone and showed them photographs of both pieces of the embroidery. Anya pored over the images, flicking between them. Her focus was intense.
She got up suddenly and disappeared into the bedroom, returning with a laptop and some pieces of an old manuscript and a letter that she laid out on the table.
“This is the glossary and the letter that were hidden in my father’s manuscript.” She turned the laptop so Clio could see the screen. It showed a high-res image of pages from the Voynich. “And I think the embroidery pieces could be from the Voynich’s original binding. When you put them together they’re the perfect size. Where did you find the missing piece?”
“I can’t divulge that yet,” Clio said. Anya didn’t have to know everything.
“Have other people seen it?”
“It was discovered by a woman who we believe kept it hidden to study it. She seems to have written a poem about it.”
“Can I see it?”
Clio watched Anya carefully as she read Eleanor Bruton’s words. Her cheeks were flushed when she looked up. She said, “Whoever wrote this linked the embroidery to Verona, but that’s all. They didn’t connect it to the Voynich. Can you tell me who wrote it?”
Clio explained about Eleanor Bruton, without naming her, and about the two groups of women, one with links to St. Katherine.
“Oh my God, the couple we saw earlier. She was wearing a St. Katherine brooch,” Anya said.
