“Sounds good.” I tried to keep the excitement out of my voice. This might be exactly the break I needed.
Lucy led me to a small private room with windows overlooking the reading room, poor lighting, and a beat-up foam cradle. Security cameras mounted high on the walls would deter any reader from stealing or damaging one of the Beinecke’s priceless books.
“I won’t start the clock until you unwrap it.” Lucy handed me the boxed manuscript. It was all she was carrying. There were no papers, reading materials, or even a cell phone to distract her from the job of monitoring me.
Though I normally flipped manuscripts open to look at the images, I wanted to take my time with the Voynich. I slid the manuscript’s limp vellum binding—the early-modern equivalent of a paperback— through my fingers. Images flooded my mind, my witch’s touch revealing that the present cover was put on the book several centuries after it was written and at least fifty years after I’d held it in Dee’s library.
I could see the bookbinder’s face and seventeenth-century hairstyle when I touched the spine.
I carefully laid the Voynich in the waiting foam cradle and opened the book. I lowered my nose until it practically touched the first, stained page.
“What are you doing, Diana? Smelling it?” Lucy laughed softly.
“As a matter of fact, I am.” If Lucy was going to cooperate with my strange requests this morning, I needed to be as honest as possible.
Openly curious, Lucy came around the table. She gave the Voynich a good sniff, too.
“Smells like an old manuscript to me. Lots of bookworm damage.” She swung her reading glasses down and took an even closer look. “Robert Hooke examined bookworms under his microscope in the seventeenth century. He called them ‘the teeth of time.’” Looking at the first page of the Voynich, I could see why. It was riddled with holes in the upper right corner and the bottom margin, both of which were stained. “I think the bookworms must have been drawn to the oils that readers’ fingers transferred to the parchment.”
“What makes you say that?” Lucy asked. It was just the response I’d hoped for.
“The damage is worst where a reader would have touched to turn to the next folio.” I rested my finger on the corner of the page, as if I were pointing to something.
That brief contact set off another explosion of faces, one morphing into another: Emperor Rudolf’s avaricious expression; a series of unknown men dressed in clothing from different periods, two of them clerics; a woman taking careful notes; another woman packing up a box of books. And the daemon Edward Kelley, furtively tucking something into the Voynich’s cover.
“There is a lot of damage on the bottom edge, too, where the manuscript would have rested against the body if you were carrying it.” Ignorant of the slide show playing before my witch’s third eye, Lucy peered down at the page. “The clothes of the time were probably pretty oily. Didn’t most people wear wool?”
“Wool and silk.” I hesitated, then decided to risk everything—my library card, my reputation, perhaps even my job. “Can I ask a favor, Lucy?”
She looked at me warily. “That depends.”
“I want to rest my hand flat on the page. It will be only for a moment.” I watched her carefully to gauge whether she was planning to call in the security guards for reinforcement.
“You can’t touch the pages, Diana. You know that. If I let you, I would be fired.”
I nodded. “I know. I’m sorry to put you in such a tough spot.”
“Why do you need to touch it?” Lucy asked after a moment of silence, her curiosity aroused.
“I have a sixth sense when it comes to old books. Sometimes I can detect information about them that’s not visible to the naked eye.” That sounded weirder than I’d anticipated. “Are you some kind of book witch?” Lucy’s eyes narrowed.