Peter Knox had seen the Voynich this past May, before Emily died. “That bastard.” My fingers tingled, and the knots on my wrists burned in warning.
“Something wrong?” Lucy asked.
“There was a name on the list I didn’t expect to see.”
“Ah. A scholarly rival.” She nodded sagely.
“I guess you could say that.” But my difficulty with Knox was more than an argument over competing interpretations. This was war. And if I were going to win it, I would need to pull ahead of him for a change.
The problem was that I had little experience tracking down manuscripts and establishing their provenance. The papers I knew best had belonged to the chemist Robert Boyle. All seventy-four volumes of them had been presented to the Royal Society in 1769, and, like everything else in the Royal Society archives, they were meticulously cataloged, indexed, and cross-referenced.
“If I want to trace the Voynich’s chain of ownership, where do I start?” I mused aloud, staring at the materials.
“The fastest way would be for one of us to start at the manuscript’s origins and work forward while the other starts at the Beinecke’s acquisition of it and works backward. With luck we’ll meet at the middle.” Lucy handed me a folder. “You’re the historian. You take the old stuff.”
I opened the folder, expecting to see something relating to Rudolf II. Instead I found a letter from a mathematician in Prague, Johannes Marcus Marci. It was written in Latin, dated 1665, and sent to someone in Rome addressed as “Reverende et Eximie Domine in Christo Pater.” The recipient was a cleric then, perhaps one of the men I’d seen when I touched the corner of the Voynich’s first page.
I quickly scanned the rest of the text, noting that the cleric was a Father Athanasius and that Marci’s letter was accompanied by a mysterious book that needed deciphering. The Book of Life, perhaps?
Marci said that attempts had been made to contact Father Athanasius before, but the letters had been met with silence. Excited, I kept reading. When the third paragraph revealed the identity of Father Athanasius, however, my excitement turned to dismay.
“The Voynich manuscript once belonged to Athanasius Kircher?” If the missing pages had passed into Kircher’s hands, they could be anywhere.
“I’m afraid so,” Lucy replied. “I understand he was quite . . . er, wide-ranging in his interests.”
“That’s an understatement,” I said. Athanasius Kircher’s modest goal had been nothing less than universal knowledge. He had published forty books and was an internationally bestselling author as well as an inventor. Kircher’s museum of rare and ancient objects was a famous stop on early European grand tours, his range of correspondents extensive, and his library vast. I didn’t have the language skills to work through Kircher’s oeuvre. More important, I lacked the time.
My phone vibrated in my pocket, making me jump.
“Excuse me, Lucy.” I slid the phone out and checked the display. On it was a text message from Matthew.
Where are you? Gallowglass is waiting for you. We have a doctor’s appointment in ninety minutes.
I cursed silently. I’m just leaving the Beinecke, I typed back.
“My husband and I have a date, Lucy. I’m going to have to pick up with this again tomorrow,” I said, closing the folder containing Marci’s letter to Kircher. “A reliable source told me you were on campus with someone tall, dark, and handsome.” Lucy grinned.
“That’s my husband, all right.” I smiled. “Can I look through this stuff tomorrow?”
“Leave everything with me. Things are pretty slow around here at the moment. I’ll see what I can piece together.”
“Thanks for your help, Lucy. I’m under a tight—and nonnegotiable—deadline.” I scooped up pencil, laptop, and pad of paper and rushed to meet Gallowglass. Matthew had seconded his nephew to act as my security detail. Gallowglass was also responsible for monitoring Benjamin’s Internet feed, but so far the screen had remained blank.