“Where?” She stood beside him, both of them in the shadows. He pointed out a younger man and a middle-aged woman, looking in a shop window opposite. Doubtless, they weren’t shopping but using the reflections to see behind them and tell them who was entering and exiting Anya and Sid’s building.
In that same reflection, Clio could see the St. Katherine’s wheel brooch on the woman’s lapel.
“Is there a back way out of here?” she asked.
Chapter Sixteen
Anya
Sid and I stuffed everything into our packs. We didn’t know if it would be safe to return.
We ran downstairs and searched the dim corridor. There was no back exit. Clio hammered on the door of one of the apartments. A young woman with a baby in her arms opened it. Visible behind her were doors that opened onto a courtyard at the back.
“I’m so sorry,” Clio said. She pushed past the woman; Sid and I followed. The woman held her baby’s head to her shoulder and shouted at us. Clio pulled a plastic table up to the courtyard wall and we climbed over, dropping down hard on the other side into a narrow alleyway.
The sun had just gone down. Away from the main streets, some light spilled from streetlamps and apartment windows, but the shadows were dark and deep. We headed toward the cathedral.
Outside Juliet’s House the crowds were still thick, everyone trying to catch a glimpse of the famous balcony. Clio dove into the throng of people, and we emerged on the other side near the Scaliger tombs, which were creepy at night, as was the silent church beside them where I knew Isotta and her family had worshipped.
We took the path by the river, the breeze on our faces, moving quietly past busy restaurants, ducking away from the glow of their garlands of lights, until the path ended, forcing us back into a labyrinthine warren of narrow streets that eventually led us to the cathedral.
A mass was underway. One of the cathedral doors was open. We could hear the organ and over it, the priest’s voice, intoning the mass through a microphone, his voice sonorous and mesmeric. I stared, my eyes caught by the stands of flickering candles. I was trying to ignore a growing feeling that this location wasn’t right, that I’d got it wrong. This place was so touristy. If Isotta had hidden something here, it would surely have been discovered by now.
The baptistery entrance was at the back of the cathedral. It was a small hall, ancient, remnants of frescoes on the otherwise plain walls, the star of the show the huge octagonal marble font carved with bibilical scenes that I tried to relate to the Voynich but couldn’t. I felt despondent. My gut was still insisting that the answer lay elsewhere, that coming here was a mistake.
“Anything?” Sid asked, and I shook my head.
“I need to look at the manuscript and the embroidery again. This doesn’t feel right.”
“We can get a hotel,” Clio said.
Outside, the street was empty, apart from a woman and three men, standing a little way down, conferring. My heart skipped a beat. “It’s them,” I whispered.
We walked fast around the side of the cathedral, and as soon as we rounded the corner into the square, we ran. Clio was ahead. She led us into a narrow passage beside the cathedral steps. It was unlit and claustrophobic, hemmed in by tall ancient walls. We emerged into a small square on the riverbank. We heard the water below. A portico sheltered the entrance to another church, even more ancient than the cathedral. I tried its massive door handle, tugged it, rattled it, but it was firmly locked. “Over here,” Sid said. Opposite was a low, tunneled entrance, cutting through a building, our only option.
We ran through it and found ourselves in the corner of a shadowy cloister. I reached for my phone, to turn on the flashlight, but as I did, we heard voices approaching. Spotlights came on suddenly around the cloister and in the garden, showing off its beauty, forcing us to melt back into the shadows.
A large party of tourists entered the tunnel, following a guide who held up a sign saying “Verona by Night.” She stopped them at the mouth of the tunnel and talked about the remains of Roman mosaics that had been unearthed beneath the cloister. The group huddled around her. Her voice rung out clearly in the quiet space. She spoke English with a lilting Italian accent.
Clio whispered, “Follow me.”
She discreetly joined the back of the group, and Sid and I followed. When the guide moved around the cloister, we went with them. The group was large enough that nobody noticed. I glanced toward the entrance. No one was looking for us here yet.
“So, this is a very special place,” the guide said. “Verona is home to the oldest working library in the world, and where we’re standing right now is the site of the ancient scriptorium. We have the first written record of it in the fourth century CE. All that remains of it is this cloister, because...” She talked on, and I barely listened. I knew of the library. Dante had studied there. Isotta would have known it, too.
Sid nudged me. A man had appeared in the doorway to the cloister, staring in. He was tall and scarily well built, and he was scanning our group. We all three moved so that we were obscured by other members of the group.
My phone pinged once, then again, loud enough that people turned around to look. I fumbled in my bag to find it. Three more messages came in—ping, ping, ping—all from Magnus, before I managed to mute it. I shoved the phone in my pocket without reading them. I could hear my heart pounding in my ears.
The man in the entrance was still there. He looked adrenalized but hesitant. I willed him to leave. The guide kept talkingthroughout, explaining how the library had been affected by a series of disasters over the years, devastating floods from the river it was built directly above, raids during war with Napoleon. I glanced at Clio. She was facing the guide, but I could see the whites of her eyes. Her gaze was trained on the entrance.
I glanced back there to find that the man had gone. I felt a moment of relief before I realized he could easily have slipped into the cloister’s shadows. He could be closing in on us.
“Then there was the time the library was almost totally destroyed,” the guide said. “The Allies landed a bomb directly on it during the war, and it burned. Flames reaching up into the night, their reflections in the river. Can you imagine that? If you come back here in the daytime for a tour of the reading rooms, you’ll see shrapnel scars on the spines of some of our books from that explosion. They were dug out from the rubble afterward. But it wasn’t the end of the library, because at the start of the war a clever librarian had packed up fifty-three boxes with our most precious books and sent them to a monastery in the mountains for safekeeping. So, they were spared, and they’re here today in the collection.”
The story reminded me of Magnus’s collection, saved from flames, but it also made me think of the Voynich, and all the botanic illustrations in its pages. I’d been connecting them to the frescoes around Verona, thinking they related to the churches here, but what if they were more literal than that? What if the drawings of flowers and plants, and even the water imagery, hinted thatThe Book of Wonderhad been removed from the city and taken to the countryside instead, just like the books from this library? I remembered something else: Isotta’s poem, the one that mentioned Cyanum, was also about her family’s idyllic country home. What ifThe Book of Wonderwas there?
“Okay,” the guide said. “So, we move on to visit our city’s beautiful Roman bridge, the Ponte Pietra. Follow me!”
