I thought about Mum, how she and Isotta shared a love of language and how, in her riddles, Mum never knowingly put one meaning into words when she could put two. It occurred to me that maybe I’d been looking in the wrong place. Was there a chance that Mum had put a hint in her email, something that might not be in the glossary or in Isotta’s letter but could have been handed down with them, something that would either tell me I was on the right track or point me in a different direction? I couldn’t be sure Mum had been well enough to pull off anything like her usual word tricks, but—
Verona was dark when I crept out of bed. The swallowtail merlons on the Castelvecchio Bridge were still lit, its terra-cotta bricks glowing. Clio and Sid had been restless all night, too, but both were lightly asleep as I got up.
Quietly, I slipped my phone off the charger and found Mum’semail. As I reread it, I thought of Isotta, of double meanings, of the importance of our choice of words. The paragraph where Mum described the bookmark she’d been given by Josephine Dunne stood out. There was too much detail in it for such a minor recollection.
“‘Coronet weeds,’ this one said. Do you remember it?” Mum wrote about the bookmark. “When you were a child, I kept it in the little drawer in my workshop, the one you loved to rummage through.”
I remembered the drawer. There had been a bookmark in it, but it wasn’t made of leather, nor was it red. I searched online for the words “coronet weeds” and found them easily. They were fromHamlet, a description of Ophelia’s flowers, the ones she had when she died.
It dawned on me, then. Mum was steering me toward a picture we’d seen together on our first-ever visit to the Tate Gallery: John Everett Millais’s famous painting of Ophelia’s corpse floating ethereally in the river, after her death, surrounded by flora. “Who’s that flower girl?” I’d asked, and she’d explained the play’s sad story. It was the words “flower girl” she wanted me to remember, I realized with a jolt, and everything fell into place.
The Nogarola women had been made into literal flower girls on the Voynich’s binding. I pictured their portraits on the embroidery, saw their initials tangled in the delicate foliage that framed each portrait: A, I, G, L, and I.
I played with the letters, wondering if I could insert them into the baffling words from the last paragraph of the Voynich to make sense out of them. It didn’t work. I was about to give up when I noticed that the letter G and one of the I’s had a tiny star embroidered beside them. There were another five of them beside the letter A, but nothing beside the L and the other I. Could the stars possibly represent numbers, telling me which letters to use, and how frequently? It was my best guess. Holding my breath, I tried different combinations until I had something.
HYPO EUM SNT MR SSUNT
became
HYPOGEUM SANTA MARIA ASSUNTA
I googled it and the results stunned me. My heart was pounding. This, surely, was the answer to the puzzle.
I glanced at Sid. He was awake, watching me. I put my finger to my lips and beckoned to him to follow me. I didn’t want to wake Clio. I didn’t trust her not to force me to hand overThe Book of Wonderto the local police if I found it.
I quickly packed and took my backpack with me as we snuck out of the room. The hotel corridors had the emptiness of the quiet hours. The lobby downstairs wasn’t manned overnight and was empty apart from the eye of a camera trained on us. We sat close together on the small sofa. I leaned toward Sid and told him what I wanted to do. I turned my face away from the camera so no one could lip-read my words.
He didn’t like it, but I was ready for that. I knew how to convince him.
He ran his hand over his forehead after hearing me out. His face was already drawn with fatigue and worry, and my plan was worsening it.
I said, “Sid, it’s going to work. I don’t see any other way.”
I had to remind myself to breathe as I waited for him to weigh everything up, knowing better than to rush him. Finally, he said, “Okay, if you’re sure.”
He went to the front desk and rummaged behind it until he’d found a pad of paper and a pen. I wrote a note, keeping it out of sight of the camera and gave it to him.
“Do you have everything you need?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Be careful.” He hugged me tightly.
“I will,” I told him. The words seemed too small and too ordinary for the moment. Everything else we meant to convey seemed to be glittering in the air around us, not needing to be spoken; the way it does when you love someone and they love you back. I knew he felt it, too.
He went to the elevator. The note was in his hand. As soon as the doors closed, my stomach dropped; the air stopped glittering and darkened.
I took a card for a taxi firm from a rack on the reception desk, scanned the QR code on it, ordered a car, and waited for it outside. There were glimmers of light to the east, and their reflections glinted on the river’s surface.
It wasn’t a long drive. I sat in the back of the taxi and stared out the window. Housing petered out and gave way to agricultural land, pastures and fields that rested softly in the languid dawn, everything dewy and quiet. The land was mostly flat, cradling patches of soft mist where it dipped. To our right and ahead hills rose steeply, terraced with vines; switchback roads zigzagged up them.
I didn’t want the driver to know exactly where I was going, so I asked to be dropped in the middle of the village and used my phone to navigate the last bit of my journey on foot. It was a beautiful, quiet, pastoral spot off the beaten track, ringing with birdsong, a rich tang of the season in the air.
This wasn’t Isotta’s country home, but this place had surely meant something to her.
I was betting everything on a hunch that it had.
The church was simple, built from stone and brick in the same sand and coral palette as Verona. It stood on the corner of a road, the Via Pantheon. In front of its doors was a small square with a few modest houses around it. A black cat with yellow eyes watched me impassively from the top of a tall wall; it felt like an omen, but I didn’t know how to interpret it. Otherwise, the place was deserted.
