“Baldwin will no doubt have one here before the day is done.” Matthew’s attention fixed on the pulse at my throat.
“Let’s hope your brother doesn’t feel he needs to deliver it himself.”
Matthew’s eyes drifted to my lips. “He’s not my brother. He’s your brother.”
“Hello the house!” Gallowglass’s booming, cheerful voice rose up from the downstairs hall.
Matthew’s kiss was hard and demanding. I gave him what he needed, deliberately softening my spine and my mouth so that he could feel, in this moment at least, that he was in charge. “Oh. Sorry. Shall I come back?” Gallowglass said from the stairs. Then his nostrils flared as he detected my husband’s overpowering clove scent. “Something wrong, Matthew?”
“Nothing that Baldwin’s sudden and seemingly accidental death wouldn’t fix,” Matthew said darkly.
“Business as usual, then. I thought you might want me to walk Auntie to the library.”
“Why?” Matthew asked.
“Miriam called. She’s in a mood and wants you to ‘get out of Diana’s knickers and into my lab.’”
Gallowglass consulted the palm of his hand. It was covered in writing. “Yep. That’s exactly what she said.”
“I’ll get my bag,” I murmured, pulling away from Matthew.
“Hello, Apple and Bean.” Gallowglass stared, besotted, at the images on the fridge. He thought calling them Baby A and Baby B was beneath their dignity and so had bestowed nicknames upon them.
“Bean has Granny’s fingers. Did you notice, Matthew?”
Gallowglass kept the mood light and the banter flowing on our walk to campus. Matthew accompanied us to the Beinecke, as though he expected Baldwin to rise up out of the sidewalk before us with a new phone and another dire warning.
Leaving the de Clermonts behind, it was with relief that I opened the door into our research room.
“I’ve never seen such a tangled provenance!” Lucy exclaimed the moment I appeared. “So John Dee did own the Voynich?”
“That’s right.” I put down my pad of paper and my pencil. Other than my magic, they were the only items I carried. Happily, my power didn’t set off the metal detectors. “Dee gave the Voynich to Emperor Rudolf in exchange for Ashmole 782.” It was, in truth, a bit more complicated than that, as was often the case when Gallowglass and Matthew were involved in the transfer of property.
“The Bodleian Library manuscript that’s missing three pages?” Lucy held her head in her hands and stared down at the notes, clippings, and correspondence littering the table. “Edward Kelley removed those pages before Ashmole 782 was sent back to England. Kelley temporarily put them inside the Voynich for safekeeping. At some point he gave two of the pages away.
But he kept one for himself—the page with the illumination of a tree on it.” It really was impossibly tangled.
“So it must have been Kelley who gave the Voynich manuscript—along with the picture of the tree—to Emperor Rudolf’s botanist, the Jacobus de Tepenecz whose signature is on the back of the first folio.” Time had faded the ink, but Lucy had shown me photographs taken under ultraviolet light.
“Probably,” I said.
“And after the botanist, an alchemist owned it?” She made some annotations on her Voynich timeline. It was looking a bit messy with our constant deletions and additions.
“Georg Baresch. I haven’t been able to find out much about him.” I studied my own notes.
“Baresch was friends with de Tepenecz, and Marci acquired the Voynich from him.”